HT SF Post-Colonial Literature Examination Quotations

Said on Oriental's Agency

Because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.

Said on Authority

There is nothing natural or mysterious about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental; it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it signifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, tramits, reproduces.

Said on the Orient

The Orient was reconstructed, reassembled, crafted, in short, born out of the Orientalists' efforts.

Said on Looking at the Oriental

Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed…as problems to be solved or confined or…taken over.

Said on Absence/Presence

The Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says is presence.

Said on Geography

The Orient is a geographical space to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded.

Said on Truth

[Orientalism] seemed to be morally neutral and objectively valid.

Said on Discourse

Without examining Orientalism as a discourse, one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage - even produce - the Orient.

Michael Foucault

There are no power relations without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge; nor knowledge which does not claim and that does not consititute at the same time, power relations.

Spivak on Female Subaltern

If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern female is even more deeply in shadow.

Spivak on Epistemic Violence

Epistemic violence is the remotely orchastrated, far-flung, heterogenous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.

Spivak on Vertretung/Darstellung

Running [Vertretung and Darstellung] together, especially in order to say that beyond both is where the opporessed subjects speak, act, and know themselves, leads to an essentialist, Utopian politics.

Hunt on Confliction

Perform according to institutional standards in order to be taken seriously as an academic, yet as an indigenous person, these norms went in constant tension with other networks of responsibility.

Hunt on Indigineity

Indigineity is not just an idea…indigineity is also lived, practiced, and relational.

Hunt on Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous knowledge is rarely seen as legitimate on its own terms but must be negotiated in relation to pre-established modes of inquiry.

Hunt on Colonialism

Process of colonialism in North America involved representational strategies that transformed Indigenous peoples and their lands conceptually and materially in order to facilitate their displacement and to render them less than human.

Hunt on New Thoughts On Indigenous Knowledge

Embracing the shifting relationality, complexity, and circularity of Indigenous knowledge as productive and necessary.

Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg

Subaltern/Indigenous dialoguse is…within and about incommensurability.

Mignolo Definition

A Nahuatl word describing the "in-between situation"…between ancient Aztec wisdom and the ongoing Spanish colonization.

Mignolo on Continuation

Inscribed and continues to inscribe in the history of the modern the changing borders of colonial expansion.

Mignolo on Knowledge and Power

Not a happy place in the middle, but refers to a general question of knowledge and power.

Mignolo on Change

"re-placing" rather than "opening" the humanities and social sciences…begin with the assumption that "subaltern knowledges" are one of the consequences of the hegemy of cultures of scholarship and academic disciplinarity.

Maxwell on Two Options

The writer brings his own langauge - English - to an alien environment and a fresh set of experiences…the writer brings an alien language - English - to his own social and cultural inheritance.

Maxwell on Land

[The Land] comes to signify the qualities of the society that inhabits it and prompts the imagination to see in it the imprint of the past which the present must try to understand.

Verancini on Settler Paradox

Confliting tendencies operating simultaneously on the settler collective - one striving for indigenization and national autonomy, the other aiming at Neo-European replication and establishment of a civilized pattern of life.

Verancini on Colonial Project

Transforming the environment to suit the colonizing project and of renewing the settler to suit the environment.

Verancini on Settler Power

Selective capacity to draw lines and/or erase them depending on opportunity and local circumstances.

Lois on Paintings

Despite the fact that there were no people in them or even animals, its as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.

Lucy on Knowledge

Lucy did not care about the things she didn't know, whereas Lois did.

Lois on Stealing

Lois finds it disquieting. She knows too much about Indians: this is why…it had all been a form of stealing.

Atwood on Paintings

These paintings are not landscape paintings. Because there aren't any landscapes up there, not in the old, tidy European sense…Instead theres a tangle, a receeding maze…There are no backgrounds…no vistas: only a great deal of foreground…the trees themselves…are currents of energy charged with violent colour.

Athletics in A Passage to India

Athletics can only raise a temporary glow. Nationality was returning…"if only they were all like that," each thought.

Dr Fielding in A Passage to India

He had no racial feeling.

Indian Unity in A Passage to India

If the English were to leave India the committee would vanish also.

India in A Passage to India

She is not a promise, only an appeal.

Ending of A Passage to India

'Why can't we be friends?…Its what I want its what you want.'…but the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the earth…; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the camon, the guest-house…they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices: "no, not yet," and the sky said, "no, not there."

Flames in A Passage to India

The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone.

Dr. Fielding and Other English in A Passage to India

He did succeed with his pupils, but the gulf between himself and his countrymen…widened distressinly.

Frank Kemode

Leading idea of all his work - the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the bariers of race, class, and nation.

Jonny Sharpe

Inscribed the natives savagery onto the objectified body of English women, even as it screened the colonizers brutal suppression of uprisings.

Preface to The Rabbits

Infested a vast and ancient land.

Panels in The Rabbits

The rabbits came many grandparents ago; They made their own homes; Who will save us from the rabbits?

Shaun Tan

Avoid any specific cultural reference to an aboriginal experience.

Sheila Collingwood-Whitick

To allway their overwhelming estrangement…entailed a systematic elimination of all that was 'alien' in their surroundings.

Graham Huggan

Inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical leagues of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse.