Postcolonial American Studies

Abstract

The heightened climate of xenophobia and compulsory patriotism, as well as the rallying together behind values by many intellectuals in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, makes painfully clear the necessity of interrogating US culture through the lens of postcolonial studies. Repeated invocations of differences between our civilization and their barbarity, entreaties for a new imperialism, and calls for reinstating a nineteenthcentury type of colonialism, now with the US replacing Britain and France, are ample proof that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate.' Hardt and Negri's postulation of the contemporary world as the age of unlocalized, nonimperialist empire is surely being tested (xiv, 134). Nevertheless, although the present moment might warrant a postcolonial understanding of US literature and culture, the relevance of postcolonial analyses to American studies has not always been clear. After all, the master-texts of American studies were consolidating American exceptionalism at the very moment that radical anticolonialist treatises questioning the humanity and universality of modernity were being written by Third World intellectuals such as Aim6 C6saire, Frantz Fanon, and George Lamming. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is widely credited for having inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies, and with Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Parry, Ranajit Guha, and the subaltern studies scholars, the major questions of postcolonial studies were laid out. These questions included the analysis of Western texts as colonial discourse, the investigation of representations of the colonized, the study of forms of resistance to colonization in the literature of the formerly colonized, and issues of neocolonialism, comprador natives, and subaltern representation. Yet despite revisionist histories such as R. W. Van Alstyne's The Rising American Empire (1960) and Carl Eblen's The First and Second American Empires (1967), and later works such as Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (1980), which demonstrated imperialism as central to national identity from the beginning, much of American studies remained remarkably insular, thus reinforcing