The Triangle Space

Naveed H. Sandeelo

‘Orientalism’ is the foundational text for Post-colonial theory. Including this our discussion will be focused on the main points, salient features, and peculiarity of its contents. Moreover, we shall identify and explain what is difference between latent and manifest Orientalism in detail with special reference to Bernard Cohn’s meaningful concepts of ethnography, ‘The language of command and command language’.

 The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest, richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. In this way, we can say that the orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarships, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies, and colonial styles. According to Edward Said, “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and (most of the time) “the occident”. Hence, we see there is a very large mass of writers, among who are novelists, poets, philosophers, economists, political theorists, and imperial administrators. They all have accepted the basic distinction between east and west as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, minds, and destiny and so on.” (Said, p.221-222, 2001)

Difference between Latent and Manifest Orientalism

    Before going to define we ask, what difference is between ‘latent and manifest Orientalism’? Latent and Manifest Orientalism are the two strands of Orientalism that describe its ideological and political aspects respectively. For Said, Latent Orientalism is a set of ideas and unconscious assumptions about the Orient, while Manifest refers to the real-world interactions with it. Further, he has made a distinction between unconscious positivity which he has called latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literature, history, sociology, and so forth, which he called manifest Orientalism. For Said, whatever change occurs in the knowledge of the orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism, whereas the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. According to him, the Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, western empire. The Orient existed as a place isolated from the mainstream of European progressivism the arts, sciences, and commerce. For Said, “There were two principal methods by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West in the early twentieth century.  All these, as we have seen, built upon the prestigious authority of the pioneering scholars, travelers, and poets, whose cumulative vision had shaped a quintessential Orient.” (Said, p.221-222, 2001) The study of Indian languages was important to the colonial project of control and command. The British in India about Indian society contributed to colonial cultural hegemony and political control. In this connection, Bernard S. Cohn brings out historical pieces of evidence that, the tribute represented in print and manuscript is that of complicated and complex forms of knowledge created by Indians, but codified and transmitted by Europeans. He thinks that the conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge.

Through some reliable sources of colonial history, we have deeply observed that how dramatic British innovations in India, including revenue and legal system, led to fundamental structural changes in Indian social relations. Through these official sources, it has been traced the changes in forms of knowledge that the conquerors defined as useful for their own ends. Persian was a language that required highly specialized forms of knowledge and medium of communication throughout India. The British in 17th century India operated on the idea that everything and everyone had a ‘price’. The vast social world that was India had to be classified, categorized, and bounded before it could be hierarchized. None the less the languages which the Indians were to speak and read were to be transformed. The discursive formation was to participate in the creation and reification of social groups with their varied interests. It was to establish and regularized a discourse of differentiation that came to mark the social and political map of nineteenth-century India. (Cohen, p. 42, 1996)

     Now we come to an important portion of our debate to identify and elaborate the difference between latent and manifest Orientalism by citing examples in Bernard Cohn’s well-explained ethnography, ‘The command of language and the language of command’. It is found that the years 1770 to 1785 may be looked upon as the formative period during which the British successfully began appropriating Indian languages to serve as a crucial component in their construction of the system of rule. More and more British officials were learning the “classical” languages of India especially, Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, as well as many of the “vulgar” languages.

     In manifest Orientalism’s context, we see this was the period in which the British were beginning to produce an apparatus: grammars, dictionaries, treatises, class books, and translations about and from the languages of India. The production of these texts and others that followed them began the establishment of discursive formation defined an epistemological space, created a discourse(Orientalism), and had the effect of converting the Indian form of knowledge into European objects. The subjects of these texts were first and foremost the Indian languages themselves, represented in European terms as grammars, dictionaries, and teaching aids in a project to make the acquisition of working knowledge of the languages available to those British who were to be part of the ruling groups of India. Seen as corpus, these texts signal the invasion of an epistemological space occupied by a great number of diverse Indian scholars, intellectuals, teachers, scribes, priests, lawyers, officials, merchants, and bankers, whose knowledge as well as they themselves were to be converted into instruments of colonial rule.

