Discourse Ks – Gonzaga Debate Institute 14



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Exploration

Shell




“Exploration” discourse is founded off of hegemonic structures that seek to colonize and to cast a fake conception of the land being explored


Freund, Undergraduate & Law Studies at University of Michigan, 2001

[Toby, Fall 2001, Michigan Journal of History, “The Occidental Tourist: Discover, Discourse, and Degeneracy in South Africa,” http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/freund_toby_the_occidental_tourist-1.pdf, accessed 7-6-14, J.J.]


European exploration of the non-Western world sought to assign foreign lands and peoples a place within the Occidental paradigm and Eurocentric cosmos. As such, colonial hegemony was largely achieved through the sometimes deliberate, often unconscious processes of systemization by which European explorers and thinkers configured the external world. Recent postcolonial historiography treats the discourses of exploration and travel writing as, “a malign system constituted by diffuse and pervasive networks of power.”1 The periphery emerged to invent the metropolis, nature was discovered to offset civilization, and the unearthing of savage humanity created the sophisticated and reasoning man. The power of these images resided in the West’s assumed prerogative to identify, name, and in so doing invest with significance that which it observed on the colonial frontier. However, these were merely perceived dichotomies, the meanings of which were continuously redefined and contested by the various actors in specific historical dramas and discursive enterprises.

Colonialism is an unacceptable ethical violation.


Shaikh, Producer Democracy Now, 2007

(Nermeen, @ Asia Source, “Interrogating Charity and the Benevolence of Empire”, Development 50, p.83 – 89)


It would probably be incorrect to assume that the principal impulse behind the imperial conquests of the 18th and 19th centuries was charity. Having conquered large parts of Africa and Asia for reasons other than goodwill, however, countries like England and France eventually did evince more benevolent aspirations; the civilizing mission itself was an act of goodwill. As Anatol Lieven (2007) points out, even 'the most ghastly European colonial project of all, King Leopold of Belgium's conquest of the Congo, professed benevolent goals: Belgian propaganda was all about bringing progress, railways and peace, and of course, ending slavery'. Whether or not there was a general agreement about what exactly it meant to be civilized, it is likely that there was a unanimous belief that being civilized was better than being uncivilized – morally, of course, but also in terms of what would enable the most in human life and potential. But what did the teaching of this civility entail, and what were some of the consequences of changes brought about by this benevolent intervention? In the realm of education, the spread of reason and the hierarchies created between different ways of knowing had at least one (no doubt unintended) effect. As Thomas Macaulay (1935) wrote in his famous Minute on Indian Education, We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. This meant, minimally, that English (and other colonial languages elsewhere) became the language of instruction, explicitly creating a hierarchy between the vernacular languages and the colonial one. More than that, it meant instructing an elite class to learn and internalize the culture – in the most expansive sense of the term – of the colonizing country, the methodical acculturation of the local population through education. As Macaulay makes it clear, not only did the hierarchy exist at the level of language, it also affected 'taste, opinions, morals and intellect' – all essential ingredients of the civilizing process. Although, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, colonialism can always be interpreted as an 'enabling violation', it remains a violation: the systematic eradication of ways of thinking, speaking, and being. Pursuing this line of thought, Spivak has elsewhere drawn a parallel to a healthy child born of rape. The child is born, the English language disseminated (), and yet the rape, colonialism the enablement (the violation), remains reprehensible. And, like the child, its effects linger. The enablement cannot be advanced, therefore, as a justification of the violation. Even as vernacular languages, and all habits of mind and being associated with them, were denigrated or eradicated, some of the native population was taught a hegemonic – and foreign – language (English) (Spivak, 1999). Is it important to consider whether we will ever be able to hear – whether we should not hear – from the peoples whose languages and cultures were lost? The colonial legacy At the political and administrative levels, the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies, many of which survive more or less intact, continue, in numerous cases, to have devastating consequences – even if largely unintended (though by no means always, given the venerable place of divide et impera in the arcana imperii). Mahmood Mamdani cites the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and maintenance of colonial forms of law and government. Belgian colonial administrators created extensive political and juridical distinctions between the Hutu and the Tutsi, whom they divided and named as two separate ethnic groups. These distinctions had concrete economic and legal implications: at the most basic level, ethnicity was marked on the identity cards the colonial authorities introduced and was used to distribute state resources. The violence of colonialism, Mamdani suggests, thus operated on two levels: on the one hand, there was the violence (determined by race) between the colonizer and the colonized; then, with the introduction of ethnic distinctions among the colonized population, with one group being designated indigenous (Hutu) and the other alien (Tutsi), the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itself. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, which Mamdani suggests was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' (2001: 11; 2007), needs therefore to be understood as a natives' genocide – akin to and enabled by colonial violence against the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population introduced by the colonial state. It is not necessary to elaborate this point; for present purposes, it is sufficient to mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political violence. The genocide in Rwanda need not exclusively have been the consequence of colonial identity formation, but does appear less opaque when presented in the historical context of colonial violence and administrative practices. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an excuse to overlook the unintended consequences.

