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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

Gilroy (1987, 1992, 1993) has done much to interrogate a conception of national
identity around which British cultural studies has coalesced.
These two models: the diasporic and the postcolonial, while raising a range of impor-
tant issues for cultural studies in terms of ‘global’ and ‘national’ discourses, are not with-
out limitations. There are still speaking positions which remain marginalized by these
models. ‘One such position … would be the indigenous (whose voice has been scarcely
heard in cultural studies anywhere)’ (Stratton and Ang, 1996: 385). The contribution of
Aboriginal writers in Australia and Maori writers in New Zealand still leaves the intellec-
tual high ground of cultural studies unmarked. Stratton and Ang suggest a third model –
the subaltern – which they describe as ‘a position to be distinguished from both the
diasporic and the postcolonial as it tends to be spoken from a very different geo-political
and geo-cultural space, namely the Third World’ (ibid.: 385). Rey Chow (1993) raises the
implications of the use of ‘subaltern’, which , as Chow, points out, ‘when construed in
terms of foreignness of race, land and language, can blind us to political exploitation as
easily as it can alert us to it’ (1993: 9). Chow points up the implications of this type of
binary construction, because ‘the representation of “the other” as such ignores … the
class and intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures’ (ibid.: 13). The intersection
of feminism with the postcolonial is a significant intervention into these debates and has
implications for the increasingly transcultural and transnational framing of debates on
representation and identity.

Transnationalism and transculturalism and the postcolonial

The intersection of transculturalism and transnationalism with discourses on the
postcolonial has provided fertile territory for reconceptualizing debates on subjectiv-
ity and identity. The relationship between postcolonialism, transculturalism and
transnationalism has both epistemological and historical dimensions as Hall (1996)
shows. The concept of the postcolonial provides a conceptual repertoire to facilitate
an understanding of a process of global transformation or transculturation. Hall pro-
vides a critical overview of the concept of the postcolonial in terms of its wider the-
oretical framework on the ‘politics of representation’. Hall deals elegantly with the
epistemological and chronological dimensions of the postcolonial concept, particu-
larly with regard to its potential as a mechanism for deconstructing binaries. As Hall
observes, while the concept of the postcolonial is by its very nature ‘universalizing’
(Hall, 1996: 246), because of its high level of abstraction, it need not get trapped by
uniformity in its application. As Frankenberg and Mani observe:

The ‘postcolonial’ as an axis of subject formation is constructed not simply in
dialogue with dominant white society, but is an effect of engagement between
particular subjects, white society, region of origin and region of religious and/or
political affiliation, what Paul Gilroy (1990/91) describes as ‘the dialectics of
diasporic identification’.
(1993: 302)

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