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Literary Analysis Of David Spurr's The Rhetoric Of Empire

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In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr identifies rhetorical features by considering the path in which they work as means of representing the other , each of these rhetorical tropes is displayed as a different method used by westerners in order to depict the non-westerners. Debasement, negation and affirmation are three fundamental rhetorical tropes that Spurr uses as different aspects of portraying the colonized “other”. Though the distinction of the techniques they adhere as being part of the colonial discourse, yet, they are common in the representation of the colonial other in several ways including the reinforcement of the negative picture that tends to be affirmed through neutral interpretations of the “other” in addition to emphasizing superiority through Western representations. The colonial discourse analyzed by David Spurr is also common in being a justification of the colonizer’s purpose of colonizing a native’s landscape so as to make their colonial motives reasonable. Debasement, for instance, portrays the westerner’s manner of despising the “other”. Spurr broadly discusses the method used to treat the colonized society and how its people are reduced to being uncivilized savages, he quotes Hayden White who gives an answer to the stimulus behind rhetorical debasement that is according to her “connected to the need for positive self-definition in times of sociocultural stress. When notions such as ‘civilization’ and ‘reason’

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