***
"The growth of modern Western knowledge systems and the histories of most 'disciplines' can be seen to be embedded within and shaped by colonial discourses. Martin Bernal's well-known book Black Athena demonstrates this most forcefully in the case of classics. It argues that the history of black Egypt and its centrality to ancient Greek culture was erased by nineteenth-century scholarship in order to construct a white Hellenic heritage for Europe. Bernal goes further than that: he suggests that the rise of professional scholarship and its bifurcation into 'disciplines' are profoundly connected with the growth of racial theory (1987: 220). Thus he questions the objectivity of not just the writing of history but of all knowledges produced in Europe during the colonial era...
[Ed: Martain Bernal is talking rubbish. As Wikipedia notes: "Bernal's specific theories are not accepted by the majority of classical scholars; Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College is a notably active critic... Bernal's model posits, among other things, that Greece was occupied by Egypt for two long periods, even though no evidence for that can be found in Egyptian or other sources." And the Ancient Egyptians weren't 'black'.]
The development or reproduction of even those knowledge systems that appear to be too abstract to have an ideological inflection, such as mathematics, can also be connected to the imperialist project (Bishop 1990). To that extent, we may say that all discourses are colonialist discourse. At one level, such a conclusion simply underlines the Marxist notion that all ideas are inter-dependent with economic and social reality.
[Ed: This is priceless, and underlines the notion that a lot of post-Marxism is bullshit. Cock: if you mean the domination of indian numericals over the whole world, certainly. (he probably means Arabic)]
... At a very practical level, colonialists were dependent upon natives for their access to the 'new' lands and their secrets. As Caliban reminds Prospero, he showed the latter 'all the qualities o'th'isle,/The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile'...
The female body is described in terms of the new geography, as in Donne's 'Love's Progress':
The nose (like to the first meridian) runs
Not 'twixt an East and West, but 'twixt two suns;
It leaves a cheek, a rosy hemisphere,
On either side, and then directs us where
Upon the Islands Fortunate we fall,
(Not faint Canaries, but Ambrosial)
Her swelling lips... and the straight Hellespont between
The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts...
And sailing towards her India, in that way
Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay... (Donne 1985: 181)
The lovers' relationship is worked out in terms of the colonialists' interaction with the lands they 'discover', as in 'To his Mistris going to Bed':
Licence my roving hands, and let them goe
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America, my new found lande,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My myne of precious stones, my Empiree,
How blest am I in this discovering thee. (1985: 184)
... Sexual and colonial relationships become analogous to each other. Donne's male lover is the active discover of the female body, and desires to explore it in the same way as the European 'adventurer' who penetrates and takes possession of lands which are seen as passive, or awaiting discovery. Here the sexual promise of the woman's body indicates the wealth promised by the colonies - hence, in the first poem the lover/colonist traverses her body/the globe to reach her 'India', the seat of riches. But the woman/land analogy also employs a reverse logic as the riches promised by the colonies signify both the joys of the female body as well as its status as a legitimate object for male possession...
[Peter] Hulme shows how two words - 'cannibal' and 'hurricane' - were liften from Native American tongues and adopted as new words into all major European languages in order to 'strengthen an ideological discourse' (1986: 101) Both words came to connote not just the specific natural and social phenomenon they appear to describe but the boundary between Europe and America, civility and wildness. 'Hurricane' began to mean not simply a particular kind of a tempest but something peculiar to the Caribbean. Thus, it indicated the violence and savagery of the place itself. [Ed: What's in a name? A hurricane by any other name would be implicated in colonialist discourse.] Similarly, 'cannibalism' is not simply the practice of human beings eating their own kind, not just another synonym for the older term 'anthropophagi'. 'Anthropophagi' referred to savages eating their own kind, but 'cannibalism' indicated the threat that these savages could turn against and devour Europeans... they both came to designate whatever lay outside Europe. Moreover, 'cannibal' was etymologically connected to the Latin word canis (dog), reinforcing the view that 'the native cannibals of the West Indies hunted like dogs and treated their victims in the ferocious manner of all predators'. Hulme discusses how a play like Shakespeare's The Tempest (far from being a romantic fable removed from the real world) is implicated in these discursive developments, and in the formation of colonial discourse in general, how its tempests are hurricanes in this new sense, and why Caliban's name is an anagram for cannibal, and why also Prospero turns a dog called Fury on to the rebels (Hulme 1986: 89-1340. [Ed: Seems some people don't know what anagrams are.]
... George Lamming... claimed that there were 'for me, just three important events in British Caribbean history' - Columbus's journey, 'the abolition of slavery and the arrival of the East - India and China - in the Caribbean Sea' and 'the discovery of the novel by the West Indians as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community' [Ed: I wonder how many of the 'colonised' actually read colonial/postcolonial works.]
... Caliban in The Tempest, who, Prospero alleges, threatens to rape his daughter Miranda. This stereotype reverses the trope of colonialism-as-rape and thus, it can be argued, deflects the violence of the colonial encounter from the coloniser to the colonised. Understood variously as either a native reaction to imperial rape, or as a pathology of the darker races, or even as a European effort to rationalise colonial guilt, the figure of the 'black' rapist is commonplace enough to be seen as a necessary/permanent feature of the colonial landscape. [Ed: i.e. black rapists exist because white men are evil; white rapists exist because white men are evil.]...
As Spivak pointed out in an early essay, 'It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English' (1985a: 243). Thus, no work of fiction written during that period, no matter how inward-looking, esoteric or apolitical it announces itself to be, can remain uninflected by colonial cadences. [Ed: Why stop at fiction? Non-fiction too is tainted!]"
--- Colonialism/postcolonialism / Ania Loomba (2005)
Addendum: In sum, post-colonialism is bullshit
