Letteratura Post-Coloniale, Letteratura Inglese 1

Colonialism and culture

“Europe is literally the creation of the third world”: it’s probably one of the most famous quotes from Frantz Fanon, the so-called founder of Third Worldism. E. M. Forster asserts (in A Passage to India) that colonialism is more than just momentary chaos, since it has become nature itself: the Indian city of Chandrapore seems ‘made of mud’ (‘the inhabitants of mud moving’). Forster’s writing describes the ethnography of British colonialism in India: for him, nature was a way of talking about culture. Colonialism not only has had cultural effects that have too often been ignored or displaced into the logics of modernisation and world capitalism, it was itself a cultural project of control. Colonial knowledge enabled colonial conquest; in certain important ways, culture was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in newly classified ‘traditional’ societies were reconstructed and transformed by and through colonial technologies of conquest and rule, which created new categories and oppositions between colonisers and colonised, European and Asian.

The anthropological concept of culture might never have been invented without a colonial theatre that necessitated the knowledge of culture; claims about nationality necessitated notions of culture that marked groups off from one another in essential ways, uniting language, race, geography, and history in a single concept. But culture became fundamental to the formation of class society, the naturalisation of gender divisions, and to developing discourses of race, biology, and nationality.

Culture and colonial history

If culture itself, as an object of knowledge and a mode of knowledge about certain objects, was formed in relation to colonial histories, it is even more difficult to recognise the ways in which specific cultural forms were themselves constituted out of colonial encounters. This task becomes even more daunting when we realise that these cultural forms became fundamental to the development of resistance against colonialism. Looking at colonialism as a cultural project of control thus focuses attention on the interdependency of these terms, on the complex interplay of coercion and hegemony, on the categories of thought that generally orient scholarly considerations of colonial history or historical anthropology. The culture of colonialism was also characterised by violence: brute torture on the body of the colonised and the public exhibition of a colonised body were the fundamental reasons why torture became terror through the culture of colonialism.

Transformations in academic landscapes

For the first time, it seems possible to imagine dramatic transformations in certain academic landscapes: the traditional analytic antinomies that have shaped questions and discourses in the past are being reformulated and sometimes dissolved. Colonialism can be seen both as a historical moment (in relation to European political and economic projects in the modern era) and as a trope for domination and violation. Culture can be seen both as a historically constituted domain of significant concepts and practices and as a regime in which power achieves its ultimate apotheosis. Linked together, colonialism and culture can be seen to provide a new world in which to deploy a critical cartography of the history and effects of power.

Science and colonial expansion

Science flourished in the 18^th century also because colonial expansion both necessitated and facilitated the active exercise of the scientific imagination: it was through discovering (the siting, surveying, mapping, naming, and then possessing) of new regions that science could open new territories of conquest: cartography, geography, botany, and anthropology were all colonial enterprises. Not only did colonial rulers align themselves with the inexorable and universal forces of science progress, rationality, and modernity, they placed many of the disruptions and excesses of rule into institutions and cultures that were labelled as tradition.

An example of this can be seen in the history of the caste system in India: for anthropology, for social theory, and for contemporary political practice in India, culture in India seems always to have been principally defined by caste: caste is considered today the major threat to Indian modernity. However, much of what has been taken to be timeless tradition is the paradoxical effect of colonial rule: culture was carefully depoliticised and reified into a specifically colonial version of civil society; it has been studied that there can be supplemental readings of ‘caste’, that make it seem more a product of rule than a predecessor of it. Caste became the essence of Indian culture and civilisation through historical process, under colonial rule. This reminds us that Western scholarship has consistently been part of the problem rather than the solution.

