Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 18:28:39 -0800
From: Azfar Hussain <azfar-AT-wsu.edu>
Subject: Re: post(-)colonial 



As I don't get "posts" seperately each time but receive them together in
the digest-form, I don't know what kinds of discussions are right now going
on vis-a-vis the "post(-)colonial" and Aijaz Ahmad whose work I mentioned
in my earlier post. I feel I need to make a couple of corrections and
clarifications  subsequent to my earlier post.

As I was relying exclusively on memory at the time of writing my earlier
post, I missed certain details. The anthology in which Ahmad's article
"Postcolonialism: What's in a Name?" appears is not called _Late
Imperialism_ but _Late Imperial Culture_ (London: Verso, 1995), and it's
not edited by Michael Sprinker ALONE but also by two others--Roman de la
Campa and E. Ann Kaplan.

Now a couple of points. The argument Ahmad makes in his "Postcolonialism:
What's in a Name?" is of course partly rehearsed in his "The politics of
literary postcoloniality" (_Race and Class_ 36.3 [1995]). But it is in the
former that Ahmad most sustainedly engages the term "postcolonialism" in
the context of the early-seventies-political-theory debate engineered by
Hamza Alavi--a debate in which folks like Wallerstein and Ahmad himself
participated subsequently.

True, Ahmad in his "Postcolonialism: What's in a Name?" doesn't EXPLICITLY
undertake a discussion of the differences beetween the hyphen and its
absence in the term "postcolonial." However, a careful reading of that very
article gives us a clear sense that when the term first got into political
theory it carried a hyphen (legibly inscribed or not) in the sense that
"post(-)colonialism" came to mark a historically specific "break", a phase
that rose "after" the European colonial-imperial period.

But there's another problem here. Although Ahmad cites Hamza Alavi's _New
Left Review_ article called "The State in Postcolonial Socities: Bangladesh
and Pakistan" (Alavi apparently doesn't use a hyphen in the term here, as
you can see), the sense of a strong presence of a hyphen is still conveyed
by Ahmad to the extent that the term turns out to be FUNDAMENTALLY a
periodizing one.

Now, what's more interesting is that Alavi wrote another article on the
same topic using a hyphen--an article whose publication preceded that of
the one Ahmad refers to.  The article is called "Post-colonial [mark the
hyphen here] Societies: Questions and Concerns" which Bangladesh Society of
History published in their journal in 1972. So one can see that the
hyphenated term actually comes straight from Alavi.

Thanks for your time.

Regards,

Azfar

Azfar Hussain
Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020
USA

Courses Currently Teaching: English 301: RHETORICAL CONVENTIONS

Phones: 509-335-1331 (office)
        509-332-3344 (home)

E-mail: azfar-AT-wsu.edu




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