Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 11:33:41 -0500
From: gruffydd-AT-uniwa.uwa.edu.au
Subject: Re: Australia/N America conflict


Dear Karen,.
with regard to your posting on the exclusions question, if I might so term
it.  I agree it is a pity that some of the postings lumped together Canada
and the US as N. America.  And you are quite right to protest it
obviously.It is also the case that little information on specific local
issues such as Hindmarsh or Yackabindie which have been raised recently on
this server, or many other issues less public and political but stiill of
some concern to postcolonialists such as shifts recently in Australia from
concerns with "representing Australian difference" to a very great interest
in a form of US inspired internationalist urban fiction (so called dirty
realism) by younger Oz writers) with all the implications of this for the
intyernatuionalisation of a culture as yet still barely decolonized in any
real sense as other postings recently have argued,  do not get heard in
Canada and vice versa.  How much less do the issues between areas less
likely to "speak" to each other in the public media (e.g. Africa and
Australia)  get heard.  This is not a matter only of the "who can speak for
the Other" kind, important though the theoretical and practical
implications of the cultural and philosophical issues this question raises
are?  It's also a sociological as much as a cultural issue.  What viable
means other than the Internet are there for such speech to be regularly
effected outside fairly narrow academic associations (Aust-Canada
Conferences etc...)  It is still the case that what Biodun Jeyifo referred
to recently as "the central social formations of the world system" (Jeyifo
essay in Literary Theory and Afdrican Literatureedited by Josef Guygler et
al and  published by Literature Verlag, Munster/Hamburg 1994)effectively
control and channel the intercommunication of the bulk of the globe.  This
means in effect the dominance of European and American publishers
and,increasingly media networks.  The old BBC world service or even more
powerfully recently Ted Turner's world news or Murdoch's News Ltd.Sky
Channel   It is significvant of course that the rotten Ozzie as the Brits
call Murdoch is now expediently a US citizen.  He knows where his real
power base is.  The issue seeme to me to be  how do we try and effect
communications which do not proceed through the central social formations?
Much work done so far in postcolonial studies, including much of my own,
addresses the "culturalist" stage (which emphasises the need to empower
local voices)  though obviously this is not sufficient it is or was a very
important stage in establishing the alternative discourse we are all in
various ways seeking to construct.  Beyond the issue of who speaks though
is the issue of speak where and how? As it stands if I want to speak to you
directly now I have to publish or otherwise "speak" thorugh institutions
still largely controlled by the central social formations, international
publishing and media networks which are still firmly based in the Euro-US
bloc.  The Internet currently offers a means of speaking at least between
individuals in what partly Australian educated Canadian critic Stephen
Slemon, adapting the old term for the erstwhile Soviet bloc in the
traditional usage, has called "Second World" countries (those economically
developed but still culturally marginalised, such as Canada, Oz etc...) but
it reaches only to a few in places like Africa and India.  Check Africa on
the Virtual Tourist Map and you will find all the sites listed there are in
the Republic of SA.  In India individuals who have access to a single
departmental machine in a Uni can get email but the Internet connectors are
still few and far between.  There is a real struggle here to be fought and
won.

While I am deeply sympathetic to people like Stephanie Gilbert  whose
recent posting  quite rightly recorded the fact that the "others' as she
terms them still do not get to speak for themselves,  this is also part of
a wider issue in which the "nativist" voice, however strictly defined or
essentially structured and policed, can still only get licenced to speak
within powerful institutionalised controls.
How can this be combated?
Clearly strategic stuggles on local issues are vital.  But in themselves
they do not get at the root of the propblem.  To do that it is necessary to
destabilise the assumption by the "central social formation" that it is
constituted differently to the marginal formations.  That is that it is
somehow  pure, fixed, authorised etc..  in a way that they are NOT.  For
this reason much recent theory IS important.  But what is now needed also
it seems to me is a series of specific studies of how post-colonial control
(by which I mean the control exercised by both colonial and neo-colonial
power before and after the moment of independence-see my earlier posting on
why I adhere to this formulation)  continues to function hegemonically
through the control of the "means of production, distribution and
exchange"....and to invoke that old Marxist tag is not necessarily to
invoke a simplistic doctrine of revolution, since we have to deal with the
fact that revolutions do not necessarily displace authoritarian structures
as neither does technical decolonization by the construction of independent
neo-colonial "native" regimes.  The Jeyifo article forms a useful point of
departute which might be discussed if other posters are so inclined.
Let me quote what seems to me a crucial passage which could initiate
discussion, though I advise reading it in context to get its full flavour:


