Anxieties, Influences and After Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism.pdf

ANXIETIES, INFLUENCES AND AFTER
Critical Responses to
Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism

ANXIETIES, INFLUENCES AND AFTER
Critical Responses to
Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism
Edited by
Kaustav Bakshi
Samrat Sengupta
Subhadeep Paul

Contents
Preface ix
Postcolonialism: Charting the Uncanny xii
Introduction
SAMRAT SENGUPTA & KAUSTAV BAKSHI 1
THEMES AND VARIATIONS
At the Rendezvous of Conquest: Post-colonial 16
Possibilities and the Anxiety of Inference
KRISHNA SEN
Post-colonial Studies: The New Intellectual Imperialism? 32
NILANJANA DEB
The Debate over Authenticity: How Indian is Indian 43
Writing in English, and How Much Does This Matter?
RIMI B. CHATTERJEE
The Volatile Power-Equation: 61
W(h)ither Postcolonialism?/Whether Neocolonialism?
SUBHADEEP PAUL
TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
Premchand in Our Times: A Postcolonial 83
Reading of Godaan
ANAND PRAKASH
The Flight of the Eunuch: Mapping Homotextualities 91
in South Asian Diaspora Literature
ANIRUDDHA MAITRA
Worldview Publications
An Imprint of Book Land Publishing Co.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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(c) Collections, Worldview Publications, 2009
Individual Essays (c) contributors
ISBN 10:
ISBN 13:
Typreset by Illuminati, Delhi-110007
Published by Sachin Rastogi for Book Land Publishing Co.,
Delhi-110007 printed at D. K. Fine Art Press (P) Ltd., Delhi

The Decent Impulse: A Study of the 114
Father-Daughter Relationship as a Sign of
J. M. Coetzee’s Response to Apartheid
ARPA GHOSH
The Unchartered Territory: A Comparative Study of 128
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Buchi Emecheta’s
The Slave Girl
CHANDRANI BISWAS
Sitting on the Dust, Singing by the Road: 142
‘Writing’ ‘Women’ in the Postcolonial Era
EPSITA HALDER
An Impossible Choice: The Ethical Aporia in 164
The English Patient
KALLOL RAY
Localizing the Global: Anxieties of Preserving 185
National Culture in the Globalized World of
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
KAUSTAV BAKSHI
In Search of Swaraj: A Gandhian Reading of 202
R. K. Narayan’s The Guide
NANDINI BHATTACHARYA
Karnad, South Indian Folk Theatre and Hayavadana 214
PARICHAY PATRA
Prelude to Postcolonial Awareness: Krishnachandra 222
Bhattacharyya’s “Swaraj in Ideas”
PRADIP BASU
Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day: A Postcolonial 242
Feminist Tempest
PRITHA CHAKRABORTY
Postcolonial Detective: The Crisis of European 253
Epistemology in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood
SAMRAT SENGUPTA
‘Lest We Forget’: Colonial Voices and the Great War 266
SANTANU DAS
Society and Political Environment in Shyam Selvadurai’s 286
Cinnamon Gardens
SAYANTAN DASGUPTA
Indian English Poetry in the Wake of Postcolonialism: 307
A New Perspective
SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE SRIWASTAV
Possibility of Negotiation: Postcolonial Impasse in 322
Mahasweta Devi
SHREYA CHAKRAVORTY
The Archetypal Psychomestry of Othering and Violence 334
in The Inheritance of Loss
SISIR KUMAR CHATTERJEE
Ezekiel and His Kind: Reflections on 358
Indian Poetry in English
SOMAK GHOSHAL
To say or not to say: Bildungsroman and Repressed 367
Narratives in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyaya’s Kankaboti
SREEMOYEE BANERJEE
Politics of ‘Nation’ and ‘Community’ in 386
Selected Partition Narratives
SURANJANA CHOUDHURY
Contents | vii
vi | Contents

IN CONVERSATION
Of New Centers and Old Margins: The Limits 394
of the Postcolonial
BILL ASHCROFT IN CONVERSATION WITH DEBASISH LAHIRI
“I think they call me a postcolonial dramatist 405
because I write in English…”
MAHESH DATTANI IN CONVERSATION WITH SATARUPA RAY
Editors and Contributors 410
Preface
Ardent fans of literature, all three of us found our true calling when
we were introduced to postcolonial studies. This is because we could
easily identify with the conditions of postcoloniality and the discussions
surrounding them. We could feel almost palpably the necessity of the
empire writing back. On the other hand, our friends, initially proud
employees of Transnational Companies, started taking away few hours
of our day, almost daily, eternally complaining about their employers
and how they are mindlessly exploited. Quite a few of them had to
leave the country (some left willingly too) and settled abroad, mostly
in the United States. Soon more whinges flowed in through e-mails
and phone calls: how difficult was it to survive in a foreign country,
how inhumanly racist some whites were, unavailability of servants,
total lack of proper community life, inedible canned food, and a life
too fast to keep up. However, these complaints arrived mostly after
three-four months of stay in the US, when the dreamland had
sufficiently deteriorated into perdition. Once the dream paradise was
lost, the homeland left behind, all of a sudden, emerged as a new space
of desire. Again there were quite a few who hung on to the constructed
dream figment that is America, and stayed on, looking upon their
present situation as better than a dark homeland, still lagging behind,
in terms of wealthy living. While all these happened in our
neighbourhood, literary authors, filmmakers, painters, musicians, and
dramatists of the former colonies of American or European origin
kept on arriving in large numbers, wittingly or unwittingly addressing
in their works the present political and socio-cultural environment.
The book world began to be flooded with theoretical discourses and
arguments on Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism. Our bookshelves
too were soon populated with these.
And then, one evening in the Jadavpur University campus, we
viii | Contents

hit upon the idea of this book. But the idea almost died as soon as
it was born; for, our minds were assailed by the disturbing thought
that who was going to publish us. We shared our doubts with Pritha
Chakraborty, Lecturer in English, Durgapur Govt. College. She called
up her friend Anupama Moitra who redirected us to Sachin Rastogi
of Worldview. We were pleasantly surprised that Sachin showed
interest in our project and agreed to take it up. What followed was
a Herculean task of gathering the right kind of essays conforming
thematically to the title of our book. In this, we were whole-heartedly
supported by our teachers who contributed some of their best papers.
Krishna Sen, Nilanjana Deb, Nandini Bhattacharya, Rimi B.
Chatterjee, Epsita Halder, Sayantan Dasgupta and Chandrani Biswas
have all taught us, and were quite glad to be a part of our book. Many
of our scholarly friends working in this field also joined us and put
in their best efforts. Special mention should be made of Suranjana
Choudhury who assisted us in editing and Indranil Mitra who kept
on boosting the project emotionally and morally. Such senior people
like Pradip Basu and Santanu Das whose guidance we seek now and
then also came on board.
We were initally not sure whether people like Bill Ashcroft and
Mahesh Dattani would consent to be a part of this project, owing
to there various academic and creative commitments. While dreaming
of a grand book, one of us casually said one day that what about
bringing in Bill Ashcroft. We laughed at such a proposition, but
somehow we felt that it might happen. By God’s grace, as it were,
Krishna Sen introduced us to Debasish Lahiri, a good friend of
Ashcroft. He was quite excited at the proposal and immediately set
to work. He kept on sending e-mails to the fiercely mobile Ashcroft
who answered the questions from various locations. In fact, Ashcroft’s
interview was one of the earliest papers to arrive. When we managed
to secure Ashcroft’s interview, we became more daring. Looking at
the content page of our book we found that we did not have many
papers on postcolonial drama. We thought of interviewing Mahesh
Dattani. And when it comes to interviewing high profile authors we
can think of none other than Satarupa Ray. She finished her ground
work on Dattani in a fortnight and sent the playwright a long list of
questions. Surprisingly enough, Dattani reverted back with the
answers in a week. It seemed to us that all the battles were finally
won.
It took three-four months for that ‘grand’ idea to germinate, and
in the next five months we spent sleepless nights hurrying our
contributors up and giving them sleepless nights too. Yet, a question
still kept nagging some cynics who repeatedly asked us why another
book on Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism. We humbly asked them
to wait for the book.
December, 2008 Kaustav Bakshi
Kolkata Samrat Sengupta
Subhadeep Paul
x | Preface Preface | xi

Introduction
Samrat Sengupta & Kaustav Bakshi
Colonial past / Neocolonial present
Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow, before embarking on a journey to
Africa, the ‘dark continent’, takes a retrospective glance at Britain’s past.
The seat of the greatest colonial power of the world, he observes, was
‘one of the dark places of the earth’1. What Africa is to Britain today,
Britain was to Rome yesterday:
I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen
hundred years ago – the other day…Light came out of this river since – you
say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like flashing of
lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old
earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday…Sand-banks, marshes,
forests, savages, – precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but
Thames water to drink…cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death, – death
sulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.2
Marlow’s tale underscores the fact that colonization of the powerless by
the powerful, to put it naively, has a history so elaborate that it can
be traced back to the beginning of time. Yet when we talk about
colonization, we compress that history considerably, and tend to fix a
date of its initiation: the expansion of Europe with the ‘noble’ mission
of Christianizing the world and exploration of commercial possibilities
overseas. The process, which officially began, say, in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, never really stopped. A tripartite
restructuring of the world in terms of core/semi-periphery/periphery was
envisaged when parts of Western Europe began establishing economic
bonds with other countries of the globe, spurred by technological
innovation and the rise of market institutions, owing to a long-term

