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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••
Those who are critical of this model of the postcolonial make an epistemological
distinction between a rational logic and a deconstructive one, one such critic is Dirlik
(1992) whose criticisms of the postcolonial are twofold. The first point that he makes
is that it is:
A post-structuralist, post-foundationalist discourse, deployed mainly by dis-
placed Third World intellectuals making good in prestige ‘Ivy League’ American
universities and deploying the fashionable language of the linguistic and cul-
tural ‘turn’ to ‘rephrase’ Marxism, returning it ‘to another First World language
with universalistic epistemological pretentions,
(Dirlik, 1992: 346)
Linked to this, is Dirlik’s second point which is that poststructuralist, anti-founda-
tionalist underpinnings of the postcolonial make it incapable of dealing with ‘capi-
talism’s structuring of the modern world’ (Dirlik, 1992: 346). In addition, Dirlik
claims that poststructuralism is preoccupied with questions of identity and not able
to give ‘an account of the world outside the subject’ (ibid.). The parallels between
poststructuralism and the postcolonial in the writings of postcolonial intellectuals is
taken up by Bulbeck (1998) who claims that for this group postmodernism and post-
colonialism are coterminous:
In the hands of postcolonial writers like Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, Abdul
JanMohammed, Gayatri Spivak (most of whom are academics in European or
North American universities), postmodernism becomes post-colonialism, a dis-
course which attempts to heal the ‘epistemic violence (to borrow Spivak’s
phrase) of imperialism’ (Emberley 1993: 5). The contradictory experiences of
those located between a ‘homeland’ and western academic privilege, or as
fourth world peoples in a first world nation, is particularly explored by the post-
colonial writers.
(Bulbeck, 1998: 14)
While Bulbeck’s conclusions are over-simple, there is little doubt that the postcolo-
nial intellectual, both feminist and non-feminist, provides an interesting case study
of a site for the transculturalism and transnationalism conceptualizations of debates
on representation and identity.
The feminist postcolonial intellectual – a case study of transculturalism and
transnationalism in redefining subjectivity and identity
Key to the development of a range of conceptualizations which draw on a cultural
studies frame of reference has been the work of both feminist and non-feminist post-
colonial intellectuals. This group encompasses the ideas of feminism, postcolonial
theory, postmodernism combined with the experiences of transcultural and transna-
tional analysis. Feminist and non-feminist postcolonial intellectuals have led to an
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