Crisis and Politics in Postcolonial Discourse

Abstract

The development of a ‘postcolonial’ mode of discourse as a direct derivative of postmodernist theories of knowledge and culture creates a historic crisis for the study of decolonization literatures — those literatures created to combat European colonialism in the past and neocolonialism in the present — by subverting its purpose with a universalist, homogenizing discourse that denies the very essence of the subject matter of the study. Many major exponents of the term ‘postcolonial discourse’ justify the use of the concept on such grounds as:

• (i) the need to liberate the discourse from the hegemonic connotations and neocolonialist entanglements of such terms as ‘Commonwealth literature’, ‘New English Literatures’, ‘New Literatures in English’, or ‘Third World Literature’;

• (ii) the advantage of a field of intellectual inquiry that embraces all europhone writing from formerly colonized peoples, rather than merely anglophone writing;

• (iii) the need to end the marginalization of the literatures and cultures of the vast majority of the worlds’ peoples who have hitherto been subordinated to Europe, the imperial centre, and to strengthen the oppositional role of the majority’s discourse; and

• (iv) the empowerment of those marginalized peoples and cultures by asserting the validity of their historical experience, cultural products, and world views in opposition to the universalist claims of imperial Europe.

we black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation — this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems. It is time, clearly, to respond to this new threat, each in his own field.¹