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A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 449. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.
There was a time not too long ago when "post colonial criticism" seemed the harbinger of a new ethical framework in western cultural critique. Only four years ago, the "postcolonial" perspective in literary, anthropological, and political analyses seemed to be the emergent regime of truth. For a short while, "postcolonial critics," as purveyors of a seemingly new ethic of resistance, were hot commodities in MLA job lists, at Triple A meetings, in high theory journals, and the various academic conference circuits (the present reviewer was himself hired to teach "postcolonial perspectives on Victorian studies"). It is an indication of the vagaries of intellectual fashion today that critics who once styled themselves "postcolonial critics" (I, perhaps presumptuously, include myself in this category) cannot take too much distance from that very intellectual formation that enabled them, and gave them a certain visibility. It would seem that the postcolonial sun is setting, or better, being eclipsed.
And perhaps intellectual fashion is not solely to blame for this eclipse. In the post-Soviet New World order, politics and economics have come together in unprecedented ways through a globalized techno-informational culturalism: "Third World cultures," the stock in trade of much postcolonial criticism in the North, have become valuable fetishes in the ritualistic expropriation of the South by globalized capital. The mantra "democracy, liberalization, and human rights" seals the deal in the neat repackaging of "non-western cultures" in "development" under the austere patronage of the World Bank and the IME By now this is a familiar tale, but the question that more and more critics are asking is: what is the relationship between these global flows in capital, cultures, migrants, and information and the rise of postcolonial criticism in the West? Has the critique of western imperialism in colonial discourse analysis somehow foreclosed the very ethical moment that it seemed to herald? What has become of the persistent critique that postcolonial studies launched in the name of the Other?
The short answer is that the Other has become a different-deferred version of the Same. Thus the situation is precarious. And from...