The Postcolonial Enlightenment by Daniel Carey;Lynn Festa; & Lynn Festa

Author:Daniel Carey;Lynn Festa; & Lynn Festa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2007-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 See e.g. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (New York: Longman, 2002), 57–8: ‘the accusation that the British orientalists concerned were “orientalist,” in the critical sense … cannot for the most part be sustained … As children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,… they were inclined to believe that man, though culturally different, was basically the same everywhere…. Rather, many Orientalists formed enduring relations with Indians, in particular members of the Bengali intelligentsia…. Were such men … afflicted by the narrow racialism, nationalism and parochialism attributed to them by the critics of orientalism? It would seem improbable.’ For J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 26, ‘The Saidian mode of explanation …is… too broad because, even if we allow for its cogency within the “high” colonial period of roughly 1800 to 1950, it becomes fragile when stretched beyond those limits.’ According to John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 26, ‘the description applied to the activities of a group of eighteenth-century scholars who sought to rediscover the languages, arts, and laws of India comes to be identified with an ideological faction constituted of their sworn enemies… . Nothing could better illustrate the problems of Said’s conception of a continuous oriental discourse.’ See also David Smith, ‘Orientalism and Hinduism’, in Gavid Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): ‘This perverse sleight-of-hand [by Said] magics away into thin air the editions, translations, and dictionaries of the true and original Orientalists who devoted their lives to understanding the meaning of instances of Oriental culture and civlization’ (p. 46). Smith adds, ‘Orientalist indologists … were not “making a career of the East” … the goal … was purely intellectual’ (p. 60). See also J. L. Brockington, ‘Warren Hastings and Orientalism’, in Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson (eds), The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 91–108; S. N. Mukherjee, ‘European Jones and Asiatic Pandits’, Journal of the Asiatic Society, 27/1 (1985), 43–58; P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982), 156–7; and David Kopf, ‘The Historiography of British Orientalism, 1772–1992’, in Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine (eds), Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746–1794) (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 141–60. See Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) for essays that treat or touch on eighteenth-century British colonial Orientalism, generally sympathetic to but not completely in agreement with Orientalism. The essay by David Ludden, ‘Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge’, in Breckenridge and van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 251–2, criticizes the lack of specificity in Said’s use of the term ‘Orientalism’.

2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 94 and 221.

3 G. W. Forrest (ed.), Selections from the State Papers of the Governors-General of India, 4 vols (Oxford: B.

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