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  • Essay / Orientalism and the postcolonial situation: perspectives on the new cultural studies of South Asia

    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 articles were originally published at the 1988-1989 Annual South Asia Seminar hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, as articles devoted to "Orientalism and Beyond." The ten contributors to this book approach the predicament in different, although overlapping, ways. Edward Said, in his influential work Orientalism, argued that Western knowledge of the Orient in the post-Enlightenment period was "a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage – even produce – the Orient politically." , sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively,” which created a great stir at the time among humanists and social scientists concerned with the non-Western world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayAccording to Said, European and American visions of the Orient created a reality in which the Oriental was forced to live. Although Said's work focuses primarily on the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of the "Orient". Drawing on ideas from Said's book, Carol A. Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and the other contributors to this book explore how colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and other colonized countries of South Asia and the processes by which this knowledge was acquired. knowledge has shaped South Asian reality past and present. The common theme that links the articles in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament is the suggestion that Orientalist discourse is not limited to the colonial past but continues even today. The contributors argue that it is still extremely difficult, for Indians and foreigners alike, to think of India in anything other than strictly Orientalist terms. 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 are not considered modern or because they were not colonies. Orientalism and the postcolonial situation provide new and important insights into the cultural anchoring of power in the colonial and postcolonial world. In “Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures,” Dharwadker reveals that what we might otherwise consider a common-sense notion of “Indian literature” owes its existence to distinctive European ideas about what constitutes literature. In 'The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge' and the Project of a National Language', Lelyveld paints a fascinating portrait of how a 'native' language - Hindustani - was actually a creation of the 'colonial imagination which aimed to create a common language” in northern India, where languages ​​changed every time. eight miles. In "Eighteenth-Century British Orientalism: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government," Rocher traces much of the hostile Hindu-Muslim divide to 18th-century British attempts to reduce complex and fluid indigenous issues to legal texts of these two traditions. In “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge”, Ludden attempts to show..