Roger Berger

Department of English
Witchita State University
<Berger@twsuvm>

 

Adam, Ian, and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Calgary: U Calgary P, 1990.

 

In a recent review in Transition 53 of Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, Benita Parry distinguishes two methodologies–the post-colonial and the post-modern –that currently dominate literary and cultural theorization. On one side, she asserts, are those who recognize that texts are “involved necessarily in the making of cultural meanings which are always, finally, political meanings,” but who insist that “culture does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production” and that texts are “inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history”; on the other side are those who (in Stuart Hall’s phrase) would want to expand the territorial claims of the discursive infinitely, and therefore privilege textual strategems as in and of themselves the location of gathering points for solidarity.¹ It is difficult to accept–and many of the essays in the volume under review here consider this fundamental problem–that a connection can be made between these two “posts.”

 

To a degree, of course, terminological imprecision makes difficult such a project. Post-modernism, for instance, has been variously troped as “hyperreal,” “excremental,” “inflationary,” “wilfully contradictory,” skeptical of all metanarratives yet located in a “perpetual present”–the contradictory nature of which seems to define the post-modern itself. Post-modernism is simultaneously (or variously) a textual practice (often oppositional, sometimes not), a subcultural style or fashion, a definition of western, postindustrial culture (Gibson’s “the matrix”), and the emergent or always already dominant global culture. At the same time, post-colonialism is simultaneously (or variously) a geographical site, an existential condition, a political reality, a textual practice, and the emergent or dominant global culture (or counter-culture). For me, the post-colonial and the post-modern can be heuristically understood as metonyms for larger, irreconcilable positions, as Parry suggests. On the one side, there is a limit to textuality–call it Raymond Williams’s sense of “lived” experience; on the other, an infinite textuality, Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text,” in which subjectivity is a textual matter–pain and oppression merely tropes. The question thus is clear: is there any formal or political relationship between post- modernism and post-colonialism or is post-modernism yet once more instance of colonization–a contemporary moment of western textual imperialism? That is, what does, say, the collapse of critical space between the western media spectacle and the production of a post-modern subjectivity have to do with the the lived realities of oppression in the dominated world–with the lack of health care, food, electricity, education and an abundance of western appropriation of labor, raw materials, and imposition of a cultural imperialism?

 

In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-modernism,” Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin assemble an impressive, international cadre of theorists who offer daring and inventive (though on occasion irrelevant or incomprehensible) responses to these questions. These essays, as Helen Tiffin suggests in her introduction, “seek to characterise post-modernist and post-colonial discourses in relation to each other, and to chart their intersecting and diverging trajectories” (vii). To that end, the anthology succeeds brilliantly: it articulates in many of the essays resonant homologies that suggest the possibility of a strategic alliance between post-modern and post-colonial discursive strategies.

 

Yet, after completing this inaugural volume addressing these two salient cultural and literary theories, I am left with a sense of the forced and even–from a political perspective–counter-productive nature of the project. That is, this volume, much like another project that attempts to reconcile earlier manifestations of the post-colonial and the post-modern, Michael Ryan’s interesting though often plodding Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation, expends massive amounts of critical energy with little to offer for ongoing oppositional and post-colonial struggles. In many of the essays, theorists admit the problematic nature of the project–the fundamental incompatibility of post-modernist textuality and the lived realities of the post-colonial (or really, neo-colonial) experience. At the same time, however, most of the essays assert that useful parallels between post-colonialism and post-modernism can be identified. Various images are deployed to suggest this: “conjunctions of concern” (Hutcheon), “a working alliance” (Huggan), “a rapprochement” (Carusi), “contamination” (Brydon), and so on between oppositional discursive strategies–and they thus derive their conclusions from the pragmatic political principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Without a doubt, many oppositional features of post-modernism resemble those of post-colonialism. However, my sense–at least at the current historical moment–is that while many of the parallel elements have theoretical valence, the telos of each project is so fundamentally different that the parallels are accidental rather than significant. As Diana Brydon suggests, at the end of the collection, in something of a “minority” report, “When directed against the Western canon, post-modernist techniques of intertextuality, parody, and literary borrowing may appear radical and even potentially revolutionary. When directed against native myths and stories, these same techniques would seem to repeat the imperialist history of plunder and theft” (195-196). Ultimately, it must be noted, post-modernism would seem to need post-colonialism far more than post-colonialism needs post-modernism; and thus, once again, after another “treaty,” the West (rather than its Others) ends up with far more in the exchange.

