From: FRAGANO S LEDGISTER <f.ledgis-AT-msuacad.morehead-st.edu>
Subject: Re: your mail
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 95 10:37:14 EDT


> 
> Dear Ledgister,
> 
> I want to clarify my position, since your posting grossly oversimplifies my
> view.

How so? All I did was ask some questions in the hope of gaining greater
clarity.

> I did suggest that the "post-colonial" Australian "nation state" may
> represent a state rulked by a comprador elite, easily identified in some
> respects because of the fact that it is white.  This do not mean that all

Okay, but how do you distinguish it from the non-elite? Race is hardly
a useful criterion in an overwhelmingly white society.

\> white Australian culture is only and always a product of that elite and its
> attitudes, certanly not that that is in an y way inevitable.  This is to
> really ESSENTIALISE culture in an incredibly naive way.  I also did not
> intend to suggest that this situation was unique to either Australia or to
> settler colony cultures except in respect to the marker of colour.  Ngugi's

Could you clarify this?

> work demonstrates clearly how a black independence goverment in Kenya can
> act as a comprador elite.  Equally the rule of Muslim Malays in Malaysia to
> the detriment of other raceswith different religious affiliations (Chinese,
> Tamil "left over" by colonialism) or the domination of Indian indentured
> labourers by "native" Fijians under Rambuka (a race configuration again)  
> in a government predominantly involved with multinational interests in
> sugar, mining wtc... are all examples of precisely the same problem.  What

Ethnic solidarity for the purpose of establishing or maintaining the dominance
of the elite of a particular ethnic segment or alliance of segments is the
problem?  One finds this everywhere in the post-colonial world (certainly
everywhere in the places I study), though the dominant segmental elite is
not always (and, I suspect, rarely primarily) a 'comprador' class. (In your
examples only the case of Kenya is unambiguously that of a comprador
bourgeoisie; Malaysia and Fiji are dominated by a landed elite, even if much of
it has turned to business or built connections to TNCs).

> I was drawing attention to was not a SPECIAL condition of Australia or even
> of white settler colonies though it would be very comforting to have things
> that simple  but a specific example of a much wider  problem.  To argue
> that post-colonial means decolonised is inaccurate.  I have always used the

Okay.

> term to designate the study of the TOTAL and ONGOING effects of colonialism
> on the two-thirds of the world affected by it.  I do not mean to assert
> either that the dominating groups within those post-independence elitist
> nation states  and their productions are not themselves in part defined by
> and marginalised by colonialism, and are valid in themselves both as art
> and as objects of study.  Take books like Patrick White's "A Fringe of
> Leaves"or  David MALOUF'S "Remember Balylon", for example.  Clearly this is
> a specific white view of settler/Aboriginal interaction but it inscribes
> important insights into the idea of "going native" as a trope which
> explores and exposes the anxiety at the heart of the idea of colonialism
> and of racial purity as a metaphor for it.  To suggest that because
> politically White Australia is not fully "decolonized" that makes its works
> invalid is patent nonsense. Even those books which inscribe the experience

I don't disagree.

> of white Australia per se are still clearly products of the wider forces of
> colonisation.  Post-colonialism studies the differences across a wide
> variety of kinds of colonial experiences and seeks to see both the
> similarities and differences it produced under different conditions. We do
> NOT have to function by a series of excluding polce actions unless we
> believe that only overtly resistant texts can be meaningful or can provide
> us with an understanding of how colonialism operated.  To understand
> colonialism and its effects we need to understand it in all its
> manifestations and their complex interactions.
>

Okay.

> Also you seem a little confused in the latter part of your posting.  How
> can you want simply to dismiss defining the problem of speaking for people
> who have been silenced bu domnant discourses and instiuitutions and at the
> same time advocate that they JUST speak?  The issue is whether that speech
> is controlled by the dicourses and instututions which "give it voice". 
> This is not just a fancy poststructuralist theory.  The institutions which
> control who speaks and the discourses they generate include media outlets,
> book publishers, lists like this.  I too welcome the voices that speak like
> Stephanies but I don't think that this somehow bypasses the problem of
> theorising discursive and institutional controls of marginalised groups nor
> do I think that only those groups who are marginalised in certain ways,
> e.g. by color discrimination or gender discrimination, should speak.  Try
> telling tha white Catholics of Northern Ireland that they were not
> discriminated against under colonisation, and that discrimination continued
> to be a feature of colonies like Australia in the nineteenth and early
> tewentieth century.

I tend to get nervous when people claim to speak on my behalf, especially
when they are ethnic outsiders.  Otherwise, I don't disagree with you.
> 
> Your final section suggests that speaking one's lived experience is
> achieved by essentialising one's identity?  I'm sorry, but isn't this a
> contradiction. Essentialising one's identity means fixing one's lived
> experience in "essential" ways which are legitimated as "authentic' and to
> which any aberration is deviant and inauthentic; and as you properly point
> out that experience is complex and hybrid involving intersections with
> gender choice, class, religion etc...etc..Stephanie Green's point, as I
> understood it, was that lesbians  didn't fit the acceptable essentialised
> stereotype of the "Aboriginal woman" and so didn't get to speak.  
> A further  example.  Ningali Lawford, a Nyoongah (Aboriginal) performer in
> her recent autobiographical theatre piece  "Ningali" used both traditional
> songs and country and western music as markers of her "lived experience",
> since for many modern aboriginal peoples they are both part of their
> current identity; similiarly she spoke in "language" (Nyoongah language),
> appropriated "Aboriginal" english and Received Standard English indicating
> that as a modern aboriginal she had access to all these modes amnd was
> entitled to use them all as she saw fit.
> 
I don't think I made the argument you think I made. I find what you say interesting, and, as far as I can make out from looking at my posting, all I did was raise some questions that I wanted greater clarity on.

Thanks & Cheers,
Fragano Ledgister


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