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"While many of its critics felt that the subject was not radical enough, most complaints came from conservatives who feared that it was part of the dangerous new politicisation of the academy in general, and humanities in particular. Today, that trend continues and postcolonial studies (along with feminism, gay studies as well as other forms of social critique) are regularly held responsible for polluting an academy that ought to be safeguarding Western culture...
At the same time, we cannot dismiss the critiques that postcolonial theory can be often written in a confusing manner, is marked by infighting among the critics who all accuse each other of complicity with colonial structures of thought, and although its declared intentions are to allow the voices of once colonsied people and their descedants to be heard, it in fact closes off both their voices and any legitimate place from which critics can speak (Jacoby 1995: 30). Many of these criticisms are shared by those who are sympathetic to the aim of postcolonial studies. I am routinely irritated when objects, food or clothes (and perhaps ideas) from my part of the world become 'ethnic' in Europe or North America; within India, 'ethnic' applies to the cultures and objects of tribal, or rural folk, especially when they are displayed in trendy markets...
This book is written in the belief that postcolonial theory does not have to be 'depressingly difficult'...
Essays by a handful of name-brand critics have become more important than the field itself. Students feel the pressure to 'do' Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha or to read only the very latest article. What Barbara Christian (1990) has called 'the race for theory' is detrimental to thinking about the area itself. It is the star system of the Western and particularly the United States acaddemy that is partly responsible for this...
In The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare's single major addition to the story he found in certain pamphlets about a shipwreck in the Bermudas was to make the island inhabited before Prospero's arrival (Hulme 1981: 69). That single addition turned the romance into an allegory of the colonial encounter...
The most bizare instance of [whites being the agents of colonial rule] may be South Africa, where nationalist Afrikaners 'continued to see themselves as victims of English colonisation and... the imagined continuation of this victimization was used to justify the maintenance of apartheid'...
Foucault's notion of discourse was born from his work on madness, and from his desire to recover an inner perspective on the subject, or the voice of insane people, rather than what others had said about them... [He] found that literary texts were one of the rare places where they might be heard. He started to think about how madness as a category of human identity is produces and reproduced by various rules, systems and procedures which create and separate it from 'normalcy'... This includes not just what is thought or said but the rules which govern what can be said and what not, what is included as rational and what left out, what is thought of as madness or insubordination and what is seen as sane or socially acceptable...
Said argued that knowledge of the East could never be innocent or 'objective' because it was produced by human beings who were necessarily embedded in colonial histoy of relationships... Said's book denies the claim of objectivity or innocence not only within Oriental studies but on the part of any Western scholarship. [Ed: Like that no knowledge is ever objective]...
the historical experiences of colonial peoples themselves have no independent existence outside the texts of Orientalism. ... At a theoretical level, then, Said appears to have placed himself in the position of denying the possibility of any alternative description of 'the Orient', any alternative forms of knowledge and by extension, any agency on the part of the colonised. The fact that this theoretical position runs counter to Said's professed political aim of effecting the dissolution of 'Orientalism' could be seen as an ironic validation of his own theory, since even he seems trapped within the frame of Orientalism, unable to move outside it. (Vaughan 1998: 3)
... Foucault also discusses how dominant structures legitimise themselves by allowing a controlled space for dissidence - resistance, in this view, is produced and then inoculated against by those in power... One can see how such a pessimistic theoretical framework would be criticised by those who are beginning to uncover the histories of women or colonised subjects as histories of resistance and opposition and not just as stories about oppression...
It is interesting to note that Spanish colonists increasingly applied the term 'cannibal' and attributed the practice of cannibalism to those natives within the Caribbean and Mexico who were resistant to colonial rule, and among whom no cannibalism had in fact been witnessed. The idea of cannibalism was directly applied to justify brutal colonialist practices (Hulme 1986; Miles 1989: 25)...
Grove's work cautions us against too simplistic a reading of the European will to power: Western science, it points out, developed both as an impulse to master the globe, and by incorporating, learning from, as well as aggressively displacing other knowledge systems. Through the 'objectivity' of observation and science, Europan penetration into other lands is legitimised. Natural history is thus as much a form of writing and representation as it is a discovery of something already there in the natural world. [Ed: They can try eating mercury pills to live longer and see what happens.]...
In the debates on women's intelligence and psychology too, we can see how scientific knowledge is refracted through the prism of prejudice, so that age-old ideas about women's instinct as opposed to men's rationality, or about female behavioural patterns, are regularly recycled as 'latest' scientific knowledge. [Ed: Similarly, contemporary prejudice is also recycled as 'scientific' 'knowledge']...
Scientific language was authoritative and powerful precisely because it presented itself as value-free, neutral and universal (Stepan and Gilman 1991). For this reason, it was extremely difficult to challenge its claims. To some extent, European scientists' own racial and political identities prevented them from radically questioning scientific theories of racial difference, and on the other hand, people who were constructed as inferior by these theories had little access to scientific training, and their objections were dismissed as unscientific. [Ed: I wonder how one can make scientific objections without scientific training?]"
--- Colonialism/postcolonialism / Ania Loomba (2005)