Write a 5 pages paper on the ideology of englishness. Lamming continues that Englishness is often defined in its colonizing and expanding terms, as an instrument to demonstrate superiority and class division.
Write a 5 pages paper on the ideology of englishness. Lamming continues that Englishness is often defined in its colonizing and expanding terms, as an instrument to demonstrate superiority and class division. Laclau (1985) sees the social differentiation also as a geographical one – England and the colonized territories –West Indies, Africa, Australia. The geographical places also create ambiguity in the religious sphere, because if you are different on the bases of religious beliefs, historical background, social class, then one can not be included in the “Englishness” shared by the natives. . Lamming (1984) remarks that there is a linguistic barrier too – well-spoken English versus the broken English.
Englishness appeared as an ideology as early as the 18th, transforming itself into a modern phenomenon separating colonized people from the industrialized society and well-taught Christians from the elite class. The distinguished English attitude establishes boundaries between the white race and the others described as savages and primitive (James 1984). Consequently, the very skin color empowers the people to incorporate certain English attitudes towards the different ones, adding more features into the differentiation. In this way the white people disempower the colonized subject, disparaging both his culture and his human status. Lamming (1984) gives an example of the English writer embodying the Englishness and the West Indian writer which can not be grasped as intelligent and thoughtful as the English one. In this sense, otherness is seen as “part of his historic contract, the English critic accepts-for what else can he do?-the privilege so natural and so free of being the child and product and voice of a colonizing civilization (Lamming 30).”
The Englishness doctrine leads to hegemony and postcolonial supremacy (James 1984). .