Postcolonialism And Post Colonialism

It goes without saying that postcolonialism seeks to undermine and transform the dominance of Eurocentrist colonial discourses. It searches, as David Spur put it, for “alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era” (1993: 6) and “changes the world, providing interpretations that have practical consequences” (Schwarz 2005: 4). The postcolonial counter-hegemonic project interrogates and disintegrates any form of imperialism (Xie 1997: 17-18). Postcolonialism is, then, “about a changing world, a world that has been changed by struggle and which its practitioners intend to change further” (Young 2003: 7). Yet, as is true of nearly every field of intellectual inquiry, fractures and fissures gradually opened up within postcolonial studies.

In the inaugural issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies, Simon During drew a distinction between what he calls “reconciliatory postcolonialism” and “critical postcolonialism.” He remarks that through deploying “categories such as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence…postcolonialism effectively became a reconciliatory rather than a critical, anti-colonialist category.” Both forms of postcolonialism, he claims, share the basic premise that “western cultural history since at least the sixteenth century is unanalysable without reference to colonialism” (1998: 31), and show how postcolonial societies as we know them today have been “built by both sides,” neither completely dominated by the West nor fully free of the legacy of imperialism. Beyond these commonalities, however, it is the differences between reconciliatory and critical postcolonialisms that have become increasingly significant and constitutive of the field. Whereas reconciliatory postcolonial thought finds its intellectual and political origins and allegiances within a broadly defined “postmodern Left,” critical postcolonialism maintains in various ways a commitment to materialist, realist and Marxist analyses. Likewise, Mishra and Bob Hodge have distinguished between “oppositional” postcolonialism and “complicit” postcolonialism and argue for what they call a “new postcolonialism.” Other critics also

imperialism in the eighties and nineties. Very importantly, she addresses the curious absence of the term “postcolonial” in academic oppositions to the Gulf War despite its widespread institutional endorsement (1992: 105-99). Indeed, the key journals of postcolonial studies have been relatively quiet on the new imperialism. Another equally blunt way of saying this is that postcolonialism is criticised for a tendency to “focus on faded European empires while ignoring the actually existing U.S. neoimperialism that surged into the vacuum left by the receding empires” (Stam and Shohat 2012: 372). What is more, postcolonialism involves a serious neglect of the role of global capitalism in perpetuating global inequalities in the present and accordingly serves the cultural requirements of global capitalism. Others strongly believe that postcolonialism is an “alibi” to and for the neo-colonialists (Farred 2001: 231). This is due to the fact that it is politically complicit with the dominant capitalist and neo-colonial regimes of knowledge. Such attacks typically assert that the institutional location of postcolonial theory in the Western academy necessarily and automatically precludes it from being able to