Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse

Abstract

Writing of the disparate projects that seek to establish alternative protocols in disciplinary studies, Edward Said finds their common feature to be that all work out of a secular, marginal and oppositional consciousness, posits 'nothing less than new objects of knowledge ... new theoretical models that upset or at the very least radically alter the prevailing paradigmatic norms', and are 'political and practical in as much as they intend ... the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge'. 1 The policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend, which is condensed in this ecumenical scan of contemporary dissident criticism, can act as a caution against the tendency to disown work done within radical traditions other than the most recently enunciated heterodoxies, as necessarily less subversive of the established order. Said's own critique of Orientalism, directed at 'dismantling the science of imperialism', has fed into and augmented colonial discourse analysis, itself engendered where literary theory converged with the transgressive writings of women, blacks and anti-imperialists in the metropolitan wor ld, and post-colonial interrogations of western canons. The construction of a text disrupting imperialism's authorized version was begun long ago within the political and intellectual cultures of colonial liberation movements, and the counter-discourse developed in this milieu which is known to western academies, read by black activists in the USA and transcribed as armed struggle in the other hemisphere, was written way back in the 1950s by Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and polemicist, theoretician and guerilla. Although critics now developing a critique of colonialism do invoke Fanon, this can be a ceremonial gesture to an exemplary and exceptional radical stance