Damned Souls Research Articles

<i>Da la scheggia rotta usciva insieme parole e sangue:</i> an unusual case of bleeding and the metaphor of a clinical trial

In the Canto XIII of the Inferno, in the forest of suicides, Dante and Virgil encounter a damned soul who, though not revealing his name, is easily identifiable as Pier delle Vigne, a notary and right-hand man of the emperor Frederick II in Palermo. Among other achievements, Pier delle Vigne signed the Constitutions of Melfi and, in 1224, the founding act of the University of Naples. Later, due to court intrigues, he fell out of favor with the emperor and committed suicide. The suicides in Hell have lost their bodies, transformed into trees or bushes (“men we were, and now we are stumps”). The report of Dante, Virgil and Pier delle Vigne’s encounter follows a sequence that, more than 700 years earlier, mirrors the general path of modern scientific research, in particular of clinical trials: from the observation of an unusual episode of bleeding (a tree that speaks and from which words and blood flow together), to the formulation of a hypothesis, from the mentor-student relationship to the experiment without informed consent, from empathy with the patient to the definition of autoimmunity and inflammation, and finally to the publication of the case.

As Though “Wit” Never Were: The Dual Pronoun as Interpretive Crux in The Wife's Lament

As Though “Wit” Never Were: The Dual Pronoun as Interpretive Crux in <i>The Wife's Lament</i>

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

William James, Radical Empiricism, and the Affective Ground of Religious Life

A damned soul with goiter. "The life of Christ" (c. 1480) by Giovanni Martino Spanzotti.

The church of San Bernardino in Ivrea (Piedmont) houses a cycle of frescoes of "The Life of Christ"by the Italian painter Giovanni Martino Spanzotti. In the painting, a damned soul of the Hell with a large bi-lobar goiter is represented, confirming the interest of Renaissance artists towards thyroid diseases.

La doppia natura dei suicidi del canto XIII dell’Inferno: un parallelismo con la dualità onda-particella nella fisica quantistica

The hybrid nature of the human–plant suicidal souls explored through the character of Pier delle Vigne in Inferno XIII exhibits unique characteristics in the Comedy’s first cantica. For centuries the Wood of the Suicides has demanded the attention of readers and scholars alike and yet the interplay and structure of their coexisting identities remain subject to lively debate. As an analytical tool, Dante’s encounter with Pier delle Vigne is compared to the wave–particle duality of light, a peculiar phenomenon of quantum physics. Indeed just as the suicides are at once true human and true plant, light behaves simultaneously as wave and particle depending on the experiment performed. The two complementary descriptions of light are mirrored in the duality of Pier delle Vigne, allowing a schematic restating of the canto emphasizing the multisensory interaction between Dante and the sinner. The hybrid nature of the damned soul thus becomes an expression of the contrasting judgments of Dante–theologian and Dante–poet on this character. Furthermore, the analogy shows how the anonymous suicide from Florence introduced at the end of the canto embodies the ambivalent perspective of Dante on the city of Florence itself.

IDENTITY AND MULTILINGUALISM. AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL READING OF THE REPRESENTATION OF ALTERITY IN LITERARY KATABASIS

In a global and multilingual society, indubitable is the importance of a reflection on the Self and the Other as defined by language. This interdisciplinary study aims at investigating, the narrative reinvention of the theoretical principles involved in the definition of the anthropological identity as expounded by Francesco Remotti. Specifically, we analyse a centenary trend in European literature identifying a peculiar form of multilingualism with the non-human and the lack of identity. From Dante’s Inferno to Joyce’s The cat and the Devil, the netherworld, its inhabitants and captives are characterized by the use of several (usually not intelligible) languages. According to this literary cliche, while the clarity and precision of a single language contributes to define a human identity, the plurality of languages is often a sign of a lost identity and of not being human anymore. It is not by chance that the verses of Dante ‘There sighs and wails and piercing cries of woe/ […] Strange languages, and frightful forms of speech,/ words caused by pain, accents of anger, voices/ both loud and faint’ are echoed in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Multilingualism is the central point in Levi’s memories from the time spent in a concentration camp where ‘languages absolutely not understandable [...], the orders shouted in languages [we] were not able to recognize’ and the ‘endless Babel where everyone is shouting’ symbolize the lost human condition. Both the damned souls and the prisoners of the camp are not human anymore because they have lost their language and, with it, their identity. In our study, the comparative and hermeneutic analysis of the narrative and lexical choices adopted to represent multilingualism in European literature reveals a strong connection between human identity and the purity of language intended as a manifestation of human rationality. On the contrary, a number of recurrent diegetic choices and figures of speech seem to define the non-human as a multilingual world characterized by sighs, wails and strange languages, like the Bellsybable of Joyce’s devil. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/sm-2018-0002

