Introduction and the Postcolonial Condition: Complexities Abounding

LINDA HUTCHEON is profes- TI HE TWENTIETH CENTURY has seen the end of official colo- sor of English and comparative -A- nial rule in much of the non-European world and, as many have literature at the University of argued, the simultaneous recolonization or neocolonization of the globe by multinational economic forces. Such a general statement, however, Toronto, Saint George Campus. risks downplaying the significant differences between the historical, po- Her most recent books include litical, and cultural effects of empire in settler colonies (such as English The Canadian Postmodern (Ox- and French Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even the United ford UP, 1988), The Politics States) and in the diverse nonsettler colonies of the Indian subcontinent, of Postmodernism (Routledge, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Korea, Latin America, and the many nations 1989), Splitting Images: Con- of Africa.1 The existence of different kinds of empires and of different temporary Canadian Ironies experiences of empire results in part from the “unbridgeable” racial (Oxford UP, 1991), and Irony’s chasm (Mishra and Hodge 408) that separates these two general forms of , but the settler colonies’ varied relations to aboriginal Edge: The Theory and Politics peoples complicate any attempt to make overly neat or precise distinc- of Irony (Routledge, 1994). Her tions. (The artist Victor Burgin’s double image of Australia’s history, article “The Post Always Rings produced in the country’s bicentennial year, is a pointed reminder of the Twice: The Postmodern and the racial divide that exists even within settler colonies.) The “structural Postcolonial” appears in Tex- domination” that empire represents (Stam and Spence 3-4) can take tual Practice 8 (1994). many diverse forms in each of its political, economic, military, intellec- tual, and cultural manifestations. Albert Memmi has argued that colo- nization means economic and political exploitation (149); Edward Said has further specified the complexities that may inadvertently be masked by such a general description: “to be one of the colonized is potentially to be a great many different, but inferior, things, in many different places, at many different times” (“Representing the Colonized” 207). Those “many different” factors are addressed by the essays on the spe- cial topic Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition that are published in this issue.2 According to both its theorists and its cultural activists, postcolonial criticism has positioned itself as a broad anti-imperialist emanicipatory project and has thereby added a more overtly politicized dimension to related work in the field of Commonwealth studies (see Tiffin; Brydon), as well as in various national-language literary disci- plines. But like all labels, postcolonial has created complications of its own, complications that involve the historical and national contexts in which literature is produced and received, as well as the gender, class, religious, and racial specificities of colonial (and imperial) experiences. The totalizing possibilities (both of the term postcolonial and of its cat- egories of analysis), which have concerned theorists for some time now, are confronted head-on in the discussions that follow. These essays are also marked by sensitivity to the positionality of the critic and by acute self-consciousness of the possible risks of the critical enterprise in which they participate. Following the postcolonial problematizing of the politics of colonial stereotyping (see Bhabha, “Other Question”), Rosemary Jolly’s “Re- hearsals of Liberation: Contemporary Postcolonial Discourse and the New South Africa” calls attention to the particular context in which the term apartheid is used by Jacques Derrida (“Racism’s Last Word”) and by others working more explicitly as postcolonial theorists. Jolly aims to signal certain dangers that she sees as attending the rapid institution- alization of postcolonial discourses. In the light of recent events in South Africa, she argues, a word like apartheid risks reification into a “reactionary measure at a historical moment in which the break from apartheid and its constructions requires a profoundly different strategy” for its articulation in criticism. Jolly’s frame of reference for her study of resistance and recuperation, of structural and nominal dissidence (both in South Africa and in discourses about South Africa), includes the context of literary reception and production during apartheid— which dramatic works were allowed to be performed and where and why those performances were allowed. Offering the complex South African colonial situation as a challenge to current postcolonial theory, she asks that theorists remain alert to their own limits (see also Miller 8; Said, “Intellectuals”), as