WHEN WAS 'THE POST-COLONIAL'?
THINKING AT THE L l M l T
WHEN WAS 'THE
1 of a historical epoch, as ifcolonialismand its effects aredeíinitively over. 'Post',
POST-COLONIAL'?
THINKING AT THE LIMIT
, intended to he epistemological or chronological. Does 'posr-colonial' mark the
Stuart Ha11
Necessarily, we must dismiss thosc tendencies that encourage ihe con-
soling play o í recognitions.
Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'
When was 'the post-colonial'? What should hc included and excluded from its
frame? Where is the invisible line belween it and its 'others' (colonialism,
neo-colonialism, Third World, imperialism), in relation to whose termination it
ceaselessly. hut without final supcrsession, marks ilselr? The main purpose of
this paper is to explore the interrogation marks which have begun to cluster rhick
and fast around the question of 'the post-colonial' and thc notion of posr-culonial
times. If post-colonial time is the time afer colonialism, and colonialisrn is
defined in t e m s of the hinary division betwezn the colonisers and the coloniscd,
why is post-colonial time also a time of 'difference'? What sort o í 'difference' is
this and what are its implications for the forms of politics and for subject
formation in this late-modern moment? T'hese questions increasingly haunt the
contested space in which the concept of the 'post-colonial' now operates and they
cannot be satisíactorily explored until we know more ahout what the concept
rneans and why it has become the bearer of such powerful unconscious invest-
nieiils - a sign of desire for some, and equally for others, a signifier of danger.
This interrogation can most usefully be done by engaging with the case against
the 'post-colonial' which has been rapidly taking shape in a series o í critica1
commentaries in recent months. Ella Shohat, whose work in this field has been
exemplary for critical scholars, has taken il to lask for a vasiety of conceptual
sins. She criticises the 'post-colonial' íor its theoretical and political ambiguity -
its 'dizzying multiplicity of positionalities', its 'a-historical and universalizi~~&
displacements' and its 'depoliticizing implications' (Shohat, 1992). The post-
colonial, she argues, is politically ambivalent because it blurs thc clcu-cut
distinctions between colonisers and colonised hitherto associated with the
paradigms oí 'colonialism', 'neo-colonialism' and 'Third Worldism' which it
aims to supplant. It dissolves the politics of resistance because it 'posits no
domination and calls for no clear opposition'. Like the other 'posts' with which
ir is aligncd, it collapses diffcrent histories, temporalities and racial formations
into the same universalising category. This is a critique shared by Anne
McClintock, another of the original scholars working in this field, who criticises
the concept for its linearity and its 'entranced suspension of history'
(McClintock, 1992). For both critics, the concept is uscd to mark the final closure
for Shohat, means past: definitively tenninated, closed. But this too, for Shohat,
is part of its amhiguity since it does not make clear whether this periodisation is
mptural point between twoepistemes in intellectual history or does it refer to 'thc
strict chronologies of history tour couri'? (Shohat, 1992: 101)?
In his recent polemical contnhution to this debate, the distingushed scholar o í
modern China, Arif Dirlik (1994). not only cites many of the criticisms of Shohat
and McCliiitock with approval - he ioo finds the concept 'celebratory' of the
so-called end of colonialism - hut adds two suhstantial critiques of his own. The
first is that the post-colonial is a posl-stmcturalist, post-foundationalistdiscourse,
deployed mainly by displaced Third World intelleciuals making good in prestige
'Ivy League' American universitics and deploying ihc fashionahle language of the
linguistic and cultural 'tum' to 'rephrase' M m i s m , returning it 'to ano,ther First
World language with universalisric epistemological pretentions'. The second and
related argument is that the 'post-colonial' grossly underplays 'capitalism's
stnicturing o í the modern world'. ~ L Inotion of idcntity is discursivc not sbuctural. 11
repudiates swcture and totality. Post-colonial discourse, he says hlankly, is 'a
culturalism' (Dirlik, 1994: 347). Lurking within the first of Dirlik's arguments is
a refrain which is common to al1 these recent cntiqucs: namely, the 'uhiquitous
academic marketability' of the term 'post-colonial' (McClintock. 1992) and the
pmminent position in its deployment of 'academic intellectuals o í Third World
origin . . . [acting as] pace-setters in cultural criticism' (Dirlik, 1994: 347).
Let us Ieave aside the laüer point, with its whifí o í politically conect grapeshot
and the unwelcome glimpse it unconsciously affords into (as well as the bizarre
preoccupation of American-based critical intellectuals with) the 'ins' and 'outs'
o í Amencan Academia. There are larger issues hovering in the s h a d o ~ here s to
-
which we will have to rcturn such as, COI example, the reductionism of Dirlik's
proposition that post-colonial criticism 'resonates with the conceptual needs' o í
global relationships caused by shifts in thc world capitalist economy (when Last
have we heard that formulation!) which, he says, explains why a concept which
is intended to be critical 'should appcar to be complicitous in "the consecraliun
of hegernony"' (Dirlik, 1994: 331. quoting Shohat; see also Miyoshi, 1993).
Of course, when onelooks at these arguments carefully in context, thereis lcss
underlying agreement between them than sometimes appears. The 'multiplicity
of positionalities' which Shohat fmds disquieting in the post-colonial may not be
al1 that different from the 'multiplicity' McClintock regards as a worrying
absence: '1 am stmck by how seldom the term is used to denote rnuliiplicify.' The
assault on p ~ ~ t - ~ t n i ~ l ~inr aDirlik
l i ~ mdoes not actually square with what we
243
 STUART HALL
know of McClintock's suhstantive work, which i s profoundly 'post-
foundational' in inspiration (for example, the hrilliant essay on .The Return of
Female Fetishism' in New Formatn>ns, 1993; see also 1995). Though Shohat
ends her critique wiih therecognition that oneconceptual frame is no1 necessarily
'wrong' and the other 'right', her criticisms are so extensive and damaging that ir
is difficult to know what of suhstance she would like to see rescued from the
debris. But this is nil-picking. The case against the post-colonial advanced by
these critics and othen is substantial and must be taken seriously inits own terms.
A certain nostalgia mns through some of these arguments for a retum to a
clear-cut politics of binary oppositions, where clear 'lines can he drawn in the
sand' hetween goodies and haddies (Shohat's article starts with the 'clarifying3
instance of the Gu\f Wat). This is not as compelling an argument as ir seems ai
first sight. Thcse 'lines' may have been simple once (were they?), hut they
certainly are so no longer. Othenvise, how are we to understand the general crisis
of politics on the left except as some sort of simple conspiracy? This does not
mean t h a ~therc are no 'right' or 'wrong' sides, no play of power, no hatd political
choices to be made. Bot isn't the ubiquitous, the soul-searing, lesson of our times
the fact that political binaries do not (do not any longer? did they ever?) either
transg_n~L ,~. j n ~-.
