Toward a Profane Postcolonialism

Diaspora 8:2 1999 Toward a Profane Postcolonialism Neil Larsen University of California—Davis Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 1. Postcolonialism, it seems, has had its day. Such, at any rate, is the word on the academic street level, outside special sessions ofthe MLA and along the myriad alleyways ofInternet chatter. A relative newcomer to "poco" could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, of course: university presses continue to announce new titles in which the term features prominently; every English department or "cultural studies" curriculum must have its "postcolonialist" (under which heading all or part of US "ethnic" studies is often included); graduate students in the humanities and on the left fringes of the social sciences must be introduced to postcolonialism's authoritative theorists and texts; and who knows how many "poco" dissertations are in preparation or still to be written? But, perhaps just because of its secure institutionalization and the consequent waning of its vanguard aura, poco's stock seems poised to fall, and the wise "theoretical" investor should probably be looking elsewhere to park his share of cultural capital. When one of poco's legendary founders (though, of course, not a vulgar "postcolonialist " herself ) announces not only the existence of something called "postcolonial reason" but in the same breath its "critique" (see Spivak), one can safely wager that a trend is being unmade and an intellectual market-space cleared for a potential successor. What, if anything, will this successor be? The more dedicated jargon-mongers have long been primed for this moment. Perhaps "post-occidentalism" or a generic, appropriately de-historicized "subaltern studies"? My personal favorite is Amitava Kumar's suitably ironic "World Bank Literature," though I suspect this rubric will not make its way into university course catalogues or sell more than one university press book. 173 Diaspora 8:2 1999 Sheer terminological convenience, of course, guarantees a marginally more extended shelf life to poco. Postcolonialism, postcolonialist , postcoloniality, postcolonial theory, postcolonial literature, the postcolonial, a postcolonial, and so on: try this with, say, "subaltern cultural studies" and the result is considerably more cumbersome . Or try the same with the more historically and politically entailed "Third World," and the greater convenience of poco, both lexical-syntactical and euphemistic, is obvious. Poco is, for want of a more fulsome definition, "Third World" minus its explicit ideological charge and geopolitical eschatology. In this it at least retains a certain descriptive and generic utility that, say, its Tweedledumish near twin, "porno," seems unlikely ever to enjoy. I sometimes think of proposing to my students as a thought experiment the excising from all "theoretical" literature produced over the last generation of the term "postmodern" and its variants, leaving in place only those words that actually describe pomo's putative qualities , for example, "meta-fiction," "pastiche," or the "waning of affect." Would the net intellectual or conceptual loss be measurable at all? Might it not, in fact, become apparent that earlier "theories" of modernism, for all their own vagaries and general absence of rigor, had already sketched in the basic outlines, or "cultural logic," of the postmodern? To mark the occasion of its probable demise, one might then go on to attempt an analogous exercise for poco, substituting "third world" or "neocolonial" at the appropriate sites. Or one might spare oneself all the trouble and simply turn to Neil Lazarus's Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. In the course of the precise and painstaking polemics that make up the first two chapters of this book, something like this unflinching measure is taken, not only of poco but of its often cognate "theories" of "globalization," "hybridity," "New Times," and so forth. Lazarus engages, sometimes angrily, sometimes sympathetically , but always with genuine polemical rectitude, work by Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri C. Spivak, Stuart Hall, Ranajit Guha, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Valentin Mudimbe, Gyan Prakash, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Robert C. Young, Partha Chatterjee, Christopher Miller, and others, as well as the less- or non-poco-aligned theories of Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Anthony Giddens, Eric Hobsbawm, David Harvey, and others. Nationalism and Cultural Practice is quite explicit about the standard ofmeasure to be universally applied: a...