Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 08:14:53 -0400
Subject: RE: quite simply put...some more worms to can...


warning: long post.

comments anyone? 

Excerpt below from pg. 33. Aihwa Ong (1999)
"Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality" 
Duke univ press. 


" More broadly, postcolonial theorists focus on recovering the 
voices of the subjects silenced by patriarchy and colonial rule....;
they assume that all contemporary racial, ethnic, 
and cultural oppressions can all be attributed to Western colonialisms.
American appropriations of postcolonial theory have created a unitary
discourse of the postcolonial that refers to highly variable situations
and conditions throughout the world; thus Gayatri Spivak is able to talk 
about the `paradigmatic subaltern woman,' as well as `New World Asians 
(the old migrants) and New Immigrant Asians (often `model minorities') being
disciplinarized together.' Other postcolonial feminists also have been eager
to seek structural similarities, continuities, conjunctures, and alliances
between.... 

Seldom is there any attempt to link these assertions of unitary 
postcolonial situations among diasporan subjects in the West to the 
historical structures of colonization, decolonization, and 
contemporary developments in particular non-Western countries.

..... In careless hands, postcolonial theory can represent a kind of theoretical
imperialism whereby scholars based in the West, without seriously 
engaging the scholarship [or lived contexts] of faraway places, can project
or "speak for" the postcolonial situations elsewhere." 



_________
a ) where and how do we "do Theory" as postcolonial scholars?

b) why the false (and yes this is implicitly and explicitly there - see some
of the most recent posts even) binary between theory and practise? [these
binaries, btw do injustice to the processes associated with both "Theories"
and "Practises" ]. Are we - even as we critique "Enlightenment" and
post-Enlightenment modes of thinking, still perpetuating an implicitly
colonialist binary where "we" do Theory  and explain "them" and their contexts?

c) in what contexts are these theories useful or not and why

d) Assuming that every context of action simultaneously "produces" and is
"informed" by  theory - what is the location of the Theorists who get heard
within hegemonic powerfields and what are the "theories" that never emerge
to complicate Theory?

e) do we need to be engaging with questions (a) to (d) at all as
"self-reflexive" postcolonial intellectuals? Or shall we just adopt a couple
"grand theories" and apply to all contexts like everyone else...

I don't see that there is anything "anti-theoretical" "anti-intellectual"
"anti-activist" or anything else about these simple questions (whoever they
came from - by this time in the discussion, I'm seeing text and no names).
The questions remain the same whichever Theorists - Grand Theories and
French Theories etc - we want to talk about.


r



 
****************************************************
Radhika Gajjala
http://www.cyberdiva.org/
http://lingua.utdallas.edu:7000/4425/
http://moo.hawaii.edu:7000/599/
http://scape.uta.edu:7000/3027/



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