ABSTRACT
The impact and influence of so-called poststructuralist thought on the development of postcolonial studies have been widely acknowledged by critics who are both sympathetic to and critical of poststructuralism. For some critics, such as Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Robert J. C. Young and Dipesh Chakrabarty, poststructuralism is part of a broader questioning of the values of the European enlightenment, and its claims to universalism. For others, such as Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik and Pal Ahluwalia, the development of postcolonial theoretical formulations through a critical engagement with the vocabularies of poststructuralist theory provided by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, signifies the depoliticization of a postcolonial studies that has its origins in left-oriented national liberation movements. By framing political resistance in the abstract terms of signs, codes and discursive strategies, in other words, materialist critics of a postcolonial theory informed by the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argue that postcolonial theory – either wittingly or unwittingly – denies the agency and voice of the colonized.
