Article

Rerouting the Postcolonial from an East African Perspective

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Abstract

Some postcolonial critics have recently called for a rerouting of the postcolonial study of literature due to what they perceive as increased globalization that affects the identity and worldview of the subject. Various critics have also called for attention to variants of Cosmopolitanism. Such critical terms invite the global into the local, leading to different readings of postcolonial texts in negotiating the third space of multiculturalism. Depending on the perspective of the critic, the West may be invited into the analysis of the Postcolony, or the focus may be primarily on the African postcolonial subject. What is the input of locally based African literary critics in negotiating this third space? This paper intends to interrogate the question of Postcolonial theory with the view of positing an East African literary perspective as an entry point into the debate on whether or not there is a need to reroute the Postcolonial, and if so, on whose terms?

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The notion of the postcolonial gained currency as a category of experience in the Western academy during the 1980s, roughly two decades after decolonization in Africa, in the wake of Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978). Said’s impressive survey of Western representations of the Orient inspired critics and theorists across many fields because of the way he linked up the politics of institutions and discursive formations with the cultural use of power and knowledge. This English literature professor of Palestinian origin helped initiate a paradigmatic shift away from criticism narrowly focused on texts and their formal aspects to the study of literature in its multiple contexts. This broadening of the critic’s scope to allow for a consideration of the dynamics of empire was consolidated over the next decade with a number of collaborative efforts of which The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin stands out as a noteworthy example. Rhetorical features of postcolonial discourse such as mimicry and hybridity proposed in The Empire Writes Back were subsequently expanded and refined by critics such as Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha and the authors of The Empire Writes Back were also professors of English, which signals how important English departments were in shaping the emergence of postcolonial studies, but it is also useful to remember that French post-structuralism provided much of the theoretical basis from which they developed their common project.
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In a reconsideration of the role of the postcolonial in the twenty-first century, the article focuses on contemporary issues that have involved what can be characterized as the politics of invisibility and of unreadability: indigenous struggles and their relation to settler colonialism, illegal migrants, and political Islam. It is argued that while none of these fall within the template of the classic paradigm of anticolonial struggles, they all involve postcolonial remains from the colonial past as well as prompting political insights that show the extent to which postcolonial perspectives continue to offer the basis of transformative critique.
Article
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Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
Article
The original title of this paper was “Power, Desire, Interest.”1 Indeed, whatever power these meditations command may have been earned by a politically interested refusal to push to the limit the founding presuppositions of my desires, as far as they are within my grasp. This vulgar three-stroke formula, applied both to the most resolutely committed and to the most ironic discourse, keeps track of what Althusser so aptly named “philosophies of denegation.”2 I have invoked my positionality in this awkward way so as to accentuate the fact that calling the place of the investigator into question remains a meaningless piety in many recent critiques of the sovereign subject. Thus, although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice.
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