Listening for the echo

Representation and resistance in postcolonial studies

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2178441
AutoresRobert F Spencer (University of Manchester, autor correspondente), Robert Spencer (0000-0003-0860-4717)
Ano2009
Volume45
Fascículo1
Páginas71-81
Data de publicação2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449850802636747
OpenAlexW2021673044
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas18

Edward Said's Orientalism is an anomalous work in his oeuvre; unlike many of his later books its emphasis on the way in which cultures have been misrepresented and misused by colonial power is not matched by an equally voluble insistence on the need to contest those misrepresentations and therefore to develop more self‐conscious, sympathetic and egalitarian relationships with power's victims. The importance and availability of those relationships to western readers is explored by The Redundancy of Courage, Timothy Mo's allegorical novel about the neo‐colonization of East Timor or, as he calls it, Danu. Largely as a result of its distinctive narrative voice, Mo's novel highlights the hazards and difficulties faced by the western percipient as well as that percipient's considerable moral and political responsibilities towards the places about which he or she reads. Keywords: representationresistanceawarenesshumanismnarrative Notes 1. The many anthologies of and introductions to postcolonial theory, which invariably bring up Orientalism, rarely include a flavour of Said's other writings. Valerie Kennedy's introductory Edward Said (Citation2000) discusses Said's writings on the Palestinians but not his neglected early texts or the later essays' exploration of post‐imperial arrangements and attitudes. 2. See John Beverley's Subalternity and Representation (Citation1999) which argues "the absence, difficulty, or impossibility of representation of the subaltern" (40) and reduces radical scholarship to a sort of penance or self‐mortification, and Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (Citation2000), which devotes almost all its energies to denouncing Eurocentric thought. In other words, a sustained critique of Eurocentric assumptions about the postcolonial world is hardly ever accompanied in these works and in postcolonial scholarship more broadly by a discriminating critique of European thought of the kind undertaken by, say, Asha Varadharajan in Exotic Parodies (Citation1995) or Leela Gandhi in Affective Communities (Citation2006). 3. The character of Mabbeley is based on the freelance journalist Roger East who arrived in East Timor in order to investigate the deaths of the Nine Network TV crew and was then, as the novel dramatizes, shot by Indonesian forces on the first day of the invasion. 4. The real Bishop of Dili, Carlos Ximenes Belo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Ramos‐Horta in 1996. 5. See Daniel Martin Varisco's Reading Orientalism (Citation2008), which, though a little quarrelsome at times and very fond of bad puns, is nonetheless a prodigious survey of the many pertinent objections and qualifications with which scholars have responded to Said's Orientalism

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · CONTEST · Impossibility · Literature · Narrative · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Postcolonialism (international relations · Power (physics · Representation (politics · Resistance (ecology · Scholarship · Sociology · Subaltern · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature