ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four areas of metropolitan theorizing, suggesting some openings for further investigation of the complexity of critical debates within each of them. It focuses on certain pressure-points of post-colonial studies: nationalist culture in Ireland, new perspectives on ethnicity in Britain, African American interventions in the United States, and the difference and position of the settler colonies in post-colonial studies. Irish writing from street ballads through to James Joyce has been heterogeneous, parodic, assimilating, and characterized by this adulteration which David Lloyd argues is a stylisation of the hybrid status of the colonised subject as of the colonised culture. The differences, of course, between colonising and colonised cultures remain profound. In significantly different ways from countries in Africa and Asia, all of the geographical areas discussed have also generated multiple lines of resistance to colonization, imperial expansion, and exploitation or slavery.
