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The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?Author(s): Benita ParrySource: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 27, The Politics of Postcolonial Criticism (1997),pp. 3-21Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509129 .

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The Postcolonial:ConceptualCategoryorChimera?BENITA PARRYUniversityf Warwick

No discussion of the 'postcolonial' should proceed without participantsmaking known their understanding of the term, for no word is moreseductive in appearing to offer limitlesspossibilitiesfor composing a revisednarrative of colonialism and its consequences, and few words have provedmore elusive. Yet within the multiplicityof literaryand cultural studies nowidentified as constituting a 'postcolonial criticism', there is a constantslippagebetween significationsof an historicaltransition,a cultural ocation,a discursive stance, and an epochal condition. Not only has postcolonialitybeen privileged as the position from which to deconstruct colonialism'spastself-representationsand legitimating strategies but it is also designated thelocation for producing properly postmodern intellectual work on thecontemporaryworld, which, it is asserted,has seen the implosion of Westernculture under the impact of its inhabitation by other voices, histories, andexperiences.1 Nor do these variants exhaust the connotations which, morenarrowly, include a description of those Third World literatures character-ized by intertextualitythat (in contrast to fictions of an earlierphase) devise'post-nationalistnarratives'.Such indeterminacyin significationhas prompted essaysand lectures withtitles such as 'What is Post(-)colonialism?'and 'When was the Postcolonial?';2and indeed a glance at the contents of the two recent Postcolonial Readerswill suggest the range of topics and methodologies now being subsumedunder the sign of the postcolonial.3But if the critical freedom from precisionand closure has induced scepticism in some critics, the very multivalenciesof the term have been valorized by others concerned to rearticulatecolonialism and its aftermath from a theoretical position that has disen-tangled itself from the categories of political theory, state formation, andstructural socio-economic relationships. It is this model that came to attainpredominance in the burgeoning discussion, and while its suppositions and

1 Foran extravagantstatement of this position, see Ian Chambers, Migrancy,Culture,dentityLondon:Routledge, 1994),p. 68.2 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, in ColonialDiscourse nd Postcolonial heory:A Reader, d. by PatrickWilliams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, I993), pp. 276-90 (firstpubl. in TextualPractice, (I99I), 399-414); StuartHall, Lecture to Center for CulturalStudies, Universityof Californiaat Santa Cruz, Spring I995.3 Williams and Chrisman; The Post-Colonial tudiesReader, d. by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,andHelen Tiffin (London:Routledge, I995).

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ThePostcolonial: onceptual ategoryr Chimera?procedures have already been questioned, there are now indications that itspremisses are being contested by critics devising practices considered moreappropriateto understandingthe continuities of the imperialproject withinour late imperialistmoment.To the exponents of 'a postcolonial critique', thepostin postcolonial is 'aspace-clearing gesture'4 signifying a site for the production of theoreticalwork which, although indelibly marked by colonialism, transcends itscognitive modes. This 'negotiated postcolonial positionality' has beendescribed by Gayatri Spivak as the heritage of imperialism which thepostcolonial critic occupies intimately but deconstructively, making inter-ventions 'in the structure of which you are a part' and trying 'to changesomething that one is obliged to inhabit'.5 For Homi Bhabha this 'in-between' or 'hybrid position' enables the critic to re-read the colonialistarchive in ways which are attentive to 'the more complex cultural andpolitical borders that exist on the cusp' of opposed political spheres.6Thelocation occupied by such criticism has been glossed by Gyan Prakash as'neither inside nor outside the history of western domination but in atangential relation to it',7 the double or semi-detached consciousnessfacilitating an understanding of colonialism and its legacies different fromthe narratives handed down by both colonialism and anti-colonialistmovements. In the work of some adherents, this departure extends from arepudiation of justificatory Imperial Histories and liberal CommonwealthStudies, to the narrativescomposed by liberation theorists and subsequentlymodulated for circulationin Third Worldanalyses.The immediate ancestry of postcolonial theory can be assigned to thewide-ranging retrospect undertaken during the ig8os on the exclusionaryforms of reason and universality composed by a Western modernitycomplicit with imperial expansion and colonialist rule.8 The genealogicalmap of the propositions and procedures deployed by both colonial discourseanalysis and postcolonial theory is, however, altogether more complicated.This indicates a shared provenance with contemporaneous gender and gaystudies, as well as with the devising of minoritydiscourses,9and the recoveryof African-American literary and cultural traditions.10Significantly, such

4 The phrase is used by Kwame Anthony Appiah in 'Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- inPostcolonial?',Criticalnquiry, 7 (199 ), pp. 336-57.5 'The Post-colonial Critic' in The Post-ColonialCritic:Interviews, trategies,Dialogues,ed. by SarahHarasym (London:Routledge, 1990), p. 72.6 TheLocationfCultureLondon:Routledge, 1994),p. I73.7 'Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography',SocialText,31 /32(1993), 8- 19 (pp. i6- 7).8 See PeterHulme, Colonial ncountersLondon:Methuen, 1986).9 Issues 6 and 7 (1987) of CulturalCritique ere devoted to the subject; republished as TheNatureandContext f MinorityDiscourse, d. by Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford

UniversityPress, 1990).10Amongst the large volume of work produced in this area, see, for example, Henry Louis GatesJr,Figuresn Black(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and TheSignifingMonkey Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988);Houston A. BakerJr, Modernismnd theHarlemRenaissanceChicago: Universityof Chicago Press, I987).

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diverse inquiriesdirected at contesting the authorityof distinctivesystemsofdomination, and jointly contributing to deciphering systems of representa-tion designed to validate institutional subordination and silence the voices ofcompetitors, had recourse to the same criticalparadigms.Poststructuralismundermined the concept of language, and indeed of anysignifying system, as a transparentmedium for the neutral transmission ofinformation, thereby ruining the notion of representation as innocent andauthentic mimesis. When Foucault defined the discourse of any culturalepoch as the means of producing its objectsof knowledge according to ritualsof truthor authorized sets of internal rules and procedures, he demonstratedhow cognitive codes are deployed in relations of power. For EdwardW. Saidthe study of colonial discourse was facilitated by Foucault's 'understandingof how the will to exercise dominant control in society and history, has alsodiscovered a way to clothe, disguise, rarefy,and wrap itself systematically nthe language of truth, discipline, rationality, utilitarian value, and know-ledge'."1 Gayatri Spivak, on the other hand, found that a postcolonialcriticism could take 'analytic and interventionist advantage' of Derrida'sdeconstruction of the discursive apparatus to occidental reason, since 'hissustained and developing work on the mechanicsf the constitution of theOther', posed 'the question of how to keep the ethnocentric Subject fromestablishingitselfby selectively defining an Other'.l2In another register,WesternMarxism provided a model of the reciprocalaction between base and superstructure,between material conditions andideas, thereby recuperating the earlier Marxist formulation of a socio-economicformation ithin which a nexus of heterogeneous and contradictorydeterminations interact. The writings of Gramsci, which made connexionsbetween culture and both state and civil institutions, proposed that theinventions of cultural activity kept the ideological world in movement; andBritish cultural criticism, or CulturalMaterialism, proferred a definition ofculture as itself a set of social practices, rather than as superstructure.Particularlysignificantwas Raymond Williams'sexposition of hegemony-that is, the expedients deployed in order to win the spontaneous consent ofthe great mass of the population to the intellectual and moral directionimposed on social life by the dominant group. Williams's elaboration of aconcept devisedby Gramsci,definedhegemony as 'awhole body of practicesand expectations [... ] a lived systemof meanings and values- constitutiveand constituting'. It also expanded on the volatility and open structureof aninteraction which accommodates not only complicity, but the space forresistance, the maintenance of domination depending on 'continuousprocesses of adjustment, reinterpretation, ncorporation, dilution', processes1 Edward W. Said, TheWorld,heTextand heCritic(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1983;repr. London: Faber, I984), p. 2 6.12'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Williams and Chrisman (pp. go, 89) (firstpubl. in Marxismand theInterpretationfCulture,d. by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg(Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1988),pp. 27 -313).

