Comparative Identities in the Post-Colonial World

Post-colonialism is quite distinct from anti-colonialism. Reactions against colonialism have manifested themselves in a variety of ways, but always posited on the premise of a binary opposition. Where post colonialism differs is that although challenging the hegemony of colonizing cultures, it recognizes the plurality of contacts between colonizing and decolonized.

Postcolonial comparative literature is also a voyage of discovery, only this time, instead of the European setting off in search of riches and new lands to conquer, equipped with maps and charts to aid him, this voyage is one towards self-awareness, towards recognition of responsibility, guilt, complicity and collusion in the creation of the labyrinthine world of contemporary writing.

 European are no longer embarking on that voyage from the center of the world either, for centers and peripheries have been redefined. In his study of the relationship between Europeans and native Caribbean between 1492 and 1727, aptly entitled Colonial Encounters, Peter Hulme discusses accounts of the discoveries citing several respected 20^th century autobiographical and historical works. Questioning the premises upon which scholarly judgments were made, he draws our attention to the assumptions that underline a great deal of European investigation into non-European cultures: The ethnic stereotypes are more powerful for being embedded in contexts which convey a certain amount of historical and ethnographic information.

As always, the stereotype operates. The characteristics of Orient: historical, ferocious, warlike, hostile, truculent and vindictive; these are present as innate characteristics irrespective of circumstances; and of course there were cannibals, locked by the verb into a realm of beingness that lies beyond question.

Hulmes is here discussing the Handbook of South American Indians, published in 1946-50, and draws our attention to the subtle use of emotive language that relies upon stereotypes of savagery.  And the savage is, of course, outside the world of civilization. They carried with them a belief in the civilizing mission of their own culture, a belief which, as Hulme points out, is still enshrined in much European thinking today.

Carlos Fuentes, expands America, he says, was discovered because invented because imagine because desired because named. Humanist intellectuals, he suggests, saw in America the promise of a New Golden Age, and the concept of the Noble Savage was born. Utopia was demolished, burned and branded and killed by those who wanted Utopia: the epic actors of the Conquest, New World of enchantment and fantasy only read about before in the romances of chivalry, and who were then forced to destroy what they had named in their dreams of Utopia.

The early Portuguese explorers who encountered African civilizations were not motivated by Utopian social vision, but by economic goals:

1. African ports were stopovers on the way to the Far East, it is interesting to compare the pattern of European infiltration into the Americas and into Africa.
2.  As the native populations of the Americans were decimated, an increasing number of slaves were transported across the Atlantic to the expanding settlements and plantations of the Americas.

Wole Soyinka, eminent writer and Professor of Comparative Literature, recounts in his Myth, Literature and the African world, his attempts in the early 1970s to give a series of lectures on African literature at Cambridge, where he was visiting fellow. His lectures were given under the aegis of the Department of Social Anthropology, for the English Department did not believe in any such beast as ‘African Literature’. The object of that study was Anthropological and not literary. Soyinka recognizes this categorization system.

Soyinka’s criticism of the marginalization of African Literature is important. He draws attention to the anthropological bias of much European work on Africa, just as Hulme draws our attention to a similar bias in work on Native American languages and cultures. In the 1990s the gap is finally beginning to be bridged somewhat, as postcolonial anthropology on new territory. And the methodology is essentially comparative.

Example: Chidi Amuta feels, this crisis, he argues, derives from the double precise views on who an African is:

To the Western mind, the African was and has remainded a product of the ‘heart of darkness’, an incarnation of several racially defined pathological limitations. To the Western educated African, on the other hand, the African just happens to be the darkest species of homo-sapiens, the victim of centuries of denigration and exploitation. Nadine Gordimer, endeavoring to define African writing from her perspective as a white African writer argues that:

 African writing is writing done in any language by Africans themselves and by others of whatever skin color who share with Africans the experience of having been shaped, mentally and spiritually by Africa rather than anywhere else in the world. One must look at the world from Africa, to be an African writer, not look upon Africa, from the world.

These African writers propose an Africa-centered consciousness and a study of literature that starts with Africa and considers other literatures in relation to that African center .This model of comparative literature is in complete contrast to the old Eurocentric models that rejected comparison with non-European texts on the grounds of unbridgeable difference and the absence of a place in the western Canon.

Post-colonial literary theory has begun to deal, with the problems of transmuting time into space, with the present struggle out of the past, and, like much recent postcolonial literature, it attempts to construct a future. The postcolonial world is one in which destructive cultural encounter is changing into an acceptance of difference on equal terms.

The early travelers sought to describe the new with the perceptual tools and literary conventions of the known world. So they drew upon a hoard of images of mythical beasts, tales of the unknown and imaginary worlds, as exemplified in the hugely popular romances of chivalry. These images of a fantasy come to life, combined with the desire to believe in the existence of Utopia and the ‘Nobel Savage’ shaped European perceptions of Latin America. Gradually, as the Utopian ideals faded, the continuant came to signify something align, one of the last places on earth. Even today, myths of Latin America prevailing in Europe the United States see the continent as the place to which criminals, bank robbers or ex-Nazis can run and hide the place down below from which dark hordes of illegal immigrants, drug traffickers, killer bees and other undesirable diabolic things seek to rise up and cross the Rio Grande into the light of western civilization.