Francophonie: Trash or Recycle?

Summary

The May 2007 issue of PMLA devoted its editor's column to the question, ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory?’ The year before, a roundtable discussion at the University of Michigan had apparently sparked such lively debate and controversy that PMLA wanted to address the validity of postcolonial theory today in a more public fashion. As the editors put it, the time had come to ‘investigate […] the potential exhaustion of postcolonialism as a paradigm’ (Yaeger, 2007: 633). To question its validity and to talk about its ‘potential exhaustion’ amounts to announcing, if not its death, at least that something is wrong with postcolonialism and postcolonial studies today.

Indeed, the field has come under criticism in the last few decades for a number of reasons. The most frequently stated is postcolonialism's failure to account for the state of the global world, be it new imperialisms brought about by the events of 9/11, increasingly complex geopolitical configurations, or twenty-first-century identities and conditions. Another, perhaps more dismissive, reason is that postcolonial studies has become an ‘exceptionally self-reflexive field’ (Yaeger, 2007: 643), concerned less with the state of the world than with the state of the discipline itself and the position of its interpreters. To be brief, the world has changed, and postcolonial theory/ studies may no longer provide the necessary tools to interpret it. Rather than the actual arguments of the debate, what interests me here is the performative act of announcing – or hinting at – the ‘end’ of the discipline.