Empire Expansionism, Ideology, and, Desire

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.