Difference between Foucault, Derrida and Said

“And yet, the geographical and cultural parameters for Said’s poststructuralist ‘demonstration’ are, as I have been arguing, radically different from those deployed by Foucault and Derrida in their revisionist critique of Western epistemology and cultural hegemony. For while these poststructuralist luminaries challenge the conceptual boundaries of the West from within Western culture, they are, as Homi Bhabha writes, notoriously and self-consciously ethnocentric in their refusal to push these boundaries ‘to the colonial periphery; to that limit where the west must face a peculiarly displaced and decentred image of itself “in double duty bound”, at once a civilizing mission and a violent subjugating force’ (Bhabha, 1986, p.148).”

(Ghandi, Leela, 1998:72)

 

Ghandi, Leela, 1998. Postcolonial theory: a critical introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

 

Re-membering the Colonial Past

In his comments on Frants Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, announces that memory is the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural identity. Remembering, he writes, ‘is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present’ (Bhabha, 1994, p.63).

(Ghandi, 1998:9)

 

– Bhabha, 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.

 

Ghandi, L. 1998. Postcolonial theory: a critical introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

On Fears and Power

“There is a collective responsibility to understand that the west, via political, economic an cultural control. is implicated in the processes by which the fears and despairs of non-westerners are transformed into violent acts. Yet such understanding is obscured partly by growing fearfulness and its deployment by western regimes.” (Shirlow & Pain, 2008:18 )

Shirlow, P.; Pain, R., 2008. The geographies and politics of fear. Capital and class, 80:15-26.