File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9804, message 137


Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 18:16:38 -0500
From: "Kimberly A. Nance" <kanance-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: The trouble with nations WAS Re: Is the US postcolonial


>> Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky wrote:
>> > In order to be post-colonial you must have been colonial at least
>> > once before, you must have passed through a national liberation
>> > struggle, you must have attained formal independence, and _you
>> > must still be dependent in spite of formal independence_.
>>
Someone questioned:
>> I wonder: If Englishmen went to a part of Africa as colonists,
>> killed as many blacks as they could, (maybe with a governmental
>> policy of sending soldiers to bayonette their babies and
>> grandmothers, "the only good black is a dead black") and put the
>> rest in camps; and then announced independence from the Crown -
>> would those Englishmen be "post colonial"? It doesn't seem to fit?
>> For that area to be "post colonial" wouldn't it be necessary for the
>> people who had been colonized to have regained their independence?

Certainly an argument against the US as postcolonial--and in terms of
postcolonial classification, where would this leave Argentina,
or some of the other places in Latin America where one might substitute
"espa=F1oles" for Englishmen and indigenous peoples for "blacks" in the above
formulation? The situation is complicated, of course, by the rapid replacement
of Spanish imperialism by the US version. 


_________________________________________________________________
Kimberly A. Nance			kanance-AT-ilstu.edu
Director of Graduate Studies		office 309.438.8178
Department of Foreign Languages		fax 309.438.8038
Illinois State University
Normal IL 61790-4300



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