Representation and Resistance

Representation: how are cultures presented?

Large Group (20 min):
With your group, identify “universals” about humanity that might simply be one culture projecting its culture to the rest of the world.
- List those universals that you believed at one time…”All people are…”
- List those universals that many still believe today
- What are some universals that your tradition (group project) believes?
- What are some universals outsiders believe about your tradition?
- List the answers to C and D on your wiki


How were the colonies represented?

• Edward Said (1935-2003) Orientalism . Identified the problem that certain groups developed their self-identity based on what the West was saying about them. For example, why, when we think of the Middle East, do we have a preconceived notion of how the people are. How do we come to understand people other than ourselves? The way we gather this information about other cultures is not impartial, it comes through a lens that distorts the way we see the unfamiliar. This "orientalism" is a form of complex stereotyping that originates into popular images, including film, art, and literature. these images may often come from people who have never in fact been to the countries being described.
• Colonizers represented the Colonized in ways that the Colonized would not represent themselves.
• The Colonizers created an "Other" and taught this "Other" through their educational systems.
• The Colonizers used the "Other" to define themselves (as more "advanced").
• The Colonized cultures were represented as stagnant (what was being said about these cultures in the 1830s and in the 1920s was the same).
  

The way information is presented is driven by motivated interests: Motivation/Interest influences Education influences Perception

Those who have power create knowledge
Those who create knowledge have power


Colonial Discourse -- a system of statements that can be made about colonial peoples and colonial powers and their relationship. It is a system of knowledge and belief about the world within which colonialism takes places.Within the colonial discourse, there are things you can and cannot say. For instance, questioning the colonial power structures was not part of the discourse. The “inferiority” and “depravity” of the native, however, could be discussed.

Manicheanism-- Imperial discourse polarizes the relationship of colonizer to colonized into issues of good and evil.

Another major figure in this field is Homi K. Bhabha, professor at Harvard. The Location of Culture.

Bhabha said that Western imperialism was violent because of binaries in Western culture.

He talks about binarisms: The term on the left is often the dominant one in culture. A binary is created so that one aspect can control the other. Hybridity, which will be covered later in class, looks to see what we loose by having binaries and seeks what exists in the middle.

• man-woman
• adult-child
• friend-alien
• sun-moon
• birth-death
• advanced-retarded
• teacher-pupil
• doctor-patient

Binarisms of colonial discourse:

• good-evil
• human-bestial
• self-other
• us-them
• colonizer-colonized
• civilized-native
• white-black
• beautiful-ugly

The issue is not so much that binaries exist, as much as the balance of power between the binaries.

"this is what we're not, and what they are."

Further discussion on bianarisms:
A way of social action would be deconstructing these definitions and asking what fits in the middle? Where does a particular group define that the other is good? And, typically, the powerful pull together a bunch of random facts to create this image of the other. He doesn’t say that this is unique to non-Western cultures. Every time that we have a narrative, we seem to throw this in idea of the good vs. the villain- how does this effect my Christianity? We do think in terms of categories, good and evil within Christian tradition, the Western form has made it much more absolute, but there are Christian expressions that are a bit more fluid (i.e. being a member of a church isn’t a “yes” or “no”, your spiritual life with God isn’t a “yes” or “no” but people are all a particular journey, not necessarily a category of “in” and “out”) family members don’t tend to be kicked out of the family). There are ways to access the Christian story narrative without being rigid, but tough for us as evangelicals and we can learn much from other traditions outside our own regarding this. For example, in the West we have dualism between individualism and community that doesn’t exist in many communities outside of the West and we need to figure out how to join these two together again. Even if dualisms are the reality, such as there are good and evil, we don’t have to live defined by them and they can live for more of the point of them- God. Living in the tension. Jesus, Himself, was a “hybrid” between God and human.

Hegemony-- domination by consent and is the result of binaries.

• People believe in the colonial discourse and are controlled by it
• Seems like common sense because it is so embedded when in reality it is cultural
  
• Not violent oppression (colonialism), but it is still oppression