“Postmodernism” did not begin until the literary and theoretical consciousness of the academic literary discourse had moved away from “Modernism.” While eras overlap and change is slow, the term “Postcolonial” troubles me for this reason:
The structures, hegemonies, values, and binaries which colonialism sought to put in place still stand. There’s work. Conversations are happening. New voices are being recognized, but still tokenized.
How can we say that we are in an era of postcolonialism when the Colonialist mindset is not only still prevalent, but thriving. The rhetoric among leadership in the U.S., Canada, and Britain continues to reflect a manifest-destiny nationalism that once could perhaps be argued down with only the fact that most countries are not out actively attempting to colonize other nations.
And then this happened. (As a personal quip to news outlets which roll their eyes and say “well, it’s just something silly, Greenland isn’t for sale anyway.” I’d like to point out that nor was Turtle Island or India for sale when they were colonized.)
And also important conversations like this:
It’s entirely possible I focus too much on the word itself, with “postcolonialism” being a begin point and not an end point. Postcolonialism began the moment that colonialism touched new shores and began changing stories. I’m looking forward to the name of the era when colonialism has ended, when I will be less troubled by the term, because it will be something of the past anyway. Scarred in, but healed over and no longer tender.
I have spent my life positioning myself within the postcolonial, I am a product of it. I bloomed into it with roots deep enough to reach a place where the water is untainted by colonization. It’s complicated to navigate, but often easy to state for that reason. I was blessed with so many good ways and grew up so isolated, a good portion of my mind was never colonized. Still so many people I know, myself included, are on a journey to decolonize the parts of us that have been. Born into this world, of course it is human nature to dream and aspire and find opportunity in the road ahead, the road is new to our paths and has many pitfalls which wounds generations before and after us.
In my terms, I’m a ruckus. It took time to recognize the intensity of my presence in many of the spaces I inhabit. In postcolonial America, I’m not even supposed to exist. My people are lore meant to be extinct. Just existing disrupts that narrative.
And so when we speak, we bring the thunder.
Yet just as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states in her TED Talk, there is no single story. I am half white and white-passing. I did not grow up urban nor on a reservation, but rather, backwoods and often alone. This story is far different from many I’ve heard. Yet as a 3rd grader, when other girls at school would call me dirty, make fun of my feathers and beads, it did not occur to me to tell them, “I am different than you.” They recognized differences that I did not. It never occurred to me that they did not dress how I did; maybe they’d never been to a powwow, collected medicine, or left an offering at the berry patch.
When considering post colonialism, the most important thing is to de-center yourself. We are all the centers of our own worlds. Words like “colonizer,” “settler,” “decolonize,” etc are so prevalent within contemporary Native American discourse, that it’s easy to forget we are not the only nations affected by colonization. The billions of stories of post colonialism all over the world also have deep soil millions more layers made of stories which are pre-colonial and their own methods of decolonization.
It’s easy to feel entitled to ownership of the voices of post colonialism. It’s easy to be loud for all the faceless, unrepresented, “othered” groups and quickly forget that their story is not your story and find ways to privilege yours for that reason. Adichie speaks on her college roommate’s single story of Africa and her expectations of Adichie as a result of this single narrative:
“In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.” [5:07]
This is the purpose of postcolonial studies, I think. Regardless of whether we are troubled by the continuing structures and hegemonies of imperialism, this is a focused effort in literature to de-centralize oneself and their single narrative of themselves and of others. When those voices who are other, unrepresented, when those single stories become many stories, that is when they are no longer unrepresented. They are no longer other.
As the single story becomes many voices, many stories, it becomes more natural to decentralize yourself and the hegemony begins to lose its partisanship.
Esperando por una Revolución 