Between the Self and the Other. A Dialectical Trajectory in Postcolonial Thinking

Abstract

The central focus of this thesis is the way that a certain postcolonial subject can be deduced out of the hegemonic discourses of postcoloniality, as well as the way in which this subject could be positioned to make critical interventions. I have aimed to trace and construct a model of theorizing postcolonial identity; one that oscillates between the consolidation of the sovereign self as a hegemonic, totalising archetype, and the disruption of the latter by locating and negotiating the otherness within. This shuttling from a space of dominant, imaginary sameness to an ambivalent, critical difference moves along a non-conclusive dialectic that is articulated through a number of encompassing discourses. I have condensed these discourses into a series of related yet dissimilar projects: the colonial, the nationalist, and the metropolitan or pedagogic. Each “project” is split between the operations of the particular dominant discourse on the one hand, and the way that a subject of this discourse is positioned to sabotage those same operations of power. In the former scenario, irreconcilable differences and divides are perpetuated, which nevertheless work to consolidate the imagined sovereign self of the totalising discourse. At the same time, this process creates ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of the discourse, which are then utilised by the precarious subject to surmount these divides by a strategic performativity that disperses the totalising hegemony. This overall model emerged from the close reading of several theorists who seemed to converse together: Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. The research method consisted of a close and in-depth reading that facilitated a discussion of sorts between these theorists. This discussion did not involve a historicising of postcoloniality or an account of postcolonial theory in its entirety; instead, it was a construction of one possible project out of some key ideas shared by the writers. More than any pre-meditated hypothesis, it was the desire to suspend myself into the writings of these thinkers that allowed me to locate the liminal space of postcolonial intervention: in-between the self and the Other.