To: <postcolonial-AT-lists.village.viginia.edu>
Subject: Post-colonial condition of knowledge.
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 18:34:20 +0500


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I would like to make a request for discussion on the 'post-colonial condition of knowledge',
within the frame work of the concept of 'hybridity',as it is understood in its various contexts
in Post-colonial discourse.As a preliminary hypothesis ,it can be suggested that the hybridization    
of the dominant and the dominated sociologies of knowledge ,in the colonial situation leads to
the emergence of degenerative unconscious processes,which ultimately stunt the 'natural' growth
 of the cognitive faculties of the colonized.
 Science ,the most pervasive colonial epistemology,rooted as it ,in the historico-cultural formations of the
 colonizer,comes to be dispersed into a multiplicity of historical trajectories
of appropriation,in different colonized societiesThese hybrid epistemologies,go along with '
the psychologies of defense ,at the individual and cultural levels,purporting to find workable
 and sometimes ,not so workable answers to the question: how to live
 with the 'irreconilables' and the 'irreversivbles' and yet not be paralyzed by intellectual apathy
 or a sense of cultural doom(a sort of no-way-out syndrome).
Who is going to tell the stories (or sub-altern histories,if you like) of pidgin sciences,and Creole
philosophies in the post-colonial world(south Asia, for that matter)

                           

                                   
Mirza Athar Baig
Associate Professor,
Department of Philosophy,
Government College,Lahore,
PAKISTAN.

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