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Identifier	Thesis 1670
Author	Wankerl, Thomas
Title	On the Imperial Storyteller
Publisher	Central Connecticut State University
Date	2002
Resource Type	Master's Thesis
Notes	In his ground-breaking books, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said explains how the Eastern, colonized other was textually created by the imperial powers that controlled them. Specifically, Western experts on and creators of texts about the East created, through their works, the way people and places of the East are viewed. Said terms this textual invention of the other "Orientalism,: and this concept is extremely important in the way intellectuals think about texts and about people from other areas of the globe. Still, in considering works produced under different European empires about the widely different colonies of those empires from vastly different time periods, Said is misleading in an important way. He leaves his reader with the impression that, at any given time, empire was experienced similarly worldwide and that the changes that occur over time in the presentation of colonies and the colonized occurred universally and did not occur in tandem with important, place-specific historical events. This idea is fatuous. A more likely model of the way colonies and their inhabitants are textually created is that their presentation is place- and time-specific. In other words, the people of a given colony will be presented in a way different from how natives of other colonies are depicted. This difference will reflect the contemporary political interactions between the colony and the colonizing country. Further, not only do real world events influence the presentation of the colonial other, but their presentation influences real world events. In order to show that such a model is more apt than Said's, I analyzed British texts that deal with a single colony, India, from three consecutive time periods -- the era prior to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the period immediately after the Sepoy Mutiny, and the late-Victorian era (30 to 40 years after the Sepoy Mutiny). My hypothesis was that works produced prior to the Mutiny would depict India and Wankerl 3 Indians in a fairly positive way, that post-Mutiny works would portray India and Indians in a negative and hostile way, and that late-Victorian texts would manifest a cooling of the reactionary fervor of the previous period. And, indeed, that hypothesis proved to be accurate. Through close readings of literary works like Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, The Moonstone, Kim and various contemporary travelogues, through the analysis of non-literary texts like speeches, political cartoons, exhibitions, and through research into numerous secondary sources, it was found that the manner in which India and Indians were presented to the British populace changed in a revolutionary way in response to the Mutiny. Indians went from being docile, simple sidekicks to vicious, amoral killers, and India changed from being an exotic land of opportunity and escape to a weighty responsibility with few redeeming qualities. In texts of the late-Victorian era, one finds that the presentation of the place and its people strikes a kind of balance between these two extremes. Thus, a Hegelian process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is apparent in the textual representation of India and Indians. These changes occurred in response to a discreet, place-specific, real-world event, and they occur in the representation of India alone. Thus, Said's suggestion of a monolithic, evolutionary change in the presentation of the entire colonial world is inaccurate. Further, the representation of India and Indians in texts, in influencing the way Britons thought about these distant subjects, did, in fact, influence public policy. Thus, contrary to Said's claim, one can see a mutually causal relationship between history and texts. Further academic scrutiny into the way the powerful construct the powerless through texts is merited and, in fact, goes on. Perhaps more important than analysis of historical texts, however, is the analysis of contemporary ones. If one is able to understand how and why the powerful control images of the disenfranchised other, one may be able to avoid some of the mistakes of the past.
Subject	Said, Edward W Orientalism in literature India -- Fiction
Department	Department of English
Advisor	Barnett, Stuart
Type	Text
Digital Format	application/pdf
Language	eng
OCLC number	713734077
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