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ThePostcolonial: onceptualategoryr Chimera?moreover which are conducted in relation to 'alternative', 'oppositional','residual',and 'emergent'culturalformations.13It was also from within Western Marxism that ideology was reconceivednot as false consciousness but as the means of constituting concreteindividualsas subjects,the subjectdenoting both subjectivityand subjection.I have here referred to the work of Althusser, and although this is currentlyout of fashion, his disposalsof a Marxismthat drew on the theories of Freudand Lacan to explain the multiple determinants of subject-formation,continue to circulate as if unconsciously in the larger contemporarydiscussion on the uncertain relationship between objective structuralposition, or social interest, and political identification. Furthermore,although seldom cited as an influence, the practice of'symptomatic reading'(thatis, reading literature for the ways this challenges ideology by using andtransforming it) proposed by Althusser's collaborator Pierre Macherey14appearsto have infiltratedthe work of criticsexamining the signsof empire,both conspicuous and ghostly, written across the body of metropolitanliterature.'5In all, the strategic redeployment of these different theoreticalparadigmsenabled investigationsto be made into the ways that culture andideology participatedin exercising and sustainingcolonial domination; theyremain invaluable for understanding both the making and reception,whether as approbationor interrogation,of colonialistself-representation nthe metropolis, and the buttressingof military and institutionalforce in thecolonies with the production of consent.According to Peter Hulme,16 the disciplinary area known as 'colonialdiscourseanalysis'came into being as a critiqueof the continental theoreticalwork it enlisted. The progenitor of this criticism of Europeancriticalthoughtwas Said. In freely acknowledging a debt to continental theorists, WesternMarxism, and Anglo-Saxon cultural criticism, Said observed both themassive indifference of these modes to colonialism as constitutive ofmetropolitan society and the failure of their authors to recognize that anti-colonialist critics such as Aime Cesaire, FrantzFanon, and C. L. R. James,had confronted the contradictionsand hierarchiesin the thought of Westernmodernity long before prominent European, North American, and British

13 Raymond Williams, Marxismand LiteratureOxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. Io, andProblemsn Materialism nd Culture(London:New Left Books, 1980), pp. 37-42.14A Theory fLiterary roductionLondon:Routledge, 1978).15 See, forexample, Daniel Bivona, Desire ndContradiction:mperialVisionsndDomestic ebatesn VictorianLiteratureManchester: Manchester University Press, i990); Suvendrini Perera, Reaches f Empire:TheEnglishNovelfromEdgewortho Dickens New York: Columbia University Press, 99 ); FirdousAzim, TheColonialRise of theNovel(London: Routledge, I993). There are also numerous recent essays on thedeployment of empire as metaphor in novels such as MansfieldPark,Jane Eyre,DanielDeronda,TheMoonstone,nd The Waves.16 'SubversiveArchipelagoes:Colonial Discourse and the Break-Up of Continental Theory', Dispositio,I4 (989), I-23.

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theoristshad got round to it.17Said's own writings can be seen to negotiatean alliancebetween Westerntheory and the analyses developed by liberationmovements, in the process producing elaborations which were not in themetropolitan sources. This conjoining of disparate intellectual spheres hasprovoked criticism from those who find that Said's attempt to graftFoucault's anti-humanism on to appeals to a transcendent human realityremains involved in the ethical and theoreticalvalues it criticizes, and hencefails to 'decolonize western thought'.18 But for Peter Hulme, Said'sachievement is to have brought together 'the rhetoricalpower of the textualreadings offered by discourse analysis [...] with a "real" world ofdomination and exploitation, usually analyzed by a Marxism hostile topoststructuralism's epistemological scepticism' (p. 3). Thus, Hulme con-tends, Said, who recognizes the scrupulously ethnocentric nature ofFoucault's undertaking, chooses to emphasize the possibilities inherent inthis work, in the interests of extending to a global terrain the concept ofdiscourse with the constant implication of textuality within networks ofhistory,power, knowledge, and society.Tim Brennan, however, maintains that Said, who is resistant to thetotalizing forms of all theoretical systems, owes more to Raymond Williamsthan to continental theory;19and indeed it is evident that in a parallelresituation of another critical practice within a larger arena, Said draws onWilliams'swork,while at the same time interrogating tsprivilegedinclusionsand calling attention to its exclusions. For lodged within Said's handsomeappreciations of Williams's path-breaking studies is a commentary on theirrelevance of the colonial experience to Williams's revisionist narrativeabout the making of English culture, the zones of exclusion staking out theground on which Said offers an interpretation of empire's constitutive rolein the making of metropolitan cultures: 'Studying the relationship betweenthe "West" and its dominated cultural "Others" is not just a way ofunderstanding an unequal relationship between unequal interlocutors, butalso a point of entry into studying the formation and meaning of Westerncultural practices themselves' (CulturendImperialism,. 230). All the same,Said acknowledges that it is from Williams that he derived his usage of17 See especiallyFanon, 'ConcerningViolence', in TheWretchedftheEarth 963) (London: Macgibbonand Gee, 965). On anti-colonialisttraditions,see Edward Said, Culture ndImperialismLondon:Chattoand Windus, I993), especially Chapter 3, 'Resistance and Opposition'; Neil Lazarus, 'DisavowingDecolonization', Researchn AfricanLiterature, 4.4 (Winter I993), 69-98; Benita Parry, 'ResistanceTheory/Theorising Resistance', in ColonialDiscourse/Postcolonialheory,d. by F. Barker,P. Hulme, andMargaret Iversen (Manchester:Manchester UniversityPress, 1994),pp. 172-96; Kenneth Parker,'VeryLikea Whale: Post-ColonialismBetween Canonicities and Ethnicities',SocialIdentity, (I995), I55-74.18See James Clifford, 'On Orientalism', in The Predicamentf CultureCambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, I988); Robert Young, WhiteMythologies:Writing,Historyand the West (London:Routledge, 1990).19'Placesof Mind, Occupied Lands', in Edward aid:A CriticalReader,d. by Michael Sprinker(Oxford:Blackwell, 1992), pp. 74-95; see also Benita Parry, 'OverlappingTerritories and IntertwinedHistories:Edward Said's PostcolonialCosmopolitanism', in the same volume, pp. 19-47.

