Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality
Carole Boyce Davies For this reason, the postcolonial has come as a mixed blessing for those formally colonized. At once a recognition of the afterness of colonialism, it nonetheless also has the potential of extending colonialism’s effects beyond what was an assumed endpoint. Like other vexed formulations like “post-raciality,” it becomes prematurely celebratory when there are still actual colonial and racializing processes in place or at times recolonizing ones. The African postcolonial state we already know is in many ways a neo-colonial manifestation with a range of processes in place like excessive militarization, corruption, male dominance without any possibilities for anti-postcolonial struggle, even after all the work done by scholars and activists of the anti-colonial movements to liberate these countries. Ngugi’s critique of postcoloniality, is handled on balance in Globalectics in a sophisticated way. While recognizing the utility of it as a theoretical framework in some academic contexts, he presents one of the best disclaimers available. For this reason, his discussion in my view should be part of the teaching of postcoloniality wherever it is deployed as a master discourse. This critique of postcoloniality by itself is not surprising since Ngugi is one of the early definers of what has become the new languaging of the decolonial. In recent academic discourse, the decolonial has moved out of the state of “arrest” that it was under and is fast becoming a framework used more readily now by writers and critics alike. Junot Diaz talks about the search for “decolonial love”[ix] in describing his creative project. Chicana women scholars have examined how gender works in the formation of the “decolonial imagination.” [x] And bringing much of this together theoretically, Walter Mignolo in his essay “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality[xi] indicates that “the grammar of de-coloniality (e.g., de-colonization of knowledge and of being and consequently of political theory and political economy) begins at the moment that languages and subjectivities that have denied the possibility of participating in the production, distribution, and organization of knowledge” are able to claim space. Thus, Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [ix] Paula M.L. Moya The Search for Decolonial Love, An Interview with Junot Díaz” Boston Review on line, June 26&27, 2012 [x] Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. (Indiana University Press, 1999). [xi] Cultural Studies 21:2( March, 2007), 449-514. |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |