1. COLONIAL DISCOURSE
THEORIES
Postcolonial Literatures
Prof. José Santiago Fdez. Vázquez

2. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
 Criticism of the
traditional view of
history:
 Nietzsche criticizes
linear progression and
causality.
 Emphasis on
discontinuity ⇒
epistemological
break

3. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
 Interest in the concept
of power:
 Historical change
determined by the “will
to power”.
 Truth depends on
power.

4. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
 Nietzsche anticipates the
critique of the subject:
 Challenge to the idea of a
homogeneous subject: conscious
and unconscious.
 There is no preexistent
subjectivity. Subjectivity is
constructed by supraindividual
structures (language,
ideology, discourse).
 Double meaning of the term
subject in postructuralist
theory.

5. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
LOUIS ALTHUSSER
 Distinction between
Repressive State
Apparatuses and
Ideological State
Apparatuses.
 Gramscian concepts of
hegemony and
domination by consent
⇒ Internalization of
dominant values ⇒
Interpellation.

6. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
JACQUES LACAN
 Lacan distinguishes several
stages in the construction of
human subjectivity:
 Imaginary phase: the “mirror
stage”.
 Initial state of confusion.
 Identification with the “imago”:
the fiction of a unified self.
 Dialectic of recognition:
ambivalence towards the “imago”

7. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
JACQUES LACAN
 Lacan distinguishes
several stages in the
construction of human
subjectivity:
 Symbolic phase:
 Entry into the language
system.
 Assimilation of social
values.

8. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY:
MICHEL FOUCAULT
 Rejection of
conventionally accepted
views and assumptions.
 Discourse transports
and produces Power.

9. KNOWLEDGE =POWER
 “We should admit … that power produces
knowledge (and not simply by encouraging
it because it serves power or by applying it
because it is useful); that power and
knowledge directly imply one another;
that there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of
knowledge; nor any knowledge that does
not presuppose and constitute at the same
time power relations”.

10. WHAT IS POWER?
 “Strategic” view of power: power is
present in all forms of social relation
⇒ All of us are the recipients and the
agents of power.
 Foucault is interested in the microphysics
of power: how power is exercised in
ordinary relations, at all levels of society.

11. WHAT IS POWER?
 “Power works over free subjects” ⇒
The subject cooperates in his/her own
subjection to the structures of power ⇒
Internalization of dominant discourses ⇒
Cf. Interpellation / Hegemony-Domination
by consent.
 Power is productive ⇒ The subject is
an effect of power.

12. THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY:
IS IT POSSIBLE TO RESIST POWER?
 There is no possibility to be outside power
⇒ Even resistance takes place within the
realm of power.
 Two possible interpretations:

13. THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY:
IS IT POSSIBLE TO RESIST POWER?
 There is no possibility to be outside power
⇒ Even resistance takes place within the
realm of power.
 Two possible interpretations:
 Resistance is controlled by power ⇒ Acts of
resistance enable power to work more
effectively.

14. THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY:
IS IT POSSIBLE TO RESIST POWER?
 There is no possibility to be outside power
⇒ Even resistance takes place within the
realm of power.
 Two possible interpretations:
 Resistance is controlled by power ⇒ Acts of
resistance enable power to work more
effectively.
 Power can be subverted from the inside.

15. SUBVERTING POWER FROM THE
INSIDE
“The answer was sure to go unchallenged. Of late,
the white people of Top Rock had been
complaining that the police were letting too many
people use the area as a thoroughfare, that too
many houses in the area were being broken into,
and that people were vandalizing the well-
manicured lawns and stealing the mangoes off
the trees in the back yards. So the police chief,
who himself lived in Top Rock, and whose wife
was a good friend of Pretty’s mistress, had put
more policemen with bicycles on patrol in the
area with orders to stop everyone” (No Man in
the House)

16. DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH
 Inquiry on the origin of
prisons.
 Rejection of the
humanitarian argument ⇒
See quotations.
 Disciplinary power
represents a shift from the
control of the body to the
control of the mind ⇒ Cf.
Interpellation / Hegemony-
Domination by consent.

17. DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH
 Surveillance as the major strategy of
control in disciplinary societies.
 The Panopticon as the epitome of
surveillance ⇒ Self-transformation.

18. THE PANOPTICON

19. THE PANOPTICON IN
LITERATURE: AN EXAMPLE
“Something was happening in his head, and he stared blankly waiting
for it to pass out. But suddenly the boy might look up, and
catching the teacher’s eye would feel captured. He had done
nothing wrong, and it was not his intention to do anything wrong.
He had simply be seen by the teacher ... He did nothing wrong,
but that didn’t matter. He was seen by the teacher. It didn’t
happen between the boy and the teacher only, because it had
nothing to do with authority. It also happened between teacher
and teacher ... He had been seen by another. He had become a
part of the other’s world, and therefore no longer in complete
control of his own. The eye of another was a kind of cage. When it
saw you the lid came down, and you were trapped. It was always
happening. Sometimes when you stood alone in the public square
where the buses parked, and the people went to and fro buying
nuts, looking around, you got the feeling sometimes that they
were looking at you, and if you were too sensitive you wanted to
hide. Or in the cinema before the lights were dimmed ... It
seemed the whole cinema like the public square had turned into
an enormous eye that saw you. A big cage whose lid came down
and caught you”. (In the Castle of My Skin)

20. EDWARD SAID
 Major critical works:
 Orientalism (1978)
 Culture and Imperialism
(1993)
 Main influences on
Orientalism:
 Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony.
 Foucault’s theory of discourse
and power.

21. ORIENTALISM
 Definitions of “Orientalism”:
 The history of the cultural relations between
Europe and Asia.
 Scientific discipline producing specialists in
Oriental languages and culture.
 The ideology about the Orient produced by
Western scholars.

22. ORIENTALISM
 The distinction between ‘the Occident’
and ‘the Orient’ is culturally made.
 In Orientalist discourse non-Western
people are “othered” in order to reaffirm
the Western self.
 Orientalism is legitimising and
institutional. Literary presence.
 Latent and Manifest Orientalism.

23. ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATION

24. SOME OBJECTIONS TO
ORIENTALISM
 Monolithic and static definition of
“Orientalism”.
 Misrepresentation of material realities.
 Absence of counter-hegemonic thought.

25. GAYATRI SPIVAK
 Main influences:
deconstruction theory,
feminism, Marxism.
 Some issues studied by
Spivak:
 The role of the postcolonial
critic and postcolonial studies
and their complicity with
colonialist practices.
 The construction of
“otherness”.
 “Can the subaltern speak?”

26. HOMI BHABHA
 The construction of the
colonial subject is an
ambivalent process:
 “Othering” of the colonial
subject vs. civilizing
mission.
 Partial reproduction of
Western culture.
 Mimicry becomes mockery
⇒ Subversive potential of
“hybridity” and
“appropriation”.