Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers Book

Acknowledgements     x
Introduction     1
Colonialist Discourse: A Rhetorical and Ideological Palimpsest     9
Modern Europe and Classical Connections     11
Kipling and imperial Rome: the warrior ideal in 'Regulus'     19
Ancient Greeks and Romans as heuristic teachers     24
Colonialism-as-grafting     32
Imperial Ideology: Between Totality and Differentiation     40
Classical Orientalism and modern colonial construction of difference: continuity and rupture     40
The middle ground theory: its merits and limits     47
Impact of Classical Discourse of Barbarism on Modern Colonial Taxonomies     55
Language, culture and race     55
Colonial politics of territoriality: keeping the 'dumb' barbarian out of the articulate centre     63
Colonialism: From Hegemony to Infantilism     70
Colonial relation: child and instructor dyad     70
When virile domination and infantile regression coalesce     76
Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire     82
E. M. Forster: a disenchanted Hellenist in the tangles of imperial ideology     82
Virginia Woolf: classical culture, colonialism and gender     91
James Joyce's Ulysses: narrating the odyssey of imperialism through anodyssey of writing     99
Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau and Albert Camus: Algeria and the Latinist myth     106
Modernist Literature and Colonialism: Between Contest and Complicity     113
Modernism, Modernity and Imperialism     115
Culture, Civilisation and Inter-Racial Encounters: Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly     121
Cultural insularity: interrogating the dialogism of the colonial relation     122
Hybridity: the space of the impossible     130
Sexuality and colonial politics: containing the metis, preserving race and national identity     133
Redeeming the Colonial Idea: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness     138
Towards a humane colonisation     140
The 'saving idea': the dialectics of 'good' and 'bad' colonialism     148
Marlow's ambivalence: where does Conrad stand in all this?     153
Reading Conrad's 'barbarian' trope in the light of Herodotus's, Michel de Montaigne's and Jean de la Bruyere's observations     155
Pedagogy of Re-Colonisation or the Peaceful Re-Conquest: Andre Gide's Voyage au Congo     158
Saving the French empire: Gide, a modern Curtius     159
Building a humanist empire: fusion of the religious imperium and kingdom of commerce     167
Split Between Radical Rhetoric and Conservative Practices: Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps     176
Questioning Western positivism: the primitivist discourse and its limits     177
Negotiating Africanist and Orientalist discourses     187
Getting Out of the 'Nightmares' of History and 'Stiff' Imperial Culture: Albert Camus     196
Interrogating colonial mythologies     196
Rehabilitating the petty colonist     200
The colonial relationship: racism, responsibility and guilt     204
European settlers as semi-colonised     207
Camus's natives: from erasure to objectification     209
Conclusion     214
Notes     220
Works Cited     233
Index     245