Pre-colonial Text as Colonial Discourse: A Postcolonial Reading

Abstract

This study attempts to contextualize the pre-colonial text,The Journal of Christopher Columbus,within the paradigm of colonial discourse.For that purpose, it uses the concepts of postcolonial thinkers such as Ed ward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,Homi K Bhaba etc,and analyzes how the text creates a discourse of otherness and misrepresents the Native American people by various stereotypes like savages, cannibals, good people to be servants,timid, deficient of intelligence etc. The study finds The Journal implicated with four motives of Europe—glory, god, gold and govern—of the time which lead to the formation of the binary oppositions between the Europeans and the Native Americans. In this sense,it claims this text to be an originary colonial discourse that subsequently leads to the Spanish imperialism in the Americas.Hence,it also urges for the incorporation of pre-colonial texts like this in the corpus of postcolonial studies.For this purpose,it also borrows insights from the critics such as Robert St am,Ella Shohat, Enrique Dussel, Asselin Charles, Peter Hulme etc who have criticized the postcolonial theory for its negligence to the texts written around 1492. The thesis has been divided into five chapters. The first introduces The Journal as acolonial discourse, the postcolonial theory and the crux of the study. The second situates colonial discourse in the postcolonial theory. The third presents the historical contexts and motives of the exploration. The fourth reads The Journal through the postcolonial perspective and analyses how it is a colonial discourse. The last concludes that The Journal misrepresents the Native Americans and hence initiates the Spanish imperialism in the Americas. It also argues for the extension of the postcolonial theory to the pre-colonial contact period to include the texts of the period into its corpus of study.