(Re)Figuring Colonialism: Narratological and Ideological Resistance

Abstract

notion that history of Third World peoples in general, and of Caribbean people in particular, is history of marginalization and of subjection to colonial discourse succinctly encodes background to struggle of these peoples to establish cultural and discursive identity of their own. appropriation of identity, property, and traditions of colonized by virtue of their representation as intrinsically deprived, benighted and inferior has been shown to be typical pattern of colonization process. Inherent in this process is suppression of national identity and culture, where, as Abdul JanMohamed puts it, The colonialist destroys without any significant qualms effectiveness of indigenous economic, social, political, legal and moral systems and imposes his own versions of these structures on Other.' operation of this dialectic is crux of colonial relationship, legitimizing negation and erasure, and reinscribing sense of inferiority and insufficiency which colonized traditionally attempt to overcome through mimetic replication of Other. critical role of this paradigm in production of strategies of circumscription calculated to perpetuate procedures of systematized exclusion has been outlined by Fredric Jameson, who inscribes negation of colonial subject as a strategy of representational containment, which scarcely alters fundamental imperialist structure of colonial appropriation; Jameson goes on to point out that ultimate result for colonial subject of discursive absence generated by this structural opposition is enforced nonentity: the mapping of new imperial world system becomes impossible, since colonized other who is its essential other component or opposite number has become invisible.2 From this perspective, subjection to colonial discourse may be seen as an effective means of denying identity and expression to an entire category of marginalized nationalities. tendency toward nationalism and national expression which has recently marked Caribbean territories -most particularly in latter half of this centurysymbolizes desire for resistance to colonial hegemony on regional scale. In sum, these desires are aimed at subversion and overturning of master's discourse, replacing it with authentic cultural and political voice of these subjected peoples. In this regard, striking anomaly of French West Indies, whose continuing status as French de'partements d'outre-mer is markedly at variance with increasing number of newly independent states in other parts of region, shows most clearly ambiguity of post-colonial existence; as Beverley Ormerod puts it, the French