Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full? Rethinking the Problems of Postcolonial Revisionism

Abstract

Since the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, which was then unnoticed but is now looked on as an epoch-making event, we have witnessed the emergence of postcolonialism as discursive practice in Euramerican literary and cultural studies. Despite their differences in historical and cultural modalities, most postcolonial projects have a common denominator: the critical rereading of texts in the Western canon that have been thought of as embodying universal and transhistorical values. The primary concern of these revisionist projects has been with the conjunction of colonialism as a politicoeconomic reality and colonialism as a system of cultural representation, namely, with literature's complicity or involvement in the enterprise of empire making. Based on the assumption that the double-edged (material and discursive) practices of colonialism are concomitant and interrelated, postcolonial critics continue to investigate how the seemingly apolitical literatures of the West have contributed to the naturalization of colonialist myths or ideologies and how a variety of discourses of empire and race have formed mutually reinforcing and comple-