Identity and Multilingualism. An Anthropological Reading of the Representation of Alterity in Literary Katabasis

Summary In a global and multilingual society, indubitable is the importance of a reflection on the Self and the Other as defined by language. This interdisciplinary study aims at investigating, the narrative reinvention of the theoretical principles involved in the definition of the anthropological identity as expounded by Francesco Remotti. Specifically, we analyse a centenary trend in European literature identifying a peculiar form of multilingualism with the non-human and the lack of identity. From Dante’s Inferno to Joyce’s The cat and the Devil, the netherworld, its inhabitants and captives are characterized by the use of several (usually not intelligible) languages. According to this literary cliché, while the clarity and precision of a single language contributes to define a human identity, the plurality of languages is often a sign of a lost identity and of not being human anymore. It is not by chance that the verses of Dante ‘There sighs and wails and piercing cries of woe/ […] Strange languages, and frightful forms of speech,/ words caused by pain, accents of anger, voices/ both loud and faint’ are echoed in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Multilingualism is the central point in Levi’s memories from the time spent in a concentration camp where ‘languages absolutely not understandable [...], the orders shouted in languages [we] were not able to recognize’ and the ‘endless Babel where everyone is shouting’ symbolize the lost human condition. Both the damned souls and the prisoners of the camp are not human anymore because they have lost their language and, with it, their identity. In our study, the comparative and hermeneutic analysis of the narrative and lexical choices adopted to represent multilingualism in European literature reveals a strong connection between human identity and the purity of language intended as a manifestation of human rationality. On the contrary, a number of recurrent diegetic choices and figures of speech seem to define the non-human as a multilingual world characterized by sighs, wails and strange languages, like the Bellsybable of Joyce’s devil.

Trinity Homily XXIX De Sancto Andrea between Tradition and Innovation

AbstractRecent scholarship has challenged the view of the late twelfth-century Trinity Homilies, and of the contemporary Lambeth Homilies, as two collections that merely continue the earlier Old English vernacular homiletic tradition. This study aims to contribute to the scholarly debate on the Trinity Homilies by considering the elements of tradition and innovation featured in the twenty-ninth sermon of the collection, De Sancto Andrea. Through a discussion on the passage on the ‘Soul’s Address to the Body’ preserved in this homily, I shall show that Trinity XXIX includes both elements of continuity with the ‘Soul and Body’ literature attested in Old English homiletic texts (like the antithetical rhetorical pattern developed in the damned soul’s speech) and new features (like the motif of the ‘Signs of Death’ and the theme of ‘neglectful friends’) which reflect early Middle English developments in the ‘Soul and Body’ theme. I shall argue that the Trinity XXIX homilist probably adapted and reworked a lost Latin source into a poetic passage metrically and thematically consistent with contemporary ‘Soul and Body’ poetry. In the Appendix, I shall discuss the sources for the Latin material embedded in Trinity XXIX.1

