ABSTRACT
Scholars of epic ekphrasis have traditionally cast the ekphrastic description of a visual object as the generic ‘Other’ of the epic’s verbal narrative. Postcolonialism criticism reformulates this otherness in terms of race by seeing the ekphrastic conflict between image and word as reflective of the political and discursive struggle between coloniser and colonised. In contrast to this binary, the concept of ‘anotherness’ highlights the deep complicities between postcolonial authors and European art. Western art, in fact, is cast as much as a target as a weapon of postcolonial critique. Postcolonial epic ekphrasis critiques European art as a site of hegemony, even as it uses the same European art to lead an attack on two fronts: one that undermines nativist conceptions of a national art ‘emancipated’ from Europe’s yoke, and one that critiques the cultural amnesia of the post-literate world of multinational capitalism. In addition, the ambivalent Virgilian formulation of ekphrasis prefigures postcolonial preoccupations with the commemoration of suffering and survival as well as the ambiguity of interpretation. Postcolonial epic thus marks a change in ekphrastic preoccupation from the representation of reality (mimesis) to the grounds of representation itself (mimicry as defined by Rei Terada). Unlike political epic that monumentalises the origins of a culture, of a nation and of the text, postcolonial epic problematises rather than promotes such myths of origin by revealing the origin to be a myth in itself.
