Enacting postcolonial theory

Abstract

"A quick look at British politics as the state election machine cranks up again reveals denunciations of Tinkers / Travellers as social pests and of illegal immigrants as threats to national integrity. Here we see clearly the every-day enactment of postcolonial theory: how othering strategically consolidates a communal self; how blaming the victim shores up privilege; how a former imperial nation continues to operate internally with the tools of global power management. Part of this systemic othering continues to operate around the conflicting/ conflicted sites of settlement and nomadry. This issue of Postcolonial Text can illustrate further aspects of a shifting power-play across settled-unsettled/unsettling binaries. There is the ongoing differential of unsettlingly activist creative writing (as in Deidra Dee's Native American poems directly confronting the history of white destruction) and the settling abstraction of theoretical overviews (Zach Weir's article on the postcolonial present)although that defining work of theory may itself be working a paradox of pinning down an essence that is, by definition, characterised by conflict and change. The issue itself might appear to suggest a stable commonality settled under the institutional labels of "postcolonial" and "text," but this is by no means the theoretical tenor of its contents; they range from Australian film to Sri Lankan verse to Indian criticism to Afro-Canadian reflections on travel and the internet. The very existence of this journal in electronic form suggests that the locating title is itself subject to dis-locating change, and in at least one article (Chelva Kanaganayakam's engagement with Gayatri Spivak's reading of "culturally different" texts), the "text" is not even an electronic one, but rather a set of classroom reading practices that shift from one audience to another. This collection clearly demonstrates how the former field of "Commonwealth Literature"originally operating more or less as studies in comparative colonial cultures and comparative national literature studieshas opened up to a much wider set of experiences and academic practices. At that same time, the institution still requires certain cohesion in its concepts and materials to recognise textual phenomena as subjects and their interpretation as scholarship. Here, again, the claim is that postcolonial literatures can be read as definitively located on unstable groundnot just the literal experiential instability of Third World natural disasters (as with the poems on recent tsunami devastation), but also the liminality of texts such as Shashi Deshpande's, at the edge of modernist aesthetics, open to the postmodern but resistant to cooption by a system perceived often as First-World global-imperialist (Majumdar). In the Australian context, Anthony Lambert works with the equation of nation, land, and homestead to show how Aboriginal women have exposed and challenged false boundaries while testifying to their historical power