Borders and Margins: Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism 9783964566683

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface: Borders and Margins or the Paradigm of Inquiry in the West
Excursus: What Are We After?
Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges: The Periphery in the Centre, the Periphery as the Centre, the Centre of the Periphery
Writing Sub-Alterity: Guamán Poma and Garcilaso, Inca
Borges, the Encounter, and the Other: Blacks and the Monstrous Races
Post-Modernism, Monotheism, Polysemy, Economism
Foe and Robinson Crusoe: An Examination of Place, Space, and Displacement in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature
The Commitment to Complicity: the Cathexis of the Other and Post-Colonial Theory
Mexican Female Imagery in Como Agua Para Chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate
From Where to Speak? Post-Modern/Post-Colonial Positionalities
Loving the Other: Subjectivities of Proximity in Hélène Cixous' The Book of Promethea
Rethinking Latin America: Post-Modernity's dumping grounds
Imagining the Other Among Us: Kathy Acker Between New York and "Algeria"
Letters in the Post, or How Juan Goytisolo Got to La Chanca
Index
Notes on the Contributors

Citation preview

Fernando de Toro (editor) Alfonso de Toro (editor) Borders and Margins Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism

TCCL - TEORIA Y CRITICA DE LA CULTURA Y LITERATURA INVESTIGACIONES DE LOS SIGNOS CULTURALES (SEMIOTICA-EPISTEMOLOGIA-INTERPRETACION) TKKL - THEORIE UND KRITIK DER KULTUR UND LITERATUR UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZU DEN KULTURELLEN ZEICHEN (SEMIOTIK-EPISTEMOLOCIE-INTERPRETATION) TCCL - THEORY AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE INVESTIGATIONS ON CULTURAL SIGNS (SEMIOTICS-EPISTEMOLOGY-INTERPRETATION) Vol.5 DIRECTORES:

Alfonso de Toro Centro de Investigación Iberoamericana Universidad de Leipzig Fernando de Toro Center for Research on Comparative Literary Studies Carleton University, Canada

C O N S E J O ASESOR: W.C. Booth (Chicago); E. Cros (Montpellier); L. Dällenbach (Ginebra); M. De Marinis (Macerata); U. Eco (Boloña); E. Fischer-Lichte (Maguncia); G. Genette (París); D. Janik (Maguncia); H.-R. Jauß (Constanza); D. Kadir (Norman/Oklahoma); W. Krysinski (Montreal); K. Meyer-Minnemann (Hamburgo); P. Pavis (París); R. Posner (Berlín); R. Prada Oropeza (México); M. Riffaterre (Nueva York); Feo. Ruiz Ramón (Nashville); Th.A. Sebeok (Bloomington); C. Segre (Pavía); Tz. Todorov (París); J. Trabant (Berlín), M. Valdés (Toronto) CONSEJO EDITORIAL: J. Alazraki (Nueva York); F. Andacht (Montevideo); S. Anspach (Säo Paulo); G. Bellini (Milán); A. Echavarría (Puerto Rico); E. Forastieri-Braschi (Puerto Rico); E. Guerrero (Santiago); R. Ivelic (Santiago); A. Letelier (Venecia); W. D. Mignolo (Ann Arbor); D. Oelker (Concepción); E.D. Pittarello (Venecia); R.M. Ravera (Buenos Aires). N. Richard (Santiago); J. Romera Castillo (Madrid); N. Rosa (Buenos Aires Rosario); J. Ruffinelli (Stanford); C. Ruta (Palermo); J. Villegas (Irvine). REDACCION: C. Gatzmeier, R. Ceballos

Borders and Margins Post-Colonialism

and

Post-Modernism

Fernando de Toro (EDITOR) Alfonso de Toro (EDITOR)

Kathleen Quinn (EDITORIAL ASSISTANT)

Vervuert • Iberoamericana

1995

This book has been published with the assistance of the Faculty of Arts at Carleton University

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Borders and margins : post-colonialism and post-modernism. / Fernando de Toro (ed.),...- Frankfurt am Main : Vervuert ; Madrid : Iberoamericana, 1995 (Teoría y crítica de la cultura y literatura ; Vol. 5) ISBN 3-89354-205-1 (Vervuert) ISBN 84-88906-23-4 (Iberoamericana) NE: Toro, Fernando de [Hrsg.] © Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995 © Iberoamericana, Madrid 1995 Apartado Postal 40154 E-28080 Madrid Reservados todos los derechos Impreso en Alemania

