Untitled - witz cultural

Hypertext as Paradigmfor PostcolonialityHaving observed a few examples of the way existing hypermediaprojects do in fact answer some needs of various postcolonialcountries, I'd now like to examine the usefirlness ofhypertext as a paradigm for understanding postcolonial (ordecolonized) cultures. It is hardly surprising that hypertext and postcolonialtheory both of which have important parallels to poststructuralist thought,have much in common, but because hypertext lexias take part in a networkedstructure, resist simple lineairy, and show that a complex entity can existwithin multiple contexts without losing its identity they have proved particularlyuseful when discussing postcolonialities. Although my students and Icreated an early version of The Postcolonial Web ln 1992,I don't think I realizedthe full implications of hypertext for postcolonial theory until faishree K.Odin, associate professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, sent in her essay,"The Performative and Processual: A Study of the Hypertext/PostcolonialAesthetic." Drawing on the first version of Hypefiert, Odin pointed outhow this information technology modeled key issues of postcolonial theory:The postcolonial critique of unitary models of sublectivity reveals that all such modelsare based on binary thinking that creates categories like selfand other, male andfemale, first world and third world where the first term is always the privileged term.Rejecting binary models, postcolonial theorists describe both sub,iectivity as well asexperience decentered and pluralistic. The electronic media can be used as metaphorfor describing what is happening to the culture at large as the Culture (represented bythe dominant group) is being displaced by minority cultures which demand recognitionoftheir histories as well as cultural productions. Just as in networked comPutersdiverse, sometimes contradictory information, can exist simultaneously in hypertextformat, so it is in culturally diverse societies with different, sometime contradictorynarratives. The person's location based on race, class, and gender determines whatperspective will be taken.The rejection of oversimplifying, even falsifying binary oppositions has,I would urge, an immediate practical consequence. Postcolonial theory andpractice is riddled with less-than-helpful oppositions, pre- and postcolonialbeing just one of them. As Neal Lazarus pointed out in his pioneering Resistancein Postcoloniol Afncon Fiction (1990), the reductive rhetoric of anticolonialismled to serious postliberation problems because it did not prepare thenewly freed countries for differences of attitude and approach among formerallies. "It implied that there was only one struggle to be waged, and it wasa negative one: a struggle against colonialism, not a struggle for anything