Things She Said

unexpected ways of expression, mostly because it gives us a very peculiar look about Portugal. He’s Japanese and when he looks into our coffee shop’s culture, he sees the same thing as the pub’s culture in England. Thus, he picks some elements associated with the coffee shop, reinterprets, and projects on them other things he finds in the streets: sentences that people say such as ‘window-shop’, also projecting the utopias, so to speak, which are imaginary spaces that keep missing, so that the…

Few theoretical fields can compare with the amount of internal conflict that plagues postcolonial theory: a semmingly constant stream of debates centring on internal rather than external elements. One such debate can be located between the ‘first wave’ and ‘second wave’ critics of the theory, who are often engaged with one another in a rather antagonistic manner. A simple explanation of the stances of each wave can be stated as such: first wave criticism challenges the colonial status quo,…

the colonial culture, specifically English literature and language. She uses the culture that is oppressing her as a means of liberation. Similarly, Homi Bhabha argues that a person’s identity is constructed by the perception of how others see this person; this perception is referred to as the “gaze,” which he also argues is unstable. This could be seen in Annie John, in which the protagonist returns and reverses the white gaze; she appropriates the colonizer’s gaze and turns it against them.…

have been fairly harsh with their views on Orientalism, even going so far as to “[accuse] Said of perpetuating the same Eastern stereotypes for which he has faulted the Western imperialist” (“Edward W. Said” 336). Others simply focused on the imperfections in his arguments, stating that they were weak or could have had more impact (336). In his review of Orientalism in 1980, Malcolm H. Kerr states that “Edward Said, a literary critic loaded with talent, has certainly made a splash [with…

Edward Said in which was very influential and controversial in postcolonial studies. Said redefined the term “Orientalism.” He defined it as a constellation of untrue assumptions expressing how the western attitudes toward the East were romanticized. Said starts off his book with the fact that the Orient played a key role in the “construction” of European and American culture, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1).…

In A Passage to India colonization is only one of the many aspects of the relationship between the East and the West. The construction of the East and the West paved the way for the creation of stereotypes of Easterners by Westerners and vice versa and the physical, social, cultural, and emotional distance between the two parties perpetuated the reliance on stereotypes as a means of understanding one another. Another binary opposition presented in A Passage to India is that of…

This is linked to the power that narrates the history through colonialism. Furthermore, this issue relates to the idea of representation. How the non-European cultures connoted. Realizing this notion, theorists such as Edward Said developed and introduced postcolonial theory. Said highlights the prevailing binary opposition between the west and the rest. There are some findings such as the rest is often depicted especially in Literature as the other which is exotic and less…

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…

cause us the first position state which will we will lose our national identity. Basically our roots in which our country had been built on will die and we will do something different. The past will be forgotten, and the future will remain the only thing we care about in our world. My opinion well i completely disagree with this the fact is…

an issue for American society. Multiple scholars trace the issue back towards the enlightenment, referencing the context surrounding the interactions between the eastern and western world as laying the groundwork for interactions to this day. Edward Said famously developed the concept of Orientalism, which he defines as “a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.”…