well as to the possibility of “complicity with the colonial imagination.” Like others working in this field (see, for ex- ample, Spivak, “Subaltern”) and in related ones (see LaCapra 2), she ar- gues for a postcolonial theory written and taught from a vigilantly self-aware position that recognizes “the communality of the critical act, ... its heterogeneity and reciprocity.” This challenge raises the implicit concern that postcolonial theory— as exemplified in PMLA'—represents yet another of the First World academy’s covert colonizing strategies of domination over the cultural production of the Third World. For some observers, the prefix post not only is premature but also has the disadvantage of embodying the ideol- ogy of linear progress that underpinned empire, as well as continuing to orient analysis around the colonial center (McClintock). Additional concerns include the ahistoricity and depoliticization of some uses of the term (Shohat 99) and the possible displacement of other critical pro- cedures (Wilson 13). Still other problematic issues involve the related dangers of creating a “new orientalism” (Spivak, Teaching Machine 56-57) that would construct and give institutional value to the “mar- ginal,” of “inverse colonialism” (Gellner 3), of creating “a grand unified theory of oppression” (Gates 470), of naively assuming that postcolo- nial intent alone can excise colonialism (Bal 44). Countering this set of concerns are the possible benefits of what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls the “space-clearing gesture” (348) of an oppositional “counter-discourse” (Terdiman) and the political energy that discourse enables (Slemon 3). As the essays in this issue of PMLA show, some of the preoccupations of postcolonial theory intersect (with- out replicating) those of contemporaneous and equally problematic the- oretical discourses such as postmodernist, feminist, lesbian, and gay or queer studies. For instance, the postmodern deconstruction of the epis- temological and ideological assumptions of historical narrative through fiction gains political specificity and agency in Aparna Dharwadker’s reading of Girish Kamad’s “historical” play Tughlaq in “Historical Fic- tions and Postcolonial Representations: Reading Girish Karnad’s Tugh- laq.” Neil ten Kortenaar’s analysis of Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God in “Beyond Authenticity and Creolization: Reading Achebe Writ- ing Culture” raises related issues by exposing the complicated interrela- tions of tradition and change and their function in generating the identity narratives of both colonizer and colonized. In the overdeter- mined context of cultural and racial differences,4 postcolonial theory and feminist theory intersect in Thomas Foster’s “Circles of Oppres- sion, Circles of Repression: Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose” and in Gwen Bergner’s “Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.” And Joseph Boone’s “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism” pushes the boundaries of the new field of gay studies by showing “how contingent and Western its conception of ‘homosexuality’—as an identity category, a sexual practice, and a site of theoretical speculation—often proves to be when brought into contact with the sexual epistemologies of non-Western cul- tures, particularly when encounters of ‘East’ and ‘West’ are crossed by issues of colonialism, race, nation, and class.” The of the “new cultural politics of difference” (West) may unite postcolonial, feminist, postmodern, Marxist, and gay theoret- ical perspectives, but specificity of focus and of agenda defines the par- ticularity of each field. Even as a generic label, however, postcolonial may be misleading with respect to both focus and agenda. The univer- sality implied in any such naming risks homogenizing as well as totaliz- ing and thus may mask the complexity of the colonial and postcolonial experiences of diverse individuals and societies in various times and places. Any common denominators could easily cut across language and culture lines in ways that blur familiar disciplinary boundaries: in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s terms, there may well be “greater coherence be- tween literatures from all the formerly colonized countries in Africa— French, Portuguese or Spanish speaking—than there is between the white dominions and the Afro-Asian republics of the ‘British’ Com- monwealth” (“Tension” 3). Most critics agree that the literatures desig- nated “postcolonial” share a “foregrounding [of] the tension with the imperial power” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2), but the agreement often ends there. Of the many meanings attributed to post, two have emerged as em- blematic of the dynamics of cultural resistance and retention. On the one hand, post is taken to mean “after,” “because of,” and