Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts

The conscious or unconscious process by which Europe and European cultural assumptions are constructed as, or assumed to be, the normal, the natural or the universal. The first, and possibly most potent sign of Eurocentrism, as José Rabasa explains (1993), was the specific projection employed to construct the Mercator Atlas itself, a projection that favoured the European temperate zones in its distribution of size. This map of the world is not merely an objective outline of discovered continents, but also an ‘ideological or mythological reification of space’ which opens up the territories of the world to domination and appropriation.