Otherness and the Rhetoric of Imperialist Discourse :: Free Essays Online

Otherness and the ornateness of Imperialist DiscourseLe yo vle touye yon chen, yo dil fou.(When they want to pull down a dog, they say its crazy.) ---Haitian Proverb When Elizabethan map makers came upon an subject field of the globe that was yet to be thoroughly explored by western civilization, they would give birth a rough estimate as to its shape and terrain, and then adjudicate it as Terra incognita, or unvalued land. To help illustrate exactly how unknown this land was, images of demons and a variety of other monsters filled space unremarkably inhabited by the names of cities, rivers and deserts. While the labeling itself could at first mess be dismissed as a simple acknowledgment of ignorance (as it sure was,) an understanding of traditional heathenish attitudes within imperialist countries provides us with the tools to take hold of such language and imagery as highly representative of an political orientation exemplified (though certainly not monopoli zed) by England during the period. What is so striking about terra incognita is not so much its name or the images it connects to nonwestern culture, but the fact that betrays flat something as scientific and functional as a map to be a form of discourse deeply enmeshed in ideology. In a imperialist society, cultural discourse tends to seep into nearly any aspect of human communication and interaction, and is often characterized by an emphasis on separation, classification, and the idea of opposites. This seperative effect exploits differences in ideology, race, religion, tradition, clothing style, and language, among others, to create a images of cultural oppositeness. Such images are exactly the type that Edward Said describes in his script Orientalism. As Said puts it, orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and (most of the time) the Occident.1 These distinctions can be found in all colon ial and imperialist societies, including those that benefit from forward-looking day manifestations of such constructions. The effect of separating first world or western culture from that found in countries outside the Occident is to create a general perception of the people practicing these cultures as Others. Otherness (a term frequently used in critiques of imperialist discourse,) is usually synonymous with poor, third world, or pre industrialized, and suggests many of the same remedies that have been prescribed to countries suffering from otherness and Orientalism for hundreds of years.