Disability and Colonialism by Karen Soldatic Shaun Grech

Author:Karen Soldatic, Shaun Grech [Karen Soldatic, Shaun Grech]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138392359
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Postcolonial contentions, dissention and confrontations

The historiography of postcolonial scholarship within the academies is often narrated as a radical break from hegemonic discourses on empire, colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism’s rich scholarship, delineating and traversing cultural processes of colonial subjugation within nascent postcolonial nations, brought with it a critical reflexive engagement with issues of power, structure and agency – distilling relations and strategies of resistance, contestation and insurrection that were spatially grounded and locally situated. This radical break from western scholarship on, about, and for the postcolonial is most clearly attributed to the scholarly projects of the Subaltern Collective. While the idea of the subaltern was historically tied to the work of Gramsci, as Ludden (2002, p. 5) argues, this collective of postcolonial scholars in South Asia effectively reinvented subalterity, along with nation, nationalism and insurgency, through their radical project of scholarship from below. The work emerging from the Subaltern Collective may only represent one strand of the postcolonial intellectual journey; however, in many ways, it exemplifies the ongoing intellectual challenges that postcolonial scholarship presents to readings of the colonial, the postcolonial, and those fluid, hybrid states of being somewhere in between (Chibber, 2013).

Despite its promises, postcolonial scholarship is increasingly being questioned on a number of fronts. Support for its methodological threads and its theoretical assemblages are splintering as writers such as Chibber (2013, p. 3) argue that there is significant ‘conceptual inflation in which the substantive influence of its framework appears to extend beyond its actual reach’. A range of protagonists support Chibber’s apprehensions. In particular, indigenous scholars, advocates and activists too are contesting the relevance of postcolonial scholarship and its ability to adequately know, understand and describe the experience of indigeneity. In engaging in these debates, indigenous researchers have mooted the need for some primary departures. This critique is strongest from indigenous scholars within white-settler colonies (Rizvi, Lingard, & Lavia, 2006), pivoted around three points of contention.

The first area is the positioning of the ‘post’ in the postcolonial, and the multiplicity of assumptions that the ‘post’ embodies. An increasing number of indigenous scholars have suggested that the ‘post’ in the postcolonial faces real constraints; colonization has not ended and, therefore, the canons of postcolonial scholarship are unable to reflect the ongoing, broad dispossession of indigenous people, in particular when positioned in the white-settler colonial state (Hart, 2003). Indigenous people have thus openly questioned the ‘post’ to capture the continuance of colonization: their experiences of colonial violence including the dispossession of their land, culture and language with the intensification of neoliberal globalization (DeSouza & Cormack, 2009). This is best exemplified by leading Australian Aboriginal scholar Victor Hart, who argues that:

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