Mythologies ofMigrancy: Postcolonialism ì Postmodernism and the Politics of (Dislocation (original) (raw)

JLY. NEW TYPE OF Third World" 1 intellectual, cross-pollinated by postmodernism and postcolonialism, has arrived: a migrant who, having dispensed with territorial affiliations, travels unencumbered through the cultures of the world bearing only the burden of a unique yet representative sensibility that refracts the fragmented and contingent condition of both postmodemity and postcoloniality. Journeying from the "peripheries" to the metropolitan "centre," this itinerant intellectual becomes an international figure who at once feels at home nowhere and everywhere. No longer disempowered by cultural schizophrenia or confined within collectivities such as race, class, or nation, the nomadic postcolonial intellectual is said to "write back" to the empire in the name of all displaced and dispossessed peoples, denouncing both colonialism and nationalism as equally coercive constructs. The ideological lineage of this itinerant postcolonial intellectual is typically hybrid because postcoloniality, as Kwame Anthony Appiah observes, "is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Westem-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery" (348). These cultural mediators are invariably dependent on and inevitably influenced by Euro-American publishers and readers, Western universities, and Westernized élite educational institutions in Asia or Africa. Not surprisingly, then, the first generation of postcolonial novels largely reflected the belief held by both 'Third World" intellectuals and the high culture of Europe-that new literatures in new nations should