ABSTRACT
It is scarcely news to readers of this volume that the heterogeneous field of ‘post-colonial studies’ is reproducing itself at present as a spectacle of disorderly conduct. Perhaps this is as it should be for a field which takes for its academic objective a wholesale refashioning of the Western project of the traditional ‘humanities’; but I think it is clear that the institutionalized field of post-colonial studies, at least, has arr ived at a point of multiple intersections, of ruptures, of territoriality-and this suggests that the field has arrived at a point that really matters in its history. In this essay, I want to try to think through the dis/order imbricated in the post-colonial academic field, and in part to respond to the ways in which a policing energy seems to carry itself across a variety of articulations within the postcolonial problematic. The policing energy which interests me here is in the final instance an internalized apparatus for control and regulation, an effect of ideology, and I am not about to argue that ‘out there’ in post-colonialdom there are double agents, neocolonialist conspirators, wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing, whom ‘we’ must resist through some vigorous form of oppositional collectivity. But I am going to suggest that as the field of post-colonial studies is becoming professionalized as an institution for social critique and as an apparatus for producing cultural knowledge, it is beginning to perform within itself a regulating operation which has no necessary relation to, or investment in, a politics of anti-colonialism. This article, consequently, is an attempt to carry out some (ideological) refereeing in this structure of professionalized or disciplinary regulation: I want to address the question of who gets to play on the post-colonial field, who is asked to sit on the bench, who plays on the farm team, how and when a player is, or ought to be, called
‘out’. Now obviously, I am in no sense outside of these questions; I too have an institutional stake in this game and am part of the disciplinary scramble. My refereeing persona here must necessarily be ambivalent, compromised by a double articulation in meta-regulation and in wager. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this exercise, I want to pretend to stand somehow outside the ‘field’.
