Neoliberal Globalization and the future of Postcolonial Studies (original) (raw)

- Postcolonialism as a discoursive formation

Since the mid-1980s the term "postcolonial" has become a well-known key signifier in analysis of cultural and political representations of dominance and subalternity in contemporary societies. It was in the wake of the success of this term that from the early 1990s an impressive field of studies, from transversal to traditional disciplines, entered the archives of Western knowledge, at first in the Anglo-American world but later worldwide: postcolonial studies, or postcolonial critique. It could be argued, as in the case of cultural studies, that postcolonial criticism emerged at an imaginary epis-temic intersectional point, binding in new ways objects, approaches, and perspectives coming from different traditional disciplines: from literary critique to philosophy, from anthropology to psychoanalysis and sociology, from history to the political sciences, from English to linguistics. It is for this reason that the postcolonial discursive formation is usually conceived both as a radical epistemological challenge to traditional academic disciplines and specializations and as a new and more democratic approach to the conceptualization of contemporary and historical relationships between the West and its others. According to this self-representation, then, postcolonial studies may be better defined as an emergent critical space aimed at the decolonization of current theoretical and political practices. Despite its close association with academic European postmodernism and poststruc-turalism in mainstream critical thinking, postcolonial critique can be approached as the effect of a very complex genealogy. My approach to its emergence as a discipline is based on Edward Said's constructivist idea of beginning. A beginning, Said maintains, is different from an origin because a beginning can be chosen, while an origin can only be acknowledged: "beginning is not so much an event unto itself as an opening within discourse" (Said 1975, 350; emphasis original). Said's idea of beginning is important here because it seeks to methodologically combine "intention" and "method," allowing subjectivity and politics ("secular agency") to enter the domain of theory through an epistemological solid ground. Our starting premise will be that postcolonial criticism came out of multiple hybrid and transnational roots. It was not a discourse that originated in the postcolonial world but one produced by migrant postcolonial intellectuals displaced in the West, who were also notably critical of the essentialist and binary political imaginary of anticolonial first "great narrations." However, it could be argued that its beginning can be tracked down to classical anticolonial thinking (to political interventions of figures such as Mariátegui, Gandhi, Sartre, Césaire, Fanon, etc.), namely to the critique of Western imperialism that arose in the context of the different national liberation movements during the decol-onization processes. Its beginning can also be tracked down to the development of The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

The Development of Postcolonial Theory

Post-colonial theory is a post-positivist/reflectivist/constitutive and non-mainstream International Relations (IR) i theory which posits a critical thinking to dominant IR theories. It is assumed to offer an alternative to the Eurocentric stance and concepts of classical International Relatios theories and carry a potential to move beyond these mainstream theories, even to restructure them. Post-colonial theoreticians, like all critical scholars, have tried to shift the classical thinking in the discipline and save it from the hegemony of Western conceptions by challenging "Western-theorizing" and "decolonizing" it. However, it is not a single theory but a set of different theories. There is an immense diversity of post-colonial theory which focus on different issues such as literature, art, music, linguistics, slavery, migration, discrimination, historiography and discusses different kinds of subjugation like racism, gender, nationalism and identity.

Exploring the Elements of Postcolonialism and its Exponents

The Creative Launcher, 2021

Postcolonialism is an academic discipline that analyses, explains and responds to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. The purpose of the present study is to examine the postcolonialism and elements of postcolonialism such as marginalization, identity, multiculturalism, racial discrimination, hybridity, mimicry etc. The article discusses the thoughts of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak on postcolonialism as well.

Postcolonialism and its Discontents

What do we mean by "postcolonialism"? Does it represent a distinctive way of being and seeing in the world after the collapse of the Eurocentric world order? Or does it refer more narrowly to a set of critical-theoretical perspectives on modern imperialism and its afterlives? What are the contributions and limitations of postcolonialism as an intellectual enterprise?