2 | Anxieties, Influences and After
crisis in feudalism. This marks the foundation of the modern World
System, consolidated in its current form in the mid seventeenth century.
This tripartite structure was not demolished after the formal
decolonization of former colonies after the Second World War. While
the locations of the core, semi-periphery and periphery changed, with
the emergence of the United States as a hegemonic power, and the rise
of wealthy industrial countries like Japan, the nature of the relationship
hardly altered.3
Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India, in a way, marks the beginning
of formal colonization. The Portuguese epic poem Os Lusíadas by Luís
Vaz de Camões (sometimes spelled Camoens in English) that celebrates
this grand voyage of the facundo capitão (the ‘eloquent captain’), and
the consequent conquest of India by the Portuguese, is one of the most
significant literary works eulogizing the colonial enterprise. What makes
this poem particularly interesting is that the poet identifies the possibilities
of resistance this grandiloquent Western project might encounter. While
Vasco da Gama is assisted by Venus, he is strongly resisted by Bacchus,
associated with the East, and who deeply begrudges the infringement
of his territories. In fact, several cantos of the poem are devoted to the
various tricks and maneuverings to which Bacchus resorts in order to
oppose Vasco da Gama’s passage to India. However, the Portuguese
captain surmounts all obstacles and lands in the Indian city of Calicut.
Os Lusíadas, therefore, becomes prophetic: it forecasts the revolt the
Empire might rise to against its colonial master. And, as it is now well-
known, that Luís Vaz de Camões was right. The Empire did revolt, and
successfully oust the colonizers. But alas! The colonizers’ physical
disappearance did not really assure independence. An everlasting bond
had been solemnized: Bacchus had been defeated forever.
The colonizer no longer has his national flag flying high in the land
of the colonized. Yet he makes his presence felt so overwhelmingly, and
has entered into the consciousness of the colonial subject in such a way,
that the physical existence of the flag seems redundant. In fact, the
inhabitants of the former colonies still revel in the glory of independence,
hardly realizing their subjugated status. To quote the much-quoted Said:
“(I)mperialism…lingers where it has always been, in a kind of general
cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic and

Introduction | 3
social practices”.4 Therefore, the very use of the term ‘postcolonial’ is
barely unproblematic. The formal dissolution of colonial rule bred high
hopes for the newly independent countries, but it wasn’t long before
that they realized that the West hadn’t yet given up on them – they
were still tied to the West, economically, politically, ideologically. A true
post-colonial age never really came. While countries like India still
celebrate their so-called Independence Day ostentatiously, they are still
handcuffed to the Western powers. That is why, a Nuclear Deal with
the United States, all of a sudden and quite vehemently, jeopardizes the
subsistence of a coalition government in India, when the Left threatens
to walk out, contending that India’s increasing “proximity to the US
is a recipe fiery enough to singe the country’s future and endanger its
sovereignty” (as if India hadn’t lost its sovereignty already).5 This anxiety
of losing sovereignty is not only specific to India, but all the former
colonies of the world (with the exceptions of perhaps Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand, the white settler colonies). Says Jane N. Jacobs:
Formal postcolonial status is a product of imperial cores conceding power over
colonized territories. More often than not structures of neo-colonialism
provided the very preconditions for such gestures of decolonization...
Contemporary resettlements and reterritorialisations undo the geographies of
colonialism. Yet diasporic groups, citizens of the newly independent nations
and indigenous peoples still face the force of neo-colonial formations and live
life shaped by the ideologies of domination and the practices of prejudice
established by imperialism.6
These social, political, ideological or military tie-ups between the
imperial cores and the colonies have transformed every form of culture
in such a way that they have lost their indigenousness: no form of culture
is uncontaminated or homogenous any more. All forms of art –
literature, painting, music, cinema – are informed by this phenomenon.
Hybridity is the order of the day; the possibilities of the nation-state
losing its cultural identity (as well as its political identity) are imminent;
this has bred tremendous anxieties in the former colonies, the diasporic
communities, the host countries harbouring these communities, and so
forth. In fact, globalization of the world has not erased differences;
rather, it has reconstituted and revalidated place, locality and difference.7
The main title of the book Anxieties, Influences, and After takes its

cue, as is evident, from the title of Harold Bloom’s celebrated book The
Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Although Bloom’s project
apparently has no connection with the phenomenon of colonialism/
postcolonialism/neocolonialism, his central thesis that every poet shares
an ambiguous relationship with his predecessors, and is bound to
produce poetry which is derivative of what already exists, can be
extended to the nature of relationship between the colonial master and
the colonized subject. The anxiety of influence a poet suffers from is
scarcely different from the anxiety the colonized subject suffers under
the unavoidable influence of the colonial master’s culture. The colonial
master, on the other hand, is always on guard, for he too resists, rather
consciously, any influence of the colonial subject’s culture upon its own.
But hybridization cannot be resisted successfully. The anxiety of
influence is even more palpable in the present-day world. To quote Arjun
Appadurai:
For with the advent of the steamship, the automobile and the aeroplane, the
camera, the computer and the telephone, we have entered into an altogether
new condition of neighbourliness, even with the most distant from
ourselves…The world we live in now seems rhizomic, even schizophrenic,
calling for theories of rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance
between the individuals and groups on the one hand, and fantasies (or
nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other.8
The Freudian concept of the male child’s oedipal hostility towards the
father, the symbol of authority, yet his irresistible desire to model himself
on that figure, is the root of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence.
The same ambiguous relationship is observed between the colonial
subject (the male child) and the colonial master (the father); the former
while inclined towards overthrowing the master, is deeply influenced by
the same and makes an attempt to shape himself accordingly. This in
turn breeds profound anxieties, both in the colonial subject and the
colonial master. Postcolonial and neocolonial discourses are, therefore,
by default, characterized by similar kinds of anxieties which this book
thoroughly examines. This volume would contribute in a small way to
the gigantic body of works on postcolonialism (and also neocolonialism)
that already exists. The following section makes an attempt to establish
the significance of this venture.

Introduction | 5
Postcolonialism and All That
One of the basic principles of postcolonial thinking is that you really should
not say, “one of the basic principles of ‘X’ is ‘Y’.” Postcolonialism in its
epistemological orientation, stands against what it labels “essentialism”, the
identification of central or core characteristics, particularly of peoples, societies,
and cultures. However adhering to this prohibition makes it difficult to identify
or discuss anything, including postcolonialism.9
In the discourse of postcolonial studies the omnipresence of the shadow
of colonialism is widely acknowledged. The ethically ambiguous position
of postcolonial scholarship is manifest in Mbembe’s expression
‘postcolony’10 that considers the existence of colonial and imperial power
structures in altered form which makes the world a ‘postcolony’. The
gesture of challenging the dominant power structures made by the
postcolonial studies is challenged often with ‘a tendency to read
postcolonial as mere ideology’11 as Neil Lazarus comments based on
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s attack on postcoloniality as “a comprador
intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group
of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities
of world capitalism at the periphery”.12 However, any such essentialization
of postcolonial studies is difficult as it itself by its own making resists
essentialism. Ania Loomba and her co-editors in Postcolonialism and
Beyond suggest that “it charts a path between utopianism and ‘hip-
defeatism’”.13 Justifying the title of the volume, they quote Peter Hulme
in the “Introduction”:
So one of the fundamental ‘beyonds’ suggested by my title is an encouragement
to strip off the straightjacket of those accounts and definitions of postcolonial
studies that simplify and narrow its range to the work of a handful of theorists
and a handful of novelists.14
It is needed to remember that postcolonialism doesn’t specifically and
always speak about a historical period of European colonialism specifically
and always. Colonialism acts as a metaphor of cultural and epistemological
domination where ‘truth value’ is ascribed to any one particular set of
values or knowledge system to hegemonize the other. Postcolonialism
resists any form of absolutism and considers the subject as an effect of

many intersecting discursive domains. For example, Feminist Postcolonial
theory in spite of declaring itself as a part of postcolonial studies criticizes
its dominant modes. The predominance of male-oriented theories in the
postcolonial canon itself is regulated by the logic of colonialism which
is patriarchal and heterosexist in nature. So the necessity for discussions
on feminist postcolonial writing is deeply felt. Reina Lewis and Sara
Mills in the “Introduction” of Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader
comment:
But, as postcolonial studies has become established in the Western academy…we
note that the dynamism of feminism provided for the early development of
critical studies in colonialism, imperialism, race and power has often been
overlooked. It is far more common to see allegiances proffered to the line of
male greats (for example, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha) than
to acknowledge the contributions of women scholars and activists (such as
Angela Davis, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde or bell hooks…”15
Complete freedom from colonial knowledge structures might not be
possible, but postcolonialism attempts to subvert and question those
presuppositions finding out new tools of analysis and collaborating with
other disciplines. The oft considered centre stage of postcolonialism –
the idea of decolonization as proposed by anti-colonial thinkers like
Fanon – has an air of absolutism about it. Therefore the idea of
decolonization as redemptive violence is rejected by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
He intelligently suggests that postcolonialism is a process of transition
from the colonial to the postcolonial as “(i)n an actual historical
context...the colonizer and colonized are often engaged in a hybridizing
encounter”.16 However, postcolonial scholarship cannot remain confined
to the history of colonial encounter particularly and is transhistorical.
Colonialism is important as long as it suggests the influence of European
metahistories to make us think in terms of the binaries of colonizer/
colonized, master/slave, civilized/savage, where one set of terms is
preferred over the other.
With the independence of the former European colonies the hopes
and aspirations of a society ideally free from all forms of domination
reached its zenith. However, as Neil Lazarus realizes, “Independence was
a hoax. It signified a refinement of the colonial system, not its

