ABSTRACT
In conclusion, it could be said that post-colonialism is caught between the politics of structure and totality on the one hand, and the politics of the fragment on the other. Postmodern/poststructuralist commentators argue that post-colonialism is in danger of becoming yet another totalising method and theory. Critics such as Robert Young have recently suggested that post-colonialism can be best thought of as a critique of history. Most evidently, the organisation of the immediate past under the rubric of colonialism tends to reduce the contingent and random diversity of cultural encounters and non-encounters within that past into a tired relationship of coercion and retaliation. Moreover, to continue this critique of postcolonial ‘world history’, the notion of an academic ‘post’-colonialism carries within it a suggestion of cognitive mastery—a detached perspective or vantage point from which it is possible to discern and to name the completed and clear shape of the past as colonialism.
