post colonial chapter: imagining the world
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IMAGINING THE WORLD
Tengku Nurshazliyana bt Tengku Sahrum
Siti Nazihah bt Mohamad Hanapi
JOHN MANDDEVILLE: CHAPTER XVII
ETHIOPIA
People are slightly drunken
They turned black when they grow older
Large foot
Have one foot only
Many diverse folk
Live not longLittle appetite to
meat
A TEXTUALISED WORLD
Imagined geographies
inhabited by imagined others, people who were very different from Europeans.
described the world to people, explained their place within it, shaping how people responded to the world.
IMAGINED OTHERS
Transformation of the Europeans in one way to another.
Transformation of body: these people had huge ears, with their faces on their chest, were giants or pigmies.
Transformation of Gender: hairy women, Amazons and androgenes.
Transformation of life cycle: these people were said to rear children just once or to conceive at five years of age.
Transformation of social: wife-gavers, who were repeatedly an amiable race who give their wives to any travellers who stopped among them.
Transformation of needs: Astomi, who lived near the headwaters of the Ganges, were said neither to eat nor drink but existed by smelling roots, flowers and fruits.
Europeans were always seen as the reference point, Europeans always represented what was right and normal.
Less bizarrely different peoples. Ex: Ethiopians – black men in the mountains of Africa – were understood to have been burnt black because of their close proximity to the sun.
Aristotle’s Cosmology
Frigid Zone
Frigid Zone
Temperate Zone
Temperate Zone
Torrid Zone
ORIENTALISM
• Study of languages and traditions of the Middle East.
• Edward Said’s redefines, ubiquity of a sense of the division of the world into two spheres in aesthetic production, popular culture, and scholarly, sociological, and historical texts.
ORIENTALISM IS AN IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHY FOR TWO REASONS
Projected a single culture into the space of the orient that was at odds with the diversity of peoples,
cultures and environments
This space was defined by texts and not by people from the Orient itself. These texts preceded
experience.
ORIENTALISM
Power emerged through institutions and
practices used.
Those resident in the space of the Orient
were not allowed to speak for
themselves.
Always described by others,
characterised by others.
Made up of a series of discourses that
explained the nature of the Orient (east) and
Occident (west)
Themes/ Discourses
• What is discourse?
That thing or system of ideas and beliefs and
words (the forms of “knowledge”), that sets
limits upon and yet produces what one person
is able to think or say or do in a given situation.
It is what makes you think or produces what you
say or think. It uses you as much as you use it.
Discourse can be thought of as a lens
through which people interpret the world,
which is not unchanging but is temporarily
and spatially specific.
Discourse is about the use of knowledge and ideas, including their influence on
people, as much as the actual content or meaning of such ideas.
Rationality:rational : irrational
Orientalism
Occident: Orient
Religionreligious : heathen
Science:science : superstition
Race
Development:developed : backward
Moralitymoral : immoral
1. Development and time
Orient - Europe
1. backward - developed
2. unchanging - dynamic (Enlightenment, the drive of mercantile capitalism/ Industrial Revolution)
Orient -
3. Egyptians and Chinese
had great societies before
Europe had developed
BUT these civilisations were
now seen to be in decline.
4. Asia and North Africa –
old, decrepit, decaying civilisations
Orient - Europe
5. Sub-Saharan African dynamic yet mature
(endeveloped) and child-like
- It was the duty of Europeans to rule the ‘immature’ peoples in Africa because – not sufficiently mature enough to govern themselves.
2. Morality
Orient - Europe
1. immoral “white-man’s burden’ to improve the Orient’s morals.
How it was invoked..
Assessments of
other cultures of
religious practices Order and hygiene
Sexuality – Orient often
seen as a place of
unrestrained sexuality
Discussions and
laziness – Orient (not
productive)
3. Rationality
Orient - Europe
1. Irrational (not accepting notions of science and reasons
of European science – turning
into animistic beliefs and magic.
“backward”
4. Religion
• Orientalism did not accept Hinduism, Islam, other than non-Christian religions – TRUE RELIGIONS instead MYTHS and BELIEFS.
• Orientals were NOT religious and should be converted to Christianity.
5. Science
• ‘proof’ of western superiority
• European science had allowed people to conquer nature, time and space, the body
• Africans and others were seen to be living with nature.
• Natives were unable to exploit natural resources and transform nature
• European diseases killed many indigenous peoples
Medicine conquered
illness
Morality controlled natural bodily
desires
Mining extracted resources from
nature
Travel conquered time and space
6. Race
• ‘scientific’ category of European domination
• Measurable biological facts ( head shape or brain size) – explaining western superiority.
ORIENTALIST ART
• Paintings are interesting
- Broad appeal
- For the majority of Europeans, paintings were the only insight they had into the Orient.
- Presented incredible detail, convincing viewers of their authenticity through the ‘reality effect’
The Fanatics of Tangier, Delacroix, 1838
Delacroix, 1838
‘their enthusiasm excited by prayers and wildcries, they enter into a veritable state ofintoxication, and, spreading through thestreets, perform a thousand contortions, andeven dangerous acts.’
Dance of the Almeh, Gerome, 1863
Gerome, 1863
Women revelling in the pleasure ofWILD and RELEASED SENSUALITY(impossible to depict European womenat the time). Erotic, on excess, andmale fantasies played out in sites oflanguid opulence.
Gateway to the Great Temple at Balbec, Roberts,
1841
David Robert, 1841
Ruined greatness and an impliedcriticism of the local people forNEGLECTING their own monuments –architecture falls into decay. (decayingcivilisations themselves.
ORIENTALISM IN THE PRESENT
• Orientalism is still with us but in a slightly different form.
• The west is no longer just Europe, now the United States of America – become more influential (Hollywood)
George W. Bush’s ‘War of Terror’
• September 11th 2001.
• Created a binary imagined geography that has divided the world into the WEST and the ‘axis of evil’ to the EAST.
Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of civilisations”
• Between the WEST(secular-Christian west) and ISLAM (Islamic East)
• The events of September 11th seemed to prove the theory, despite various voices, including Said and Huntington himself, which insisted that this was the action of a small group of extremists rather than being representative of Islam more generally.
CRITIQUE OF ORIENTALISM
Occidentalism
RetextualisationGender
Historical Differences
1. Occidentalism
• Said reduces all of Europe (and later also North America) to the Occident.
• There are traditions of ‘Occidentalism’, representations of Europe and its culture from the non-Western world.
• Orientalism X Occidentalism
(POWER)
2. Historical Difference
• While we can trace the continued existence of themes from Orientalism into contemporary culture, clearly some things are different today
• The way we view the images of the rest of the world which used to be taken for granted
3. Gender
• Critiqued for an implicit gendering of the Orient as FEMALE.
• Men who are active and capable, and women are passive and unable to represent themselves.
• Feminists have argued that western women travellers produced very different accounts because of the power relations they experienced at home.
Retextualisation
• No one can provide a true representation of reality, all is constructed through discourse.
• Now the Orientalists’ texts are replaced by Said’s text.
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