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American Literary History 16.1 (2004) 162-175



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Postcolonial American Studies

Malini Johar Schueller

Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. University of Mississippi Press, 2000
Postcolonial America. Edited by C. Richard King. University of Illinois Press, 2000

The heightened climate of xenophobia and compulsory patriotism, as well as the rallying together behind "Western" values by many intellectuals in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, makes painfully clear the necessity of interrogating US culture through the lens of postcolonial studies. Repeated invocations of differences between our civilization and their barbarity, entreaties for a "new imperialism," and calls for reinstating a nineteenth- century type of colonialism, now with the US replacing Britain and France, are ample proof that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate. 1 Hardt and Negri's postulation of the contemporary world as the age of unlocalized, nonimperialist empire is surely being tested (xiv, 134).

Nevertheless, although the present moment might warrant a postcolonial understanding of US literature and culture, the relevance of postcolonial analyses to American studies has not always been clear. After all, the master-texts of American studies were consolidating American exceptionalism at the very moment that radical anticolonialist treatises questioning the humanity and universality of modernity were being written by Third World intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and George Lamming. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is widely credited for having inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies, and with Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Parry, Ranajit Guha, and the subaltern studies scholars, the major questions of postcolonial studies were laid out. These questions included the analysis of Western texts as colonial discourse, the investigation of representations of the colonized, the study of forms of resistance to colonization in the literature of the formerly colonized, and issues of neocolonialism, comprador natives, and subaltern representation. Yet despite revisionist histories such as R. W. Van Alstyne's The Rising American Empire (1960) and Carl Eblen's The First and Second American Empires (1967), and later works such as Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (1980), which demonstrated imperialism as central to national identity from the beginning, much of American studies remained remarkably insular, thus reinforcing [End Page 162] the idea of the nation's exception from Western imperialism and colonialism. The "postnationalist" agenda of the New Americanists in 1992 was to question the coherence of national identity and to demonstrate its constructedness based on an exclusion of raced and gendered others, not to broaden the field beyond the nation. 2

The early 1990s witnessed the beginning of a healthy and vigorous debate about the inclusion of the US into postcolonial studies. At its best, this debate has the potential to challenge not only the central assumptions of American studies but also those of postcolonial theory. The major components of this debate are the applicability of the term postcolonial to the US, the suitability of the internal colonization model to describe US postcoloniality as well as ethnic studies in general, and, more recently, the questioning of center-periphery models in view of globalization and transnational capitalism. The assertion of the authors of the academic bestseller The Empire Writes Back (1989) that "the American experience and its attempts to produce a new kind of literature [could] be seen as the model for all later post-colonial writing" was met with hostility by many critics (Ashcroft etal. 16). Anne McClintock questioned the moral efficacy of using the term postcolonial to describe Charles Brockden Brown as well as Ngugi wa Thiong'o (294); Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani suggested that the term post-civil rights be used as a parallel to the anticolonial struggles that define the "after" to colonialism (293). 3 Implicitly refusing the postcolonial thesis of The Empire Writes Back, many works in American studies have stressed the importance of imperialism to the construction of national identity: Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald...

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