Holmes, Alice, And Ezeulu : Western Rationality in the Context of British Colonialism and Western Modernity

This book's argument that rationality is less an intellectual than a cultural entity shouldn't be startling. Contemporary intellectual theory has spent thirty years questioning the assumptions behind the epistemological processes of Western rationality. A casual glance at the situatedness of rationality in social class during the colonial period, during which one of the book's primary texts, The Hound of the Baskervilles, was written, suggests that its purpose has as much to do with social class as it has to do with an objective uncovering of facts and truth. Watson's heartfelt, morally-impassioned remark that to believe in a superstition like the hound would be to "descend to the level of these poor peasants" (146) shows very clearly that rationality forms an important boundary between the lower and middle class. When one thinks about the influences that permitted the middle class to develop and differentiate itself from the lower, rationality becomes evident everywhere.