Reversed Roles?

Both of the works, Bressler’s “Postcolonialism: ‘The Empire Writes Back’”, and Said’s “Crisis [in orientalism]”, really convey an interesting method for addressing works in the postcolonial era. In particular I liked two things about the two articles as a whole. The first was Said’s metaphor about the study of lion’s and their fierceness. As he states and I paraphrase, “Understanding the lion in literature is a one-sided conversation until the lion writes back”. I think this idea is immensely powerful since it shows the neglect the other sided suffers when its voice is unheard. It also gives way to the clichéd, “you don’t know a man until you’ve spent a day in his shoes” which helps to try and put the perspective of the observer in the shoes of the “Other”. Also, Bressler’s addressing of Said in particular, providing the background information of Said, gave a more personal feel to what Said writes in his article. Now relating to the text there are infinite amounts of relationships that can be draw onto, the juxtaposition of Archie with religion, society, and personal relationships. In particular the Jehovah’s Witness theme throughout the work gives a sense of religious backlash as the Witness’s try to convert people in Britain, a thought often portray in the opposite manner with an international superpower converting the “Other”. On a side note, Microsoft Word detects Postcolonialism as a misspelling, does that imply that Bill Gates supports Post-colonialism instead, as Bressler suggests varies from Postcolonialism?