Representation and Resistance

Abstract

Though a portmanteau concept, postcolonialism is a strategy of reading whose guiding premises, working principles and theoretical yardsticks are grounded in bringing to crisis all normative discourses, time-setting notions and master theories. Its project of committing critical violence on the discourse of colonialism has entailed a face-t o-face engagement with a variety of topics as migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, identity, race, difference and gender. It has also necessitated a reassessment of such cognitive fields and scholarly disciplines as history, philosophy, anthropology and philology as well as such assumed value-free, objective domains as Western mathematics.¹ Hence, rising high on the agenda of critics such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Sadek Jalal el-Azm, Anwar Abdel Malek, Samir Amine, Edward Said, G.C. Spivak and Homi Bhabha is the resolution to debunk and dismantle Western stereotyped and prejudiced representations of the other, and then, at a hopefully later stage or during that very gesture, to reconstruct in their stead images of the self and the other, images that go beyond the fixity of binary oppositions to celebrate the interdependence and interpenetration of same and different.