THE PROBLEM WITH POST-COLONIAL THEORY:

Re-Theorizing African Performance, Orature and Literature in the Age of Globalization and Diaspora Studies by Esiaba Irobi

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY, from The Empire Strikes Back through  Spivak’s  Critique of Postcolonial Reason  to   Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia  is a reaction to Western imperialist history and intellectual ideology.  It is  a spirited engagement with the structures of thinking and  actions  that facilitate the continued subordination, marginalization  and  exploitation of the intellectual resources  and cultural  reserves of the previously colonized peoples of the Western and non-Western worlds. It is also a subtle examination of the many and often conflicting strands that make up the postcolonial situation and identity. It seeks to dismantle the epistemologies of intellectual hegemony  cultivated by the West via its academies as well as confront the ex-colonized with the options available for their critical redemption via alternative modes of discourse  which may be different and antithetical in structure and content  from those traditions of discourse fashioned by the West. In temperament, post-colonial theory  differs from postmodern theory primarily in the sense that it often combines individual emotional commitment and outrage with a defiant optimism which is much more strident and activist than an acquiescent postmodernism. 1 We see this intensity in the scholarly work of Wole Soyinka, Biodun Jeyifo, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Rustom Barucha, Augusto Boal, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Henry Louis Gates, Coco Fusco,  Guillerma Gomez-Pena,  among  many others. 
  
However, post-colonial theory’s major linguistic currency is English language followed by French and other European languages. Its teleology , by this I mean  how it conceptualizes   time and  history,  mirrors and sometimes interrogates European and European diasporic notions of time and history. Its epistemological impetus i.e. how it defines knowledge, culture, artistic productivity, theatre, performance, also imitates  or, contradictorily,  questions what the West  has already foregrounded. In other words, the agenda for post-colonial theory and the possible space for manouvre  by any postcolonial scholar is over-determined or,  to use a fairer word, circumscribed by a Western ontology and a response to this ontology.  Why is this so?  Abiola Irele explains: ...

Click to Read More>>>www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/slq2.1/esiaba_irobi.htm