ABSTRACT
The premise to modes of criticism within the postcolonial critique which are attentive to those moments and processes when the colonised clandestinely or overtly took up countervailing stances is that no system of coercion or hegemony is ever able wholly to determine the range of subject positions. A postcolonial rewriting of past contestation, dependent as it is on a notion of a multiply (dis)located native whose positions are provisional, and therefore capable of annulment and transgression, does not restore the foundational, fixed and autonomous individual. Hall is quite aware of the colonial subject as the product of multiple constitutions, of the contradictions and over determinations of postcolonial ideological positions – having written of these as always negotiated and negotiable – and of ethnic and cultural difference as sites of articulation. Boehmer argues, postcolonial discourses of self-determination 'have a considerable investment in nationalist concepts of "selving" and of retrieving history, the gender specifics of nationalist iconography are accepted.
