| Abstract: | One of the primary difficulties in conceiving a 'postcolonial' criticism in South Africa is the use and understanding of terms, particularly because all variants of 'post' criticism tend to be provisional and self-reflexive. In this article it is argued that certain uses of 'postcolonial' as a category can lead swiftly to an apprehension of critical disablement, passivity, and self-defeating contradiction. Two positions of disablement are identified, derived from A. Carusi's exposition (1991) of poststructuralism and postcolonialism. The first is the plight of a South African critic who occupies a position historically marked as 'other' (broadly speaking, 'black'): these critics are supposedly trapped by their historical emergence in colonial/postcolonial modalities of subjectivity. The second position of disablement is that of the South African critic who is 'European or white' and who cannot claim to have anything 'valid' to say in 'intercultural description' because 'the arena of subaltern's persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian'. The present author argues against both these positions insofar as their disabling implications are perceived as absolute. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |
Africana Periodical Literature 
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