Page 107 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

Post-colonial and multicultural theory derive from a common
empirical datum, that of the collapse of European imperialism, and of
the British Empire in particular: the result in the former colonies was
societies that could meaningfully be described as post-colonial, in the
former metropolis and in the affluent colonies of settlement societies
that might eventually hope to become multicultural. In both cases, the
argument commenced not so much with a celebration of subordinate
identity as with a critique of the rhetoric of cultural dominance. The
origins of much recent post-colonial theory can be traced to Edward
Said’s Orientalism, a deeply scholarly account not of “the Orient”
itself, but of the ways in which British and French scholarship had
constructed the Orient as “Other”. For Said Orientalism was a
“discourse” in the Foucauldian sense of the term: “an enormously
systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—
and even produce—the Orient…during the post-Enlightenment
period”. British cultural studies began to explore the multiculturalism
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of its own society through a somewhat analogous critique of the ways
in which white racism had come to constitute blackness as “Other”.
Thus Stuart Hall and a number of his colleagues from the Birmingham
Centre co-authored a highly acclaimed “cultural studies” account of
“mugging”, which showed how media constructions of black criminality
had conferred popular legitimacy on state authoritarianism. 91
At the level of practical politics, such critiques of white racist
misrepresentation might well suggest the need for a counter-assertion
of some authentically black identity. That move is precluded by the
logic of post-structuralism, however, for if whiteness and blackness are
each constituted within and through discourse, then there can be no
extra-discursively “real” black or post-colonial identity, to which a
multi-cultural or post-colonial cultural politics might appeal for
validation. As Gayatri Spivak has astutely observed: “when the connection
between desire and subject is taken as irrelevant…the subject-effect
that surreptitiously emerges is much like the generalized ideological
subject of the theorist… It is certainly not the desiring subject as Other”. 92
For Spivak, as a self-declared “post-colonial intellectual”, it is essential
to ask whether the subaltern “Other” can speak. And yet she is also a
“deconstructionist”, the translator into English of Derrida’s Of
Grammatology, “a model product”, in Colin MacCabe’s words, “of
an Indian undergraduate and an American graduate education—probably
the most scholarly combination on this planet”. 93

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