The Rhetoric of India

Provider: Kate Liu / 劉紀雯

• The rhetoric of otherness (strict binarism)
• Criticism of S. Rushdie's Shame
• Pakistani nationalism 

The Rhetoric of English India   Sara Suleri's The Rhetoric of English India is a powerful challenge to the obsession with otherness that marks the current study of colonial discourse. Where other scholars tend to observe a strict separation between works by Western and  non-Western writers, and between ruling and subject races,  Suleri reconstructs a diverse Anglo-India narrative in which English and Indian idioms inevitably collude. The author focuses on the paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by British colonization of the Indian subcontinent.    By studying a wide range of materials, from the writings of Burke to the travel logs of nineteenth-century women such as  Fanny Parks and Harriet Tytler to the fiction of Kipling,  Forster, Naipaul, and Rushdie, Suleri deftly reveals the complicity that always operates in these stories. Her study succeeds not only in challenging the standard chronology of  imperial history; it fundamentally recasts contemporary discourse on the theories of cultural empowerment.  The University of Chicago Press  from Sara Suleri Goodyear Homepage

• The rhetoric of otherness (strict binarism)

1. p. 1 "Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories, its concept-function remain too embedded in a theoretical duality of margin to center ultimately to allow the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires.
2. p. 4  break down the binarism -"To study the rhetoric of the British Raj in both its colonial and postcolonial manifestations is therefore to attempt to break down the incipient schizophrenia of a critical discourse that seeks to represent domination and subordination as though the two were mutually exclusive terms.
3. example of otherness: India read as "intransigent," or India as unreadable., to protect the myth of colonial authority. P. 7

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• Criticism of S. Rushdie's Shame

1. 174 "Since the book attempt to house idioms of the political and the news-worthy, and finally can only draw attention to its own language in a gesture of defeated surrogacy, Shame's narrative peculiarities become paradigmatic of the casualties frequently accrued by contemporary postcolonial writing.
   • the novel's two narrative modes: 1. documentary fragments, 2. Allegorized, third-person tale
   • The aura of shamefulness, self-censorship
   • the novel's unhappy relation to the molecular profusion of fact that constitutes political discourse, is Shame's undoing.'resort to allegory or fairy-tale (the story of Omar Khayyaam, born out of a trinity of mothers, being dismembered by Shame. )
   • Its binarism'the urge to Westernization, a will to fundamentalism
   • the connection between idioms of exile and adolescence--[His] nostalgic evocations of exile recast the postcolonial writer as Peter Pan, who, after he has learned to fly, returns home to find that his parents have put bars on his bedroom window and a new baby in his bed. After self-exile, the writer must come to terms with the literalizing urge to return, simply in order to examine a prior history as a prison house, --being a voyeur, not taking any responsibility.

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• Pakistani nationalism

1. 183 As Stanley Wolpert's biography demonstrates, the sheer unlikeliness of Jinnah's rise to power in the Muslim League such an overdetermined relation between national movements and religion. In the context of political mythmaking in Pakistan, Bhutto's need to serve as a truant to that country's originary myth is a compelling narrative that no novel about the latter ruler can afford to ignore.

184 After twelve years of military rule, Pakistan was hungry for a flamboyant, civil ruler; Bhutto was both fetish and scapegoat for this desire.

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Bibliography

The Rhetoric of India. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1992.

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Postcolonialism