even un- avoidably “inclusive of” the colonial; on the other, it signifies more ex- plicit resistance and opposition, the anticolonial. Drawing on anthropological debates about the meanings of culture, Kortenaar artic- ulates this cultural dualism in terms of creolization and authenticity but then concentrates on the rhetorical intent of these categories, not on their ontological reality. As a warning about the fixities of new discipli- nary discourses like the postcolonial, this position treats these cate- gories not as descriptions of what culture is but as “metaphors that permit collective self-fashioning,” with the emphasis on process and political agency in the formation of communal identity. Empire may well be “inexorably integrative” (Said, Culture 6), but the responses of colonizer and colonized to its integrative power are being theorized in ways that complicate any simple dualism.5 And, of course, appeals to either position associated with post are neither pro- gressive nor regressive in themselves, as Kortenaar points out. Whether an assimilative transcultural reading of colonial interrelations is figured in terms of complicity (Mishra and Hodge 407), creolization (Brath- waite), hybridity and syncreticity (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 38-39), or mimicry (Bhabha, “Mimicry,” “Representation”), the ambivalence of the “outside/insider” (Spivak, Teaching Machine 197) to what Dhar- wadker calls the “mutually transformative encounter” with the culture of is being theorized in multiple ways. On the more opposi- tional side of the post issue, the early race- and ethnicity-centered de- bates on “Negritude” (Senghor) and nativism have been complicated by such diverse cultural issues as language, religion, and history and by the perceived political advantages, on the one hand, of a “strategic” essen- tialism (Spivak, Post-colonial Critic 280) and, on the other, of forthright rejection (such as that of Kwame Anthony Appiah) of the idea of a purist or “unitary” African culture or any “fully autochthonous echt- African culture awaiting salvage” (Appiah 354). What categories of analysis need to be developed in order to allow for a discussion, for ex- ample, of black South African writers of Afrikaans (see Jolly)? The concept of “nation” adds yet another important dimension to colonial and postcolonial narratives,6 whether the nation in question re- sembles the Lebanon of Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, in which a civil war transforms colonial or “external oppositions into internal contradic- tions” (Foster), or the India of Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, a country where the past is often known only through historical representations that are the result of “orientalist (mis)construction” (Dharwadker). As Dharwadker shows, the new and different meanings given to this con- temporary “historical” play by various Indian audiences since its 1964 opening reflect important changes in the “emergent but precarious twentieth-century Indian nationhood.”7 For some theorists today, what unites all these different, even oppos- ing, positions on the meaning of the postcolonial is a shared stake in the psychological and social analysis of colonial identity on the collective and individual levels (see Fanon, Black Skin, Wretched of the Earth', Mannoni; Nandy). The essays presented here do not deconstruct an ex- isting subjectivity or posit an essentialist, universal, unitary subject; in- stead, they investigate the “multiplication” of identities (Laclau 84) and the intersection of nation, gender, sexuality, class, and race, as well as history, religion, caste, and language.8 Bergner offers a historicized cri- tique of Fanon’s construction of gender and sexuality in his psycho- analytic paradigm of colonial relations and racial identity. Pointing to Fanon’s replication of the very structures of colonialist discourse that his work carefully deconstructs, Bergner argues for precisely what Fanon ignores: that race and gender are mutually constitutive. In a related move that makes sexual difference a historical problem within specifi- cally nationalist thought,9 Foster studies a particular set of contradictory postcolonial meanings of the feminine (“as visible agents of [Euro- peanized] modernization and guardians of [indigenous] tradition”) and of the nation (here, Lebanon, asserting both “equality with European powers and autonomy from them”). Adnan’s novel, Foster argues, ef- fects a double critique of European and American representations of “the Arabs” and of Lebanese nationalism’s representations of “women, Palestinian refugees, and handicapped children.” Like gender, class (compounded by considerations of language, education, race, and reli- gion)—elite versus bourgeois versus subaltern—is a frequent factor in these analyses of the colonized and the decolonized subject (see