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ThePostcolonial: onceptualategoryrChimera?culture as social practice, as the negotiated processes within which subjec-tivities, cognition, and consciousness are made and remade under determin-ate historical and political conditions; and it is this construction that makespossible Said's usage of discourse as always implying a 'worlding' oftextuality.

In drawing attention to Said's immense influence on the development ofboth colonial discourse analysis and its close younger relative, postcolonialtheory, I do not mean to overlook that the beginnings of these projects weremultiply determined by the convergence of a new generation of critics, manyof whom came from decolonized worlds, the availability of innovativecritical theories, and the concurrent investigations of other forms ofoppressive ideologies. Furthermore, whereas Said's theoretically eclecticwork was a potent force in promoting an inquiry that in turn generatedpostcolonial theory, and although the realist paradigm continues to be thechosen mode of many who situate themselves as contributing to apostcolonial criticism, it was the 'the linguistic turn' that a prominentexponent was to hail as effecting 'a shift within contemporary criticaltraditions of postcolonial writing'.20Thus, while the notions and the language of the subject and the realm ofhuman activity are still retained by participants who acknowledge theenergies of the colonized's self-affirmation, and hence of conscious agency,21what high-profile critics brought to the discussion was the poststructuralistcritique of subjectivity as a theory bound to the metaphysics of presence. Asan exemplary instance of this procedure, Homi Bhabha, in his concern toexpose 'the myth of the transparency of the human agent', and to dispose ofthe discourse of the intentional subject or collectivity, has proposed asubjectless process of significations and discursive mechanisms. The implica-tion of a position enjoining the critic to recuperate agency from the native'sinappropriate and subversive rearticulations of colonialist enunciations, hasbeen criticized as tending 'to conceive of colonial subjects as resisting oracting only within the spaces made available by colonial discourse'.22Moreover, in eschewing the notion of agency as performed by the subject oncontested ground, and disclaiming resistance as a social practice, Bhabha'sproposal is incommensurate with accounts of'a culture of resistance'. In the20 Bhabha, TheLocation f Culture,. 24I. For a discussion of this volume, see Benita Parry, 'Signs ofOur Times', ThirdText,28/29 ( 994), 5-24.21 In his foreword to Selected ubaltern tudies(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1988), Said commendsthe work of the Subaltern Studies collective for theorizing the insurgentsubjectivitiesof the conscious

native as agent, the rebel in Ranajit Guha's work being conceived as 'an entity whose will and reasonconstituted the praxis called rebellion'; see also Guha, 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency'in the samevolume, pp. 45-86.22 Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, 'Introduction:Location, Culture, Post-Coloniality', OxfordLiteraryReview,16 (1994), 3-30, p 8).

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BENITA PARRY 9version offered by Said, however, written and remembered stories ofinsubordination and rebellion are chronicled and insurgent acts arerecounted. We could also note that Bhabha's designation of agency as sitedin the enunciative act falls outside the long-standing debate betweenstructural explanations which foreground the determinate constraints ofideological construction, and those paradigms privileging the consciousactor; it is also distinct from that other famous story of how history is madeby human subjects,but not under conditions of their own choosing.23For another influentialpostcolonial critic, who is also hostile to notions ofconsciousness-as-agency and rejectsthe search for the colonized's sovereignand determining subjectivity,24t is axiomatic that 'imperialism'sepistemicviolence [ . .] constituted/effaced the subject that was obliged to cathect[... ] the space of the Imperialists'self-consolidatingother.'24 The clearestavailable example of [. .. ] epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated,far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject asOther.'25 Gayatri Spivak's adamantine contention that the over-determinations in Europe's constructions of its Others obliterated theirsubjectivity, eaving no space from which the subalterncould speak, appearsto conflate the intentionality of a dominant discoursewith its effects, therebyoverestimating social constraint while occluding the ways in which multiplyconstitutedsubjectsrefusea position aspliant objectsof another'srepresenta-tions.26Her position has been designated by Ania Loomba as absolutist inits effacement of the alternative positions occupied by the colonized and23 The 'paradox of a critique of determinism based on an approach that "underestimates humanaction"', while attributing to the structure of language 'another, equally powerful factor ofdetermination',is discussedby Eleni Varikas n the context of writingwomen's history:see her 'Gender,Experience and Subjectivity',NewLeftReview, 1 I (1995), 89- Io i.24 Gayatri Spivak, 'Deconstructing Historiography', in SelectedSubaltern tudies,p. 18. Spivak hascriticized Foucault's post-representational vocabulary for hiding an essentialist agenda where theconcrete experience of the oppressedis valorized. Perceiving an inconsistencyin the project of SubalternStudies, whose practice implicitly acknowledgesthe impossibilityof the sovereign self at the same timeas it falls back upon 'notions of consciousness-as-agent, totality,and a culturalismthat are discontinuouswith the critique of humanism', she endeavours to correct their work by reading it against the grain.This is then re-presented as 'a strategicuse of positivist essentialism in a scrupulouslyvisible politicalinterest',the retrieval of subalternconsciousnessinterpretedas 'thechartingof what in a poststructuralistlanguage would be called the subject-effect'('Deconstructing Historiography',pp. I 0, 12).25 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', p. 76. Spivak's contention resembles that ofJean andJohn Comoroffwho, workingwithin a realistparadigm,have maintained that 'the essence of colonialization inheres lessin political rule than in seizing and transforming"others" by the very act of conceptualizing, inscribingand interactingwith them in terms not of their own choosing; in making them into pliant objects andsilenced subjectsof our scriptsand scenarios;in assuming the capacity to "represent", the active verbitself conflating politics and poetics' (OfRevelation ndRevolution:Christianity, olonialismndConsciousnessinSouthAfrica, vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199 ), I, I5.26 In a recent study, Honi Fern Haber stresses that 'the self is never the culmination of a single [. .]narrative' but is the product of plural modes of constitution (BeyondPostmodernolitics (London:Routledge, I994), pp. I 9-20). In specificallyaddressingthe colonial situation, Rosalind O'Hanlon is

sceptical of the possibility that 'the subaltern may be subject to such an intensity of ideological andmaterial pressure that his consciousness and practice are indeed pervaded and possessed by it'('Recovering the Subject', ModemAsianStudies, 2 (1988), I89-224 (p. 222). We could here also referback to Raymond Williams's gloss on hegemony as ideological domination that must always contendwith resistance.



