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Introduction: Postcolonialism and the Crisis of Aphasia
The Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader.1 The modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing.2
Can postcolonialism speak? Attempts to define this concept are legion, making it live a talkative, one could even say an overemphasized career. Given the current state of academic studies, there is not much to be found in the limelight of postcolonialism by way of rectification. Postcolonialism has raised complex, perhaps irresolvable issues of definition, as has been discussed by Mishra and Hodge in their essay “What is Post(-)colonialism?” and Huggan in his review “Postcolonialism and its Discontents.” Mishra and Hodge's essay examines the matter engagingly and gives a clear answer in the negative as, for them, postcolonialism has secured postmodern characteristics. It is, they say, “as defiant as oppositional postcolonialism but without political independence or autonomy.”3 For Mishra and Hodge, the postcolonial effort has splintered and been pressed into “postmodern postcolonialism” which has “an increasing alliance with the postmodern at the level of theory.”4
The clothes donned by postcolonialism today, in comparison to the traditional one, are made of smokescreen criticism that follows a “strategic” methodology in its confrontation with structures of power- in the shape of Spivak's conciliatory phrase of positive, “strategic essentialism.”5 The inquietude surrounding postcolonialism's affiliation to colonialism, and the symmetry and unsubtle complicities existing between them are confronted with a lenient ilk of criticism (if it can be called criticism at all) characterized by ambivalence, exaggerated caution and absence of “forthrightness” which emanate from apolitical quietism, “‘objectivity' and ‘scientific' impartiality.”6 The oppositional criticism first pledged by the postcolonial enterprise has been outflanked at last by the obduracy of an imperial script and privileges. Today's postcolonial criticism proposes to “strategically” challenge (yet it promotes) structures of power.
It is leashed, and indeed allowed so long as it does not substantially oppose (which it does not) and promotes more significantly than it opposes. Contemporary scholars have contributed significantly (and often unconsciously) to mapping this shift in postcolonialism's energy which is today unhoused of its erstwhile opposition and forced to relocate to a new abode with a strategic location. Postcolonialism, which has promised upon its...