From Post-structuralism and Marxism to Postcolonial Cultural Subversion and Political Resistance against the Once-colonized

Abstract

abstract

Contemporary political movements such as Marxism and post-Marxism, as well as intellectual and academic movements such as post-structuralism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis have had a great influence on postcolonial literary criticism. There has been so much debate around the question whether issues of colonial/neocolonial domination and decolonial resistance should be regarded as political or cultural issues or as a combination of both political and cultural sectors (including ethical and psychological points of view) that the terms “political”, “cultural” themselves have appeared to be relative terms–assuming different meanings at different times. This paper will show how such poststructural conflations of the “political” and “cultural” regarding the issues of both domination and resistance can appear as problematic for postcolonial context where the division between the two terms appears so obvious at times that the boundary between them is inescapably erected once again producing ultimately an ambivalence. However, whatever the approach is to colonial/neocolonial dominations, and whatever the mode of resistance is proposed to challenge them, whether it is political or cultural or psychological, radical or liberal, or conflation of them, every discussion ultimately produce a liberal self-criticism at the cost of the once-colonized peoples, states and their cultures.