Bill Ashcroft

Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis

Abstract Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Saids work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant culture. Orientalism remains even more critical now than twenty-five years ago because the task of taking hold of self-representation has become, for Palestinians, a matter of life and death. Resistance (muqãwamah) was first applied to literature by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani, and the example of post-colonial literature remains the crucial model for the Palestinian people. This article proposes that the post-colonial strategy of transformation turns resistance from a simple opposition to a control of the means of representation. Success for the Palestinian people will never come from armed struggle but from the control of representation and the communication of the Palestinian situation to a dominant audience. In this way the achievement of Orientalism can be extended to the level of contemporary politics.

Primitive and Wingless: the Colonial Subject as Child

In 1956 John F. Kennedy remarked that ‘If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the god-parents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future’ (Fishel, p. 18). Embedded in this statement is a central feature of imperial rhetoric. For what strikes us about imperialism is not so much its ubiquity, its totality and eventual dominance of global culture, but its astonishing capacity to mask its own contradictions. I want to suggest that the trope of the child, both explicitly and implicitly, offered a unique tool for managing the profound ambivalence of imperialism, because it absorbed and suppressed the contradictions of imperial discourse itself.

Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city

The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it encapsulates the processes of postcolonial movement and settlement that come to extend globally. An invention of colonialism, no city has been a greater focus of literary writing than Bombay, which demonstrates the mobility and cosmopolitanism of the postcolonial city, and the fluidity, class disparity and ambivalent sense of home that has come to characterize diasporic populations. This essay examines the extent to which Bombay literature, despite the devastating pressures of state control, corruption and fundamentalist violence, expresses a utopian view of the social, religious and cultural openness of this radical conglomeration of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, classes and religions.

Towards a postcolonial aesthetics

Aesthetic theory has often been regarded with suspicion by postcolonial theorists who see aesthetics as implicated in the canonical marginalization of postcolonial literatures. This article approaches the idea of a postcolonial aesthetics from the point of view of the transformative exchange that occurs in the “contact zone” of the transcultural text. Debates about aesthetics revolve around its status as either an ideology or a stimulus, universal or culturally specific, elitist or quotidian. However, postcolonial texts – visual, auditory and written – produce an aesthetic engagement in which both producer and consumer are transformed, one that may force us to revise our understanding of the utility of aesthetics for postcolonial cultural production. The identification of an affective response that moves across cultural boundaries indicates the kind of intervention that postcolonial theory may make in a number of fields but perhaps none more contested than the field of aesthetics. The article contends that a non-cognitive quality referred to here as “material resonance” opens the way for a transformation of the field of aesthetics by postcolonial notions of cross-cultural engagement.

Remembering the future: utopianism in African literature

No race has a monopoly on beauty, or intelligence, or strength, and there will be a place for all at the rendezvous of victory. Aime Cesaire These words from one of the most robust critics of colon...

Globalization, Transnation and Utopia

The impact of post-colonial theory on globalization discourse has been clear for some time now. The ‘cultural turn’ of globalization studies in the nineties was due almost entirely to the impact of post-colonial analysis. This paper will propose a way of extending this analysis of global culture in a phenomenon I refer to as ‘the transnation.’ The transnation is not an object in space but a way of addressing the mobility, contingency and variable cultural positions of subjects in an increasingly globalized world. ‘The’ transnation represents a state of inbetweenness not adequately accounted for by the terms ‘diaspora’ ‘migrancy’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but which disrupts the discourse of loss attending those terms. The transnation thus becomes a post-colonial intervention into the debates circulating around the questions of cultural identity, diaspora, language and literature in a global future.

Travel and Utopia

Almost all journeys are begun in hope. While they may not begin with the expectation of arriving at Utopia, the impetus of travel is essentially Utopian because it is driven by hopeful expectation in one form or another. It might be hope to discover the entirely new, to find the exotic, to find some example of the ideal, or, in tourism for instance, it may be driven by the hope to discover what we already know through reading. No matter what the nature of the journey or the destination, travel is propelled by desire, the desire for discovery, for the place or the experience that can throw one’s present situation into relief.

Including China: Bei Dao, resistance and the imperial state

This article suggest how we might include China in postcolonial studies. Despite its lingering sense of victimization by the West, Chinas peculiar manifestation of continental imperial power upon its 55 ethnic cultures makes it amenable to a post-colonial reading. But the case of the Bei Dao and the ‘misty poets’ shows how imperial power is threatened by a form of literary resistance, developed through a new language and an annoyingly obscure literary form, that exists outside state control. The relevance of a post-colonial reading can be seen in the development of a ‘new’ literary language, drawing on the style of ancient Chinese poetry, the ambiguously empowering experience of exile and the persistence of a utopian hope for the future.

African futures: The necessity of utopia

Abstract This article examines the utopian vision of much African writing as the dynamic of hope generated in anticolonial struggle continues to characterise contemporary poetry and novels. The premise is that utopia is necessary, not as mere wishful thinking but as willed action, because, according to Paul Ricoeur, utopia is the ‘no place’, the only place from which ideology can be countered. This means that utopia is the only place from which the discourse of catastrophe continually undermining Africa can be countermanded, the only place from which European history can be subverted. The perception of a grounded utopian future requires a vision of the past, of cultural memory freed from the confines of Western history. According to Ernst Bloch, the doyen of Marxist utopianism, utopia cannot exist without the operation of memory. The present is the crucial site of the continual motion by which the new comes into being. In such transformative conceptions of utopian hope, the ‘not-yet’ is always a possibility emerging from the past. African utopianism reconsiders the possibility of an ahistorical past, rethinks the function of memory and of time itself. The momentum of hope not only imagines a hopeful future for Africa (crystalised in the concept of an African Renaissance), but carries forward into a perception of Africas impact on the world. The key to this is that the subversion of history, the affective operation of memory and a creative vision of the future are most powerfully conducted in African art and literature.