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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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