File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postco_1995/postco_Aug.95, message 97


Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 09:07:09 -0500
From: gruffydd-AT-uniwa.uwa.edu.au
Subject: Re: your mail


Dear Fragand,
thanks for your response.  I think the confusion may have arisen because
you posted interleaved replies to a posting from Timothy.  He raised most
of the issues to which I responded rather than you and he sent me a private
posting which resolved most of our "differences".  These interleaved
messages get rather confusing as to origin.  My apologies for confusing you
as interjector with the original sender Timothy Gaynor who raised most of
the points I responded to.

Your point about how do we identify the "comprador ruling élite" in a
predominantly white society is an important one.  It seems to me to be why
race as an identifier also has tro be modified by other factors, class,
gender etc...and not in an essentialist way, but in terms of function and
effect.  White polies of workiong class origin (e.g. Keating or Wilson
Tuckey) may become rich and may also become in their various ways
reactionary , though clearly noone in their right mind would think Keating
quite as reactionary, even at his worst, as Tuckey.  But it is a crucial
point and it is why 'race" is as Fanon noted (in The Fact of Blackness ) a
crucial element in discriminatory practices.  Good point and I don't
disagree.

This does not mean that all 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.

you asked me to clarify this.  I'll try.
The practice of power, even hegemonic power, is never absolute (thank
goodness).  Power constrains but in sop doing creates the possibilities for
resistance and subversion (Massa talk; mimicry, direct rebellion, e.g.
Indian Liberation War of the 1850's etc...Australian Aboriginal resistance,
even,in a way,  God help him, the sort of "outlawry" that Ned Kelly
represents see Eric Hobsbawm on this kind of outlaw figure).  So th
erelations between dominater and dominated are never simply a one-way flow,
though clearly the relationship is deeply uneven and hierarchic. A ruling
élite never represents the whole of a culture.  Nor is its "rule"
inevitable and unable to be resisted or dismantled.  Otherwise we accept
the "myth" of the nation as equivalent to the "nation state" erected by
that ruling élite who essentialise certain values and features and then
designate them as national values : "Aussie traditions", the recent
privatised movement to define "Australian Values", dissapeared into
oblivion thank goodness; (Un)American Activities;homo sovieticus etc...
etc..  It is this which I argue is not unique to settl;er colonies but is a
feature of post-colonial natioopn states and their ruling élites in many
places.

Your comment about the "landed élite in Malaysia and FIji is probably
correct.  Certainly bumaputraism moved rapidly away from a "race/religion"
configuratioon when Chinese-Malays  started to convert to Islam.  But I
think my general point stands that a variety of reasons for internal
discriminations occur  in the name of recovery of original pre-colonial
culture (a culture defined by a construction of tyhat past by the present
ruling elite).  In fact, of course, one has some sympathy with the need for
negative discrimination for groups like the Melanesian Fijians or the
Malays in Malaysia, probably more for the latter, but the practices of
discrimination spawned by them are rreal nebvertheless.


Thanks for your posting.

I'm sorry I can't carry on this discussion as I am signing off the list for
a while.  I just have to get some WORK done.  Thanks for an interesting and
stimulating exchange.

Gareth




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