Tyson’s ways of reading the colonialist ideology claims the colonizers’ assumptions on their assumed superiority based on their technology and culture.
The colonizers’ believe that their technology and culture are highly advanced, therefore they disregard the colonized’s religions, customs and codes of behavior.
Relates to their position as part of the world, the colonizers see themselves at the center while the colonized is at the margin. They become the center of attention
and civilization, whereas the people they invaded become the marginalized.
c. Othering
Spivak contends othering is the process by which imperial discourse creates its others, “…the native states are being distinguished from “our [colonial]
governments”.
57
Therefore, dividing society in term of binary opposition between center and margin is the way to maintain colonialist power by creating others. To
divide the societies by giving them certain characteristics also creates the image of others. This is in line with Minh-ha’s concept of naming: “Naming is part of
human rituals of incorporation, the unnamed remains less human than the in- human or sub-human. The threatening Otherness must, therefore, be transformed
into figures that belong to a definite image—repertoire.”
58
Therefore, othering is a process to divide societies by naming, to construct the others to a definite image,
without the name means less human. Then, in relation to “self”, the Western are the embodiment of what a
human being should be. Therefore, they are the one having the proper “self”, whereas the natives are claimed to be the opposite. Primitive, backward, savages,
57
Spivak, p. 255
58
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism USA: Indiana University Press, 1989 p. 54. I thank Dr. Patrisius Mutiara Andalas SJ., S.S., S.T.D for alerting me with this useful reference on Asian feminist.
at the margin and other or different become the characteristics of the inferior natives.
d. Hybridity
The relations between the colonizers and the colonized are associated with the concept of hybridity from Bhabha:
“Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination
through disavowal that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the “pure” and original identity of authority.”
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From postcolonial perspective, hybridity then is the condition of the colonized subjects who have been contaminated by colonialism. It shows that the colonized
are not simply and completely opposed to the colonizers. Thus, the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized is ambivalent.
3. Decolonizing the Mind
