Empire Expansionism,
Ideology, and Desire
In the process of finding my own skripsi topic, the basic
topic for my skripsi as “Empire Expansionism” but, it does not end at that
point. I have interested, currently (since I believe I will change the topic
overtime, to find the one best suits, and concerns me the most), in discussing
the altering of ideology, and if possible, culture, of the colonized nation in
literature by the trying-to-expand Empire, the colonizer. To give more details
about the topic, I want to know how the colonized nation’s ideology and culture
are implemented and giving the nation benefit before the colonization occurs; I
want to know how the process of culture and ideology alteration occurs; I want
to know how long the effect of the alteration, such as how long it will occur,
the outcome of it, etc.; I want to know how the literature explains it. So far,
I only have the topic but not the object of research, the work that I will
examine. That means I still don’t know yet, whether my topic is usable, or is
possibly presented on one or some works of literature.
There is also something that I’d question about empire
expansionism. Reading through American history, for example, the American land,
then became the territory for the colonists, was one of the source of the
empire’s wealth to build and to maintain the central, the mainland of the
empire, in this term it is London or the Great Britain’s land. Knowing the
fact, then, the sole desire of the empire to expand its territory, to lengthen
the reach of its hands around the globe, must be to gain wealth and resource
needed by the empire to make itself rich. But, what if that is not enough? What
if what they really is not only the wealth of the colonized nation, but also
the nation’s people along with their mind constructed to be the same as the
empire for whatever reason beneficial for the empire. According to that base
idea, perhaps ideology, beliefs (not only the religious ones), and also culture
are parts of the empire’s expansion too.
Despite the example I’ve given, what I really want myself
concern with is the expansion of Islamic empires. Today, for me, it seems very
distorted and unclear the idea of certain Islamic empires that was warring with
other non-Islamic empires for the glorious reason of expanding the influence of
Islam as, what they believe, the truest belief, the belief that must be spread
out throughout the globe. Now, when I make more specific of my topic, then I
want to examine the empires’ true aim of expansion. How Islam is treated in
such case? How Islam is used? How Islam is presented as a seemingly a part of
the empire’s reason to expand itself? How the presence of desire is presented
in the work? How the colonized nation’s ideology and culture be altered by this
empires’ “Islamic expansion?” How both new and old ideology interact? Those are
some question I’d like to answer myself.
The more specific topic I have explained previously must be
put aside for now though, lack of references is the main reason for that. So, I
will examine empire expansionism for now without making it specific.
First, since basically I will examine something about empire,
‘Nation and Empire’ issue clearly have to be explained here. According to
Parry, using Hobson’s argument, the empire is able to “exercise physical and
discursive power over conquered territories and cultures” but, in Parry it’s,
seemingly, limited to “possess and exploit space.” If discursive means can be
applied to gain power in conquered territories and, especially, cultures, then
can it be used to exploit resource other than space? Let’s say, the colonized
nation’s people along with its culture and ideology, but then another question
rose, do exploiting and possessing the culture and ideology of the colonized
nation have any benefit at all to the empire?
Spivak in Can the
Subaltern Speak? Stated:
… the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation
cannot be bypassed here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance
politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can speak and know their
conditions. (Spivak, 1995)
Is “The oppressed …. Can speak
and know their conditions” a result of the interaction between the
colonized and the colonizer? Can the colonized be oppressed culturally and
ideologically? I got the interest to know whether the colonized is (for me is unconsciously)
oppressed by the colonizer’s ideology and culture. But then again, is that
really a matter? It is a matter to me because I think of a nation’s identity
pre-colonization is the more original one than that of post-colonization, after
the colonization it seems to me that the identity has to be distorted. Identity
itself is a problem, need to have a specific definition of it to explain this.
My topic relates to oppression by
one side to other sides, then there must be the superior and inferior force
“playing” inside the circle of colonization, which is obvious if one should
take it ignorantly. My reason that there is a kind of gender between the sides
of colonial power and the colonized came from Cixous’s Hierarchical opposition
according to man/woman opposition.
It's the classic
opposition, dualist and hierarchical. Man/Woman automatically means
great/small, superior/inferior . . . means high or low, means Nature/History,
means transformation/inertia. In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of
society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems-everything, that is,
that's spoken, everything that's organized as discourse, art, religion, the
family, language, everything that seizes us, everything that acts on us-it is
all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman
opposition, an opposition that can only be sustained by means of a difference
posed by cultural discourse as "natural," the difference between
activity and passivity. (Cixous & Kuhn, 1981)
So according to her statement
regarding hierarchical opposition, it can be concluded that the superior one
should be the colonizer, the empire in expansion. Automatically, the inferior
one is the colonized nation. That also makes the colonizer the masculine and
the colonized the feminine.
This is quite important because if
it is related, what I have explained before, then “decapitation,” what I so far
recognize as the shutting down of the oppressed voice, the oppressed means to
struggle for freedom, can be one of the means to occupy, to possess the
colonized, oppressed nation culture and ideology. And according to Cixous
again, the superior, the masculine can “control” the feminine, the inferior,
through their “education.” This education they have, then will be applied to
the inferior to “shape” them according to the superior’s liking.
It's hard to imagine
a more perfect example of a particular relationship between two economies: a
masculine economy and a feminine economy, in which the masculine is governed by
a rule that keeps time with two beats, three beats, four beats, with pipe and
drum, exactly as it should be. An order that works by inculcation, by
education: it's always a question of education. An education that consists of
trying to make a soldier of the feminine by force, the force history keeps
reserved for woman, the "capital" force that is effectively
decapitation. (Cixous & Kuhn, 1981)
In Bhabha’s Of Mimicry and Men there’s
a concept of “mimic man” that is created to “be employed in different
departments of Labour” by making “a class of persons Indian in blood” into a
class of person that, while keeping the previous qualities, at the same time,
“English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” and the “mimic
man” was made in “our English School.” This example is one of the factors that
drives me to believe that the empire can play tricks to alter the colonized
nation’s ideology and culture for their advantage.
What I can conclude from that
then, the empire is purposefully making the colonized nation to mimic
themselves and, seemingly, to forget their native culture and ideology. But, in
the process of making the colonized nation’s people “belong” to them, they
seemed to have done a mistake, as Bhabha stated:
What emerges between
mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of represen-tation, that marginalizes
the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that
power which supposedly makes it imitable. (Bhabha, 1984)
It is as
if, by making the colonized nation’s people to mimic them, the empire had given
them the way to strike them back; with their own piece of culture, writing. And
as Cixous stated, the feminine, the oppressed, must speak and they speak
through writing, their own writing. If The case can be related, then the next
interaction, the game of altering ideology and culture, come to the phase where
the oppressed struggle to regain their freedom, themselves. Mimicry, although
ambivalent, can be “an in-surgent counter-appeal.”
References
Bhabha, H. K. (1984). Of Mimicey and Man: The
Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A
Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, 125-133.
Cixous, H., & Kuhn, A. (1981). Castration or
Decapitation? Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1, 41-55.
Parry, B. (2004). Reading the Signs of Empire in
Metropolitan Culture. In B. Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist
Critique (pp. 107-118). London: Routledge.
Spivak, G. (1995). Can the Subaltern Speak? In B.
Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The Post-colonial Studies
Reader (pp. 24-28). London: Routledge.
