In ‘The Rhetoric of Empire’, David Spur explores the discourse that Western journalists, travel writers and imperial administrators have used to depict the non-Western world using tropes, which he identifies through a careful analysis, tracing various sorts of writings from different historical contexts, and studying the way in which these tropes have been deployed. Among these rhetorical modes are surveillance, classification, and affirmation; framing these themes proves very much useful, as it allows to give answers to the question that Spurr rises: ‘how does the Western writer construct representation out of the strange and (to the writer) often incomprehensible realities confronted in the non-Western world? What are the cultural, ideological or literary presuppositions upon which such a construct is based?’
The act of looking that is supposedly normal when making a report about a particular subject or place, takes in a different dimension in the eyes of the Western writer. By examining James Agee’s comments on the American South conditions during the 1930s, Spurr realizes that the simple acts of looking and speaking mark a colonial situation, given the authoritative manner in which they were evoked. A situation where Agee himself, …show more content…
Buchan mentions the notion of the ‘white man’s duty’, a phrase that invokes the title of Kippling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ which was published in The Time in 1899. The poem greatly represents the theme of affirmation as a self-idealization technique, thus seems appears to have been, as Spurr mentions, ‘an especially British idea’. This statement recalls Carl Thompson’s example of ‘tinned can food’ which, upon its invention, British writers never ceased to praise, for it symbolized the british progress and
The act of looking that is supposedly normal when making a report about a particular subject or place, takes in a different dimension in the eyes of the Western writer. By examining James Agee’s comments on the American South conditions during the 1930s, Spurr realizes that the simple acts of looking and speaking mark a colonial situation, given the authoritative manner in which they were evoked. A situation where Agee himself, …show more content…
Buchan mentions the notion of the ‘white man’s duty’, a phrase that invokes the title of Kippling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ which was published in The Time in 1899. The poem greatly represents the theme of affirmation as a self-idealization technique, thus seems appears to have been, as Spurr mentions, ‘an especially British idea’. This statement recalls Carl Thompson’s example of ‘tinned can food’ which, upon its invention, British writers never ceased to praise, for it symbolized the british progress and