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More Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Patricia Seed
Patricia Seed*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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The three responses to “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” raise significant questions for studying such discourse but with significant similarities and differences. Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo embark on commentaries that endeavor in part to define a new position of engagement for intellectuals, while Rolena Adorno retains traditional academic distance. Yet all three responses provide colonial and postcolonial discourse with a historic trajectory. Showing that a trend has roots in the past, even if accounts of those roots differ, is a grudging way of acknowledging its legitimacy in the present. Although such a process is an interesting phenomenon of academic life, in this instance it leaves me, a historian by training, in the unusual position of arguing for the tangible difference between the contemporary world and our understandings of it. Perhaps that in itself is symptomatic of how the current trend toward interdisciplinary inquiry differs from those of the past. Our traditional disciplinary practices are much more at risk in the present.

Type
Commentary and Debate
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , 1993 , pp. 146 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Interesting accounts of these struggles from within contemporary South American aboriginal communities are Alcida Ramos, “The Hyperreal Indian,” forthcoming in Critique of Anthropology; Claudia Briones, “Disputas y consentimientos en la identidad étnica de los Mapuche argentinos,” manuscript, 1990; and Briones, “The Race for Authenticity, a Contest without Winners,” manuscript, 1991. Another example of such tensions is the ongoing Cuban-Chicano conflict over the “Hispanic” identity within the United States.

2. The term transnational dislodges the term international, the formal definition of political power as moving between state apparatuses, by recognizing other less official vectors of power. Similarly, transnational culture supplants the conventional one-on-one approach (moving from one group to another) to studying cultural influence in favor of a more fluid conception of cultural flows across national boundaries.

3. Steven Feld, “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis,” in Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred Myers (forthcoming).

4. Two excellent recent treatments are James Clifford, “Borders and Diasporas in Late-Twentieth-Century Culture,” lecture presented at the East-West Center, Honolulu, 18 Sept. 1992; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).

5. A useful history of narratives of resistance and accommodation in Southeast Asian history is Robert Van Nief, “Colonialism Revisted: Recent Historiography,” Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (1990):109–24 (published in Honolulu). See also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 217, 228–30, 272–74, 311–17.

6. James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985) was a compendium of strategies of the Anglo-American school of domination and resistance. It has been revised and updated in his Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). An excellent English-language introduction to Latin American intellectuals' rejection of the narratives of resistance and accommodation can be found in William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991).

7. Terry Turner, “Representing, Resisting, Rethinking: Historical Transformations of Kayapo Culture and Anthropological Consciousness,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contex-tualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, edited by George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 285–313; see also Rachel Moore, “Marketing Alterity,” Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1992):16–26.

8. My introductory chapter to this project, “Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empire,” appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly 49 (Apr. 1992):183–209. It is reprinted in Early Images of the Americas, edited by Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 111–47.

9. See Vicente Durán Casas, S.J., “¿De qué ética hablamos? Etica ciudadana como ética del consenso,” and Iván Orozco Abad, “Etica y proceso de paz,” both in Colombia: una casa para todos (Bogotá: Ediciones Antropas, 1991), 69–86, 353–74. Also relevant are Norbert Lechner's excellent “Un desencanto llamado posmoderno” and José Joaquín Brunner's “Notas sobre cultura y política en América Latina,” presented at CLACSO's twenty-fifth-anniversary conference, “Identidad Latinoamericana, Premodernidad, Modernidad y Posmodernidad.” Its papers appeared as a special issue of David & Goliath (Buenos Aires), no. 52 (1987). See also Fernando Calderón, Imagen desconocido (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 1989). These essays are being published in English in The Post-Modern Debate in Latin America, edited by John Beverley and José Oviedo, a forthcoming special issue of Boundary, which is also to be published in book form by Duke University Press.