Of walls and veils : Book review

Abstract

"Robert Young‟s Colonial Desire (1995) presented an interestingly engineered contrast between the East and the West through his description of the zero degree GMT Meridian that runs arbitrarily through the Old Royal Observatory in London. Tourists almost always straddle the narrow brass strip and have themselves photographed with each foot in a different hemisphere. This is a narrative technique by which the author connects image with theory, a method he uses to advantage in Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. This book is a neat summation of his ideas about postcolonialism intended for the beginner but also, one might add, equally useful for the expert. Young‟s engagement with theories of (post)colonialism began with White Mythologies, a landmark achievement in postcolonial criticism. His most recent book, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, is full of conversational directness and makes early ingress into a style of writing completely at variance with the perplexity of many books on the subject. As Young writes, “[s]ome of this theoretical work has gained a reputation for obscurity and for involving complex ideas that ordinary people are not able to understand. . . . This is unfortunate, since many of these ideas were never produced by academics in the first place and can be understood relatively easily once the actual situations that they describe are understood.” Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction acquaints the completely unfamiliar reader with ideas such as domination, the exploitation of the marginalized, and inferiority, and links them to the terminology of postcolonial studies, addressing such concepts as subalternity, hybridity, and gender. One narrative of postcolonial theory is that it developed with the intention of dissolving master narratives, and postcolonialism also grew as a system of interrogative practices much like feminism, often contradictory but generally supportive of a balance between the west and the non-west, black and white, men and women, elite and “subaltern.” The colonial imbalance evoked responses as varied as the “surgical intervention” of the two revolutionary doctors and patron saints of national liberation, Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, or, as Young points out, the “ayurvedic medicine” approach of the great healer, Mahatma Gandhi. Postcolonial Theory is the road academics have taken."