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Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse

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COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS: EUROPE AND THE NATIVE CARIBBEAN, 1492–1797. By HULMEPETER. (New York and London: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1986. Pp. 350. $35.00.)
DISCURSOS NARRATIVOS DE LA CONQUISTA: MITIFICACION Y EMERGENCIA. By PASTORBEATRIZ. Second edition. (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1988. Pp. 465. $25.00 paper.)
UNFINISHED CONVERSATIONS: MAYAS AND FOREIGNERS BETWEEN TWO WARS. By SULLIVANPAUL. (New York: Knopf, 1989. Pp. 269. $22.95 cloth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. 294. $12.95 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Patricia Seed
Patricia Seed*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , 1991 , pp. 181 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. See Roger Chartier, Cultural History, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

2. The saga of the “weapons of the weak” continues in James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). See also Zygmunt Bauman's review of this work, “How the Defeated Answer Back,” New York Times Literary Supplement, 11 Jan. 1991, p. 7.

3. John and Jean Comaroff call these kinds of accounts “challenge and riposte.” See their forthcoming work, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press).

4. Jean François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Giles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970); and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). For a historical introduction to the issues in the United States, see Jonathan Arac's introduction to his edited collection, Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Useful secondary works include Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); Jonathan Arac and Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); John Raichman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

5. See Barthes's “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, 142–48; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), chap. 2, especially pp. 38, 221–23; and “Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?” Bulletin de la Sociète Française de Philosophic 63, no. 3 (1969):75–95, published in English as “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies, edited by Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979).

6. Gayatri Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” Subaltern Studies IV, edited by Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330–63, especially 337.

7. A critical difference exists between the reception of literary texts by communities of readers and that by the subjects of imperial power. As Homi Bhabha has pointed out, colonial discourse is not simply appropriated by textual communities but is addressed to someone (or a specific community). To Bhabha's proposition, I would add that this discourse is maintained by the exercise of force through armies, inquisitions, secret police, and jails, all of which give it an entirely different inflection. The addressee does not have the freedom to ignore the discourse, and if he or she does so, it can be only as a gesture of resistance.

8. The best recent discussion of the relationship between feminism and poststructuralism is Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990). See also Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1987); Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–94; Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2, 12 (1984): 3–13; Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987):119–56; Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986); and also the thematic issues of Inscriptions, nos. 3–4 (1987–88) and 5 (1989). See also Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

9. For example, Lelia Ahmed, “Feminism and Cross-Cultural Inquiry: The Terms of the Discourse in Islam,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, edited by Elizabeth Weed (London: Routledge, Chapman, Hall, 1989), 143–51. See also Homi K. Bhabha, “Dissemi-Nation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in his edited collection, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–322.

10. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). Although Frederic Jameson claims in his foreword to the English translation of Caliban and Other Essays that Roberto Fernández Retamar's work was the Latin American equivalent of Said's Orientalism, their similarities inhere only in their critical positions. Unlike Said, Fernández Retamar does not deal with discursive practices. See Caliban and Other Essays, foreword by Frederic Jameson, translated by Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), viii.

11. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952), originally translated into English by Charles L. Markham as Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967). Homi Bahbha's introduction was published in 1986 in London in Pluto Press's edition under same title. The view that the field of colonial discourse begins with Fanon rather than Said has been argued most recently by Benita Parry in “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987):27–57.

12. George E. Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1986); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), published in Spanish as Retóricas de antropología (Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1991); and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

13. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt: Orientalism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Many of the important articles and reviews in this field have been published in the journal Middle Eastern Research and Information Project. For a summary of the impact of Orientalism on Middle Eastern studies over the past decade, see Khamsin (1988).

14. See also Rolena Adorno's excellent pioneering work on Spanish America, Guarnan Poma: Writing and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); Adorno, “Discourses on Colonialism: Bernal Díaz, Las Casas, and the Twentieth-Century Reader,” Modern Language Notes 103 (1988):239–58; Adorno, “Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales hispanoamericanos,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 14 (1988):11–28; and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). For recent work on Brazil, see Roberto Reis, “Hei de Convencer: Autoritarismo no Discurso Colonial Brasileiro,” paper read at the meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, 4–6 Apr. 1991, Crystal City, Virginia.

15. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255–76.

16. Ibid. Said's defense against his critics in anthropology can be found in “Representing the Colonized,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989):205–25.

17. For multiple examples of these experimental ethnographies, see Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique.

18. Orin Starn, “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru,” Cultural Anthropology 6 (1991):63–91.

19. George Stocking, Colonial Situations, vol. 7 of the History of Anthropology series (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). An early statement is Talal Assad's collection, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973).

20. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

21. Subaltern Studies I, edited by Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982). The last volume under Guha's editorship was Subaltern Studies VI (1989). See also my review of poststructuralism's impact on Third World history, “Poststructuralism in Postcolonial History/' forthcoming in The Maryland Historian.

