In a commentary entitled “East isn’t East,” which appeared
not long
ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Edward Said proposed
that one
of the essential gestures of postcolonial criticism, and one
of its enduring
achievements, rested in what he called its “consistent
critique
of Eurocentrism” (1995: 5). In the pages that follow, I
would like to
put some pressure on this assessment. My intention is not,
of course,
to suggest that the postcolonialist critique of Eurocentrism
has not
been significant in helping to expose the tendentiousness,
chauvinism,
and sheer pervasiveness of the ideological formation that
Said
himself, in his seminal study of 1978, addressed under the
rubric of
Orientalism. I take it for granted that it has, and believe
moreover that
to argue otherwise would be simply perverse. Rather, my aim
in this
chapter is to suggest that in the field of postcolonial
studies at large,
including in the work of some of the field’s most audacious
and theoretically
sophisticated practitioners, Eurocentrism has typically been
viewed not as an ideology or mode of representation but as
itself the
very basis of domination in the colonial and modern imperial
contexts.
