Postcolonizing Europe? An International Workshop // May 10-12, 2010

Zelia Gregoriou (Cyprus) - “Post-midnight study is rupturous due to the exhaustions of my eyes”: Subjection and govermentality in a Program of Agglicization without English
This paper revisits the debate between Benita Parry and Homi Bhabha on whether the postcolonial search for anti-colonial resistance should focus on a search for resistance native voices in liberation struggles or traces of ambivalence and rupture in the colonial text (a text where native agency can be complicitous with colonial discourses). This revisit is deployed against the background of recent debates about the institutions and policies of English education in colonial Cyprus. This paper disagrees both with kinds of “exonerative anthropology” that neutralize the imperial character of agglicization but also with readings of “the imposition of English” as a form of oppressive, top to down system of power that promotes subordination through dehellenization. Instead, it proposes a reading of agglicization that understands the intersections between the introduction of English andcolonial control as form of governmentality (Foucault). The paper focuses on the Teaching of English for voluntary government clerks at the turn of the twentieth century, (These clerks subscribe to the idea of learning English for the fear of having their government jobs or opportunities for promotion terminated.) The performativity of colonial rule, the desire for (and fear of) English and the Subjectivation and objectification of the self are restaged through the close reading of a series of letters exchanged between voluntaty clerks and colonial administrators before, during and after the the first official examination in English languages (September 4-5, 1901). In these letters, the “pupils” express their desire to be included among the select few who will attend the English classes (before the exam) or excuse their failure to show up for the examination (as ordered) by pathologizing their oriental culture or their bodies and “pupils” who turn out to be weak instruments for such an intensive learning. A postcolonial reading of these letters suggests that the exercise of colonial power interlocks with the construction of the desiring (and confessing) governmental clerk, to produce a network of power relations against and through which the subaltern Eye/I bears witness for his weakness.

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