Table of Contents

Preface: Borders and Margins or the Paradigm of Inquiry in the West

i

Djelal Kadir, Excursus: What Are We After?

iii

Alfonso de Torn, Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges: The Periphery in the Centre, the Periphery as the Centre, the Centre of the Periphery

11

Sara Castro-Klarén, Writing Sub-Alterity: Guamân Poma and Garcilaso, Inca . 45 William Luis, Borges, the Encounter, and the Other: Blacks and the Monstrous Races

61

Patrick Imbert, Post-Modernism, Monotheism, Polysemy, Economism

79

Jennifer Mackey, Foe and Robinson Crusoe: An Examination of Place, Space, and Displacement in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature

91

Michael D'Arcy, The Commitment to Complicity: the Cathexis of the Other and Post-Colonial Theory

103

Maria Elena de Valdés, Mexican Female Imagery in Como Agua Para Chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate

121

Fernando de Toro, From Where to Speak? Post-Modern/ Post-Colonial Positionalities

131

H. Jill Scott, Loving the Other: Subjectivities of Proximity in Hélène Cixous' The Book of Promethea

149

Daniel Castillo Durante, Rethinking Latin America: Post-Modernity's dumping grounds

159

Penelope Ironstone-Caterall, Imagining the Other Among Us: Kathy Acker Between New York and "Algeria"

169

Randolph Pope, Letters in the Post, or How Juan Goytisolo Got to La Chanca

181

Index

193

Notes on Contributors

203

Preface: Borders and Margins or the Paradigm of Inquiry in the West

Fernando de Toro Director Centre for Research on Comparative Literary Studies Carleton University Alfonso de Toro Director Ibero-American Research Centre University of Leipzig Post is not only a word or a new trend or fashion of some clever academics, or a new gimmick introduced for marketability or in order to concoct a "conspiracy" against minorities of all sorts. Post, in fact, marks an end, and the beginning, of a new field of inquiry which unsettles and undermines previous theoretical discourses and forms of inquiry, while drastically providing an open-ended field of possibilities. The present volume is the result of the first year (out of three years, 1995-1997) of a collective thought and research project which is centred on the question of PostModernism and Post-Colonialism, Post-Feminism, as the various articles collected in this volume will show. In fact, both Post-Colonialism and Post-Feminism are part and parcel of what we will call, Late Post-Modernity. It is under the umbrella of that condition of Post-Modernism that the decentrement of the totalizing/hegemonizing/universalizing discourses comes to a closure. It is here, then, in this condition where these two discourses not only emerge but develop into a Post, in the sense that theoreticians begin to incorporate forms of knowledge previously rejected as "centrist", "white male", etc., forms such as those introduced by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, etc. This "incorporation" has allowed these two Posts to challenge those very forms of knowledges from within, in the process of appropriation and subversion. These new forms of knowledge are what have become so prominent, and so abundantly fertile with possibilities, in the work of authors such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Djelal Kadir, Judith Butler, Edward Said, Linda J. Nicholson, Robert Young, Laura E. Donaldson, just to mention a few prominent cases, and it is these possibilities we have attempted to explore in this first volume.' All the articles presented here problematize some of these issues: the questions of Feminism/Post-Coloniality in such articles as those by Jill Scott, Penelope Ironstone-Caterall, Jennifer Mackey, and Maria Elena de Valdés; or the question of Othering in articles by Sara Castro-Klarén and Fernando de Toro; problems of de1

The next two volumes will be published in succession, by Prof. Randolph Pope at Washington University in S i Louis in 1996, and by Prof. Alfonso de Toro at Leipzig University in Germany in 1998.

