Assignment #10: Postcolonialism/Race

Postcolonialism...

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Just a little link about Orientalism and Edward Said...

And some Gloria Anzaldua...

And some Homi Bhaba...

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I'll keep this short. My spring research touched on postcolonialism, so the only new information I've gleaned are really just resources that (one sweet day) I'll get around to reading...

Essentially, postcolonial theory examines the effects that colonialism has had on the development of literature and literary studies. This often takes, as its focus, the formation of postcolonial identity. It is similar to feminist theory in its attempt to illuminate discourses of subjugation, which typically serviced imperial narratives of legal, religious, educational, political, aesthetic and military superiority. Narratives - not strictly those written during colonial times or by colonized authors - act as sites for us to analyze for such discourses, and to determine the extent to which the narrative either reinforces or challenges the dominant colonial paradigm.

Interestingly, some of my references discussed postcolonialism in its own chapter, while others combined it with race and ethnic theory. This usually illustrates that theories of race and ethnicity are, naturally, socially constructed phenomenons rather than biological truths; it intersects clearly with a Eurocentric compulsion to define itself positively in relation to a projected, negative definition of an indigenous population. This is referred to as "othering" or, more specifically by Edward Said, as the act of "Orientalism." Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes" leaps to mind, as well as my general distaste for nearly all 19th century French colonial literature. More pertinent to modern American scholarship, perhaps, is the specific branch of African American race theory, which strives to honor African American creative production after centuries of outright exclusion in the mainstream educational system.

Klages does a nice job of bringing in Gloria Anzaldua and Homi Bhaba, who both examine the ways in which national/racial/ethnic identity are defined, and the consequences of such identification (Klages 157). These scholars write extensively of hybridity. I appreciated that Klages made an effort to connect hybridity to the everyday life, pointing out that hybridity matters to us all because:

-in a humanist tradition, I can define myself as a 31 year old American female, teacher, writer, and mystic.
however...
- in a postructuralist tradition, I am defined as the subject/product of discourses - as she puts it, "my ideas about who I am, about what my sex, race, age, etc. mean,c ome from my position within these ideologies and discourses I inhabit" (158).

That's a depressingly deterministic outlook, I thought. However, hybridity gives me back some hope, becaseu it recognizes that I may be constructed, but I am likely to be constructed by 100s of discourses, which can even conflict! Klages writes that this "overdetermination" means that "there's no predicting what I will think, say, believe or do in any specific situation or in relation to any specific issue or idea. At any moment, I can speak from any of my multple subject positions. And that starts to look almost like having the 'free will' and 'creative uniquness' we valued so much in the humanist model" (158). Hybridity and its recognition of multiplicity defies the stability of binary classification.

So, Bhaba writes about national identity and nationalism, while Anzaldua confronts dominant cultures and subordinated languages by naming the "borderlands" as "the spaces between cultures, classes, races, sexual orientations - the slash" between the rigid binaries often demanded by a colonial entity (Klages 162). Important stuff, indeed.