Safa Almijbilee, Dr. Azra Ghandeharion(Corresponding Author) & Dr. Zohreh Taebi Noghondar, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran
Abstract
This research reviews Foucault’s idea about discourse and power, Said’s view about the Orient and Bhabha’s perception regarding stereotype. Benefitting from Foucault’s ideologies, postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha illustrate how colonial discourse circulates. They insist that Western episteme on knowledge, science and understanding has empowered the Occident/ West to control and command the Orient/ East. Said’s insight toward Orientalism sheds light on how the occident represent and dominate the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively in the past centuries whose effects are still prevalent. Bhabha builds on Said’s work linking Saidian and Foucauldian discursivity. This research illustrates how the discourse of marginalization is presented and how it shapes the postcolonial stereotype. The marginalization is portrayed by the colonial power over colonized nations. This research addresses one of the noticeable postcolonial issues: colonial discourse. It reveals that the representation of Middle Easterners is a continuation of Western accumulations of negative stereotypes and prejudices that are circulated for decades. It provides a detailed debate to describe postcolonial theory and colonial discourse.
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- Introduction
To better understand the relationship between post colonialism and colonial discourse, one must understand how postcolonial literature functions. In her book, Postcolonial Theory (1998), Leela Gandhi explains postcoloniality as a condition that “is painfully compelled to negotiate the contradictions arising from its indisputable historical belatedness, its postcoloniality, or political and chronological derivation from colonialism, on the one hand, and its cultural obligation to be meaningfully inaugural and inventive on the Other” (Gandhi 6). Postcolonial literature finds faults in regards to the Eurocentric application applied to today’s text. The definition of colonial discourse is where colonization involves epistemicism determining the extent of human knowledge that someone knows something versus someone fails to know something.
This research focuses on the history recorded from roughly 1920s to present, in which colonialism is enforced by international law. There is a relationship between imperialism and international law. The law is applied to the civilizing mission; in order to take over and control the East, the imperial concept divides the cultural differences between the Western and Eastern worlds. The importance of the civilizing mission is to classify Easterners as backward, therefore in need of the Western intrusion to conquer these societies. This justifies the colonial empowerment to control and transform the so-called East. The project justifies colonialism, to rescue the backward, oppressed, undeveloped people of the Eastern world by placing them into the universal civilization of the West. In practice the concept of civilization was and is used as a form of the exclusion of Eastern values and Eastern identity. In recent years, such exploitation is called the war on terrorism, a new form of classifying the Middle East as barbarian and as enemies (Gandhi 7).
The aim to create a sovereign recognition to exclude the Eastern world as backward and uncivilized is to enforce a legal framework to justify colonization as a means of accomplishing the civilizing mission. In which this mission is disguised in imperial hunger to exploit. The colonial discourse makes such proclamation to colonial intensions “tends to exclude statements about the exploitation of the resources of the colonized. Rather it conceals these benefits in statements about the inferiority of the colonized” (Ashcroft 43). Therefore, the obligatory imperialism is to vindicate itself in the colonial society, and to progress the civilization of the colony. Racial discrimination, cultural inferiority, imperial and economic exploitation are all part of the imperial project. The inequalities that are inherited from the colonial encounter generated people living in Third World societies to be disadvantaged and marginalized.
Creating legal laws towards the civilized the uncivilized world, forming a gap between two cultures, one as universal and civilized and another as local and uncivilized. Colonization and imperialism has taken universal ideals that have never been abandoned, whatever new forms it may have taken. The colonizer’s aim is to normalize these societies into an existing Eurocentric system by placing international law as to solve the problem of difference since Westerns have preceded Easterners. A frame is formulated that European states are sovereign while non-European states are not.
Influential theorists such as Foucault, Said, and Bhabha are advocators against colonial rule, and their legacy carrying this continuing protest to this day. Introducing their anti-colonial thoughts, they challenge the dominance of race, culture, language and class shadowing over the colonized. They outline some of the key concepts around the idea on language and culture in order to point out their anti-colonial thought and practice.
