Postcolonial Future(s)Ilyas Babar Awan

Reg # : 103-FLL/PHDENG/S16

International Islamic University , Islamabad

Introduction

• Because post-colonial theory was an invention of literary study, given particular importance by the development of English as a vehicle of cultural propaganda (The Empire Writes Back 2–3) it has therefore been at the cutting edge of developments in that discipline.

Culture is ‘art’ vs culture as ‘ way of life’

• The debate continues to revolve around the Raymond Williams

• inspired distinction between culture as ‘art’ or as ‘way of life’.

Problematizing Culture

• Post-colonial cultural discourse of all kinds problematizes this

• distinction and indeed problematizes the concept of culture itself.

Assuming ‘their’ culture Inferior

• Colonial identities assume that their own culture is unimportant

English Culturalism

• Post-colonial literary critics quickly come to realize that they are constantly thrown into conflict with this ideologically and institutionally buttressed category of literature because of its roots in the universalist ideology of English culturalism.

Diversity

• In its engagement with the culturalist myth of ‘literature’ then, postcolonialism brings to cultural studies its own well established concepts of diversity, particularity and local difference.

Postcolonialism and the Local

• Clearly, the future of post-colonial studies is vitally implicated in the future of the institutions and disciplines in which it is practiced.

• But one future of the field itself hinges on the balancebetween the articulation of theoretical generalizations

(constructed texts) and the analysis of particular material

(worldliness) post-colonial realities.

Worldly and locally

• The importance of the ‘worldly’ affiliations of the text meant that the study of local conditions was always important.

• As the field has developed over the last decade or so, it becomes clearer that perhaps post-colonial theory needs to be further grounded in specific analyses of the effects of large movements and ideologies on particular localities.

• ‘colonial discourse operates identically not only across all space

but also throughout time’. Robert Young

Constructing Postcolonial discourse & Contributors

• The West’ or ‘colonialism’ or‘neo-colonialism’ [or ‘post-colonialism’] and even colonial discourse’are themselves in their current usage often the creation of Third World theorists such as Fanon, Nkrumah or Said, [and other theorists and creative writers such as C.L.R.James, Wilson Harris, Raja Rao, Judith Wright, Robert Kroetsch]who needed to invent such categories precisely as general categories in order to constitute an object both for analysis and resistance. Robert Young

• Why??????????

(Resistance and Representation)

Postcolonial Theory and its limitations

• Post-colonial theory remains the servant of literary and other cultural production rather than its master. It is abductive or appropriative rather than deductive, and asystematic rather than systematic.

Post-colonialism and the sacred

• Debates concerning the traditional and sacred beliefs of colonized,indigenous, and marginalized peoples have increased in importance.Since the Enlightenment the sacred has been an ambivalent area in a Western thinking that has uniformly tended to privilege the secular.

Sacred vs Secular

Secular: secularity, economic

rationalism and progressivism have dominated,

Sacred: ‘the sacred’ has so often been relegated to

primitivism and the archaic.

Chakrabaty : 2000

By the end of twentieth century : debates about the

sacred have become more urgent

as issues such as land rights (Gelder and Jocabs, 1998)

Sacred in postcolonial societies

• The sacred has been an empowering feature of post-colonial experience in two ways:

• 1. Cultural Identity

• 2. western forms of sacred as means of local empowerment

Postcolonialism, animals and the environment

Environmental issues

• The sacred has frequently entered post-colonial debates in relation to environmental issues. Place has always been of great importance to post-colonial theory, but the more material and global issue of environmentalism is an important and growing aspect of this concept.

• Post-colonial studies, then, have inevitably been imbricated in

environmental issues, particularly in terms of relationships between humans and place, and between land and language.

‘The West and The Rest’.

• Environmental crisis : Mostly done by West/Indutrialization

• Alfred Crosby (1986) outlines the destructive effects – for both places and peoples –of the European colonization of much of the rest of the world.

Animalization/Othering

• literature and literary criticism and hassignificant implications for issues of race, racism, ethnicity and(human and animal) genocide.

• Jacques Derrida, notes that ‘the humanist concept of subjectivity is inseparable from the discourse and institution of speciesism’,

• The sacrifice of ‘the animal’ and the animalistic which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we can engage in a ‘noncriminal’putting to death (as Derrida phrases it) not only of animals, but of other humans as well, by marking them as animal (Wolfe 1998:39).

Post-colonialism and globalization

• Perhaps the ultimate and unavoidable future of post-colonial studies lies in its relation to globalization.

• Theories of globalization have moved, over the last half century, from expressions of the process as ‘cultural imperialism’ or neoimperialism to analyses of the ‘hybridization’, ‘diffusion’, ‘relativization,’ and interrelationship of global societies,

Diaspora

• Diaspora does not simply refer to geographical dispersal but also to the vexed questions of identity, memory and home which such displacement produces.

• Diaspora might disrupt the binary of local and global and problematize national, racial and ethnic formulations of identity.

Conclusion

• post-colonial has been one of the most powerful means of re-examining the historical past and re-configuring our contemporary world-wide cultural concerns.