Untitled - witz cultural

354HYPERTEXT 3.0 grows out of while creating new forms of "glocality." The choice of global or local is afalse one. (Dark Fiber,63)Users of the Internet, particularly in postcolonial regions, experience thesimultaneous advantage and dilemma of existing as a complex palimpsestof identities, locations, and responsibilities. Lovink, who is well aware ofproblems of accessibility, commercialization of the Internet, and the difficultiesof using the Internet to foster democracy, nonetheless describesexamples of success.laThe crude binary oppositions that permeate so much of colo-FormsofPostcolonialistAmnesia nial and postcolonial studies produce three especially scandalousforms of historical amnesia. First, displaying a blatantdisregard of modern history, postcolonialists all too often write as though theBritish empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the major, andoften the only, form ofEuropean colonialism that existed, or at least the onlyone worthwhile studying. After surveying discussions of subject on the WorldWide Web, Eric Dickens complained, "Most of the websites, pages, searches,etc., concentrate on countries where the British Empire had colonies. Evenwhen conferences are held in Finland, it's still British culture, British Blackliterature, and so forth, which are the focus. And the research itself is oftendone in Australia or the United States, where a British colonial past dominates,if subliminally. Whatever happened to discussing Portuguese, Spanish,French, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Roman, etc., etc.,colonialism over the centuriesl" In other words, instead ofconceiving colonialismand its aftermath as a complex network of relations, too many postcolonialistspresent their field in terms of a simple opposition that omitsmuch of Eurooean historv.Second, too much of iost.olorrial studies not only focuses exclusively onEngland and its empire but this narrowness appears in a crude eurocentrism.Chidi Okonkwo, a postcolonial scholar originally from Nigeria who writesabout African, Oceanic, and Maori texts, points out the importance of recognizingboth contemporary and historical "imperial ambitions among non-European peoples." Looking at the present, Okonkwo reminds us that "Indonesia'sannexation of East Timor in 1975, with the attendant atrocities bywhich the colonial occupation has been perpetuated (about a third of theindigenous population), provides a stark reminder that neither the imperialistnor the genocidal impulse is exclusively European" (25). Okonkwo, whoshows no interest in justifying European imperialism, argues that ignorant