I see myself as operating between two or three bodies of thought and also see
the postcolonial theorizing that I'm interested in as
articulated in tension with particular traditions of
understanding First World-Third World relationships.
That first body of thought that I see myself in tension with and I see more broadly
postcolonial theorizing in tension with comes out of Marxism,
comes out of neo-Marxist understandings of
the relationship of the First to the Third as some model of structural integration.
That basically the Third World countries are integrated into
a larger political economy in which they
occupy the periphery space with respect to a core.
And I'm thinking here of Immanuel Wallerstein and his World Systems Theory,
Immanuel Wallerstein World Systems Theory.
I'm thinking of people like Martin Carnoy and his notion of cultural imperialism and
all those traditions that come out of dependency theory that basically argue
that the under-development of Third World countries is not an original state of affairs.
It is an effect of the development of the First World.
So, you have this notion of structural integration,
unequal patterns of trade,
the creation in these societies of facsimiles
of first in terms of all their running institutions,
their legal apparatuses, their cultural institutions, etcetera.
What that formulation does is to marginalize the spaces of culture,
ideology and psyche that when I
talk about post-colonial aesthetics will become really important.
So, that's to one side.
To the other side is tradition coming out of anthropology
of cultural diffusion theories the work of Malinowski,
Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown, Margaret Mead, etcetera,
that basically see energies are generated out of
the metropolitan centers to what would be seen as the periphery.
And that ideas and institutions sort of move around in
this kind of political cultural space from a center to a periphery,
moral and ethical energies seem to operate in
this linearity from First to Third World etcetera.
And part of this is captured then in the third aspect of
the critique that I'm identifying in modernization theory.
The notion basically that at the end of
a communicator chain exists that Third World as a bastard text,
a bastardized text of the first,
and that its fortunes,
its futures etcetera are tied
to some wholesale absorption of the structures and forms,
the forms of democratic order,
the forms of economics in terms of capitalism and so forth.
That their fate lies in the adaption of,
an adoption of those elements of social,
economic, political and cultural organization.
The Third World, the post-colonial theories then goes to culture,
goes to ideology, goes to psyche to talk about contradiction and to talk about agency as
proceeding out of the hegemonic relationship
between the First World and the Third.
And so that not all the energies are going in one direction from
the First to the Third but direction is sort of both ways.
Homi Bhabha, one of the leading postcolonial theorists,
talks about looking back on the eye of power itself.
And so you see within
particular cultural form the play of this tension,
this dynamic, the work of mimicry,
the work of irony.
The point is that cultural reproduction.
The arguments from and the work of people like PR Bojo, etcetera,
that circle is never complete because of the differences, the tensions,
the specificity, the historical contextualization,
the historical patterns of incorporation that produce constant tension,
constant problematics of simple absorption
one way from First World to Third World.
And this brings us then to postcolonial aesthetics as
sort of a concrete space
in which the illustration of thinking about contradiction,
thinking about center periphery as actually a dynamic relationship of
not you know things going in one direction
but going in multiple directions with tensions and so forth.
This brings us to postcolonial aesthetics which will provide
the illustration of this kind of constant negotiation,
constant revision constant reinvention that I want to point to and that I
see as a wellspring for experimentation of knowledge in education and curriculum.
That's the endpoint that I want to get to.
