French Colonial studies And Postcolonial Theory

Abstract

The colonial legacies of Britain, Spain, Portugal and France, and, to a lesser degree, Germany and Holland, have been restudied and redebated in conferences, lectures, and research centers throughout North America. Often amalgamated with African-American, Afro-Caribbean, French-Asian, transnational and diaspora studies, postcolonialism has generated a lengthy and fast-growing bibliography, and, increasingly, humanities departments advertise positions calling for expertise in the field of postcolonial studies. Although there are obviously many complex reasons why “postcolonialism” has become a code-language elected to speak to the issues of multiculturalism, canon realignment, global decentering, revisionist historiography, identity politics and cultural hermeneutics in the American academy, one thing is clear: there is really no commensurate intellectual movement on the European continent. Malraux recounts the anecdote surrounding “Yadtou art” to illustrate that African art, despite the drawback of having “no history,” could be ratified by virtue of its formalist offerings to European primitivism.