Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia New Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1993, is a collection of articles. Most of these papers were originally presented at the University of Pennsylvania's 1988-1989 annual seminar on South Asia as papers on “Orientalism and Beyond.” The ten authors of this book approach the situation in different, if overlapping, ways. Edward Said in his influential book Orientalism argued that Western knowledge of the Orient in the post-Enlightenment period was “a systematic discourse through which Europe was able to manage – even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively,” which created a considerable stir at the time among humanists and social scientists interested in the non-Western world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay According to Said, European and American views of the East created a reality in which Easterners were forced to live. Although Said's work is primarily concerned with the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of the “Orient.” Drawing from Said's book, Carol A. Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and the other contributors to this book investigate the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and other colonized countries in Asia South Asia and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped the past and present reality of South Asia. The common theme linking the articles in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament is the suggestion that orientalist discourse is not only limited to the colonial past but continues today. The authors argue that it is still extremely difficult for both Indians and foreigners to think about India in terms other than strictly orientalist ones. The collection of articles is dedicated to discussing Said's thesis in the context of modern South Asian countries, which include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sir Lanka. It is unclear whether Nepal and other South Asian countries are excluded because they were not considered modern or because they were not colonies. Orientalism and the postcolonial situation provides new and important insights into the cultural embeddedness of power in the colonial and postcolonial world. In “Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures,” Dharwadker reveals that what we might otherwise take as the commonsense notion of “Indian literature” owes its existence to distinctive European ideas of what constitutes literature. and the project of a national language,” Lelyveld draws a fascinating portrait of how a “native” language – Hindustani – was actually a creation of the “colonial imagination that set out to create a common language” in northern India , where languages changed every eight miles. In "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectic of Knowledge and Government," Rocher traces much of the known hostile Hindu/Muslim divide to 18th-century British attempts to reduce the complex and fluid indigenous issues to legal texts of those two traditions "Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge", Ludden attempts to demonstrate that what was considered a neutral fact, such as the existence of autonomous village communities, l 'Hinduism and castes, were creations of the organization and record-keeping for official colonial purposes. The alternative and competing views on what constitutes the.
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