-
stabilise the ficld of ~oliiicalantaeonism in
u ~
--- anv
~ , nemanent
r.....-.....
t e. ~ l i g i B ~ e ~ ~ i s i i ~'givkn'
..-, nr
wav -. ren<(rr ; e
~ r e <5UtcGiSYiuEíéd;
~i
.-..--L.L
con-
f i e n t l y , p o ! i t c & n ~ s i t ~ ~ n?t n ~áxed.and
e. .damot m ; e Z themselves
~ --
(from on~~historica!.s&u?!hon lo the n e n r . ~b ~ ~ m ~ ~ ~ . ~ f to~
s z t v s r , ever 'in place', in an endless iteratioa6n.t that the shift from r>6lfk&as
a ' i a r of manoeuvre' topolitics as a'war o'f position', which ~ r a m s c i ' l o nago.
and decisively, chmted? And are we not all, in different ways, and through
different conceptual spaces (of which the post-colonial is definitively one).
desperately trying to understand what making an ethical political choice and
taking a political position in a necessarily open and contingent political field is
like, what sort of 'politics' it adds up to?
There may indeed be differences of response here between the US and Britain.
Withoot going to great Icngths, I fin* myself insisting that what the Gulf War
provided was not the clarifying political experience of 'lines . . . drawn in the
sand' hut the difficulties which arose in opposing the Western war i o the desert
when manifestly the situation in the Gulf involved both the atrocities which the
Alliance committed in defence of Western oil interests under UN cover against
thc people of lraq (in whose historic 'under-development' the West is deeply
irnplicated); and the atrocities conuoilted against his own people and against the
best interests of the region. not to speak of those of the Kurds and the Marsh
Arahs, by Saddam Hussein. There is a 'politics' there; hut it is not one from which
complexity and ambiguity can be usefully expunged. And it isn't an untypical
example, randomly chosen, but characteristic of a certain kind of political event
of our 'new times' in which hoth the crisis of the uncompleted sttuggle for
'decolonisation' ond the crisis of the 'psl-independence' state are deeply inscribed?
ln short, wasn't the Gulf War, in this sense, a classic 'post-colonial' event?
244
WHEN WAS 'THE POST-COLONIAL'? THINKING AT THE LlMlT
Ella Shohat, of course, at one level, clearly underslands this argument, if not
endorsing al1 of its implications. The last three decades in the 'Third World', she
observes, have
offered a number of very complex and politically ambiguous developments
. . . [including] the realization that the wretched of the earth are not
unanimously revolutionary . . . and [that] despite the broad patierns of
geo-political hegemony, power relations in the Third World ate also dis-
persed and contradictory.
She refers to conflicts 'not only hetween . . . hut also within nations. with the
constantly changing relafions between dominan1 and suhaltem groups . . .' (Shohat,
1992: 101). Howcver, instead of this observatiun provoking an examination of
the potential vaiue of the t e m 'post-colonial' in precisely referencing this shift
theoretically. she ends this part of the discussion with a polemically negative
observation about the visibility of the 'psl-colonial' 'in Anglo-Amencan aca-
demic cultural studies'. In short, where she could easily have concluded with a
conceptual reflection, she chose instead a polemical closure.
As lo whether the concept .post-coloiiial' has hcen confusingly úniversa~ised:
there is undoubtedly some careless homogenising going on, as the phrase has
caught on and hecome widely and sometimes inappropriately applied. There are
serious distinctions to bc madc here which have bezn neglected and which do
o n i s mweaken the conceptual value of the tem. 1s Britain 'post-colonial' in the same
sense as the US? Indeed, is the US usefully thought of as 'post-colonial' al a117
~ Should the t e m be commonly applied to Australia, which is a white settler
colony, and to India? Are Britain and Canada, Nigeria and Jamaica 'equally
"post-colonial"', as Shohat asks in her article? Can Algerians living at home and
in France, the French and the Pied Noir settlers, o11 be 'pusl-colonial'? 1s Latin
Amenca 'post-colonial', even though its independence stmggles were fought
early in the nineteenth century, long hefore the recent stage of 'decolonisation' to
which the tetm more evidently refers, and were led by the descendants of Spanish
settlers who had colonised their own 'native peoples'? Shohat, in her article,
exploits this weakness effectively and it is clear that, in the light of this critique,
those deploying the concept must ancnd more carefully to ils discriminations and
specificities andlor estahlish more clearly at what level of ahstraction the t e m is
operating and how this avoids a spurious 'universalisation'. Anne McClintock
also persuasively distinguishes betwcen a number of different trajcctories in
global domination, in the course of making a valid and important general point
about the need to think the 'continuities and discontinuities of power' together (p.
294). Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, in their carefully argued assessmenl
(1993) are particularly helpful here in reminding us that it need not follow that al1
societies are 'post-colonial' in the some way and that in any case the 'post-
colonial' does not operate on its own but 'is in effect a constmct inteiiially
differentiated by its intersections with other unfolding relations'.
So,a more careful discrimination is in order hetween different social and racial
245
 STUART HALL WHEN W A S 'THE POST-COLONIAL'? THINKING A T THE LlMlT

formations. Australia and Canada, on thr one hand, Nigeria, India and Jamaica on
the other, are certainly not 'post-colonial' in rhe sume woy. But chis does not
mean that they are no1 'post~olonial'in any way. In tenns of their relation to the
imperial centre, and the ways in which, as C. L. R. lames put it about the
Caribbean. they are 'in but not of the West', they were plainly al1 'colonial', and
are usefully designated now as 'post-colonial'. though the manner, timing and
conditions of their colonisation and independcnce varied greatly. So, for that
matter, was the US, whose curtent 'culture wars', conducted throughout with
referente to some mythicised Eurocentric conception of high civilisation, arc
literally unintelligible outside the framework of America's colonial past.
Tbere are, however, soine ways of discriminating between uses of the t e n
which are not, in my view, helpful. Some would deny it to white settler colonies,
reserving it exclusively for the non-westem coloniscd societies. Others would
refuse it to the colonising societies of the rnetropolis, reserving it for the colonies
uf the periphery only. This is to confuse a descriptive category with an evaluative
on-efl_JWhZConcept m@vhelp us~todo is io descnbe or ch&terise the shift in
d o h a l relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age,of
Empires to the post-independence 9r pa~t~dccolonlatioq momentl lt may also
cultural effects of the 'transculturation' which characterised the colonising ex-
i perience proved, in my view, to he irreversible.iTh~pif~erences, o f coune.
between colonising and coloniscd cultures remain profound. But they have nevw
f opratcd in a putely hinary way and they certainly do so no longer. Indeed, the
sKif from circumstances in which mti-colonial stmggles secmed to assume a
hinary form of representation to the present when they can no longer be rcpre-
sented within a binary structute, I would describe as a move from one conception
of difference to another (see Hall, 1992), from difference to'd;%éraice, -d this
shift is preCi&ly what the serialised or s@gg+d transition to the 'post-colonial'
is maiking. But it isnot only not marking it in a 'tben' and 'now' way. It .i
ohliging us to re-read the very binary form iri which thc colonial cticounter hasi
for so .long
.- .itself been represente$. rt obliges us to re-read thebinaries as fonns
~Ttranscuituration,of cultural translation, destined to trouble the heretthere
cultural binaries for ever.
