ABSTRACT
Colonial discourse analysis was initiated as an academic sub-discipline within literary and cultural theory by Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978.1 This is not to suggest that colonialism had not been studied before then, but it was Said who shifted the study of colonialism among cultural critics towards its discursive operations, showing the intimate connection between the language and forms of knowledge developed for the study of cultures and the history of colonialism and imperialism. This meant that the kinds of concepts and representations used in literary texts, travel writings, memoirs and academic studies across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences could be analysed as a means for understanding the diverse ideological practices of colonialism. Said’s Foucauldian emphasis on the way in which Orientalism developed as a discursive construction, so that its language and conceptual structure determined both what could be said and what recognized as truth, had three main theoretical implications. First, Said showed how Foucault’s notion of discourse offered an alternative way of thinking about the operations of ideology, both as a form of consciousness and as a lived material practice. If discourse comes close to Althusser’s definition of ideology as the ‘representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, Said extended the implication to be found in Althusser that a cultural construction could be historically determining.2 Orientalism thus challenged the traditional self-devaluation in deference to the economic of orthodox Marxist cultural criticism. And though doubtless the Western expansion into the East was determined by economic factors, Said argued that the enabling cultural construction of Orientalism was not simply determined by them, and thus established a certain autonomy of the cultural sphere.
