Dagger of Brutus E-Book

Anand Bose

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

These essays are a collection on diverse topics. Philosophical and Literary issues are read critically. The essays include post colonial criticism, feminist and queer studies, aesthetics, philosophy and literary theory. This collection is the result of a mass reading of many texts. 

Leseprobe

Anand Bose

Dagger of Brutus

This is Dedicated to my Father the late Prof. Mathen Bose BookRix GmbH & Co. KG80331 Munich

Reflections on the Post Colonial Philosophy of Homi Baba

Homi Baba is one of the foremost thinkers of Post Colonial Criticism and belong to the school of Post Structuralism. Homi Baba has made intrusions into the Philosophy of Language where texts become constructs for Post Colonial Criticism. For Baba Colonialism has not been a straight forward clique between the oppressed and the oppressor but an evolving semantic machine marked by psychological anxiety and tension between the oppressor and the oppressed. 

Here in this article, I would like to articulate some ideas of Baba on Post Colonial Criticism. They are hybridization, mimicry, ucanny, doubling, difference, ambivalence and anxiety. For Baba, a Nation is always evolving and it's not a fixed entity. 

Hybridization is a process through which cultures interact, mix, and develop new cultural and evolutionary tendencies. A common example that can be taken is Black English. Black English has evolved by fusing many dialects of the native black with the colonizer's English. Indian English has absorbed native English words and also has adopted words borrowed from the English Language. British English consists of many Gaelic, Latin and French words and therefore if we look at English, it is going through a process of hybridization. English is a transnational language and is always adopting new vocabularies into its lexicon. Another common example would be that of dance and music. Dance and Music have fused various elements of the Orient and the Occident. 

Mimicry refers to a process through which the colonized mimics the language and culture of the Colonialist. Mimicry is a powerful tool, a coping mechanism of the colonized to resist the rule of the colonizer. The white other becomes the subject of my gaze and I adumbrate his or her cultural moorings into my possessive outlook. For the White, the discourse of the Orient has been a fragmented one, a one of bitter misunderstanding. According to Edward Said the discourse on the Orient has been a philosophical and intellectual construct drawn out from Occidental narcississm and fantasy. 

A lexical meaning of the word Uncanny would be: something strange or mysterious in an unsettling way. For the white, Oriental cluture and religion has been marked by the strange and the uncanny. Baba also discusses the problem of migrant cultures. Migrant cultures into the Occident bring many elements of the uncanny. Uncanny also represents the misunderstanding of the mass psyche of the colonized. For example let's take the Blues. Blues as a form of Black Music emerged as an Uncanny one, a one to show solidarity and protest against the whites.  Mahatma Gandhi's behavior as a political protestor of the English Rule was an uncanny one. The British simply could not understand and tolerate the half naked fakir. The occult aspects of the religion of the aborigines were ostracised and many were made into Christian converts. 

Doubling as used by Homi Baba refers to the process in which duplicates of the colonizer were created from the colonized. The colonized were trained in the language and culture of the colonizer, mainly to suit them for administrative purposes. For exmaple India as a British Colony needed a large army of clerks to run the governmental machinery. Doubling became a headache for the colonizer as these doubles soon realized their self worth  and started protesting against colonial rule.