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Posmodernism and Post-Colonialism
- Similarities between Postmodernism and Postcolonialism and where they overlap
- Their de-centering movement: both discourses dismantle the Western/Colonial centers and challenge their power, history and prejudices.
- Their presentation of heterogeneity (as a result of colonization, immigration, multinational capitalism, etc.) .
- Hutcheon: They "overlap in their concerns: formal, thematic and strategic."
- examples: duality -- the use of mimicry, parody, irony and allegory.
- Problematic overlapping: the postcolonial intelligensia --under the influence of Western culture (K.A. Appiah), or global capitalism (Dirlik)
- Identity:
- A major difference: post-colonialisms "assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity" while postmodernisms challenge "coherent, autonomous subject" (Hutcheon)
- The Global/Imperialistic vs. the Local/Colonized
- Views of the World: 1st World vs. Third World, One World theory, Cultural Imperialism
- How do we think about the local and marginalized? As silent subaltern?
TOP
Past the last Post
[the editors see postmodernism] see it. . . as a determined attempt to retain the position and influence of global centrality. More than simply capitalism's cultural logic, it now sounds like the essence of capitalism itself:
Post-modernism. . . operates as a Euro-American western hegemony, whose global appropriation of time-and-place inevitably proscribes certain cultures as 'backward' and marginal while coopting to itself certain of their cultural 'raw' materials. Post-modernism is then projected onto these margins as normative, as a neo-universalism to which 'marginal' cultures may aspire, and from which certain of their more forward looking products might be appropriated and 'authorized'.Their contention that post-modernism and post-structuralism exercise intellectual hegemony over the post-colonial world and post-colonial cultural production is obviously relevant to the problematically post-colonial former white settler colonies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand.. .
p. x from Past
Discontinuity, polyphony, parodic form, and in particular the problematisation of representation and the fetishisation/retrieval of "difference," take on radically different shape and direction within the two discourses. While post-modernism has increasingly fetishised "difference" and "the Other," those "othered" by a history of European representation can only retrieve and reconstitute a post-colonized "self" against that history wherein an awareness of "referential slippage" was inherent in colonial being. While the disappearance of "grand narrative" the "crisis of representation" characterize the Euro-American post-modernist mood, such expressions of break-down" and "crisis" instead signal promise and decolonization potential within post-colonial discourse. Pastiche and parody are not simply the new games Europeans play, nor the most recent intellectual self-indulgence of a Europe habituated to periodic fits of languid despair, but offer a key to destabilization and deconstruction of a repressive European archive. Far from endlessly deferring or delaying meaning, these same tropes function as potential decolonizing strategies which invest (or reinvest) devalued "peripheries" with meaning.
TOP
Brydon vs. Hutcheon
Hutcheon. . ."post-modernism is politically ambivalent." . . .the "post-colonial is 'as implicated in that which it challenges as is the post-modern" (183). This assertion depends on a leap from the recognition that the post-colonial is "contaminated" by colonialism to the conclusion that such "contamination" necessarily implies complicity.
[post-colonial subjectivity--includes diasporic communities, 'ethnic minority' communities within the overdeveloped world as well as formerly colonized national cultures.]
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