'/ It is precisely this 'duuhle inscription', breaking down the clearly demarcated
insideloutsidc of the colonial system on which the histories of imperialism have
thrived for so long. which the concept of the 'post-colonial' has done so much to

k
* ,~ ,,
s -(though
..
here
-.
relations and dispositiins
.~ ..~--..
its

u1 a s P e t e r ~ u l r n has
<-.
value
of
is
power
more
which
e argued recently,
gestural)
are
to identi@
emerging in the
what & m w
new ConjunCturb.

If 'post-colonial' is a useful word, then it refers to a process of disen-

gagemenf Emm the whde colonial syndrome which takes many f o m s and
is probably inescapable for al1 those whose wodds have heen marked by
that set of phenomena: 'post-colonial' is (or should he) a descriptive notan
evaluative tenn.. . [lt is notl some kind of badge of inerit.
(Hulme. 1995)
This thought also helps 11s to identify, not only the level at which careful
distinctions have to he made, hut also the level at which 'post-colonial' is
properlv 'universaiising' (¡.e. a concept which is refemng to a high level of
abstraction). It refers to a general process of decolonisation which. like
colonisation itself, has inarked the colonising societies as poweriully as it has the
colonised (of course, in diffcrent ways). Hence the subverting of the old
. -
colo,@iaglcolonised hinary in the new conjuncturc. Indeed, one o-pial
, .. ,
bring to the fore. (See, on this historiographical point and its impli.ations for a
poiitics of the pment, Catherine Hall's essay in this voiume.) It follows that the
t e e - c o l o ~ i ~ i ~ s . m t merely descriptive of 'this' society rather than 'that'.
or of 'then' and 'now'jlt re-rcids 'culonisation' as pan of an essentially trans-
y. ational and transcultur~"~lobd'process - m d it produces a drcentred, dia-
.. .'
sponc or loh&-w-riting of eqiier. nation-centred imperial grand narratives.
$ ~ s d v a l u etherefore lies precisely in its refusal of this 'here' and 'there',
'then' and 'now7,'home' and 'abroad' perspective, 'Global' here does not rnean
universal, hut it is nut nation- or society-specific either. It is about how the lateral
and traa'sverse cross-relations of what Gilroy calls th<=hc: . (Gilroy, 1994) !
supplement and simultaneously dis-place the centre-periphery, and the global/ ?
local reciprucally re-orgamse and re-shape one another. As Mani and Franken-
berg argue, 'colonialisrn' always was about, and 'post-colonial' certainly is
about, different ways OS, 'staging the encounters' between the colonising
societies and their 'others' - 'thuugh not always in the same way or to the same
degree' (Mani and Frankenberg, 1993: 301).
%S argurnent connects with another strand of the critique - namely, the
'post-colonial' as a form of periodisation, and what Shohat calls its 'problematic

f
1
alues of the tenn 'post-coloniál' has been to duect our attenrión to tlie niany

&&6!r%nbed
...- ~, ,
- *.--
ways in w h i c h ~ l o n i s a t i o n w a snever simply externa1 to the socictics of rhe
impcrial mrtropolis. It was always inscribed deeply within them - a s i ( %<ame
g the ciillures of the col- This was a process whose
temporality'. What 'post-colonial' certainly is not is one of hose periodisations
based on epochal 'stages', when everything is reversed at the samc moment, al1
the old relations disappcar for ever and entirely new ones come lo replace them.
Clearly, the disengagement from the colonising process has hccn a long. drawn-
negative effects provided the foundotion of anti-colonial political mohilisation. out and differentiated affair, in which thc recent post-war movcments towards
and provoked the atrempt to recover an altemative set of cultural origins not decolonisation figures as one, hut only one, distinctive 'moment'. Here,
confaminated by the colonising experience. This was, as Shohat observes, thc 'colonisation' signals direct colonial occupation g d nile, and the transition to
crilical dimension of anti-colonial stmggles. However, in t e m s of any ahsolute 'post-colonial' is characterised by independence from direct colonial nile, the
return to a pure set of uncontaminated origins. the long-tem histoncal and fomiation of new nation states, f o m s of cconomic dcvclopment dorninated by the
246 247
 .,iulini HALL - ." ~~

WHEN WAS 'THE POST-COLONIAL'? THlNKlNG A T THE LIMt.1'

growth of indigenous capital and their relations of neo-colonial dependency on for rethinking the Westem S e l f . It would, as they say, bc a tum-up for the books
the dcveloped capitalist world, and the politics which arise from emergente of if the 'key ohject and acliievement of the Algerian Warof lndependence was the
powetiul local elites managing the contradictory effects of under-development. overthrow of theHegelian dialectic' (1993: 101)! In fact. in my view. the problem
C, Justas significant, it is characterised by the persistente of many of the effects of with Whire Myrhologies (1990) is not that it sees the connection between the
., colonisation, but at the same time lheir displacement from the coloniser/colonised post-colonial and the critique of the westem metaphysical tradition, but that it is
' axis to their internalisation within the decolonised society itsclf. Ilence, ihe driven by a Promethean desire for the ultimate theoretically correct position - a
British, who were deeply implicated with the regional economies, the mling desire to out-theorise everyone else - and, in s o doing, sets up a hierarchy from
factions and the complex politics of the Gulf States, Persia and Mesopotamia the 'bad' (Sartre, Marxism, lameson) through the 'not-100-bad-but-wrong' (Said,
[
through the nehvork of mandates and protected 'spheres of influence' after World
War One, withdrew in the decolonising moment 'west of Suez': and the 'after-
' Foucault) tothe 'almost-OK' (Spivak, Bhabha) without ever once putting on the
rable for serious critical inspection the nomative discourse, the foundational
effects' of this pervasive type of indirect colonial hegemony is then 'lived' and figure - ¡.e. Demda - in relation to whose absencelpresence the whole linear
're-worked' through the various 'internal' crises of the post-colonial states and sequence is staged. But thai is another siory - or rather the same story in another
societies of the üulf States, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. no1 to speak of Palestine part of the forest. . .
and Israel. In this scenario, 'the colonial' is not dead, since it lives on in its
'after-effects'. But its politics can certainly no longer be mapped completely back
into, nor declared to be 'the same' in the post-colonial moment as it was during 8
-
and dispersa1 (though Dirlik. with his stress on th@tmctunngforce
-
Many of the critiques of thc 'post-colonial', then - paradoxically, giren its
post-stmcturalist orientation - take the f o m of a demand . .., .for
. .more multipljcity
~. .-of- .capl-ta!ism.