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processing/re-processing in Daniel Castillo's and Patrick Imbert's articles; conflicting/converging positionalities in Michael D'Arcy's reflections on Spivak's and Bhabha's work; the always problematic question of displacement, brilliantly exposed by Randolph Pope; and the key article by Alfonso de Toro regarding the conflictual and complex relations between "centre and periphery" marked by the seminal work of Jorge Luis Borges. Last, but not least, the introductory article by Djelal Kadir paves the way for the road we followed during the course of 1994, and which we will walk together until 1996 and beyond. Finally, perhaps one of the main results of this volume is that it exposes unequivocally that there is no longer any hegemonic centre of inquiry. Long gone are the days of the tyranny of the formalist pseudo-scientific paradigm of formalism, structuralism, and particularly an abstruse form of semiotics. Now the path has been cleared so that free reflection may start; now we can look from different directions to different objects simultaneously, in what is very rapidly becoming a time of PostTheory.

Excursus: What Are We After?

Djelal Kadir University of Oklahoma Nuestro patrimonii) es el universo. (Jorge Luis Borges)

Modernity, Coloniality, the post, and the multiple combinatorial possibilities of these terms have held much of our academic discourse in thrall for some time now. The collection of essays that follow explore this post-ridden constellation in their various ways. Ultimately, however, our explorations, individual or collective, of the issues implied by these terms must countenance the ambiguous question I posit here, at a moment we identify as Post-Modern, in this era we designate as Post-Colonial: What are we after? On occasions such as this, we might do well to begin by invoking a conjectural dialogue between an inquisitive master and his imprudent disciple. Let us call them Jacques et son maître. I trust Diderot would smile as approvingly as Borges. "What are you after, young man?" the master might query. "The history of the universe, sir", the disciple might respond. "A bit ambitious, aren't we?" the master might indulge. "It may well be, sir, it's just that it all lies before me". "How true", the master concedes. All that lies before us is quite tempting indeed. And the din of this prepositional polyphony may well be the catalyst that triggers the myriad congeries of ambiguous truths that underwrite our investments in that prosthetic appendage we designate as "post". Because, in the prepositional construct of Jacques' panorama, the before that antecedes one in time also designates all that is arrayed in one's view. Likewise, the after of our question "what are we after?" places us at once in a consequential relationship to antecedents we look back to, as well as having us in pursuit of what we anticipate as the object to be attained. On this bifrontal site, in the sights of this lexical Janus, we are bound to pursue the relentless obligation to grope for and question the ongoing repercussions of the prefix "post" as cultural construct. So much more compelling does this necessity become when we yoke Modernity or Coloniality to the post, precisely because both Modernity and Coloniality as cognate phenomena congenitally move to occlude their semantic resonances, occupied as they are with their self-absorbed movement toward their target, and with the singleminded pursuit of their "noble goals". It is the post and its volatile élan that complicates the otherwise straight and narrow vocations of Modernism and colony, that perverts the unalloyed virtue of unswerving constancy and forthright steadfastness. If the post be an exacerbation of such teleological urgency, it is also a wild card that mitigates the reasoned clarity of self-justification and the sanctimonious (or ludic) verve of self-righteousness.

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Modernism and Coloniality share this in common: their perennial thrust is systemically outward, their justification endemically exclusionary and esoteric. Esoteric, because, even when self-targeted, Modernity's impetus invariably operates on self-engendered and self-sustaining terms. Coloniality, likewise, derives its selfjustification on homologous grounds, on criteria that are continuous with its own raison d'etre. Both phenomena, in other words, are internally consistent and unitary, self-totalizing, and axiomatically commensurable to their internal paradigms and laboured contradictions. While both may engender self-critical narratives, neither ultimately moves from self-indictment to self-condemnation. And the sentences pronounced upon themselves, in the final analysis, end by way of self-vindication or in the assuaging of a bad or irascible conscience through the salve of transvaluation. The phenomenon of "post" may well be, at least in part, such a prosthesis to selfcurtailment, a self-compensatory excrescency of Modernist and Colonial rationality in a process of self-succession. Coloniality, from its earliest historical manifestations in antiquity, has invariably been a la mode-, and Modernity, ever since its historical beginnings, has inexorably manifested imperial entailments. Today, in an age wishfully dubbed "an era of late capitalism", but which in reality is an era of capitalism in triumphalist apogee, we have come to realize more than ever that both Colonialism and Modernity share certain programmatic characteristics that render the prefix post analogously ironic, not to say paradoxical, when affixed to them. Coloniality's mode has always been the self-justifying mode of the colonist, whatever its ideological underpinnings (civilizational, providential, or economic); while the mode of Modernity has been sustained by authoritative rationalities no less self-legitimating. Modes are normative programs underwritten by ideologies, which is to say convictions upheld by the fulcrum of their own self-investments, philosophical and otherwise. Whether leveraged in space (Colonialism's geographical irradiation), or in time (Modernism's temporal suzerainty), the political and aesthetic economy of modes exerts its own nomos, or reigning principle, as instrument of domestication that moderates or brings into line the spatial geography and temporal space of its jurisdiction. As such, modes, whether of Coloniality or of Modernity, are proprietary and unifying, if not downright appropriative and hegemonic in their outward reach and grasp. Like the successive waves of Modernity, Colonialities also have their vanguards, the determined movement at the forefront, whose thrust clears the territory to make way for a new order and a new world, for a new world order in proper consonance with the modes and global visions which engendered them. The landscape is thus breached and properly limned by the agency of shock-troops meant to shock, but whose shocking exploits may well be occluded behind the screens of language that would have any unsettling acts, prerequisite for new settlements, linguistically palliated as the exalted deeds of discoverers, explorers, pioneers, trailblazers, innovators, groundbreakers, pacesetters, pathfinders, point men, at the cutting edge whose sword, pen, paintbrush, chisel, or laser beam takes the horizon as its whetstone and plus ultra as its motto.

