Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other” - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
various other races. J. F. Blumenbach argued in 1775 in his treatise On the Natural Variety of
Mankind that the originary race of human beings were white and beautiful and that all
present varieties descended from these, with the European or Caucasian as the least
degenerate and the Ethiopian and Mongolian or Calmuck as the most degenerate (Bendyshe
269).
These kinds of theorizing activities and inhuman assumptions endorsed by the
Orientalists/colonialists have caused serious wounds and entailed huge and traumatic split to
the concept of human coexistence. In addition to its dehumanization of the “Other”, the idea
of the supremacy and superiority of the “West” has led to a process of displacement of
history. By these terms I mean that the West has tried hard to dismiss and erase the history of
the “Other” and to replace it with history written by the West. The argument of this paper is
based on a historical sense of recasting and questioning the dominant forms of culture, in a
sense that the struggle for history is a political endeavor and this would explain why
postcolonial writers and critics seriously recognized the central relation between history,
narrative and politics in their works. I have strongly observed that one of the legacies of
Orientalism, and indeed one of its epistemological foundations, is historicism which means
that the history of humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of
Europe, or the West alone. Historicism is actually an essential component of a modern mode
of thinking. We cannot conceive of modernity without historicism. The denial of other modes
of knowledge is part and parcel of the Orientalist mindset. The multiplicity of the past is
erased. Hence, it needs no further proof to say that Modernism, Historicism, Orientalism,
Imperialism, Colonialism, and other Western “isms” all work on a Manichean logic and
Darwinian concept of separation.
Biography
Both Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-Mahfedi and Venkatesh P work in the Department of
English, University of Mysore in India. They specialize in postcolonial literature and theory.
References
Adas, M. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Anthias, Floya. “Cultural Racism or Racist Culture?”. Economy and Society. 24.2. 1995:
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
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