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IO The Postcolonial: onceptual ategoryr Chimera?outside the remit of imperialism's ideological constructions.27Other com-mentators, however, have argued that 'Spivak'stheory of subalternitydoesnot seem [... ] to be a theory of "native agency" at all, but a theory of theway in which disenfranchised elements of the 'native' population arerepresentedn the discourse of colonialism.'28Such a reading of her stanceconformswith Spivak'sown declarationthat it is the 'catachrestic'rearticula-tion of dominant texts thatwill force a re-thinkingand fracturingof forms ofknowledge and social identities authored and authorized by Westernmodernity.29It could be claimed that it was the common pursuitof all who engaged inthe study of colonial discourse to reveal the limits of a Western modernitywhich had accommodated slaveryand colonial genocide and was complicitwith the imperial project. However, a consideration of what came toconstitute the most influential practices within postcolonial theory willsuggest the distance travelled from the initial project of unmasking themaking and operation of colonial discourses -an undertakingwhich, forall its diversity, shared a concern with the specific historical conditions andsocial purposes of ideological representation.30By no means all the studiesthat can be subsumed under colonial discourseanalysiswere attentive to theindigenous systems of thought and hermeneutic traditions that Westernwriting had traduced or mistranslated;nor were their authors necessarily

27See Ania Loomba, 'Overworldingthe "ThirdWorld"', in Williams and Chrisman,pp. 305-23 (firstpubl. in Oxford iterary eview, 3 (199 I), 164-9 I.Other womenwho are trying,precisely, o record such voices within colonialandpostcolonialhistorydo notindicatethe epistemicwastelandSpivak mplies.There have been attemptsto locate contemporary ndianwomen'sstruggles or survivalagainstcolonial and indigenousstructuresof dominationin the context ofcultures hat did notsimply escape'colonialismbut resisted tsattempts o shapetheirepistemologyp. 318).Spivak'sstance has also been questioned by the anthropologistAndrew Apter, who reads her aphorismon the impossibilityof the native voice as silencing 'thevery people [... .] whose condition it purportstodemystify'. 'Does not this most "radical"of critical positions', he asks, 'in fact recapitulatethe logic ofcolonial conquest - the negation of the Other by a magisterialdiscourse that today masquerades as itsantithesis?'('Que Faire?ReconsideringInventions of Africa',Criticalnquiry, 9 (1992), 87- 04 (p. I04)).28Neil Lazarus, 'National Consciousness and Intellectualism', in Barker, Hulme, and Iversen,197-220 (p. 205).29As an instance amongst many other possible citations of critics who have adopted this stance,consider the contention of Denis Ekpo:'Perhapsthe most interesting thing that the postmodernturning-point has brought about through its radical and uncanny unmasking of the principles and ruses ofwestern culture, power and history, is opening the way for non-westerners in general and Africans inparticularto radicallyre-think the fundamental categories through which they have hitherto perceived,received and rejected the West' ('Towards a Post-Africanism:Contemporary African Thought andPostmodernism', TextualPractice,9 (I995), 12-135 (p. I29).30As a samplewhich makes no claim to being either representative or exhaustive, and which does notincludejournal literature, considerJohannes Fabian, TimeandtheOther:HowAnthropologyakes ts Object(New York: Columbia University Press, I983); Hulme, ColonialEncounters;hristopher Miller, BlankDarkness: fricanist iscoursen French(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 985); V. Y. Mudimbe, TheInvention f Africa:Gnosis,Philosophynd the Order f KnowledgeLondon: Currey, i988); Jenny Sharpe,AllegoriesfEmpire:TheFigure f Womann the ColonialText(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,I993); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's ulture: nthropology,raveland Government,Cambridge: PolityPress, I994).



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BENITA PARRYconcerned with recovering signs of native resistance.31All the same, thesedimensions were not programmaticallyruled out.This was the effect of Spivak's emphatic declaration that the task ofpostcolonial work is not to address victimage 'by the assertion of identity',but to tamper 'with the authority of Europe's story-lines', as the criticnegotiates and attempts to change what s/he necessarily inhabits 'byreversing,displacingand seizing the apparatusof value-coding'.32Similarly,Bhabha has contended that 'a shift within contemporary critical traditionsof postcolonial writing' has replaced 'an influential separatistemphasis onsimply elaborating an anti-imperialist or black nationalist tradition "initself"' with a 'postcolonial rearticulation that attempts to intervene in andinterrupt the Western discourses on modernity' (The Locationof Culture,p. 241). This privileging of an immanent critique of dominant Westernforms has been contested by Laura Chrisman, who looks forward to aparadigm shift in which 'colonialism be construed less as a self-determiningand pre-determined condition of power knowledge, and more as a productof struggle and contestation with the oppositional (physical and cultural)presences of the colonised', where 'the anti-colonial movements [...]become a fundamental element in the theorisation of colonial discourse',and are 'seen as constitutiveof, not merely constitutedby, colonialism'.33What are the consequences of contending that the task of the postcolonialintellectual is not o recover signsof self-representationor of'the disenfranch-ised speaking for themselves'?34One such outcome is to disregard theimportance to once or still dominated populations of recognizing thecontinuities and persistence of indigenous temporalitieswithin transformedand plural cultural formations, or of recovering the evidence and traces ofresistanceto colonialism. This last has been the concern of criticsrecuperat-ing the slave narratives, either written or dictated by ex-slaves of Africandescent during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.35A similarurge is intimated in the aphoristic writingsof the Martinican writerand critic Edouard Glissant, who contends that because the slave trade had

31 Said's work accommodates 'the rediscovery of what had been suppressedin the natives'past by theprocesses of imperialism'and is attentive to written or remembered accounts of native insubordinationand rebellion;while Mudimbe addresses the problemsof translatingAfrican gnosis.32 'Poststructuralism,Marginality,Postcolonialityand Value', in Literary heoryToday, d. by P. Collierand H. Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge:PolityPress, 1990), pp. 227, 228.33 'InventingPost-colonialTheory: Polemical Observations', in Pretexts, (1995), 205- 2 (p. 2 0).34 Spivak, ThePostcolonialritic, . 56.35 For example, The Slave'sNarrative, d. by Charles T. David and Henry Louis Gates Jr (Oxford:Oxford University Press, I985). See also Wilson Harris, the Caribbean novelist and critic, who citeslimbo dancing as an instance of re-membering. This is a practice stemming from Africa andreinterpreted on the slave ships of the Middle Passage, and which although indebted to the past is notan imitation of that past but 'rather the renascence of a new corpus of sensibility that could translateand accommodate African and other legacies within a new architecture of cultures' (History,FableandMyth n theCaribbeanndGuianasGuyana:National Historyand ArtsCouncil, I970), p. Io). On the placeof memories of Maroonage in contemporary consciousness, see Baker;also Aim6 C6saire'spoem 'TheVerb "Marronner"Ifor Rene Depestre, Haitian poet', Collectedoetry,rans.by Clayton Eshlemann andAnnette Smith (Berkeley:Universityof California Press, 1983),pp. 369-7 I.

