Page 153 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

this was also the point at which he emerged as a commanding
figure in cultural studies, not only in Britain, but also inter-
nationally (cf. Gilroy et al., 2000). There is no denying either the
necessity for or the importance of this work of ‘decentring’, in
which liberalism was exposed as ‘the culture that won’ rather
than the ‘culture . . . beyond culture’, Britishness as subject to a
‘major internal crisis of national identity’ (Hall, 2000, pp. 228–9).
But Hall’s approach to these matters remains theoretically prob-
lematic, especially insofar as it tended to read difference in
increasingly post-structuralist terms.

Postcolonial cultural theory
Postcolonial cultural theory derived from much the same empir-
ical datum as multiculturalism, that of the collapse of European
imperialism, and of the British Empire in particular. What multi-
culturalism meant to the former metropoles, postcolonialism
meant to the former colonies. Postcolonial theory was initially
very much the creation of ‘Third World’ intellectuals working in
literary studies within ‘First World’ universities. The key figures
were Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, the first Palestinian, the
second Indian, both now Professors of Comparative Literature
at Columbia University. But one could easily add to the list: Homi
Bhabha is Indian and Professor of English at the University of
Chicago; Dipesh Chakrabarty is Indian and Professor of South
Asian Languages, again at Chicago (cf. Bhabha, 1990; Bhabha,
1994; Chakrabarty, 2000). The resulting combination of Third
Worldist cultural politics and post-structuralist theory has
become an important, perhaps even characteristic, feature of
the contemporary First World radical academy. As with multi-
culturalism, the argument commenced not so much with a
celebration of subordinate identity as with a critique of the
rhetoric of cultural dominance, which sought to ‘decentre’ the
dominant—white, metropolitan, European—culture. The central
‘postcolonialist’ argument is thus that postcolonial culture has
entailed a revolt of the margin against the metropolis, the periph-
ery against the centre, in which experience itself becomes
‘uncentred, pluralistic and nefarious’ (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 12).

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