Colonial ‘discoveries’ of native origins were projections of colonists’ own notions

Evidence

Colonial discourse is the sum of prejudice, unspoken belief, stated ideology, and assumptions that guided colonial societies in their enterprise. It can be reconstructed to some extent through an examination of a wide variety of oral accounts, novels, political pamphlets, essays, and colonial reports. Each contributing text builds on its predecessors, creating an interlocking system, although not all texts contribute to a given stream of discourse. What concerns me here is the way in which the encounter between European and “native” frequently gave rise to the creation of imagined and mythic pasts for colonized or foreign peoples. These imagined past languages, beliefs, and origins, were extracted from notions that colonists carried with them into the field. These notions frequently served colonial purposes; they were projections born of colonial fantasies that were often far from malignant and that frequently sought to find links of kinship particularly with minority groups within the colonized or foreign populations. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 307

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘colonial discourse’ as interlocking prejudice/ideology/assumption and specifies its textual sources.