ABSTRACT
Ever since its development in the 1980s, post-colonialism has found itself in the company of disciplines such as women’s studies, cultural studies and gay/lesbian studies. Postcolonial studies follows feminism in its critique of seemingly foundational discourses. The term ‘humanism’ owes its origins to a secular and anthropocentric cultural and educational program concerned with the celebration and cultivation of ‘human’ achievements. Post-colonialism, then, derives from the anti-humanism of post-structuralism and the ‘new humanities’ a view of Western power as a symptom of Western epistemology and pedagogy. It is instructive here to recall Raymond Williams’ understanding of culture as ‘whole way of life’ within which artistic and intellectual labour coexist through necessary linkages with other social activities. There are serious limitations, as Foucault tells us, to a critique of academic activism which insists upon the fundamental irrelevance of all knowledge production.