Introduction | 7
abolition”.17 We observe a new revolutionary Idealism based on Marxist
ideology emerging in the late 60s as an aftereffect of the failure of the
nationalist spirit which however was defeated eventually. The description
of the postcolonial condition with the failure of the ideals of nationalism
and Marxism given by Neil Lazarus where he says, “After 1975, as many
commentators have observed, political sentiment in the West tended to
turn against Nationalist insurgency and revolutionary anti-capitalism”
and which explains eventually “the strong anti-nationalist and anti-
Marxist dispositions of most of the scholars working with postcolonial
studies”18 corresponds to what Sunil Gangopadhyay says in the
introduction of an anthology of Bangla short stories published by
Sahitya Akademy. He says:
The country will be given a new shape; India will occupy the centre stage
of the World. The smugglers will be hanged over the lamp-post, there will
be no caste difference, the difference between the rich and the poor will be
minimized, right to education and health will be equally available to everyone.
But alas! Such golden days never came to the youth of that time…19
The idea of the sovereignty of the nation-state is put into question.
Postcolonialism attempts to question the existing modes of domination
and establishes relation between the past and the present. The failure
of nationalist and Marxist idealism is not only conditioned by the late
capitalism but it is also a product of a certain way of uncritically
appropriating European knowledge/power system in those discourses
that tend to exclude the presence of the other voices in history. The
rise of postcolonial studies, therefore, not only helps us to study the
present postcolonial condition but also in a way identify the ghost of
the Western knowledge system that uncannily haunts the present.
Academic postcolonial scholarship eventually helps determining many
other postcolonialisms in different disciplines and in different countries.
In the discourse of postcolonialism different ways of legitimizing and
normalizing of a particular kind of knowledge system in several other
discourses is measured and contested. The fundamental problem is it
cannot be contained into any one predetermined discipline or
understanding. In the given figure we have tried to produce a rough
family tree of the multiplicity of postcolonial studies which shows the

varied range of disciplines and spatio-temporal zones it refers to.
However, it must be admitted that any such charting would be like
holding infinity in the palm of your hand and can never be complete.
Postcolonialism is still in the process of discovering its boundaries and
there are many areas yet to be explored adequately.
As the chart shows much of the theoretical foundations of postcolonial
scholarship are derived from the west’s own self-criticism of its knowledge
system. The literary and cultural foundation on the other hand, has been
formulated in the productions of the previously colonized nations.
However we believe that some of the theoretical writings must have been
produced by the colonized, yet to be discovered: Dr. Pradip Basu’s
discussion of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s “Swaraj in Ideas” included
in our anthology, is only one instance of indigenous theorization.
The major influences of Postcolonialism are Foucauldian idea of
discourse, Marxist scholarship reflected through British Cultural Studies
and Gramscian-Althusserian ideas of hegemony and ideological state
apparatus, poststructuralism and postmodernism. Lacanian interpretations
of Freudian psychoanalysis considering subject as an effect of language
resists any essentialization of subjectivity and therefore the marginalization
of the other and helps in forming the theoretical base of postcolonialism.
Foucault’s concept of discourse talks about the particular way of
producing and justifying a system of knowledge which normalizes its
basic premise and assumptions and evades questions regarding its
foundation. Man is an effect of a great many such discourses which
produces human subjectivity. Colonialism can be thought of as one such
knowledge system which however should be studied together and in
relation to other similar systems like capitalism or patriarchy which carry
the same legacy of European Enlightenment. Discussing Foucault’s
“What is Enlightenment?” Leela Gandhi questions western epistemological
binary of mature and the immature sanctioned by Kant and shows the
relevance of Foucault’s idea in postcolonial scholarship:
Postcolonial theory recognizes that colonial discourse typically rationalises itself
through rigid oppositions such as maturity/immaturity, civilization/barbarism,
developed/developing, progressive/primitive.20

Introduction | 9
When Derrida talks about ‘differance’, he on the basis of Saussearean
linguistics suggests that language works through a constant process of
difference and deference and the difference of a word gets infinitely
deferred from the other words in the vocabulary. It challenges the
western epistemological obsession with truth and helps in the postcolonial
understanding of the politics of signifier and the formation of ‘meaning’
and attribution of truth-value. Derrida through his reading of Heidegger
deconstructs the western ‘metaphysics of presence’ and talks about an
absence which precedes the ‘Being’. Deconstruction resists any close
reading of the text (considering the ‘textuality’ of any discourse) and
therefore paves way for postcolonial challenges to all hegemonic discourses.
Following critics like Homi K. Bhabha and Robert Young it is hard to
forget that
Postcolonial thought has combined the radical heritage of such theory
[Structuralism and Poststructuralism] with further ideas and perspectives from
tricontinental writers, together with other writers who have emigrated from
decolonized tricontinental countries to the west.21
Another example of this congruence would be the adaptation of
Gramscian idea of hegemony by postcolonialists which helped in the
understanding and theorization of Indian peasant insurgencies. David
Arnold suggests that the concept of hegemony provided Gramsci with
an explanation of why peasants remained disunited and passive.22 The
domination was internalized by the peasants themselves as a part of their
culture and their consciousness. However the Subaltern Studies scholars
like Ranajit Guha or Partha Chatterjee, however, repeatedly talk about
the ‘dominance without hegemony’23 operating amongst Indian subalterns
owing to the presence of a mediating, educated, bourgeois, middle class,
who could not rise above their immediate class interests and give pace
to the subaltern cause to establish a genuine hegemony in the Gramscian
sense. Following British historians (like Christopher Hill or E. P.
Thompson) writing working class history, Ranajit Guha believes that
peasant revolts should not be disengaged from peasant consciousness as
the “risk in ‘turning things upside down’ was indeed so great that he
could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of absent-

mindedness”24. David Arnold quotes Raymond Williams and comments:
‘A lived hegemony’, he argues, ‘is always a process.’ It is not a rigid, all-
encompassing, unchallenged structure, but ‘has continually to be renewed, re-
created, defended, and modified’. There are always non-hegemonic or counter-
hegemonic values at work to resist, restrict and qualify the operations of the
hegemonic order.25
Theorists of British Cultural Studies like Raymond Williams have also
brought into attention the importance of cultural texts which might
throw a new light on history. The Cultural Materialists and New
Historicists engage in the study of literary and cultural texts and extract
the cultural assumptions, biases and politics. Cultural studies have tried
to break free the disciplinary and discursive barriers of scholarship which
tend to normalize itself through a humanist reading of literature and
culture. The Gramscian idea of hegemony should be studied in relation
to Althusserian concept of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)26 ISA’s
function in the normalization of a discourse and resist questions put
forth to its basic premises and assumptions which are culture specific.
The concept of ISA also interprets the failure of a revolution like the
student revolution in France in 1968-69. It describes how we are
hemmed in the postmodern condition where capitalism and cultural
imperialism chain our mind to ideas and structures internalized by us
(refer to Krishna Sen’s and Pritha Chakrabarty’s essays in this book).
This is important for the understanding of the so-called colonized mind,
ideologically dominated by the language and truth-values of the colonizer
and also for the realization of US cultural imperialism which following
western essentialist humanist tradition takes on the guise of liberalism
and markets its ideas to the rest of the world to which we get culturally
bound. Edward Said’s Orientalism27 influenced by Foucault, Gramsci
and Althusser has shown how Europe generated the ‘Orient’ as a
conceptual category in its discourses. This helps the postcolonialists to
understand the colonial power politics of the self and the other, and
also the subaltern studies scholars to study the fragmentariness and
hybrid formation of subaltern consciousness where they retain their
community identities based on tradition, religion, caste, etc without
essentializing them as a binary to the so-called civilized, educated and

Introduction | 11
emancipated.
The myth of a unified subject trying to model himself as an ideal
white, male, Eurocentric Man is demystified repeatedly in postcolonial
discourses. The discussion so far shows the impossibility of determining
the disciplinary boundaries of postcolonial discourse. Postcolonialism is
characterized by a kind of self-effacement which provides a resistance
to the formation of grand narratives. More often it is thought that
postcolonial skepticism might be the plea of the American imperialist
and multinationalist grand narrative who in the guise of a multicultural
model of tolerance actually promotes a universalistic culture that would
redefine the marginal cultures according to the logic of a consumerist
market economy. The varied range of arguments and debates and various
disciplines and subjects postcolonialism encompasses might make one
skeptical about what it really means. In the Introduction of his book
Refashioning Futures David Scott uses a quote from Stuart Hall which
says: “I’m not afraid of positionalities. I am afraid of taking positionalities
too seriously”28. The problem of clearly making its positionality
understood is crucial for postcolonialism. Using Quentin Skinner’s
reading of R. J. Collingwood’s philosophy Scott quotes from the former:
(T)he history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer
a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the
questions as well as the answers have frequently changed.29
Following this proposition it is important to understand how
postcolonialism has evolved and has given birth to its new avatars
depending on the time, place and situation. Simultaneously, therefore,
its object of critical enquiry and set of questions have also changed.
The central logic of this discipline is however the reversal of gaze.
It constantly looks at the peripheral. A characteristic of postcolonial
politics is the politics of becoming the centre. If the focus shifts towards
the periphery it ceases to be marginal any more. It is re-appropriated
and reinstated to its position at the ‘centre’. But every time this happens
a new kind of postcolonialism shall emerge. Postcolonialism shares its
‘post’ with postmodernism insofar as there is always a postponement
of the final moment of truth – a Derridean deference of the meaning.
The identity of the postcolonial studies is therefore relational. It

constantly refers back to a colonial moment with respect to which it
is postcolonial. The colonial knowledge system acts as a philosophical
absence-presence. The irreducible ‘colonial’ in each and every moment
of the ‘postcolonial’ creates or helps to create a new version of
Postcolonialism with respect to the realization of that residual ‘colonial’.
So, the colonial is inextricably assimilated with the postcolonial.
Therefore, we have done away with the famous hyphen.
With the variety of sub-genres and neo-critical perspectives placed
under the banner of Postcolonialism everyday, this branch of study then
becomes a constant substitution of signs in a constant flux of evolving
meanings. Postcolonialism is a system of study that points out towards
a new process of understanding and therefore creates the possibility of
decision making but never does the same actually. This, however, makes
it unfailingly productive. Some of the sub-genres of this discipline are
Orientalism, Diasporic Studies, Globalization andTransnational theories,
Hybridity and Multiculturalism, Postcolonial Feminism and Subaltern
studies. In the chart provided with this essay we have shown the
influence and relation of subaltern studies with postcolonialism only in
order to capture the influence of other western critical theories which
got disseminated into postcolonialism through it and also because of
the status of Subaltern studies as an acknowledged academic programme
organized by a particular group of scholars that, however, later got
dispersed and shared its territory with postcolonialism. The other
disciplines studied under Postcolonial studies we shall avoid discussing
in details as the various articles included in this book shall demonstrate
those theories in action and shall determine the immense potential and
wide range of the subject which shall be put under-erasure/under-
creation every time. The success of the book and also therefore the
discipline shall depend on perjury and not on loyalty as Derrida talks
about the relation between fidelity and betrayal. He explains how he
poses his loyalty to thinkers like Freud or Heidegger through betrayal:
Within the experience of following them there is something other, something
new, or something different which occurs and which I sign. That’s what I call
‘counter-sign’…A counter-signature is this strange alliance between following
and not-following, confirming and displacing; and displacing is the only way