Colonial and postcolonial literature

Imperialism and textuality

Present-day readers experience Empire textually through the medium of 19^th and 20^th-century novels and periodicals and travel writings. Yet Empire was itself a textual exercise: the colonial officer filing a report on affairs in his district, administrators who consulted Islamic and Hindu sacred texts to establish a legal system for British India… They too understood colonisation by way of text. The triple-decker novel and the best-selling adventure tale were infused with imperial ideas of race pride and national prowess. Writing was also used to claim territory, becoming a vehicle of imperial authority and symbolising and performing the act of taking possession; often the effect of their descriptions was to erase the signs of other lives which had unfolded in that particular space. People experienced an intense need to create new worlds out of old stories.

Writing also became a way to understand the diverse: strangeness was made comprehensible by using everyday names, and rhetorical and syntactic textual conventions. From the early days of colonisation, therefore, literary efforts to interpret other lands offered home audiences a way of thinking about exploration. Spanish, Portuguese, and later Dutch, British and French hegemony were affirmed and justified in myriad forms of cultural pageantry and symbolic display: literature created channels for the exchange of colonial images and ideals. Travel meant imaginative anticipation, and the actual treasures and curiosities encountered on distant shores (gold and ivory, cinnamon and ginger, parrots, exotic beasts, human beings of different cultures) could only embellish expectation.

Victorian era of full-blown empire

The focus of this book is the Victorian era of full-blown empire (territorial expansion, occupation, and symbolic investment on a massive scale); however, it’s important to note that European exploration as a metaphoric practice was already well established some three or four hundred years before this time. The early colonisers borrowed conceptual schemes from oral narrative, popular fantasy, and ancient sacred books (including those of colonised peoples) and they also were inspired by early travellers’ tales (savagery in Herodotus, the accounts of Marco Polo…). In essence, colonial expeditions were inspired by reading, and they became themselves exercises in reading; mythic and narrative patterns gave to uncertain journeys a direction and a path.

The diverse was interpreted with the eyes of the colonialist: the fascination with difference competed with a reliance on sameness and familiarity, through an associative work. So, European models were applied to the new world: countries were spatially conceived using figures which harked back to home ground, and classifications and codes imported from Europe were matched to peoples, cultures, and topographies entirely un-European. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the practice of interpretation as replication is memorably demonstrated: the protagonist wards off starvation and the anxiety of the unknown by building himself a small estate characterised by its true Protestant tradition and, in the absence of society, writing a journal becomes his way of objectifying and confirming the surrounding reality.

However, no matter how much Crusoe strives to assert his own reality and establish his rights to the island ‘kingdom’, the unknown remains a constant anxiety, represented by his horror of cannibalism. This explains his concern to make of Friday an image of himself, an opposite who will confirm the reality of his own being: he is ‘my man Friday’, dressed like Crusoe, named after the day Crusoe saved him.

In a continuing process of historical sedimentation, travellers wrote memoirs preserving the fascinations which had tempted them out in the first place. 19^th-century writers of empire were heirs to long-established traditions of symbolic interpretation. During the early days of administration in areas such as India, South-East Asia and the Middle East, colonisers often searched for the non-European texts that would help them to govern; in many cases, textual borrowings took place with the co-operation of colonised subjects: the aim was to legitimise colonial rule in an indigenous idiom. European scholars and colonial officials alike pored over and assiduously absorbed indigenous religious texts, laws, and legends. Translations and evocations of local custom provided introductory readings to the colonies for those in Britain.

Imperialism's effects on indigenous peoples

For many peoples, imperialism represented destruction of their communities, dispossession, death in colonial wars and in labour gangs, death as a result of disease (native Americans, Aborigines of Australia…) and starvation. These effects of imperialism usually appear as mere traces in the writing of the time: the colonialist world system legitimated itself by way of myth and metaphor while, at the same time, masking suffering. The characterisation of indigenous peoples was overdetermined by stereotypes, and the colonised was referred as the colonial other, or simply the Other. The West conceived of its superiority relative to the perceived lack of power, self-consciousness, or ability to think and rule, of colonised people. Colonialist attitudes were formed in response to the culture and the struggles of the colonised, and this shows the anxieties of the colonialists.