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ThePostcolonial: onceptual ategoryr Chimera?snatched African-Caribbeansfrom their original matrix, erasing memoryand precluding the ability to map a sequence, it is the function of acontemporary counter-poeticsto engender that tormented chronology: 'Forhistoryis not only absence for us. It is vertigo. The time that was never ours,we must now possess'.36

In a discussion where the language model is deployed to devise a socialtheory of the colonial encounter, the material and experiential worlds ofcolonialism addressedby historians,social scientists,and culturalmaterialistshave receded from a purview which instead foregrounds the neuroticstructure of colonialism evidenced in its texts, or the dubieties and uneaseregisteredin the instabilitiesof its enunciations.37This direction in turn haselicited protests from those who, while appreciative of the immensecontributions textual studies have made to an understanding of the manydimensions and articulations of colonialism and imperialism, contest arewriting of the imperial project that derives social explanation from thelanguage of discourse and textuality, or from enunciative modalities, andasserts that the testimony of history is invested in its mode of writing.(Bhabha, p. 30). When language is taken as the paradigm of all meaning-creating or signifying systems,the significantdisparitiesbetween construingthe structure of language and explaining the forms of social practice arecollapsed, and because human practice is perceived as riimicking the formsof writing,what is offeredis the Worldaccordingto the Word.38A procedurewhich reduces the dynamics of historicalprocesses to the rules of languageand reads these as encoding the agonistic and ambivalent movement ofdiscursivedifferentials hus permits the circumvention and relegation of theeconomic impulses to colonial conquest, the appropriation of physicalresources, the exploitation of human labour, institutional repression, andcultural domination.39

Integral to this revisionistendeavour is a concern to effect the 'break-upof a binary sense of political antagonism', and, by subsuming the social totextual form, a criticism such as thatpractisedby Bhabha strainsto represent36 Caribbean iscourse: elected ssays,trans. by Michael Dash (Charlottesville:University of VirginiaPress, 1989), p. 161.37See especially Sara Suleri, TheRhetoricfEnglish ndia(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).For a critique of this mode, see Aijaz Ahmad, 'The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality', RaceandClass,36.3 (1995), I-20.38 This practice has come in for concerted criticismfrom, amongst others, ChristopherNorris, who onboth cognitive and ethical groundshas censured 'facile textualist thought' which 'contrives to block theappeal to any kind of real-world knowledge or experience' (The TruthAboutPostmodernismOxford:

Blackwell, 1993), p. I82.39 See the criticisms of Masao Miyoshi, 'ABorderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalismand the Decline of the Nation State', CriticalInquiry,19 (1993), 726-51; Arif Dirlik, 'The PostcolonialAura: 'Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism', CriticalInquiry,0 (1994), 329-56, andAfter heRevolution:Wakingo GlobalCapitalismHanover, NH: Wesleyan UniversityPress, 1994).

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colonialism as transactional, thereby replacing the received perception ofcontest with the 'in-between' space of negotiation. Spivak too is critical 'ofthe binary opposition coloniser/colonised', her concern being to 'examinethe heterogenity of "colonial power" and to disclose the complicity of thatopposition as it constituted the disciplinary enclave of the critique ofimperialism.'40The substitution of interjacent ground for a war zone wouldappear to stem from a theoretical commitment to rejecting fixed subjectpositions as ontologically faulty, and dyadic polarities as epistemologicallyunsound, and because the means of representationor the semiotic process isprivileged as the progenitor of meaning, the colonial encounter comes to berewritten as an exercise of authoritythat is agonisticratherthan antagonistic.For in this critical mode, where the regime of phrases is all-powerful, ananalysis of the ambivalence and blind-spots in colonial enunciations isextended to underwrite the assertion that because 'the implacable logic ofoppositionality' in colonialist thought is always and necessarily disrupted,the critic can therefore deduce that 'thefunctioning f colonial power' wasdisjunct from 'its founding oppositions'.41 The implications of rewriting ahistorical project of invasion, expropriation, and exploitation in termsderived from the indeterminaciesof language, is that this dispenseswith thenotion of conflict-- a concept which certainly does denote antagonism, butwhich does not posit a simplistically unitary and closed structure to theadversarial orces.If the purpose of displacing an oppositional structure is to construecolonialism as a complicated, overlapping, and entangled event, then thisshould not imply that its operations are to be understood as necessarilyconducted in a negotiatory or interstitialspace.42Rather, it counsels us torecognize borders as ground that is policed as well as transgressed.This is, Isuggest, the perception yielded by the tension in Said's 'contrapuntal'reading of colonialism's intertwined histories, a strategy proposed tointerpret the discrepant experiences as interactive, and one haunted byvisitations of schism. For what Said recognizes is that running like a fissurethrough 'the imperialist ensemble [... ] is the principle of domination andresistancebased on the division between the West and the rest of the world'(Cultureand Imperialism, . 6o). Certainly, Said does discern sympathy,

40 Angela McRobbie, 'Strategiesof Violence: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak', Block,o1(I985), 9-41 Prakash,'PostcolonialCriticism',pp. 6- 7; my emphasis.42 Colonialism's histories are, of course, differential, and therefore opportunities for discovering a'middle ground' are greater, for example, in nineteenth-centuryIndia than in the plantation colonies ofthe Caribbean, the genocidal settler regimes of Southern Africa, the Americas, and Australia,and theterritorialexpropriationsin North and sub-SaharanAfrica.However, even in the case of India, it shouldbe noted that the political and cultural traffic which occurredwas between the rulers and India'selites,and not its overwhelmingly peasant populations. Kenneth Parkeradds a note of necessary caution whenobserving that whereas the rigid administrative and cultural divisions set up by colonialism 'weremarked by constant acts of transgression, especially on the part of the elites of both sides', it was thesubalternfiguresfrom all sides who were victims of that process ('VeryLikea Whale', p. 157).