Introduction | 13
to pay homage, to do justice. If I just repeat, if I interpret ‘following’ as just
repetition, following in a way, just repeating not animating, it’s another way
of betraying.30
The contributors of this book have tried to pay homage and to enrich
the field of postcolonial studies through this process of counter-signature
where they have repeatedly questioned, defied and thus recreated the
canon as it is formed in the academic west. Apart from studying the
texts and issues already included as a part of postcolonial pedagogy,
readings of Mahasweta Devi’s fiction or Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s
novel have created indigenous versions of postcolonialism as well as
unearthed hidden potential of such possibilities in bhasha literatures of
Indian subcontinent. Kaustav Bakshi’s study of a popular Hindi film
has also exposed the cultural legacy of colonial assumptions still scattered
in popular discourses of Indian culture and society. Interdisciplinarity
of postcolonialism is repeatedly experienced in several articles of the
book which explores the discipline from philosophical, historical or
anthropological approaches. Above all we hope this book shall add on
to and curve a new path for the immense potential of this field which
we believe is yet to be realized.
Notes
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, edited by S. Satpathy, (New Delhi:
Worldview, 2001), 5.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and
the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New
York: Academic Press, 1974) and The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New
York Press, 2000).
4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus,
1993), 8.
5. Seema Sihori, “What’s There to Hyde, Really?” in Outlook, September 3,
2007, 42.
6. Jane M. Jacobs, “(Post)Colonial Spaces”, in The Spaces of Postmodernity:
Readings in Human Geography, edited by M. J. Dear and S. Flusty (Oxford
and Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 193.

7. See M. J. Watts, “Mapping meaning, denoting difference, imagining
identity: dialectical images and postmodern geographies”, in Geografiska
Annaler 73B (1991), 7-16.
8. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy” (1990) in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader,
edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993), 325.
9. Philip Carl Salzman, “Postcolonialism” in Encyclopedia of Anthropology,
edited by H. James Birx (New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd., 2006), 1912.
10. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (CA: University of California Press,
2001) discussed in The Postcolonial Challenge by Couze Venn (London:
Sage Publications, 2006), 4.
11. See Neil Lazarus, “Introducing postcolonial studies” in Postcolonial Literary
Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 5.
12. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy
of Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149.
13. See Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed
Esty, “Beyond What? An Introduction” in Postcolonialism and Beyond,
edited by Ania Loomba et al. (Duke University Press, 2005), 4.
14. Peter Hulme quoted in Ania Loomba et al, “Beyond What? An Introduction”,
4.
15. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, “Introduction” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1.
16. Dipesh Chakraborty, “Introduction” in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial:
India and Pakistan in Transition, edited by Dipesh Chakraborty, Rochona
Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2007), 3.
17. Neil Lazarus, “Great Expectations and after: The Politics of Postcolonialism
in African Fiction” in Social Text, No. 13/14, Winter-Spring, 1986, 55.
18. See Neil Lazarus, “Introducing postcolonial studies”, 5.
19. Translated by me from Sunil Gangopadhyay “Bhumika”(Introduction) in
Bangla Golpo Sankalan Volume IV: An anthology of Bengali short stories,
compiled and edited by Sunil Gangopaphyay (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy,
2006), 1. The original Bengali text from which the translation is made
is as follows:
Notunbhabe desh gora hobe, bharot abar jogoto shobhay sreshto ashon
lobe Shomosto chorakarbarider phashite jhuliye dewa hobe rastar lampposte,

Introduction | 15
e desher nagarikder modhey sreni boishommo thakbe na, dhoni o doridrer
modhey byabodhan ghuchiye ana hobe, shiksha o shastho-parishebar
shoman odhikar pabe shomosto manush. Kintu hay, totkalin kishor-
kishorira temon shonali din dekhar sujog payni.”
20. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 32.
21. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001) 67-68. Also consult Simon Gikandi, “Poststructuralism and
postcolonial discourse” in Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil
Lazarus, and Eleanor Byrne, “Postmodernism and the postcolonial world”
in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, edited by Stuart Sim
(London and New York: 2005) for further ideas on postcolonialism’s
relation with postmodernist and poststructuralist critical theories.
22. See David Arnold, “Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India” in Mapping
Subaltern Studies, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi (London and New York:
Verso, 2000), 24-49.
23. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in
Colonial India (London: Harvard University Press, 1997).
24. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter Insurgency” in Selected Subaltern
Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York
and London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45.
25. David Arnold, “Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India”, 36.
26. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes
towards an Investigation” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
translated by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127-86.
27. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).
28. Stuart Hall, “Politics, Contingency, Strategy” quoted in David Scott,
Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.
29. Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics” in Meaning and Context: Quentin
Skinner and His Critics, edited by James Tully; quoted in David Scott,
Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, 6.

At the Rendezvous of Conquest: Post-colonial
Possibilities and the Anxiety of Inference
Krishna Sen
There is room for us all at the rendezvous of conquest.
– Aimé Césaire, “Return to My Native Land”1
“Uhuru [Swahili for “Freedom”]!”2 Aimé Césaire’s black Caliban cries
in Une Tempête (A Tempest) as he faces off against an exploitative white
Prospero on a Caribbean island, in a classic moment of the empire
writing back. The truest freedom that this Caliban ultimately wrests
for himself is, of course, the freedom to define himself in terms
different from the hegemonic colonial discourse of otherness and
marginality that has been imposed upon him. His final words to
Prospero figure the attempt to recuperate the colonised Self (or in
Ngugi’s terms, to decolonise the mind)3 in yet another paradigmatic
post-colonial gesture of resistance:
Understand what I say, Prospero:
For years I bowed my head […]
But now it’s over! [...]
I don’t give a damn for your power
or for your dogs or your police or your inventions!
[…] you lied to me so much
about the world, about myself,
that you ended up by imposing on me
an image of myself:
underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent
that’s how you made me see myself!
And I hate that image … and it’s false!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I also know myself. (64)

This reference to the psychic violence inherent in colonial
strategies of representation is a startling anticipation of Said. Caliban
can come to this perception because he has finally seen through the
so-called civilising mission of European imperialism – “You didn’t
teach me a thing. Except to jabber in your own language so that I
could understand your orders” (27). His subversive self-awareness
extends to his equally contemptuous rejection of the apparently
‘benevolent’ colonisers Stephano and Trinculo (as opposed to the
overtly malevolent Prospero) – they are befriending him, he realises,
only to hoodwink him into coming with them to Europe, where they
would make money by exhibiting his negroid body as a caricature
of humanity like a grotesque museum piece (a practice prevalent in
Shakespeare’s London).
However, instead of being alienated like Shakespeare’s Caliban
who used the coloniser’s language only to curse, this Caliban
assertively deploys the acquired tongue to rehabilitate his own identity
and to re-legitimize indigenous epistemologies. He invokes his native
thunder god Shango to neutralise Prospero’s raising of the tempests,
and tries to tell Prospero that, according to his beliefs, nature is more
than a mere passive receptacle for the exhibition of Eurocentric
technological mastery (Prospero’s ‘magic’) – “[…] you think the earth
itself is dead. […] It’s so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk
on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror.
I respect the earth because I know it is alive […]” (12). Moreover,
this Caliban claims equality, over and above freedom, by stubbornly
addressing Prospero with the French familiar appellation ‘tu,’ as
opposed to the honorific ‘vous.’ The more compliant Ariel of
Shakespeare’s play. who in this play is a mulatto slave conniving at
Prospero’s nefarious designs for his own advancement, obsequiously
maintains the hierarchical ‘vous.’ He “arrests” Caliban on Prospero’s
command (57), and chortles gleefully as he watches Caliban labour:
I shall be the thrush that launches
its mocking cry
to the benighted field-hand
“Dig, nigger! Dig, nigger!” (60)
At the Rendezvous of Conquest | 17

