[Framework Post] Week 9: Postcolonialism.

When elaborating on the English impulse to colonise new-found land in Culture And the Landscape of Colonisation (1994), Harriet Edquist invokes the writings of Margaret Kiddle:

yet their unchanging world was about to be disturbed by a race of men who had little time for dreaming. The first white man to traverse it thought only of its capability for commercial exploitation: ‘flocks might be turned out upon its hills or the plough at once set to work on the plains’. When the news of his discoveries reached Mitchell’s homeland it was read with eager interest by his country-men, hungry for land and security. They were soon to regard the Western District as theirs by right of discovery, confirmed by the expenditure of labour and capital they would bring to its development. (qtd in Edquist, 47)

This is a critical paragraph as it sums the key agendas of colonial expansion down to the singularly most important term: capital. When the colonials took over land, they also began to reinscribe in the colonised cultures the latter’s voice—a set of ideas, language, cultural values—by which the colonised was required to appropriate as their own. Whilst some might argue that this inscription might bring leverage to the colonised people, it must be pointed out that often if not always, this voice is secondary in power, and meant initially only as a form of oppressive device. Enough was taught to the people so that they might not only understand their colonial masters, but more importantly carry out instructions accordingly. (Side: Incidentally, this reminds me of the liberalisation of education in England at the turn of the last 19th Century. With the rise of machine operated industries, it became crucial that workers be sufficiently competent in reading manuals and mechanical instructions.)

But the reinscription of a master voice does not affect on the economic production of that culture. Invariably, seeing as how the construction of a culture’s identity is formed in an influencing environment, the inscription consequently naturalised itself as part of that culture’s identity. On the other hand, the master voice through which the colonised people speak is not one authentic to their original culture, thus in reproducing this voice, a mutant form of the master voice actually formulates.

In this day and age, two battles of the postcolonial wars are fought. The first seeks to use this mutant master voice to question inscribed assumptions and conventions of the colonised society. This is best exemplified by the character Caliban in William Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest (1612), who defiles his subservient adopted voice by using it to swear at his founder/ keeper/ (colonial) master, Prospero:

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language! (1.2.325-327)

The second battle of the postcolonial war seeks to recover an authentic voice that distrust the inner dogmas of the master voice. It’s conceived that the master voice is never capable of speaking for colonised people because it never was meant as an uttering device for them in the first place.



References:

1. Edquist, Harriet. “Culture and the Landscape of Colonisation.” The Culture of Landscape Architecture. eds. Edquist, Harriet, and Vanessa Bird. Melbourne: Edge Publishing Committee, 1994. 43-52.

2. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1612.