The Postcolonial Alien in Us All: Identity in the Global Division of Intellectual Labor (original) (raw)
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Fall or Formation? Postcolonial Identity under Construction
ATLANTIC LITERARY …, 2004
Writing is a dichotomous event that happens in language: dichotomous because, it is an act of construction and therefore by the same virtue, is simultaneously an act of subversion as well. It is more so in the case of postcolonial writing, because here, by default, something is constructed only on the debris of something else that has been deconstructed. This phenomenon entails postcolonial writing to preoccupy itself with a kind of mediation between construction and destruction giving it a Janus face. Whether it is social, cultural, or literary, the postcolonial discourse engages itself on a new polemic front initiating a meaningful dialogue between the two antithetical forces that contest with each other to control the center. This is a desired act for maintaining an academic and political equilibrium of the cultural locus in order to escape the imperialistic appropriations and misrepresentations. More than that, it is at the heart of negotiating with politics of recognition. Today the postcolonial industry is more keen on inventing new strategies and counter-strategies to survive in the game of identity politics-and it can be done only when it arrives at formalizing its own notions of identity not as opposed to anything that is colonial, but in opposition to itself. This defies the notion of its existence in relation to the center and helps formulating its own independent existence, not as 'a living fossil', but as an independent organism.
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2018
My social identity as a diasporic Korean American male sometimes engendered doubts about my competency as a cultural anthropologist of South Korea. Such ethnonational gatekeeping by my 'native' Korean colleagues laid bare broader critiques of 'the West'. Paradoxically, they also prompted re-entrenchments of nativeness (and implicitly, nonnativeness) by my colleagues despite their increasingly 'non-native' transnational identities. These embodied cultural boundaries are less visible (and arguably less consequential) to those viewed as recognisably non-native Asian (for example, white, Euro-American) or native Asian. But they are markedly visible and relevant to diasporic subjects who fit less comfortably within both boundary-enforcing classifications. The figure of the diasporic anthropologist reveals presumed racialised and gendered markers of difference-chiefly the unmarked but organising role of whitenessconveniently subsumed under categories of 'the West' and 'Asia'. Consequently, recent calls for 'global anthropology' against 'Euro-American academic hegemony' that fail to address this essentialising tendency, although important, remain inadequate.
2006
The most recent meaning of both forms of the term came into use when the field of postcolonial studies itself came into existence. Insofar as postcolonial theorists addressed the abstract condition, naming it for the first time and constituting it as an object of study, it may be said that postcolonial theory preposterously constituted-in the sense that it named and made legitimate-the postcolonial condition. Yet "postcolonialism," just like "postcolonial," may refer both to a specific historical period and to formerly colonized space, on the one hand, or to an abstract symbolic condition, only vaguely associated with that geo-historical location, on the other. The respective entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) expose this duality. The term "post-colonial" is defined as "[o]ccurring or existing after the end of colonial rule; of or relating to a former colony. In later use also: of or relating to the cultural condition of a former colony, esp. regarding its relationship with the former colonial power." This double meaning is echoed in the OED entry for "postcolonialism," which reads, "[t]he fact or state of having formerly been a colony; the cultural condition of (a) post-colonial society." 10 8 Despite later variations, in 1997 Laclau maintains that floating and empty signifiers are, for all practical purposes, the same: "In the case of a floating signifier we would apparently have an overflowing of meaning while an empty signifier, on the contrary, would ultimately be a signifier without a signified. But if we analyze the matter more carefully, we realize that the floating character of a signifier is the only phenomenic form of its emptiness" (1997: 306). Laclau is an Argentinean-born political theorist working at the University of Essex, U.K. Hence, the postcolonial, as an abstract condition of being and knowing, is inextricably linked to postcolonialism as an academic field. As will be discussed below, this proximity has crucial implications for the centrality of the subject in postcolonial theory and, particularly, for where that subject is situated in a geo-economic totality. For the time being, 14 12 Dirlik is a Turkish historiographer specialized in Chinese history; he taught in the U.S.A, at Duke University and the University of Oregon; though still active, he is now retired. Ahmad considers that even today "the already existing structures of the nation-state are a fundamental reality" and hence "the struggle for even the prospect of … transition presumes a national basis" (318, emphasis in text). Yet, as in the case of Dirlik, Ahmad's emphasis is on the fact that today "the nation-state has ceased to be the discrete site for the reproduction of advanced capital" (313, emphasis in text). But the changing role of the nation-state must be distinguished from the possibility of a continued pertinence of the Third World category. As Ahmad's account of 13 I use the term "Third World" as "a matter simply of common parlance," a usage "which makes no theoretical pretence and applies the nomenclature 'Third World' simply to the so-called developing countries" (Ahmad 1992: 307). Nonetheless, as the political analyst and literary theorist at the Centre of Contemporary Studies in New Delhi, India, Aijaz Ahmad also explains, "this term, 'Third World', does not come to us as a mere descriptive category, to designate a geographical location or a specific relation with imperialism alone. It carries within it contradictory layers of meaning and political purpose" (307). For a full length analysis and historization of the term as a theoretical category see Ahmad 1992: 287-318. 14 See also Ahmad 1992: 287-318, esp. 304-311.
