| Can E. M. Forster's colonial fiction be read as an exercise in Orientalism, reiterating what Edward Said has written of this phenomenon, the will “to control, manipulate, even to incorporate what is manifestly a different world?” Can an analysis which is predominantly concerned with colonial power and issues of domination not address itself to the specificity of the colonial encounter and produce, as it claims, a theory of colonial discourse? Using these questions, this study attempts to reorient Edward Said's Orientalism. Specifically, in questioning the autonomy and stability of the subjects in colonial discourses, as suggested in Said's text, I will generate an analysis that poses a challenge to the colonial discourse analysis theory of Orientalism. Reading Forster's colonial fiction from a number of different perspectives, a special emphasis will be given to the construction of gender and sexuality in colonial discourses, I will expose the complexity of the dichotomy Self/Other, colonizer/colonized and male/female in the colonial encounter. While some tropes appear to be dominant and representative of colonial experiences, the principal thrust of my argument, however, is to show how variant and complex processes of modification, transformation, and resistance characterize not only the Western representation of the Orient, but also the Orient response to and conceptualization of these experiences.; My main thesis will be that Said's text depends largely for its strategy on the primary division between two fixed and essentialized categories like East and West. This in fact privileges the binary opposition Self/Other or colonizer/colonized and makes it a dichotomy necessary to domination in the colonial discourse analysis theory. However, my presentation will focus to draw attention to the ambivalent position of colonial discourses and the need to reformulate new parameters of the ways colonial discourses actually work. |