22. The confusion between literary and social practices of power is common to many post-structuralists, among them Derrida in his chapter of “violence of the letter” in Of Grammatology. See also Jacques Lacan's similar concepts in Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) and even Michel Foucault's “I, Pierre Rivére,” translated by Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

23. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1981) and his recent influential article, “Dominance without Hegemony” in Subaltern Studies VI (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Literary critics Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak also share an interest in the representation (and understanding) of the voice of the Other in historical writing about India during the period of British rule as well as a common goal of reinterpreting that history in light of contemporary poststructuralism. Bhabha is partial to Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Freud (including the discourse of psychoanalysis). Spivak mainly favors Derridean deconstruction.

24. See Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Guha's forthcoming biography of Mahatma Ghandi; and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed, 1986).

25. The start of this collection was inspired by Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Other postcolonial books include Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, edited by Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990).

26. Frederick Cooper, “From Free Labor to Family Allowances: Labor and African Society in Colonial Discourse,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989):745–65; Randall Packard, “‘The Healthy Reserve’ and the ‘Dressed Native’: Discourses on Black Health and the Language of Legitimation in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989):686–703; John Lonsdale, “African Pasts in Africa's Future,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Etudes Africaines 23 (1989):126–46; Preben Kaarsholm, “The Past as Battlefield in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe: The Struggle of Competing Nationalisms over History from Colonization to Independence,” Culture and History 6 (1989):85–106; and Fritz W. Kramer, “The Otherness of the European,” Culture and History 6 (1989):107–23.

27. Much of this work can be found in articles, presentations, and unpublished theses. See, for example, Peter Mason, “Portrayal and Betrayal: The Colonial Gaze in Seventeenth-Century Brazil,” Culture and History 6 (1989):37–62. See also William Taylor, “Mexico as Orient: Introduction to a History of American and British Representations since 1821,” and Ricardo Salvatore, “Yankee Merchants' Narratives: Visions of Social Order in Latin America and the U.S., 1800–1870,” papers read at the meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, 4–6 April 1991, Crystal City, Virginia. Also Alexandra David, “The Quest for Public Order,” paper read at the meeting of the Southwestern Historical Association, 28–31 Mar. 1989, Fort Worth; and Pamela Voekel, “Forging the Public: Bourbon Social Engineering in Late Colonial Mexico,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.

28. See notes 21, 23, 25, and 26.

29. Alcida Ramos, “Indian Voices: Contact Experienced and Expressed,” in Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous Perspectives on the Past, edited by Jonathan Hill, 214–34 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); and Ramos, “Indigenismo de Resultados,” Revista Tempo Brasileiro, no. 100 (1990):133–50.

30. Preben Kaarsholm, “The Past as Battlefield,” Culture and History 6 (1989):85–106; and Nancy Vogeley, “Colonial Discourse in a Postcolonial Context: Nineteenth-Century Mexico, ” paper presented at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, 4–6 Dec. 1989. See also note 27.

31. The term new historicism was first applied to the movement in the 1950s and 1960s that sought to unite literary history and literary criticism within the conventionally defined discipline of literature. See Wesley Morris, Toward a New Historicism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 14, 78; and Roy Harvey Pearce, Historicism Once More (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 6–63. The more recent popularity of the term is usually attributed to Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to the collection Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982). His essay criticizes the earlier historicism for its failure to perceive the text in a complex relationship to the culture that produced it. For other important programmatic statements on the new historicism, see Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester, Engl.: Manchester University Press, 1985), especially Dollimore's “Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism, and the New Historicism.” See also Jonathan Goldberg, “The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay,” ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 49 (1982):514–42; Louis A. Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980):153–82; Stephen Orgen, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Steven Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” Representations 1 (1983): 40–67; Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Johnson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Greenblatt, “King Lear and Harsnett's Devil's Fiction.” in The Forms of Power; and Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1980). A recent effort to broaden new historicist approaches to colonial discourse is Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, edited by Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

32. See Mullaney, “Strange Things”; and Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 18–47.

33. J. Fisher Solomon, Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); William E. Connolly, editor of the journal Political Theory from 1984 to 1990; Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics of Discursive Practices (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). A good collection of recent writing on the subject is International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, edited by James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989).

34. For the influence of anthropology on the new historicists, see Louis Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios 7 (1980):51–74. For a critique of literary theory in anthropological style, see Aijaz Ahman, “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,”‘ Social Texts, no. 17 (1987):3–27. For a critique of literary theorists who have failed to incorporate such perspectives, see Richard Roth, “The Colonial Experience and Its Postmodern Fate,” Salmagundi, no. 85 (1989):248–65.

35. The idea that any repetition, no matter how identical, always entails a difference is recognizably poststructuralist. See Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).