18 | Krishna Sen
This Ariel is not only a type of the culturally ambivalent mestizo
but also a prototype of the comprador who colludes with the
‘métropole.’
Russell West-Pavlov has raised the point whether, rather than
“writing back” to the looming interpellative shade of Shakespeare,
Césaire has in Une Tempête “not simply confirmed stereotypes of the
marginality and parochiality of Third World literatures,”4 presumably
in their perpetual citationality. Yet, despite its primary purpose of a
revisionary re-reading of Shakespeare, however, Une Tempête has
famously sought to transcend the narrow confines of a racialized
‘writing back.’ This has been achieved not merely through the
indigenising of Caliban and Ariel, but more specifically through
Caliban’s opening cry of “Uhuru!,” as well as through his defiant
rejoinder to Prospero towards the end of Act I. Refusing to accede
to the name by which he is designated by the conqueror/slaveholder
Prospero, he declares polemically – “Call me ‘X’! […] Like a man
[…] whose name [i.e. history] has been stolen” (15). “Uhuru” conjures
up Jomo Kenyatta and the ethos of pan-Africanism. The invoking of
Malcolm X (and by implication, New World negro slavery as well as
the larger African diaspora in later times) subsumes within the scope
of the play the transnational “Black Atlantic” addressed by Paul
Gilroy,5 as also the whole (apparently liberatory) counterdiscourse of
“la Négritude” that Césaire formulated along with Léopold Senghor
and Léon Gontian Damas. That negritude was part of the project of
the play is evident from the original French subtitle – “Adaptation
pour un théâtre nègre” (the valency of “théâtre nègre” is only
imperfectly captured by the usual English translation, “Black theatre”).
The ideal of negritude has not gone uncensored, however, even among
its own constituency. In an important critique, Maryse Condé has
questioned whether a black aesthetic predicated on the paradigm of
negritude does not in fact represent a capitulation to Eurocentric
cultural hegemony (the construction of the ‘negro’) rather than a
refutation of it.6
It is surely significant, then, that there is no clear victor in Une
Tempête. Prospero’s grand masque of Roman deities at the wedding
of Ferdinand and Miranda (gesturing towards the deliberate theatricality

of imperial power) is rudely disrupted by Caliban’s invocation of the
tribal trickster god, Eshu - but in the end both Prospero and Caliban
remain trapped on the island. The Epilogue ironically inverts the
colonial binary of nature and nurture. An aged and enfeebled Prospero
is unable to authorise his writ and watches the island slips back to
its natural state, overrun with untamed vegetation and wild animals
– “opossums […]. Peccarys, wild boar, all this unclean nature […].
It’s as though the jungle was laying siege to the cave. […] But it’s cold!
Odd how the climate’s changed […]”(68). One wonders, though, what
sort of assertion of resurgent indigeneity this regression to primitivism
is meant to be. In any case, the textuality of the play undercuts its
message – it is an Anouilh-like ‘jeu’ in which a Master of Ceremonies
or “Le Meneur du jeu” calls up the ‘characters,’ including the wind
and the storm, to play their parts. Is this the failure of both colonial
discourse and postcolonial resistance – the one to securely dominate,
and the other to effectively liberate?
As this analysis reveals, Une Tempête encodes both the possibilities
as well as the problematics of the post-colonial enterprise. In terms
of the possibilities, it goes well beyond the kind of one-dimensional
‘writing back’ that is forever doomed to re-inscribing imperial
discourse in the very act of inscribing its counter-discursive stance.
Through the simple strategy of re-locating Shakespeare from the
beginnings of imperialism to the post-imperial phase, thereby opening
up a space to include the ideology of the Black Atlantic, the play,
inserts into its Shakespearean matrix the complex social, political and
cultural consequences of imperialism – politicisation of the subaltern,
the contestation of elitist epistemologies, and nationalism on the one
hand, and comprador collusion, hybridity and diaspora on the other.
Further, the play gestures towards the epistemic violence of imperial
strategies of representation – othering, museumisation, colonial
theatricality and colonial amelioration discourses. Then again, the
subtle incorporation of Black Atlantic ideology introduces an Afrocentric
perspective that significantly extends the parameters of Saidian
Orientalism. But on another level, the play remains susceptible to
neocolonial interventions in its falling back on nativist stereotypes as
the paradigm of negritude, and in its inability to construct an

20 | Krishna Sen
alternative model of African selfhood beyond tribalism (the Yoruba
deities Shango and Eshu) – it simply reverses the nature/nurture
binary. Une Tempête is thus post-colonial both in its strengths and in
its weaknesses. What it does establish is the fact that the colonial
encounter was no simple opposition of black and white, or good and
evil, but an extremely complex cluster of social and ideological
formations with long-term historical consequences – what might be
designated as a volatile node of multiply intersecting experiential
trajectories in which all parties (including, as we see in hindsight, the
conquerors too) were crucially affected and changed. In other words,
the colonial encounter was certainly not monologic (domination), nor
merely dialogic (resistance/writing back) – it was heteroglossial.
That post-colonial theory at its inception unduly flattened out the
multi-stranded nature of this striated heteroglossia, that there was
more to the colonial relationship than mere oppositionality, that there
were crucial differences between settler and conquered colonies, and
that the term ‘post-colonial’ itself is contentious in not only eliding
these complexities but also forever ‘locking’ the former colonies of
the imperial European powers into a very narrow segment of their
long histories – all these charges, and the numerous critical storms
raised by such totalizations, have triggered a series of refinements in
post-colonial theory. This is evident from the successive developments
and amplifications of post-colonialism as a heuristic and interpretive
tool in the work of one of its founding fathers, Bill Ashcroft7 The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
(1989) was seminal in its inverting of the centre-margin binary with
respect to cultural productions in colonized societies, but it nevertheless
retained a strong sense of the centre as the ground of the margin’s
counter-representation of itself:
[…] the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial
world to the ‘margin’ turned upon itself and acted to push that world
through a kind of mental barrier into a position from which all experience
could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious. Marginality thus
became an unprecedented source of creative energy.8

Contrary to popular belief, national ‘differences’ were acknowledged
(Empire Writes Back 17), but there was perhaps too much emphasis
on excavating overarching similarities deriving from the common
trauma – “[…] many thematic parallels across the different literatures
in english [the authors’ special term for colonial Englishes]”9. Path-
breaking though it was, then, The Empire Writes Back was limited in
its scope, focusing only the cultural products of colonial resistant
discourses, and not the socio-political processes involved in the
formation of those discourses. Though he continues to foreground
culture as the special terrain of his kind of post-colonial analysis,
Ashcroft has become increasingly receptive to the specificities and the
material conditions of the different experiences of post-colonial
cultural formation. More important, he has extended that early
parameter of post-colonial agency as simply a ‘writing back.’ Post-
Colonial Transformation (2001) carries forward the trope of redemptive
cultural practice by unconventionally de-linking post-colonial culture
from the moment of political colonisation, and depicting that culture
as a rhizomic network of (often subversive) transformational strategies
rather than as a linear chain of hegemonic influences flowing from
the coloniser to the colonised:
Post-colonial discourse is the discourse of the colonized, which begins with
colonization and doesn’t stop when the colonizers go home. The post-
colonial is not a chronological period, but a range of material conditions and
a rhizomic pattern of discursive struggles […].10
Colonial hegemony is, according to Ashcroft, ‘countered by the
culturally indwelling forces of habitation’ and ‘horizonality’11, which
are now offered as markers of innate native agency. ‘Habitation’
signifies the sustaining and mediating capacities of ‘the local’ that may
be occluded but cannot be obliterated, and that interpolate the
interpellating imperial cultures in a variety of subversive ways:
‘horizonality’ gestures towards the procreative power of indigenous
cultures to adapt and appropriate and set new horizons for themselves
even when they are forcibly deflected from their natural paths of
development. In On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial
Culture (2001) Ashcroft further extends his argument to embrace both

22 | Krishna Sen
sides of the colonial divide. Distinguishing between the political
interpretation of colonial resistance as ‘opposition,’ and the cultural
interpretation of colonial resistance which he identifies as
‘transformation,’ Ashcroft goes on to argue that the post-colonial
paradigm of transformation is double-edged in inflecting the cultures
of both the erstwhile colonizer and the erstwhile colonized:
It is transformation that gives these societies control over their future.
Transformation describes the ways in which colonized societies have taken
dominant discourses, transformed them and used them in the service of their
own self-empowerment. More fascinating, perhaps, post-colonial
transformation describes the ways in which dominated and colonized
societies have transformed the very nature of the cultural power that has
dominated them. This is nowhere more obvious than in literary and other
representational arts, but it remains a strategic feature of all cultural practice.
That is why cultural influence circulates, rather than moves in a straight line
‘downward’ from the dominant to the dominated.12
‘Transformation’ is thus complemented by ‘circulation’ of cultural
practice, the ultimate consequence of this being the evolution of a
‘global culture’13. It is interesting how this percolation of the insurgent
energies of the local into the metropolitan is offered in On Post-
Colonial Futures as an alternative to the political and economic
discourses of neo-colonial globalization signified by the Eurocentric
(primarily American) cultural/commercial/discursive domination of
the only apparently decolonized Third World, most famously articulated
in Hardt and Negri’s Empire which was published a year earlier in
2000.14 In a recent essay on globalization as transnationalism (seen
as an inevitable corollary of post-coloniality) rather than as neo-
colonialism – “Globalization, the Transnation and Utopia” – Ashcroft
re-affirms the liberatory nature of post-colonial cultural discourse and
the current (according to him) metamorphosis of the ‘global’ into the
‘glocal.’ Claiming that the social sciences had become “hopelessly
mired in the classical narrative of modernity, in dependency theory,
and in centre-periphery models,” and that they could only be
redeemed as it were by postcolonial theory’s emphasis on ‘cultural
practices,’ Ashcroft goes on to valorise “two dynamic patterns of
interaction accounting for the nature of global flows, the transformation

of the global by the local, and the circulation of the local in the
global.”15
As Ashcroft’s example illustrates, from its formal inception in the
1980s, post-colonialism (more than any other postmodern theoretical
formulation) has not remained static, but has sought (often inadequately
or contentiously) to address the entire heteroglossia of European
imperialism and its aftermath – expectedly giving rise to the charge
that it signifies too many different things to too many people without
really being inclusive enough – what might be dubbed the anxiety of
inference. In “Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance, or Two
Cheers for Nativism,” the West Indian critic Benita Parry has
stretched the terms of the debate from the material to the psychological.
She argues that simply identifying the post-colonial with a rhetoric
of resistance does not wash away the deep scars embedded in the
national psyche as a result of several centuries of exploitative
hegemony, the more so since the demeaning colonial construction of
the native in many cases continues to govern in a damaging way the
native’s self-perception. Parry’s argument is a variant of Kwame
Nkrumah’s celebrated charge that the term ‘post-colonial’ emits a false
optimism because it masks the pernicious reality of neo-colonialism,
in terms of cultural, economic, and sometimes even (covert) political
domination. Palestinian critic Ella Shohat’s extremely polemical essay,
“Notes on the Post-colonial” attempts to expose two fallacies implicit
in the term – first, that it lumps together the white ex-colonized such
as Australians and Canadians with the black, brown and yellow ex-
colonized from Asia and Africa, as being equally disinherited and
marginalized, which is absolutely not the case; and second, that it
ignores people who have not technically been conquered, but who are
virtually colonized within their own county, like the Palestinians of
the West Bank.16 Another salvo in the politics of the post-colonial has
been fired by ‘liberated’ Eastern European intellectuals after the
collapse of the former Soviet Union – they contend that the
identification of colonization solely with nineteenth-century European
imperialism places under erasure the pain of the ‘colonized’ peoples
of the Balkans and the Baltic under Soviet ‘occupation.’17

