Empire
Language
and Power
(Crf.
Thompson, Maglioni, New Literary Links. From the Victorian Age to Contemporary Times,
Teacher’s book, CIDEB, pp. 84-85)
The idea the Empire was rooted in the Renaissance when the foundations
of modern
But looking at the map which shows the extension of the Empire we can see
that another decisive factor in the establishment of the Empire was naval
power. The connection between naval power - having a large fleet of good ships
- and domination of the globe is made visible in the portrait of
The important point to stress here is that mapping is always done for
the benefit of the colonisers, and presumes that the territory in question is a
'blank space' - a terra incognita, before it is mapped. We can see this in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, when he
says that when he was a boy 'there were many blank spaces on the earth.'
Yet we can see how, for example, the
English literature is full of tales which enact such displacement. In The Tempest, the exiled Prospero
displaces Caliban's mother Sycorax as ruler of the island, and makes Caliban
his slave, through a combination of the power of his art and language. Remarkable
for the time is surely the way Caliban uses the language he is taught by
Prospero as an instrument of resistance, anticipating the much later
appropriation of English and the English canon by post-colonial writers (See
Agard, Walcott,
A similar situation occurs in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, only here there is no magic involved. Crusoe
masters the island thanks to his resourcefulness and hard work. Indeed he turns
the island into a microcosm of the bourgeois property owning society he comes
from. It's interesting, however, to note that here the native instantly submits
to Crusoe, almost wishing to become his slave. Unlike in The Tempest, here there is no conflict, no power struggle. Crusoe's
superiority and right to rule is instantly acknowledged. Friday is thus in a
way the projected fantasy of the ideal colonial subject. In a way Friday is as
much a tabula rasa as the blank spaces on the map. Crusoe teaches him the
rudiments of 'language' as he would a child. Interesting too is the way Defoe
in his description of Friday tries to emphasise the aspects of him that are
closest to European physiogr)omy. Compare this with Coetzee's 'tongueless'
Friday who refuses to learn to express himself, whose silence is a form of
resistance to being known.
Essential to both these enterprises as we have seen is the teaching of
language. In both cases language is used as a means of government, of control. It
is both a way to give orders and instructions. Through language, the violence
of colonial power is sublimated in a more civilised form of c6ercion. In this
sense we can see that the ideology of Empire is inseparable from a didactic,
“civilising” impulse, and yet mantains a necessary supplement of pure racism.