"The nativist positions on contemporary critical theory are polemical
counter-diswcourses...Two distinct but often interlocking composite
"nativisms" are involved in this polemic: an extreme or 'strong' nativism,
and a moderate or 'soft'nativism. 'Strong' nativism implicitly or
unwittingly accepts that theory is 'Western' and it therefore completely
rejects 'theory' in toto.  The nativist polemic is often couched in the
form of 'their' theory and'our' literature and speaks of its project as one
of total 'decolonization'.  Moderate or 'soft' nativism calls for
flexibility and vigilance in applying 'their' theory to 'our' own
literatures and cultural traditions and furthermore it additionally caklls
for gewnerating 'our' own theoiry fgrom 'our' own literatures and cultural
traditions, a thoery whicvh would be more ';authentic' and 'relevant'.   It
would be counter-productive to ignore certain crucial aspects of these
nativist positions: the tremendous emnotional charge, the ido9logical uses,
limited as these may be, as counter-discourses of Eurocentrrism in critical
theory, and the cases of genuine theoretical refglection that have emerged
from so-called nativist views.  (It is all the more necessary to make
therse points since it has now become fashionable amonmg certain theorists
of "post-colonial hybridity" to trash nativism without however engaging the
Eurocentric culturalist misrecognition and reification of theory which
produces nativist pourism in theory and fuelks its political extremism.)
Nevertyheless it must be added tya5, like Eurocentrism, nativism also
entails a culturalist obscuring of the systemic features of the
centre-periphery contradition of the world capitalist system.  A critique
of nativism must thus foreground these very systemic features which, like
the Eurocentric culturalism it opposes, it tries to repress.  As a
fundamental dimension ofmthe debate on the decolonizationm of theory, it
might be useful to present some of therse repressed systemic features as
working theses towards the critique of both Eurocentric and naticist
culturalisms.

This Jeyifo does in the rest of the paper.

Incidentally my own work with Ashcroft and Tiffin to which Jeyifo makes
reference is classified as "soft nativism" by Jeyifo, since he properly
recognises that although we embrace a concept of hybridity as an inevitable
condition for post-colonial culktural production and reject the fantasy of
a return to an unadulterated pre-colonial past as a viable aim of
"decolonizatuion" we do so in an argument which also supports and records
sympathetically the growth of and the need for "native" (sorry, but it's
the term HE uses) theories and literary and cultural positions to be
developed and recovered.  The theorists of "hybridity' to which he refers
in the paragraph above are the stricter colonialist discourse theorists
such as Bhabha, and to some extent, until recently with her statement on
"strategic tactical essentialism",  Spivak)



Jeyifo's argument seems to me to be flawed in so far as it is still marked
with a certain nostalgic form of Marxist theory, and in invoking "world
systems theory", as so many people, especially critics in the US and in
Latin American and other cooparative studies there, have done recently
(Dirlik, Coronnal etc..) the piece raises the issue of whether a defence of
the essentially "local" character of radical post-colonmial resistance can
be easily articulated through another globalising system however "liberal"
its intent?  But this is an issue that post-coloniak studies of all
varieties is continually forced to face, and as Jeyifo at least indicates
the simplictic retreat to a polemic of "nativism" raises as many questions
as it solves in this respect.

This is a Sunday Morning Oz time reply so forgive the length.  I would
think, that a debate which sought to focus some of these issues might be
useful.  In this regard as Peter Stewart has argued, local struggles such
as Hindmarsh or specific problems such as US/Canada/Oz hegemonic
contestationswhich you raise  might be viewed throuygh a post-colonial kens
which might cause both light and shadow to fall on thse issues to the
better focus of all.


Thanks for your stimulating posting,


Gareth Griffiths

>May I ask what posters mean when they ask somethimg like whether Australia
>exists from the North American point of view?  What is meant by "North
>America"?
>
>Why don't I know about the Hindmarsh affair?  Probably for the same reasons
>that others on the list don't know much about local battles here (in
>Canada) between the Federal govt and numerous aboriginal groups:  It
>doesn't make it into the international section of our national paper here,
>nor on the CBC news, etc.  Our newspapers are conservative and "yet another
>aboriginal/govt battle" just will not make the news.  I look to this group
>as an alternative source of news/ideas/discussion.  I rarely post to the
>group because, for some reasons that I understand and some I don't, it
>makes me feel uncomfortable.  Is _my_ silence in the face of the Hindmarsh
>discussion to be read as a colonizing force, an attempt _to silence_ the
>discussion?  I know that posters are talking in general terms, and not
>about "me" necessarily, but I don't always understand those terms.  Are
>there only two positions open here -- speak and therefore recognize the
>Australian voice, or keep quiet and therefore silence it?  I can't accept
>this.
>
>re: that "good old, fundamental question for poco theorists -- who has the
>right to speak and ... is the speaker heard?"  I hear a lot about
>Australian issues/concerns/events on this list -- far more Australian than
>Canadian content (are there fewer of us?  are we more likely to be lurkers?
>I don't know).  I find it hard to understand the lament that "we
>Australians" are not heard in "North America."  Not only do I follow with
>interest postings to this list on Australian subjects and discuss with my
>peers the intersections and differences between native politics here and in
>other places (like Australia), I have been practically raised on Australian
>poco criticism and theory, as have my colleagues (here in south-western
>Ontario).
>
>Karen
>
>
>
>
>
>
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