24 | Krishna Sen
To address the multi-dimensionality of all these various form of
imperialism(s), post-colonial theory has necessarily become
interdisciplinary, moving beyond its initial concern with literary and
cultural representation and production. From its early theorizations
about a simplistically resistant ‘writing back’ and a uni-directionally
hegemonic Saidian Orientalism, to the dialogism of Bhabha’s ‘colonial
mimicry’,18 and through Marxist theorizing on class and capital as
crucial aspects of colonialism (Robert J.C. Young has argued that
“postcolonial theory operates within the historical legacy of Marxist
critique” and that this “remains paramount as the fundamental
framework of postcolonial thinking”),19to post-structuralist
deconstruction of the raced and gendered discourses of imperialism,20
the ambit of ‘the post-colonial’ has broadened out exponentially. The
field now covers post-colonial discourse theory, post-colonial cultural
studies, and post-colonial ethnicity and diaspora studies on the one
hand, and ‘Empire studies’ of the various colonial ‘centres’ on the
other,21 addresses issues of race, class and gender, and spans
disciplines such as the social sciences, literature, the fine arts, and
the histories of science and medicine. But interdisciplinarity, crossing
as it does the fault lines between different academic approaches, brings
with it its own set of tensions. As Homi Bhabha puts it –
Interdisciplinarity is the acknowledgement of the emergent sign of cultural
difference produced in the ambivalent movement between the pedagogical
and performative address. It is never simply the harmonious addition of
contents or contexts that augment the positivity of a pre-given disciplinary
or symbolic presence.22
Interdisciplinarity, in other words, fundamentally changes the contours
of the primary argument it inflects.
Expectedly, then, the broadening of the terms of reference of the
post-colonial have transmuted some of its basic contours, moving
from predominantly cultural formations to, say, class formations.
These rhizomic transactions have also affected the nomenclature of
post-colonialism. Following a growing concern with the material
contexts of the politics and culture of imperialism, as well as the

extending of the concept of imperialism to that of ‘Empire’ (pace Hardt
and Negri), the chronologically grounded ‘post-colonial’ has transited
to the more densely packed notion of the ‘postcolonial,’ as a site of
predominantly ideological rather than historical perspectives. The
authors of the first edition of The Empire Writes Back with its
essentialist rubric of literary resistance could hardly have anticipated
that the theoretical framework that they were among the earliest to
inaugurate would, by 2006, inflect the sociology of Youth Studies to
produce analyses such as “European Youth Cultures in a Post-colonial
World: British Asian Underground and French Hip-hop Music
Scenes.” Referring to Said, Spivak, Gilroy and Stuart Hall, the author,
Rupa Huq, claims that “the discursive treatment of the two cases of
expressive youth culture that follows will serve as examples of much
of this post-colonial theorizing” in its concern with “immigrant youth
from past colonies in the two countries.”23 Striking indeed is what
Antoinette Burton calls “the pressure of postcolonial social, political,
and demographic realities on the production of modern knowledge”24
– Huq’s essay stands as a startling but relevant example. ‘Postcolonialism’
(without the hyphen) now functions practically as an epistemology
rather than as merely an interpretive tool.
It is arguably these epistemological possibilities of ‘the postcolonial’
(as contrasted with ‘the post-colonial’) that have led to the scramble
to annex the term for subjectivities and conditions which are
tangentially or indirectly, rather than immediately and causally, related
to nineteenth century European imperialism – thus making
postcolonialism (as the approach is now almost universally called) the
fastest growing theoretical domain in current times. One such
endeavour may be dubbed the ‘postcolonialisation’ of America. In
Postcolonial Theory and the United States, Amritjit Singh and Peter
Schmidt have argued that “(t)he US may be understood to be the
world’s first postcolonial and neo-colonial country” (emphasis in the
original), and that, more crucially, the experiences of its African
American, Native American, and early Asian immigrants can only be
understood in terms of an internal Anglo ‘colonization’ that equalled
European imperialism in its exploitative harshness and fuelled

26 | Krishna Sen
comparable stratagems of resistance.25 Similarly, Richard King, the
editor of Post-Colonial America, has justified the application of the
term in American Studies as being most expressive of the “change,
decentering and displacement” of America’s ethnic minorities.26
Anticipations of postcolonial theoretical categories, such as the
Manuel and Poslun’s concept of the ‘Fourth World’ in 1974 have been
used to delineate the experiences of African Aborigines and Canadian
Inuits.27 While the notion of the ‘Fourth World’ has been contested
by some critics with respect to aboriginal experience (see Nilanjana
Deb’s article below), it has been found useful in analysing the
experience of ethnic minorities by others, such as Bernd Peyer for
example.28 But the idea of interpreting colonial American literature
in postcolonial terms has been strongly contested by American Studies
practitioners themselves. Lawrence Buell, for instance, has argued that
one cannot apply a trope such as ‘writing back’ even to an American
writer of the colonial period; speaking of Lee Fenimore Cooper, he
says that Cooper
played the postcolonial to the extent that he deferred to Scott’s plot forms,
but he played the imperialist to the extent that his own narratives reflected
and perpetuated the romance of American expansionism [to the exclusion of
the Native American].29
While Ethnic Studies have clearly made productive use of some of
the master tropes of postcolonial theory such as hegemony, resistance,
appropriation, cultural empowerment and so on, yet another
contemporary application of postcolonial insights has been in the area
of Subaltern Studies, both as it originated in India as the Subaltern
Studies Collective, and as it flowered in Latin America as Latin
American Subaltern Studies. The progenitor of Subaltern Studies,
Ranajit Guha, has described the movement as both uniquely South
Asian and uniquely postcolonial.30 Characterising Subaltern Studies
as ‘necessarily postcolonial’(emphasis in the original) rather than as
“simply yet another version of Marxist/radical history,” Dipesh
Chakrabarty has drawn careful parallels between the two theoretical
approaches in his excellent and exhaustive essay, “Subaltern Studies
and Postcolonial Historiography”:

With hindsight, it could be said that there were broadly three areas in which
Subaltern Studies differed from the “history from below” approach of
Hobsbawm or Thompson (allowing for differences between these two
eminent historians of England and Europe). Subaltern historiography
necessarily entailed (a) a relative separation of the history of power from any
universalist histories of capital, (b) a critique of the nation-form, and (c) an
interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge (hence of the
archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge). In these differences,
I would argue, lay the beginnings of a new way of theorizing the intellectual
agenda for postcolonial histories.31
These points of intersection and convergence have been further
explored in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial edited by
Vinayak Chaturvedi.32
The third major extrapolation of postcolonialism in recent times,
deriving from the global/glocal dialectic of the spread and movement
of populations following nineteenth century imperialism and its
aftermath are Diaspora Studies, and the attendant issue of hybridity
and multiculturalism. Diaspora studies came into their own from the
mid-1980s as a province of the social sciences (but with a strong
literary component because of the concern with representation),
possibly as a response to increased migration, as well as to the (often
contentious) discourses and policies of multiculturalism in plural
societies (this very pluralism being a direct consequence of imperialism)
such as Canada (from as early as the mid-nineteen seventies), and then
Britain, the United States, Australia, and western Europe. Broadly
speaking, diaspora is regarded either as primarily a demographic
phenomenon or as primarily a psychological and/or cultural
phenomenon, though the categories often overlap. William Safran
(1991) and Robin Cohen (1997)33 categorise it as a demographic
phenomenon in their typologies of diasporas, with the typologies
themselves unsettling the notion of diaspora as a uniform condition.
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), while taking demographics as
its point of departure, radically extends the aesthetic and cultural
parameters by staging the Black diaspora, not as dispersal merely, but
as paradigmatic of a cultural politics transcending “both the structures
of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national

28 | Krishna Sen
particularity.”34 The theorist par excellence of diaspora as the
(psychological/cultural) site of displaced consciousness fractured by
hybridity is, of course, Homi Bhabha, particularly in The Location
of Culture (1994) – the point of the title being that the diasporic
subject has no ‘home,’ but can only inhabit a succession of ‘locations’
as in Rushdie’s “Imaginary Homelands” or Agha Shahid Ali’s “India
always exists off the turnpikes of America.” A more recent manifestation
of diaspora studies and of postcolonialism generally, is transnationalism
as academic disciplines increasingly engage with what Arjun Appadurai
calls ‘global ethnoscapes,’ featuring the new postcolonial/globalized
transmigrant who operates in more than one culture simultaneously.35
For example, in May 1990 the New York Academy of Sciences
sponsored a research seminar to study “the multi-faceted impact of
[…] mass movements on both sending and receiving societies” in the
era of globalization, and to probe the consequent re-inflection of
“concepts or terms such as melting pot, integration, assimilation,
syncretism, reinterpretation, pluralism, diffusion, cultural exchange
and acculturation […]. ” The proceedings were published in 1992 (i.e.
two years before The Location of Culture) as Towards a Transnational
Perspective on Migration:36 the three editors followed this up in 1994
with a study of the impact of diaspora on the traditional concept of
the nation, entitled Nations Unbound.37
Clearly, these new directions in postcolonial studies have
problematized traditional concepts of society, class and nation – a far
cry from ‘writing back’ or even the cultural hegemony of Orientalism.
The future possibilities of this infinitely elastic (or so it seems)
discourse are dizzying and the attendant anxieties of referentiality and
relevance are bound to be acute. But for the moment one can only
echo Aimé Césaire – “There is room for us all at the rendezvous of
conquest.”
Notes
1. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of A Return to My Native Land (Cahiers d’un retour
au pays natal, 1956). Introduced and translated by Mireille Rosello, with
Annie Pritchard (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995), 127.

