Page 201 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-10.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 190

••• Ann Brooks •••

In reframing the discourses on ‘colonization’, the narrative framework established by the
postcolonial positions ‘colonization’ as something more than the exercise of colonial
power in different parts of the world. Hall understands the significance of the ‘postcolo-
nial’ in terms of a global, hegemonic process, central in the development of capitalist
modernity. As he comments: ‘I think it is signifying the whole process of expansion, elab-
oration, conquest, colonization and imperial hegemonization which constituted the
‘outer face’, the constitutive outside, of European and then Western capitalist modernity
after 1492’ (Hall, 1996: 249). This has strong parallels with Ong’s (1999) conception of
‘flexible citizenship’ in the growth of Chinese transnational capitalism.
The concept of the postcolonial is not about describing a particular state of historical
or contemporary relations as they apply to one society rather than another. It is about ‘re-
reading’ and rethinking ‘colonization’ as part of what Hall describes as ‘an essentially
trans-national and transcultural “global” process’ (1996: 247). It is about the deconstruc-
tion of the binary structures within which relationships are framed and represented.
Hall describes the process as a move from one conception of difference to another (Hall
1992a) and he draws on the distinction elaborated by Derrida (1978) between difference
and ‘différence’. This shift from difference to ‘différence’ is, as Hall notes: ‘It obliges us to
re-read the binaries as forms of transculturation, of cultural translation destined to trou-
ble the here/there cultural binaries forever’ (Hall, 1996: 247). In its move to a position
of ‘transculturalism’, previously established relationships captured by the binary fram-
ing of relations have to be rethought. Postcolonial analysis ‘produces a decentred, dias-
poric or “global” rewriting of earlier, nation-centred imperial grand narratives’ (ibid.).
The concept of what Gilroy (1993) identifies as the ‘diasporic’ is central here in under-
standing the shift in relations. The notion of the diasporic supplements and displaces
the centre/periphery binary so fundamental in the met narratives around ‘colonization’
and reorganizes and reshapes global relationships.
Hall shows that ‘[i]t is in the reconstitution of the epistemic and power knowledge
fields around the relations of globalization through its various historical forms’
(1996: 50) that gives the postcolonial its transcultural and transnational potential,
and that defines the ‘postcolonial’ moment. The postcolonial is thus sensitive to a
number of dimensions including the ‘question of hybridity … the complexities of
diasporic identification which interrupt any “return” to ethnically closed and “cen-
tred” original histories’ (ibid.). When colonization is thus situated within the revised
postcolonial narrative framework, and ‘[u]nderstood in its global and transcultural
context’, colonization can be seen to have made ‘ethnic absolutism an increasingly
untenable cultural strategy’(ibid.).
The central issue for Hall is the process of ‘transculturation’ which characterizes
the nexus of colonial relations. Through this process

colonization so refigured the terrain that, ever since, the very idea of a world of
separate identities, of isolated or separable and self-sufficient cultures and
economies, has been obliged to yield to a variety of paradigms designed to cap-
ture these different but related forms of relationship.

(1996: 253)
• 190 •