Postcolonial Discourse: The Raw & the Cooked 24Jan'22 (original) (raw)

Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization

Social Analysis, 2002

In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse. Numerous academic conferences, books and journals on postcolonialism appeared one after another. In the academic periphery, many viewed postcolonial discourse as a site of resistance against Western cultural hegemony. With the rise of the discourse of globalization in the 1990s, postcolonial discourse, no longer riding on the whitecaps of the latest critical wave, seemed to have lost much of its currency and critical energy. On the face of it, many central issues of postcolonial discourse, such as colonizer/colonized, East/West and center/margin turned out to be no longer applicable to the global era, when national borders blurred. Yet in the new global/local paradigm, the above binaries continued to cast a shadowy specter. Many academic journals focusing on postcolonialism, such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies (online) were born in the late 1990s. In a sense, there appears to be an intricate relationship between the discourses of postcolonialism and globalism. Simon During pointed to their "dialectical" relationship (During 1998) and Arif Dirlik tried to relate the two by asking the question "When exactly … does the 'postcolonial' begin?" (Dirlik 1997: 52). One might then ask, is postcolonial discourse becoming less relevant in an age of globalization? The influence of postcolonial discourse on other forms of discourses is too profound to be easily dismissed. "As the domain of the postcolonial has expanded," Dirlik (2000: 1) notes, "postcolonial criticism has infiltrated discourse that have origins quite independently of postcolonialism, and in turn has been infiltrated by those discourses, so that it is quite impossible

- 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.

Introduction: The Genres of Postcolonialism

Social Text, 2004

This issue gathers recent work in postcolonial criticism and theory. The perspectives represented and contexts considered (South Africa, Canada, the United States, India, Pakistan) are the result of an especial-and still all-too-uncommon-effort to attend to scholarship produced in the global South, rather than simply entrenching further the association of postcolonial studies with a relatively narrow coterie of metropolitan migrants. At the same time, in bringing together work engaged with subaltern studies historiography in India (particularly the contributions of Sanjay Seth and Rosinka Chaudhuri) and work explicitly concerned with U.S. imperialism and contemporary globalization (particularly the contributions of Pius Adesanmi and Mark Driscoll), the issue poses once more a question raised by the last Social Text special issue on this topic-published in 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War-around the theorization of the postcolonial itself. 1 Vigorously questioned in that setting in now-classic essays by Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock, the term postcolonial may have proven itself to be most useful precisely when it is placed under severe pressure, angled to highlight the necessarily uneasy relationship between colonial past and neocolonial present, history writing and current critique, cultural studies and political economy, as a task or problematic rather than a method or map. 2 In 1992 Shohat noted what she termed the "puzzling" absence of the term postcolonial in the rhetoric of the academic opposition to the Gulf War (in contrast to commonly invoked terms such as imperialism and even neocolonialism). She wondered in response whether something about the rubric of the postcolonial "does not lend itself to a geopolitical critique"; in the open-ended present of the "war on terror," the relative invisibility of explicitly postcolonial analysis must beg the same question. 3 Instead of rehearsing those definitional debates or simply offering overviews of the essays that follow, I will comment briefly on an issue that has long haunted methodological concerns in postcolonial studies: the politics of interdisciplinarity. The following essays raise this issue in disparate arenas and different ways (whether Sarah Nuttall's recourse to ethnography and feminist critique; Rosinka Chaudhuri's conjoining of poetics, translation studies, and historiography; Kamran Asdar Ali's attending to reader-response criticism as well as the sociology of religion; or Mark

The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance

Routledge eBooks, 2019

Arguably the product of comparative literature, Euro-American postcolonial theory is largely in the process of being superseded by Global South studies in the same discipline. Thus far, Global South studies, for the purposes of comparatists, remains undefined, beyond gesturing towards the task of South-South comparatism, a gesture in and of itself premised on postcolonial theory's critique of Eurocentrism. "I think global South is a reverse racist term, one that ignores the daunting diversity outside Europe and the United States," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently written. "We decide to define what we are not by a bit of academic tourism," she continues, "choosing academics to represent the global South at conferences and in journals from countries elsewhere who have class continuity with us and thus resolving our own sense of ourselves as democratic subjects resisting definition by race and gender" (Spivak 2018, 166). While the charge of "tokenization" (Spivak 2018, 167) has been leveled likewise against Euro-American postcolonial theory, my wager is twofold: Global South comparatism can and should find some of its conceptual bearings in postcolonial theory; and the postcolonial here is to be epistemologically and temporally extended to embrace its prehistory in the liberation moment and thus recoup its emphasis on social justice for the purposes of the "New International" (Derrida 1994). I demonstrate this wager through the writings of Edwar al-Kharrat about the Afro-Asian movement. It is of no small significance that the first of two explicit mentions of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Indonesia, or Bandung, as it came to be known, in Edward Said's Orientalism occurs in the context of a citation from Anouar Abdel-Malek's 1963 article "Orientalism in Crisis." Abdel-Malek, the Egyptian Leftist intellectual and political scientist, had argued that "the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations" was what it took to "provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of The pre-postcolonial and its enduring relevance Afro-Asian variations in Edwar al-Kharrat's texts Hala Halim