Edward Said's Orientalism And The Study Of Self And Other In George Orwell's “Shooting An Elephant”

Edward Said's Orientalism and the study of Self and Other in
George Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant”

Critics unanimously regard Said’s Orientalism as the cornerstone of the postcolonial canon. Orientalism is a Western style for Orientalizing the Orient, i.e. how from knowledge of the Orient, particularly from the nineteenth century, the Orient is defined by a set of recurring images andclichés and how afterwards this knowledge of the Orient is put into practice by colonialism and imperialism.
Orientalism is affiliated with the representation of the Self or Occident and the Other or Orient in which the Self is privileged and has upper hand to define and reconstruct the passive, silent and weak Other.
Said in his book demonstrates how the Western literary and cultural canon hasotherized its other and how they have misrepresented the Orient. The book begins with a quotation by Karl Marx: ‘they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’. As a result, it is a Western career to represent them. The relationship of power and knowledge is essential in post-colonial discourse on how through this knowledge Orientalists and European administrators were able to reimposecolonial domination. Said elucidates how the West constructed Orient in various works such as travelogues, historical accounts, state and official archives and novels. For Said, Orient and Oriental do not exist, however, the Westerners construct and counterfeit the
Orient. The outcome of Orientalism is the building on a binary opposition between Occident and Orient. Orient is imposed aseverything that the West is not, exotic, alien, dangerous, unreliable, to be tamed, exhibited, a threat to the West. Western metaphysics is based on binary oppositions, a hierarchy in which one is privileged and the other is unprivileged. Binarism ranges from general binaries such as light/dark, white/black to some more complicated and culturally weighted as man/woman, the colonizer/ the colonized and inthe case under consideration the self/other.
The Self and the Other can be translated to the Occident / Orient, us /them, The West /the rest, center/margin, metropolitan/colonial subjects. In all these cases Western literary and cultural canon defines "its other" in relation to himself, the other is an alien and alter ago, to and of the self, as the inferior reflection of Europe. By the processof Othering, the colonizers treat the colonized as ‘not fully human’, and as a result, it dehumanizes natives. Othering codifies and fixes the self as the true human and the other as other than human. The Colonizers consider themselves as the embodiment of “proper self” while label the colonized as “savages”.
In colonial novels, such as those of Kipling and Conrad, the Orient and Orientals areviewed through the lens of a Western writer who has taken the upper hand to manipulate, construct and re-present the Orient. The imaginary line between the Orient and Occident becomes ‘clear, visible, and there’. George Orwell as a British writer who was directly involved by the Orient and the Oriental is not an exemption. He was born in Motihari in India with his colonial roots and served fiveyears in Indian Imperial Police. His firsthand experiences as a sahib and agent of British Raj gave him, as he claims, a glimpse for better
understanding of ‘the nature of imperialism’. Orwell, like other colonial novelists appears contradictory, simultaneously criticizes, resents and sympathizes with both the colonizers and the colonized. The double perspective or duplicity in his short story“Shooting an elephant” will be discussed in this presentation.
Shooting An Elephant” narrates the story of a police officer stationed in the British colony of Burma ( present day Myanmar) in the 1920's. The constable is summoned to control a tame elephan which has gone amok, destroying private property and even killing a man. The policeman, who narrates the story, brings a gun to the scene but...