ABSTRACT
Tropological operations form a kind of figurative substratum within the discourse of empire. One key colonialist trope was animalization. This was rooted in a religious and philosophical tradition which drew sharp boundaries between the animal and the human, and where all animal-like characteristics of the self were to be suppressed. Animalization forms part of the larger, more diffuse mechanism of naturalization: the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the tendency to associate the colonized with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural. Colonialist tropes and topoi of colonialist discourse also displays regional specificities. The trope of infantilization, meanwhile, projects the colonized as embodying an earlier stage of individual human or broad cultural development. The infantilization trope also posits the political immaturity of colonized or formerly colonized peoples, seen as Calibans suffering from what Octave Mannoni has called a "Prospero complex", that is, an inbred dependency on the leadership of White Europeans.
