Points of departure

What is nowadays perceived as the mutual antagonism of Marxism and postcolonialism rests, in fact, on a rather more intimate and disparate relationship than may be supposed, even by a well-meaning intention to mediate between the two. Although postcolonialism in its presently domestic/institutionalized form has no doubt contributed to the fashionable dismissal of Marxism as a “discourse” reducible to its “Western” and/or “modern(ist)” origins, postcolonialism's own genealogy as an instance of “theory” or even just as a strategy of “reading” can, in a roundabout way, be traced back to Marxism itself. Of course, there is a sense in which all contemporary “theory” with social implications can be shown to bear a necessary, if tensile relationship to the thought of Marx, at least if one accepts the view expressed by Sartre in Search for a Method that a “going beyond Marxism” will be “at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond” (1968b: 7).

But what I refer to here is something more discreet: the sense, which postcolonialism inherits directly from poststructuralism, that Marxism can be purged of its ‘Hegelian’ birthmarks and incorporated successfully within the same critical spirit that animates the poststructuralist critique of the sign.