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August 7, 2007
I don't know that much about postcolonial studies or the debates in the discipline other than it is relevant to indigenous issues in Australia. Indigenous people were the other in colonial project of the dispossession, of land, and they have played a central role in the colonial project of constituting the other, of 'knowing' the other and of producing knowledges of the other. I understand the postcolonial project of recasting colonial and national narration of histories through the subaltern studies project.
In this review of Simon Featherstone, Postcolonial Cultures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005) by Vijay Devadas who quotes Mike Featherstone reiteration of Dipesh Chakrabarty's position and suggests that:
whilst it [postcolonial historiography] may contest the [colonialist tradition's] material and interpretations, and seek to represent the experiences of subaltern groups, at a profound level it inevitably accepts their most powerful predicates--such concepts as nation, politics, progress.
Devadas says that in other words, while the postcolonial project is committed to rewriting received historiography (and hence rethinking the relationships of power that are manifested through such practices of writing), it does not reconfigure or challenge the received concepts (such as nation) around which the apparatuses of power and privilege are constructed.
This position, stating the limits of postcolonial historiography, is not necessarily abandoning the project of postcolonial historiography. Rather, it points to some of the limits it must confront and simultaneously calls for the development of alternative concepts around which the idea of a postcolonial collective can be imagined. After all, the category of the nation (and the formation of the nation-state as a legitimate expression of power) as it is imagined in postcolonial Australia, for instance, is far removed from the ways in which indigenous communities imagined the space called 'Australia'.
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