On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Postcolonial Theory for Pan-American Study

Abstract

Beginning in the 1990s, a number of scholars have attempted to ground the nascent field of pan-American studies in postcolonial theory. Drawing upon the works of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said in particular, pan-American postcolonialists have elaborated an interdependent relationship of colonizer and colonized within the Americas. José David Saldívar's The Dialectics of Our America (1991) and Border Matters (1997), for example, posit an imperial/subaltern dialectic for apprehending American literatures. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, editors of a new collection entitled Postcolonial Theory and the United States (2000), have argued for the value of using a postcolonial model in the Americas to understand power relations not only between nations but also within them—"not just the lines dividing one country from another, but also the ways in which difference is deployed across societies and cultures to mark distinctions of power." 1 A brief exploration of the paradigms erected by these accounts forms the point of departure for my inquiry into the advantages and disadvantages of postcolonialism for pan-American study. [End Page 87]

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