Postcolonial criticism and Indian historiography

Gyan Prakash

118 citations0/0 files storedCambridge University Press eBooks

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies Cultural Studies and Colonialism

Abstract

One of the distinct effects of the recent emergence of postcolonial criticism has been to force a radical rethinking and reformulation of forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination. For this reason, it has also created a ferment in the field of knowledge. This is not to say that colonialism and its legacies remained unquestioned until recently: nationalism and Marxism come immediately to mind as powerful challenges to colonialism. But both of these operated with master-narratives that put Europe at its center. Thus, when nationalism, reversing Orientalist thought, attributed agency and history to the subjected nation, it also staked a claim to the order of Reason and Progress instituted by colonialism; and when Marxists pilloried colonialism, their criticism was framed by a universalist mode-of-production narrative. Recent postcolonial criticism, on the other hand, seeks to undo the Eurocentrism produced by the institution of the West's trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History. It does so, however, with the acute realization that postcoloniality is not born and nurtured in a panoptic distance from history. The postcolonial exists as an aftermath, as an after – after being worked over by colonialism. Criticism formed in this process of the enunciation of discourses of domination occupies a space that is neither inside nor outside the history of Western domination but in a tangential relation to it. This is what Homi Bhabha (1989) calls an in-between, hybrid position of practice and negotiation, or what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990) terms catachresis; “reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding.”

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 118 citations exist upstream.

References

2003Can the Subaltern Speak?1985Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism 1983The Other Question…1985Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817 1990Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception 2022After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World

Cited by

2002The Development of Community-based Tourism: Re-thinking the Relationship Between Tour Operators and Development Agents as Intermediaries in Rural and Isolated Area Communities 2003Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography 2008International Management Research Meets “The Rest of the World”2001Conceptualizing the selves of tourism 2014The Sociology of Empires, Colonies, and Postcolonialism 1994Signs of our times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha'sthe location of culture 2010Dialog Theory in Marginalized Settings: A Subaltern Studies Approach 1998

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.