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Imperialism In Small Island

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3. Otherness and the Empire In Small Island, as well as Dracula, the uncanny is linked to concepts of otherness and orientalism. Within the orientalist mind-set exists a clear distinction between the oriental "other" and the occident (Said, Orientalism 2). The East is represented as weak (Said, Orientalism 152) and feminised (Said, Orientalism 309) whereas the West is strong (Said, Orientalism 321) and masculine (Said, Orientalism 309). In his work Orientalism, Edward Said remarks that in orientalist discourse the West is often depicted as dominant in contrast to the East (321). Moreover, the encounter between the two clashing regions is often portrayed as "an advanced society dealing with a less advanced society, a strong culture encountering …show more content…
As Said claims in his work Culture and Imperialism, an empire needs this mentality: For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire […] and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture; then in turn imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences, and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture. (11, original emphasis)

This "idea of having an empire" (Said, Culture and Imperialism 11, original emphasis) is depicted in Small Island. In the very first chapter, we witness Queenie visiting the British Empire Exhibition (Levy, 1). She remarks that "the King had described it as 'the whole Empire in little'" (Levy 2). Although only a child, Queenie has already been engrained with an imperialist mind-set. The text …show more content…
For instance, Chinua Achebe, an African novelist, criticised Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness heavily in his lecture "An Image of Africa" because of its depiction of Africa as "the other world" (783). Achebe went so far as to call Conrad "a bloody racist" (788). The aforementioned depictions of the "other" in novels like Heart of Darkness or Jane Eyre are products of their historical environment (Kuehn). Julia Kuehn concludes her article "Exoticism in 19th-century literature" with the observation that "[e]xotic representations rarely give the 'truth' or 'reality' about a foreign culture but are aesthetic, subjective utterances produced in a specific historical – in the 19th century, colonial – context" (Kuehn). This historical context is all too present in Victorian literature, as Edward Said points out in Culture and Imperialism: "Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the facts of empire, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity and frequency than in the British novel" (62). He makes mention of several other Victorian authors who broach the issue of empire and otherness such as Charles Dickens (Said, Culture and Imperialism 62), William Thackeray (Said, Culture and Imperialism 62) or Rudyard Kipling (Said, Culture and Imperialism 66). Regarding the depiction of the "other," Dracula too is a product of its

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