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

criticism of Roberto Retamar "which calls us into question fully as much
as it acknowledges the Other ... neither reduc [ ing] the Third World to some
homogeneous Other of the West, nor ... vacuously celebrat [ ing] the
'astonishing' pluralism of human cultures". (Foreword to Retamar, caliban
and Other Essays, University of Minnesota, 1989) .
As current debates in postmodemism question, to adapt Hegel' s
phrase, the "cunning" of modernity -- its historical ironies, its
disjunctive temporalities, its paradoxes of progress, its representational
aporia -- it would profoundly change the values and judgements of such
interrogations if they were open to the argument that metropolitan
histories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the savage
colonialist and imperialist antecedents of the ideals of civility. It
also suggests, by implication, that the language of rights and
obligations, so central to the modem myth of a peoples, must be
questioned on the basis of th~
anomalous and discriminatory legal and
cultural status assigned to migrant, diasporic and refugee populations who
find themselves, inevitably, on the other side of the law.
The postcolonial perspective forces us to rethink the profound
limitations of a concensual and collusive "liberal" sense of corrmunity.
It insists that cultural and political identity is constructed through a
process of alterity. Questions of race and cultural difference overlay
issues of sexuality and gender, and overdetermine the social alliances of
class and democratic socialism. The time for "assimilating" minorities to
holistic and organic notions of cultural value has dramatically passed.
In this neuraesthenic hour the very language of cultural and "national"
corrmunity needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective, in a move
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