***
"'Postcolonial theory' has largely emerged from within English literary studies. The meaning of 'discourse' shrinks to 'text', and from there to 'literary text', and from there to texts written in English because that is the corpus most familiar to the critics... The isolation of text from context is an old and continuing problem in literary studies...
Many critics are beginning to ask whether, in the process of exposing the ideological and historical functioning of such binaries, we are in danger of reproducing them. Do we end up overemphasising cultural/racial difference and alterity, albeit from a different ideological standpoint than those of colonialist discourses? [Ed: Contrary to claims about existential bad faith, the notion that talking about (what are seen as) problems reinforces them is common in the literature.]
'The European dream, endless reiterated in the literature of exploration, is of the grossly unequal gift exchange: I give you a glass bead and you give me a pearl worth half your tribe' (1991: 110), in the Ottoman or Mughal territories, that dream turned into an endless nightmare in which the European pearls were treated as baubles by Eastern emperors... The English turned their feelings of inadequacy into an account of Oriental greed or lack of manners. Edward Terry described the Mughal Jahangir's heart as 'covetious' and 'so unsatiable, as that it never knows when it hath enough; being like a bottomless purse, that can never be fill'd' (1655: 378-379). Medieval notions of wealth, despotism, and power attaching to the East (and especially to the Islamic East) were thus reworked to create an alternative version of savagery understood not as lack of civilisation but as an excess of it, as decadence rather than primitivism. [Ed: Of course, a white man rejecting a pearl would be seen as greedy.]
... There is a wonderful anecdote about an American journalist's interview with Haiti's Papa Doc Duvalier which indicates the connections between theories of racial purity and social dominance. The journalist wanted to know what percentage of Haiti's population was white. Ninety-eight per cent, was the response. Struggling to make sense of this incredible piece of information, the American finally asked Duvalier: 'How do you define white?' Duvalier answered the question with a question: 'How do you define black in your country?' Receiving the explanation that in the United States anyone with black blood was considered black, Duvalier nodded and said, 'Well, that's the way we define white in my country' (Fields 1982: 146)...
[Ed:
Keywords so I can find this more easily next time:
reporter 98% "considered black" "considered white" "same here" Jamaica, white ancestor, white ancestry, everyone, cuba, one drop of blood]
Hanif Kureishi's film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) in which a white working-class lad suggests to his Pakistani employer that as a non-white person he should not evict his Caribbean tenant. The landlord replies: 'I am a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani'...
Aime Cesaire angrily quotes Ernest Renan on [races being suited to particular jobs]:
Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honour; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied
... Fanon announced at the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks: 'At the risk of arousing the resentment of my coloured brothers, I will say that the black man is not a man' (1967: 8). The colonial experience annihilates the colonised's sense of self, 'seals' him into 'a crushing objecthood', which is why he is 'not a man'... It is colonialism that is now seen as psychopathological, a disease that distorts human relations and renders everyone within it 'sick'. Conversely, traits that had been characterised within ethnopsychiatry as forms of native hysteria and evidence of atavistic brain structures are interpreted by Fanon as signs of resistance; laziness, for example, is 'the conscious sabotage of the colonial machine' on the part of the colonised: 'The Algerian's criminality, his impulsivity, and the violence of his murders are therefore not the consequences of the organization of his nervous sytem or the characterial originality, but the direct product of the colonial situation' [Ed: Maybe someone can write about the myth of the criminal native]
... Fanon reworks the Lacanian schema of the 'mirror stage'... According to Lacan, when the infant first contemplates itself in a mirror... [it] constructs itself in the imitation of as well as opposition to this image. Fanon writes:
When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man the Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self - that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable...(1967: 161)
[Ed: Hoho. Linking postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. Bullshit + bullshit = total rubbish. This is so racist, since it ignores yellows, reds, browns etc and flattens whiteness - what about Pollacks?]
... Fanon's split subject cannot be read as the paradigmatic colonised subject: the psychic dislocations Fanon discusses are more likely to be felt by native elites or those colonised individuals who were educated within, and to some extent invited to be mobile within, the colonial system than by those who existed on its margins... his subject is resolutely male, and reinforces existing gender hierarchies even as it challenges racial ones...
Female bodies symbolise the conquered land. This metaphoric use of the female body varies in accordance with the exigencies and histories of particular colonial situations... These discursive divisions also spill over to depictions of ordinary women - in Cesare Vecellio's well-known sixteenth-century costume book, for example, women from India, Turkey and Persia are heavily draped in comparison with their naked African or American sisters. [Ed: Maybe that's because African and American women wore little, and Indian, Turkish and Persian women wore comparatively much more.]