the period of the British iriandate. These complexities and re-stagings have is deeply suspicious of this kind of post-st+~cLuraIist flirt?&&-Y$2-wJh!11e
become a common feature in many parts of the 'post-colonial' world, although holding ---. .,.-
fast 10 diffe~ntiationand specificity,iwe cannot afford to forgettbe over-
there have also been other 'decolonising' trajectories, both earlier ones and ones deTGining .~ effects of the
. .col6nlil
-.-~,-A~.. --
moment,
. ~,.. the 1
'work' which its binaries were !
with significantly different outcomes. constantly required i o d o to re-presenr the proliferation of cultural difference and
One could ask - it seems some of the n i t i n arc asking - why then privilege this
moment of the 'post-colonial'? Doesn't it, with its preoccupation with the colonised/
colonising relationship, simply revive or re-stage exaclly what the post-colonial so
forms of life, which were always there; within the sutured and over-detenni ed
_ _
"unity' of that simplifying, over-arching binary
i e k t i ~ g 6 some
, -
.. 2--.- a
'the West and the Rest: (This--'
e ~ way to rescuing Edward Said's 'Orientalism' from the
i

triumphantly declares lo be 'over"? Dirlik for example, finds it strange that the critique that it fails to discriminate between different i m p e r i a l i s m s . m

,,?
post-colonial critics are so preoccupied with the Enlightenment and with Europe, the keep
. ..., .these
a hvo ends of the chain in, play a t t h e saEi.tt; over-determination
critique of which seems - oddly - to be their central task. McClintock also criticises and
.~ . diffgrence,
. .-. , ...
condeniation
- . " l__.L____.__ - if we are not to f$l into
h d..dissemination
the 'recentering of global history around the single mbric of European time' (p. 86).
lt'is tme that the 'post-colonial' signals theproliferation '8f MRistoñes and
playful
~

dcconbüuctionism
-.4-.-.-.-:--.---2..--,---
the fantasyoraQowe-rece ,,
It is
only tao tempting to fall into the trap of assuming that, hecause essentialisni has i
teñipO&eS,efielntniSion ofdifferéince~andspecificiiy into ttie generalising and
Eurcceiimc post-Edightenmeni grand nanatives; the multjpliciíy of lateral and
been deconstnictcd rheorericnlly, therefore it has .... ~ . .~
been. diaplaccdpoliricully~~"'
1n'teGs of periodisation, howevei, the 'post-colonial' retains some ambiguity
-

decentred cultural connections, movements and dgrations,wlch.&e "p the world.
today, often bypassing the old metropolitan ceotres,,?erhaps, however, w ~ s h o u l d
>..
have heen wamed by other theoretical examples, where the deconstniction of core
concepts undenaken by the so-called 'post-' discourses is foliowed. not by theu
abolition and disappearance but rather by their proliferarion (as Foucault wamed),
~)dynowi" a ' d ~ e.n t .r e-.d.'position in the discourse.\'ihe
.- ,_....,. subject. i d 'identity' are
o n l y hvo of the concepts which, h&irtgheen radically undermined in their unitary
and essentialist form, have prnliferated beyond our wildest , cxpcctations ..,. iii tlieii
' ..
'. decentred forms
. ,..Ki,.,h +..'.., into new
.-....... .- ... discu~j,ye.p,~.si~onaliUes./
e same time, there is someting to the argument that, as Lata Mani and
Ruth Rankenberg remark in their critique of Robert Young's Whire Mythologies
(1990), sometimes the only purpose which the post-colonial critique seems to
serve is as a critique of western philosophical discourse, which, as they observe.
is like 'merely [taking] a detour lo return to the position of the Other as a resource
because, in addition to identifying the post-decolonisation moment as critical f0r
a shift in global relations, the term also offers - as al1 periodisations do - an
alternative narrative, highlighting different key conjunctures to those embedded
in the classical narrative of Modernity. Colonisation, from this 'post-colonial'
perspective, was no local or marginal sub-plot in some larger story (for example.
the transition from feudalism to capitalism in western Europe, the latter de-
veloping 'organically' in the womb of the former). In the re-staged narrative of
the post-colonial, colonisation assumes the p l a c ~ & @ s . ~ ; ~ f ~ \ ~
extended and ruptura1 world-historical
-.; event.,! y e@-casn> the 'post-
Col'6nEf7Zerences something more than direct mle over certain areas of the I
world by the imperial powers. 1 think it is signifying the whole process of i
expansion, explomtion, conquest, colonisation and imperial hegemonisation which
constituted the 'outer face', the constitutive outside, of European
-.--.
Westem capitalist riiodci iiity after 1492. - - .-
~. ~~ . ~
 STUART H A L L
, ~ .
~~ . ..
'? This re-nanaiivisation displaces the 'story' of capitalistmodernitv froin ii$
European cenmng to its dispersed global 'peripheries': from peaceful evolution
; to imposed violence; from the transition from feudalism to capitalism (which
j played such a talismanic role in, for example, Western Marxism) to the formation
of the world niarket, to use shorthand t e m s for a moment; or rather to new ways
! of conceptualising the relationship between these different 'events' - the pcr-
i?sid+utside W r s of e m e r g ~ n t c a p i ~ s t t r n ~ e ~
retrospective re-phraqing of Modernity within the framework of 'globalisation' in
al1 its various m p m l forms and mornents (frorn the Poriuguese entry to the
lndian Ocean and the conquest of the New World to the internationalisation of
financia1 markets and informalion flows) which is the really distinctive element
in a 'post-colonial' periodisation. In this way, the 'post-colonial' marks a critical
intemption into that whole grand historiographical n m t i v c which, in liberal
historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant
traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate
presence in a story which could essentially be told from within its European
par?m.etcrs.
o
unc!erstood re-reap in this sense, was . intelligible as an
. onlx ~
even o g obal significance by which one signals not-its universal and total-
izing, but its dislocated and differentiatcd character. That is to say, it had to be
un¿iSíStooa7Fie~;'añdZifai'nly c i n o d y be understood now, in t m s , not only of
the vertical rclations between coloniser and colonised, but also in terms of how
these and other f o m s of power-relations were always displaced and decentred by
another set of vectors - the transvene linkages between and across nation-statc
kontiers and the globaUlocal inter-relationships which cannot be rcad off against
a nation-state template. It is in this reconstitution of the epistemic and
powerfknowledge fields around the relations of globalisation, through its various
historical forrns, that the 'periodisation' of the 'post-colonial' is really
challenging. However, this point hardly surfaces in any of the critiques. And
when it does (as in Dirlik, 1994). its effects are contradictory for the mn of the
argument, as 1 hope to demonstrate below. What's more, to jump several stages
ahead for a moment, ir is precisely bccause of this critical re-lay through the
global that [he 'post-colonial' has been able to become so sensitively attuned to
precisely those dimensions which Shohat, for example, finds problematic -
questions of hybridity, syncretism, of cultural undecidahility and the wmplexities of
diasporic identification which intempt any 'return' to ethnically closed and
'centred' original histnries. Understood in its global and transcultural context,
colonisation has madeíelTG¡E ZbYoBgm>an increasingly u ~ t e o a b kcultural
strategy. It madc the'colonies' themselves, i d even more, large tracts of the
'post-colonial' world, always-aiready 'diasporic' in relation tn what might be
thought of as their cultures of origin. The notion that only the multi-cultural cities
of the First World are 'diaspora-ised' is a fantasy which can only be sustained by
those who have never lived in the hybridised spaces of a Third World, so-called
'colonial', city.