2. Aimé Césaire, Une Tempête, d’après “La tempête” de Shakespeare - Adaptation
pour un théâtre nègre (Paris: Seuil, 1969); translated by Richard Miller as
A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest – Adaptation for a Black
Theatre (Rev.ed.; New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1992),
11. All page references in parentheses from this play are taken from this
edition.
3. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986).
4. Russell West-Pavlov, Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the
Teaching of Literary Studies (Paris: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2005), 83.
5. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(London: Verso, 1993).
6. Quoted in West-Pavlov, op. cit.
7. I am referring to the following texts – Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and
Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Bill Ashcroft, Post-
Colonial Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Bill
Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture
(London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001); Bill Ashcroft,
“Globalization, theTransnation and Utopia” in Narrating the (Trans)Nation:
The Dialectics of Culture and Identity, edited by Krishna Sen and Sudeshna
Chakravarti (Kolkata: Dasgupta, 2008), 1-24.
8. Ashcroft, Empire Writes Back, 12.
9. Ibid., 27.
10. Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, 12.
11. Ibid., 15-16.
12. Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture, 1.
13. Ibid., 2
14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. & London:
Harvard Uuniversity Press, 2000).
15. Ashcroft, “Globalization, the Transnation and Utopia”, 1-2.
16. Parry’s and Shohat’s essays are both available in Padmini Mongia ed.
Contemporary Postcolonial Theory : A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
17. See David Moore, “Is the ‘Post-’ in ‘Post-Colonial’ the ‘Post-’ in Post-
Soviet? Towards a Global Post-Colonial Critique,” PMLA, January 2001,
16:1.
18. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial

30 | Krishna Sen
Discourse” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 121-
131.
19. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 6.
20. A cardinal example is the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
21. I am thinking of studies of ‘Englishness’ as constituted by the contingencies
of the imperial project, as for example Colin Holmes John Bull’s Island:
Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988);
Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Ian Baucom’s
Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Location of Identity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999); and David Rogers and John Mcleod
eds., The Revision of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2004).
22. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., 163.
23. Rupa Huq, “European Youth Culture in a Post-colonial World: British
Asian Underground and French Hip-hop Music Scenes” in Global Youth?:
Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds edited by Pam Nilan and Carles Feixa
(London: Routledge, 2006, 14-31), 16-17.
24. Antoinette Burton, “On the Inadequacy and Indispensability of the
Nation” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation
edited by A. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, 1-23), 2.
25. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (eds.), Postcolonial Theory and the United
States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2000), 3-69.
26. Richard King (ed.), Post-Colonial America (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 2000), 7.
27. George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality.
With an Introduction by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Don Mills: Collier-Macmillan
Canada, 1974).
28. Bernd Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary Writers in Ante-Bellum
America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
29. Lawrence Buell, “American Literary Emergnce as a Postcolonial
Phenomenon” in American Literary History Vol. IV (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992, 411-442), 435.
30. Ranajit Guha, “Subaltern Studies: Projects for our Time and Their
Convergence,” in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader edited by
Ileana Rodriguez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, 35-46), 42.
31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,”

in Nepantla: Views from South, I:1, 2000 (9-32), 10 and 15.
32. Vinayak Chaturvedi ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial
(London: Verso, 2000).
33. William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Society: Myths of Homeland and
Return.” Diaspora 1:1, 1991, 83-98; Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An
Introduction (London: University College London Press, 1997).
34. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(London: Verso, 1993), 19.
35. Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for
Transnational Anthropology”, in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 48-65.
36. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton eds. Towards
aTransnational Perspective on Migration Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism
Reconsidered . New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
Vol. 645, July 6, 1992. The immediately preceding quotation is from p.
vi.
37. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Blanc-Szanton eds. Nations
Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and
Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1994).

Post-colonial Studies: The New
Intellectual Imperialism?
Nilanjana Deb
Post-colonialism has spawned a vast matrix of critical theory.
However, scholars such as Leela Gandhi have observed that post-
colonial studies have come to represent a “confusing and often
unpleasant babel of subaltern voices.”1 Despite its imprecise definition,
post-colonial studies have taken on an interdisciplinary character
within the humanities, ranging from history and cultural studies to
education and literary criticism. Although it is nearly impossible to
define what ‘post-coloniality’ is, given the contested issues it
encompasses, what might seem more feasible is to define what it is
not. With or without the much-debated hyphen in the term ‘post-
coloniality’ it is not always possible to map the différance in the
meaning of the term that occurs when post-coloniality is situated
geographically, historically, and culturally. For example, Ella Shohat
feels that, echoing ‘postmodernity’, ‘post-coloniality’ can be taken to
be the indexical marker of a “contemporary state, situation, condition
or epoch”2. The use of the term in this sense implies linearity; a
superceding that is not entirely true of what post-colonialism stands
for. Even more dangerous, according to her, are post-colonial
formulations that blur national and racial formations that are very
different as being equally post-colonial. If we follow Ella Shohat’s
argument, situating the United States and Nigeria as equally post-
colonial masks the unequal relations of the white settlers in North
America to the European ‘center’ by equating them to the relations
of the Indigenous peoples of Nigeria to the European colonizers.
Shohat argues that the critical slippage in meaning occurs when the
suffix ‘post’ is thus applied to two very different experiences of
colonization. 3

This differànce is complicated by the ambiguity in the notion of
post-coloniality that allows for the masking of the histories of violence
that Indigenous people faced under colonization and continue in many
instances to face under neo- or continuing colonization. Critics of
post-coloniality such as Shohat feel that this ‘undifferentiated’ use of
the term has diminished its political agency. For her, a materialist
reading of post-coloniality sees and acknowledges the minorities and
marginalized people that colonization creates. It acknowledges the
historical and continuing brutalities that construct those minorities.
One the other hand, a discursive reading of post-coloniality does not
disturb the façade of equality that post-coloniality creates as a common
experience of ex-colonials. Within this reading, post-colonialism
simultaneously indexicalizes actual geopolitical spaces, that is, the
Third World countries that became independent after World War II,
thereby periodicizing post-colonialism. At the same time, post-
coloniality refers to the diasporic circumstances since the last five
decades or so of the twentieth century - from forced migration to
voluntary immigration - within the metropolitan First World. Post-
colonialism in this sense refers to discursively dissimilar forms of
representational practices and values.4
The problem of clubbing such discourses under the banner of
post-coloniality is that tropes of ‘resistance’, ‘mimicry’ and ‘transgression,’
frequently found in the literature of nations that have a history of anti-
colonial struggle, can become a marker of the expectations that the
reader trained in ‘post-colonial’ literary study has from an immigrant
or minority writer’s work, even that coming out of the privileged
location of a First World university. While such tropes may indeed
be a part of the work’s design, to always read ‘resistance’ into texts
where the author’s intentions are different could become a form of
critical assimilationism as well. Ironically, this kind of reading can
happen out of the urge for critical coalition-building among non-
dominant groups within the milieu of First World multiculturalism.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has pointed that,
…under the sign of multiculturalism, literary readings are often guided by
the desire to elicit, first and foremost, indices of ethnic particularity,
especially those that can be construed as oppositional, transgressive, subversive.5
Post-colonial Studies: The New Intellectual Imperialism? | 33

34 | Nilanjana Deb
Ironically, post-colonial theorists have emphasized this very particularity
and specificity in order to highlight the political, even emancipatory
nature of the field. It is now critical commonplace to focus on cultural
specificity. For example, Stephen Slemon asserts that that research in
the field of post-colonialism must address the local, at least at the level
of material applications. As he reminds us,
If we overlook the local, and the political implications of the research we
produce, we risk turning the work of our field into the playful operations
of an academic glass-bead game, whose project will remain at best a
description of global relations, and not a script for their change…6
While the need to locate texts within specific cultural contexts is
necessary, this can often cloud a larger issue – that of the absorption
of ‘new’ literatures within the post-colonial spectrum without thought
given to whether the literatures are at all ‘post-colonial’ or amenable
to ‘post-colonial’ readings. The emphasis on the local can lead to the
assimilation of ‘new literatures’ within the category of the post-
colonial, and the imposition of reading frameworks of the sort that
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. mentions. In the scramble to locate new texts
to feed the burgeoning industry of post-colonial studies, post-colonial
theory can turn into a tool for intellectual neo-colonialism.
Aboriginal literatures are a case in point. There is, in the opinion
of Linda Smith, a suspicion among Indigenous scholars that
the fashion of post-colonialism has become a strategy for reinscribing or
reauthorizing the privileges of non-Indigenous academics because the field of
‘post-colonial’ discourse has been defined in ways which can still leave out
Indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current concerns.7
For example, Dee Horne’s Contemporary American Indian Writing:
Unsettling Literature examines Aboriginal authors through Homi
Bhabha’s frame of ‘mimicry.’ Horne argues that authors such as
Thomas King, Jeannette Armstrong, Ruby Slipperjack, Beatrice
Culleton, Tomson Highway and Lee Maracle deploy ‘trickster’
mimicry in order to bring about decolonization. Horne’s work
indicates an uncritical acceptance of the authority of the postcolonial
critics and theorists she cites. The entire text is shaped by the

