Page 159 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 150

Contemporary Cultural Theory

Africa and Asia as in some sense analogously postcolonial.
Moreover, the category of ‘postcolonial’ has often been expanded
to include not simply the post-independence period, but all
writing ‘affected by the imperial process from the moment of
colonization to the present day’ (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 2). The
paradoxical effect of this argument is to obliterate rather than
celebrate difference: both between pre-independence and post
independence periods and, more importantly, between colonis-
ers and the colonised. The colonies of white settlement are not
postcolonial in any sense other than that posited by a strict
periodisation between pre-independence and post-independence.
In every other respect they are instances of a continuing colon-
isation, in which the descendents of the original colonists remain
dominant over the colonised indigenous peoples.
Accounts of how European colonial discourse had 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’. Postcolonial 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’ (Rushdie, 1991, p. 70).
To be fair, the New Zealand postcolonial theorist Simon
During, Professor of English at, by turn, the University of
Melbourne and Johns Hopkins University, had conceded the
distinction between the postcolonialism of the post-colonised and
that of the post-coloniser (During, 1990, pp. 128–9). But no such
distinction was registered in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, for
whom the logic of their own argument compelled the inclusion
of the United States within the category ‘postcolonial’ (Ashcroft

150