- Sociopolitical and Historical Background
The categorization of countries based on classifying some countries as developing, Third world, oppress such countries: politically, economically, and morally. This authority of power and war in the world we live in is a cause of social inequality and of struggles for social justice. The theoretical perspectives dedicated to explore epistemology in literature in which the issue of the inequality that undergo between non-West with the West. The colonial resistance and discursive representations presents inequalities. Mocking and attacking societies using racism and stereotype to insult the region. The division and classification of human beings by physical and biological characteristics is racist. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was often used as a pretext by Western colonial powers for slavery. Using universality, the process by which cultures or people are brought into the dominant Eurocentric/Western global society (Olaniyan 747).
The literary works that are considered representatives of the colonial discourse present the themes and topics only from the point of view of the colonizer without considering the way that individuals have been living in these spots previously. Postcolonialism is focused on the new perspective on individuals living in the former colonies. Most postcolonial theorists show traces of relation to the power balances in texts. Dividing how power structures are maintained by investigating how the discourse is polarized according West versus East. One of the procedures received to indicate control structures is social portrayal; by growing or contracting the size of portrayal to specific gatherings in particular groups in society (Velautham 42).
The discourse in the textual representations of different groups in society proclamations which are sanctioned inside a social setting and which add to the manner in which that social setting proceeds with its reality. Foundations and social settings in this manner assume an essential role in the improvement and upkeep maintenance and circulation of discourses (Velautham 44). When institutions represent individuals from other cultures their determination of images and discourse depends on the information that they, as the representors have about the represented (Velautham 45).
3. Foucault: Discourse Circulation of the Orient
Foucault emphasizes subjectivity and language which later influences Edward Said’s Oriental postcolonial studies. Every human thought, and all fields of knowledge, are organized and dictated by the laws of a specific code of knowledge. No subject is free and utterances are predetermined. The literary text “is not created by an intention, it is produced under determinate conditions” (Loomba 36). This view crosses with certain essential innovation in linguistics which also tested customary mindsets about human articulations (Loomba 36).
All speech is organized through “some material medium” (Loomba 100). A pattern which Foucault calls discourse. Foucault’s notion of discourse recovers voices that have been deemed not worthy of social circulation. He found that literary texts were one of the places that were also not heard. This covers the thoughts and controls what is said, and the power which governs what can and cannot be said, what is incorporated as rational and what is ignored, and what is seen socially acceptable. Discourse is a space inside which dialect is utilized in certain ways. Discursive practices make it troublesome for people to consider think outside the box options practicing power and control.
The concepts of colonial discourse are the foundation to the Foucauldian concept of discourse. Foucault points out how modern Western states create normal and abnormal subjects in order to patrol both objectify and distance the East (Townley 541). Colonial discourse more than a new term for colonialism; it displays a new way of exhibiting the interaction of cultural, intellectual, economic and political processes in the colonialism. It both describes and helps to create the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism. It also seeks to offer inside-out investigations of colonial epistemologies, and connects power and colonialism together. Colonial discourse is keen on how oriental images and stereotype, and prior knowledge of colonial societies are presented and circulated. One of the sharpest criticisms of colonial discourse studies is that it presents a distorted picture of the colonized. The colonized impose rules to inflate native culture and literature by exploiting economic and political institutions to gain aim and potentially power. “It conceals these benefits in statements about the inferiority of the colonized, the primitive nature of other races, the barbaric depravity of colonized societies” (Ashcroft 38). Therefore, the duty of the colonizer is to be in power and to present itself in the colonial society and to advance the civilization of the colony through trade, administration, cultural and moral improvementt.
- Said: West Versus East
The Foucauldian understanding of power affected Edward Said’s Orientalism, which calls knowledge to the learning about the Orient as it is delivered and flowed in the West an ideology that supports colonial power. This is a book not tied to non-Western societies, but rather about the Western portrayal of these societies, such as in the academic control and patrolling. Said demonstrates how this control is made close by the Western penetration into the East and how it is sustained and supported by different discipline, for example, literature.
Said and Foucault share many ideologies; like Foucault, Said connects structures of thought to power. He focuses a lens to show how the Orient is portrayed, and represented. Said contends that portrayals of the Orient in European literary text and different compositions have influence in the formation of an extremity among Europe and its Other, an ambivalence that is vital to the creation of European culture and to the upkeep and expansion of European authority over the Middle East. Said’s venture is to demonstrate how learning about non-Europeans is a part of the way toward keeping up control over them; along these lines, the status of knowledge is certain. Analyzing discourse bridges between the known and the unknown, the dominant and the marginalized, the ideas and institution. It enables us to perceive how power functions through language, writing, culture. Said’s contention is that Orientalism, or the study of the Orient, “was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted a binary opposition between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)” (Loomba 45). Said explains that this resistance is vital to European existence: whenever colonized individuals are irrational, Europeans are rational; if the Other is barbaric and lazy, Europe is human progress itself (Loomba 46).
