Colonial+Discourse

**COLONIAL DISCOURSE**
This is a term brought into __currency__ by Edward Said who saw__Foucault__ ’s notion of a **discourse** as valuable for describing that system within which that range of practices termed ‘colonial’ come into being. Said’s //Orientalism//, which examined the ways in which colonial discourse operated as an instrument of power, initiated what came to be known as colonial discourse theory, that theory which, in the 1980s, saw colonial discourse as its field of study.__The best__ known colonial discourse theorist, apart from Said, is Homi Bhabha, whose analysis posited certain disabling contradictions within colonial __relationships__, such as [|**hybridity**] , [|**ambivalence**] and [|**mimicry**] , which revealed the inherent vulnerability of colonial discourse. Discourse, as Foucault theorizes it, is a system of statements within which the world can be known. It is the system by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing specific knowledges, disciplines and values upon dominated groups. As a social formation it works to constitute reality not only for the objects it appears to represent but also for the subjects who form the community on which it depends. Consequently, colonial discourse is the complex of signs and practices that organize social existence and social reproduction within colonialrelationships. Colonial discourse is greatly implicated in ideas of the centrality of Europe, and thus in assumptions that have become characteristic of [|**modernity**] : assumptions about history, language, literature and ‘technology’. Colonial discourse is thus a system of statements that can be made about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the relationship between these two. It is __the system of__ knowledge and beliefs about the world within which acts of colonization take place.

Although it is generated within the society and cultures of the colonizers, it becomes that discourse within which the colonized may also come to see themselves. At the very least, it creates a deep conflict in the consciousness of the colonized because of its clash with other knowledges (and kinds of knowledge) about the world. Rules of __inclusion__ and exclusion operate on the assumption of the superiority of the colonizer’s culture, history, language, art, __political__ structures, social conventions, and the assertion of the need for the colonized to be ‘raised up’ through colonial contact. In particular, colonial discourse __hinges__ on notions of race that begin to emerge at the very advent of European imperialism. Through such distinctions it comes to represent the colonized, whatever the nature of their social structures and cultural histories, as ‘primitive’ and the colonizers as ‘civilized’. Colonial discourse tends to exclude, of course, statements about the exploitation of the resources of the colonized, the politicalstatus accruing to colonizing powers, the importance to domestic politics of the development of an empire, all of which may be compelling reasons for maintaining colonial ties. Rather it conceals these benefits in statements about the inferiority of the colonized, the primitive nature of other [|**races**], the barbaric depravity of colonized societies, and therefore the duty of the imperial power to reproduce itself in __the colonial__ society, and to __advance__ the civilization of the colony through trade, administration, cultural and moral improvement. Such is the power of colonial discourse that individual colonizing subjects are not often consciously aware of the duplicity of their __position__, for colonial discourse constructs the colonizing subject as much as the colonized. Statements that contradict the discourse cannot be made either without incurring punishment, or without making the individuals who make those statements appear __eccentric__ and abnormal.

//Further reading//:
Ashcroft 2001b; Barker //et al//. 1994; Bhabha 1983, 1984a; 1994, 1996; Chrisman and Williams 1993; Hulme 1989; Lazarus 1993; Mohanty 1995; Parry 1995; Pennycook 1998; Said 1978; Spivak 1987.