Past the Last Post (review)

In a recent review in Transition 53 of Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, Benita Parry distinguishes two methodologies—the post-colonial and the post-modern —that currently dominate literary and cultural theorization. On one side, she asserts, are those who recognize that texts are “involved necessarily in the making of cultural meanings which are always, finally, political meanings,” but who insist that “culture does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production” and that texts are “inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history”; on the other side are those who (in Stuart Hall’s phrase) would want to expand the territorial claims of the discursive infinitely, and therefore privilege textual strategems as in and of themselves the location of gathering points for solidarity.¹ It is difficult to accept—and many of the essays in the volume under review here consider this fundamental problem—that a connection can be made between these two “posts.”

To a degree, of course, terminological imprecision makes difficult such a project. Post-modernism, for instance, has been variously troped as “hyperreal,” “excremental,” “inflationary,” “wilfully contradictory,” skeptical of all metanarratives yet located in a “perpetual present”—the contradictory nature of which seems to define the post-modern itself. Post-modernism is simultaneously (or variously) a textual practice (often oppositional, sometimes not), a subcultural style or fashion, a definition of western, postindustrial culture (Gibson’s “the matrix”), and the emergent or always already dominant global culture. At the same time, post-colonialism is simultaneously (or variously) a geographical site, an existential condition, a political reality, a textual practice, and the emergent or dominant global culture (or counter-culture). For me, the post-colonial and the post-modern can be heuristically understood as metonyms for larger, irreconcilable positions, as Parry suggests. On the one side, there is a limit to textuality—call it Raymond Williams’s sense of “lived” experience; on the other, an infinite textuality, Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text,” in which subjectivity is a textual matter—pain and oppression merely tropes. The question thus is clear: is there any formal or political relationship between post- modernism and post-colonialism or is post-modernism yet once more instance of colonization—a contemporary moment of western textual imperialism? That is, what does, say, the collapse of critical space between the western media spectacle and the production of a post-modern subjectivity have to do with the the lived realities of oppression in the dominated world—with the lack of health care, food, electricity, education and an abundance of western appropriation of labor, raw materials, and imposition of a cultural imperialism?

In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-modernism,” Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin assemble an impressive, international cadre of theorists who offer daring and inventive (though on occasion irrelevant or incomprehensible) responses to these questions. These essays, as Helen Tiffin suggests in her introduction, “seek to characterise post-modernist and post-colonial discourses in relation to each other, and to chart their intersecting and diverging trajectories” (vii). To that end, the anthology succeeds brilliantly: it articulates in many of the essays resonant homologies that suggest the possibility of a strategic alliance between post-modern and post-colonial discursive strategies.

Yet, after completing this inaugural volume addressing these two salient cultural and literary theories, I am left with a sense of the forced and even—from a political perspective—counter-productive nature of the project. That is, this volume, much like another project that attempts to reconcile earlier manifestations of the post-colonial and the post-modern, Michael Ryan’s interesting though often plodding Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation, expends massive amounts of critical energy with little to offer for ongoing oppositional and post-colonial struggles. In many of the essays, theorists admit the problematic nature of the project—the fundamental incompatibility of post-modernist textuality and the lived realities of the post-colonial (or really, neo-colonial...