동방, 아프리카, 여성 담론의 역사성: 에우리피데스, 셰익스피어, 핸즈베리의 경우

Abstract

As Foucault says, knowledge production is the process of a discursive practice. A discourse is a knowledge system, which reflects the cultural, political ideology of a society on the basis of historicity. Accordingly, this paper, focusing on discursive historicity, is to analyze the colonial imagination of Orient, Africa and women in some plays from Euripides, Shakespeare and Hansberry. The main aim of this paper is to show how the discourse of Orient, Africa and women overlaps with colonial imagination, and, based on the discursive historicity, what difference or similarity there is among the three ages and playwrights. In Euripides' Βάκχαι, the Dionysiac world representing the Oriental, feminine values overcomes the Hellenistic values featured by masculinity, reason and superiority of Pentheus, who is defeated by the Maenads worshipping Dionysus. In worship of Dionysus debunking colonial imagination, there is no discrimination between young and old; there is no racial discrimination; there is no gender discrimination. Dionysiac dynamism results from the cosmopolitanism of the Mediterranean world. Also we may see a similar discourse in the modern play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, whose Afro-Americans pursuing their identity defeat colonial imagination of the whites, deciding to move in the community of the whites. In contrast, we may see a strategical circuit of subversion and containment in Othello, where Dionysiac dynamism gives its place to colonial imagination. The subversive marriage serves as a precondition of the Renaissance authority chastising Othello and Desdemona under the name of patriarchial order. Remarkably enough, colonial imagination equates Othello's blackness with a symbol of a subversive other attacking white Christendom, since in the Renaissance stage, the color black is associated with the Islamic invasions to Europe during the Middle Ages. Also Renaissance Europe never forgot the Plinian myth of the unhuman barbarians, despite its frequent trade with Africans. The Renaissance imagination concerning the other reflects Roman imperialism and Medieval exclusionism.