Ideologies of the postcolonial

Abstract

‘Postcolonialism’ has come to name a certain kind of interdisciplinary political, theoretical and historical academic work that sets out to serve as a transnational forum for studies grounded in the historical context of colonialism, as well as in the political context of contemporary problems of globalisation. The major criticism of postcolonial work, despite this, is that it has transmuted the long history of anticolonial and anti-imperialistic activism via a range of theories sometimes extraneous to that history, into a form of academic critical analysis. However, in naming this journal Interventions we do not intend to challenge contemporary postcolonial work in terms of an opposition between textualism and political activism. A more complex process has been at work: gender issues in postcolonial theory, for example, are not just theoretical, but are also directed towards inequalities and strategic material needs; at the same time demonstrating the ways in which postcolonial strategies can be most effective when inflecting other practices and knowledges. Indeed rather than berating postcolonialism for its textualism, we recognise that in many ways it has created possibilities for new dynamics of political and cultural practice. The journal will seek, therefore, to forge the identity of contemporary postcolonial work so as to foreground its interventionist possibilities. One implication of this is that the category of resistance so favoured in postcolonial studies will require reconsideration: ‘resistance’ emphasises a form of political agency that is at best reactive against forms of dominant oppressive power, and fails to emphasise the need for and possibilities of active, interventionist movements forcing political change and social, economic, and cultural transformation within and across postcolonial nation-spaces.