Postcolonialism: Subverting whose empire?

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 239-250

  Goss, Jasper ^a  

^a GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 5844395083     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436599650035662     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. S Rushdie, Midnight's Children, London: Picador, 1982.
2. D Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990; and J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.
3. D Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990; and J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.
4. A Ahmad, 'The politics of literary postcoloniality', Race & Class, 36(3), 1995, p 9.
5. G Prakash, 'Subaltern studies as postcolonial criticism', American Historical Review, December 1994, pp 1475, 1484.
6. G C Spivak, 'Can the subaltern speak?', in C Nelson & L Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp 271-304.
7. E Said, Orientalism, Ringwood: Penguin, 1991, pp 6-7.
8. A Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, p 222.
9. H K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p 178.
10. A Dirlik, 'The postcolonial aura: Third World criticism in the age of global capitalism', Critical Inquiry, 20(2), 1994, p 334.
11. H K Bhabha, 'Introduction: narrating the nation', in H K Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990, p 6.
12. H L Gates, 'Critical Fanonism', Critical Inquiry, 17(3), 1991, p 461.
13. H K Bhabha, 'Foreword: Remembering Fanon', in F Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1991, p x.
14. F Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1991, p 25.
15. While one may speak of postcolonial critics' post-structuralism it is important to remember that, of my three main examples, each author's main influence is an incredibly diverse and complicated writer (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan respectively) whose work, in some cases, defies conflation.
16. In Gyan Prakash's words, postcoloniality is 'a new beginning, one in which certain old modes of domination may persist and acquire new forms of sustenance but one that marks the end of an era'. G Prakash, 'Introduction', in G Prakash (ed) After Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, p 5.
17. Dirlik, 'The postcolonial aura', p 329.
18. C T Mohanty, 'Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses', in P Williams & L Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p 196.
19. See Spivak's self-referential 'Post-Colonial Critic'. Here her own practice equates postcolonial with a state of being. G C Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, New York: Routledge, 1990.
20. D Harvey quoted in B Parry, 'Signs of our times', Third Text, 28/29, 1994, p 19.
21. See B Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991; E Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983; and E J Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
22. See B Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991; E Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983; and E J Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
23. See B Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991; E Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983; and E J Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
24. N B Dirks, 'Introduction', in N B Dirks (ed), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992, p 3.
25. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p 29
26. Both modernisation theory and dependency theory perhaps being the most pervasive responses to this situation. For important initial examples of this see W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; and A G Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
27. Both modernisation theory and dependency theory perhaps being the most pervasive responses to this situation. For important initial examples of this see W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; and A G Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
28. M Berger, 'The end of the Third World', Third World Quarterly, 15(2), 1994, pp 267-268.
29. Ahmad, The politics of literary postcoloniality', p 7.
30. A McClintock, 'The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term post-colonialism', Social Text, 31/32, 1992, p 93; and G Eley quoted in Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, p 13.
31. A McClintock, 'The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term post-colonialism', Social Text, 31/32, 1992, p 93; and G Eley quoted in Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, p 13.
32. Parry, 'Signs of our times', p 8.
33. Obviously this is not meant as a truism. I use this example only to problematise the reductio ad absurdam of much postcolonial theory with its calls for heterogeneity.
34. Gates, 'Critical Fanonism', p 462.
35. R Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West, London: Routledge, 1990, p 153. Young is using the term colonial in an all-encompassing sense rather than, for example, a colonial 'document' sense.
36. Ahmad, The politics of literary postcolonialty', p 9.
37. Dirlik, The postcolonial aura', p 345.
38. E Shohat, 'Notes on the post-colonial', Social Text, 31/32, 1992, pp 99, 102. One must of course note the role of elites within various colonial states (eg the Philippines or India) whose positions in many cases facilitated the incorporation of regions into various empires.
39. Parry, 'Signs of our times', p 13.
40. Dirlik, The postcolonial aura', p 333.
41. Parry, 'Signs of our times', p 18.
42. This is in fact how most 'analytical' media coverage concerning the bombing occurred, ie a heavy emphasis on the bomber's alienation from the army with light coverage concerning his philosophies of militant libertarianism. The coverage that did examine the 'militias' tended, however, to fetishise and mock what is a heavily armed and violent group by depicting them as overweight middle-aged men.
43. B Ashcroft et al, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1989, pp 16-17.
44. P Kane, 'Postcolonial/postmodern: Australian literature and Peter Carey' World Literature Today, 63(3), 1993, pp 519-522.
45. Ibid.
46. S K Martin, 'White coffee: colonial discourse in (postcolonial) Australian advertising', Meanjin, 52(3), 1993, pp 509-511.
47. F Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism', New Left Review, 146, p 55.
48. As Ahmad (The politics of literary postcoloniality', p 12) argues in orthodox Marxist terms, 'the structural dialectic of imperialism includes ... the deepening penetration of all available global spaces by the working of capital and intensification of the nation-state form Simultaneously. This dialectic produces contradictory effects in the realms of culture and ideology. The same Arab magnates and Irani mullahs who chase petrodollars across the globe - those same saffron yuppies who are opening up the Bombay Stock Exchange and the computer industry of Bangalore for foreign capital - organise their own lives around the fetishism of commodities bequeathed to them by advanced capital but are also the ones most vociferous in propagating the discourse of authenticity and cultural differentialism in the name of Islam in one space, Hinduism in another, in order to forge protofascist nationalisms for the working masses of their own nations, so as to wean them away from the progressive projects of socialism and anti-imperialist nationalisms. Within this context, speaking with virtually mindless pleasure of transnational cultural hybridity, and of politics of contingency, amounts, in effect, to endorsing the claims of transnational capital itself.' (original emphasis).
49. Nor in many cases have writers been willing to identify cases of recolonisation.
50. Dirlik, The postcolonial aura', p 356.