Page 111 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

special value of “Literature”. For it is only in the very peculiar and
increasingly socially marginal instance of high literary studies that
such notions of American marginality retain an even residual credibility.
Elsewhere, American centrality is surely almost self-evidently obvious.
There is, then, a certain irony in the way post-colonial theory proclaims
its own antipathy to the Anglocentrism of traditional English studies,
whilst simultaneously rejoicing in notions of Literature clearly
reminiscent of Leavisite culturalism.
If the idea of an alternative commonality provided a left culturalist
rationale both for radical nationalism and for multiculturalism, then
the category of difference performs a similar function in post-
structuralism. But in each case the practical politico-cultural dilemma
arises of how exactly to reconcile a post-colonial identity, the external
difference of which is predicated upon its own internal unity, to a
multicultural diversity that will threaten all national cultural unities,
including even the post-colonial. In Simon During’s opinion, “today,
in writing in a First World colony…one ought to be nationalistic”
and “nationalism in post-colonial nations has virtues that perhaps it
lacks elsewhere”. This is especially so, he continues, in those settler
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societies where “nationalism is not used against large minority racial/
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tribal groups”. By contrast, Sneja Gunew insists that multiculturalism
must seek to “confound those who believe that the land speaks …literary
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nationalism”. Ironically, Gunew is here writing against an Australian
radical nationalism that is exactly the kind of “virtuous” post-colonial
nationalism During seeks to celebrate.
No doubt nationalism “has different effects and meanings in a
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peripheral nation than in a world power”. But these differences
may matter much less for those whose own difference is lived in and
against the peripheral nation—women, subordinate social classes,
ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples—than for the post-colonial
national intelligentsia itself. Post-colonial theory is thus repeatedly
hoist by its own post-structuralist petard. Ahmad’s critique of Said
and Rushdie clearly implies as much. And Said himself concedes
something of the same, when he writes that “the national
bourgeoisies…have often replaced the colonial force with a new class-
based and ultimately exploitative force; instead of liberation after
decolonization one simply gets the old colonial structures replicated
in new national terms”. 114

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