Abstract
Though a portmanteau concept, postcolonialism is a strategy of reading whose guiding premises, working principles and theoretical yardsticks are grounded in bringing to crisis all normative discourses, time-setting notions and master theories. Its project of committing critical violence on the discourse of colonialism has entailed a face-t o-face engagement with a variety of topics as migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, identity, race, difference and gender. It has also necessitated a reassessment of such cognitive fields and scholarly disciplines as history, philosophy, anthropology and philology as well as such assumed value-free, objective domains as Western mathematics.1 Hence, rising high on the agenda of critics such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Sadek Jalal el-Azm, Anwar Abdel Malek, Samir Amine, Edward Said, G.C. Spivak and Homi Bhabha is the resolution to debunk and dismantle Western stereotyped and prejudiced representations of the other, and then, at a hopefully later stage or during that very gesture, to reconstruct in their stead images of the self and the other, images that go beyond the fixity of binary oppositions to celebrate the interdependence and interpenetration of same and different.
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Notes
Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 1995; repr. 1978, p. 53.
Ibid., p. 101.
Sir Walter Scott, The Talisman, ed. Dent. London: Dent, 1980, p. 24.
Ibid., pp. 38–9.
Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott.: The Great Unknown, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970, p. 933.
Ibid., p. 937.
Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Dent, (London: Dent, 1980, p. 36).
Ibid., p. 39.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 80.
Quoted by Hans E. Tutsh, Facets of Arab Nationalism, Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1965, p. x.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Trans. H.T. Love-Porter, New York: The Modern Library, 1927, p. 315.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Harvard: Library of Congress, pp. 9–10.
Thomas Mann, ibid., p. 548.
Walter Allen, The English Novel, Great Britain: Pelican Books, 1954, p. 90.
Paul Bowles, Without Stopping, London: Peter Owen, 1972, p. 127.
Ibid., p. 127.
Ibid., p. 152.
Ibid., p. 283.
Ibid., p. 305.
Cited in Edward Said, ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry 15, Winter 1989, pp. 205–25.
Ibid., p. 207.
Ibid., p. 215.
Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory, London: Verso, 1992, pp. 165–70.
Ibid., pp. 165–70.
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 2.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, London: Penguin, 1994, p. 119.
Helen Triffin, ‘Postcolonial Literatures and Counter-discourse’, in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 95.
Ibid., p. 96.
Jenny Shape, ‘Figures of Colonial Resistance’, in The Postcolonial Studies Reqder, eds Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Teffini, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 100.
Bart Moore Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London & New York: Verso, 1997, pp. 26–8.
Quoted in ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 27.
Quoted in ibid., p. 29.
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© 2012 Taoufiq Sakhkhane
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Sakhkhane, T. (2012). Representation and Resistance. In: Spivak and Postcolonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349414_5
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