Said (1978) claims that the colonized appears powerless, silent, and objectified. Objectification is incorporated within the assumption that non-European people are backward, primitive, quaint, sometimes even noble, but always different from Western civilization (Rizvi 295). Historical scholars raise cultural bias, and unrealistic facts claiming the truth for colonial exploitation. Colonial discourse is an interdisciplinary work that gathers these disciplines together. According to Edward Said (1978), when cultures interact with each other, Western colonial contact is privileged over non-Western nations (301). Postcolonial theory tends to illustrate a variety of power imbalances such as deprivation in power as to create a subaltern. These groups are the marginalized groups in society. A typical perspective of colonization which represent it as an unmitigated social catastrophe, neglects the norms by which colonial societies are invaded from supreme societies for their own benefits (Velautham .37). This argument sets a firm step towards the formation of a colony after its independence. This includes administrative, legal and educational institutions to be an identical copy from the colonial interference part of their new independent governments (Velautham 38).
Despite the fact that the colonial period is over colonial discourse is representing the East in contrast to Western standards. The West today holds power over other cultures by justifying its role as being more developed and competent (Velautham 67). The colonizer dominates land and economy of the colonized in order to fuel Western capitalism. For colonizers money and materials replaces human relations. In this quintessence, objectifying the colonized and denying them of their human rights is nomalized (Yadav 94). Colonialism exploits, dehumanizes and objectifies the colonized subject. Postcolonial discourse presents ideas such as colonizer versus colonized, East versus West and center versus margin. The East are presented as backward and require the firm hand of those who are more progressive and informed. Colonial discourse is a pool of resistance against Western hegemony (Velautham 67).
Postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha states that native identity is tied to colonial discourse. Postcolonial outlook sheds light on the colonial declarations that Third World countries and the discourses of minorities within the geographical boundaries is assumed by the colonizer having power over the colonized history, language, and literature. Decision of inclusion and exclusion is proclaimed by the superiority of Western culture, history, language, art, political structures, and social conventions. In the era of post-colonial theory, epistemology has risen between: Third World and First World. The aim of Western economic success to create Third World populations and governments is to continue Western/American colonizing goals. The argument to justify such actions is the incapability of Third World nations to neither govern themselves nor solve their own problems. Such nations choose to ignore its most critical issues. Instead use principles of trickery and deceit in taking any decision.
Location of Culture (1994), unfolds Postcolonial criticism to uncover the unequal and uneven powers of social portrayal to fulfill political and social authority within the modern world. The hostility between the colonizer and colonized and the dominance of the colonizer is noticeable. Indigenous identity is mediated through colonial representational system because of the colonial power is dominant. Bhabha added to Foucauldian politics. To Foucault “there are no relations of power without resistance”; habha (1994) adds “there are no relations of power without agency” (44). Bhabha calls Third Space which is a position that is made possible by discursive subjection. It is a non-dialectical between orientalist representations and imperial power.
An ambivalent frame between East and West colonial discourse is a feature from nineteenth century to present day. The psyche of colonial power is a controversial matter for postcolonial studies: “colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer and therefore there is no room for negotiation or change” (Loomba 46). Said’s Orientalism is mainly involved with how the Orient is portrayed in Western literature. Foucault’s ideologies are directed towards the point that domination and resistance are intertwined.
According to the Westerners, native Eastern populations are primitive (Sium 9), establishing the idea that the West is developed while the East is undeveloped. Bhabha’s principals on cultural difference apply to modern day situation, he says social distinction is the procedure of the articulation of culture as knowledgeable, legitimate, authoritative to the development of frameworks of social and cultural identification (Velautham 56), this is clear that cultural difference is widely spread and accepted from a number of Western politicians and leaders.
The West has fixed stereotypes towards certain racial groups. The indication of social, cultural, racial contrast in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical method of portrayal: it means having rigidity nature and changing order and disorder (Velautham 67). This type of racist stereotype is circulated through the method of colonial discourse through repetition until the points wind up settled in the brains of the overall public. Such discursive strategies set Eastern people outside mainstream norm of society. Therefore, new norms are formed by the colonizer a straightforward standard is established, a standard given by the host society or prevailing society, which says that these societies are fine, yet we should have the capacity to find them inside our own framework (Velautham 67).
