Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism

240 Pages·1995·1.432 MB·English

by  Radhika Mohanram, Gita Rajan

Postcolonial Discourse and
Changing Cultural Contexts
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Postcolonial Discourse and
Changing Cultural Contexts
Theory and Criticism
Edited by
Gita Rajan and
Radhika Mohanram
Contributions to the Study of World Literature, Number 64
Emmanuel S. Nelson, Series Adviser
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Postcolonial discourse and changing cultural contexts /
edited by Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram.
p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of world literature,
ISSN 0738–9345 ; no. 64)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–313–29693–6 (alk. paper)
1. Colonies in literature. 2. Decolonization in literature.
3. Imperialism in literature. 4. Literature, Modern—History and
criticism—Theory, etc. 5. Developing countries—Literatures—
History and criticism. I. Rajan, Gita. II. Mohanram,
Radhika. III. Series.
PN56.C63T44 1995
809′.93358—dc20 95–16019
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 1995 by Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95–16019
ISBN: 0–313–29693–6
ISSN: 0738–9345
First published in 1995
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Locating Postcoloniality
Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram 1
1. Rereading Fanon, Rewriting Caribbean History
Patrick Taylor 17
2. The Dialectics of Négritude: Or, the (Post)Colonial Subject in
Contemporary African-American Literature
Christopher Wise 33
3. The Colonial Voice in the Motherland
Judie Newman 47
4. Minor Pleasures
Indira Karamcheti 59
5. Women’s Rights versus Feminism? Postcolonial Perspectives
Harveen Sachdeva Mann 69
6. Plantation Cafés: Jazz, Postcolonial Theory, and Modernism
Burton W. Peretti 89
vi Contents
7. Postcoloniality and the Politics of Identity in the Diaspora:
Figuring “Home,” Locating Histories
Anindyo Roy 101
8. Postcolonial Spaces and Deterritorialized (Homo)Sexuality: The
Films of Hanif Kureishi
Radhika Mohanram 117
9. Is My Body Proper? Postcoloniality in the Classroom
Gita Rajan 135
10. The Media Scene and Postcolonial Theories: An Interview with
Prajna Paramita Parasher
Gita Rajan 151
11. “Retrospective Hallucination”: Postcolonial Video as Cultural
Critique
Amy Villarejo 159
12. History, Folklore, and Common Sense: Sembène’s Films and
Discourses of Postcoloniality
Marcia Landy 171
13. Biculturalism, Postcolonialism, and Identity Politics in New
Zealand: An Interview with Anna Yeatman and Kaye Turner
Radhika Mohanram 189
14. Postcolonialism/Multiculturalism—Australia 1993: An
Interview with Sneja Gunew
Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram 205
Select Bibliography 219
Index 223
About the Contributors 229
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank Fairfield University, University of Waikato,
and the University of New Orleans for their support in preparing this
manuscript. We would particularly like to thank Barry Parsonson, Dean of
the School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, who gave
Radhika a generous grant to come to the United States to finish the project,
and the staff at the Computing Center at Fairfield University and the
Communications Center at the University of New Orleans for their prompt
and cheerful transmittal of editorial queries between the United States and
New Zealand.
We especially want to express our gratitude to Emmanuel Nelson, who
encouraged us to put this volume together, challenged us continually to be
rigorous in our scrutiny of the essays, and helped us to make difficult
decisions. Also innumerable thanks to Mary Beth Brown and Jennifer
Decker, Gita’s students at Fairfield University, and to Susan Sayer and
Helen Baird at the University of Waikato, who went above and beyond the
call of friendship and provided secretarial help so that we could meet the
deadline. Finally, we wish to thank Rohin Rajan and both our families for
their continued encouragement and support.

Introduction: Locating Postcoloniality
Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram
In this volume we wish to examine various theories girding the notion of
empire, specifically as they form networks of discourses which “world”
postcolonial debates today. This book can be read as a sequel to our other
work, English Postcoloniality: Literatures from Around the World, which pro-
vides historical backgrounds and focused analyses of some important
neocolonial and postcolonial writings. The essays in that volume deal with
texts from English colonies as both independent works in their own right
and as responses to imperial fictions. Here we wish to extend that debate
into a more theoretical space. Similar to the complex and powerful material
reality of colonization, the language surrounding empire too remains over-
determined in current discussions of postcoloniality, and we wish to ex-
plore such constructions as nation and modernity, identity politics, status
and role of exile and exilic subjectivities, and border intellectuals. Our
collection of essays in this work complements the pieces in our other book
so that readers may perceive postcolonial theories in their continuities,
discontinuities, complexities, complications, and varying evolutions, and
locate one facet of postcoloniality.
HISTORY AND NATION
Generally, ideologies of nation and nationalism together with theories of
modernity and postcoloniality are explained through the recordings of
history in all their political, economic, cultural, historical, and archeological
implications. It is the analyses of these implications that postcolonial schol-
ars find useful in holding empire accountable, if not for anything else, at
least for querying history. Romila Thapar in “The Past and the Prejudice”
2 Postcolonial Discourse and Cultural Contexts
foregrounds the intellectual impetus behind the colonial method of writing
history. She begins by saying:
There is a qualitative change between the traditional writing of history and history
as we know it today. The modern writing of history was influenced in its manner
of handling the evidence by two factors. One was the intellectual influence of the
scientific revolution, which resulted in an emphasis on the systematic uncovering
of the past and on checking the authenticity of historical facts. The other was the
impact on the motivation of history by the new ideology of nationalism, with stress
on the notion of a common language, culture and history of a group. Indeed,
historical studies the world over have assumed special significance in proving the
background of nationalism. (3)1
Thapar also acknowledges that the Enlightenment agenda and the Euro-
pean mode of writing the nation in tracing nationalist trajectories were
structurally manipulated to fashion the history of the colonized peoples.
Going beyond such an overtly fictive telling, the Subaltern Studies Group
argues that there is another layer of colonial domination by showing that
historiography of newly emergent nations (as in the writing of nation/na-
tionalist struggles) borrows heavily from pejorative, imperial methods to
often ignore, even delete subaltern historiography in order to privilege
elitist, official versions.2
In fact, this argument echoes one of Frantz Fanon’s most brilliant in-
sights, wherein he excavated and scrutinized the damaged psyche of the
colonized people to show how the native mirrors the desires of the colo-
nizer. Recently, in “Absences in History” Aloka Parasher has foregrounded
that debate by posing a challenge to scholarship which relies on poststruc-
tural vocabulary to decode colonization and re-encode a new historiogra-
phy. She says that
in our new post-modern consciousness we apparently privilege the margins of the
past by constructing a new difference of the other “other” which has all the elements
of heterogeneity, multivocality, and open-endedness, but the space and item where
these margins of the past meet are the center of history. . . . In a study of pre-modern
society [colonized nations] then, where history as we understand it today was an
alien concept, we privilege a modern notion of history [that of a de-colonized
nation] and all that it entails so that it becomes central, and the object of study to
remain distant and marginal. (5)
An important point that emerges from Parasher’s argument is the brack-
eting of time to serve the interests of the decolonized nation so that the
concept of “belated modernity” is made irrelevant. 3 Such a re-location of
history from the postcolonial perspective decenters Enlightenment narra-
tives, which always favor the colonizer.
Literature and art are reflections of a culture and can serve, in this
instance, to test limits of colonial influences. In The Location of Culture, Homi