Dhar- wadker; Foster; Bergner; Boone; see also Ahmad, In Theory, Alvarez). Class and gender are subsumed in the sexual politics of homoeroti- cized colonial narratives that frame Boone’s investigation of real and imagined voyages to the Near East in the writing of European and Amer- ican men.10 Problematizing the historical appeal of Edward Said’s “Ori- entalism” as an “occidental mode of male perception, appropriation, and control,”" Boone suggests ways in which borders between divisions such as East/West, femininity/masculinity, homosexual/heterosexual, and colonized/colonizer, along with the hierarchies such binaries imply, can be and have been challenged. Through his analysis of Achebe’s Arrow of God, Kortenaar similarly undoes any easy oppositions between the narratives of colonizer and colonized, of power and resistance, of “imperialist capitalist modernity and precapitalist tradition.” The complexities that abound in the literature and the theory in these essays defy any single binary construction of oppression: race, class, gender, and sexuality all participate in the complex politics of represen- tation. From the careful self-positioning statements of the authors of these essays, readers of PMLA will sense the authors’ awareness of the politics of the multiple constituencies of postcolonial theory and prac- tice, as well as their willingness to acknowledge their contributions to the debates surrounding both the colonial and the postcolonial as per- formative,12 provisional, and “situated” (Haraway 188)—in theory and in practice. To borrow Djelal Kadir’s felicitous term, these authors are all “other-wise”: “wakeful to the otherness within as well as mindful of the other as other” (1).

Notes

’As an English-speaking Canadian, I have always been aware of the strong cultural presence of empire—both past and present—but also of these differences, as well as the equally important variations in response that are bound to occur in a multiethnic and mul- tiracial settler colony. 2The 6 essays in this issue were among 117 submitted for this special topic, a record number. ’This statement could also be applied to Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Diacritics, or Yale French Studies—to mention only a few other general-focus journals that have recently given special attention to this topic. 4For other perspectives on this intersection, see Blunt and Rose; Donaldson; Emberley; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres; Petersen and Rutherford; Rajan; Spivak, Other Worlds', Su- leri; Trinh; Ware. ’Dualisms are rarely simple: see Memmi (140) on antitheses; JanMohamed on Manichaean dualism; and Gates (466) on Fanon and the “sentimental romance of alterity.” 6Fredric Jameson’s controversial view that the fiction of all Third World nations con- sists of “national allegories” (69) has been challenged from many different perspectives. See Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric”; McGee 171; Chow 91. ’While the essays here focus primarily on narratives of nationalism and nationhood, their broader ideological frameworks imply that the postcolonial project involves the in- vestigation of migrant and diasporic cultures (see Nelson), as well as concern for what has been called “internal colonization” (Amin 369)—from the culture of the Turkish Gast- arbeiter in Germany to that of the Chicano or Chicana in the United States (see Gugel- berger 582). On the possible dangers of this extension, see Chicago Cultural Studies Group 535. 8On the role of language, see Fanon, Black Skin 38; Ngugi, Decolorising the Mind; on the “deterritorialization” of language, Deleuze and Guattari 17. The vast critical literature on standard and vernacular languages must also be considered. 9For a sense of the density of these issues, see Chatterjee; Bhabha, Nation; Parker et al.; Radhakrishnan. ,0On travel writing, colonialism, and gender issues, see also Behdad; Blunt; Pratt; Mills. 1'Said’s Orientalism has been called the inaugural text of colonial discourse analysis (Williams and Chrisman 5). For a discussion of Said’s “heterosexualization” of homosex- ual writers, see Hastings 134; on joining the tropes of nationalist and anticolonialist dis- course to the assertion of masculinity, see Martin 97; on more general concerns about orientalism as a totalizing concept, see Young 173; on Said’s intended audience and its limits, see Pathak, Sengupta, and Purkayastha. ,2It is perhaps no accident that two of the essays in this issue (those of Jolly and Dhar- wadker) examine drama rather than narrative fiction, the genre of choice in postcolonial literary studies. The relations among identity, agency, resistance, history, and performativ- ity are important ones to study, and the analyses here of the theatricalization of politics and of the social space of theater constitute a move in this direction.

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