Dealing in cashmere and turtles: the Victorian novel

To legitimate its presence, colonial authority depended on imaginative backing, what have been called energising myths of the New World, of the Empire ‘on which the sun would never set’: imperialism was a thing of mind and representation. Most British imperialists cherished a heroic image of themselves as conquerors and civilisers of the world. Where the British established a colony, they proclaimed the start of a new history: other histories were declared of lesser significance or, even worse, non-existent. British writers formed part of an imperial society, and their work was often animated by the awareness of the vastness of the British Empire (they participated in the representation of British global power mainly by taking it for granted). Even when appearing in the form of wealth (Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park), colonial matters tended to be kept in the background of the novel, in particular when they involved risky or dirty investments. The colonies, as we all know, were places of banishment, unlawful practice, oppression, and social disgrace: colonial territories took the aspect of Victorian society’s hidden self.

Empire enters the 19^th-century novel chiefly as commodity, in images of riches and trade: lands beyond the seas would manifest themselves in the form of products. The presence of exotic objects in novels carried associations of either the fascination or the fear of the forbidden: the ‘Other’ could signify anything from irresistible delight to social unacceptability and instability (Jane Eyre—Rochester’s first wife’s madness is caused by the tormented sexuality of her Caribbean past). The Victorians’ relationship to the colonial experience showed distinct contradictions, which too were reflected in the novel: because of metaphoric projection, the colonies were depicted as being ‘just like home’. The colonial factor often operated in the manner of deus ex machina: in distant lands, remunerative prospects were to be had.

The Imperial century

For the British the time of Queen Victoria’s reign represented their great age of colonisation; it was believed that Britain had a destiny and a duty to rule the world. For Britain the second half of the 19^th century represented its period of high imperialism, but the foundations for this power had been laid during the decades of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, with the opening of the South Pacific, the annexation of territory in southern Africa and, most important, the dominion in India. Victorian high imperialism was distinguished by its geographic magnitude, the institutionalisation of colonial power, the formalisation of imperialist ideologies (especially the racist ones). Empire both stimulated and satisfied the wildest imaginings through propaganda, with an eye-catching assemblage of hero cults, exhibitionism, rituals of self-glorification and an eagerness to ‘Play the Game’.

As Empire grew, identity was defined as against the inferior state of being which the colonised represented. The intensity of these beliefs concealed an edge of anxiety, a fear that all that had been gained could be easily lost; it was certainly true that Britain’s heavy dependency on the colonies had exacted its costs. The Great Depression (1873-1896) shifted the economic power bases in Europe, and other nations were not only outstripping Britain in trade, manufacture, and technological development, they were also challenging its sway by amassing colonial possessions for themselves abroad: despite its patriotic excesses, for Britain, the final decades of the 19^th century were a time of growing self-doubt. There were apprehensions, too, regarding the effect of the miscegenation in the colonies, the creolisation, and the fear that humankind might be regressing. As we can see in R. L. Stevenson’s later tales, colonial literature was sensitive to these anxieties, and the white degenerate began to replace the intrepid adventurers. In Britain patriotism, called jingoism in its more rabid forms, was perhaps the most powerful medium through which the belief in the Empire was maintained.

Wealth, sweetness, glory: Justifications for Empire

Theories of racial and cultural supremacy obviously played a key role in validating imperial rule: imperialist discourse, in fact, was indistinguishable from racism. Justifications such as the need to ‘civilise’ natives, or the appeal to the technological superiority of the West, and motives formed a complicated matrix, comprising many layers. In British East Africa at the end of the 19^th century, strategic pressures converged with anti-slavery sentiment and economic speculation to encourage colonisation: the Victorians had a genius for fashioning moral ideals which matched their economic needs (it was believed that enterprise would secure the happiness, prosperity, and salvation of dark tribes sunk in barbarism).