Afterword: Three Warnings

Summary

I began this book with a personal reminiscence and want to do likewise in these concluding remarks. The day of September 11, 2001, remembered well by the entire world perhaps, was also a unique experience for me. As a freshly minted Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas, I heard the first, still uncertain news about the attack on New York's Twin Towers on National Public Radio (my favorite American radio station) while en route to my lecture. Everything became clear soon thereafter. When I entered the lecture hall in which I taught a course on East-Central European fi lm on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, the students were behaving differently than they normally did. They were very serious and sad—I could see barely held back tears in their eyes. This was to be expected since the group consisted almost entirely of American students. Almost, since there was also one Australian among them. He always stood out a little from the rest: he reacted differently to the films we studied, gave different answers to questions, and spoke with an accent that was difficult to understand even for Americans, as a result of which he sometimes became the butt of the joke for the group. In a word, he was a version of the classic Other—an alienated newcomer from a foreign culture. On this day, however, he too became part of the community that came together in the small hall of the Fondren Library. Like the others, he refrained from an outburst of emotion. The psychological, mental, and cultural differences among students disappeared in the face of a human tragedy, the size and significance of which we were not yet able to comprehend.

This is a recurrent memory. It returned to me, for example, when I reflected on the significance of difference in the context of postcolonial theory and studies. It is difficult, of course, to question the role of this category in the construction of the conceptual framework of postcolonialism, where it has the rank of an epistemic principle that permits the description of social and cultural phenomena tied to discrimination, colonial oppression, and cultural supremacy. Yet the absolutization of difference makes the tangible reality of its opposite difficult to observe.