Chapter 10: Postcolonial criticism

Textbook scribblings:

• self/other
• authority/powerlessness
• advanced/backward
• white/colored
• beauty/lack thereof (ugliness)
• science(scientific)/superstition(superstitious)
• civilized/barbaric
• Christian(religious)/pagan
• own systems of language/native systems of language

An important and recurring binary of self vs other, where, as above, the former is privileged over the latter. If you recall from Marxism, ideology is a set of ideas and beliefs propagated by a certain section of society (the dominant one, that possesses authority). This is done through control over discourse. The point is, the colonizers and the colonized made sense of or learned to make sense of their "self", respectively, in relation to one another (as, say, superior/inferior). Basically the colonizers were creating an identity for the "other" and imposing it through control and authority.

Notebook scribblings:

Adopt phase: postcolonial writer who adopts the Western way of writing (Phyllis Wheatley, the black slave girl who was taught to read and write by her masters, wrote of Lady Liberty as a fair lady with golden hair)

Adapt phase: Man's World (the web-series: watch)

Adept phase: create a genre for yourself, like the novel form in the Indian context, or the creation stories. (Leslie Marman Silko?)

Discourse always plays with power. Also, "good" and "bad" are acts of representation, acts of language, within a discourse.

March 8, 2016 - Orientalism:

• closely linked to discourses
• Said is talking about colonial discourses that construct the colonized in a certain way (administration instructions, legal documents - acts, laws, policies.., historical records (annals), autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, newspapers)
• ideas about East constructed and kept in place by the West
• Orientalism is a style  kind of thinking, a form of representation that created opinions, ideas and images of the non-European culture in racialized ways so that:

1. the East was always contrasted negatively with the West/Europe
2. it justified colonial presence in the East

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Neil Lazarus notes: 

from Benita Parry: the institutionalization of postcolonial studies took place at a time when the linguistic turn was in the ascendant within philosophy and literary theory, and at the moment when cultural studies was in the process of turning its back on its materialist beginnings [...] the stage was set for the reign of theoretical studies which Edward Said, among others, has deplored for permitting intellectuals "an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history." In the realm of postcolonial studies, where premises affording analytical priority to formations of discourse and signifying processes were already to the fore, discussion of the internal structures of texts, enunciations, and sign systems became detached from a concurrent examination of social and experiential contexts, situation, and circumstances.

^This is w.r.t. the supplementarity of postcolonial studies to post-structuralist theory.

Neil Lazarus cites Salman Rushdie as a true (and perhaps the only) example of an author belonging to the postcolonial canon. He says his novels - especially Midnight's Children, Shame, and the Satanic Verses - are cited ("endlessly, not to say catechistically") in the critical literature as testifying to:

• the instability and indeterminacy of social identity
• the volatility and perspectivalism of truth
• the narratorial constructedness of history
• the ineluctable subjectivism of memory and experience
• the violence implicit in the universalist discourse of the nation
• the corresponding need to center analysis on the notions of immigrancy, hybridity, diaspora, 'in-betweenness', 'translation' and 'blasphemy' (as anti-hegemonic forms of trangression)

and so on. Lazarus' issue is that he finds the examples present in postcolonial criticism to be inadequate and repetitive, limited to very few and erroneously grouped-together authors on such flimsy grounds as multiculturality. He feels that the following would be better examples:

1. 'Waiting for the Barbarians' or 'Foe', by J.M. Coetzee, for the "problematics of alterity and incommensurability"
2. 'The Sand Child' by Tahar Ben Jellhoun, for "the theory of identity as a performative construct"
3. 'Maps' by Nuruddin Farah, for the "critique of essentialist myths of origin"
4. and our beloved Nissim Ezekiel

Lazarus further criticizes postcolonial criticism 

wait for it we're getting our hall tickets printed

you also go print

Yes, so Lazarus further criticizes postcolonial criticism saying that the field of postcolonial studies is structured in such a way that it is more likely to register the presence of writing in English (and perhaps Spanish or French) than writing in such other languages as Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, Zulu, Amharic, Malay, Urdu, Telugu, Bengali, Sinhalese, Tagalog, or even in the formerly colonial but 'minor' metropolitan languages of Dutch and Portugese.