Artrite 6 k.way 2008

Radhika Mohanram, “The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995, pp172-194.


Radhika Mohanram is a teaching academic whose research interests are gender, postcolonial theory and the position of the diasporic. (1)This essay addresses issues of justice in relation to contemporary politics of difference, focusing in particular on the critique of differences pertaining to post-colonial intellectuals who speak from the university in the place of their physical indigeneity and those who speak in a diasporic place from first world universities.

The 1990 Post Colonial Critic Interview between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and three Indian women professors of English at Jawaharlal University provides Mohanram the question,“Is there discontinuous development in the production and practice of postcolonial theory “ between the two entities. The three Indian professors assert their difference, emphasising “distance and proximity” and “indigenous theory” whilst Spivak emphasised a similarity in their structural position. (2)

Mohanram begins her examination of postcolonial theory with a solid critic of Western productions of third-world theory revealing problematic firstly of Frederic Jameson’s expose of his Western binary thinking that positions the East as one-dimensional and Benita Parry’s approach that insists on a single authority of the ‘native ‘ voice. These analysis and beliefs exemplify the very processes that formulate constructions of self and other by the European West and underpin colonisation.
Dismissing nation-naming whilst emphasing one’s own (American) nation, criticising the third-world intellectuals returning a “collective attention to “us” whilst returning the focus to the writers own American intellectual peers. Naming, constructing the ‘third world’ as the ‘third world’,is that which Edward Said calls Orientalism, the Orient being constructed in opposition to a constructed European West that is represented as being as being enlightened , rational and civilised. (3)

In her book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Smith writes that “The globilisation of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West’s view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilised’ knowledge.’” (4)
Taking cognisance of the persistent presence of this Western force it becomes clear that those who are speaking from the lived site of colonialism, the indigenous place, will continue to voice difference as long as they experience that “what we teach and write has political and other actual consequences for us”. (5)

I came across an interesting art response to this question when researching the South African artist and writer Kendall Geers, who lives and works mostly in the ‘West”. When asked to name that he thought of as important emerging artists, Sean O’Toole said, “
As South Africa is a country gripped by political factionalism and lingering racial divisions, it is apt that collectives impressed the most this past year. Amongst these, … AVANT CAR GUARD (ACG). Not only has this trio of young white males danced on the grave of revered/reviled landscape painter J.H. Pierneef, they also symbolically buried Kendell Geers.
‘We have issue with him authoring the South African experience remotely,’ stated ACG’s Michael MacGarry. ‘He isn’t relevant here anymore.’ (6) (my emphasis).

1. Mohanram, Radhika. "The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995, P.173.
2. Ibid. P.173
3. Said, Edward W. Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books Edition. 1979
4. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London : Zed Books Ltd.1999.P.63
5. Mohanram, Radhika. “The Postcolonial Critic: Third-World (con)texts/First-world Contexts” in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1995 P.175
6. frieze magazine. Issue 112 January-February 2008
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/emerging_artists2/