Introduction

Montage

Have you ever been the only person of your own colour or ethnicity
in a large group or gathering? It has been said that there are two
kinds of white people: those who have never found themselves in a
situation where the majority of people around them are not white,
and those who have been the only white person in the room. At that
moment, for the first time perhaps, they discover what it is really
like for the other people in their society, and, metaphorically, for the
rest of the world outside the west: to be from a minority, to live as
the person who is always in the margins, to be the person who never
qualifies as the norm, the person who is not authorized to speak.

This is as true for peoples as for persons. Do you feel that your own
people and country are somehow always positioned outside the
mainstream? Have you ever felt that the moment you said the word
T, that T was someone else, not you? That in some obscure way, you
were not the subject of your own sentence? Do you ever feel that
whenever you speak, you have already in some sense been spoken
for? Or that when you hear others speaking, that you are only ever
going to be the object of their speech? Do you sense that those
speaking would never think of trying to find out how things seem to
you, from where you are? That you live in a world of others, a world
that exists for others?

How can we find a way to talk about this? That is the first question
1
 which postcolonialism tries to answer. Since the early 1980s,
postcolonialism has developed a body of writing that attempts to
shift the dominant ways in which the relations between western
and non-western people and their worlds are viewed. What does
that mean? It means turning the world upside down. It means
looking from the other side of the photograph, experiencing how
differently things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin rather
than Berlin or Boston, and understanding why. It means realizing
that when western people look at the non-western world what they
see is often more a mirror image of themselves and their own
assumptions than the reality of what is really there, or of how people
outside the west actually feel and perceive themselves. If you are
someone who does not identify yourself as western, or as somehow
not completely western even though you live in a western country,
or someone who is part of a culture and yet excluded by its
dominant voices, inside yet outside, then postcolonialism offers you
i a way of seeing things differently, a language and a politics in which
'E your interests come first, not last.
1
S. Postcolonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the
same material and cultural well-being. The reality, though, is that
the world today is a world of inequality, and much of the difference
falls across the broad division between people of the west and those
of the non-west. This division between the rest and the west was
made fairly absolute in the 19th century by the expansion of the
European empires, as a result of which nine-tenths of the entire
land surface of the globe was controlled by European, or European-
derived, powers. Colonial and imperial rule was legitimized by
anthropological theories which increasingly portrayed the peoples
of the colonized world as inferior, childlike, or feminine, incapable
of looking after themselves (despite having done so perfectly well
for millennia) and requiring the paternal rule of the west for
their own best interests (today they are deemed to require
'development'). The basis of such anthropological theories was the
concept of race. In simple terms, the west-non-west relation was
thought of in terms of whites versus the non-white races. White

2
culture was regarded (and remains) the basis for ideas of legitimate
government, law, economics, science, language, music, art,
literature - in a word, civilization.

Throughout the period of colonial rule, colonized people contested

this domination through many forms of active and passive
resistance. It was only towards the end of the 19th century, however,
that such resistance developed into coherent political movements:
for the peoples of most of the earth, much of the 20th century
involved the long struggle and eventual triumph against colonial
rule, often at enormous cost of life and resources. In Asia, in Africa,
in Latin America, people struggled against the politicians and
administrators of European powers that ruled empires or the
colonists who had settled their world.

When national sovereignty had finally been achieved, each state

moved from colonial to autonomous, postcolonial status.
Independence! However, in many ways this represented only a
beginning, a relatively minor move from direct to indirect rule, a
shift from colonial rule and domination to a position not so much of
independence as of being in-dependence. It is striking that despite
decolonization, the major world powers did not change
substantially during the course of the 20th century. For the most
part, the same (ex-)imperial countries continue to dominate those
countries that they formerly ruled as colonies. The cases of
Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq, make it clear that any country
that has the nerve to resist its former imperial masters does so at its
peril. All governments of these countries that have positioned
themselves politically against western control have suffered military
interventions by the west against them.

