Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

What is the most pressing question facing post-colonial writers today? For Chris Bongie it is that of knowing: "Who can speak for and/or as the Other?" (287). This question might be formulated other ways, and Bongie is the first to admit how problematic such terms as "Other" can be, especially when used in locutions about speaking as the Other. But by placing this question, with all the problems that it implies, at the heart of his book, Bongie makes an important attempt to work through the numerous problems, "both epistemological and ethical" (as he puts it), involved in thinking about culture, race, and identity in a post-colonial context. As V.Y. Mudimbe had already demonstrated in The Invention of Africa, his magisterial study on the problem of African gnosis, the very terms we use to speak of the post-colonial or non-Western Other (beginning with "Other," "non-Western," and "post-colonial") tend to imply a subsidiary, or at best oppositional role for all that is not Western. And this is true not only of those working within a European or American context, but also of those thinkers from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere most concerned with delineating non-Western identities strong enough to be able to dispense with the implicitly hierarchical "non-."