Offline: The urgent need to rehumanise science

Over dinner last week, a friend turned to the subject of methods (pitiable, but true). He had just been lecturing about how to make epidemiology more meaningful. The two-by-two table was a wonderful creation, but it may not be well adapted to understanding the hypothetical causes and associative consequences of poverty, war, or climate change. Making connections between seemingly disparate settings and events—in other words, interpreting the complexity of the world—was the chief challenge for the health sciences today, he suggested. Describing our world as truthfully as one can (and using those descriptions to accelerate its change) is one of the founding ideals of the scientific Enlightenment. The notion of a “scientific method” is core to that ideal. Anyone motivated by a wish to use science for public good should therefore be obsessed by method. But the science of health and wellbeing has evolved into an often arid, brutalising, and inhuman force (notwithstanding my friend's efforts), devoid of understanding about the experiences of communities and lacking sensitivity to explain the predicaments of individuals. The recent deaths of two writers illustrate the need to reanimate science with the authenticity of humanity. Michael Herr died on June 23, 2016. Between 1967 and 1969, he was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. His most important book was Dispatches (1977), which more than any other piece of writing changed the way Americans viewed the dexedrine-driven, “psychotic vaudeville” of the Vietnam war (“that silent tolerance for misery that made so many Americans uneasy”). His subject was death, “which of course was really what [Vietnam] was all about”—death's impersonality and the way the press “never found a way to report meaningfully” about it. Herr anatomised death in ways few other writers, let alone scientists, have done: “the grey-blue fishbelly promise of death that would spread upward from the chest and cover the face”; “some horrible light that seemed to recede, vanishing through one layer of skin at a time and taking a long time to go completely”. Elie Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. He reflected that if in his lifetime he could have written only one book, it would have been Night (1958), an account of his journey from the Hungarian ghetto through Auschwitz-Birkenau to Buna, and finally to Buchenwald. His subject too was death, and the indifference of the world to it—”How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?” His story is short, but succeeds in conveying the extraordinary slowness with which depravity unfurled itself. Every page is a new scene of horror, of “damned souls wandering through the void”. “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me.” “Death, which was settling in all around me, silently, gently.” “I tried to distinguish between the living and those who were no more. But there was barely a difference.” Neither Herr nor Wiesel were physicians or scientists. Yet both were concerned about the use of writing—the descriptive testimony of someone who was there—to change attitudes towards their subject. For Herr, “I was there to watch”. That position as observer held acute ethical duties—”You were as responsible for everything you saw as for everything you did.” Herr's conviction was that standard war reporting (“that uni-prose which all news magazines and papers maintained”) “would somehow be lost in the wash of news”. “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history.” Wiesel put it this way in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere…I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” Science and its methods have made incalculable contributions to human welfare. But their increasingly desiccated forms are widening the gap between human reality and public understanding. This disconnection between science and humankind has stripped the moral urgency from scientific inquiry. Reading Herr and Wiesel reminds us why writing (and scientific writing too) matters—to illuminate the darkest corners of human injustice and to offer tentative prospects for remedy and redemption.

Dualism in Old English Literature: The Body-and-Soul Theme and Vercelli Homily IV

Scholarship on the Old English body-and-soul theme has largely focused on the damned soul’s hostility toward its body, especially as this is represented in the poem Soul and Body . Yet, whether censuring the poem’s perspective or attempting to rehabilitate it, studies of this theme have not clearly described the concept at its heart, anthropological dualism. This article argues that we as critics must clarify our terms when discussing the body-and-soul theme if we are to gain purchase on just how anthropological dualism is represented in the theme’s various instantiations. Following my treatment of anthropological dualism, I read Vercelli Homily IV as a unique instantiation of the body-and-soul theme that ultimately affirms the complementarity of body and soul and their mutual implication in one another—specifically through the use of dramatic form in the homily’s Judgment scene. Christ’s speeches in this scene produce a structural irony out of the traditional material, simultaneously including the familiar positions while critiquing them internally through an anthropological dualism that is complementary, not hostile, and found in Latin patristic texts commonly studied in Anglo-Saxon England.

Saltus Mortis in Valvasor’s Theatrum Mortis Humanae Tripartitum. A Copy of Holbein’s Dance of Death?

Theatrum mortis humanae tripartitum (1682) by Johann Weichard Valvasor is an illustrated moralizing book on the vanity of human life in three parts: the first one - Saltus mortis - follows the traditional iconography of the Dance of Death although it introduces some interesting novelties; the second part - Varia genera mortis - describes the deaths of famous men and women, the third part - Poenae damnatorum - is a compilation of various images depicting the torments of damned souls in hell. The one hundred and twenty-one copper plate engravings represent an important contribution to the iconography of Death in the 17th century art and literature. The fifty-four engravings of Saltus mortis are often unjustly designated as copies of the famous Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger (first edition in 1538) although they are actually modeled on the woodcuts in Imagines mortis by Arnold Birckmann published in Cologne in 1555. The comparative analysis of Valvasor, Birckmann, and Holbein reveals that the engravings of Saltus mortis introduce significant changes in the iconography of the Dance macabre which appear to be the result of the integration of the Dance of Death into the new context of Theatrum mortis. While in Holbein’s and in Birckmann’s Dance of Death the social criticism, irony, and a fine satire play an important role, Valvasor concentrates on the phenomenon of inevitability and omnipotence of Death that rules the world unhindered by any power, human or divine.

