Of Hauntings, Impasses and Lacunae: The South African Debate on Postcolonial Theory

Abstract

Summary Which modalities of postcolonial theory gained currency within the literary-cultural discourses of the South African academy? In seeking to answer this, I highlight the key concerns in the debate on postcolonial theory in South Africa: the question of the applicability of the term postcolonial or a notion of postcoloniality as an explanatory discourse for the South African case; the question of critical disablement of the investigating intellectual who deploys postcolonial theory informed by deconstruction; the question of the political implications of postcolonial theory as appropriated in the South African academy; and the question of the focus on racial and cultural difference at the expense of an analysis of class. The mode of articulation of postcolonial theory in South Africa submerges a “liberal-humanist” tendency – one that sought to abrogate some of the most radical insights of postcolonial theory. What results from this will to power is a deadlocked institutional politics that does not yet begin to exhaust the potentialities of postcolonial theory – a correlative reductivism of literary criticism (should we posit one) could then perhaps be traced back to this moment of appropriating a theoretical lexicon.