Reading Non-Western Discourses

Abstract

In the contemporary West, the non-Western world is still rarely read about, spoken of, or listened to. If at all, then it more often than not figures as the ‘Other’, removed from Western self-experience and deviant from ‘the norms’ arid ‘the standards’. If and when, for some dramatic reason, the Other is invoked in Western discourse, then it is usually ‘we’ that speak for ‘them’ (Said 1978, 1993). Indeed, reading the non-Western Other and letting the non-Western Other speak have yet to become a normal part of Western discourse (Spivak 1988a, 1988b). But as we enter into the new millennium, it has become abundantly clear that whilst the contradictions between the West and the Rest are being deepened, the interconnections between the two worlds also proliferate, in finance and trade, migration, the World Wide Web, environmental disaster and international terrorism. Nowadays problems ‘there’ easily become problems ‘here’; what ‘we’ say or do ‘here’ quickly changes or even eliminates lives ‘there’. The changed conditions of growing cultural interdependence and hostility call for new modes of communication reaching beyond local, national, linguistic and cultural boundaries.