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

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
sub-human race, for instance, allowed Spanish colonizers to feel justified in enslaving and
slaughtering them in Central and South America, wiping out entire native peoples. The belief
in racial inferiority likewise allowed colonists in North America to displace, subjugate, and
kill Native Americans. Colonial conquest of Asia and Africa was promoted as a moral
obligation for Europeans, the "white man's burden" to bring civilization to supposedly
inferior races. When indigenous populations resisted conquest, these same ideas of their
inferiority were used to justify the use of brutal force against them, as in the German
extermination of the Herero in Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907. Africa was colonized
after ideas of scientific racism had become widely accepted, and this powerfully shaped
colonial policy on the continent. In particular, the British and Belgians understood ethnic
group differences in racial terms, and discriminated among their colonial subjects on the
assumption that certain "tribes" were better at ruling, others at fighting, and some others at
laboring. Racism has served as a factor in more recent genocides as well. In the early 1990s,
Serbian and Croatian leaders in the states of the former Yugoslavia depicted Muslims not
simply as a religious minority but as a non-Slavic racial group, related to the much-hated
Turks, who had to be eliminated from the territory in order to purify it.
It would seem indisputable that modern colonialism in the early twentieth century involved
racism. Indeed, during colonial occupation, colonizing groups were granted political,
economic, and social privileges denied to the colonized, and the hierarchy was typically
sustained by claims that the latter were racially inferior. The historian Partha Chatterjee
refers to this as “the rule of colonial difference”—the colonized, by virtue of their biology,
were represented “as incorrigibly inferior” (19, 33). Traditional scholarship has thus treated
racism as “a built-in and natural product [of colonialism], essential to the social construction
of an otherwise illegitimate and privileged access to property and power” (Stoler 322). More
recent scholarship in the humanities has added that the very purpose of colonial discourse
was “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial
origin; in order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 70).
Two sets of ideas have contributed to my analysis of the Orientalist construction of the
“Orient”. This first inspired by Edward Said’s “colonial discourse” in his seminal book
Orientalism (1978). The second is the nineteenth century Victorian progress in natural
sciences which formed the intellectual support of the imperial and colonial enterprise, though
in recent years, there was a shift from the natural biological division among human beings to
the socially constructed, and hence historically variable, meanings. However, both the
biological and the constructivist meanings of racial difference are the underlying premise and
an integral constitutive part of the Orientalist/colonialist thought. At most, those theories and
scholarships intimated the representations of the “other” as well as facilitated and justified
the colonial rule. The Orientalist/colonialist representations of the colonized entailed
“racism” and that “the display of contempt or aggressiveness… [was] based upon physical
differences” (Todorov 370).
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
JPCS Vol 3, No 1, 2012
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