-COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM-

Week 1; Seminar 1: EMPIRE AND HISTORY: INTRODUCTION.

- 300 years of Imperial history shape the world that we live in. Although Colonialism as
such is not anymore in Europe it is still going in other parts of the world. Ex: Israel to
Palestine.
- -The influence of Colonialism is still very present in the culture of many countries, in
their economy, and even in the psychology of people around the world, we have to
understand where we come from in order to fully understand how the world works.
Colonialism is an undeniable part of the history of plenty of countries and its influence
is still present.
- Religion has played a great part in the Colonizers and Colonized countries, the
imposement of different religions is a key aspect to understanding the colonizing
process.
- SLAVERY is another key factor, the ¨European superiority¨ has been the excuse for
abuses, occupation, and other aspects of colonizing history. **
- Rise of anticolonial movements in the 19th/20th century.

Important terms/definitions:

-Imperialism: The ¨authority¨ assumed by a state over another territory (outside their
frontier).

-Colonialism: ¨The settlement in this territory, exploitation of resources and the attempt to
govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands¨

-Postcolonialism: (Political and Chronological sense.) Dealing with cultural and literary
productions. Retroactive understanding of the effects of Colonialism in a broader sense.

2) a way of describing and critically analyzing texts that work in opposition to established
imperial power relations and ways of seeing.

Empire, Power, and Knowledge:

Profit motive: Capitalism as one of the main motives for capitalism, new riches were created
thanks to the appropriation of newly discovered territories and the exploitation of the natives.
New raw materials and cheap labors were the main sources of income for the colonialists.

Knowledge and Power: Coercion and brute force were used against the colonized people.
Also, knowledge was used to govern them easily. New ideas such as racism developed quickly
thanks to the idea that the Europeans (colonizers) were racially superior to these new
indigenous tribes/villages.

Struggle over Representation:

- Postcolonial writers writing back to the “Empire” about stereotypes and

misinterpretations of Imperial Discourse.
- Drastic effect of imperial experience on the sense of identity of the colonized.
- Displacement and migration/ sense of belonging.
- Rise of postcolonial literature accompanied by the evolution of postcolonial theory.
- Need for a balance of theory and historical context, form, and content in analyzing
these texts.
Week 2: Seminar 2: Said and Kipling.

White man’s world and the claim to civilization

[T]he west-non-west relation was thought of in terms of whites versus non-white races. The
white culture was regarded (and remains) the basis for ideas of legitimate government, law,
economics, science, language, music, art, and literature – in a word, civilization.

Robert Young, Postcolonialism: Very Short Introduction, 3.

 Binary Opposites “ruling the world” – One reinforces what the other is not.
 Terminology used is an invented construction (like race?).
 Impact of colonization in the identities, forming clashes of cultures and integration in
between.
 - Islamic -Inbalance -Dominance.

Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by Edward W. Said (1978)

• Origins of attitudes of West to non-West, or the ‘Orient’.

• In Said’s case, the Middle East, but principles applied more broadly to other colonized parts
of the world.

• (Importance of issues like history, identity race, and belonging in postcolonial lit easier to
see.)

• Orient = ‘the place of Europe’s greatest, richest and oldest colonies, the source of its
civilizations and languages ... and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other.

• Orientalists = travelers, writers, artists, administrators: anyone who produces a (written,

spoken, painted, etc.) text about the colonial space

• Basic binary distinctions – Orient/Occident, East/West/ ‘Them’/‘Us’

• Sets up colonies to be everything enlightened Europe is perceived not to be – irrational,

bestial, childlike, backward, unenlightened, over-sexual, etc. therefore in need of colonization

• Postcolonial writers often answer such biased and inaccurate depictions. Reclaiming power
to represent oneself and one’s past.

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF.

What does the “Orient” actually refer to?

What do you think Said means by referring to it as the “cultural contestant” or “underground
self” of Europe’s (the “Occident”)? How do you think one has defined the other?

What do you think Said means when he says that “because of Orientalism, the Orient was not
(and is not) a free subject of thought or action”?
Are “East” and “West” useful terms?

Image 1 : The Dice Players. Rudolph Weisse (1869)

-Little boy begging. Gives a sense of poorness, and few resources.

- Cultural presence <man reading) shows that the “orientalists” were not as primitive as many
European might have thought they were.

- No women are present in the picture! Representing the Islamic Culture and their attitude
towards women (they were expected to be indoors). The markets and street places were
reserved for males. (MALE DOMINANCE in Islamic Culture/ Oppression).

Image 2: The carpet Merchant, Jean Leone Gerone (1887)

-Clothes on the street floor (not a developed society).

- “Petty Bourgeoisie”. Representing the merchant Orient.

