on meaningful action and intervention when a postcolonial critique attempts to accommodate the disruptive and dissentient aperçus of a postmodernist discourse of suspicion (Slemon and Tiffin, 1989; Mason, 1990; Adam and Tiffin, 1991; Carusi, 1991; Mishra and Hodge, 1991; Appleby et al., 1994; Bahri, 1995; Werbner and Ranger, 1996).
As early as 1983, Dennis Porter asked about Orientalism, if ‘as Said sometimes implies, truth in representation may be achieved, how can it be justified on the basis of a radical discourse theory [i.e. postmodernism] which presupposes the impossibility of stepping outside of a given discursive formulation by an act of will or consciousness’ (1993, 151)? If Said were right, Porter added later, there could be ‘no way out of cultural solipsism’ (1991, 4) – no culture could hope to understand another. Aijaz Ahmad took this depressing prospect further, arguing that the logic behind Foucault’s and Said’s arguments bestowed ‘upon the world a profound cage-like quality, with a bleak sense of human entrapment in Discourses of Power [sic]’ (1992, 130). Such propositions ‘depict human beings as caught in a prison of language’ (Appleby et al., 1994, 213). Billy Pilgrim, the character from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969), strapped to a flat-car and peering through a fixed tube, comes to mind.
Ahmad lamented the crippling of a postcolonialism predicated on postmodernist scepticism: ‘Any attempt to know the world as a whole, or to hold that it is open to rational comprehension, let alone the desire to change it, [is] to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to construct “grand narratives” and “totalizing (totalitarian?) knowledges”’ (1992, 69). Speaking at a conference in 1991, the Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo quipped: ‘Colonialism has not been “posted” anywhere’, and warned that as celebrated in the Western agnostic academy, the ‘postcolonial’ was ‘a pernicious fiction’ (cited by Gikandi, 1996, 14). More recently, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, revisiting an article they had written in 1991, have charged that ‘postcolonial theory … has aestheticized the struggle’ instead of confronting it, and they have called for the postcolonial project to ‘re-establish vital links with Marxism’ in order to re-enhance its credentials as ‘a proactive and radically anticolonial theory’ (2005, 389–395). I shall return below to South African anxieties along the same lines.
Numerous further discomfiting insights have followed in the wake of the recognition of the misalliance of postcolonialist idealism and postmodernist incredulity. Helen Tiffin has observed that ‘certain tendencies within Euro-American post-structuralism and post-modernism have in practice operated … to appropriate and control the “other” while ostensibly performing some sort of major cultural redemption’ (1988, 70). Confronting ‘The Problems of Cultural Paralysis in Postcolonial Criticism’, Alison Donnell has deplored ‘the propensity to deal in perpetual marginality and voicelessness [that] not only condemns writers to dismal and oppressed self-denying narratives but burdens readers with a baggage of unresolved cultural sensitivities’, when in fact the colonial record is full of ‘writings that often rest uncomfortably on the cusp of coloniality, and writings that select to work with rather than against European models’ (1995, 102).
Such views are echoed by other critics weary of the Billy Pilgrim flat-car orthodoxies of postcolonial critiques: ‘The contemporary reification of otherness reproduces the sharp “us and them” opposition of colonial discourse itself, and simplifies the complex transactions and migrations of the history of colonialism’ (Edmond, 1997, 21). Deepika Bahri speaks of ‘the comfortable umbrella of essential binarism that characterizes much postcolonial discourse’ (1995, 61), which effectively blurs any insights it might have to offer.
On the other hand, Salman Rushdie’s postmodernist playfulness in contexts properly deemed to demand a postcolonial solemnity has frequently been targeted as ‘an exercise in self-reflexive literary game-playing’ and as writing that ‘allows us to evade the necessity of concrete political and ethical choices’ (Baker, 2000, 43).
A local version of such anxieties occupied South African academics and authors in the 1980s and 1990s in the shape of controversial polemics about ‘Writing in a State of Emergency’ (Chapman, 1992). Behind this preoccupation lay the heavy weight of centuries of apartheid and an already long history of agonised confrontation with South Africa’s racialised society that had occupied local writers – Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) is perhaps still the most famous instance. As apartheid ran its final desperate course and state repression increased, South African writers increasingly had to ponder Seamus Heaney’s question: ‘What is my apology for poetry?’ (1979, 41).
Their most obvious response was the argument that South Africa’s crisis demanded a literature of socio-economic conscientising and exposure, a mirror-like recreation of the conditions, repressions and agonies that affected especially black people’s lives. Postmodernist ‘game-playing’, such as that deemed to occupy much of the early fiction of J.M. Coetzee was considered irrelevant, even abhorrent. Magic realism, metafiction, irony and satire were branded the irresponsible distractions of the neo-bourgeois author. Students of Marxist literary theory will recognise the debate, as ‘committed’ South African academics rehearsed the pro-historicist, pro-activist arguments of Lukács (1971), Adorno (1977) and Fredric Jameson (1984). The temptation to expect the poem or novel to be a petrol bomb, or, again as Heaney puts it, ‘a slingstone / Whirled for the desperate’ (1975, 72), is always a strong one in such contexts.
The relevance of the controversy here is that the ‘Writing in a State of Emergency’ polemic not only demonstrated for me once again the problems created by a postcolonialist critique in confused alliance with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ encouraged by postmodernist scepticism and irreverence, but also continued to sharpen the focus and caveats of my own enquiries. There simply was no such thing as a monolithic, monovalent Eurocolonial discourse of Africa, nor a single ‘master narrative’ of the fraught European-African encounter. Instead, there were many different stories, attitudes, interactions and surprises.
Postcolonialism still remains high on the international conference agenda, even if the stark binarisms of earlier decades have now been flushed out (Gurr, 1997; Cannadine, 2001; Hall, 2002; King, 2004). As for postmodernism, Raymond Tallis has trenchantly identified the ultimate nihilism embedded in its central tenets: ‘All attempts to demonstrate that the truth about truth is that it is not really true fall foul of the Cretan Paradox’, for if ‘the critique of truth were true, then it would be false’ (2001, 4). Put more simply and with specific relevance to my project, authors who have tried to expose the ‘truth’ about colonialism have generally fatally impaired their project by seeking an alliance with postmodernist iconoclasm. Richard Rorty puts it well: ‘People who wave the banners of multiculturalism typically pride themselves on their postmodernism, but revert to old-fashioned essentialism when they start describing the incommensurable identities of members of diverse cultures’ (1994, 13).
Similarly, many others, arguing that it is impossible for the European (or Eurocolonial) observer ever to have fathomed the ‘truth’ about the colonial subject while nevertheless holding forth confidently on the ‘truth’ of the colonial encounter from some privileged position already denied, have to be guilty, at the very least, of gross self-deception. By 1995, Robert J.C. Young would remark: ‘We have reached something of an impasse with regard to the theoretical questions raised in the study of colonial discourse’ (164), and the ghosts have not yet departed – see Mishra and Hodge (2005), quoted earlier, or Richard Gott’s scathing review of the new Oxford History of the British Empire (2001) in the London Review of Books (Gott, 2002, 26–28). The untenability of the postmodernist postcolonialism of a sometime doyenne of the discourse, Gayatri Spivak, has been laid bare: ‘Spivak wants to discern politically expedient ideological falsehoods where there can allegedly be no truth; she wants to help reconstruct the history of female literary marginalization whilst denying the possibility of authentic histories’ (Freadman and Miller, 1991, 39). Edward Said eventually had to confess: ‘[The] crucial difference between the urgent historical and political imperatives of postcolonialism, and postmodernism’s relative detachment, makes for altogether