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ThePostcolonial:onceptual ategoryr Chimera?cooperation, and congruence in the imperial encounter, but such affirma-tions are repeatedly interrupted by observations of 'the fundamentalontological distinctions'(p. 129),the absolutediscrepancy n power (p. 195),the meticulous codification of difference, the installation of a radicaldiscontinuity in terms of human space, the preservation of 'absolutegeographical and cultural boundaries' (pp. 129-30), the withholding ofmutuality, and. the exercise of an 'almost total control' which placed theparties to the encounter in 'devastating and continuous conflict' (p. 308).Thus, against the grain of his own optimistic practice, Said makes thismelancholy observation: 'History [... ] teaches us that domination breedsresistanceand that the violence inherent in the colonial contest -for all itsoccasional profit and pleasure -is an impoverishment on both sides'(p. 348).The perception that both interconnection and division were innate in thecolonial encounter is also registeredby the anthropologistNicholas Thomas.While insistingin Colonialism'sulturehat the power of colonialism was nevertotal, its history having been shaped by both indigenous resistance andaccommodation, its discourses not only exhausted by its own internalcontradictions and debates but always in unacknowledged traffic with thenative's discontents, Thomas dissociates himself from those paradigmswithin 'the anthropology of exchange' which he considers to be 'myopicallyliberal in theirmodels of reciprocityand assumptionsof consent'.43Forwhatis relegated as mere external contingency, he argues, is that this interchangetook place in the 'context of illiberal domination' that was colonialism;whatis overlooked is that the centralityof exchange in everyday practice does notencompass 'the larger field of power relations that constitutes the circum-stances of colonized populations'. Likewise,Kenneth Parker'sacknowledge-ment of border-crossingswithin the colonial relationship, and the locationof 'the Rest' as part of 'the West', is not made at the expense of denying 'theforce of the discursive as well as the ideological utility of binaries [.. .] andthe consequent emphasis on oppressor/oppressed' (p. I57). A similarlynuanced readingis offeredby Annie Coombes in her study Reinventingfrica.Although Coombes is concerned 'to indicate some of the more ambiguousand strategic exchanges in the dialogue between coloniser and colonised'and to explore 'the possibilityof an interactive and mutually transformativerelationship' between communities that were heterogeneous rather than'easily unified and straightforwardlyoppositional entities', she does notoverlook that 'any dialogue said to occur between coloniser and colonised isalreadycircumscribedby the all too tangibleviolence of imperialism'.44

43 EntangledObjectsCambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 199), pp. xi, 9.44 Reinventing frica:Museums,MaterialCulturendPopularmaginationNew Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress 994), p. 6.

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BENITA PARRYI would, however, contest the use of 'dialogue' in the context ofcolonialism, since the word suggests an equal and symmetrical associationbetween parties conducting colloquies in non-coercive situations,and henceintimates an interaction where each party recognizes the other as an agentof knowledge. It would appear, then, that another term should be devisedfor the transactions where the native was sometimes an informant, always atopic, but rarely, and only in very special circumstances, an interlocutor.The same qualification surely applies also to accounts that specify theappropriation by the West of Asian and African architectural styles,decorative arts and artefacts, or the successive vogues in Europe for themyths and metaphysics of the East, as constituting a 'culturaldialectics', or'a politics of reception'.45European culture is undeniably 'hybrid',as are all

cultures, and certainly metropolitan societies were multiply and determin-ately inflected by trafficwith the colonial worlds. But this infiltration shouldnot be designated a 'conversation'with other cultural forms and cognitivetraditions, a term that should properly be retained for communications ofmutuality and requital. The inequality and constraints in the exchanges ofcolonial encounters emerge from Mary Louise Pratt's deployment of thenotion of 'transculturation'as a 'phenomenon of the contact zone'. Thisdescribes a process where 'subordinated or marginalized groups select orinvent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitanculture', determining 'to varying extents what they absorb into their own,and what they use it for'. But when Pratt asks 'another perhaps moreheretical'question, how one can speakof'transculturation from the coloniesto the metropolis', of the ways 'the periphery determines the metropolis',what she is able to offer suggests a greatly attenuated, indeed a solipsisticnotion of 'transculturation',since the only instance she cites is 'the latter'sobsessive need to present and represent its peripheries and its others toitself'.46Thus, whereas the peripheriescan readilybe shown to appropriateand redeploy materials from the centre, what emerges is that the centre isunable to recognize the materials from the periphery as constitutingKnowledge.The attempt to retrieve colonialism as negotiatory, as a mutuallytransformative and symbiotic encounter, may be designed to shift theposition of the colonized from victim to participant in its structures andprocesses. Christopher Miller has observed how in response to 'the messyhistory of hegemony and conflict', recent trends in anthropology haveturned to 'the far more congenial model of interpretative practice', which,by drawingon Bakhtiniancriticism,is concerned to show how 'dialogue and

45 See for example, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, 'Unpacking the West: How European is Europe?', inRacism,Modernity,dentity,d. by Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood (Cambridge:PolityPress, 1994).46 Imperial yes:TravelWritingndTransculturationLondon:Routledge, I992), p. 6.

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The Postcolonial: onceptualategoryrChimera?polyvocality can be uncovered within apparenthegemonies'. While acknow-ledging dialogueto be 'the most compelling ethicalmodelorthe representationof cultures', Miller cautions that 'such a fantasy depends on a completerewriting (or ignorance) of the material conditions of history [. . .] thatvitiate dialogism within the substance of history'.47It is because so manyauthors of a postcolonial critique melt the solidity of history into air, that Iwant now to considerhow colonialism is theorized within other explanatorysystems.

The perspective on colonialism as a spatial or geographical enterpriseofferedby contemporaryhistorical-materialistgeographersfocuses on how,in the words of David Harvey, 'the world's spaces were deterritorialized,strippedof theirpreceding significations,and then reterritorializedaccordingto the convenience of colonial and imperial administration'.48As bothEdward Soja and Neil Smith have argued,49 he global spatial integrationinitiated by colonialism and completed under imperialism effected theuneven insertion of the colonies into a world economy as the underdevelopedsector,and instituted an internationaldivisionof labourfacilitatinga transferof value fromperipheryto core. To speak, then, of metropolis and colony asinhabiting the same interstitial ground neglects that this territory wasdifferentially occupied and that it was contested space, being the site ofcoercion and resistance, and not of civil negotiation between evenly placedcontenders. This suggests that the besetting problem in the currentpostcolonial rewriting of the past and chronicling of the present is a'culturalism' where the analysis of the internal structuresof texts, enunci-ations, and signifying systems has become detached from a concurrentexamination of social and experientialcircumstances.What, then, is the relationship of a dialogic model to the record ofcolonialism as violent dispossessionachieved by militaryforce and sustainedby institutionalpower, or to received perceptions of the quotidian colonialworld as a place of economic exploitation, social division, and politicalconflict? Such is the theoretical legacy of anti-colonialist analyses, althoughit is now too often forgotten that if Colonial Discourse and PostcolonialTheory are recent, then the critique of colonialism is not. There are, ofcourse, many contemporary critics who do honour the writings producedfrom within liberation movements, which were in ostensible dialogue with

47 Theories f Africans:FrancophoneiteraturendAnthropologyn Africa Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, I990), pp. 27, 8.48 TheConditionfPostmodernityOxford:Blackwell, 1989), p. 264.49 Postmoderneographies:heReassertionfSpacen Critical ocialTheoryLondon:Verso, 1989)and UnevenDevelopment:atureCapitaland theProductionf Space Oxford: Blackwell, I984; repr. Oxford: Blackwell,I990).