250
WHEN WAS 'THE P O S T - C O L O N I A L ' ? THlNKTNG AT T H E L l M l T
Ln this 'post-colonial' moment, these transverse, transnational, transcultural
movements. which were always inscribed in the history of 'colonisation', but
carefully overwritten by more binary forms of narrativisation, have, of course,
emerged in new forms to dismpt the senled relations of domination and resistance
inscribed in other ways of living and telling these stories. They reposition and
dis-place 'differcnce' without, in the Hegeliaii sense, 'overcoming' it. Shohat
t Y ~ i observes that the anti-essentialist emphasis in 'post-colonial' discourse some-
times seems to define any attempt to recover o r inscribe a communal past as a
fonn of idealisation, despite its significance as a site of resistance and collective
identity. She makes the very valid point that this past could be negotiated
differendy, 'not as a static fetishized phase to be literally rcproduced but as
fragrnented sets of narrated memories and experiences' (1992: 109). 1 would
agree with this argurnent. But; this is to iake t h e , d ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ i d s c n p t i&e ~ns"of
eolonising enc&te-_'~,dialog~~ characier'CfiG alterity, the specific character
;of its'díFfe'ir.;ice'and the centra& of questions of narrative and the imagiory
k m political
c- ' s't e t x i P L i J y - ( f e e . for example, Hall, 1990). However, isn't that
' -
recisely what is meant by thinking the cultural consequences of the colonising
process 'diasporically', in non-originary ways - that is, through-rather than
around 'hybridity'? Doesn't it imply trying to think thc questions of cultural
power and political stmggle within rather than against the grain of 'the post-
colonial'?
The way difference was lived in the colonised societies after the violen1 and
abmpt tupture of colonisation, was and had to be decisively different from how
these cultures would have developed, had they done so in isolation from one
--.--
ano@er.)f?om that turning point i n i h e closing decades of the fifteenth century '
1
forwards, there is, of course, no 'single, homogeneous, empty (Western) time'.
But there are the condensations and ellipses which sise when al1 the different
1 temporalities, while remaining 'present' and 'real' in their differential cffccts, arc
j also mpturally convened in relarion to, and rnust mark their 'difference' in terms
i of, the over-deterniining effects of Eurocentric temporalities. systems o f
: representation and power. This is what is meant by placing colonisation in the :
framework of 'globalisation' or rather by the asseriion that what distinguishes
'modemity is this over-determined, sunired and s u b p í i h & r a j charaiter o f i t s
i -t-.e m p o i t W e ~ - S Y n C Y E . s mmultidimensional
, temporalities. the double
inscnptions of colonial and metropolitaii tinies. thc two-way cultural traffic
characteristic of the contact zones of the cities of the 'colonised' long before they
have become the characteristic tropes of the cities of the 'colonising', the f o m s
of translation and transculturation which have characterised the 'colonial
relation' from its earliest stages, the disavowals and in-betweenness, the here-
and-theres, mark the aporias and re-doublings whose intcrsticcs colonial
discourses have always negotiated and about which Homi Bhabha has written
with such profound insight (Bhabha, 1994). It goes without saying that they have,
of course, always to be set within and against the over-detemining power-
knowledge discursive relations by which imperial regimes were stitched or laced
25 1
 STUART HALL
together. They are the tropes of supplementarity and différance within a dis-
located but sutured global system which only emerged or could emerge in the
wake of the onset of the colonising expansionist process which M q Louise Pratt
calls the Euro-imperial adventure ( Pratt, 1992).
Since the Sixteentb Century, these differential temporalities and histories have
heen irrevocably and violently yoked together. This certainly does not mean that
they ever were or are the same. Their grossly unequal trajectones, which formed
the very ground of political antagonism and cultural resistance, have nevertheless
been impossible to disentangle, conceptualise or narrate as discrete entities:
though that is precisely what the dominant western histonographical tradition has
often tried to do. No site, either 'there' or 'here', in its fantasied autonomy and
--
in-difference, could develop without taking into account its significant andlor
abjected o t h e r h e very notion of an - i i % Z ~ % ~ $ ~ & ~ ~ % l ' f ~
The Other ceased to he a term fixed in place and time externa1 to the system of
S identification and became, instead, a symbolically marked 'constituitive outside'. ,
apositionalig
L-.-. .- of differential marking----.-.,. --
within a discursive, c h a g
It is possible, now, to answer the question posed earlier about the 'post-
colonial's' preoccupation with Eurocentnc time. The Enlightenment retums, in
the discourse of the 'post-colonial', in its decentred position, because it
represents a critica1 epistemic shift within the colonising process, understood in
this wider sense, whose discursive, power-knowledge, effects are still in play
(how, in western discourses dominated by Science and the Social S*e~~q&d~
-,--.
it fail to be?l.,JJntil ?he E ñ i i $ f e ¡ i i i" i_~_ ~_ .r e ñ c. .e. h a,-d.often
.,. . .been
., .. .,.-.. ,,.
h te%s"of different orders of, -* beinp- 'Are they Tme Men? was the question
'%id! Sepulveda pui'to Eianholome de Las Casas in the famous debate at
Vallodolid before Charles X in 1550. Whereas, , -under theuniversalising panoptic
q~
eye of the Enlightenment, al1 formi of human life were biought within the
Lacross thegorous or invisible borders to disturb and subvert from
,
- . the i n s i d
L A
(Laclau, 1990; Butler, 1993).
The argument is not that, thereafter, everything has remained the same -
colonisation repeating itself in perpetuity to the end of time. It is, rather, that
colonisati'on so refigured the terrain that, ever since, the very idea of a world of
--... . ~. . . . .. . .- ~
252
W H E N W A S 'THE POST-COLONIAL'? THINKING A T T H E LIMIT
,&$arate identities, of isolated or sepaiable and silf-suffidiékt cult&.G Gd <con&
, Ges, h e been-obliged to yield toa, variety of paradigms designed to capture thest
1
.
' differen~hut-
. . ... ..
c .of r d a b n h p . inie~connectionand discontinuityi
This was the distinctive form of dissemination-and-condensation which
colonisation set in play. It is in pnvileging this missing or downgraded dimension
in the official narrative of 'colonisation' that the discourse of 'post-colonial' is
concepmally distinctive. Although colonisation's panicular forms of inscription
and subjection vaJ'ied in almost every other respect from one par< of the globe to
another. its general effects also require to be cmdeiy but decisively marked,
theoretically, alongside its pluralities and multipiicities. That, in my view, is what
the anomalous signifier 'colonial' is doing in the concept of the 'post-colonial'.
