Page 256 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 22: Edward Said's Crisis [In Orientalism]:
Inter-Textual Analysis (Alluding Fanon, Foucaut and Bhabha)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
22.1 The Holy Trinity
22.2 Said on Heart of Darkness
22.3 Foucault’s Concept of Discourse
22.4 The Importance of Postcolonialism
22.5 Summary
22.6 Key-Words
22.7 Review Questions
22.8 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss the idea of the wide field known as Postcolonial.
• Explain ‘Orientalism’ (Said), ‘Subalternity’ (Spivak) and ‘(Bhabha)’.

Introduction

As stated earlier, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan are three French thinkers
(they are mostly clubbed under ‘poststructuralism’) who have exercised a profound influence on
almost all that has happened in literary theory in recent times. In the case of postcolonial theory,
the man who has exercised the greatest influence on the field is Foucault. Said’s work shows his
influence in a very marked way. Spivak and Bhabha also draw from him. The more obvious
influence on Spivak is that of Drrida and Bhabha’s case the more obvious influence is that of
Lacan.
Since power is a major issue in postcolonial theory let us take a look at Foucault’s view of power.
Simply stated, ‘discourse’ (to Foucault) is a system of statements within which and by which the
world can be known Discourses are ways of constituting knowledge together with the social
practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations that inhere in such knowledge and the relations
between them. Power too is a relation and gets exercised within discourses in the ways in which
these discourses constitute and govern individual subjects. In The History of Sexuality. Volume One,
An Introduction, Foucault defines power as:
The multiplicity of force relations imminent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute
their own organization, as the process by which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,
transforms, strengthens or reverse them; as the support which these force relations find in one
another thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions
which isolate them from one another and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect, whose
general design or institutional crystalization is embodies in the State apparatus, in the formulation
of the law, in the various social hegemonies.
Postcolonialism involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its present
effects bothat the level of ex-colonial societies and of more general global developments thought
to be the after-effects of empire.

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