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the long anti-colonialist traditions of European socialism.50None the less,the relationship of the newer debate to the prior discussion (which did afterall inaugurate the interrogation of colonialism and imperialism as both aproject of and a constitutive force in Western modernity) is less intimatethan one could expect of a filialrelationship.The exclusion and implicit dismissal can perhaps be attributed to anembarrassmentamongst many prominent contemporary critics at theoret-ical constructionswhich do not conform to their doctrines about discursiveradicalism. If we consider Aime Cesaire's question and response, 'hascolonization really placed ivilizationsncontact?.. ] Not human contact butrelations of domination and submission';51or reflect on Fanon's starkdefinition of decolonization as 'the meeting of two forces, opposed to eachother by their very nature' (The Wretchedf theEarth,p. 30), we can see thatsuch inscriptions of dichotomous conflict would be unacceptable to thosewho set out to dismantle binary structures of domination and dissent andseek to rewrite a historical project of invasion, expropriation, and exploita-tion in terms that are freed from an explanatory system where contest isforegrounded - an agenda which brings to mind FredricJameson'sremarkthat at stakein such moves is 'the rolling back of Hegel and Marx by way ofa conceptual discreditingof contradiction and dialectical opposition'.52A further obstacle for postcolonial theory is that in the vocabularies of thetexts written by the liberation movements, so-called 'nativism' remains amajor term, since in the interests of mobilizing populations against theirforeign rulers, notions of communal ethnic identity were invoked, whileindigenous cultural heritages denigrated and despised by colonialism wereaffirmedas authentic traditions. Such recuperations, which were not madein the interests of discovering uncontaminated origins or claiming ethnicpurity, have retrospectivelybeen repudiated by many contemporary criticsas atavistic and 'essentialist'.I, however, want to suggestthat these strategiesof anti-colonialistwritingcannot be dismissedas a retrogradeand impossibleattempt to retrievean irrecoverablepast.The writings of Frantz Fanon, the French-educated Martinican psychi-atrist who during the I950s actively participated in the struggles of theAlgerian peoples against Frenchcolonialism, have recently been invoked inthe interests of validating a number of incommensurable theoretical

50 See, for example, the section 'Resistance and Opposition' in Said, Culture ndImperialism;azarus,'Disavowing Decolonization', Chrisman, 'Inventing Post-colonial Theory'; Parker; Benita Parry,'Problemsin Current Theories of Colonial Discourse, Oxford iterary eview, (1987), 27-58.51 Discoursen Colonialism1955) (New York:Monthly Review Press, I972), p. I I.52 Postmodernism:r heCultural ogic fLateCapitalismLondon:Verso, 1991), p. 344.

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The Postcolonial:onceptualategoryr Chimera?propositions.53What interestsme is that whereas Fanon didrecommend theconstruction of an insurgent black subjectivity, cultural affirmation beingavowed as a necessary moment in creating a combative position, hisperspective encompassed a future beyond ethnicity. 'This rediscovery',Fanon wrote, 'this absolute valorization almost in defiance of reality,objectivelyindefensive, assumes an incomparableand subjective mportance[... ] the plunge into the chasm of the past is the condition and source offreedom.'54At the same time, Fanon scorned attemptsto create a new blackculture, since he anticipated a time when national cultures would betranscendedby a new universalism.Here, I think, we witness an anti-colonialist stance that is not just areaction againstWestern oppression but, in perceiving decolonization as aproject that 'sets out to change the order of the world' (The Wretchedf theEarth,p. 29), envisions an alternative to dominant western values. Norshould disenchantment with post-independence regimes, which has anim-ated what Appiah calls 'post-nationalist narratives', blind critics to theimport of liberation struggles conducted in the name of nationalism. NeilLazarus55 nd Tim Brennan56have arguedthat this disavowaloverlooks thedistinctionbetween imperialistand anti-imperialistnationalistproblematics,the former being an appropriativenationalism taking the form of 'projectsof unity on the basis of conquest and economic expediency' (Lazarus),whereas the latter are orientated towards the task of reclaiming communityfrom the definitionsof that very power whose presence denied community.

Because theirpreoccupation is with the representationalsystemsof colonial-ism and imperialism,those pursuing a postcolonial critique are able to hailthe vigorous contestation of ideologically contrived Knowledges as tanta-mount to sounding the death-knell of the West's continuing power - andwithout the need to examine the political economy and international socialrelationships of a contemporary late imperialism. As Kenneth Parker haswritten, 'If it is well-nigh impossible to sustain the proposition that the"post" in postcolonial is a temporal one near the end of a millennium inwhich globalneo-colonialisms arerampant,we are reduced to the conclusion

53 See Henry Louis Gates Jr, 'Critical Fanonism', Critical nquiry,17 (I991), 457-70. Amongst suchappropriationsis the tendency to read Fanon as an early theorist of a 'politics of identification'whosework at 'the intersection of anti-imperial politics and psychoanalytic theory' enabled him to diagnose'the neurotic structureof colonialism itself', and whose most importantcontribution to political thoughtis that 'the psychical operates precisely as a political formation'. See Diana Fuss, 'Interior Colonies:Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification', Diacritics, 4 (1994), 20-44 (pp. 20-39).54 TowardsheAfricanRevolution(New York:Grove Press, I967), p. 43.55 'Transnationalismand the Alleged Death of the Nation-State', in Reflectionsnthe Work fEdward aid:SecularCriticism ndTheGravityfHistory, d. by Keith Ansell-Pearson,Benita Parry, andJudith Squires(London:Lawrence and Wishart,forthcoming).56 'The National Longing for Form', in NationandNarration,d. by Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge,I990), pp. 44-70.