 

The intellectual heart of this project in this anthology may be located in three essays–Stephen Slemon’s “Modernism’s Last Post,” Ian Adam’s “Breaking the Chain: Anti-Saussurean Resistance in Birney, Carey and C.S. Pierce,” and Linda Hutcheon’s “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire'”–which are strategically positioned near the beginning, middle and end of the collection. Slemon argues, for example, that the “disidentificatory reiteration across the various national post-colonial literatures” (4)–that is, the post-colonial “rewriting the canonical ‘master texts’ of Europe” (4) and tropic appropriation of Eurocentric history (e.g., in the “plagiarizing” strategems of Yambo Oulogeum)–strongly resembles Linda Hutcheon’s notion of a post-modern “intertextual parody.” He does admit to some fundamental problems with the connection between post-modernism and post- colonialism–among them the tendency of “Western post-modernist readings” to “so overvalue the anti-referential or deconstructive energetics of post-colonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them” (7) and “the universalizing, assimilative impulse . . . of post-modernism” that appears to continue “a politics of colonialist control” (9). However, Slemon ends his essay with a hopeful vision: in post-modernism’s contradictory need to appropriate and exclude post-colonialism, “there could perhaps reside a fissuring energy which could lay the foundation for a radical change of tenor within the post-modern debate” (9). Slemon’s mixed metaphor here could perhaps be understood as a post-modern ironic discursive strategy, but it seems to reveal, as I shall presently suggest, the fundamental irreconcilability of post-modernism and post-colonialism. Linda Hutcheon, similarly, in “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire,'” points out the “considerable overlap” in the “concerns” of post-colonialism and post-modernism (168). The deployment of “magic realism,” subversions of Eurocentric master narratives (historical and literary), and, above all, the strategic use of “irony as a doubled or split discourse” (170) constitute points of convergence. I need to say that these attempts to contribute to a poetics of resistance literature–what Chidi Amuta in A Theory of African Literature terms a “poetics of the oppressed”–without question offer imperatives for examining this collection.

 

Localized applications of this theory may be found in Simon Gikandi’s excellent “Narration in the Post-Colonial Moment: Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey” and Annamaria Carusi’s interesting “Post, Post and Post. Or, Where is South African Literature in All This?” These essays argue that that post-colonial literature often finds in formal (post-modern) strategies a means of rupturing the discourse of imperialism. Gikandi asserts that while many Caribbean women writers–often excluded from the canon of West Indian literatures–would seem to oppose the project of post-modernism, nevertheless “they increasingly fall back on post-modernist narrative strategies–such as temporal fragmentation, intertextuality, parody and doubling” (14)–to contest both the imperial narrative and the modernist impulses of male Caribbean writers. To that end, Gikandi explains, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey both recovers a voice of difference long suppressed by the colonial planatation society and combines the creative aspects of “creole and colonial cultures as opposed sites of cultural production” (19). Carusi argues that both poststructuralism and resistance literature–at least within the oppressive context of apartheid South Africa–have encountered limits of theoretical achievement: poststructuralism with its “affirmation of difference as pure negativity” (103) cannot sever its discursive connection with Western textuality, while the South African literature of liberation privileges a dead-end humanist subject, discursively sutured into an imperialist subjectivity. She sees a way out of this paralyzing aporia in a “radical heterogeneity” (of the Foucauldian variety) that permits political agency without reinstalling “positivity” and abandoning difference. Carusi ultimately seeks “a rapprochement” between post-modernism and post-colonialism in which the subject–what she terms “a discursive instance”–is “embedded in a socio-historical configuration” (104). “The heterogeneity,” she writes, would thus be a difference that does make a difference, but it is not, for all that, a difference that can or should be named. The Other, theorized from a post-structuralist perspective (and at present time we have no viable alternative), is irretrievable, unlocatable, refractory and by definition unnameable; it is not there as a positivity, but as an effect. (104)

 

Yet it is precisely at points such as this one that a very real political anxiety about the theoretical aims of post-modernism manifests itself. Indeed, these theorists–apprehensive about re-enacting the epistemic violence and ethnographic appropriation accompanying the colonial project– appear inordinately defensive about the connection between post-coloniality and post-modernity. Consider, for example, Annamaria Carusi’s rejection of a political critique concerning the irrelevancies of a theoretical intervention in the post-colonial:

 

There are many who will point out that what I have said, and what anything theory may say to the struggle against apartheid, has nothing to do with people living in the squatter camps, or under detention without trial. This argument, arising from the political urgency of opposition, is however, specious.(105)

 

