The literature(s) of the colonized:
Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. There are
however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for instance:
otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other , every
different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and
meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define;
the western concept of the oriental is based, as Abdul Jan Mohamed argues, on the
Manichean allegory (seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding opposites): if
the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the orient is chaotic, irrational,
feminine, evil. Simply to reverse this polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and
identity-destroying power (all is reduced to a set of dichotomies, black or white, etc.);
colonized peoples are highly diverse in their nature and in their traditions, and as beings
in cultures they are both constructed and changing, so that while they may be 'other' from
the colonizers, they are also different one from another and from their own pasts, and
should not be totalized or essentialized -- through such concepts as a black consciousness,
Indian soul, aboriginal culture and so forth. This totalization and essentialization is often
a form of nostalgia which has its inspiration more in the thought of the colonizers than of
the colonized, and it serves give the colonizer a sense of the unity of his culture while
mystifying that of others; as John Frow remarks, it is a making of a mythical One out of
many... the colonized peoples will also be other than their pasts, which can be reclaimed
but never reconstituted, and so must be revisited and realized in partial, fragmented ways.
You can't go home again.
Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, of resistance as
subversion, or opposition, or mimicry -- but with the haunting problem that resistance
always inscribes the resisted into the texture of the resisting: it is a two-edged sword. As
well, the concept of resistance carries with it or can carry with it ideas about human
freedom, liberty, identity, individuality, etc., which ideas may not have been held, or held
in the same way, in the colonized culture's view of humankind.
On a simple political/cultural level, there are problems with the fact that to produce a
literature which helps to reconstitute the identity of the colonized one may have to
function in at the very least the means of production of the colonizers -- the writing,
publishing, advertising and production of books, for instance. These may well require a
centralized economic and cultural system which is ultimately either a western import or a
hybrid form, uniting local conceptions with western conceptions.
The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is in most cases a concept
foreign to the traditions of the colonized peoples, who (a) had no literature as it is
conceived in the western traditions or in fact no literature or writing at all, and/or b) did
not see art as having the same function as constructing and defining cultural identity,
and/or c) were, like the peoples of the West Indies, transported into a wholly different
geographical/political/economic/cultural world. (India, a partial exception, had a long-
established tradition of letters; on the other hand it was a highly balkanized sub-continent
with little if any common identity and with many divergent sub-cultures). It is always a