What is the definition of colonial discourse?

Answer 1

The general area within which this study operates could then be named colonial discourse, meaning by that term an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships, an ensemble that could combine the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents - say the Capitulations issued by the Catholic Monarchs to Christopher Columbus in 1492 - with the most non-functional and unprepossessing of romantic novels - say Shirley Graham's The Story of Pocohantas. Underlying the idea of colonial discourse, in other words is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of the non-European world were produced for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into the discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative literature, personal memoir and so on. But, as a case study, this book operates on a particular geographical ideological terrain within that general area, which is to say that there is no presumption that the key tropes and narratives analyzed here would play as central a role within colonial discourse in general.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters p.2