Page 110 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE

“affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to
105
the present day”. A paradoxical effect of this argument is to obliterate
rather than celebrate difference: both that between pre-independence
and post-independence periods; and, more importantly, that between
the colonizers and the colonized. For, of course, the colonies of white
settlement are not post-colonial in any sense other than that posited
by a strict periodization between pre-independence and post-
independence. In every other respect, they are instances of a continuing
colonization, in which the descendents of the original colonists remain
dominant over the colonized indigenous peoples.
Whatever the merits of the kinds of analysis pioneered by Said,
these accounts of how European colonial discourse constructed the
non-European as “Other” cannot plausibly be applied either to
Australia or to Canada, still less to the United States. To the contrary,
the colonies of European settlement were typically imagined precisely
as overseas extensions of Europe itself, as “Self” rather than “Other”,
106
as “New Britannias”, in the phrase of an Australian poet. Post-
colonial literature—defined both as exclusive of non-English language
writing and as inclusive of settler writing—has thus increasingly come
to represent little more than a fashionable refurbishment of what
used to be called “Commonwealth literature”. And, as Salman
Rushdie rightly insisted: “‘Commonwealth literature’ should not exist.
If it did not, we could appreciate writers for what they are, whether
in English or not; we could discuss literature in terms of its real
groupings, which may well be national, which may well be linguistic,
but which may also be international, and based on imaginative
affinities”. 107
To be fair, the New Zealand post-colonial theorist, Simon During,
does concede a distinction between the post-colonialism of the post-
108
colonized and that of the post-colonizer. But no such distinction
registers in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, for whom the logic of their
own argument compels the inclusion of the United States within the
category post-colonial. The implication, that American culture is
109
somehow subversively peripheral to a European centre, seems almost
wilfully perverse, given that many of the dominant cultural forms of
our time—science fiction, jazz, rock, the Hollywood movie, some
important television sub-genres—are characteristically American in
origin. It can be sustained only at the price of a systematic indifference
to such “popular” cultural forms and a corollary insistence on the

101