-Presence of women BUT HIDDEN (in darkness). Showing again how women were treated back
in the orient. (Exteriority vs. Interiority. (Who belongs where!).

The Snake Charmer. Jean Leone Gerone (1889).

- Boy holding a snake. Sense of primitiveness, a crude representation of infancy. The boy
is seen as a “bestial” creature, undeveloped, and uneducated. A savage.
- Boy being naked. Again giving the boy primitive aspects. OVERSEXUALIZATION.
- Presence of Arabic language on the walls. Showing differences even in the language.
- Snake being prohibited in Islamic Culture.
- Boy being the only person in the photo standing on the carpet. Meaning?!.

Orientalism and Kipling: 3 points of contact

1. Kipling is a writer who appears to accept a basic distinction between East and West.

2. India appears as a backdrop and an imaginative space, though Europe/British/English

subjects always have the upper hand.

3. Said describes his analytical method as attending to the writer’s “strategic location”
(positionality) and “strategic formation” (referentiality). He goes on:

“Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself [sic] vis-à-vis the Orient; translated
into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure
he builds, the kind of images, themes, motifs that circulate in a text – all of which add up to
deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or
speaking on its behalf.”

-English people living inside the colonies and creating relationships with native people. Power
hierarchies are clearly defined thanks to racial inequalities and gender inequalities. Also the
sexual tensions (abuse) between the colonizers and the colonized.
Week 3: Seminar 3: Kipling:Influence of Colonization in Literature: How is colonial thinking
reflected and reproduced by literary texts?

- Orientalism as a discourse (enunciatively possibilities). Tends to operate through

“them/us” binaries. Works through a kind of self-reinforcing dialectic of knowledge
and power.

Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of
the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it. I
ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of
the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the
few.... Travel books were popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure,
and even moral fervour about European expansionism. They were, argue, one of the key
instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key
instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.

Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p.3

Said’s Biography:

• Born in Bombay, 1865• Educated in England and returned to India, aged 16 in 1882, to
become Deputy Editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette • Began writing fiction, as
well as journalism• First, published volume – Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) • Work
focused on the world of action and adventure in spaces of Empire like India and South
Africa

• Won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 • 1900 - Walter Besant referred to him as the
‘Poet of the Empire’.

Critics on Kipling

‘Kipling is a jingo-imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is

better to start by admitting that, and then try to find out why it is that he survives while the
refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly. - George Orwell

‘We must make no mistake about it – Kipling was an honest man and loved the national
virtues. But I suppose no man ever did more harm to the national virtues than Kipling did.
He mixed them with a swagger and a swank, with bullying, ruthlessness, and self-
righteousness, and he set them up as necessarily antagonistic to intellect.’ - Lionel Trilling

-‘...for Kipling, there was no conflict ... That there might have been a conflict had Kipling
considered India as unhappily subservient to imperialism, we can have no doubt, but he did
not: for him, it was India’s best destiny to be ruled by England.’ - Edward Said

The Kipling Society on ‘Head of the District’

Important: Yardley-Orde, in charge of a District on the North-West Frontier, is dying. It is a wild

region, with lawless tribesmen in the mountains just over the Border, fanatical Mullahs stirring
up hatred against the English, and a tradition of blood feuds and cattle raiding. Such a district
could only be governed effectively by tough fair-minded men who understood the people and
commanded their respect.

Then the Indian Government, in their wisdom, appoint a highly educated Bengali, Grish
Chunder Dé, to succeed Orde. Bengalis are emphatically not respected by the tribesmen.
When the rumour of his appointment spreads, there is serious trouble, killings of coolies on
the canal embankment, and plans for murderous raids against villages within the Border.
Orde's Deputy, Tallantire, responds vigorously, meeting force with force, and the tribesmen
are driven back. Dé, who has not yet taken up his post, declines responsibility and flees for
safety. He reports sick and is transferred to his own home district. Meanwhile Tallantire takes
firm command, and clearly this is what is needed.

Analyze text on Kipling: What imagery does Kipling give of India? What sense do Europeans
get from these texts? How does he describe natives?...

Power and knowledge in Kipling’s stories

• Kipling’s work often concerned with knowledge and the correct and effective exercise of
power. The short stories and also Kim (1901) his novel of a boy spy in India. ‘Beyond the Pale’
and ‘On the City Wall’ about the limits to appropriate knowledge and the dangers of
transgressing them. But sometimes a tension between claimed knowledge of the narrator and
the trajectory of the plot (e.g. in ‘Beyond the Pale’ and ‘On the City Wall’). Reflects wider post-
uprising (1857) anxieties.