The knowledge which this small group of British officials sought to control was to be the instrumentality through which they were to issue commands and collect ever-increasing amounts of information. This information was needed to create or locate cheap and effective means to assess and collect taxes, and maintain law and order, and it served as a way to identify and classify groups within Indian society.  Nonetheless, the languages that the Indians speak and read were to be transformed. The discursive formation was to participate in the creation and reification of social groups with their varied interests. It was to establish and regularize a discourse of differentiations that came to mark the social and political map of nineteenth-century India.” (Cohen, p. 42, 1996)  Including manifest Orientalism, now we turn to identify latent Orientalism by citing examples in the under discussion essay of Cohn. In the case of India, as the land of empires, ancient civilizations, various cultures, we find, there is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, and obsessions that are manifested through literature and the arts, cultural geography, and myriad other means of informing the unconscious ethnic groups. 

It is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. In this context, we see this in Cohn, who giving reference to Major General Sir John Malcolm’s, “The only way to gain the knowledge and sympathy that Malcolm’s instructions required were through the languages of the people. Knowledge of Indians language was the means of gaining a more complex knowledge of the strange customs, codes, and rules of the Indians, who were in most instances docile, cooperative, and quite willing to obey the orders and commands of the sahibs, except when ignorance led the latter to offend the prejudice of the natives.” (Cohen, p. 42, 1996)

In the same way, the backwardness, attachment with the past, and scattered knowledge created hurdles for the British to understand easily the Indian mind. According to Cohn, “Persian as a language was part of a much larger system of meanings, which was in turn based on cultural premises that were the basis of action. The meanings and the premises on which the Indians constructed actions were far different from those of the British. Europeans of the seventeenth century lived in a world of signs and correspondences, whereas Indians lived in a world of substances”. (p.18, Cohn) Including this, the British were taking too much interest to learn Sanskrit; there was a scholarly curiosity to unlock the mysterious knowledge of the ancients. He further tells us with enough sureness that, “The practical question arose as to how the British were to gain knowledge of the “ancient uses and institutions.

The answer was easy enough to state. The Hindus, Hasting answered, “had been in possession of laws which continued unchanged, from the remotest antiquity.” These laws, he wrote, were in the hands of Brahmans, or “professors of law”, found all over India. (p.26)  In the same essay on page 25 we find another glaring example, of Howell who castigated a travel writer as superficial: “He’s telling us such and such a people, in the East or West-Indies, worship this stick, or that stone, or monstrous idol, only serves to reduce in our esteem, our fellow creatures, to the most abject and despicable point of light.”  

      To summing up our discussion we reach some edifying conclusive points, and with enough confidence say, that, it was Cohn’s vigilant eye that attracted our mind with the gravity of his scholarship over the subject and brought before us some glaring realities regarding the intentions of British rule in India. Cohn argues that the British Orientlists’ study of Indian languages was important to the colonial project of control and command. 

 As a self-described postcolonial critic, often compared with Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak, Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his theory of cultural hybridity.  Bhabha describes the lives of racialized subjects living in the west as rife with split, doubled experiences – experiences that have more than one meaning. Such moments of splitting or doubling cause extreme discomfort, and consternation.

Moreover, adapted into colonial discourse theory by Homi K. Bhabha, it describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizers and colonized. Ambivalence is therefore an unwelcome aspect of the colonial discourse of the colonizer. Including this, we also see that Bhabha seizes upon many of the theoretical difficulties encountered by Said as indications of processes that occur during the construction and exercise of colonial knowledge and power – perhaps not very reassuring for Said but a brilliant theoretical insight on Bhabha’s part. Colonialism is identified as the discourse which betrays a dissonance or discordant implicit in western knowledge. It is also allowing for an examination of Bhabha’s subsequent essays all represent a refinement of the position first somewhat ambiguously sketched out in ‘Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’.

Bhabha demonstrates against Edward Said that the authority of colonial power was not straightforwardly possessed by the colonizer. In ‘Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism’, Bhabha, it will be recalled, had carefully distinguished between colonialism discourse and the practices of revolutionary struggle. This new position adopted in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ might therefore be regarded as an important theoretical and political advance. On the basis of his new argument, we see that Bhabha accordingly shifts his concept of mimicry from being something that is simply disquieting for the colonizer to a specific form of intervention.