EXCURSUS: WHAT ARE WE AFTER?

v

There is a register of grandeur that modulates the discourse and narrative of such acts. The deeds of Modernism and of Coloniality are indeed rendered in the heroic mode, even when the protagonists become sublimated into antiheroes, individual or collective. Deeds so exalted require a grand récit, and that dimension is not one either Colonialism or Modernity has denied itself. Neither Modernism nor Coloniality has cast itself in terms less than emancipatory, soteriological, progressive, ameliorationist. And certainly both have made themselves transcendental, whether transcending from unregenerate barbarity into civilization through colonizing acts, or superseding obsolescence and transiting from the unregenerate and out-moded to what is deemed à la mode. And if Colonialism assumes the burden of civilization, Modernism exacerbates that onus by arrogating to itself the charge to unburden civilization, and certainly premodera cultures, from the weight accrued to traditions that may impede modern civilization's inexorable course. It is safe to say, then, and history bears witness, that both Colonialism and Modernism are endemically transgressive and self-transgressive. They are programmatically imbued with the impulse to breach frontiers and overcome their target, just as at crucial moments they must overcome themselves. Their greatest springboard for this vocation is the very difficulty engendered by the enterprise, and any impediments are taken as challenge meant to test their resolve and resourcefulness. In this respect, there is a clear continuity between the most intense age of Europe's Colonial expansion and the protocols of Modernity that would become codified at the end, or during an interregnum, of that Colonial era. The Enlightenment and its metaphysics emerge as successor to the Age of Reconnaissance, which was the age of Europe's self-reconstitution into national entities, imperial expansion, and hegemony in newly "discovered" territories. And if the age of conquest and colonization between the end of the fifteenth and the middle of the eighteenth centuries wrested its ideological underpinnings from providential tests and dispensations, the Modernist ethos displaced Providence by its faith in reason, but with no appreciable alteration to the template of a teleological and purposive progress toward self-transcendence and the transgression of benighted and retrograde forces. The difficulties of settlement and colonization which were taken as God-sent trials, or the empirical impediments that found accommodation in new discourses and adequation in adaptive ingenuity to unforeseen conditions, were simply displaced by the sublimity of modern reason's unbounded capacity to conceive constructs which man was not yet able to realize as presence or as representation, but which engaged the impossibility, nonetheless, as enlightened reason's proving ground and indomitable Modernity's self-vindication. The Enlightenment, then, which was to articulate the philosophical precepts of a Modernism we inherited, would transit from the sublime of Providence that underwrote Europe's greatest Colonial era to the sublime of reason and an aesthetics of sublimity. What would not be superseded in that transition is the disjunctive incongruity between idea and actuality, between ideation and empirical realization, between what is conceived as plausible and what proves impossible. Colonialism at its apex would devise fail-safe formulas, such as the famous Spanish Colonial

