The fetish of ‘the West’ in postcolonial theory

Abstract

In a commentary entitled “East isn't East,” which appeared not long ago in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Said proposed that one of the essential gestures of postcolonial criticism, and one of its enduring achievements, rested in what he called its “consistent critique of Eurocentrism” (1995: 5). In the pages that follow, I would like to put some pressure on this assessment. My intention is not, of course, to suggest that the postcolonialist critique of Eurocentrism has not been significant in helping to expose the tendentiousness, chauvinism, and sheer pervasiveness of the ideological formation that Said himself, in his seminal study of 1978, addressed under the rubric of Orientalism. I take it for granted that it has , and believe moreover that to argue otherwise would be simply perverse. Rather, my aim in this chapter is to suggest that in the field of postcolonial studies at large, including in the work of some of the field's most audacious and theoretically sophisticated practitioners, Eurocentrism has typically been viewed not as an ideology or mode of representation but as itself the very basis of domination in the colonial and modern imperial contexts. Setting out from this strictly idealist conceptualization, postcolonial theorists have sought to produce an anti-Eurocentric – or, in Gyan Prakash's (1990) preferred terminology, a “post-Orientalist” – scholarship.

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