What, then, about the more trouhling question of the prefix, the 'post'? Shohat,
for example, acknowledges that the 'post' signals both the 'closure of a certain
histoncal event or age' and a 'going beyond . . . commenting upon a certain
intellectual movement' (1992: 101, 108). She clearly prefers the latter meaning to
the former. For Peter Hulme (1995), however, the 'post' in 'post-colonial'
has two dimensions which exist in tension with each other: a temporal
dimension in which there is a punctual relationship in time between, for
.
,
example, a colony and a post-colonial state; and a critica1 dimension in
which, for example, post-colonial theory comes into existente through a
critique of a body of theory.
Moreover, the tension, for Hulme, is productive, whereas for Shohat it produces
a structured ambivalence. In this respect, she seems to argue that the 'post-
colonial' is different from the other 'posts' in attempting to be both epistemic and
chronological. It is hoth the paradigm and the chronological moment of the
conceptualised
'colonial' which the 'post-colonial' claims to be superseding.
However, it seems to me that, in this respect, the 'post-colonial' is no different
from the other 'posts'. It is not only 'after' but 'going beyond' the colonial, as
post-modernism is both 'going beyond' and 'after' modernism, and post-
stmcturalism both follows chronologically and achieves its theoretical gains 'on
the backof stmcturalism. The trickier question is whetherin fact these two could
ever be separated, and what such a separation would imply about the way
'colonisation' itself is being conceptualised. 'Colonialism' refers to a specific
historical moment (a complex and differentiated one, as we have tried to suggest);
but it was always also a way of staging or narrating a history, and its descriptive
value was always framed within a distinctive definitional and theoretical
,
- paradigm. The very succession of terms which have been coined to refer to this
process - colonisation, imperialism, neo-colonial, dependency, Third World -
shows the degree to which each apparently innocent descriptive term camed in
'..~
its slipstream powerful epistemological, conce~tual ..,-.and
~. indeedpol!tical baggage:
t h ~ " ~ ~ e ~ ~ ~ 6wW<Iei.h
0 i c ; ~ ihaso to be understood discunivelj. Indeed, the
distinction which this critique se& to be trying to enforce between 'power' and
'knowledge' is exactly what the discourse of the post-colonial (or rather, what
253
 STUART HALL
thinking both 'the colonial' and 'the post-colonial' discursively) has displaced.
With 'colonisation', and consequently with the 'post-colonial', we are irrevoc-
ably within a power-knowledge field oí force. It is precisely the false and
disabling distinction hetween colonisation as a syitem of Ale, of pow& and
-.- ... -
explnitation, anircoknisation as -
.-. ..a .systcm
. of knuwledge and representation,
-
HThkfiTs6éiiigFiroaed. l t ' i s hecause the relations wh'ich charactehsed the
-.
'co o n i a r are no ionger in ¡he same place and relative position, that we are able
not simply to oppose them but to critique, to deconstruct and uy to 'go beyond'
them.
But what exactly might be meant by this 'after' and 'going beyond'? Shohat
argues that 'The operation of simultaneously pnvileging and distancing the
colonial narrative, moving beyond it, StNctUres the "in-hetween" framework o t
the "post-colonial"' (1992: 107). She is not very sympathetic to this un-decid-
ability. But it is possiblc t o argue that the tension between tbe epistemological
and the chronological is not disahling hut productive. 'After' means in the
moment which follows that moment (the colonial) in which the colonial relation
was dominant. It does not mean, as w e tried to sbow earlier, that what we have
called thelC8hz:e'ffects' of'iorsniaí'
~ rum~- have somehow been suspended. It
. ..,.,,.
cenainly does not mean that we have passed from a regime of power-knowledge
intn some powerless and conflict-free time zone. Nevertheless, it does also stake
its claim in terms of the fact that some otber, related but as yet 'emergent' nevr
configurations of power-knowledge relations are beginning to exen their distinc-
tive and spccific effects. This way of conceptualising the shift between these
paradigms - not as an epistemological 'break' in the Althusserian/structuralist
sense hut more on the analogy of what (iramsci called a niovement of decon-
stmction-reconstniction o r what Derrida. i n a more deconstnictive sense, calls a
'double inscription' - is charactenstic of al1 the 'posts'.
Gramsci, speaking about transformations in the field of practica1 common
sense, observes that they have to he thought as
a process of distinction and of change in the relative weight possessed by
the elements of the old idenlogy . . . what was secondary or evcn incidental
becomes of primary importante, it becomes the nucleus of a new doctrinal
and ideological ensemble. The old collective will disintegrates into its
contradictory elements so that the subordinatc elements amongst tbem can
develop socially . . .
íüramsci, 1975, 1979. See also Hall, 1988: 138)
What, in their different ways these theoretical descriptions are attempting to
ConstNct is a notion of a shift or a transition cunceptualised as the re-
configuration of a field, rather than as a movement of linear transcendcnce
hetween two mutually exclusive states. Such transfomations are not only not
cnmpleted but they may not be best captured within a paradigm which assumes
that al1 major historical shifw are driven by a necessitarian logic towards a
teleological end. Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenherg make tbe critica1 distinction
254
W H E N W A S ' T H E POST-COLONIAL'? T H l N K l N G A T T H E 1.IMIT
between a transition which is 'decisive' (which the 'post-colonial'
. -.- -.-certainly
.
is)
and one which is 'definitive'. To put this another w a y , d & e key conccpts in th2
'post-colonial', as in the general discourse of the 'posts','&e operating, as Derrida /
would piÚt.it, 'under erasure'. They have been subjected to a deep and thoro"gh_)
going critique, exposing their assumptions as a set of foundational effects: But
thís deconstruction does not abolish tbem, in the classic movement of
supersession, an Aufghebung. It leaves them as the only conceptual instniments :
and tools with which to think about thepresent - but only if they are deployed in
their deconstmced fonn. They are, to use another, more Heideggerean, formu-
lation, which Iain Chambers, for example, prefers, 'a presence that exists in
abeyance' (Chambers, 1994).
In anow-famous exchange about 'thinking at the limit' - which seems t o m e
a good description of the status of 'the post-colonial' as an episteme-in-forrnation
- Derrida once defined the limit of philosophical discourse as 'tbe episteme,
functioning within a system of fundamental constraints, conceptual oppositions
outside of which philosophy hecomes impracticable'. He spoke of 'a necessarily
double gesture marked in certain places by an erasure which allows what it
ohliterates to be read, violently inscribing within the text that w h c h attcmpted to
govern it from without' and of trying to respect as rigomusly as possible 'the
internal, regulated play of philosophcmcs . . . by making them slide . . . lo the
point of their non-peifinence, their exhaustion, their closure'.