Indian Sepoy Rebellion (Mutiny) 1857

• Attempt to restore the Muslim Mughal Empire

• Brutally put down by the British, including violent reprisals to ‘set an example’

• Post-rebellion attempt to quell Muslim antagonism led to conciliation of Muslims at expense

of Hindus

• ‘Divide and rule’

• Educated Hindus, many from Bengal, go on to become founder members of the Indian
National Congress

Bart Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and Orientalism Kipling and Orientalism (1986) (1986)

• Sees a different kind of Orientalist discourse developing in and among Anglo-Indians to the
Metropolitan Type Said focuses on

• In the metropolitan model, the Orient is ‘The Gorgeous East’: a place of exotica, riches and
adventure (think back to those 19th-century paintings. In literature see Beckford, Collins,
Thackeray, Dickens, Conan Doyle, etc.)

• In the local Anglo-Indian variant Orient, we see a ‘Land of Regrets’: self-sacrifice, suffering,
disease, and thankless duty (another short story ‘Head of the District). In short, things go
wrong.

The Myth of Hostile India

-‘It looks as though certain facts in a developing country such as India – difficulties of
acclimatisation for Europeans, more disease and shorter life expectancy ... - have been
exaggerated by Kipling into a myth (the country) itself as having a quality of malignancy) to
support his imperial bias.’

-DCRA Goonetilleke, Images of the Raj (37)

-Task of governing diverse India made harder by lack of understanding back home in the
Metropolis, leading to ‘misguided’ ideas like promoting Indians to positions of authority.

-Gazette: ‘Why should we put a set of flabby, weak-kneed creatures into office when vigorous
Englishmen are to be had for the posts?’

‘On the City Wall’: Narrative Ambiguity

• About what happens when appropriate knowledge escapes from the control of the British
and ends up in Indian hands. Usual one-way power-knowledge assumptions of colonialism
reversed in this story. When threatened, power based on knowledge and surveillance seems to
regress to a more basic, brutal level of physical punishment.

Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish Discipline and Punish (1975) (1975)

• How imprisonment and surveillance came to replace physical torture and executions as a
mode of legal punishment. (Foucault dates it to the 18C Age of Enlightenment).

• Need for coincidence between the offense itself and the ‘effect-sign of punishment’ (e.g. in
‘City Wall’: ‘the death of one white man will mean not one hanging but many’).

• British Raj’s authority in this story always poised uneasily between old (physical) and new,
knowledge-based regimes of power. The repeated emphasis in a story on knowledge: who
should and shouldn’t have it; who actually has it; and who doesn’t (e.g. Lalun’s knowledge of
troop movements. Also Khem Singh’s planned jailbreak during the Mohurrum riot.)

• British power through knowledge breaks down and they have to fall back on brute force.
Power was estored, but at a price.

• These stories, with their concern for limits of knowledge and the need to police it/reinforce
‘the line’, express anxieties about a repeat of 1857 rebellion and the stirrings of Indian
nationalism that were going on at the time. e.g. the way Indians of all communities and creeds
conspire together to spring Khem Singh from jail.

Salman Rushdie on ‘On the City Wall’: ‘In it, the two Kiplings are at war with one another; and,
in the end ... The Indian Kipling manages to subvert what the English Kipling takes to be the
meaning of the tale.’ (‘Kipling’, Imaginary Homelands, p. 78).

*Info on Kipling:

-Said describes his analytical method as looking out for the author´s strategic location ( their
background knowledge and position in relation with Orient).

-Strategic formation: The way a text is part of a largerset of references about people/places).

“Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself [sic] vis-à-vis the Orient; translated
into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure
he builds, the kind of images, themes, motifs that circulate in a text – all of which add up to
deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or
speaking on its behalf.” – Kipling.

Important to Remember about The Kipling Society. (whilst reading Kipling texts).
Week 4: Seminar 4: Season Of Migration To The North (1966; 1969).

Preparation questions:

How does the novel reflect upon the cultural and psychic effects of British colonization?

How does the novel represent the connections between European modernity and rural
Sudanese society?

What kind of character is Mustafa Sa'eed? / What do you make of the narrator figure? /Does
this text remind you of anything else you have read?

DIFFERENCE IN BETWEEN NARRATOR AND MUSTAFA- FAMILY?º

Close reading the opening three paragraphs

Look out for... striking or dissonant uses of language, vivid or suggestive imagery and
symbolism, tone and shifts in tone, structure, connections to wider themes or contexts and
allusions, intertextuality, references.

