Sidney’s Eurocentric Polemic: A Postcolonial Exegesis of “An Apology for Poetry“

Abstract

In this paper, we have examined Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” from the perspective of contemporary Postcolonial Critical Theory. The treatise under discussion exposes the conceptual underpinnings of European modes of thought, unwittingly projecting a colonial discourse. We have identified such elements from the selected treatise that support such a perspective. This has been carried out through textual analysis of the text that underscores the ‘us/them’ dichotomy rooted in Sidney’s ideological formations. The objective of the research is not only to revisit the selected treatise from the said perspective but also to point out the problematics of race, identity, and the dehumanizing impulse of the colonists by employing the discourse on self/other as projected and theorized by Frantz Fanon (1967) in The Wretched of the Earth and Edward W. Said (1978Sidney) in Orientalism.