DOROTHY FIGUEIRA

THE PROFITS OF POSTCOLONIALISM

One of the causes of the intellectual irresponsibility that pervades literary theory today is that it is quite possible for one "ism" to be superseded by another before many readers have even discovered what the earlier "ism" stood for. So, as the popularity of postcolonial critic is beginning to be eclipsed by the next "ism," whether it be transnationalism, nomadism, or aestheticism, we might want to pause and ask a simple, yet not irrelevant, question: "What was postcolonialism, anyway?" A curious situation emerges when we seek to answer this seemingly easy question, for the critical literature suggests that there has never been a clear consensus among practitioners themselves as to what constitutes reading texts from a postcolonial theoretical perspective, or even what constitutes the canon of criticism.

Postcolonial theory, while deeply concerned with the location of the theorist, has not adequately addressed the location of the very term postcoloniality--its ahistoricity and universalizing deployments. There is little one can do with definitions that claim postcolonial criticism "covers all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day," or that postcolonial criticism "foregrounds a politics of opposition and struggle, and problematizes the key relationship between centre and periphery." An essentialism has beset discussions of postcoloniality from its arrival on the critical scene in the eighties, in the aftermath of Said's own monolithic and essentializing critique of Orientalism. So it should come as no surprise that the editors of The Empire Writes Back (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin) include under the rubric of postcolonial literature all literature written in English by societies affected by colonialism--a vast geographical zone including Africa, Australia, Bangledesh, Canada, India, Malasia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, the South Pacific Islands, and Sri Lanka. Even the literature of the United States is deemed postcolonial. While acknowledging that each of these locations possesses "special and distinctive regional characteristics," Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffen nevertheless focus on a common experience presumably rooted in the time when "they all emerged from the experience of colonialization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with imperial power."  That Third-World countries do not share a single common past or a single common condition called the postcolonial or postcoloniality has of course been duly noted, as has postcolonial theory's penchant to collapse chronologies by encompassing the historical beginnings of colonialism with its aftermaths. But such criticisms have largely been ignored. In fact, one critic even places postcolonialism in virtual space. One cannot judge, we are informed, the validity of postcolonial theory by an existing body of texts, because it depends "on a time space of subject formation. . . . "

Indeed, the critical milieu in which postcolonial theorizing has developed has largely avoided definitions. . . . Nor do postcolonial theorists usually feel any need to provide such definitions, given their advocacy, albeit theoretical, for the postcolonial subject. . . . The critical task has been aestheticized to such a degree that demands for rationality become symptoms of the malaise the postcolonial critic is presumably combating. . . . The postcolonial archive thus usually consists of a limited body of published texts in English or French, the official languages of intellectual power at the late-imperial center, as if these were truly representative of the postcolonial situation. With the exception of Spivak's Mahesweta Devi, vernacular texts that might not deal with colonialism do not enter into discussion. Postcolonial criticism does not, therefore, need linguistic skills or the tools of an archivist. The archive is largely metaphorical anyway.