ABSTRACT
A culture of power is a culture of representation. Imperializing power is often put to work on the world through representational texts, but localizing power is more likely to operate through localizing texts, significant things and practices. The power to represent reality makes its representations real; it is a real power and police racism became known as reality. Realism and scientific rationalism go hand in hand, and both grew in parallel to become the dominant ways of knowing of post-Renaissance Europe. European-derived societies have retained it as one of their commonest maps, if not the normal one, because we are still engaged in much the same global enterprise as the seventeenth-century helmsmen. The power of imperializing knowledge works in the texts discussed in this chapter by both oppression and repression. The Chandrapore houses that turn their backs on the English gaze 'other' the intruder as he 'others' Chandrapore.
