Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

substantially intervenes into those justifications of modernity -­
progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the "deep nation," the "long"
past -- that rationalize the authoritarian, "normalizing" tendencies
within cultures in the name of the national interest of the ethnic
prerogative. Post-coloniality is not the "end" of domination; it is the
recognition of its diversity and dissemination; its hybrid and productive
existence at the level of cultural objects' identifications. It disavows
any nationalist or "nativist" pedagogy that sets up the relation of Third
World and First World in a binary structure of opposition.
The
postcolonial perspective resists any such homogeneous or holistic forms of
social explanation in its recognition of the more complex cultural and
political boundaries that exist in-between these political spheres.
It is
a way of reconciling Jaar' s sense of the peculiar and perverse nearness
and farness of the here and the there.
It is from this experience of a productive hybrid of cultural
influence and "national" detennination, that the postcolonial attempts to
elaborate a historical and cultural project. The orientation of such a
project requires a for.m of dialectical thinking that doesn't sublate or
surmount the alterity, the Otherness that constitutes the symbolic
representation of psychic or social identification. The play of social
contradiction, or the incommensurability of cultural judgments, resist the
transcendent scale of universalism; they cannot easily be accomodated
within a cultural or philisophical relativism that assumes "a public and
syrrmetrical world" (Ernest Gellner) The cultural possibilities of such a
differential history have led Fredrick Jameson to recognize the
"internationalization of the national situations" in the postcolonial
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