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protocol "I obey but I do not comply" [my translation], deployed as compensatory etiquette for dealing with the incommensurability of legislated or proclaimed precept to the empirical reality of administrative experience on the Colonial front. Or, in the same seventeenth century, there would be the accommodation of divine covenants between Puritan Colonial settlers and their mosaic God to the exigencies of an obdurate nature, human and otherwise, native and colonialist, that perversely refused to fall in line with the providential program of the divinely elect, thereby souring the milk and honey of a New Canaan. Such incongruities would force a deferral of Utopian or apocalyptic teleologies, postponing the destination of the pilgrim's progress into the vicissitudes of faith. Modernism's sublimity would likewise consist in the sublimation of telos into the challenge of impossibility. And Emmanuel Kant, the Enlightenment's philosophical pillar, would be most articulate on the sublime's vicissitudes in the crucible of the incommensurable and its representational impossibilities. Modernity would, in fact, erect its edifice on that insurmountable ground, thereby seeking to guarantee its own perpetual insurmountability, except as already programmed in its own plan of unending self-succession. The sublime, the Kantian sublime in particular, JeanFrançois Lyotard reminds us in The Postmodern Condition, consists in that disjunctive interstice between concept and presentation, between idea and representation, or, as he phrases it, the sublime takes place "when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept" (1984: 78). That failure, that incongruity, comprises the engine that propels Modernism and the train of Modernity. Modernism's compulsion is to give body and representational form to that absence and impossibility, to incorporate, in James Joyce's sublime terms, "the ineluctable modality of the invisible". However, to actually breach that disjunction, that incommensurability and its impossible pursuit of impossibility, would be to fall into a phenomenalism of adequation, into an aesthetic ideology that antecedes sublimity and is, in terms Kantian, still within the realm of reflective judgement where "the capacity to conceive and the capacity to present an object corresponding to the concept" (Lyotard 1984: 77) is still possible. That is the sentimental grove in which Habermas, Jameson, and Eagleton still yearn to dwell, with unmitigated selfseriousness, in nostalgic vanguardism and in Utopian materiality. Post-Modernism is the ironic laughter whose parodie guffaw peels in the hallowed and hollow canyons of this still-resonant echo chamber of high Modernism. And Post-Coloniality is the twisted grimace of an unrelenting Colonialism whose pertinacity clones itself with aberrant vehemence in new regimes of power. That is why "post", in the words of one of its more eloquent and mild-mannered exegetes, is for many "a four-letter word if ever there was one" (Hutcheon 1991: 17). Historically entwined as Colonialism and Modernity are, then, it should not be surprising that Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism share more than the proverbial prefix. The most insistent commonality, nonetheless, has to be the problematic relationship each has to its unprefixed referent. Or, returning to the interrogatory title of this excursus and putting our inextricable selves back into the dialogical scene of Jacques et son maître, what are we after at this Post-Modernist moment in a Post-

EXCURSUS: WHAT ARE WE AFTER?

vii

Colonial era? After all this, you might ask, what is left to be after? The obvious answer is all this, of course, but with a contestatory and reconstructed attitude that must betray self-awareness on our part as more than a series of compensatory gestures of Modernist or Colonialist sublimity or of historic belatedness. Problematic as our own positionality may be in the presence of a cultural process not fully definable, because those who would define it are themselves the process, we can ill afford not to be consciously after our own history. Otherwise, how are we to place ourselves before it, to countenance its sublimities or criminalities, petty or monumental, to anticipate our own indeterminate repercussions? And what, after all, is that interstice between before and after that has the human conditions prefixed by post clamouring in the dishevelled historical life of the vigilant and in the nostalgic reveries of the still wishful and Utopian? How is that gap to be shot so different from the disjunctive incongruities which were the challenge Modernism and Colonialism took upon themselves? To answer these questions with any certainty would imply that we are little more than vestigial appendices, along with our prefix post, to the programmatic conviction that made Modernity and Coloniality indubitable, even in the inexorableness of the impossibilities they took to be their crucible and via negativa. By contrast, the very grounds, the locus of that gap itself, on which we attempt any answer have to be negotiated, and our response tendered as negotiable in the absence of the command consensus wrought by the ontological irrefragability and the epistemic surety of the Modernist ethos and of Colonialist righteousness. The dissociated sensibility lamented by Modernity's self-conscious high priests such as T.S. Eliot turned the Modernist's monody itself into an irrepressible instrument to bridge the gap and mend sensibility's tear. For Post-Modernist selfreflexive sensibility, the effort itself, as much as its telos, is put into question. In a Post-Modern era at a Post-Colonial locus, we find purpose and consensus equally contestable and the criteria for the adjudication of differences themselves must be sought as the discussion proceeds and its parameters become negotiated. Wary of absolutes and of ideological constructs that might prove imperious, we confer optimal value on dissent, even when the points of contention may have yet to emerge. While the Modernist's struggle took impossibility itself as target and as emancipatory challenge, Post-Modernity and Post-Colonialism find themselves enmeshed in exploring the very meanings of emancipation and of the consequences, good or ill, that may accrue to it. If Colonialism had a coherence in the face of the heterodox and unfathomable target that awaited its redeeming intervention, Post-Coloniality contests the many possibilities within its own heterogeneity with the tenacious verve of the coherence inherited from the colonist, only not for the sake of self-cohesion into unity, but more, as human history proves, for the spoils of internecine predation which the self-re-emancipated turn upon themselves. Modernism achieved its material culture, literary corpus, and theatrical spectacle in good measure as residual products from the enactment of its aporias. And pragmatically transculturated Colonialism, particularly in settler colonies, went some distance toward "going native" in the face of obdurate resistance to its assimilationist

