Nicole Wheatley

Imperialism in Literature: The Power of Language and the

Lie of Imperialism in Post Colonialism Texts

               When I started at University of Houston-Clear Lake in 2006 as an undergraduate Communication student I never gave it any thought as to studying another field, or even going on and working towards my graduate degree especially in Literature. I actually would have never put the two together, EVER. I am discovering after being mid-way through my graduate degree in Literature I was wrong the two fit perfectly together for a number of reasons the main one being: they tell a story. My motto has always been no matter who you are or what you stand for; you have a story to tell. World Literature writers not only have a story to tell, but even more important they find a publishing company who agrees they should share their story with the rest of the world. 

As a journalists first, and always in my heart, I am discovering these World Literature writers such as: Jamaica Kinkaid, Derek Walcott and Daniel Defoe have a way of telling their story, but through another medium and creating a postcolonial text in the process filled with lies of Imperialism. Looking at this as a journalist, I am giddy with excitement, because the very fact these authors’ texts are written through webs of “unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationships, usually between countries, based on domination and subordination,” according to the definition of Imperialism by Wikipedia. It is like reading a News Story, the headlines read deceit, rape, prejudices, over-powerment, and economic downfall of third world countries, but these authors put a name and a face while attaching feelings to make the story even more of a historic parallel of what their lives, and their countries suffered through during different periods of time.

“Economic Man” Crusoe uses soundless approach to utilize colonialism

If postcolonial literature is the process of dialogue and necessary correction of misconceptions concerning colonialism, then a comparative study of colonial and postcolonial works is essential for attaining a full understanding of the far-reaching imperialism. Postcolonial literature reveals the lie of imperialism by suggesting colonization was unsolicited by and unjustly administered to indigenous peoples; it seeks to assert that the “help” these cultures received from European nations during the colonial period had far-reaching and detrimental effects on the language and identity of traditional societies. An example of this is perhaps the most debated aspect of the Robinson Crusoe story, written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1719, is what it tells us about the “economic man.” When Crusoe is shipwrecked alone on an uninhabited island somewhere north of Brazil, he is faced with the immediate challenge of survival. Crusoe must construct an economy that will allow him the fundamental qualities of a human as an economic being: food, shelter and clothing.

               At first Crusoe can only hunt and gather food. This to him is not a long term solution given the shortage of gunpowder he has from the shipwreck. After emptying the useless chaff from a sack Crusoe discovers grain growing near his elaborate hidden shelter, built for security measures. He nurtures the grain saving enough seed for the next year to create a field of grain, and after four years of careful farming of the grain he is able to make bread. This for a man stranded on an island of cannibals is a huge feat. It is not that far after he learns to calculate how much he needs to grow on a yearly basis in order to support him, not anything more and not anything less. In addition to the grain Crusoe domesticates the goats, which are abound on the island, by creating enclosed pastures eliminating the goat’s need to chase game; and Crusoe’s wasteful use of gunpowder. By the end of the book when he is joined on the island by the famous, Friday, Friday’s father, and a Spaniard he rescues from cannibals, Crusoe has created a landed estate with him as “the king” or “master” of his two dwellings his “castle” and his “country seat” and his companions as servants.

               With all these varied activities, Crusoe creates a thriving substance economy based on Marx’s theory. He repeatedly emphasizes how hard he works, how thrifty he is, and how inventive he has become, with more than a sense of pride. His is the very model of the industrious middle rank of 18^th century England – the perspective on this could be a lie of imperialism. Obviously in Defoe’s book there is the practice, the theory and attitudes by Crusoe in dominating a metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory, being the island he shipwrecked on. At the same time it is post colonialism in that Crusoe also implants his thoughts, religious views, and economic practices on a distant territory, being the island. There is a contradiction is Crusoe’s “economic man” when he claims to prefer life on the island, however isolated, to his previous existence as a businessman.

I had enough to eat, and to supply my wants, and what was all the rest to me? If I killed more flesh than I could eat, the dog must eat it, or the vermin. If I sowed more corn than I could eat, it must be spoiled.

In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me upon just reflection that all good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use; and that whatever we heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more. (129, Defoe)

However, the most startling contradiction in Crusoe’s economic behavior and attitudes comes at the end of the novel, when he finally has the possibility of being rescued. Despite his protests that he felt “how much more happy this life was…than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days” (113, Defoe). When an English ship arrives to rescue him he very quickly reacts by retrieving his wealth, which was first gained in the “Guinea Trade” and then invested in a Brazilian sugar plantation. He makes meticulous plans for leaving behind his “colony” in the hands of the Spaniard. He is instructed exactly in how to maintain the fields and herds of goats, just as English investors gave instructions to run their plantations in the New World.

               This “soundless” approach by Crusoe (colonizer) was not taken well by the Spaniards for two reasons: 1) it is a foreign language and incomprehensible to the native population (Spaniards vs. Cannibals); 2) it is written language that cannot initially be effectively read or heard by the colonized people (Spaniards vs. Cannibals). The soundless approach of European nations (Crusoe) was difficult to guard against; the inability of the native people to hear and understand the quiet encroachment of imperial nations marks the beginnings of the slow death of their indigenous culture.

