Ethnic Studies to a large extent is a by-product of western imperialism and thereby intertwined with Post-Colonial Theory and Criticism. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) the prominent Harlem Renaissance writer and critic tries to reconcile the predicament for the African-American, while Gloria Anzaldúa expounds and pleads for, while crying out in anger and compassion, the causes for the Mexican-American, Lesbian, and Feminist. Although Edward W. Said (1935-2003) is a post-colonialist theorist who discusses the cultural domination of the Occident over Orient convincingly, he also broaches on his own experience in that “the life as a Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening” (Leitch). Lastly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942), a self-proclaimed “gadfly” post-colonialist theorist, deconstructionist, and feminine Marxist (Leitch 2110), in addition to expounding on those issues, relates a poignant story of suicide in colonial North Calcutta India in 1926, the same city where Spivak is from.
Hughes not only wants respect and appreciation by white American for the Negro but also respect and appreciation by the Negro for the Negro. He is critical that the Negro writer’s and musician’s audience is predominantly white. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” an essay written in 1926 (Leitch 1192-1196), he laments that the only Negro who is not self-conscious of his race are the “low down folks” who don’t care if they are like white folks or anybody else” (1193). Hughes rails that the Cotton Club in Harlem is catered to whites, their employees are white, while the jazz musicians and blues singers are Negro. However, the last few lines of his 1925 poem, “I, Too,” reflects Hughes’ hopes, aspirations, and predictions “Besides, / They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed / I, too, am America” (Baym 2266, 15-18). It is apparent that Hughes was a forerunner to the Civil Rights Movement a couple of decades later.
Gloria Anzaldúa difficult but high achieving life is a testament to hard work ethic, determination, and talent. She is an advocate for racial harmony, particularly, for Mexican-Americans, and equality for women and gays in a racist United States. Similar to Hughes, she admonishes not only the whites but her own people too, the Mexican-American, and the machismos men who degrade Chicano women. Her writing style in “Borderlands/La Frontera” is poetically moving (Leitch 2098-2109). It reflects her self-consciously and embodied “longings, critical consciousness, and contradictions” (Leitch 2095). La Mestiza is in a constant state of "nepantilism, and Aztec word meaning torn apart” (2099), torn apart from two cultures. This condition is similar to the condition of the protagonist in David Dabydeen’s, The Intended, who is a brown Guyanese Asian Indian hybrid who has an extended family consisting of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. He relocates to England as a teenager and his conflicts and ambivalence are emblematic of the post-modern dilemma of racial and ethnic disharmony, in a large part brought upon by Western imperialism.
Edward Said (1935-2003) a Christian Palestinian Arab, who migrated to America as a teenager, expounds on mostly the Occident’s cultural hegemony over the Orient, in particular the Middle East. The Occident predominantly includes France and England prior to World War II, and in America post-World War II. He points out that the Orient “were shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism, and the like, dogmatic views” (1872). He does a skillful job in his Introduction to Orientalism in articulating “a better understanding of the way cultural domination has operated” (1887). Said “has been celebrated and honored, in addition to being “vilified as an anti-Semite”; however, he explains “For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. We don’t want anybody’s history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. On the other hand, there’s a great difference between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people” (Edward Said Online 9). I would have to read in greater depth Edward Said’s discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and other sources to comment with more knowledge. However, there is a wide disparity regarding the origin of the Palestinian refugee situation, whether they were “encouraged by Arab leaders to flee at the onset of the 1948 War,” when Israel and Jordon were created by the United Nations, or “chased out or expelled by the actions of the Haganah, Lehi and Irgun” (5-7). Nevertheless, according to Wikipedia.org “many Israeli’s nowadays believe that the Palestinians true intentions are to conquer the Palestine region entirely and that their official claims are only temporary strategy. As proof to their claims, they note the rise of the Hamas, which has called for the takeover of all parts of Israel, incitement against Israel made in Palestinian schools’ textbooks and to the Palestinian political violence made against Israeli civilians within the green Line borders” (5-7).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak maintains that “subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge’”(2115). It seems that she disagrees with the imperialist British prohibition of the Hindu widow-sacrifice (Suttee) ritual upon her husband’s death and the predominant hegemony upon her native country India by imperialism. In conclusion, she relates to the suicide of the revolutionary Indian teenager, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, who hanged herself because she could not go through with a political assassination. Spivak regrets that the victim’s eldest’s sister’s progeny is immersed in a successful career in the global economy in a U.S. based transnational company. Spivak, a Marxist, quotes V.I. Lenin: ‘“For Europe, the time when the new capitalism definitely superseded the old can be established with fair precision: it was the beginning of the twentieth century…With the boom at the end of the nineteenth century and the crisis of 1900-03...cartels become one of the foundations of the whole economic life. Capitalism has been transformed into Imperialism.”’ Thus Spivak concludes her seeming lament with, “Today’s program of global financialization carries on that relay. Bhubaneswari had fought for national liberation. Her great-grandniece works for the New Empire” (2125). One last point to make: although these writers and theorists justifiably criticize the Occident’s imperialism and the damage it has done to the post-colonial world, they predominantly acknowledge—albeit, with ambivalence—that their intellectual careers and skills as writers and critical theorists are a function in large part due to the Occident’s excellent educational system.
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2008. Print
Dabydeen, David. The Intended. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2005.Print
“Edward Said” en.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, pages 1-17, 8 May 2011. Print
Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print.
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