REPRESENTATION OF THE OTHER IN WESTERN HISTORY: A POSTCOLONIAL READING

Abstract

Much of the European discourse on the Other has been informed by canonical figures like Kant, Hegel, and Freud, who have misrepresented the non-European non-white with special emphasis on women who were believed to be generally inferior to men.This has urged postmodern and postcolonial writers like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and Luce Irigaray to counter those writers in order to rewrite the history and identity of women and the non-European. This paper traces the history of ideas regarding the representation of the Other and offers a postcolonial critique of theories advanced by Kant, Hegel, and Freud. Kant represented the Other as lacking judgment faculties whose taste and moral judgment cannot be compared to the wise European. Hegel excluded the Other from history and alleged that the only history is European since he believes that the Other is incapable of writing history. Finally, Freud portrayed the Other as savage and primitive whose mind resembles his neurotic patients. He also represented women’s sexuality as inferior to men. Such misrepresentations have resulted in a long history of dehumanization and prejudices towards the Other. This has triggered the emergence of the postcolonial discourse in order to balance the Othering process. For instance, Spivak attacked Kant for disempowering and excluding the non-Europeans from his Critique of Judgment.She also critiqued Hegel for creating Oriental stereotypes in his Philosophy of History. Hegel’s master/slave dialectic has been deconstructed by Franz Fanon, who argues that the black cannot attain self-recognition through the gaze of the white, since the black has always been portrayed as inferior in the white’s discourse. Irigaray challenged Freud by arguing that he lacks an understanding of female sexuality. Edward Said contradicted Freud’s ambivalent notion of the non-European. Such revisionist history aims at rewriting the Other’s image and identity.