Couze Venn - The Postcolonial Challenge (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

The Postcolonial Challenge

Theory, Culture & Society

Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements.

EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University

SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD

Roy Boyne, University of Durham

Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen

Scott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Roland Robertson, University of Aberdeen

Bryan S. Turner, University of Singapore

THE TCS CENTRE

The Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, and related conference, seminar and postgraduate programmes operate from the TCS Centre at Nottingham Trent University. For further details of the TCS Centres activities please contact:

Centre Administrator

The TCS Centre, Room 175

Faculty of Humanities

Nottingham Trent University

Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK

e-mail:

web: http://www.tcs.ntu.ac.uk

Recent volumes include:

The Body in Culture, Technology and Society

Chris Shilling

Globalization and Belonging

Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall, Brian Longhurst

The Sport Star

Barry Smart

Diaspora and Hybridity

Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk

Towards Alternative Worlds

Couze Venn

Couze Venn 2006

First published 2006

Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society, Nottingham Trent University

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7619 7161 0

0 7619 7162 9

Library of Congress control number available

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in India by Gopsons Papers Ltd, Noida

For Hari Ashurst-Venn

I have been lucky to have known so many interesting colleagues and students over the years, generous with their time and ideas, with whom I have been able to discuss and develop much of what appears in this book. These exchanges have ranged across disciplinary boundaries so that they have somehow become fused in a mixture of theory and friendships that has shaped my writing. The following people have read and commented on the whole or parts of early drafts or engaged in exchanges that have provided insights and arguments without which this book would be more inadequate than it is: Pal Ahluwalia, Roy Boyne, Neal Curtis, Mike Featherstone, Julian Henriques, Matt Merefield, Scott Lash, Tina Papoulias, Bobby Sayyid, Scarlett Thomas Patrick Williams. Particular thanks are due to Matt, Scarlett and Neal who surveyed the work as it progressed and whose keen eye for lame arguments and insipid prose has saved me from some pitfalls. A constant source of inspiration has been the research seminars held at the Nottingham Trent University that I organized for the Theory, Culture & Society Centre. Through their ideas and their work the participants have enriched my understanding of the wider issues that are addressed in the book, and I have the following to thank: Roger Bromley, Steve Brown, Elizabeth Burrell, Sokho Choe, Neal Curtis, Mike Featherstone, Anders Hog Hansen, Richard Johnson, Kenichi Kawasaki, Gulshan Khan, Joost van Loon, Kevin Love, Sonia Melo, Matt Merefield, John Phillips, Inga Scharf, Tomoko Tamari, John Tomlinson, Neil Turnbull, Sally Waddingham, Patrick Williams, Andreas Wittel. They of course bear no responsibility for any inadequacy that may remain in the book. I must thank also a number of anonymous readers whose critical comments have encouraged some much needed rewriting. My editors at Sage, Chris Rojek, Kay Bridger and Mila Steele have been amazingly patient and supportive, often making suggestions that have made my task easier. I am indebted to my family, Francesca, Scarlett, Sam, Hari, who inspire me to write and have given constant support and encouragement.

This book begins with the recognition that new forms of colonization are at work in transforming the world today, more insidious and totalizing than previous forms. It intervenes in this moment of danger at the theoretical and methodological levels, interrogating the present conjuncture through a reconceptualization of problems ranging from issues of modernization and identity to the problem of establishing a political economy of standpoint that extends the focus and terrain of postcolonial theory, drawing still on the discursive formations with which it has been in solidarity, such as feminism, race studies, cultural and development studies, but equally on positions in the social studies of science and technology and in critical phenomenology in order to interrogate the material cultures and the complex character of the apparatuses that constitute the plural lifeworlds of today. The re-orientation in approach is, of course, sustained by the vocabulary and lessons that postcolonial studies has already established in its critical engagement with European colonization and its legacy at the material and discursive levels, for example, the conviction that the relationships between the present and the past, the local and the global, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, the postcolonial and the postmodern are much more intertwined and of longer duration than appears in many accounts in the social sciences. In challenging established boundaries, disciplinary or otherwise, and in seeking to overcome the limitations posed by the dualities of northsouth, developeddeveloping, moderntraditional, centreperiphery, it is concerned not so much with showing their interrelatedness and mutual dependencies, something already accomplished in postcolonial work, but with the underlying problem of opening critical spaces for new narratives of becoming and emancipation. The orientation of this questioning is transmodern, that is, properly postcolonial and post-occidental.