The Fear of Contamination- Reading Levine and Gikandi

In reading the articles by Levine and Gikandi, the common concerns of fear of “contamination” and “anxiety of influence” struck me as interesting and worth looking into in these two articles. Levine, in her essay, delves into the attitudes of the colonisers towards the cultures of the colonised, that “It was colonized peoples who were expected to conform to British behaviors and values: movement in the other direction was considered contamination, not assimilation” (107) Interestingly, in Gikandi’s essay which was published as recently as 2003, Gikandi expresses his displeasure at modernism’s shedding of the “contaminants of the Other” (456) as it enshrines itself, canonises itself as part of Western culture. A thought that entered my mind as I read this was that, if Gikandi is right, then while the age of Western colonisation ended decades ago, the ethnocentrism of the West has persisted given its insistence on claiming modernism as purely a Western aesthetic, denying the role that their empires played that “made modernism possible” (456). Interestingly then, we, the once-colonised have not truly been released from the shackles of colonisation, as “colonialism of the mind” persists to this day with the West still insisting on and establishing its hegemony in the world of English literature.

Therefore, perhaps in our decision to take on this module and examining the canonised texts, we begin to acknowledge the role played by the colonised Other in the formation of the Modernist movement, that Gikandi claims has been dreadfully under-rated and perhaps begin to right the wrong that has been done in the process?

Sorry if this is short and rather sketchy, I’m experiencing a bad case of writer’s block this week, been thinking for hours. I'll post something much much better next week.

-Leong Hui Ran