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that the prefix is restricted to discursive practices' ('Very Like a Whale,p. I58). In dissenting from this procedure, Laura Chrisman, who observesits metropolitan coinage, maintains that the word postcolonialoccludes orerases the overtly political dynamic contained in the term "anti-colonial"',allowing or implying the 'interchangeabilityof material [... ] with aestheticand interpretive processes', and liberating those practitioners who namethemselves postcolonial 'from the messy business of political alignment anddefinition' ('InventingPost-colonialTheory', p. 2 Io).Aijaz Ahmad has recalled that 'the first major debate on the idea of thepostcolonial took place not during the past few yearsbut some years earlier',and 'not in cultural theory but in political theory, where the object ofinquiry'was 'thepostcolonial state'. In these discussions,he continues, whichwere conducted within the terms of Marxist thought, the categories ofcolonialism and decolonization were used to designate 'identifiablestructuralshifts in state and society' ('The Politics of LiteraryPostcoloniality',p. 5). Itis noticeable that when the postcolonial state has been the subject of anextensive debate in culturalstudies, the issue of power is largely addressedin'superstructural erms',with only a few participantsreferringto the differentand conflicting interests within the political formations.57And it is this lastaspect which is, I suggest, damagingly absent from the current modes oftheorizingpostcoloniality.Instead, the 'postcolonial critique'celebratesglobalismfor the volatilityofthe culturalflows it brings about, while the provenance of such trafficin thecapitalistexpansion of late imperialismis overlooked. This suggeststhat theproblem can be located even furtherback, in the failure to engage with theprior terms, colonialism and imperialism, that the 'postcolonial' is said todisplace or supersede.58Associated with a casual approach to historicalspecificities, registered in the interchangeable usage of colonialism andimperialism in cultural and literary studies, is an indifference to overseasempire's capitalist trajectory,as this passed from mercantilism and planta-tion or settlercolonialism, culminated in the West's accelerated penetrationof the non-capitalist world in the late nineteenth century, and, with theending of formal colonial rule, left the West'sglobal reach intact.It is because imperialism lives on in new forms and perpetuates theexploitation of the Third World, that the addition of 'postcolonial' to thecritical vocabulary remains controversial. Ella Shohat has observed that ifthe postcolonial denotes the closureof a previouscondition, then,by alludingto colonialism 'as a matter of the past' and shutting out 'colonialism'seconomic, political, and cultural deformativetraces in the present', the term

57 See PublicCulture, ( 992).58 For criticisms of this position, see Michael Sprinker's introduction to LateImperialCulture,d. byRoman De La Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995); Benita Parry,'Narrating Imperialism:Nostromo's ystopia', in Reflectionsn the Work fEdward aid forthcoming).

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ThePostcolonial: onceptualategoryr Chimera?has 'depoliticising implications'.59ForMasao Miyoshi and ArifDirlik, one aliterary scholar, the other a historian, the formal independence won bycolonial populations does not automatically imply decolonization andindependence, since an active colonialism continues to operate in the formof transnationalcorporatism.Hence they perceive the usage of'postcolonial'as mystifying, both politically and methodologically, a situation thatrepresents not the abolition, but the reconfiguration of earlier forms ofdomination.60

Indeed, the problems with the connotations of a term that is in now inconstant use are legion, although few sceptics have been as provocative asAnthony Appiah in suggesting that postcoloniality is 'the condition of whatwe might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia:of a relatively smallWestern-style,Western-trainedgroup of writers and thinkers who mediatethe trade in cultural commodities of Western capitalism at the periphery'(p. 348). For Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, the question (one that isrepeatedly asked by agnostic critics) is whether postcolonialism 'deflectsattention from the complexity of disparate situations in "third world"societies' by implying an abstractsingularitythat overlooksspecifichistoriesand differencesin the contemporary imbalances of power. Moreover, theycontend that the privileging in Western academies of 'the experience ofmigration or exile', has meant that '"diaspora" swells to demarcate theentire experience of post-coloniality', and 'the subject-position of the"hybrid" is routinely expanded as the only political-conceptual space forrevisionist enunciation' (pp. 4, 13, I4).But perhaps the 'postcolonial' refers to the passage of societies recoveringfrom the experience of colonialism? Rather than indicating contemporarysocialcircumstances,does it signifya state of mind preoccupiedwith effectinga disengagement from the previous condition? And since, despite formaldecolonization, this experience remainsa potent factorin the formation of itspractitioners, North and South, East and West, does the gesture to anexistentially 'beyond' intimate a therapeutic discourse composed by critics,scholars,and writersin pursuitof intellectualself-fashioning? f so, then howradical is the break from received knowledge? For, as Anne McClintockcontends, its singularity 'effects a recentring of global history around thesingle rubric of European time [... ] reduces the culturesof peoples beyondcolonialism to prepositionalime [... and] signals a reluctance to surrender theprivilegeof seeingthe worldin terms of a singularand ahistoricalabstraction',59 'Notes on the "Post-colonial" , SocialText,3 /32 (1992), 99- I 13.60 'ABorderless World?';'The Postcolonial Aura'. However we could note that a critic who values a

term that is 'fluid, polysemic and ambiguous', and proposes that 'the postcolonial domain' be seen 'interms of the historical trajectoryof societies which have been subjectedto varyingforms of both colonialand neocolonial domination', has insisted that postcolonial societies be differentiatedaccordingto 'theircontinued subjection to metropolitan forces.' See Ferdinand Coromil, 'Can Postcoloniality BeDecolonized? Imperial Banality and Postcolonial Power',PublicCulture, ( 992), 89- o8 (p. o I).

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thereby continuing to locate the whole planet within a European-basedhistorical narrative.61What these demurs suggest is that postcolonial studies cannot be left tothe metacommentaries of literary and cultural critics but also require theanalytical skills of political and social theorists, economists, historians,geographers, anthopologists,and sociologists. Only then will it be possible tostudy the state apparatus, economic organization, social relationships, andcultural forms of actual and differentialpost-independence regimes, and toexamine the structuresof globalism within the contemporary world, wherethe centres of economic, political, and culturalpower remain with a smallnumber of largely Western nation-states.All the same, the word 'postcolo-nial' is, for the present at least, here to stay in both the academic vocabularyand more general usage, since it does after all register the notion of atransition or a threshold. Also, in its name important work has been and isbeing done both in disfiguringcolonialist configurationsand displacing therepresentations colonialism set in place, and in studying the culturalproduction, past and present, of peoples formed by what Edouard Glissantcrypticallycalls 'The Relation', the process of dislocation and detour, and ofself-constitutionor return. Perhapswhat I am suggesting is that we use theword with suspicion, recognizing that the 'after' which some read into it andcelebrate has not yet come; while also acknowledging the potential of atheoretical project designed to effect a paradigm shift in critical theory bywriting the colonial world back into the annals of world history. But only ifits revisionistnarrative holds in place the perception that the passage out ofimperialismrequiresa contest with still entrenchedsystemsof power can thepostcolonial critiquevalidate its claim to being a radical criticalpractice.

61 'The Angelof Progress: The Pitfallsof the Term "Post-colonialism"', SocialText, I/32 (I992),84-98 (repr.in Williams and Chrisman). AijazAhmad has also contended that the conceptual apparatusof postcolonial criticism which periodizes the historiesof colonial worlds 'in triadic terms of precolonial,colonial and postcolonial [...] privileges as primary the role of colonialism as the principal ofstructurationin that history, so that all that came before colonialism becomes its own prehistory andwhatever comes after can only be lived as infinite aftermath' ('The Politicsof Literary Postcoloniality',pp. 6-7).

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