Being Materialist: Beyond Polite Postcolonialism

Diaspora 5:2 1996 Being Materialist: Beyond Polite Postcolonialism Enda Duffy University of California, Santa Barbara Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Ali Behdad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. David Spurr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Is it possible to be a postcolonial critic without being an historical materialist? In other words, is it possible to articulate a critique from a postcolonial perspective of various colonial discourses without taking into account the specific nature of the material conditions, the exact quality of the oppressions, repressions, cajolings, brutalities, pleasures, and desires which these discourses represent? Can one assume an appropriate position of critical authority from which to critique and make after-the-factjudgments on the discourses of western colonists, hangers-on, visitors, journalists, travel writers, and the like, without taking into account the specifics of the practices that these discourses describe, praise, celebrate, ignore, or elide? Postcolonial criticism, at least in its most recent phase in the US university, especially when it has dealt with western colonial or subsequent writing on "the Orient," Africa, or any "Third World" locale and its people, has remained true to the tenor of Said's Orientalism and operated as one of the most vividly critical and "resistant" rhetorics on the US intellectual scene. Celebratory selfcharacterization as an avowed rhetoric against past and present western hegemonies and the voices that support them can easily lead, however, to complacency: the self-advocacy that is needed to keep up the spirits of the critic in the fight against those entrenched ideologies which make the current geopolitical order appear inevitable, can come to seem ajustification in themselves for the work that is being done. In general, however, postcolonial criticism as practiced in the humanities and social science departments of the US academy has been to varying degrees aware—and one might even claim, has been bedeviled by an awareness—of the Diaspora 5:2 1996 necessity of grounding its critiques in, or appealing in the final instance to, some notion of the real or the material loosely contained under the rubric of "history." Looking back at the history of postcolonial criticism since 1979, one senses that an anxiousness about the critic's justification ("Why am I making these critiques here, now?") has always hovered beneath the surface of the determined voice of resistant and counterhegemonic scholarship. Partly this is the result of the path taken by this stage of postcolonial criticism itself. Said's pioneering text, as such critics as Aijaz Ahmad have recently pointed out, is cast in a western humanist idiom whose authority ultimately lies in the same kind of "great books" that Orientalism also works to undermine . Subsequent postcolonial critiques tended to be based on Foucaultian notions of discourse, in which the notoriously amorphous notion of "power" offered a suitably capacious concept where doubts about the specific tendencies or effects of a given intervention could be avoided. In the second place, critiques gain a major part of their effectiveness from their novelty; what was striking in Said can seem merely repetitious when re-articulated about other "orientalist" texts two decades later. Much genealogical and archival work remained to be done, however; it was inevitable, therefore, that as the results of this work were published, its authors felt an increasing need tojustify their reiteration (with some modifications) of the already-stated critique. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, postcolonial criticism seems to have suffered from a secret fear that it itself might turn out to be nothing more than a further, subtle reiteration ofthe very hegemonic discourses of colonialism and western postcolonial posturing it condemns. In its eagerness to establish a critical distance from the object of its critique, and thus forestall any charges of its possible complicity, its chief tactic has always been to claim that colonialist discourses are invariably invalid because they can never in fact represent the "native" others that they describe. The effect ofthis, paradoxically, has been to turn attention more acutely on to the colonialist documents themselves, and to deny the possibility that in any instance any western self-styled experts—anthropologists , humanitarians, and even...