      In his famous book, “White-Mythologies” Robert J.C. Young writes in the 8^th chapter titled, “The ambivalence of Bhabha” “If Said’s Orientalism is directed against the hierarchical dualism of ‘West’ and ‘East’, other dualisms ceaselessly proliferate throughout his text: Orientalism as a representation or real, for example, or as vision or narrative; or, in Said’s own methodology, the opposition of universalism to particularism which repeats through many different forms. Of the many critiques of Orientalism Homi Bhabha’s ‘Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism’ (1983) stands out because it directly identifies this problem of ambivalence at the heart of the book and recasts it in a more positive, enabling form.” (Young, p. 181, 2004)

    We see that being a prominent post-colonial critic, Bhabha seizes on the analogy with Freud’s conflictual model of the dream, which Said himself makes briefly in passing, in order to argue that at the center of Orientalism there is not a single homogenizing perspective but a polarity: ‘it is, on the one hand, a topic of learning, discovery, practice; on the other, it is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions, and requirements. In this connection, to clearly understand that How Bhabha’s method contradicts Said, it is necessary here to bring out a brief account of Said’s intellectual development and popularity,  especially in the domain of  Orientalism and Imperialism.

At the time when Said had begun to publish his writings on the politics of domination and governance, he was considered quite revolutionary in his mode of attack and influences. This was one of the primary reasons for his immense popularity, particularly among Third-World intellectuals, whose primary instinct was the desperate instinct of survival against the all-pervasive techniques of assimilation of the Western socio-political system.

With the publication of Orientalism, they acquired a new weapon against Western humanist politics. Considering Said’s influences, namely Foucault and Gramsci, and his stance on the subjects of imperialism and colonialism, one might easily conclude that he was anti-humanist in his politics. Notwithstanding the fact that this stance of anti-humanism was quite fashionable to assume in the America of the sixties and the seventies, one must also admit that this was a veritably valid means of registering one’s protest against discursive dominance at that time. I say this to disarm the argument that some critics put forth about Edward Said’s anti-humanism being a fashionable strategy to survive in Western academia.

What is also interesting to note is the way Said has used this weapon of anti-humanism. He has never rejected humanism, two of his major theoretical influences being Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer. On the contrary, he has liberally used their research methodologies and resource materials to gather the information he has used against them. Only, his tools were different and new. He used the counter-discursive logic of anti-humanism to explode the myths about the “white man’s burden,” the lazy native, the objectivity of literature, or even the discipline of history. Two of his most-read books, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, are documentary evidence of such a contrapuntal manner of reading.  

However revolutionary Said might have been during his time, Homi Bhabha and his techniques of reading have really challenged not only the Western discursive systems but their critiques by the likes of Said as well. His basic intention was to move beyond the debate between discourse and counter-discourse and think of a location for the postcolonial intellectual (or even the common man; distinctions between the intellectual and the common man also dissolve in Bhabha’s works) that is beyond this categorized, defined dynamically of contestation.

His politics is arbitrary and disruptive, even more so than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Thus, inevitably, he has moved out of the teleological or the causal bind that is at the root of liberal humanist assumptions; those assumptions which, I am afraid, Said had worked within. But first, let me note the basic points where Bhabha departed considerably from Said. 

    It is rather interesting to note the way Bhabha tackles the problem of binary opposition—the way Edward Said uses it, and he himself opposes and transcends it. What Bhabha initially looks into in his essay “The Other Question” are the basic patterns of the development of colonial discourse and the tropes that they use. He immediately notices how the predominant strategic function of colonial discourse was to create a space for the colonized through the production of knowledge, a continuous mechanism of surveillance, and the creation of stereotypes.  Such a strategy of surveillance and typification helped the colonizer to categorize and hence establish a system of administration on the one hand, and to locate the colonized as the ‘other’ so as to ratify cultural authority/superiority, on the other.   

This is how the inherent politics of binarism is played out. Many Third-World intellectuals dealing with the politics of colonization failed to notice the implicit paradox within this system of operation. Whereas the consistent ‘othering of the colonized is used to situate the West in a position of binary superiority, the complete knowability or visibility of the subject people is also assumed, as if the paradigms of Western systems of knowledge have managed to know or read the ‘other’  completely.  Bhabha sees Said to have fallen into the same trap of binary politics. 