colonizer-colonized binary that is a commonplace in post-colonial
studies, without mentioning that Aboriginal literature is not necessarily
dependent on this relationship. 9
On the surface of things, there are many reasons why Aboriginal
literatures are too easily assumed to be part of the assortment of
literatures termed ‘post-colonial.’ There are many aspects of cultural
resistance and survival that are similar to patterns seen in former
colonies such as India or various African states, and these parallels
need to be scrutinized before moving on to the need for a separate
aesthetics for Aboriginal peoples.
The preservation or revival of the mother tongue as a form of
cultural self-assertiveness and an expression of a community’s nationalist
ideology is a phenomenon common to most former colonies. It is
also seen in many Aboriginal communities today. In addition,
postcolonial theory sees the appropriation of the colonizer’s language
to make it bear the burden of one’s cultural experience as a
manifestation the experience of hybridity in the wake of contact
between the colonizer and the colonized. A characteristic of most
formerly colonized societies is the development of hybrid or new
englishes, where native grammar and vocabulary modifies the intruding
language. Thus, a socially acceptable form of bilingualism develops
within the (post)colonial community in which both the mother tongue
and the colonizer’s tongue (if not one and the same) have an important
function for the community. In Aboriginal cultures as in many African
ones, the movement between orality and literacy in Aboriginal
literatures is a crucial factor in the development of narratives, both
fictional and ‘factual’, about the past and present of the people.
The colonial discourse entailed a clash of weltanschauungen or
world views, and in all cases of colonization, linguistic imperialism
involving the manipulation and dissemination of the written word was
a major characteristic. The clash of oral and literate culture is seen
in the actual loss of land and territory suffered by many Aboriginal
peoples, through the signing of treaties and other forms of negotiation
that equated written text and territory. Among Aboriginal peoples in
North America, for instance, diplomatic agreements were traditionally
concluded verbally and usually in the presence of those concerned and

36 | Nilanjana Deb
promises thus made in public became part of the collective memory
of the community.
The disruptive potential of literacy is also evident in another
common feature of colonialism, the drive to alter native religious
beliefs. European missionaries were quick to identify the associations
that colonized peoples made between technological advances and
religious prowess, and contrasted the permanence of the printed
biblical word with the supposed impermanence of oral narratives.
However, many Aboriginal belief systems persisted, in whole or part,
developing forms of syncretism and compartmentalization that preserved
their faiths or allowed the subterranean persistence of Aboriginal
practices within Christianity.
One factor that distinguishes settler societies from other former
colonies is the minority status of the colonized, as opposed to colonies
such as India where the colonized were numerically a majority. As
a result, the perceived minority status of the community within the
colonial state leads to two strands within the collective consciousness
of the community. There are keepers of the community’s cultural
heritage, for example elders, who emphasize tradition as a barrier
against uncontrolled imitation. In the later stages of the colonial
encounter traditionalists cannot completely isolate the traditions of
their community from outside influences, and so the role of
individuals who cross cultures, as well as cultural production that
addresses or bridges opposed ‘worlds’, becomes crucial. This pattern
can be seen to have similarities with developments in the national
movements of other former colonies as well.
Thus, contemporary Fourth World9 cultures have many features
that can allow them to be subsumed within the rubric of post-colonial
studies. One of the ways in which Euro-American cultural imperialism
is exercised in the colonial context is by the creating of separate
aesthetic standards for the reading of mainstream and ‘marginal’
literatures. On one hand, literature that adheres to Western standards
is seen as classical or universal, while literature that deviates from this
norm is sidelined as primitive, political, or regional. While the
empowerment of the marginal voice as a function of post-colonial
studies has become a given, the gradual ‘colonization’ of Aboriginal

literature by post-colonial theory in the last decade or so demands
that the notion of decolonisation be revived in literary studies.
In her unpublished doctoral thesis, Metis scholar Dr. Emma
LaRocque describes postcolonial theory as “a giant runaway rumball,
picking up an inchoate tangle of philosophical bits and bytes as it
avalanches its way to – where? Who can cogently tr/eat this thing?”10
Post-colonial theory includes within it elements of anti-colonial
thought as well as more recent influences of post-modern theory. These
divergent strands lead to the rather complicated response to Aboriginal
cultural production that we find in the much-read ‘overviews’ of post-
colonial literature such as The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Compilations
such as these are often received as ‘primers’ for university students
of post-colonial studies and their ‘shorthand’ representations of
Aboriginal literary studies not only marginalize the subject, but also
indicate to Aboriginal readers the lack of serious engagement with
it. Here, theorization about Indigenous writing is limited to a few
selections in a section called “Ethnicity and Indigeneity,” a textual
marginalization also seen in Elleke Boehmer’s popular ‘textbook’ of
post-colonial theory, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature11 and the
introductions to post-colonial theory by Loomba and Gandhi.
Only Mudrooroo and a few non-Aboriginal academics who focus
on the issue of white representations of the Indigene and the problem
of ‘authenticity’ are represented in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
The introduction to the section declares that the ‘First-Nations’, have
in many ways become “the cause celebre of post-colonialism. No other
group seems so completely to earn the position of colonized group,
so unequivocally to demonstrate the processes of imperialism at
work.”12 Thus, at the very outset, ‘resistance’ is made out to be the
defining feature of Aboriginal identity. The editorial voice sees
Indigenous groups as an ‘ideal’ subject for post-colonial studies on
the grounds of the possibility of ‘resistance’, but denies intellectual
agency to these groups by suggesting that they ‘fall’ into the discursive
traps set by the colonizer, for example, by succumbing to the
anthropological nomenclatures of authenticity that reinforce the
centre/margin binary. The introduction advises that essentialism is
‘locally’ strategic but ‘ultimately’ self-defeating. In what way the

38 | Nilanjana Deb
strategic assertion of identity for a severely dispossessed group can
be ‘ultimately’ self-defeating is not clarified, particularly in the face
of the fact that Indigenous communities have to deal with multiple
sources of power within the ‘post-colonial’ states in which they are
located, with the administrative setup of the state, province, district
or municipality, and are required to provide ‘proof’ of Indigenous
identity. It is at these the levels of material reality that Indigenous
communities strive to achieve their specific goals: political mobilisation
requires a certain politics of identity.14
Anti-colonial thinkers, including Aboriginal activists, point out
the weakness inherent in post-colonial studies as a result of imbalances
between the materialist and discursive origins of the field. For
example, Mi’kmaq author Marie Battiste in Reclaiming Indigenous
Voice and Vision reminds us that Indigenous thinkers use the term
‘postcolonial’ to describe a symbolic strategy for shaping a desirable
future, not an existing reality.14 For her, the term is an aspirational
practice, goal or idea.15 According to her, (post)colonial Indigenous
thought should not be confused with post-colonial theory in literature.
The material reality of Aboriginal lives under colonial regimes is often
forgotten in the search for discursive extensions of the field of post-
colonial studies.
At no point does the introduction in the Post-Colonial Studies
Reader acknowledge the intellectual agency and decision-making
power of the Indigenous communities that it seeks to warn against
essentialism. It is not surprising, therefore, that Native American
scholar Louis Owens speaks of a double barrier to the development
of new critical direction in the reading of Aboriginal writing: the
Indigenous communities’ rejection of the critical and cultural imperialism
of the metropolitan center, as well as the metropolitan center’s
hypocritical lack of interest (despite espousing policies of
multiculturalism) in seriously engaging with the voices of minorities
who would seek to construct and represent themselves.17
Epistemological differences in cultural production prompts
Aboriginal scholar Kimberly Blaeser to state that the literatures of
Aboriginal people have a ‘unique voice’ and “that voice has not always
been adequately or accurately explored in the criticism that has been

written about the literature…”17 Blaeser cites major American critics
of Native literature such as Hertha Wong, Arnold Krupat, William
Bevis and Louis Owens, who state that alternative ways of understanding
are required for the analysis of apparently ‘western’ forms such as the
autobiography when they are used by Native writers. She suggests that
the pedagogy of these texts and the ways in which they give pleasure
to the reader are different from the Western tradition. Thus, for
Blaeser, “The insistence on reading Native literature by way of
Western literary theory clearly violates its integrity and performs a new
act of colonization and conquest.”18 Thus she draws attention to the
growing need for theoretical frameworks that arise out of and are
specific to Aboriginal literatures/oratures.
The simultaneous assimilation and marginalisation of Indigenous
thought within postcolonial studies, as well as the critiques of post-
colonial theory by Aboriginal scholars, raise some important questions.
Where does the ‘giant runaway rumball’ stop? Can post-colonial theory
stretch itself to ethically engage with epistemologically different
cultural products on their own terms? If post-colonial theory is used
to impose ‘stock’ readings upon new minority writing, should the
solution be literary separatism as advocated by a number of Aboriginal
scholars?19 A greater self-reflexivity regarding the political implications
of the deployment of post-colonial theory can prevent it from
becoming a new front for intellectual imperialism in literary studies.
Post-colonial theory can only have limited applicability in the case of
Aboriginal literatures. The scrutiny of these limitations may help in
reviewing the ways in which other culturally different texts, perhaps
better known, have been (mis)read through post-colonial lenses in the
past.
Notes
1. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 3.
2. Ella Shohat, “Notes on the “Post-Colonial,” Social Text 31/32 (1992):
101.
3. Ibid., 99-112.

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