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5. Bhabha: Ambivalence, Mimicry and Hybridity
The Easterners are presented as exotic Other by European studies and culture. This idea is elaborated in the study of Orientalism in which the West declares its superiority. Thus, one group is excluded and marginalized by another group by declaring someone as Other creates stereotypical images. In colonialism and post-colonialism, language has often become a site for both colonization and resistance. Indigenous language is frequently suppressed by colonizing forces. The use of Western languages is much more respectable.
The colonizer adopts mimicry as the technique by which the colonized adjusts to the superior culture (language, education, clothing, etc.) of the colonizer but always in the process changing it in drastic ways. Bhabha denotes that mimicry is a colonial subjection and subterfuge. The deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal through mimicry “is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (Bhabha 88). Thus, hybrid forms of knowledge created by Western ideas to manipulate the culture and religion of the locals to generate conflict among subalterns. Power, according to Bhabha, is “denied knowledge” (2004). Native populations try to negotiate their identities while being controlled by ruling imperial West. However, he points out that the marginalized resists the Western ideas of authority. The discourse of mimicry is shaped around an ambivalence. The use of mimicry in discourse serves to create the Othering of the East (Velautham 67) and paradoxical representation of Arabs in colonial texts.
The oppression of the East is built on ambivalence. Exercising a psychic process where the colonized fears and distinguishes himself from, the colonizer. Bhabha coins the term hybridity to characterize this ambivalent process, arguing that “in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes hybrid” (Bhabha 33). To analyze this furthermore, Bhabha discusses the colonial “stereotype” where he illustrates colonial authority. Stereotypes such as the “noble savage” and the “wily oriental” give the colonial power to classify the colonized as subject and justify the colonizer’s superiority and authority. Such stereotypes are formed: “both savage yet obedient… is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar” (Bhabha 85). The colonizer is paradoxical in the aim of enforcing a civilizing mission by creating “mimic men,” others who are “almost the same, but not quite (Bhabha 86). This ambivalence of “same not quite” is to exploit the native. Mimicry is a camouflage for mockery, with the native threatening to deny (or denying) his master’s desire for recognition or imitation.
The colonial enlargement of the West into the rest of the world influencing social, cultural, political, and economical control ranking high Western settlers to educate the non-West as a group that is superior to the rest creating layers between the Western nations and the Eastern nations. Such system has inherited notions of racial inferiority and Otherness. Colonialism increases cultural overlap and hybridity creating ambivalence a contradicting ways in which the colonizer and colonized view one another. The colonizer often regards the colonized as both inferior and Other, meanwhile the colonized considers the colonizer as desirable yet still corrupt (Gandhi 133).
The state of being Other or different is the way by which a cultural practice is made exotic and exciting in its difference from the colonizer’s normal perspective. Ironically, as European groups educated local, indigenous cultures, schoolchildren often begin to see their native life style as exotic and the European ways as normal or typical. Hybridity is created from cross-cultural exchange. Hybridity can be social, political, linguistic, religious, etc.
6. Concluding Remarks
Colonial discourse is a set of statements, opinions, and narratives that present the colonized peoples from the view of Western colonizers. This study has become a new outlook for philosophers such as Michel Foucault and for postcolonial writers such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. Such theorists argue that written text today is globally dominated and validated by Western super powers. The intention of the West is to control the East using military and economic strategy of Western capitalist societies using historical colonial discourse of knowledge along with the strategy of political power to dominate the East. It is concluded that racial stereotypes and humanizing impact of the empire on the barbaric natives are constructed to spread over the realm to legitimize the view that the colonial control is justified and even vital. In the novel, how discourse circulate in his text shows the colonizers voice representing the colonized or speaking on its behalf of it.
Last but not least, by displacing marginalized groups from their normal spectrum and assigning the powerful to take on the role of dominance, it removes any open door for significant discourse and connection between the colonizer and colonized. Colonial texts portray an image of the colonized individuals as indistinguishable and compare them to creatures. The point is to show the colonized at a dimension that is beneath the colonizer. The native of the land have no voice in the portrayal of their identity therefore the pursuer must choose between limited options however accept what is exhibited as facts.
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