To support her position, Carusi (equally speciously) offers Foucault’s notion of the circularity of power, but earlier she asserts “the central position of cultural production in the attainment” by “colonized or subjugated people [of] an identity and . . . self- determination” (96). It is difficult, however, to reconcile her privileging at this moment a post-colonial identity with her later insistence on the impossibility of naming a post-colonial subjectivity. Even more telling, of course, is Carusi’s too quick dismissal of what seems an inconvenient political critique. As Diana Brydon points out, “Literature cannot be confused with social action” (196). Or at least post-modern literature cannot be understood as exemplifying by itself a fundamental threat to the hegemony of apartheid. Carusi indeed suggests that in South Africa “almost every other path [other than the cultural] of resistance and reconstruction is criminalized” (96). Even given its racist pathology, the criminal apartheid state understands difference between real and meaningless threats to its power.

 

A related political problem concerns Slemon’s relocation of post-colonialism in the West, as part of Western discourse, as he writes:

 

The concept [post-colonialism] proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once-colonized nations but rather when it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occulted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations. (3)

 

Slemon, who in many ways is not wholly sympathetic with the project of post-modernity, nonetheless conveniently redefines post-colonialism not as an actual, locatable activity but as a Western discursive practice. Agency is given wholly over to the colonizers who initiate in essence not only the colonial project but also the post-colonial one. All too often in this collection post-colonialism is understood in Western terms, perhaps unintentionally incorporating into an entirely Western drama the everyday struggles of dominated people to free themselves.

 

The best–most daring and oppositional–essay in the collection is Hena Maes-Jelinek’s “‘Numinous Proportions’: Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All Posts.” Harris, Maes-Jelinek suggests, rejects for the most part both post-colonial and post-modern practice –the first for its adoption of a realistic textuality, the second for its nihilistic construction of textuality. Harris imagines, according to Maes-Jelinek, an affirmative, cross-cultural (emphatically not multi-cultural) “web of space,” a site of creative engagement with the past, colonialism and language, a site not of difference but of convergence. Harris’s project thus invents a third way rather than effecting any kind of synthesis between post-colonialism and post-modernism.

 

In addition, any review of this collection must acknowledge the compelling, though (in terms of the stated project of this anthology) misplaced, essays by Simon During and John Frow. During’s “Waiting for the Post: Some Relations Between Modernity, Colonization, and Writing” and Frow’s misnamed “What Was Post- Modernism?” both attempt to open a theoretical space in which a discussion of the interrelationship between post-colonialism and post-modernism might be initiated, but ultimately their essays would seem better located in a discussion of modernism and colonialism.

 

In the “final” analysis, it is difficult to know if this collection represents a milestone or a tombstone (a postmortem) for the project. Knowing the tendency of the Western academy to appropriate any form of knowledge or human agency–especially in Said’s sense of travelling theory: to remove a revolutionary, disruptive theory from its historical context and thus domesticate it–one would expect any number of future volumes of this sort. Yet I think that the very considerable analytical skills of these theorists would be better deployed on behalf of the post-colonial project, making use of whatever theoretical strategies (post-modern or otherwise) that seem helpful in the ongoing struggle against domination and neo-colonialism. (Tiffin’s work, in conjunction with Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back [London: Routledge, 1989], seems much more a model in this regard.)

 

As world history enters into a new and perhaps decisive moment of the colonial encounter, it is imperative that culture workers–particularly those positioned in what Mary Louise Pratt terms the “contact zones” (most of the writers in this collection are located in post-colonial settler colonies: Canada, South Africa, Australia)–clearly align themselves with the wretched of the Earth. Given John Frow’s astute description of the fundamental changes marking modernization and late capitalism (hyperflexible capital being pursued by mass migrations of poor people, as well as the insidious effects of such a situation: totalized mapping of the globe, state intervention on behalf of capital, massive urbanization, the triumph of instrumental reason, and the “secularization and automatization of the spheres of science, art and morality” (140), we need public intellectuals willing to challenge what appears to be heretofore unimaginable domination and human exploitation. Past the Last Post, for all its valuable contributions to a poetics of post-colonial literature, doesn’t appear fully to participate in this great challenge. As Fanon concludes his great anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth,

 

[I]f we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples' expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe. Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened. For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (315-316)

Note

 

1. 44. Parry is not alone in describing the fault lines that have manifested themselves in contemporary political and textual theory: one might also look to Simon During’s important work, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism” or “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today,” Henry Louis Gates’s “Critical Fanonism,” Anthony Appiah’s “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, Benita Parry’s own “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” or my own “The Return of Fanon: Recent Anglophone Literary Theory” for further elucidation of this current battle of the books.