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Imperialism and Colonialism
 Military, economic, cultural
Canon formation
Control though language
Stereotypes as well as Other Forms of Racism
Contemporary examples
- (military [Gulf War], economic [MacDonald's & Marboro in Taiwan], cultural)
--Supported by colonial discourse (e.g. literature and esp. novel, travelogue, Orientalism Reader's Guide p. 190) Orientalism: An Outline by Amy Yeh.
- Prototypes in colonial discourses: The Tempest (Prospero, Ariel and Caliban); Robinson Crusoe (Crusoe and Goodman Friday)
"In The Tempest, Shakespeare's single major addition to the story he found in certain pamphlets about a shipwreck in the Bermudas was to make the island inhabited befire Prospero's arrival. This single addition turned the original adventure story into an allegory of the colonial encounter" (Loomba 2)
- Ambivalent colonial discourses: e.g. Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India
- Visual Examples: Colonialist Paintings and Photography
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- canon formation--the denial of the value of the 'peripheral', the 'marginal', the 'uncanonized'.
e.g. English Study
"It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empire proceeded from a single ideological climate and that the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, both at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and at the unconscious level, where it leads to the naturalizing of constructed values (e.g. civilization, humanity, etc.) which, conversely, established 'savagery', 'native', 'primitive', as their antithesis and as the object of a reforming zeal" (Ashcroft 3 ).
canonization--mainstream and margin
"Literature was made as central to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation. So when elements of the periphery and margin [e.g. Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea] threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidly incorporated. This was a process, in E. Said's terms, of conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation, that is, a mimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be accepted but to be adopted and absorbed. (Ashcroft 4 )
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- Control through Language
language--the imperial education system installs a 'standard' version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all 'variants' as impurities.
--e.g. pidgin English, Taiwanese
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- Stereotypes as well as Other Forms of Racism
e.g. E. Said's Orientalism [basic idea: [some texts] are accorded }the authority of academics, institutions, and governments. . . Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe" (94).
(e.g. Said's example:
- Richard Burton and his Pilgrimage, Arabian Nights;
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contemporary examples:
- Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein's The Bell Curve (1994): the discrepancy between black and white Americans on the standardized IQ tests was due to natural or genetic causes;
- Picturing Oriental Women: stereotyping/standardization of Oriental women such as Suzie Huang and Connie Cheong)
- The Colonized's Self-Hatred [dependency or inferiority complex] or Split Subject --
e.g. Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1967): In the colonized's soul "an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality" (18).
(e.g. Japanese-Taiwanese subject in 〈小琪的帽子〉、〈莎喲娜啦〉、《無言的山丘》、《阿爸的情人》)
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