“The serenity and majesty of the Thames as it is described at the beginning of Heart of
Darkness are only too appropriate for this waterway down which had sailed, long before
Joseph Conrad’s time, vessels carrying with them the seeds of the British Empire. Conrad’s
Thames flows in remarkable contrast to the Nile that rages through al-Tayyib Salih’s Season of
Migration to the North (1969). Far from resting in “tranquil dignity”, the Nile and the people
inhabiting its banks are shown undergoing violent transfigurations. If Heart of Darkness
narrates the history of modern British imperialism a position deep within its metropolitan
center, Season of Migration presents itself as a counternarrative of the same bitter history. Just
as Conrad’s novel was bound up with Britain’s imperial project, Salih’s participates (in an
oppositional way) in the afterlife of the same project today, by “writing back” to the colonial
power that once ruled Sudan.”

Saree S. Makdisi, ‘The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the
Reinvention of the Present’, Critical Inquiry, 1992, p. 804-5.

Postcolonial Counter Discourse:

‘The day to day realities of colonized peoples were in large part generated for them by the
impact of European discourses. But the contemporary art, philosophies and literature produced
by post-colonial societies are not simply continuations or adaptations of European models. The
processes of artistic and literary colonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European
codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses.
[...] Since it is not possible to create or recreate national or regional formations independent of
their historical implication in the European colonial enterprise, it has been the project of post-
colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and discursive strategies from a privileged
position within (and between) two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed
and maintained its codes in the colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world’

- Helen Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse’, Kunapipi, 9(3), 1987, p. 17-18

‘But the particular counter-discursive post-colonial field with which I want to engage here is
what I'll call canonical counter-discourse. This strategy is [...] one in which a post-colonial
writer takes up a character or characters, or the basic assumptions of a British canonical text,
and unveils those assumptions, subverting the text for post-colonial purposes. [...]

Explorers' journals, drama, fiction, historical accounts, 'mapping' enabled conquest and
colonization and the capture and/or vilification of alterity [i.e. difference]. But often the very
texts which facilitated such material and psychical capture were those which the imposed
European education systems foisted on the colonized as the 'great' literature which dealt with
'universals'; ones whose culturally specific imperial terms were to be accepted as axiomatic [i.e.
self-evident] at the colonial margins. Achebe has noted the ironies of Conrad' s Heart of
Darkness being taught in colonial African universities.’ p. 22

Not ‘simply “writing back” to an English canonical text, but to the whole of the discursive field
within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds.’ (p. 23)

Colonial education cultural and psychic effects of British colonization: Salih quotes.

In 1957, three years after my failed Cambridge application, I had my first opportunity to travel
out of Nigeria to study briefly at the BBC Staff School in London. For the first time I needed and
obtained a passport, and saw myself defined therein as a “British Protected Person.” Somehow
the matter had never come up before! I had to wait three years more for Nigeria’s
independence in 1960 to end that rather arbitrary protection.

There were Church Missionary Society yearly almanacs, with pictures of bishops and other
dignitaries. But the most interesting hangings were the large paste-ups which my father
created himself...On this paper he pasted coloured and glossy pictures and illustrations of all
kinds from old magazines. I remember a most impressive picture of King George V in red and
gold, wearing a sword. What we read in the school library at Umuahia were the books English
boys would have read in England—Treasure Island, Tom Browns School Days, The Prisoner of
Zenda, David Copperfield, etcetera. They were not about us or people like us, but they were
exciting stories. Even stories like John Buchans, in which heroic white men battled and worsted
repulsive natives, did not trouble us unduly at first.

The Nyle as a symbol of Season Migration to the North!

Mimicry:

Used in postcolonial theory to talk about the ambivalent relationship and power dynamic
between the colonizer and the colonized Colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject
to imitate or ‘mimic’ the colonizer (e.g. in speech, dress, cultural values, institutions)

YET: this ‘copy’ can be threatening; either by undermining the very ideas of ‘difference’ on
which a hierarchy of power exists OR by parodying the very thing it mimics.

Mimicry as a crack in the smooth surface of colonial domination?

mimicry represents an ironic compromise.... colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed,
recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. This is to
say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be
effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.

Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, The Location of Culture (1994)

Manopmism: Dualism between binaries. Middle Ground has influences from both East and
West.
Realism in The British Protected Child. “ being fixed in the past is usually very pessimistic,
whereas focusing too much in the future may be a little to optimize. This is another great
example of Middle Ground ( in a positive way).” Breaking the binaries!

- Writing back as a weapon from native authors to show the country their culture and to
support and excel their own national culture.

“ Not simply wrting back as to an English economical textr but to the whole of the
discourse field within which such a text operated and continuous to operate in a post-
colonial worlds” – This means writing back doesn´t only challenge the English colonial ideas
but it challenges the values and mindset in which it is based ( breaking universals).

Colonial Education:

Colonial antidiscourse is based grand part against the colonized education system.

British Protected Person: Parent child relation between the native person and the Empire.