Laura Chrisman

"Beyond Postcolonial Studies and Black Atlanticism"

Abstract:

My talk considers new directions for postcolonial studies by bringing it into critical dialogue with the recently-emerged field of black Atlantic cultural studies. To date these fields have worked in mutual isolation, though their hegemonic expressions share many theoretical and political tenets. Both are profoundly anti-nationalist. Both have tended to position African subjects as reactive. However postcolonial studies gives primacy to the imperial metropole or colonial administration as the "center" to which African cultures respond by producing, in Partha Chatterjee's words, a "derivative discourse" that may "subvert" but depends upon the epistemology of that centre. Black Atlantic studies, on the other hand, gives primacy to African America as the vanguard of cultural and political modernity which Africans seek to emulate. I will consider ways to bring the two frameworks into a productive relationship, and will also supply a critique of their conceptual limitations. My critical arguments here stem from my understanding of black South African intellectual work during its early twentieth-century emergence as a nationalist ideology. This African nationalism suggest the necessity of developing a new theoretical framework, that challenges many of the presuppositions of postcolonial and black Atlantic analysis. My talk will end by outlining what this new theoretical framework might look like, and the ways in which it points "beyond postcolonial studies and black Atlanticism."