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goals. Post-Modernism, for its part, interrogates the very earnestness of aporetic enactment. And the Post-Colonial puts into question the very notion of cultural authenticity and genuine national identity, either through knowing scepticism, the caricaturesque donning of a factitious identity, or the rabid embodiment of an ethnocentrism that belies its own self-authentication. Whether as objects of parody or as parodie objects, Post-Modernist and Post-Colonial cultures find themselves equally obliged to occupy an equivocal ground where, far from resolved into the paradox of their aporias or the irony of their predicaments, they remain suspended, not as sublime objects of the Modernist's impossibility, but as incommensurable subjects in displacement and discontinuity whose identity must be improvised continuously. The improvisational moment in the life of any culture is truly revolutionary, by which I mean a recursive move back to antecedents, as is the recurrence of Modernity in Post-Modernism and of Coloniality in Post-Colonialism. Repetition, we have come to appreciate, is not necessarily unalloyed redundancy, however, but a palimpsestuous reinscription of untidy superimpositions. Which is to say that Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism are not the supersession of their unprefixed antecedents. But, by the same token, any concessions Post-Modernism and Post-Colonialism may make to Modernity and Coloniality have the subversive unmanageability of a revolutionary counter-discourse whose only constancy lies in the parodie mimetism and ironic recursivity of paralogous improvisations. There lies the emancipatory nature of any freedom their iconoclasm, either as critique or as carnival, may purvey to the historical moment and to historical life. Clearly, this is a disruptive and untidy state of affairs which is bound to disconcert, especially for the epigones of axiomatically programmed and ontologically centred Modernity, not to speak of the ideological reliquaries of Colonialism for whom manageability and order are a sine qua non. The parodie potlatch then turns paradoxical, because neither the historical life of Post-Modernity nor the national life of Post-Coloniality can escape the interlocking dependencies which such cultural and economic diffusion can engender. For these reasons, Post-Modernism and PostColonialism mark a historical passage from the iron age of modernization and hegemony to the ironic age of equivocal indemnification and immanent dependency. The most obvious irony consists in the fact that a diffuse network of cultural and economic transactions frees cultural energy and national aspiration from the dichotomous, bilateral asymmetries of modal normativity and imperial power, while, at the same time, exposing emancipated life and its social and aesthetic representation to the more insidious, because improvisational and no longer predictably rulegoverned, pressures of domination, pressures no longer born of identifiable dicta but of pervasive predicaments of heterogeneous contingency and contestable human ambition. Individual impulse and its representations, then, bend to conformity because of the free-market commodification of material culture, and the local becomes engulfed in the global of necessity, because of the participatory role it covets or, more often, because it finds itself obliged to participate lest it perish in unfeasible isolation. The post, then, is no less a human predicament than any other phase of historical life. The paradox of indeterminacy makes itself felt in a pragmatics of interchange

EXCURSUS: WHAT ARE WE AFTER?

