|
Posmodernism and Post-Colonialism
Provider:
Kate Liu / ¼B¬ö¶²
under
construction 12/24/1998
- 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.]
|
