Colonialist Pretexts and Rites of Reply

Abstract

In this essay I want to address two related issues for postcolonial criticism: the politics of intertextuality through the relationship between colonialist texts and the material conditions of colonial practices; and the politics of rewriting, by the former colonizers, of such colonialist texts. To do this I will focus on one particular context and cluster of texts: Randolph Stow's Visitants (set in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea) and the pre-texts it interrogates. The self-conscious reinscription (by numerous writers from a variety of nations, races, and cultures) of European texts has been a widespread phenomenon over the last forty years. It has offered an important creative and political response to colonization and formed an essential part of the processes of postcolonized recovery and restitution. Such reinscriptions and replies have involved a variety of discourses and genres including western historical and political accounts of invasion and governance; the interrogation and reinterpretation of administrative records and legal documents; and the unmasking of authoritative discourses such as ethnography and anthropology as well as the questioning of the assumed superiority of western medical practices. Postcolonial responses to the written texts which underpinned and sustained western colonization have also taken the form of challenging those literary texts that were widely circulated in the imperial metropolis and abroad, through both education systems and publishing and distribution to colonial territories.' Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, Samuel Selvon, Jean Rhys, Audrey Thomas, and Raja Rao are but a few of those writers who have rewritten not just individual English (or European) canonical works, but through these reinscriptions interrogated the discursive fields within which such texts affected (and continue to affect) colonial and postcolonized societies. That such profound effects do occur seems generally agreed. It is, however, more difficult to assess the mechanisms by which texts, particularly literary texts, materially affect the lives of colonized people. Similarly difficult to assess are the ways in which postcolonial responses to such works aid in postcolonial social restitution and reconstruction. How did a text such