{"id":312,"date":"2026-05-29T12:10:44","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T12:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/?post_type=journal&p=312"},"modified":"2026-05-30T15:51:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T15:51:28","slug":"colonial-intelligibility-and-the-politics-of-literacy-language-power-and-the-making-of-the-other-in-the-tempest-and-robinson-crusoe","status":"publish","type":"journal","link":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/article\/colonial-intelligibility-and-the-politics-of-literacy-language-power-and-the-making-of-the-other-in-the-tempest-and-robinson-crusoe\/","title":{"rendered":"Colonial Intelligibility and the Politics of Literacy: Language, Power, and the Making of the \u201cOther\u201d in The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe"},"content":{"rendered":"

The portrayals of Friday and Caliban in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest<\/em> and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe<\/em> have both been extensively analysed through the lens of postcolonialism, especially in terms of colonial power, slavery and identity. However, this study shifts the attention to a less explored but equally important dimension, the strategic denial to acknowledge their intellectual agency and literacy as a means of imposing colonial authority. Both texts illustrate how colonial subjugation is established not through physical domination, but through epistemic violence\u2014 silencing and misrepresenting the knowledge of the \u201cOther\u201d as unintelligible within the colonial discourses. In The Tempest,<\/em> Prospero seizes authority by appropriating the island, displacing Sycorax and reducing Caliban to a symbol of savagery, despite his faculty for language and resistance. In Robinson Crusoe,<\/em> Crusoe emphasises his dominion over Friday by refusing to engage with his indigenous identity or knowledge, deliberately framing him as innately inferior. This paper aims to expose that such eliminations are nothing but deliberate instruments of imperial politics, where only the coloniser\u2019s language, reason and literacy are validated. This study, through a postcolonial interpretation, discloses how the construction of colonial intelligibility operates to dehumanise and intellectually reject the colonised subject in canonical English literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":265,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"article-category":[46,40,47],"class_list":["post-312","journal","type-journal","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","article-category-current-issues","article-category-praxis","article-category-volume-15-december-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/journal"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/journal\/312\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csg.ru.ac.bd\/praxis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-category?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}