File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1999/postcolonial.9907, message 114


Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 14:38:17 -0700
From: "Marlene R. Atleo" <maratleo-AT-island.net>
Subject: Re: Not White, Not Quite?


Have to agree with Joe Flanagan here...about seeing the "other" through the
evolving lens of the likes of Joyce or other literary lens....if the mind
operates metaphorically then it becomes critical to deconstruct the source
metaphor which in this case would be Joyce in all his degrees of
colonization as an Irishman and certainly...the equivalencies are "like"
and the onus on the postcolonial project I believe is to help us understand
how different those "likes" truly....

The evolution of colonization is intimately tied to the "voice" and its
decolonization....

iterestingly enough there are parallels in current psychotherapeutic
literature which has for a long time looked at the issues around
"transference" as problematic.....
ah, so many frames, so little time....but I am with Joe.....one frame does
not fit all the pictures.....
Mar.

At 01:29 PM 7/24/99 -0400, you wrote:
>I think that part of the problem about talking whether Ireland should be
>considered (post)colonial (I use this moniker because the status of
>Northern Ireland is still subject to question) is that the category of
>"whiteness" alternates between a pre-given, empirical "fact" and a
>discursive category. At the time Ireland was colonized, "race" simply did
>not have the meaning it did in the 18th and 19th century. Certainly, one
>can talk about Ireland as being colonized by the English (I suggest that
>anyone interested read Spenser's View of Ireland, which employs many of
>topi that characterize colonial discourse).  The problem with comparing
>the English colonization of Ireland with that of India, Africa, and the
>Caribbean is more than one of historical distance and different
>mobilizations of racial, cultural, national identies (besides. If we
>extend it far back enough, can we not say that England was also
>colonized--not only by the French but by tribes from Germany?) It's the
>question of _why_ scholars want to make the comparision in the first
>place...Even if we accept the term "colonization" to describe what
>happened in Ireland, does that mean Joyce can tell us about the situation
>in India or Africa? Is Irish nationalism at the end of the last century
>(and continuing today) the same as national liberartion movements in this
>century? Or is it instead that people want to preserve the traditional
>canon by adopting the most current theoretical approach--a decade ago we
>had postmodern Joyce, now we have a postcolonial one.  The problem is not
>that "whites" cannot be colonized--it's that by attempting to categorize
>Ireland, or the US, or Canada, etc. as colonized countries, we can feel
>good about nationalistic study of literature we would otherwise feel
>embarassed about. It's the kind of self-congradulatory attitude that I
>thinks mars much of the "whiteness" movement--we are not racist because we
>are already "racialized" (obviously I do not refer to all who are involved
>in this project). It is, in other words, another way of reclaiming the
>"universality" of the traditional canon and its ethnocentric
>biases--everything that we could learn from, say, Ngugi, is already found
>in Joyce, so why bother studying all this "foreign" stuff?  Joe F
> 
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>


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