Suffering in Hell: The Psychology of Emotions in Dante's Inferno

This article applies several concepts from psychology to the interpretation of Dante Alighieri’s literary masterpiece Inferno and describes elements of pedagogy for this kind of interdisciplinary approach. A premise is that sinners in Hell experience emotional suffering. Core psychological concepts are outlined. A methodological distinction is drawn between “what is said” and “what is shown” in Dante’s text. Aspects of the psychologies of the glutton Ciacco, the blasphemer Capaneus, and the sinful lover Francesca are analyzed. Three broad patterns of emotional experience are identified. (1) Each class of sinners suffers its own peculiar complex of negative emotions. The article provides close analysis of one such local complex, the emotions that the pusillanimous suffer at the edge of Hell. (2) Sinners do not suffer remorse. The article discusses a paradoxical implication of remorselessness. (3) Damned souls engage in resistance against an imperative to despair. The article also identifies a tension between infernal justice and human psychology. It concludes with brief discussion of how literature, history, and psychology are complementary resources.

Jihad as rite of passage: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul

Two recent novels by Algerians (Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason, and Slimane Benaïssa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul) offer critiques of Islamic totalitarianism in two settings: local Arab states like the one fictionalized by Djaout, and the cosmopolitan community of diasporic Muslims recruited to the ranks of suicide bombers in the name of self‐ and social purification. Djaout, assassinated by fundamentalists outside his home in Algeria for writing against them, and Benaïssa, charting the psychological path towards violence taken by one westernized Muslim in the United States, instantiate the ongoing debate within Islam.

Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress (1724) ed. by Melissa Mowry

68 events and documents surrounding Swift’s efforts to secure the First Fruits and Twentieth Parts for the Church of Ireland. But never mind. I admire his nuanced, generous study anyway. John Irwin Fischer Louisiana State University Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress (1724), ed. Melissa Mowry. Peterborough , ON: Broadview, 2009. Pp. 417. $18.95. It was not very long ago that an aspiring scholar might have proposed to a university press an edition of fiction or poetry that, while not well-known, nonetheless had genuine merit. Yet such a proposal might have been turned down because the editor contended that the market could not bear the publication of an unfamiliar work. One might justify a new edition of Robinson Crusoe, for example , but the public would surely balk at a volume devoted to Captain Singleton . Times have changed, however, and the publication of a new edition of Defoe’s Roxana bears witness to the unique niche that the Canadian publishing house, Broadview Press, has established for itself in English Studies. Its two hundred and thirty-two titles, paperback editions of works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry drawn mainly from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, range from classics like Jane Eyre or Moll Flanders to volumes that are neglected, overlooked or only survive in a single manuscript. Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue, ‘‘A Castaway,’’ has recently been rediscovered , but it is a Broadview Press edition that has made all of her once highly regarded poems newly available to the reading public. In the interest of full disclosure : I have published a volume in the Broadview Press English Studies series . The editor of the Broadview Press Roxana, Ms. Mowry is the author of the lively Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution, Ashgate, 2004 (reviewed in Scriblerian, 41, Autumn 2008, 79–81). Sometimes the Broadview Press edition of a well-known novel like Roxana becomes less useful when juxtaposed against other editions, but currently the only readily available version of Roxana is John Mullan’s Oxford World Classic volume of 1996. In keeping with the typical format of a Broadview Press edition , Ms. Mowry’s Roxana includes an Introduction; chronologies of Defoe’s life, work, and times; a text with annotations conveniently placed at the bottom of each page; appendices and a Select Bibliography. In contrast to Norton Critical editions, appendices are confined to contemporary contexts and issues and as a consequence do not include recent articles and selections from books; Ms. Mowry’s Roxana has no less than eight Appendices. Her Introduction consists of a truncated survey of Defoe’s life and a lengthy interpretive guide to the novel. It might, however, have benefited from a more careful vetting. In the Select Bibliography, the only source listed for attribution is the Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe of P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, yet the Introduction cites a title, Reflections on the Late Great Revolution (1689), that is not included in the Furbank and Owens’s volume. The reader would have been better served if Ms. Mowry had focused on the intense recent debate over the attribution of specific works and the difficulty of establishing a definitive canon of De- 69 foe’s writings. The critical introduction to the novel itself is balanced and avoids the melodramatic view that Roxana is a ‘‘damned soul’’ (where Moll Flanders, presumably, is ‘‘saved’’?), concluding instead that she is ‘‘a bright, witty, and resourceful character, capable of profound emotional attachments.’’ Ms. Mowry also suggests that the famous conclusion in which Roxana is tormented by the possibility that her daughter Susan, who had been pursuing her but has now disappeared, might have been murdered—in effect, a conclusion in which nothing is concluded—is much more powerful than an ending in which uncertainties are resolved. One strength of the edition resides in its annotations, some of which provide documentation, but once again a more careful copy editor might have noticed that the texts cited in the annotations are not included in the Select Bibliography. The eight Appendices also deserve careful review since they are accompanied by very little commentary. The use of the phrase ‘‘the Tradition of Whore Biography...