Yet the story is not wholly negative. The winning of independence

from colonial rule remains an extraordinary achievement. And if
power remains limited, the balance of power is slowly changing. For
one thing, along with this shift from formal to informal empire, the
western countries require ever more additional labour power at

3
home, which they fulfil through immigration. As a result of
immigration, the clear division between the west and the rest in
ethnic terms at least no longer operates absolutely. This is not to
say that the president of the United States has ever been an
African-American woman, or that Britain has elected an Asian
Muslim as prime minister. Power remains carefully controlled.
How many faces of power can you think of that are brown? The
ones, that is, that appear on the front pages of the newspapers,
where the everyday politics of world power are reported. Cultures
are changing though: white Protestant America is being hispanized.
Hispanic and black America have become the dynamic motors of
much live western culture that operates beyond the graveyard
culture of the heritage industry. Today, for many of the youth of
Europe, Cuban culture rules, energizing and electrifying with its
vibrant son and salsa. More generally, in terms of broad consensus,
the dominance of western culture, on which much of the division
between western and non-western peoples was assumed to rest in
colonial times, has been dissolved into a more generous system of
cultural respect and a tolerance for differences. Some of the limits of
that respect will be explored in later sections of this book.

For now, what is important is that postcolonialism involves first

of all the argument that the nations of the three non-western
continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are largely in a situation
of subordination to Europe and North America, and in a position
of economic inequality. Postcolonialism names a politics and
philosophy of activism that contests that disparity, and so continues
in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past. It asserts not
just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to
access resources and material well-being, but also the dynamic
power of their cultures, cultures that are now intervening in and
transforming the societies of the west.

Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the

elaboration of theoretical structures that contest the previous
dominant western ways of seeing things. A simple analogy would be

4
with feminism, which has involved a comparable kind of project:
there was a time when any book you might read, any speech you
might hear, any film that you saw, was always told from the point
of view of the male. The woman was there, but she was always an
object, never a subject. From what you would read, or the films you
would see, the woman was always the one who was looked at. She
was never the observing eye. For centuries it was assumed that
women were less intelligent than men and that they did not merit
the same degree of education. They were not allowed a vote in
the political system. By the same token, any kind of knowledge
developed by women was regarded as non-serious, trivial, gossip,
or alternatively as knowledge that had been discredited by science,
such as superstition or traditional practices of childbirth or healing.
All these attitudes were part of a larger system in which women
were dominated, exploited, and physically abused by men. Slowly,
but increasingly, from the end of the 18th century, feminists began
to contest this situation. The more they contested it, the more it
became increasingly obvious that these attitudes extended into the §
whole of the culture: social relations, politics, law, medicine, the «
arts, popular and academic knowledges.

As a politics and a practice, feminism has not involved a single

system of thought, inspired by a single founder, as was the case with
Marxism or psychoanalysis. It has rather been a collective work,
developed by different women in different directions: its projects
have been directed at a whole range of phenomena of injustice,
from domestic violence to law and language to philosophy.
Feminists have also had to contend with the fact that relations
between women themselves are not equal and can in certain
respects duplicate the same kinds of power hierarchies that exist
between women and men. Yet at the same time, broadly speaking
feminism has been a collective movement in which women from
many different walks of life have worked towards common goals,
namely the emancipation and empowerment of women, the right to
make decisions that affect their own lives, and the right to have
equal access to the law, to education, to medicine, to the workplace,

5
Orientalism

Postcolonial studies in its current theoretically oriented form starts

with the publication, in 1978, of the Palestinian–American critic
Edward Said’s book Orientalism. Drawing on Foucault and, to a lesser
extent, Gramsci, Said’s study completely changed the agenda of the
study of non-Western cultures and their literatures and pushed it in
the direction of what we now call postcolonial theory.

Orientalism is a devastating critique of how through the ages, but

particularly in the nineteenth century – the heyday of imperialist
expansion – which is the book’s focus, Western texts have represented
the East, and more specifically the Islamic Middle East (for the sake of
convenience I will simply refer to ‘the Orient’ or ‘the East’ here). Using
British and French ‘scholarly works ... works of literature, political
tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological
studies’ (Said 1991: 23), Said examines how these texts construct the
Orient through imaginative representations (in for instance novels),
through seemingly factual descriptions (in journalistic reports and
travel writing), and through claims to knowledge about Oriental
history and culture (histories, anthropological writings, and so on).
Together, all these forms of Western writing form a Foucauldian
discourse – a loose system of statements and claims that constitutes a
field of supposed knowledge and through which that ‘knowledge’ is
constructed. Such discourses, although seemingly interested in
knowledge, always establish relationships of power.

For Said, Orientalism – this Western discourse about the Orient – has
traditionally served hegemonic purposes. As we have seen, Antonio
Gramsci thought of ‘hegemony’ as domination by consent – the way
the ruling class succeeds in oppressing other classes with their
apparent approval. In Gramsci’s analysis it does so through culture:
the ruling class makes its own values and interests central in what it
presents as a common, neutral, culture. Accepting that ‘common’
culture, the other classes become complicit in their own oppression
and the result is a kind of velvet domination. Orientalism, then, has
traditionally served two purposes. It has legitimized Western
expansionism and imperialism in the eyes of Western governments
and their electorates and it has insidiously worked to convince the
‘natives’ that Western culture represented universal civilization.
Accepting that culture could only benefit them – it would, for instance,
elevate them from the ‘backward’ or ‘superstitious’ conditions in
which they still lived – and would make them participants in the most
advanced civilization the world had ever seen.

For Said, Western representations of the Orient, no matter how well

intentioned, have always been part of this damaging discourse.
Wittingly or unwittingly, they have always been complicit with the
workings of Western power. Even those Orientalists who are clearly
in sympathy with Oriental peoples and their cultures – and Said finds
a substantial number of them – cannot overcome their Eurocentric
perspective and have unintentionally contributed to Western
domination. So instead of the disinterested objectivity in the service of
the higher goal of true knowledge that Western scholarship has
traditionally claimed for itself, we find invariably false
representations that have effectively paved the way for military
domination, cultural displacement, and economic exploitation.

I should perhaps say at this point that in later publications, and in

response to criticism, Said has modified his position and presented a
less homogeneous picture of Orientalism, while he has also
downplayed the extent to which it merely constructs and never
describes. There is no doubt, however, that Orientalism, whatever its
shortcomings may have been, revolutionized the way Western
scholars and critics looked at representations of non-Western subjects
and cultures (just like feminism had somewhat earlier revolutionized
the way we look at representations of women).

Said’s book also drew attention to the way in which the discourse of
Orientalism serves to create the West as well it creates the East. West
and East form a binary opposition in which the two poles define each
other. The inferiority that Orientalism attributes to the East
simultaneously serves to construct the West’s superiority. The
sensuality, irrationality, primitiveness, and despotism of the East
constructs the West as rational, democratic, progressive, and so on.
The West always functions as the ‘centre’ and the East is a marginal
‘other’ that simply through its existence confirms the West’s centrality
and superiority. Not surprisingly perhaps, the opposition that the
West’s discourse about the East sets up makes use of another basic
opposition, that between the masculine and the feminine. Naturally
the West functions as the masculine pole – enlightened, rational,
entrepreneurial, disciplined – while the East is its feminine opposition
– irrational, passive, undisciplined, and sensual.

Race, ethnicity, and the dominant position of the metropolis were

already well established on the literary-critical agenda when
Orientalism appeared (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), for
instance). Said, however, was the first to draw on the new French
theory and on the recently discovered Gramsci (parts of whose work
had been published in English in 1971) in dealing with these issues.
Orientalism offered a challenging theoretical framework and a new
perspective on the interpretation of Western writing about the East
(and other non-Western cultures) and of writing produced under
colonial rule. Orientalism put the role of the West’s cultural
institutions (the university, literary writing, newspapers, and so on) in
its military, economic, and cultural domination of non-Western
nations and peoples firmly on the agenda and asked questions that we
 still ask concerning the role of scholars or artists in past and present
racial, ethnic, and cultural encounters.

