3.2 The postcolonial perspective
3.2.1 Orientalism and „Otherness‟
As a starting point, I would like to begin with Edward Said's (1978) Orientalism, in which he elaborates his interpretation of a certain form of European cultural mapping of the Orient. Said introduces the concept of Orientalism as the prevalent European ideology dividing the world into two distinct geographical spheres: the „West‟ and the „East‟ also referred to as the Occident and the Orient respectively. Said (1978:50) asserts that Orientalism creates an “imaginative geography”, dividing the world into „East‟ and „West‟, assigning societal distinctions and worth based upon these imagined divisions. Descriptive categorisations are assigned to the „East‟
(irrational, superstitious, exotic, etc). A hierarchical power structure resulted, as Europe has only defined the „East‟, but has also created and recreated the concept of the „East‟. Said (1978:1) writes that “[t]he Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”. He argues that the European idea of the Orient, the myth of an exotic place, became the Orient. This is true not just for the Europeans, who saw the Orient as “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”, but also for some of those who lived there, who saw the Orient through colonial eyes (Said, 1978:1).
Said (1993:xii) does later recognise that „Orientalism‟ tends to be an overly unifying and monolithic concept, at least as it is portrayed in his book Orientalism (1978), which depicts colonial discourse as all powerful and the colonial subject as mere effect. This is evident in the following statement: “Because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action” (Said, 1995:3). This becomes problematic, as the colonial sees himself through European perceptions and creates a sense of identity through this perception. This is what Said (1978) explains in his book; he tries to show that the Orient is a European idea and has a lot more to do with Europe than it does with the Orient itself. From this perspective, Orientalism is the study of the Europe‟s „Other‟. It is an interesting political vision of reality that produces a binary opposition between „them‟ (the strange, the Orient, the East) and „us‟ (the familiar, Europe, the West). This binary becomes essential for European identity, as Loomba (1988:47) points out:
44 If colonised people are irrational, Europeans are rational; if the former is barbaric, sensual and lazy, Europe is civilization itself, with its sexual appetites under control and its dominant ethic, that of hard work; if the Orient has to be feminine so that Europe can be masculine. This dialectic between self and the other … has been hugely influential in subsequent studies of Africans, Native Americans and other non-European peoples.
In this binary opposition the relationship of dependency becomes explicit: the construction of the
„Other‟ as backward is necessary for the construction of the „self‟ as culturally superior, which justifies the exercise of domination and control as a „duty‟ to intervene in the name of progress – to civilise, to educate, to modernise and to develop. In this analysis of Orientalism, the construction of the „Other‟ is not disinterested and is determined by the will to dominate, as the relationship between cultures in question is unequal and the knowledge produced is put at the service of the colonial administration (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). According to Seidman and Alexander (2001:26), Said shows that this construction of the „Other‟ is in essence, “both a condition of and integral aspect of, the dynamics of political and economic colonialism”.
Said‟s writing seems to resist European notions of the Orient. By his resistance and deconstruction of the field of Oriental studies he allows the possibility of reinscription of the Orient within an Oriental perspective. In order to formulate a true sense of identity, the colonial must try to see himself without the European looking glass, or at least be aware of European cultural mappings. However, this is just part of the problem. The other side of the problem a colonial must face is his own perception of the colonial power, of the colonial „Other‟. The colonial has to deal with not only the European vision, or myth, of himself, but also the myth of Europe itself (Said, 1978). No matter what one reads or knows about the colonial „Other‟, the idea of the Other is one that is quite difficult to change. Postcolonial resistance begins with the resistance to these myths.
The Orientalism and otherness dimension in postcolonial theory is critical to this study of black identity reconstruction. It illustrates how black identity continues to be framed in whiteness. But criticisms of Orientalism prevail; thus, the term „essentialism‟ is used by Said (1978) in order to
45 criticise the external identity of the Orient in the eyes of the people in the West. Orientalists presuppose or invent some sort of „essence‟ which describes the Orient as stable, stagnant and uniform (Said, 1978). Essentialism in this study has been used to mean “the assumption that [black] categories or classes of objects have one or several defining features exclusive to all members of that category” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 2000:77).
The assumption of a flat relationship of domination and subordination between the West and the East is the major problem of Said‟s work. The problem of this flat relationship is the starting point for Homi Bhabha. Bhabha (1983:200) criticises Said for promoting a static model of colonial relations in which “colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser”, with no room for negotiation or change. Bhabha (1994) uses the dimension of ambivalence and hybridity to criticise Said‟s notion of Orientalism and otherness. He conceptualises the West and the East and the coloniser and the colonised relationship as „ambivalent‟ and open to negotiation.
This elaboration by Bhabha (1991; 1994) provides a significant contrast in postcolonial theory, and offers balancing perspectives for this study.
From this point, I will now turn to Bhabha in order to build from this initial deconstruction.
Although Bhabha is critical of Said‟s oversimplification of the binaries of East and West and coloniser/colonised (as both „poles‟ are hybrid and implicated in each other), their locus of enunciation and the intellectual positions of Said and Bhabha can be considered to be part of the same tradition, as both examine processes that divide, categorise and dominate the world.
However, their approaches differ in focus: while Said focuses on differences and oppositions between colonised and coloniser, Bhabha generally examines points of similarity (Childs &
Williams, 1996). Bhabha‟s (1991:437) reading of the postcolonial is a criticism of “unequal and uneven processes of representation.” Bhabha is more specific, but also more pessimistic, about the potential for a resistant subaltern subject position. He begins from the position that colonial power is never possessed entirely by the coloniser, because of an ambivalence that lies at the root of the West‟s approach to subaltern „otherness‟. The following is a discussion of Bhabha‟s concept of ambivalence and hybridity.
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