La Grande Peur dans la montagne ou o nascimento de uma lenda

Ramuz era apaixonado pelas lendas alpinas e nelas se inspirou para escrever numerosos textos. O presente artigo examina o caso de La Grande Peur dans la montagne, de 1926, e mostra que o romance é atravessado por vários lugares comuns lendários, como o caçador diabólico e o purgatório glacial onde erram as almas danadas. À maneira de certas novelas de Maupassant, o personagem principal de La Grande Peur, Joseph, confronta-se com acontecimentos sobrenaturais que o fazem progressivamente penetrar em um universo onírico, fantástico, até mesmo fantasmático. O final do romance, ao menos na edição original, permite pensar que a narrativa como um todo é uma lenda.

Shape-changing in Hell: Metamorphosis and Katabasis in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

On the evening before the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, an American soldier sat in the sand, reading Dante’s Inferno in an English translation by Robert Pinsky. What should we make of such an image, broadcast nationwide on the British TV News (BBC, 10/03/03)? Should we be reassured that the military are engaging with serious literature at such a time? Or disturbed that a soldier might be thinking of Iraq as a region of damned souls? I took it as a sign, singular but chilling, of...

Dante and the Scandals of a Beloved Church

Dante and the Scandals of a Beloved Church Nancy Enright (bio) The church of the twenty-first century is no stranger to the word "scandal," with headlines on a weekly, even daily basis, dealing with sexual abuse by priests and the Church's past tendency to cover up these failings. Often reporters remark on the "surprising" faithfulness of devout Roman Catholics to their Church despite the abuses of some of their priests—actions that have obviously hurt and damaged family members and friends. To Dante, however, these failings and what appears to be the paradoxical faithfulness of Church members would be neither remarkable nor contradictory. Living in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Dante was fully aware of the sinfulness of members of the Church on earth—the Church visible—and, at the same time, deeply committed to the Church invisible, existing in heaven but including also all the faithful members of the Church on earth, the Body of Christ. In fact, The Divine Comedy can be seen as Dante's exploration of how both Churches—visible and invisible—exist together and how a faithful believer needs to affirm the Church rooted in heaven by relentlessly confronting the evil of the Church visible, wherever and [End Page 17] whenever it appears. It is confessing and repenting of sin, not hiding from it, that leads to salvation.1 This is the great lesson of The Divine Comedy, a lesson that is crucial to the life of the Church today. Dante's confrontation with the sinfulness of his own Church probably begins at the very threshold of hell, in the whirling mass of souls who are "hateful to God and to His enemies"2 because they have chosen neither good nor ill. Among them Dante recognizes "the shade of him/ who made, through cowardice, the great refusal" (Canto III, 60). This line is widely believed to refer to Pope Celestine V, although not all scholars agree. According to Charles Singleton, in his commentary on Canto III, this belief was generally held by the earliest commentators, including Pietro di Dante, son of the poet, who wrote, I believe he places among them Frate Pietro da Morrone, who is known as Pope Celestine V. He could have led as holy and as spiritual a life in the papacy as he had in his hermitage: and yet, he pusillanimously renounced the papacy, which is the seat of Christ. Celestine abdicated the papal throne so that he might go to a monastery. A humble man, Celestine felt unfit for the papacy and longed for the life of a monk, focusing on God alone. He was canonized in 1313. However, his "refusal" of the papal crown led to the ascendancy of Benedetto Caetani, Boniface VIII, a man whom Dante believed to be completely wicked and who was the pope reigning during the fictional time of the Divine Comedy (that is, at 1300).3 If Celestine is indeed the person described here, Dante is interpreting his abdication as a cowardly act of selfishness, not the act of humility and devotion it is now believed to have been. Celestine is placed among those who have made no choice, either for or against God—the souls linked in damnation to the "neutral" angels who neither rebelled overtly nor made a choice for God. Michael D. Aeschliman, in a lecture published in Lectura Dantis, argues that the entire modern [End Page 18] culture of nihilism, rooted in lack of belief, follows in the same kind of whirling wind as these sinners in Canto III.4 For our purposes, however, the key point here is that Dante's introduction to hell most likely includes a glimpse of a pope among these damned souls, and this ambiguous reference only paves the way for his later scathing and explicit denunciations of other popes and clerics in the three books, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The most notorious of the religious leaders denounced by Dante is Boniface VIII, mentioned above in the context of Celestine's abdication. To Dante, Boniface represents all that is corrupt in his contemporary Church, and he is placed in Hell in the circle of the Simoniacs (Canto XIX). Dante begins...

