Local Sentences in the Chapter of the Postcolonial World

D A A JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL STUDIES Diaspora 7:1 1998 Local Sentences in the Chapter of the Postcolonial World Laura Chrisman Brown University/University of Sussex Colonial Discourse IPostcolonial Theory. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. The grand narrative of decolonisation has, for the moment, been adequately told and widely accepted. Smaller narratives are now needed, with attention paid to local topography, so that the maps can become fuller ... But the small narratives do not stand by themselves—as they would for Lyotard; they are local sentences in the chapter of the postcolonial world. (73-4) These comments, from Peter Hulme's introduction, strike a keynote for this essay collection as a whole. Although some of its contributors align themselves with those very postmodern arguments from which Hulme marks his distance, they all share his concern with scaling down postcolonial cultural analysis and theorization to focus on particular cultural, historical, andgeographical cases. This provides a striking contrast with the earlier stages of the "industry ," as inaugurated by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), which was concerned with mapping a phenomenon of massive historical and geographical proportions; or, alternatively, with Homi Bhabha's projects in the mid-1980s (Location chap. 2-6), which took up the task of theorizing a generalized colonial subjectivity. It is not only the focus on "locality" which differentiates this collection from the earlier work of Said and Bhabha. This earlier stage of colonial discourse /postcolonial theory privileged India and the Orient as objects ofstudy (Said) or as the example from which psychoanalytic patterns could be derived (Bhabha). In this collection oftwelve chapters, only one is devoted to India. The rest cover a striking regional range, including Spanish America, the Philippines, the Caribbean, West Africa, South Africa, France, the USA, and the UK. This diversity of regions ushers in a broadening of theoretical as well as physical terrain. Despite the volume's title, "discourse" theory in a strongly Foucauldian sense is notprevalent in the contributions. And contrary to the title's suggestion, colonialism serves more as an epistemological and political matrix than as a topic of analysis. 88 Diaspora 7:1 1998 The contents of the book offer yet another departure from its titular focus, namely in the predominant skepticism towards the very "poco" word itself. As Anne McClintock here points out in "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Postcolonialism'": While admittedly another PC word, "post-colonialism" is arguably more palatable and less foreign-sounding to sceptical deans than "Third World Studies." It also has a less accusatory ring than "Studies in Neocolonialism," say, or "Fighting Two Colonialisms." The term borrows, moreover, on the dazzling marketing success of the term "postmodernism." As the organising rubric of an emerging field of disciplinary studies and an archive of knowledge, the term "post-colonialism" makes possible the marketing of a whole new generation of panels, articles, books and courses. (262) McClintock offers a materialist reservation toward the social, political, and economic implications ofthis postcolonial terminology and advocates that critics start rethinking the global situation as a multiplicity ofpowers and histories, which cannot be marshalled obediently under the flag of a single theoretical term, be that feminism, Marxism or post-colonialism ... a proliferation of historically nuanced theories and strategies is called for, which may enable us to engage more effectively in the politics of affiliation, and the currently catastrophic dispensations of power. (266) This materialist call to arms is well met by the book's contributions , which make important interventions in a number of postcolonial academic debates. Some of these, concerning "hybridity," "transculturation," and "transatlantic cultures," are relatively recent; others, like nativist nationalism and political cultures of resistance, are debates which have been assumed by many in the industry to be over, resolved by a postmodern consensus. This collection reveals just how erroneous such an assumption is. One of McClintock's objections to the "poco" word is that it divides and fixes history according to a single axis, from "colonial" to "postcolonial." This collection interrogates this clear-cut and singular axis by its theoretical engagement with the complicated examples of early twentieth-century Brazil, the Philippines, and South Africa; by its unusual...