Humanizing the colonial other: the engaged reader in Shakespeare, Swift, Conrad, and Barghouti

Abstract

In the modern hermeneutical tradition, the reader is the main source of textual meaning. The hermeneutical reader is encouraged to reinterpret literature and history, and to approach the text in the light of what we can know about the world. When approaching Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, the hermeneutical reader can no longer accept Prospero's authoritative and manipulative discourse on Caliban but attempts to rehumanize him and investigate his character when the reader begins to perceive the moral limitations of Prospero, his master. The hermeneutical reader of Swift's Gulliver's Travels learns to question Gulliver's view of native people, his tendency to dehumanize the Yahoos and to collaborate with the Houyhnhnms in their plans to eliminate a racial other. From a hermeneutical point of view, whether or not Swift shares Gulliver's hostility towards the Yahoos becomes less important that how the reader interprets the text and the meanings that it evokes. The hermeneutical reader of Conrad's Heart of Darkness is encouraged to question and condemn the morality of the colonial aggressors, and perhaps Conrad himself, in a novel that highlights brutal acts committed by the Europeans against native Africans. Finally, the hermeneutical reader of Barghouti's novel, I Saw Ramallah, challenges the Israeli narrative of refugees who have found â a land without a people for a people without a landâ by providing witness to the devastating effects that this narrative has visited upon the Palestinian people. The four works of literature under consideration have been read through a hermeneutical approach that has allowed the other to be re-humanized, rather than subordinated to colonial and imperial systems that disregard or violate what cannot be mastered.