To deconsmct philosophy thus would he to t h h k - in the most faithful
interior way - the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts hut at the
same time to dctcrmine - from a cenair! exterior ihat is unquantiriable or
unnameable in philosophy - what this history has heen unahle to dis-
simulate or forbid. By means of this simultaneously faithful and violent
circulation hctween the inside and the outside of philosophy . . . there is
produced a certain tcxtual work . . .
(Demda, 1981)
When his interlocutor, Ronse. asked bim whether by this means there could be 'a
surpassing of philosophy'. Derrida remarked.
There is not a transgression if one understands by that a pure and simple
.
landmg into the beyond of metaphysics . .But by means of the work done
on one side and on the othrr side of the limit, thc ficld insidc is m d i f i c d
and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere prescnt as a
.fair accompli . . .
(Derrida, 1981)
The problern, then, is not that the 'post-colonial' is aconvcntional paradigm of a
logico-deductive type which erroneously confuses the chronological and the
epistemological. Lying behind this is a deeper choice hetween epistemologies:
hetween a rational and successivc logic and a deconstnictive one. In this $ense.
Dirlik is correct to pinpoint the question of the post-colonial's relation t0 what
255
 STUART HALL
can be broadly called 'post-stnicturalist' ways of thinking as a central issue which
its cntics find particularly trouhling. Larger issues are thus 'at stake' in this
debate than h e cnticisms which have heen widely signalled sometimes suggest.
Dirlik is particularly femcious in this m a and for rearons which are not
difficult to identify. Discovering that the t e m 'post-colonial' is applied to many
wnters who do not necessaily agree with one another, some of whom Dirlik likes
and others he does not, he is dnven to the polemical conclusion that the 'post-
colonial' is not the description of anything or anyone in particular but rather 'a
discourse that seeks to constitute tlie world in the self-image of intellectuals who
view themselves or have come to view themselves as post-colonial intellectuals
[and] . . . an expression . . . of [theirl new found pnwer' in First World Academe.
This rather cmde ad hominem and ad feminam name-calling disfigures the
argument of a distinguished scholar of modern China and it would perhaps be
wise to think of ii as 'symptomatic'. But of what'! We get a clue to an answer
when h e takes Gyan Pmkash's elegant post-stmcturalist defence of the post-
colonial', 'Post-colonial Criticism and Indian Historiography' (1992) a. his
principal staiking horse. Let us leave the many local cnticisms of this article,
some of which we have already mentioned, 10 one side. The main burden of the
charge is that the post-colonial. like the post-stmcturalist discourse which pro-
vides its philosophical and theoretical grounding, is anti-foundational and, as
such, cannot deal with a concept like 'capitalism' and with 'capitalism's
stmctunng of the modem world' (p. 346). Moreover, the . , ,...-.
.*- 'post-colp~~sl', 1s 'a
culturalism'. lt is preoccupied with questions of,,identi2,& the-s!bject and
hence cannot give 'an Gc'ount of
., . . .
the world outside the sub&&'
., , , .. . -.....-.,..- ; Attentionis
shifted f~om'nitionalongin to subject position and 'a politics of location takes
precedente over politics infomed by fixed categories (in this case the nation,
though obviously other categones such as Third World and class are also
implied)' (p. 336). The 'post-colonial' presents the coloniser equally with the
colonised with 'a problem of identity' (p. 337).
This is al1 going with a remarkable swing for twenty pages when, on page 347,
a by now somewhat characieristic 'turn' hegins toreveal itself. 'These cnticisms,
however vehement on occasion, d o not necessarily indicate that post-
colonialism's critics deny it al1 value . . .' The 'post-colonial' discourse, tums out.
after all, to have something to say about 'a crisis in the modes of comprehending
the wodd associated with such concepts as Third World and nation state'. Nor,
apparently. is it r o b e denied that
as the global situation has become more hlurred with the disappearance of
the socialist states, with the emergence of important differences
economically and politically hetween so-called Third World societies and
the diasporic motions of peoples across national and regional boundaries.
fragmentation of the global into the local has emerged into the foreground
of historical and political consciousness.
(Dirlik; 1992: 347)
WHEN W A S 'THE POST-COLONIAL'? T H I N K I N G A T THE LIMIT
This may appear to innoeent eyes like recupcrating a good deal of already
repudiated temtory, apart from containing in itself some questionable formu-
lations. (Some post-modem critics may helieve that the global has fragmented
into the local but most of the serious ones argue that what is happening is a mutual
reorganisation of the local and the global, a very different proposition: see
M s s e y , 1994; Rohins, 1991; 11al1, 1992). Bui Ici that pass. For it is followed, in
the second section of the article. by a long. detailed and persuasive account of
some of the main features of what is 'variously' descnhed as 'late capitalism,
flexible production or accumulation, disorganised capitalism and global
capitalism'.
These iriclude: the new international division of labour, the new global
information technologies, a 'de-centenng of capitalism nationally', the linkage
provided by the transnational corporation, the transnationalisation of production,
the appearance of the capitalist mode of production, 'for the first time in the
history of capitalism' (p. 350), as an 'authentically global ahstraction', cultural
fragmentation and multi-culturalism, the re-articulation of native cultures into a
capitalist narrative (the example here being the Confucian reviva1 amongst the
nsing Snuth East Asian capitalist elite), the weokening of h o u n d c e s , the repli-
cation internally in once-colonial societies of inequalities once associated with
colonial differences, the 'disorganization of a world conceived in terms of three
worlds', the flow of culture which is 'at once homogenizing and heterogenizing'
(p. 353), a modemity which 'is no longer just Euro-Amencan', f o m s of control
which cannot jusr be imposed but have to be 'negoiiated', the reconstiturion of
subjectivities across national houndaries, and so on . . .
It is not only an impressive, and impressively comprehensive, list. It also, 1
think incontrovenihly. touches at some point every single theme which makes the
'post-colonial' a distinctive theoretical paradigm, and marks decisively how
radically and unalterahly diflerent - that is to say. how incontrovenibly post-
colonial - is the world and the relations heing described. And, indeed, to the
reader's astonishment, this is also acknowledged: 'post-cnloniality represents a
response to a genuine need. the need to overcome a crisis of understanding
produced by the inahility of old categories to account for the world' (p. 353). 1s
t h e x a 'post-colonial' critic in the house who would dissent from that judgement?
