Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" – summary part 1 - 2

Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" – summary  part 1 - 2

 At the beginning of "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" Abdul JanMuhamed is deliberating with different thinkers, mostly from the postcolonial tradition. He argues that they have failed to see that the question of representation is not confined to cultural products, but is rather entangled with political, historical and mainly economical structures that have to be taken into account.

JanMuhamed stresses that the center's symbolic superiority is constructed on overt as well as covert aspects. The covert aspect of colonialism aims at exploiting the other while the overt one aims at "civilizing" him. They relations between colonizer and colonized are characterized according to JanMuhamed by the "Manichean metaphor" – a system of dichotomies and oppositions between white and black, good and bad and so forth. This Manichean allegory is esstential in order to constitute the other as other and draw a line between subject and object. The writer is under pressure to cooperate with this system of distinctions as the center wishes, for the center always seeks to be justified and affirmed.

 European literature regarding the colonies, says JanMuhamed, faces an ethical problem when it seeks to represent the other, by falling into the traps and stereotypes that are meant to affirm its superiority. JanMuhamed distinguished two types of western writing about the colonies, borrowing apparently from the Lacanean vocabulary: imaginary and symbolic. Imaginary writing projects the westerner on to the other in order to fix the boundaries between them while symbolic writing is more open for negotiations of identity with the colonial other. For JanMuhamed, all imaginary writing and some symbolic writing is made to "articulate and justify the moral authority of the coloniozer and – by positing the inferiority of the native as a metaphysical fact – to mask the pleasure the colonizer derives from that authority".

Recommanded literature:

Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" – summary  part 1 - 2

Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" – summary

Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" – summary part 1 - 2

 In "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" Kenya born critical theoretician Abdul JanMuhamed is attempting to describe the central hardship facing every "marginal" writer which attempts to tell himself to a culture that has signed him off as inferior. JanMuhamed talks of the difficulty in escaping the system of representation enforced on the other by the hegemonic western center.

JanMuhamed's central claim is that every writer from the former colonies which seeks to tell the story of his marginalized community to the cultural center will have a difficult task on his hands. The difficulty, JanMuhamed holds, is in locating the postcolonial subject in the center of a literary text. This is because the discursive forces which interpolate literary production work to marginalize such subjects. In other words, JanMuhamed argues that western literature, and its constitutive discourse, is structured, from its very vocabulary to the collective psychology which underlies it, to accommodate a white protagonist, and it will require great ingenuity in order to replace him with a black one.

The post-colonial writer, according to JanMuhamed, needs to avoid duplicating the inscribed identities fixed by the center in regards to his culture of origin, or the general non-western other. JanMuhamed argues that the colonial site has been designated in advance by the cultural center (violent, emotional, sensual, lazy etc.). these stereotypes need to be subverted, and the writer needs to clear the "white" paper from its pre-inscribed representations of the colonial other.

According to JanMuhamed (and others like Edward Said) the cultural center projects its fantasies on minority groups in a manner that denies them the right to an independent formulation of identity, history and self perception and representation.

This turns JanMuhamed to the central question of "The Economy of Manichean Allegory" – how is it possible to be emancipated from the symbolic coercion dictated by the cultural center and to directly, without mediation, to represents the marginal in a manner which does not adhere to preexisting "knowledge" of him?

Recommanded literature:
 

Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature" – summary  part 1 - 2