a practice which involves material elements, such as writing or literature, which represent concepts that can function as signs and carry or bestow meanings.123
The meanings of things thus do not reside in themselves, but they are rather constructed though representing (signifying) practices, which confer meaning on things.124 This meaning is never ultimately given but depends on the cultural and historical context, on a specific time and place. Similarly, literature as a system of representation cannot be attributed any conclusive, final meaning and, given its constructionist nature, takes part in “shaping social subjects and historical events”125.
Said argues that literary representations of the Orient have served colonialism as vital tools for exerting domination and maintaining power over the non-European Other by using effective “vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures.”126 This means that every study of the Orient is linked to other studies of it.127 British geographers Trevor Barnes and James Duncan define this phenomenon as intertextuality, that is, a process in which meaning is produced from text to text rather than between a text and the world: new worlds come into being based on old texts only to become old worlds serving to produce new texts.128 This ←50 | 51→development is discussed in relation to travel literature by Peter Stadius, who studies constructions of the North in European writings. Stadius argues that prior travel literature becomes “a source of conscious or unconscious intertextuality” [Swedish: en källa för medveten eller omedveten intertextualitet]129 in works of later writers. As systems of representation, literary texts are works written by individual people whose choice is, to a degree, pre-determined by what Sherrill Grace, the author of Canada and the Ide of North, calls “tools, codes, signs”130 – ready-made and ready-to-be-reused elements, rhetorical devices designed to produce meanings and persuade readers. In colonial literary texts, they are important components of representations which impose European cognitive codes on the Other, through which the Other is “read” on the basis of a pre-existing matrix of understandings and, consequently, subjected to colonial appropriation.131
Postcolonial critics take different positions on how these fixed, recurrent literary elements instrumental in coding the ideology of imperial discourse should be named.132 Drawing on the approaches of scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, Peter Hulme and Lesley Wylie,133 in this book I employ the term “colonial tropes,” ←51 | 52→defined as “repertoires of devices and conventions”134 of colonial travel writing, and focus on their role in exerting discursive power over literary texts.135
2 The Split Subject and Ambivalence
Said has invited ample criticism for, among others, overlooking fissures, and that which is forcefully excluded from the text of colonial discourse.136 This issue is addressed by Indian postcolonial theoretician and critic Homi K. Bhabha (born in 1949), whose theories of the split subject and the ambivalence of colonial articulation I also use in this book.
In his essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Bhabha quotes Said’s distinction between latent Orientalism, which is “an unconscious positivity,” and manifest Orientalism, which is “the stated knowledges and views about the Orient.”137 Bhabha develops this theory by examining the changeability and ambivalence of Orientalist discourse and attending to cracks in articulations of colonial power. By claiming that colonial discourse is ambivalent in and by itself, he means not only that at any moment of colonial articulation there must be a resistance to power, but also that there always must be an agency of colonial resistance, not because the colonised display an intention of oppositional action, but because colonial representations are always overdetermined and ambivalent.138
This crack within the unilateral working of colonial discourse and the ambivalence which results from it entail – inevitably, according to Bhabha – a split within the subject. Bhabha insists that it is impossible to pinpoint the source of ←52 | 53→both the coloniser and the colonised “within a tradition of representation that conceives of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plentitudinous object of vision,”139 and for this reason, the construction of subjectivity within colonial relations must always recur “as a persisting questioning of the frame, the space of representation.”140 This space of interrogation, which Bhabha calls “the space of the adversarial,”141 is grounded in a fundamental difference which disrupts or topples dominant representations. The difference surfaces even in the most conventional colonial texts, without ever being “entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional.”142 As Stephen Slemon observes in his interpretation of Bhabhas theory, it is in this antagonistic space that the colonised become “agents of resistance and change.”143
Bhabha’s theories have provoked criticism from other postcolonial theorists. One reason for this criticism is their refusal to locate the Other’s resistance within the contradictions of the colonial text, which purportedly obfuscates proper anti-colonial actions.144 Another important objection is Bhabha’s disregard for any specific colonial conditions.145 According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, Bhabha promotes a misguided belief that the native in a way possesses colonial power and, consequently, that colonial discourse is a discourse of both the coloniser and the colonised.146
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Despite such critiques, Bhabha’s theoretical thought has fostered a growingly common view among postcolonial researchers that clear connections between literature on the one hand and imperialism and colonialism on the other are by no means a testimony to the absolute authority of colonial writing.147 Namely, colonial texts are never exclusively “imperialist” or, for that matter, “anti-imperialist”; rather, they are always to some extent hybrid and ambivalent as a result of the encounter of the coloniser and the colonised.148 Therefore, postcolonial re-readings of colonial literary texts are supposed not only to demonstrate the writers’ links to imperialism, but also to identify the “counter-colonial properties”149 of these
