Pre-colonial Text as Colonial Discourse: A Postcolonial Reading
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Faculty of English
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.