Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 09:44:22 -0500 (EST)
From: Lisa McNee <lm23-AT-qsilver.queensu.ca>
Subject: Re: Who is "us?" WAS: the enemy and they is us


I want to thank the person who mentioned the academic production machine.
It certainly seems to indicate that "postcolonial" peoples should be
suspicious of academics who hope to "study" their
lives/practices/cultures! Since I do ethnographic work, even though I am a
literary critic, this is a question of great concern to me. And, as a
white scholar in African Studies, I find it ludicrous that white scholars
could ever imagine that they can escape existing racial categories and all
that they imply simply because they have an interest and knowledge of
African or other non-western cultures. Perhaps the new field of "White
Studies" has arisen simply because many scholars have now realized that
they cannot "speak for the Other," but can examine the intersections
and constructions that go into these discursive machines. Although this
may seem old hat, I am interested in knowing whether other people have
read Robert Young's analysis of hybridity, and agree with him that
hybridity as a concept has also been used to protect or make permissible a
certain colonialist attitude (i.e. the white colonizer can understand
everything, for s/he is hybrid and creolized, just as the colonized
is. This reductionist attitude would then make this interesting concept
into grist for the colonialist mill.). Edouard Glissant has argued that
global creolite cannot do away with opacity. In other words, we will never
arrive at the western dream of cultural and linguistic transparency via
hybridity; however, we can relate to each other and relate (narrate) about
each other. In this way, he reworks the notion of hybridity in a way that
seems complementary to Bhabha's recent article on the irreducibility of
difference (PMLA, January 1998). Any ideas on this?

Best, Lisa 



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