Content area
Full Text
One of the main concerns of postcolonial theory is to lay bare the dehumanizing and economically devastating consequences of colonialism on indigenous populations and to restore voice to the natives who had been silenced and exploited under colonial rule. Ever since the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism, postcolonial theory has focused more on issues of representation in colonial discourse and the agency of the natives. The concern of postcolonial and emerging voices, as a response, has centered on subverting the assumptions of colonial discourse and rewriting its history from the vantage point of the subaltern. However, the direction that postcolonial theory was taking with its emphasis or rather overemphasis on the history of colonialism has received cautionary statements from a host of postcolonial critics with different political and academic agendas. Aijaz Ahmad, Ella Shohat, and Anne McClintock among others have all warned against establishing colonialism as a time marker around which other histories and subjectivities define themselves.
Ahmad, for instance, argues that while it is misleading to talk about a coherent colonial experience, we can, on the other hand, talk about a capitalist modernity that brought about similar state apparatuses and similar social and cultural configurations. He objects to the use of colonialism as a time marker since it valorizes the experience of colonialism and runs the risk of collapsing microhistories into one historical structure:
It is worth remarking, though, that in periodising our history in the triadic terms of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, the conceptual apparatus of `postcolonial criticism' privileges as primary the role of colonialism as the principle of structuration in that history, so all that came before colonialism becomes its own prehistory and whatever comes after can only be lived as infinite aftermath. (6-7)
Similarly, Ella Shohat draws attention to the homogenizing effect of the spatio-temporal semantics of the term "postcolonial":
White Australians and Aboriginal Australians are placed in the same "periphery," as though they were co-habitants vis-à-vis the "center." The critical differences between the Europe's genocidal oppression of Aboriginals in Australia, indigenous peoples of the Americas and Afro-diasporic communities, and Europe's domination of European elites in the colonies are leveled with an easy stroke of the "post." (102)
Such criticism leveled at the term postcolonial was occasioned by generalizing definitions as...