Alfred Noyes wrote The Empire Builders at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite the time at which it was written in, there are various post-colonial themes regarding the hierarchy of difference. The tone of the poem is pessimistic which is understandable since Noyes is writing during the Naturalist period of English literature. Noyes is speaking to the middle class of England; those who “fulfill their duties as they come” (Noyes, 45). He uses the first person plural article to create a unification between the readers and the narrator. Noyes, in his poem, addresses two postcolonial themes of Christianity as a vehicle of colonization, and the fallacies of European philosophy. In this essay, I argue that the themes and structure that have been connoted in Alfred Noyes’ The Empire Builders are essential in constructing the notion of the hierarchy of difference. The hierarchy of difference helped create a colonial state and since postcolonial theory primarily analyzes the legacies of the colonial period, it is essential to know the hierarchy of difference. I will divide my essay in three parts: in stage one I discuss the structure of the poem and how it creates a hierarchy of difference. In stage two I discuss the two themes mentioned above and how they establish a fragmented world between the occident and the orient. Finally in stage three I discuss the conception of time that is discussed in the poem and its relationship to postcolonial theory. The structure of the poem shows the hierarchy of difference in itself. The poem consists of six stanzas, all of which are eight lines each. The poem is divided into two sections: the first three stanzas describe the effects of the empire- builder and the last three stanzas describe th... ... middle of paper ... ... century. In conclusion, The Empire Builders can be interpreted through a postcolonial perspective since it produces many elements of the hierarchy of difference. Works Cited "Can Non-Europeans Think?" - Opinion. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove, 2004. Print. Noyes, Alfred. The Empire Builders. Oxford: The MacMillan Company, 1908. Print. Reade, Arthur Robert. Main Currents in Modern Literature. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 1970. Print. Ritze, George, and Zeynep Atalay. Readings in Globalization: Key Concepts and Major Debates. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print. Rodney, Walter, A.M Babu, and Vincent Harding. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1981. Print.
Post-colonialism is a discourse draped in history. In one point in time or another, European colonialism dominated most non-European lands since the end of the Renaissance. Naturally, colonialists depicted the cultures of non-Europeans incorrectly and inferior. Traditionally, the canon has misappropriated and misrepresented these cultures, but also the Western academia has yet to teach us the valuable and basic lessons that allow true representations to develop. Partly in response, Post-colonialism arose. Though this term is a broad one, Post-colonialists generally agree on certain key principles. They understand that colonialism exploits the dominated people or country in one way or another, evoking inequalities. Examples of past inequalities include “genocide, economic exploitation, cultural decimation and political exclusion…” (Loomba 9-10). They abhor traditional colonialism but also believe that every people, through the context of their own cultures, have something to contribute to our understanding of human nature (Loomba 1-20). This is the theme that Lewis prescribes in his, self described, “satirical fantasy”, Out of the Silent Planet (Of Other 77).
Gardner, Robert, and Wayne Lavold. "Chapter 9-12." Exploring Globalization. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2007. N. pag. Print.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. 2nd. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia: Routledge: New York, 2004. Print.
The colonial enterprise, particularly the European imperialist projects in the east, has forever changed concepts of identity, otherness, and power in both the Occident and the Orient. Both sides were indisputably and irrevocably altered; however, the effect upon native cultures (the colonized) was far greater than the effect on the imperial cultures (the colonizers). European colonizers were able to cherry-pick the greatest parts of “new” culture—their art, their music, their architecture, or their cuisine—and adopt or adapt it to modern imperial life. In many ways, the cultural practices and artifacts of a newly colonized civilization were treated like the natural resources (oil, silk, spice) the Europeans were there to gather: they mattered only in their usefulness to the empire. Unlike their imperial counterparts, however, the native peoples had no choice which customs and practices to adopt, and which to discard. The sheer military might and nature of the colonial enterprise demanded that the colonized completely adapt to the social and cultural norms of the empire. In essence, then, the colonized were forced to lead a life of double consciousness, wherein they participated in customs and practices and obeyed laws and regulations in which they did ...
Postcolonial theory will be used throughout the essay defined as a theoretical approach that focuses on the part of the formerly colonized, the subaltern and the historically oppressed, using the prism of race and the historical context of colonialism, and analyzes or produces a critical commentary that serves as an act of cultural resistance to the domination of Euro‐American epistemic and interpretive schemes (Nayar, 2016:
“The Third Space of enunciation” disrupts the consistency between the meaning and the reference, “makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process,” which consequently leads to the challenge of “our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past.” As a result, although the third space is “unrepresentable in itself,” it, in Bhabha’s words, “constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.” This ability of enunciation, crossing the limit of time, lays a foundation for the postcolonial writing and reading to overthrow the authority of the colonial discourse and articulate for self. In many postcolonial writings, “it is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of archaic” (Bhabha 1994, 35). Through deconstructing, rereading, and modifying traditions from their own
The term post colonial is resonant with all the doubts and complexities of the various cultural experiences it involves. It also addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of the colonial contact. These aspects involve the development of internal divisions based on racial, linguistic or religious discriminations and the continuing unequal treatment of indigenous people in settler/invader societies. (pL..2) All these aspects confirm the fact that post-colonialism is a continuous process involving resistance and reconstruction.
One must use special care with broadly defined words and terms, such as post-colonial. Post-colonial literature describes a wide array of experiences set in the contexts of heterogeneous societies which themselves represent many different ethnic groups. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin define post-colonial theory as discussion of "migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and responses to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe... and the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these come into being" (Ashcroft 2). The wide-ranging nature of the term post-colonial threatens to weaken its usefulness by "diffusion... so extreme
The outreach of globalization has reached unprecedented proportions. The 21st century has been marked by epochal changes in the global community that have revolutionized interactions among nations. Now more than ever, the relations among nation-states from across the globe are dually growing in complexity and becoming increasingly intertwined. Globalization, due to its expansive nature in scope, though, poses an insurmountably difficult challenge to produce a specific, yet holistic definition that encompasses the total breadth of this process. In response, scholars from the various fields define globalization subjectively- best equating the term with the matter at hand. Aspects of globalization such as the time it originated
This book is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain, though much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers, such as France, Portugal, and Spain. The semantic basis of the term ?post-colonial? might seem to suggest a concern only with the national culture after the departure of the imperial power. It has occasionally been employed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between the periods before and after independence (?colonial period? and ?post-colonial period?), for example, in constructing national literary histories, or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in those histories. Generally speaking, though, the term ?colonial? has been used for the period before independence and a term indicating a national writing, such as ?modern Canadian writing? or ?recent West Indian literature? has been employed to distinguish the period after independence.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. 2nd. New York: Routledge, 2002.
He was always aware of the impermanence of dominion, the inevitable decline and succession of empires. He knew that Western perspectives—sometimes he even seemed to recognize that masculine perspectives—were inescapably limited. There is much in the world that a European male simply cannot comprehend, and much that he compre...
Globalization is not a process that started ‘‘overnight’’. It has a long history dating back from the High Middle Ages (Osterhammel& Petersson 2005: viii), but it is probably felt now more than ever before.
“Orientalism and Anglicism appear to be two faces of the colonial enterprise, rather than forces in conflict”