Един сложен Оксидентализъм: колониално желание и разочарование

In recent years the question of V. S. Naipaul's relationship to England has begun to complicate his hitherto negative reception within the postcolonial academy. While, in the 1980's, a generation of colonial discourse analysis-inspired critics were able to condemn him unequivocally as an apologist for empire, a new recuperation reveals Sir Vidia as a casualty of imperialism; a man more victim than collaborator. Something of this, albeit still incipient, shift in attitude belongs to the changing nature of postcolonial critique itself. If, following the example of Edward Said's Orientalism, the '80's were preoccupied with imperial constructions or representations of the non-West, a new tendency seeks a reversal of the imperial gaze, asking what colonised cultures and their travelling/writing figures made of England and empire when they arrived as emigrants, expatriates, travellers, in the 'mother country'. Each of these perspectives, as we will see, offers a variant, if not opposing, assessment of Naipaul and his oeuvre. In the intellectual tensions of the Enlightenment, in its hierarchical rankings and resentments by language and culture, Polish and French, Dalmatian and Italian, it is possible to discern some aspects of national self-assertion, a kindred spirit of 1776, within the literary forms of the ancient regime in its first crisis. Furthermore, the consciousness of foreign domination among Poles and Dalmatians in 1776, in conjunction with a sensitivity to foreign literary condescension, provoked certain common cultural patterns of response, and even some inklings of a regional resemblance that would eventually be summed up in the idea of Eastern Europe.