This, according to him, is only a consolidation of Western hegemonic strategy, as the very acceptance of this binary logic is in a way succumbing to the assimilationist strategies of imperial power. One of the chief emphases in Said’s works has been the problem of representation, a trope intrinsically linked to the problem of location and space. It is while addressing these issues that Said uses the Foucauldian paradigms of knowledge and power. It is exactly at this moment, Bhabha notes, when Said unconsciously falls into the trap of binarisms: power as opposed to powerlessness; knowledge as contrasted against ignorance. The differentiation that Said makes between latent and manifest Orientalism is also symptomatic of the same implicit binary politics that completely eludes him. Bhabha elucidates how Said’s manifest Orientalism talks about the learning, discovery, and practice of imperialist politics—those signifiers of stability that constitute a static system of rule and discipline, and the logic of governance. What is denied in Said’s idea of latent and manifest Orientalism is a differential quality that allows the concepts to play against each other.  This would have enabled a continuous movement without any stable position or fixed coordinates thereby denying colonial discourse any chance to construe an attack. What Bhabha is suggesting is that in his creation of structures of resistance, Said has failed to problematize counter-discourse, and his pattern of protest was easily subsumed.  Although I feel, a lot of this is true, one must realize the advantage that Bhabha has in working with postmodern tools that have allowed him free play, which Said was perhaps denied. By situating himself within the postmodern condition it has been possible for Bhabha to maintain a differential quality throughout his work, something that was not entirely possible for Said to imagine in the theoretical milieu that he was working in.   One of Said’s chief agendas in terms of the politics of representation is to oppose the other’s of the colonial subject through the formation of stereotypes.

 Unfortunately, however, at the time when Said is writing, he does not possess the necessary tools that postmodernism has devised much later, to conclusively deconstruct this kind of ambivalence. Said understands his (the Orient’s) powerlessness to take advantage of this theoretical aporia. He constructs and cancels, deconstructs, and re-constructs at ease, thereby playing the game of representation on a plane completely removed from Said’s. In Bhabha, there is much less anxiety about his location than in the early Said. He approaches the problem of the stereotype in a manner very different from Said: “My anatomy of colonial discourse remains incomplete until I locate the stereotype, as an arrested, fetishistic mode of representation within its field of identification”. (Bhabha, p.109, 2004) 

     Talking in terms of representation we see how Bhabha re-locates the Saidian concept of latent Orientalism. He sees the Imaginary as constituted of two forms—narcissism and aggressively. By lifting this problem of representation out of the political into the psychological, Bhabha allows a free-play of meanings that are not inevitably caught up in the discursive paradigms of colonial rule. What Bhabha is trying to achieve is a dynamic of equality between the First and the Third World in terms of representation. We need not overemphasize the possibilities of such equality, but the movement out of the political into the psychological or the Imaginary can at least ensure a pluralistic, uncertain, ambivalent framework for the construction of identity.

It is indeed true that Homi Bhabha has departed considerably from Edward Said in his approach. This is, of course, not to say that he acknowledge Said only casually, as a predecessor, who also wrote (Bhabha, p.109, 2004)about the problems of imperialism and representation. However, what Bhabha departed from was the technique that Said used. Homi Bhabha, with his postmodern tools, has taken this technique of disruption to new heights. As a major theoretician from the Third World the pressure that Bhabha has exerted with his unique ideas of mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity, has not only challenged Western discursively but has also finally consolidated the position of the Third World.

 In the contemporary world, most debates and writings are continuously appearing in the post-colonial context. Now post-colonial studies as an academic discipline have received world recognition and impressed the majority of political theorists across the world. Most of the historians, writers, poets, novelists, Marxists as well as post-modernists, even budding intellectuals, and beginners, with immense love, are observed, enthusiastically focusing their research works and discourses on post-colonial theory. Therefore, post-colonialism as an academic discipline is broadening its canvas and expanding its perspectives with time duration. In this connection, we can say, the same thing is happening with prominent and world reputed intellectual Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a fearless critic of colonialism and a key figure in Algeria’s struggle for independence. Although he wrote before the advent of post-colonial studies as an academic discipline, the post-colonial theory is incomplete without him. When he was twenty-seven he published his first book. Cedric Robinson tells us that, “Fanon, the Psychiatrist, revolutionary and theorist, died of leukemia at the age of 36. In his short time, he had authored some of the most path-breaking liberationist social theory and penetrating analysis of the psycho-existential contradictions of colonialism.” (Robenson, p.79, July 1, 1993)  He was not Marxist. But he was approaching Marxism through the same essential door which for many “Marxist” officials and diplomats is closed with seven keys: his concern with what the masses do and say and think, and his belief that it is the masses, and not leaders nor systems, which in the final analysis make and determine history. (Fanon, A dying colonialism, p. 2, 1965) A pioneering post-colonial theorist and activist, Fanon’s intellectual reputation have grown on the strength of works he wrote in the 1960s in the context of the French occupation of Algeria.

