POSTCOLONIAL METACRITIQUE

Abstract

Several critics have eschewed Fredric Jameson's by-now infamous concept of ‘national allegory’, rejecting it as simply one more manifestation of the Eurocentrism of First World theory. Yet an elucidation of the concept's metacritical emphasis demonstrates that it offers an important point of departure for the development of a systematic and rigourous postcolonial hermeneutics. At the core of Jameson's thesis is a recognition that ‘Third World’ texts are a priori interpreted as Third World: there is and can be no possibility of unmediated access to the Other and thus postcolonial strategies of reading are ineluctably informed by an allegorical consciousness that accesses the Other through an anterior set of signs that pre-exist in the cultural realm. While several theorists aside from Jameson have recognized that all interpretation is essentially allegorical, his insights have a particular relevance for specifically postcolonial interpretation, especially since postcolonial critics have been slow to realize that postcolonial texts are ‘always-already-read,’ apprehended only through the residue of previous interpretations. Jameson's insights direct us forward, away from the ultimately banal task of classifying and categorizing ‘properly’ postcolonial texts and toward the more important imperative of examining the conditions that shape the process of postcolonial literary production, publication, dissemination and reception. Reading postcolonial texts as ‘national allegories’ does not, then, represent the hopelessly unsophisticated hermeneutical task that many critics now assume; rather it involves disrupting the monologic, nondialectical model of reading exemplified by what Abdul R. JanMohamed has termed ‘manichean allegories’. Allegorical reading in the Jamesonian sense exposes the breaks and gaps in colonialist logic by detecting and analyzing non-contingent and contradictory meanings.