The Intellectual's Deaf-Mute, or (How) Can We Speak beyond Postcoloniality?

5W iith increasing institutional acceptance, postcolonial discourse has become a privileged locus of voices of difference, opposition, and resistance. Yet the limitations and biases of the postcolonial perspective have also been persuasively argued in various critical studies. From general reflections on the political implications of deploying a singular term "postcolonial" to designate complex issues of continuities and discontinuities in relations of power and domination under and after colonialism (McClintock; Shohat), the critique has recently been brought closer to home to focus on the relation between the postcolonial perspective and intellectual formation under global capitalism. With reference to the eminent "diasporic" postcolonial theorists holding positions in the prestigious First World academy, Arif Dirlik calls postcoloniality "the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism" who, heady with "newfound power," project their post-foundational subjectivities and epistemologies onto the world (356). This claim parallels, with significant difference, Kwame Anthony Appiah's earlier "ungenerous" identification of postcoloniality in the African context