Theory
Post-colonial theory studies the power and the continued dominance of Western ways of knowing, of intellectual enquiry. The work of Edward Saïd on Orientalism conceptually addresses the oppressed subaltern man and woman, to explain how the Eurocentric perspective of Orientalism produced the foundations — and the justifications — for the domination of The Other, by means of colonialism. Before their explorations of The Orient, the Europeans had created an imagined geography of the Orient — predefined images of savage and monstrous places that lay beyond the horizon of the known world. During their initial Oriental explorations, the Europeans’ mythologies were reinforced, when the travellers returned to Europe with reports of monsters and savage lands. The concepts of the “difference” and the “strangeness” of the Orient were perpetuated through the mass communications media of the time, and through discourse that created an “Us” and “Them” binary social relation with which the Europeans defined themselves — by defining the differences of the Orient from the Occident, the European West. The Us-and-Them binary social relation was a foundation of colonialism, because it represented the Orient as backward and irrational lands, and, therefore, in need of European help to become modern, in the Western sense. Hence, the discourse of Orientalism is Eurocentric, and does not seek to include the voices of the Oriental peoples, the subalterns, themselves.
The cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued for the power of discourse to create and reinforce Western dominance. The discourses on how Europe described differences between itself (The West) and others, used European cultural categories, languages, and ideas to represent "The Other." The knowledge produced by such a discourse becomes praxis, which then becomes reality; by producing a discourse of “difference” Europe was able to maintain its dominance over “The Other”, with a binary social relation between the European and The Other, thereby creating and establishing the Subaltern, made possible by excluding The Other from the production of the discourse. About such a binary social relation, Owen ’Alik Shahadah said that:
The Eurocentric discourse on Africa is in error, because those foundational paradigms, which inspired the study, in the first place, were rooted in the denial of African agency; political intellectualism bent on its own self-affirmation, rather than objective study.
— The Removal of Agency from Africa
Read more about this topic: Subaltern (postcolonialism)
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