      We shall highlight some of his glaring ideas and important aspects through his worth readings and oeuvre to assess what is that makes him so important and vital to it. Not only was Fanon a direct participant in the struggles of the decolonization era, of course; his writings are today the site of major controversy and investment in the field of post-colonial studies. Frantz Fanon through his seminal works, The Wretched of the Earth (published posthumously in 1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (published in 1952, before Fanon had ever been to Algeria), analyzed the psychological effects of colonialism on both the colonizer and the colonized. Fanon argued that the native develops a sense of ‘self’ as defined by the ‘colonial master’ through representation and discourse, while the colonizer develops a sense of superiority. Fanon thus develops a psychoanalytical theory of post-colonialism where he suggests that the European “Self” develops in its relation and encounter with the “Other.” In an attempt to deal with the psychological inadequacy, the native tries to be as white as possible, by adopting the Western values, religion, language, and practices of the White, and by rejecting his own culture.  Through this writing, Fanon offers us a potent philosophical, clinical, literary, and political analysis of the deep effects of racism and colonialism on the experiences, lives, minds, and relationships of black people. 

      In his essay on “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in his magnum opus The Wretched of the Earth, he produced excoriating critique of bourgeois anticolonial nationalism, an ideology aimed at the (re)attainment of nationhood through means of the capture and subsequent “occupation” of the colonial state, which on his reading represented only the interests of the elite indigenous classes. Fanon characterized bourgeois anticolonial nationalism as “literally…good for nothing” (1968:176). Its specific project, he wrote, was “quite simply… [to] transfer into native hands”–the hands of bourgeois nationalists– “those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period”   propounded the idea of national literature and national culture, recognizing the significance of cultural nationalism, leading to national consciousness. (Lazarus, p.162, 2005)

       While reading Fanon’s “concerning violence” in The Wretched of the Earth we find the sense of national liberation, national renaissance, and the restoration of nationhood to the people, and the commonwealth is very much related to violence, without it, there is no possibility of great revolutionary change, and Fanon considers that the advent of decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. It will create new relations among people. We see that this change is also connected with complete disorder. For this Fanon says that decolonization, which set out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. He clarifies to us that the colonial world is not the same world but it a different kind of world. It is divided into portions and parts. It is that world that is divided into compartments. It is a world cut into two. On the one side are living very innocent people, victims and oppressed natives, on the other side are the agents of government who speak the language of pure force and command. He is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. In this respect, Fanon seems more optimistic and hopeful for new change which will constitute the colonized people.  He says that to wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of the action which is very clear, very easy to understand, and which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people. And this challenge of natives to the colonial world is not based on the rational confrontation of points of view. (Fanon, p.27-29, 1978)

  In end, we can say that Fanon had a strong belief in new change through the struggles of colonized people. For him, a colonized people are not alone. In spite of all that colonialism can do, its frontiers remain open to new ideas and echoes from the world outside. It discovers that violence is in the atmosphere, that it here and there bursts out, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime – that same violence which fulfills for the native a role that is not simple informatory, but also operative. And the voice of his famous dictum traveling down the years echoing in the winds, decolonize the Congo before it turns into another Algeria. Vote the constitutional framework for all Africa, create the French Communaute, renovate that same Communaute, but for God’s sake let’s decolonize quickly. This all on which basis Fanon is the leading exponent of post-colonial theory.

                                          Works Cited

Bhabha, H. K. (p.109, 2004). “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism”. The location of culture. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, B. S. (p. 42, 1996). Colonialism and its forms of Knowledge THE BRITISH IN INDIA. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Fanon, F. (p.27-29, 1978). “Concerning Violence”, The Wretched of the Earth. Great Britain: Penguin Books.

Fanon, F. (p. 2, 1965). Dying colonialism. New York: Grove Press.

Lazarus, N. (p.162, 2005). “Disavowing Decolonization”, Frantz Fanon Critical Perspectives, Edited by Anthony C. Alessandrini. London and New York: Routledge.

Robenson, C. (p.79, July 1, 1993). The appropriation of Frantz Fanon (Research Article).

Said, E. W. (p.221-222, 2001). Orientalism. India: Penguin Books.

Young, R. J. (p. 181, 2004). White-Mythologies (The ambivalence of Bhabha). Routledge.