The Dragon in the "South English Legendary": Judas, Pilate, and the "A(1)" Redaction

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DocumentsThe Dragon in the "South English Legendary": Judas, Pilate, and the "A(1)" RedactionThomas R. LiszkaThomas R. Liszka Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 100, Number 1Aug., 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493149 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2002 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Old English 'Soul and Body'

Part 1 Manuscripts: the Vercelli book the Exeter book paleographic features in the versions of Soul and Body textual history editorial history. Part 2 Language: phonology, morphology, syntax vocabulary. Part 3 Prosody. Part 4 Formulaic composition. Part 5 Sources and analogues: origins of the body-and-soul theme the Nonantola version the Junius and Cambridge Addresses Vercelli homily IV and other prose addresses Soul and Body and later English body-and-soul poems. Part 6 Literary criticism: structure and tone the damned soul the blessed soul.

Islamization of Anthropological Knowledge

The expansion of Western coloniaHsrn during the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies brought in its wake the economic and political domination andexploitation of the Third World countries. Western colonialism andethnocentrism went hand in hand. The colonial ideology was rationalizedand justified in terms of the white man's burden; it was believed that theWhite races of Europe had the moral duty to carry the torch of civilizationwhichwas equated with Christianity and Western culture-to the dark comersof Asia and Africa. The ideology of Victorian Europe accorded the full statusof humanity only to European Christians; the "other" people were condemned,as Edmund Leach has bluntly put it, as "sub-human animals, monsters,degenerate men, damned souls, or the products of a separate creation" (Leach,1982).One of the most damaging consequences of colonialism relates to a massiveundermining of the self-confidence of the colonized peoples. Their culturalvalues and institutions were ridiculed and harshly criticized. Worse still, theWestern pattern of education introduced by colonial governments produceda breed of Westernized native elite, who held their own cultural heritage incontempt and who consciously identified themselves with the culture of theircolonial masters.During the nineteenth century Orientalism emerged as an intellectualally of Western colonialism. As Edward Said has cogently demonstrated,Oriental ism was a product of certain political and ideological forces operatingin Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that it wasinextricably bound up with Western ethnocentrism, racism, and imperialism(Said, 1978).Most of the colonized countries of the Third World secured politicalliberation from Western powers during the early decades of the present century.Regrettably, however, political liberation was not always followed byideological, cultural, and intellectual jndependence. For one thing, most ofthe ex-colonial countries continued with the colonial pattern of education.Secondly, most of them were drawn into the political and cultural orbit ofeither the United States or Soviet Russia. A subtle but pervasive form of ...