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

Otherness and the Rhetoric of Imperialist DiscourseLe yo vle touye distant chen, yo dil fou.(When they want to kill a dog, they say its crazy.) ---Haitian power saw When Elizabethan map makers came upon an area of the globe that was yet to be exhaustively explored by western civilization, they would give a rough estimate as to its shape and terrain, and then label it as Terra incognita, or unknown land. To table service illustrate exactly how unknown this land was, images of demons and a variety of other monsters filled space ordinarily inhabited by the names of cities, rivers and deserts. musical composition the labeling itself could at outset sight be dismissed as a simple acknowledgment of ignorance (as it certainly was,) an understanding of traditional cultural attitudes inwardly imperialist countries provides us with the tools to see such language and imagery as highly representative of an ideology exemplified (though certainly not monopolized) by England d uring 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 even something as scientific and functional as a map to be a form of discourse profoundly enmeshed in ideology. In a imperialist society, cultural discourse tends to seep into nearly every aspect of human communication and interaction, and is much characterized by an emphasis on separation, classification, and the idea of opposites. This seperative effect exploits differences in ideology, race, religion, tradition, garment mood, and language, among others, to create a images of cultural oppositeness. Such images are exactly the character that Edward Said describes in his book 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 compound and i mperialist societies, including those that benefit from modern day manifestations of such constructions. The effect of separating first world or Occidental culture from that found in countries orthogonal 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 positively charged to countries suffering from otherness and Orientalism for hundreds of years.