Pia Florence Masurczak, M.A.
Stand 12/2016
 |
first project period: |
Dissertation project
The stereotype of the „idle“, „slothful“ and "lazy native" is a particularly degrading part if colonial discourse. At least from the late eighteenth century on, educational reforms aim at raising the colonized from their alleged civilizational backwardness and encouraging them to embrace what is presented as strict European work ethics. This project has analyzed how the stereotype of the "lazy native" and its corresponding counterpart, the industrious Westerner, were established and which function ideas of otium, idleness and leisure played in the construction of colonial and national identities.
In order to underline the ambivalence of identity constructions, the project has looked at several figures of colonial idleness: the stereotypical "lazy native", the Indian dancer and members of the zenana in contrast to the white 'memsahib' as well as the English Company clerks, the nabobs. Starting from detailed analyses of late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century travel writing and photography, the research shows how entangled and interdependent discourses of class, race and gender contribute to particular colonial notions of idleness and otium. The phenomena and discourses examined here only partly touch the semantic field of "otium". Nevertheless, a perspective from these - semantic and colonial - margins are necessary to contextualize the pervasiveness of European ideas about otium and idleness.
The dissertation was submitted in August 2016.