Harry Harootunian

"Missed Opportunities, Lost Vocations: Postcoloniality and its Fateful Encounter with Poststructuralism"

Abstract:

I've been thinking about writing a paper on the consequences of postcolonial discourse's turn to and reliance on poststructural theory. I want to explore why postcolonial discourse consistently backs off from actually addressing the post--the past after decolonization-- as a chronological marker and has concentrated on a form of 'remembering' the colonial experience at the risk of displacing social relations to psychology and the presumed subjectivity of the colonized . My real interest is in exploring why postcolonial discourse failed to turn to the real object of the post, which would have been the effects of decolonization and independence to produce new and equivalent nation-states. I believe, in fact, that decolonization resulted in new and more damaging forms of recolonization to defeat the promise of independence and thus constitutes the objective conditions explaining this turn away from history to the promise of static and typologized images passing as memories of not underdevelopment or even immense unevenness but of new subjectivities forged out of the colonial experience now capable of resisting and overcoming it. One of the striking problems in this 'narrative' is to explain the actual, historical hiatus between theorists of colonialism from the former colonies like Fanon, Cabral, Cesaire etc and the formation of postcolonial theory in its poststructural inflection. Here postcolonial theory is really post to the colonial theorizing that attended decolonization. Those whose writings emerged from the experience of colonization and decolonization prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s while postcolonial discourse, despite Said's Orientalism which was published in 1978, begins to take off in the mid 1980s early 1990s. Another problem I want to explore as a consequence of this hiatus and turn is the privilege accorded to space and spatial relationships and the virtual disappearance of concerns for temporality.