Questions: Postcolonial Criticism

Question 1

According to Said's Orientalism, what is the primary function of Western representations of the 'Orient'?

• A. To provide accurate ethnographic documentation of Eastern cultures
• B. To construct the East as an exotic, inferior Other that legitimizes imperial domination
• C. To celebrate cultural exchange between Western and non-Western societies
• D. To preserve non-Western oral traditions that might otherwise be lost

Answer: (B)

Said's central argument is that Orientalism is a discourse of power: Western representations of the 'Orient' are not neutral descriptions but ideological constructions that position the East as backward, irrational, and in need of Western governance. The representation itself is a form of domination.

Question 2

In Bhabha's framework, hybridity is essentially the same as cultural mixing or multicultural exchange between two groups.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Bhabha's hybridity is not simple cultural blending. It describes the ambivalent, disruptive 'third space' produced by colonial encounter — a space where colonial authority is undermined because the colonized subject mimics but never fully becomes the colonizer. This mimicry ('almost but not quite') destabilizes the binary between colonizer and colonized rather than harmoniously mixing them.

Question 3

What does Spivak mean when she asks 'Can the subaltern speak?', and why is her answer effectively 'no'?

Model answer: Spivak argues that the subaltern — colonized subjects, particularly women — cannot speak in a way that gets heard within intellectual and institutional frameworks built by and for the colonial elite. Even when subalterns speak, their voices are filtered, translated, or erased by the very structures that claim to represent them.

The question is not whether subalterns can physically speak, but whether they have access to representational frameworks that allow their speech to be received and recognized as legitimate knowledge. Spivak's point is that Western (including Western-trained) intellectuals who claim to 'give voice' to the subaltern often reproduce the colonial erasure they mean to oppose.