ISSUE OF IDENTITY IN THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD
Scholarly Research Journal for Humanity Science & English Language, 2022
This research will explore the issue of identity in postcolonial literature. In the modern world with the increase in immigrant numbers, hybrid nations, and the constitution of countries with different cultural diversities the question of identity came to the surface. The research will present and discuss those theorists' arguments about the issue of identity in the postcolonial world and how they viewed and presented their ideas about constructing identity in former colonized countries and immigrants from these countries who suffered from facing the diasporas and the dilemma of the difficulty to construct their identity. The paper will investigate postcolonial novelists, especially writers in former British colonies such as V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, and Tayeb Salih. As postcolonial theorists considered the issue of identity as one of its essential discussions, novelists also exposed and expressed the conditions of identity crises that emerged in the post-colonial period. The method will undertake to apply postcolonial theories to the works of the above-mentioned novelists.
Rethinking the Postcolonial and the Global: An Introduction
Ariel-a Review of International English Literature, 2009
In his latest New Left Review article titled "How to Begin from the Beginning," Slavoj Zizek points out that the world today is confronted with four major antagonisms: Eco-environmental crisis, challenge to the established parameters of intellectual property, the unethical potential of biogenetic technology, and "new forms of social apartheid--new walls and slums" (53). In his view, the fourth antagonism, "the one between the included and the excluded," stands out as the crucial one, for without it "all the others lose their subversive edge" (53). In focusing on the antagonism between the included and the excluded, Zizek purports to uncover or foreground the "need for communism" the antagonism generates. Zizek's notion of the excluded versus the included recalls what Judith Butler's conception of the excluded expounded in a different context. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the fate and situation of a different ki...
American Behavioral Scientist, 2022
This article aims to delve into the "native turn" emerging in anthropology and broad academia in Asia and the Global South in the last two decades, represented by their growing momentum in decolonization, autonomy, and "indigenization." There, however, exists a tendency in anthropology, especially among non-Western and "mixed" anthropologists, to dismiss the idea of native(s) or native anthropologists and sometimes replace it with the amorphous notion of "halfies." I contend that many of the "halfies" scholars, informed by postcolonial and postmodern thoughts, tend to misread the de facto postcolonial conditions in which the West continues to dominate in the existing world-systems. I argue that it is vital to acknowledge the native turn as an ethnographical fact because this recognition is closely associated with the prospect of decolonizing anthropology and Western-dominated knowledge production. Next, I use my experience of the native turn(s) to Tibetan and Chinese sociocultural institutions and political sensibilities to better contextualize and exemplify the examined broad native turn in anthropology and social science in Asia. Furthermore, I propose a multifaceted view of natives or nativeness as a necessary step to engage more constructively with the idea of native(s) and the native turn. In so doing, I advocate a post-postcolonial critique to make a timely and necessary intellectual intervention.