Postcolonial Romanticisms use language to breakdown imperialism

Postcolonial Romanticisms utilized as the power of language ultimately becoming a lie of imperialism examines the methods of resistance that are achieved in the postcolonial literary text through a sometimes ironic appropriation and redeployment of the discourses of European romanticism, specifically the discourse of the romantic landscape. Writers such as Derek Walcott and Jamaica Kinkaid radically reimagine and rewrite the various traditions that have figured their landscapes as unhistoricized, unoccupied, and marginal. Their island landscapes are historical and traumatic while still retaining the affect of sublime. Basically defining Postcolonial Romanticisms as an informed, contemporary reading of romance and trauma, positions the romantic landscape as a historical and contemporary technology of intervention, which in between the resistance and complicity, emerges a truly indicative of the subjectivity of postcolonial.

Pantomime: Derek Walcott’s Methods in “Rewriting” Robinson Crusoe

Walcott explores in his writing the processes of identity-making in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean and the complex connections between Caribbean identities and the Caribbean Sea and landscape. In addition to offering unique literary value, Walcott’s work can therefore serve as ethnographic documents of the challenges and tensions of postcolonial societies, calling into question the place of the colonial history and language in their contemporary culture and identity. Walcott explores and documents the past and present of the Caribbean he suggests the ways in which the Caribbean should or can position itself in the postcolonial world, providing a model of Caribbean’s that values the fertilizing nature of cultural and racial multiplicity. For Walcott, past colonial and racial divisions constitute the crux of Caribbean identity, which is partially why he chose to “write back” in his 1970s play, Pantomime, where its central pillar is the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday. Understanding why Walcott rewrites Defoe’s novel involves examining the principles of the postcolonial rewrite as well as the establishment of Robinson Crusoe as a piece of “classic” literature.  Walcott stated, he feels Crusoe performs roles himself, Adam, God and missionary. By exploring these roles in relation to Pantomime, one can understand why Walcott uses Robinson Crusoe, from his West Indian perspective, and consider whether he uses the text fairly. The rewrite is the most obvious example of postcolonial authors “writing back” to the imperial culture, the lie. Since the culture and education was dominated by imperialism rule, Walcott’s first tendency was toward imitating the literature he learned. “The writers of my generation,” write Walcott, “were natural assimilators. We knew the literature of Empires, Greek, Roman, British, through essential classics.” The next move toward “writing back, reacting against European literary standards, even after Britain’s global power was decimated. The most direct form of this is the “rewrite,” wherein the writer directly reworks a literary “classic,” or an element of, to create a new text.

Constructing a nation on a lie of Imperialism

Jamaica Kinkaid’s A Small Place reveals the subalternity of Antigua as a tourist locale; an identity which undermines Antigua’s position as a nation. Through the use of a metafictional discourse, Kinkaid’s narrator deconstructs colonial, postcolonial and imperialism myths, while interrogating the tourists’ perspective and unraveling the continuing colonizing construction of a place legitimized only by its visitors. As an undergraduate Communication student I took a class by Dr. Debra Blakely, Global Issues in Film, and Kinkaid’s A Small Place was one of the books we read. Then we watched a film on Antigua today. The film questioned Antigua’s identity as a nation – just like A Small Place does. Is it a tourist resort, postcolonial nation, an example of imperialism as a lie? Kinkaid as the film led her resisting protagonist through a voyage of self-discovery. And the perspective of the tourist – which undermines our ability to perceive Antigua’s nationhood – becomes the means by which nation and national identity revealed. Through Kinkaid’s gaze, who has insight into perspectives of both the native and that of the tourist, the colonial construction of Antigua’s history begins to unravel. According to Sarah DeLaRosa, in her 2009 midterm essay Yours, Mine, and Ours: Combining Colonial-Postcolonial Literature Studies and Contact Zone Theory in the American Classroom, “She gets very personal in her essay, Kinkaid; possessive of “Antigua that (she) knew” (92, Kinkaid). She seems to protect this remembered version of her home from her reader, who she assumes is an outsider. She exhibits a lot of anger toward the English who colonized Antigua and claims that “everywhere they went they turned in into England; and everybody they met they turned English” (92, Kinkaid). English street names, English holidays at school, English style government – all forced upon Antigua because it was taken as an English colony. This is the purest form of how postcolonial literature uses language to express the lie of imperialism to the colony the English inhibited. Kinkaid could not have expressed imperialism in literature better than she did in A Small Place.

Colonial and Postcolonial studies are essential in order to foster the emergence of a postcolonial worldview so that the differences that are present among all people may not be tolerated, but also respected and valued. Robert Young, sociologist at Brown University states, “Postcolonial vs. imperialism this thinking that imperialism operates from the center, it is a state policy, and is developed for ideological as well as financial reasons whereas colonialism is nothing more than development for settlement or commercial intentions.”

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Dell Publsihing Co., Inc., 1969.

DeLaRosa, Sarah. Yours, Mine, and Ours: Combining Colonial-Postcolonial Literature Studies and Contact

     Zone Theory in the American Classroom. University of Houston – Clear Lake. Dr. Craig White’s World

     Literature midterm. 2009.

Ford, Daniel. (2000). Theatre of the Castaway: Derek Walcott’s Methods in “Rewriting” Robinson Crusoe.    

     The Journal of Student Writing, 11:22, July.

Kinkaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. London: Routledge, 1995.

McLeod, Corinna. Constructing a Nation: Jamaica Kinkaid’s A Small Place. New York: Dell Publishing co.,

     Inc. 2008.