Postcoloniality and The Boundaries of Identity

Why is it that the term has found such urgent currency in the First World but is in fact hardly ever used within the excolonized worlds of South Asia and Africa?' What is the secret behind the academic formation called and its complicity with certain forms of avant-garde Eurocentric cultural theory? Is the entire world postcolonial, and if so, can every world citizen lay claims to an equal postcoloniality, i.e., without any historical reference to the asymmetries that govern the relationship between the worlds of the excolonizers and the excolonized? Is (notice the ontological-nominalist form of the category) a general state of being, a powerful shorthand for an intense but traveling human condition, or is it a more discrete and circumstantial experience taking place within specific geopolitical boundaries? In general, how is postcoloniality as allegory a response to postcoloniality as a historical phenomenon? These are some of the questions that I wish to elaborate interconnectedly in this essay, and perhaps I might end up making certain suggestions, making certain preferences. But at any rate, is in need of a rigorous and situated unpackingbefore it gets canonized as a universal constant by the imperatives of metropolitan theory. First of all, it is important to historicize the term with reference to its site of production, namely, the First World in general, and more specifically, the intellectual-theoreticalacademic-cultural field within the First World. In other words, need to contextualize the term both as project and as formation, both macroand micro-politically.2 The First World conjuncture within which is taking shape is one of unmixed triumph and celebration. The First World or the West3 is caught up in its own successful contemporaneity (experienced almost as epiphany) which more than ever before has a synchronic stranglehold over the rest of the world. Exhilarated by its many recent victories, the First World is in a state of countermnemonic innocence, freely and unilaterally choosing what to remember and what not to remember from the pages of history. heard President Bush proudly declare that the memories of Vietnam have been effectively and legitimately buried in the sands of the Gulf War. There is the prevalent understanding that we somehow ended up winning the Cold War and are therefore in a position of absolute ethico-political authority vis a vis the rest of the world. We have earned the privilege of initiating a new world order on behalf of everybody else. If, in the past, interventions in other spaces and histories had to be justified after the event, the current global situation lies in the form of a carte blanche for the ethico-political as well as epistemic signature of the First World. The entire world has been de-territorialized in anticipation of a democratic-capitalist takeover by the Free World.4 In short, the joyous countermemory of the First World has succeeded in putting to rest the troubling and ongoing histories of Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism, and Imperialism.5 Within the indeterminate spatiality of the post-, the First World finds no problem or contradiction, experiences no sense of