ABSTRACT
In the last ten to fifteen years, the fields of colonial and postcolonial discourses have produced a by-now-standard critique of objectification, essentialism, exoticization, and Orientalism as the representational practices of modern Western imperialism. That is, an oppositional power relation between colonizer and colonized has come to be understood as a crucial dynamic at work in the disciplines, institutions, subjects, and practices of modernity. Less understood or less examined in the interdisciplinary cultural studies of colonial and postcolonial discourses are the power relations between the different hybrid subjects produced during centuries of imperialism and modernity. Thus, the center-periphery model, or West/Non-West binary, is inadequate to understand contemporary world conditions under globalization: the relations between gendering practices, class formations, sexual identities, racialized subjects, transnational affiliations, and diasporic nationalisms, etc. Constructing monolithic notions of “Western” and “nonWestern” subjects in binary opposition cannot always account for the complex, hybrid, and often contradictory subject positions that mark the era of postmodernity.
