Signifying with a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers (review)

Abstract

Those who once were colonized, it now appears, have become the beneficiaries of a curiously inverted situation: from the perspective of a postcolonial critique, they find themselves in a culturally and ethically dominant position. It is now the colonizers who appear limited, deluded, and backward in their thinking—precisely because they had always imagined themselves to be the repositories and vehicles of values taken to be universal by virtue of their Western provenance. The languages and culture they sought to impose on the benighted and backward masses of the non-Western parts of the globe were—by definition—deemed to represent the eternal essence of humanity and set the standards, once and for all, for what it meant to be human. It was a pretense that made them often blind to their own basic inhumanity. All the more reason, then—for those who have assimilated the languages and cultural codes of the colonizers—to write back with a vengeance, as Salman Rushdie puts it. In light of this ironic reversal, "the instrument of subservience [has become] a weapon of liberation" (5).