Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 00:16:56 +0200
Subject: re: Post-postcolonial theory


Hello,

I would like to add my two cents to the ongoing, never-ending debate on the value of post colonial theory in what is my discipline -history.

I, like Ms. Dodd, have spent quite a few hours pouring over post-structuralists and post-colonialists texts (some good, most bad)trying to see how it may fit and help me understand better my own field and perhaps to help make it fit more neatly into the discipline. 

I've also come to similar conclusions that post-colonial theory is self-serving, written for and by the US academic mill and not the subjects that are supposedly trying to be liberated. Whatever happened to the E.P. Thompson school of academic writing? 

More important, I feel, is the denigration of field work, be it in a dusty archive in Buenos Aires or in a village in Africa, which Ms. Dodd rightly points out. Post-colonial theory freezes lowers the past as fictional constructions --when was the last time post-colonial theory tried to analyze three or four competing newspaper in any colonial town to capture the complexity of the social and political situation? Yes, they would be four different "constructions" or "fictions" but they are events that happened, needing some sort of historical interpretation. Perpetually wonting (not working) in theory does not help one or anyone else understand, say, the current land problem in Zimbabwe. 

Is this a problem that post colonial theory has been mostly a endeavour of English literature departments and not of more rigorous social scientists? 


Finally, and perhaps to add to Ms. Dodd's list of complaints, the subject of post-colonial theory is off the mark. My understanding of post-colonial theory --and tell me if I'm wrong-- is to decentre our collective understanding of the colonial experience, which is admirable. If this is the case, why is this list (and post-colonial theory in general) obsessed with England and not what happened Malawi, Germany, Argentina, Zambia, Canada, etc?  Colonialism and its thereafter was a many headed beast, complex and not necessarily England-centred.  

Regards, 

Samuel Horne
 











In responding to the demand for alternatives to institutionalised forms of postcolonial theory, I completely support the search for new forums and forms.

I have been thinking about these issues for a while, and was able to 
tentatively formulate some factors involved in this quest. Just to throw some ideas out there, perhaps what needs to be attended to is:

--Epistemology : what kinds of terms and categories are being employed in postcolonial discourse.. Are they being re-invested with new valences, or just re-applied uncritically.

--Audience: Just exactly _who_ is reading all the stuff classified as 
"postcolonial theory?" Is there a need to extend the audience, orseek 
new ones?

--Archive: What kinds of sources are used for most postcolonial 
theorization. Reading the French post-structuralists seems mandatory, and quite a waste of time.

Any thoughts on this issue?

Best,
Maya Dodd.


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