Links

The discourse of exploration produces its objects of inquiry.


Johnston, researcher in areas of social geography, ‘10

[Ronald J., The Dictionary of Human Geography, Travel Writing, KEC]


Within human geography, interest in travel writing has had a number of different foci. Among these has been a renewed interest in records and writings produced under the signs of exploration and science, but now read critically as texts, using the resources of the literary as well as the historical disciplines to disclose the multiple ways in which the discourse of exploration and enumeration worked to produce its objects of inquiry. As the discourse of Orientalism prevent ‘the Orient’, for example, so the discourse of tropcality produced ‘the tropics’ (Driver and Martins, 2005). Such studies feed into an interest in the spaces through which scientific knowledges are produced, the channels through which they circulate and the centers at which they accumulate.

Discourse of exploration historically ensured that explorers reflected institutional ideas of class, science, and colonization.


Ryan, Head of the Department of Languages and Cultures at University of Otago, ‘96

[Simon, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, pg. 31, KEC]


It is more productive to eschew analysis of Sturt’s or Grey’s opinions- to treat them as individual foibles- and instead examine how class-based institutions were instrumental in reproducing social formations in the discourse of exploration. The institutions with which explorers were inevitably involved not only regulated the method and reportage of exploration and ensured that explorers reflected institutional ideas of class, science, and colonisation, they were also central in creating the unified author/ explorer figure. The remainder of this chapter shows how this attempt at authorial unity was made at an institutional as well as textual level, and ultimately how it unravels in the textual playing out of the journal.

The discourse of exploration has been used to justify dominium over “others”


Arias, active member of KU at the university, national, and international levels, Melendez, Professor of Colonial Spanish American Literatures and Cultures and a Conrad Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, ‘02

[Santa, Mariselle, Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience, page 121, KEC]


Well beyond this representation, the discourse of exploration and conquest became the vehicle to describe personal experiences and the newly encountered space and, more important, to persuade on political issues concerning dominium over the new lands and the American Indian subjects.

Colonialism




The images that exploration discourse produces are ones of inferiority that highlights the different landscape in a problematic way


Freund, Undergraduate & Law Studies at University of Michigan, 2001

[Toby, Fall 2001, Michigan Journal of History, “The Occidental Tourist: Discover, Discourse, and Degeneracy in South Africa,” http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/freund_toby_the_occidental_tourist-1.pdf, accessed 7-6-14, J.J.]



During the late fifteenth century, Western explorers departed from Europe in search of an oceanic route to the Far East. This movement led to the collision of diverse peoples and cultures from throughout the globe over the next several centuries. Europeans sought both a western passage to the East across the Atlantic, and an eastern route to the Indies around the southern tip of Africa. These two approaches to maritime exploration produced two divergent discourses within which Western men of “reason” and “civilization” came to imagine the world and its inhabitants. As the colonial world emerged in the Americas, spawning European fantasies and restructuring global relationships in its wake, a very different, perhaps anomalous engagement began in southern Africa, one discursively negotiated within a unique dialectic that varied in its semantics from the contemporary conversations surrounding the New World. While the discourse of America eroticized the colonial landscape, imposing on native peoples the images of exotic difference, the discourse of South Africa developed within a framework of human similitude that touted African inferiority and degeneracy.



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