The Spectacle of the «Other»: the case of the «Hottentot Venus»

(Hall S. Representation. L.: Sage, 2013. P. 264 – 266)

Let us explore the «case» of the African woman, Saartje (or Sarah) Baartman, known as «The
Hottentot Venus», who was brought to England in 1819 by a Boer farmer from the Cape
region of South Africa and a doctor on an African ship, and regularly exhibited over five
years in London and Paris. In her early «performances», she was produced on a raised stage
like a wild beast, came and went from her cage when ordered, «more like a bear in a chain
than a human being» (quoted from The Times, 26 November 1810, in Lindfors, unpublished
paper). She created a considerable public stir. She was subsequently baptized in Manchester,
married an African and had two children, spoke Dutch and learned some English, and, during
a court case in Chancery, taken out to protect her from exploitation, declared herself «under
no restraint» and «happy to be in England». She
then reappeared in Paris where she had an
amazing public impact, until her fatal illness
from smallpox in 1815.
Both in London and Paris, she became famous
in two quite different circles: amongst the
general public as a popular «spectacle»,
commemorated in ballads, cartoons,
illustrations, in melodramas and newspaper
reports; and amongst the naturalists and
ethnologists, who measured, observed, drew,
wrote learned treatises about, modelled, made
waxen moulds and plaster casts, and scrutinized
every detail of her anatomy, dead and alive.
What attracted both audiences to her was not
only her size (she was a diminutive four feet six
inches tall – around 135 cm.) but her
steatopygia - her protruding buttocks, a feature
of Hottentot anatomy. As someone crudely
remarked, «she could be said to carry her
fortune behind her, for London may never
before have seen such a «heavy-arsed heathen»
(quoted in Lindfors, ibid., p. 2).
I want to pick out several points
from «The Hottentot Venus»
example in relation to questions
of stereotyping. First, note the
preoccupation - one could say the
obsession - with marking
«difference». Saartje Baartman
became the embodiment of
«difference». What's more, her
difference was «pathologized»:
represented as a pathological
form of «otherness».
Symbolically, she did not fit the
ethnocentric norm which was
applied to European woman and,
falling outside a western
classificatory system of what «women» are like, she had to be constructed as «Other».

Next, observe her reduction to Nature, the signifier of which was her body. Her body was
«read», like a text, for the living evidence - the proof, the Truth - which it provided of her
absolute «otherness» and therefore of an irreversible difference between the «races».

Further, she became «known», represented and observed through a series of polarized, binary
oppositions. «Primitive», not «civilized», she was assimilated to the Natural order - and
therefore compared with wild beasts, like the ape or the orangutan - rather than to the Human
Culture. This naturalization of difference was signified, above all, by her sexuality. She was
reduced to her body and her body in turn was reduced to her sexual organs. They stood as the
essential signifiers of her place in the universal scheme of things. In her, Nature and Culture
coincided, and could therefore be substituted for one another, read off against one another.
What was seen as her «primitive» sexual genitalia signified her «primitive» sexual appetite,
and vice versa.

Next, she was subjected to an extreme form of reductionism - a strategy often applied to the
representation of women's bodies, of whatever «race». The «bits» of her that were preserved
served, in an essentializing and reductionist manner, as «a pathological summary of the entire
individual» (Gilman, 1985, p. 88). In the models and casts of them which were preserved in
the Musée De L'Homme, she was literally turned into a set of separate objects, into a thing.
She underwent a kind of symbolic dismantling or fragmentation. Saartje Baartman did not
exist as «a person». She had been disassembled into her relevant parts. She was turned into an
object.