Week 2: Colonial
The readings this week expanded on what colonialism is, and the narrative that colonial powers created for themselves.
In Orientalism, Said describes the processes that the West used to create a representation of the Orient for its benefit, and the power of the West to manifest it into reality. He argues that there is no such thing as “pure” academia, and that any writings about the East directly affect cultural perception and uphold political narratives that enable exploitation. This argument seemed very postmodern in the “we live in a society” way.
Guha also describes the process that narratives around colonialism are built for upholding imperialism, but instead of a West/East divide he separates the actors by class (elite/subaltern). He further separates the elite into colonialists from Europe and Bourgeois-Native, who created a narrative of development and nationalization as elite achievements. Guha argues that the subaltern (non-elite) contributed to national development much more than the elite narrative attributes to them, and that to properly understand the history of the era we must study the people’s politics. An interesting distinction that I haven’t explored is the differences between Native-Elite and people’s development of national identity. While both were anti-imperial, I’m sure they had drastically different goals and strategies of organizing.
Cesaire most directly addresses the strategies that Europe used to fabricate a political narrative to colonize. In the name of development and civilization they invaded and exploited the East. “Progress” is measured in terms of economic output, and used as justification to destroy existing cultures and governance
Who is the antagonist / motivating force of the colonial project? Guha makes the distinction along lines of power, saying the elite, both European and native bourgeois, ran the colonial project in opposition to the subaltern. Said expands the scope to anyone who participates in defining and enacting the Western/Orient divide, from academics to politicians. Cesaire names “the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant” as the actors, which expands the group to any economic actors benefiting from colonial exploitation.
Readings
- Discourse on Colonialism - Aimé Césaire (excerpts)
- Orientalism - Edward W. Saïd (excerpts)
- On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India - Ranajit Guha (pdf)