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where frontiers and margins are diffuse and where, ironically, diffusion becomes pervasive enough to appropriate difference and heterogeneity into its levelling inclusiveness and indifference. Borders and margins then implode, and individuated diversities find their emancipation not in celebratory assertion of their difference, but in the necessary accession to negotiated conformity. Consensual representation in material culture or in national and individual selfhood may no longer emanate from orthodox dicta or imperious doxologies, but a consensus dictates nonetheless. In the case of Post-Modernism those pressures may issue from the marketplace or the museum or art gallery. In that of Post-Colonialism the most pernicious determinants could well be those internalized modes of Coloniality whose vestigial mimetism proves the greatest impediment to what Ngugi wa Thiong'o termed a process of "decolonising the mind" in the formerly colonized areas of the world. In the era we designate as Post-Modern and Post-Colonial, in other words, there may be a less cogent set of determinacies, but a more insidious, because less overtly delineated, economy of modes of representation and self-presentation hinged more tightly than ever to cultural and personal survivability. Survivalism becomes more acute in times of contention. Where and when nothing is immune to contestation, civil or otherwise, endurance becomes paramount and validation most urgent. At century's end and at a millennial threshold, resilience may well be what we are after most. And our only hope might well lie in the civility of graceful endurance.

Works Cited and Consulted Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Eagleton, Terry. (1985). "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism". New Left Review 152 (JulyAugust): 60-73. Habermas, JUrgen. (1981). "Modernity versus Postmodemity". New German Critique 22 (Winter): 3-14. Hutcheon, Linda. (1991). Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto: Oxford UP. —. (1988). The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. (1984). "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". New Left Review 146 (July-August): 53-92. Kadir, Djelal. (1995). "The Posts of Coloniality". Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (Spring). (Forthcoming). —. (1993). The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin America's Writing Culture. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 10. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. Natoli, Joseph and Linda Hutcheon, Editors. (1993). A Postmodern Reader. Albany: U of New York P. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey. Vattimo, Gianni. (1988). The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Translated by Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

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Wilde, Alan. (1981). Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman, Editors. (1994). Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP.

Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges: The Periphery in the Centre, the Periphery as the Centre, the Centre of the Periphery

Alfonso de Toro University of Leipzig

1. Post-Colonialist/ Centre/ Post-Colonialized/ Periphery vs. Post-Coloniality: Centre-Periphery In this paper I would like to address the Post-Colonial question, a question which has become a newly emergent field of research. At the same time, and as the title of this paper suggests, I must address the very concepts surrounding Post-Colonialism, i.e. centre and periphery. To begin, I wish to clarify within the context of my argument what is understood by the term 'Post-Colonialism', such that outside of its diverse meanings, there are at least two reference points which determine my use of the term: that of the PostColonialists and that of the Post-Colonialized.1 From this context, the terms 'periphery' and 'centre' can also be derived. One can surely qualify the centre as the producer of the ruling discourse, that is, the producer of power, for whoever has power imposes the discourse. Here it does not suffice to say "Wissen ist Macht" (knowledge is power), but rather "Macht ist Wissen" (power is knowledge), since the latter addresses the propagation of the imposition of a knowledge, its performance, and not its competence. In the Post-Colonialist state, race and geography have a secondary place, but technology, science, and particularly communication, have a major place. Today, communication is the major power, largely owing to the speed of communication and the effectiveness with which a communicative unity is transmitted. The terms 'periphery' and 'centre' are neither static nor unilateral. Rather, their implications are diverse, and at least twofold: the periphery is understood as the periphery itself, just as the centre defines itself. The periphery is not always produced as a result of the centre, but, as a result of its deliberate imposition as the periphery, the opposite occurs for the centre. The periphery naturally detaches itself from the attitude of the centre, and the centre from the attitude of the periphery. This differentiation, based on reciprocal implications, would characterize the Post-Colonial condition as distinct from the Colonial condition, which produces a unilateral discourse. The relationships between periphery and centre, as well their homology and differences, may be represented in the following form:

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The diverse notions of the term 'Post-Colonialism' and its theories are addressed by: Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989); Mishra and Hodge (1991); McClintock (1992): Shohat (1992); and During (1993).

BORDERS AND MARGINS

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Periphery -» Centre :: Centre