ABSTRACT
Like many a writer about former colonies, I have my doubts about the ‘postcolonial’ label. For ‘postcolonialism’ signifies, of course, not just a body of writing about former colonies, but a whole theoretical or ideological agenda, a whole gamut of doctrines and pieties which are far from historically or politically innocent. One might note, for example – though postcolonial theorists normally do not – that among the more positive reasons for the rise of this style of thought, a resoundingly negative one was a global political defeat. I believe this, in fact, to be one ground of postmodernism in general; but it is surely clear that so-called postcolonialism gets off the ground in the wake of the crushing or exhaustion of the various revolutionary nationalisms which dealt world imperialism such a staggering series of rebuffs some twenty or so years ago. Nationalism is not a sexy term with postcolonialism, which tends on the whole to remember the British in India rather than how the Portuguese were booted out of Angola. That nationalism is at once an ideology of imperial capitalism, and from time to time its formidably effective enemy, is only one of many reasons why the term generates more confusion than it resolves. Those postmodernists who lament the violent expulsion of otherness by the drearily selfsame have clearly not been thinking about the ejection of the Americans from a few of their former cheap labour markets. The postcolonial suspicion of nationalism, which I am gratified to add is not universal to the theory, has quite definite historical conditions in the failure of third-world revolutionary nationalism, since the mid-1970s, to break the hegemony of the West. That radical impulse persisted; but it had to migrate elsewhere in transmuted guise, and postcolonialism, along with the universities, was one of the places where it took up a home.