Two arguments could follow from this second half of the essay. The first is a
serious one - indeed, the mnst serious criticism which the post-colonial critics
and theorists have urgently now to face - and it is succinctly put by Dirlik. 'What
is remarkable . . . i s that a consideration of the relationship hetween
postcolonialism and global capitalism should be ahsent from the writings 0f
postcolonial intellectuals.' Let us not quihhle and say of some post-colonial
intellectuals. It is remarkable. And it has becomc scriously damaging and
disahling for everything positive which the post-colonial paradigm can, and has
the ambition to, accomplish. These two halves of the current debate about 'late
modernity' - the post-colonial and the analysis of the new developments in global
capitalism - have indeed largely proceeded in relative isolation from one another,
257
 STUART HALL
and to their mutual cost. It is no1 difficult to understand why, though Dirlik does
not seem interested in pursuing this as a scrious quesiion (he d w s have a trivial
answer to it. which is different). One reason is that the discourses of the 'post'
have emerged, and been (often silently) articulated against the practical, political,
historical and theoretical effects of the collapse of a certain kind of economistic,
teleological and, in the end, reductionist Marxism. What has resulted from the
abandonment of this deterministic economism has been, not alternative ways of
thinking questions ahout the economic relations and their effects, as the 'con-
ditions of existente' of other practices, inserting them in a 'decentred' or
dislocated way into our explanatory paradigms. but instead a massivc, gigantic
and eloquent disavowal. As if, since the economic in its broadest sense, defini-
tively does no!, as it was once supposed todo, 'determine' the real movement of
history 'in thc last instance', it does iiot exist al all! This is a failure of theorisation
so profound, and (with very few, still relatively sketchy, exceptions: see Laclau.
1990, but also Barrett, 1991) so disabling, that, in my view, it has enabled much
weaker and less conceptually rich paradigms to continue to flourish and dominate
the field. (Dirlik himself makes, al one point, an interesting ohsewation that he
prefers 'the world system appmach', even though, like the post-colonial, it
'locates the Third World discursively' [p. 3461. but this interesting and fmitful
line of discussion is not pursued.)
Of course, it is not simply a matter that the relationship between these
paradigms has been left lo one side. This is itself partly an institutional effect -
an unintended consequence, some would say, of the fact that the 'post-colonial'
has been most fully developed by lilerary seholars, who have been reluctant to
M.-- ....
make the break across disciplinary (even @st-disciplinary)boundanes required
lo advance the argument. It is also because there may well he some conceptual
incompatibility between a certain kind of post-foundationalism and the senous
investigation of these complex articulations. But this cannot yet be accepted as an
unhridgeable philosophical chasm, especially because, though they do not
address the question of the conceptual mle which the categeory 'capitalism' may
have in apost-foundationalist 'logic', certain articulations of this order are infacr
either implicitly assumed or silently at work in the underpinning assumptions of
almost al1 the post-colonial critica1 work.
Diriii has therefore put his finger squarely, and convincingly, on a serious
lacuna in the post-colonial episteme. To have concluded with the implications for
the future of the post-colonial paradigm of this critique would indeed have sewed
a very important. timely and strategic purpose. And had this been the coiiclusion
lo his essay, one could have overlooked the curiously hroken-backed and inter-
nally contradictory natuz of the argument (the second half repudiating in effect
much of the substaiice and al1 ofrhe tone of the first halo. However, it is not. His
conclusion takes the second path. Far fmm just 'representing a response lo a
genuine [theoreticall need', he ends with the thought that 'Post-coloniality reson-
ates with the pmblems thrown up by global capitalism', is 'attuned' to its issues
and hence senies irs culrural requiremenrs. The post-colonial critics are, in effect,
258
L
W H E N W A S ' T H E P O S T - C O L O N I A L ' ? T H I N K I N G A T T H E LIMIT
unwitting spokespersons for the new global capitalist order. This is a conclusion
to along and detailed argument of such stunning (and oneis obliged to say. banal)
reductionism. a functionalism of a kind which one thought had disappeared from
scholarly debate as a serious explanation of anyrhing, that it reads like a echo
from a distant, primeval era. It is al1 the more disturbing because a very similar
line of argument is to be found from a diamelrically opposite position - the
inexplicably simplistic charge in Robert Young's Coluniul Drsire (1995) that the
post-colonial cntics are 'complicit' with Victonan racial theory because both sets
of wrirrrs deplqv rhe sume rerm - hybridio - in rheir discourse!
I
I
Here, then, we find ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis, between the devil
and the deep blue sea. We always knew that the dismantling of the colonial
paradigm would release strange demons from the deep, and that ihese monsters
might come trailing al1 sorts of subtesanean material. Still, the awkward twists
and turns, leaps and reversals in the ways the argument is bcing conducbd should
i alert us to the sleepof reason that is beyond or after Reason, the way desire plays
I across power and knowledge in the dangerous enterpnse o í thinking at or beyond
!
the limit.
iI
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A Far Cry frorn Africa (Walcon) 222. Anderson, Linda 9 3

223-5.227 Appadurai, Arjun 174-5
A Guaternalan Idyll (J. Bowles) 131 Arabness 125-9,138,1514
A Pale View ofHills (Ishiguro) 191-2 Arouette. Rosanna 33
A Srick of Creen Cand,y (J. Bowles) art $0, 86-7,203,205-7,216
131-2 articulation 11. 48. 50, 169-71, 176-83.
A Wicked Old Woman (Randhawa) 194 185,203,205-7
abolilionism 74-5 Asante, Molefi 116
Aborigines 67-8.72-3.74-5 Assam, India 107
absolulisrn 250 assimilation 115
abstract machine 18@5 Augustine, St 205
Abu-Lughod, Janet 172 Australia 67-9,714,246
achievement 38-9 authenticity 19, 55, 219
Ackroyd. Annene 151, 152 autobiography 125, 133
Ackroyd, Peler 190 autonomy 19
Adang. Urna 55 krolorl (cortazar) 228-9
advertising 37.41, 220
Africa: city 78-89; reinvention in Babri Majid destruction (India 1992) 99,
Caribbean 69 110
African-Amencm 18-19.66.115-18,207 Baker, H. D. R. 193
Afrocentrism 11&17 Balbo, M. 8 1
agency 25.51, 1 7 6 7 , 180, 182,185 Baldwin, James 144
Ahmed, Rajad 86 Balzano, Wanda 92-7
Akali Dal 106 Bandung Project 102
Akare, Thomas 83 Bardhan, Pranab 1 0 3 4
Alameda. Soledad 130 Bames, Diina 133
alienation 22, 222-5 Bames, Jilian 190
alterity 21,25, 49, 52, 54, 57-8, 136-7, Barre, Siyaad 83,84,87
1 5 7 4 8 , 182,206,214,221-2,224, Barren, Michkle 31
226,251-2 Barthes, Roland 10
Althusser, Louis 254 Bateson, Gregory 49
ambiguity 5 0 , 5 6 , 2 4 2 4 Bayart, J. F. 80, 88
Amin, Samir 102-3 Becker, Carol208
Amritsar, Golden Temple Stoming 99 becoming 34,53,177,180,182-3,185.222
An Artist of t k Floating World (Ishiguro) Bell, Demck 117
.,.
141-7- BeUow, Saul 191
Anderson, Benedict 157, 174 belonging53, 67, 69,71,76, 84, 157,
Anderson, Carleen 18 175, 177, 1 8 5 4 , 189,222,224,232