... During the Renaissance, Europeans were often supplicants in front of powerful rulers in Asia and could hardly encode themselves as the male deflowerers of a feminised land. Alternative discursive strategies thus came into play. The Oriental male was effeminised, portrayed as homosexual, or else depicted as a lusty villain from whom the virile but courteous European could rescue the native (or the European) woman... The veiled Asian woman becomes a recurrent colonial fantasy, as does the recurrent figure of the Eastern Queen, whose wealth testifies to the riches of 'the Orient' and whose story of Sheba arriving laden with gold at Solomon's court and willingly surrendering her enormous wealth for sexual gratification initiated a long tradition of stories in which the desire of the native woman for the European man coded for the submission of the colonised people...
In seventeenth-century English drama, for example, sexual liaisons between aggressive black African women and white men never culminate in marriage and evoke far more horror than those between the same men and the more 'subtle' and 'wily women' from the East... non-Europeans, especially women, are repeatedly constructed as libidinally excessive, and sexually uncontrolled... Non-European peoples were imagined as more easily given to same-sex relationships. Harem stories fanned fantasies of lesbianism... Renaissance writings on Islam always emphasise that it encourages licentiousness because it promises 'marvelous beautiful women, with their Breastes wantonly swelling' as well as 'fair Boyes' in paradise (Warmistry 1658: 145)
... the figure of the sati [Ed: suttee] is seen both as an example of Oriental barbarism and an awesome sign of wifely devotion, worthy of emulation by English women...
There is an obvious nativism at work here: [Kancha] Ilaiah defends Dalit cultures as intrinsically more creative, democratic and humanitarian (and even feminist) than Hindu society, just as Cesaire had argued that all non-Western societies were superior to European ones... another Dalit writer, Chandra Bhan Prasad, [argued] that for the lower castes in Indian, British colonialism represented a progressive force because it challenged some of the orthodoxies of the upper castes; most specifically, it challenged the Brahmin stranglehold over education and created some space for the education of Dalits. Thus the British Empire played a 'liberating role' in India (Prasad 2004: 130)...
If this “third world” is constituted by the singular “experience of colonialism and imperialism,” and if the only possible response is a nationalist one, then what else is there that is more urgent to narrate than this “experience”; [in fact, there is nothing else to narrate.] For, if societies here are defined not by relations of production but by relations of intra-national domination; if they are forever suspended outside the sphere of conflict between capitalism (first world) and socialism (second world); if the motivating force for history here is neither class formation and class struggle nor the multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender, nation, race, region and so on, but the unitary “experience” of national oppression, ... then what else can one narrate but that national oppression? Politically, we are Calibans, all.
... It is a matter of some alarm that not just in Western academic circles but also beyond, writing in non-European languages is excluded or marginalised - the latest instance being Salman Rushdie's wild assertion in the pages of The New Yorker that in India, writing in English is 'a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen 'recognized' languages' of the country (1997: 50)! [Ed: I wonder what they make of the wild assertion that the AIDS problem in South Africa is caused by a silly government. Clearly, it must be the fault of apartheid and/or British colonialism in some way.]
... For [Leopold] Senghor, Africans 'belong to the mystical civilizations of the senses'... Cesaire thus claims that these [African] communal societies were fundamentally democratic, anti-capitalist, 'courteous' and therefore civilised (1972: 23). It is Europe which is barbaric... Senghor charts a dichotomy between Africa and Europe in terms that celebrate the former: whereas the 'traditional philosophy of Europe... is essentially static, objective, dichotomic' and 'founded on separation and opposition: on analysis and conflict', '[t]he African, on the other hand, conceives the world, beyond the diversity of its forms, as a fundamentally mobile, yet unique, reality that seeks synthesis (1994: 30)...
Anti-colonial or nationalist movements have used the image of the Nation-as-Mother to create their own lineage, and also to limit and control the activity of women within the imagined community. They have also literally exhorted women to produce sons who may live and die for the nation. Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement makes this point rather blatantly: 'In the resistance, the role of the Muslim woman is equal to the man's. She is a factory to produce men, and she has a great role in raising and educating the generations' (Jad 1995: 241)...
Nelson Mandela describes how the South African prison system enforced racial discrimination by not allowing African prisoners to wear long trousers in prison. Unlike their white or coloured counterparts, they had to wear shorts 'for only African men are deemed 'boys' by the authorities' (1994: 396) [Ed: If they have to cite this as an example of racial discrimination, life must be quite good.]"
... Anti-colonial movements have a complex, ambiguous and shifting relationship with the question of women's rights (see Jayawardena 1986). They have to work through a basic contradiction: on the one hand, the principle of universal equaity from which they are launched demands certain concessions to women's rights. This explains why many newly liberated nations conceded certain rights to women (such as the right to vote) well before their European counterparts.
--- Colonialism/postcolonialism / Ania Loomba (2005)
In that case, I too can write some crap and use it to 'prove' rubbish about the world.
Actually this applies to literature in general, but in postcolonial countries fewer people are literate/educated/middle-class and above, and so are even less likely to read/sympathise with the texts.
