File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0408, message 33


Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 18:20:36 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] re: Dirlik


Sorry if the Dirlik piece was a repost.  The main reason I posted it was that he discusses anarchism from a postcolonial perspective, which I thought made it of potential interest to people on this list.
 
Actually I don't know Dirlik's work very well, but I like what I've read so far.  I find postcolonial theory very interesting, for two main reasons.  Firstly, because it goes a long way in thinking about questions of power, oppression and resistance, and in giving a practical or political aspect to poststructuralist theories.  Although postcolonialism is probably best known for the more "theoretical" aspects, there's a lot of very concrete work (such as Said's work on Palestine, Chatterjee's "The Nation and its Fragments" and Hecht and Simone's "Invisible Governance") which give an empirical, everyday-life dimension to poststructuralist theorising.  I find a lot of this work useful in thinking about practical issues of resistance and in linking empirical and theoretical questions.
 
And secondly, because a lot of the most important struggles today are going on in what might be called the postcolonial world.  Also, this is basically three-quarters of the world, so we'd better pay attention one way or another.  I'm also interested in World Systems Theory for much the same reasons, though I'd gathered there was something of a feud between the two perspectives (which I'm inclined to ignore, just because I find the whole "Marxist vs postmodernist" division to be utterly unproductive and to ignore what different perspectives have in common - whether for better or worse).
 
Dirlik in particular I find interesting because he seems to have avoided going down the Lacanian/"politics of lack" path which is very apparent in the work of Bhabha and Spivak.  Also because he's written on anarchism (specifically, on anarchism in China), although I've not read this book yet.  My own direction in these matters is more in terms of a Deleuzian rewriting of postcolonial theory.  If you're interested, see:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/Trap.PDF
which is the only thing I've written on postcolonialism so far...  It's something I've been meaning to come back to, but keep getting delayed.  Sometime I'm going to have a good look at Fanon's work, and Bhabha's accusation that Fanon is a "humanist" - which I suspect, from having read some of Fanon's stuff before, is a cover for Bhabha's Lacanian distaste for Fanon's belief in revolution, or in social transformations which really escape the oppressive logics of colonialism, racism, etc.  
 
And I want to come back to the question of the Papuan resistance as well.  The OPM is an intriguing movement, not least because they have gone further than any other resistance movement in doing without a central perspective or even a unified language.  Papuans speak something like a quarter of all the world's languages, and have a wide range of different localised cultures, so the very possibility of a West-Papua-wide resistance movement would seem foreclosed in the schemas of "traditional" leftist and even anarchist perspectives.  Yet this resistance exists, and comparatively speaking, is remarkably successful.  They also have some very interesting ideas of their own.  I think the importance of locality, particularity and the link to nature in the Papuan resistance is a challenge to the kind of self/other relation set up by Derrida, Lacan, Spivak etc., because the basic demand is "leave us alone" rather than a demand to be heard within the dominant paradigm.  (There's some 
 stuff
 about already in the same area, by the way, especially Eben Kirksey's work which, from what I've seen, is very good, but I think the theoretical importance of the Papuan resistance for postcolonial theory and for radical and revolutionary perspectives still needs to be considered).
 
Actually I only got into the subject of postcolonialism because a rather annoying hardline postcolonialist got a PhD position at my university and gave me a hard time at a research seminar, claiming my way of theorising oppression didn't take account of resistances outside the west, or of experiences of black people, of migrants, etc. - an accusation I took very seriously, and went off and read some stuff, only to find that this turns out to be the standard line which hardline postcolonialists ALWAYS come out with when someone disagrees with them... Oh well, it was worthwhile reading anyway.

Andy

		
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