Content area
Full Text
Perhaps the most signal component of Walter Benjamin's complex bequest to Western aesthetics is the revamped trope of the flaneur: a celebrated hangabout completely lost in a crowd while contemplating the wonders of the megalopolis.' Yet in his intense, self-absorbed absorption, the flaneur is unaware that there may be other flaneurs in the crowd who are equally taken in by the intoxicating wonders of the vast city.
To master his narrative, the flaneur must take into account the 'tales' of fellow-flaneurs and competitors, a conceptual and spatio-temporal impossibility which spells doom for all master-narratives and paradigmatic discourses. Walter Benjamin may have met a gruesome end while fleeing the onslaught of fascism in Europe, but by this intuitive insight into the futility of all foundational projects, he has exacted a supreme revenge on his totalitarian tormentors.
After a period of relative influence and some measure of academic stardom, the doctrine of postcolonialism appears to have suffered serious ideological reverses. Question marks have been put after the validity of its intellectual claims. The viability of its politics has been subjected to pitiless scrutiny, and its major apostles have been derided as belonging to a rootless diasporic intelligentsia on sabbatical from the harsh political realities of the Third World. This reversal of fortunes is not in itself a unique development. It is perhaps anxiomatic of our troubled times that all ideological tendencies and movements prefixing themselves with 'post' often end up in the warehouse of unclaimed mail.
Postmarxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, postfeminism and now postcolonialism have suffered largely the same fate, but with different inflections. In a sardonic commentary, Terry Eagleton has observed that `the term "post", if it has any meaning at all, means business as usual, only more so'.3 Thus, if their hubris is a function of the anxieties of the dominated, their naive triumphalism, their premature and even presumptuous celebration of ascendancy have laid them open to harsh, retributive justice. Like the mighty ocean that has merely receded, the parent ideology often returns with more devastating fury.
The aims of this article are threefold. First, it proposes to return a historical materiality to the categories of postcolonialism by grounding its crisis in concrete historical and material circumstances rather than mere recriminations. Second, it hopes to remap...