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Other recuperative debates of our time have drawn on postcolonialist discourse and have displayed the same symptoms of unease when allied to or utilising the disruptive and apostate tenets of postmodernism’s ‘posture of suspicion’. One such is feminism. As Annette Kolodny had demonstrated earlier (1975), Helen Carr argues that
colonialist, racist and sexist discourse have continually reinforced, naturalized and legitimized each other during the process of European colonization…. [In the New World] and in other colonized territories the difference man/ woman provided a fund of images and topoi by which the difference European/non-European could be politically accommodated (1985, 46).
Yet here, too, the passing years would reveal a growing threat of disempowerment, until Laura Lee Downs would ask: ‘If “Woman” is just an empty category, then why am I afraid to walk alone at night?’ She warned that ‘the politics of identity, feminist and otherwise, rests on a disturbing epistemological ground’ where ‘the group’s fragile unity’ – and, indeed, its powers of advocacy – are under threat (1993, 416). Susan Stanford Friedman agonises over ‘a pressing urgency to reclaim and hold on to a newly reconstituted history of women’ aided by the insights of both postcolonialism and postmodernism, against ‘the subjectivist epistemology [also of postmodernist making] that can lead toward the paralysis of complete relativism’ (1997, 231–235).
These are the same fears voiced by proponents of a crusading postcolonialism. Thus Nancy Hartsock finds ‘it curious that the postmodern claim that verbal constructs do not correspond in a direct way to reality has arisen precisely when women and non-Western peoples have begun to speak for themselves and, indeed, to speak about global systems of power differentials’ (1987, cited by Mascia-Lees, 1993, 230). Dark surmises that postmodernist scepticism is a secret weapon of a re-mastering imperialism have emerged (Krupat, 1992; hooks, 1995), while Anne McClintock has worried over the dismissive implications of the term ‘postcolonial’ itself when it is supposed to articulate a rallying cry: ‘The word “post” … reduces the cultures of peoples beyond colonialism to prepositional time. The term confers on colonialism the prestige of history proper; colonialism is the determining marker of history’ (1992, 86). We have come full circle back to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s notorious verdict that precolonial Africa had no proper history.
Out of such anxieties have emerged various proposals for a truce between postcolonialist idealism and postmodernist scepticism, expressed in calls for a moratorium on the use of radical postmodernist insights in postcolonialist critiques, so as not to undermine the latter’s essentialist agenda of reempowerment. Gayatri Spivak has made a plea for a ‘strategic essentialism’, that is, ‘the construction of essentialist forms of “native” identity [as] a legitimate, indeed necessary, stage in the emergence … [of] a fully decolonized national culture’ (cited by Moore-Gilbert, 1997, 179). Linda Hutcheon elaborates:
The current poststructuralist/postmodern challenges to the coherent, autonomous subject have to be put on hold in feminist and postcolonial discourses, for both must work first to assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity; those radical postmodern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses (1989, 151).
This is, of course, nonsense. If the tenets of postmodernism regarding the constructedness and contingency of all cognition, identity, ‘truth’ and cultural values are correct and not merely rhetorical postures, we are being asked here to accept a logical charade for the purposes of well-meant but nevertheless fraudulent expediency. Yet such shaky options have attracted other promoters. Despite regarding postmodernism as ‘a discursive practice dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals’ (1995, 118), bell hooks wants to retain its disruptive usefulness for the ‘renewed black liberation struggle’ as long as it is stripped of its ‘critique of essentialism’, since ‘we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics’ (120; my italics – the term sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for racialism, if not racism). That such a stance could no longer qualify as postmodern seems to escape the writer.
Altogether then, crusading postcolonialists have major problems with the ahistoricity of postmodernism, its clamant decentredness, its inherent scepticism, and its agnosticism about the imperatives of historical materialism and the idealist liberationist programmes of postcolonialism. The political agenda for a better world, free of imperial domination and capitalist exploitation, that lies at the heart of the classical Fanonist enterprise is by definition questioned, destabilised and relativised by a postmodernist verdict – which in its most agnostic manifestations argues that all is verbiage, all is construct, nothing matters.
On the other hand, if it were to be accepted that ‘time-out’ has to be allowed for the reconstruction or re-affirmation of the essential identities of peoples and cultures ravaged by colonialism and imperialism, it must be conceded that the same privilege should be extended to at least those ‘colonisers’ and Western commentators who had resisted the mastering drive of their own cultures and had tried to meet African societies on their own terms, or at least on terms that recognised reciprocity and mutuality. In other words, if the discourse of postcolonialism is to be interpreted as condemning all Eurocolonial writing about Africa and its people as simply prejudicial and worthless, the insights of postmodernism invite a resurrection of such texts for the operations of quite different investigations and conclusions.
Lurking behind the unease and unequal encounter between postcolonialist ambition and postmodernist doubt have always been larger issues concerning the nature of human cognition itself. Both postcolonialists and postmodernists have been in the habit of making large and often unexamined assumptions about how we know what we know, and what we can do about changing our minds and thus the world. Cognitive philosophy is a huge discipline, but for my purposes, we may start with an anthropologist’s observation that ‘in each culture … reality is distinctively conceptualized in implicit and explicit premises and derivative generalizations’ (Albert, 1970, 99). Yet such distinctiveness is not a conceptual trap, but a cultural diversity worth celebrating. It may be true that ‘accurate and systematic knowledge about the world’ (Hartsock, 1987, 205) is hard to attain and even harder to convey across cultural divides, but that does not disqualify the effort or the results. When Linda Hutcheon concludes her examination of postmodernism with the thought that ‘There is not so much “a loss of belief in a significant external reality” as there is a loss of faith in our ability to (unproblematically) know that reality, and therefore to be able to represent it in language’ (1987, 299), she is not counselling despair, but informed awareness of the difficulties entailed in making sense of the world, particularly across cultural boundaries.
In anthropology, as in history, fierce debates surged between the 1970s and the 1990s around issues of representation, cultural translation, narrativisation and the so-called linguistic turn in a number of disciplines, all deemed to deprive the subject under investigation of its intrinsic identity (White, 1973, 1978, 1980; Geertz, 1973; Marcus and Cushman, 1982; Fabian, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Himmelfarb, 1987; Spencer, 1989; Schwartz, 1994). One polarity in the debate is represented by Peter Mason: ‘To understand the other by comprehension is to reduce the other to self…. All ethnography is an experience of the confrontation with the Other set down in writing, an act by which that Other is deprived of its specificity’ (1990, 2–13).
Obviously such an elision in which knowledge becomes synonymous with theft or erasure must once again lead to cognitive anomy, a helpless confrontation with a world in which an exchange of minds and cultures is impossible. If we are indeed ‘prisoners of the conceptual system that we are enabled by’ (Battersby, 1992, 55), the outlook would be bleak. Terry Eagleton, reviewing Stanley Fish’s The Trouble with Principle (1999), which effectively proposes just such a cognitive strait-jacket, expresses the intuitive dismay elicited by such an assault on cognitive
