Maybe I'm a lot more bothered than you are by Leftists/Marxists and Islamic radicals marching side by side in demonstrations. The two are hand in glove in some organizations.

BTW, for a good time, check out a typical newsletter from Dabashi's "Center for Comparative Literature and Society." Work past the dense academic verbal fog (see below for example), and see if you spot any Republicans in there. BTW, the main Marxist code word in this example is "postcolonial."

Q. What are your current research interests?

What most interests me in what one might call the postcolonial is the subjective experience of the postcolonial subject—an experience resulting directly from the colonial encounter, but not necessarily overtly in dialogue with that encounter. That experience, the ‘identity’ emanating from it, is one I empathize with, in the strong sense of the word, even though I am on the ‘other’ side of the equation of power. What speaks to me is the division, the plurality, the uncertainty of this status, and the ambiguity tying together the disparate selves of the postcolonial subject. Without wanting to efface the cultural, historical, and racial specificity of postcoloniality, I think there is a sense in which the postmodern subject and the postcolonial subject coincide. Giving attention to colonial relations and their consequences historicizes multiculturalism, restores cultural production to the political, and gives context to art and to the identities which take form in art. I am fascinated, for example, with the fragmented voice and narratives in Abdelkébir Khatibi, a francophone Moroccan author I am writing my Master’s Essay on, with the plural, contradictory, divided self created in his work—one which cannot but be in dialogue with the modern subject proposed by Deleuze, Derrida, or even Bataille.

Q. You stress the idea of postcolonial subjectivity, but can’t we also think of the postcolonial as a cultural heritage based on material conditions and relations of power? That is, is the postcolonial a subjective experience or a set of objective conditions?

Certainly there is a tension between the passive or objective condition of the postcolonial subject, as a recipient of world power and heir to a particular history, and the subjective, active and rebellious dynamic inherent in so many postcolonial texts, beyond even the situation and characters described—in the very voice of the postcolonial writer. The contrast between the fragmented, unfixable Kateb Yacine of Nedjma, and the lucid, controlled, and somewhat passive voice of Tsitsi Dangarembga in Nervous Conditions, plays out the conflict between the revolutionary and the reflective, the subjective and the objective, the active and the passive. But to confine these examples to this binary is of course reductive: Dangarembga uses no small dose of irony to unsettle her reader, and indeed her own narrative; the world of Nedjma is spun around a revolution but denies the possibility for positive movement. Perhaps it is more useful to see postcolonial literature as the voicing of these tensions. The act of writing itself is by definition active, subjective, an unfolding of inner experience, which includes reactions to a colonial or postcolonial situation, but also active participation as a subject. The potency of literature arising from these situations lies in the force of these reactions, and the activation of resistance, revolution or energy. The overtly political and passionate nature of this ‘prise de parole’ (here I use the French expression ‘taking of speech’ because, more than just speech, it is a repossession of language) makes manifest the essentially active nature of the writing subject. Here the writing of self is also an affirmation of voice, without necessarily being an expression of national allegory, as Jameson would have it.

Q. Do you understand the postcolonial in terms of the conditions and process of creation or in terms of the resulting text? Is it possible to be Postcolonial in the West?

I don’t think it’s useful to think in a straight binary—Western critic/Postcolonial Writer—and sidestep the complexities of a notion that evades definition. If you take the postcolonial in a broader (political? existential? philosophical?) sense, the terms of the problem are much more vague. I think that we can also take postcolonialism to be an approach, a method (of reading, of analyzing history, of interpreting geopolitics or culture) which deconstructs texts, facts, art, in the light of the colonial, imperial, and postcolonial situation of the world—in the wake of Edward Said, of course, but also of Roland Barthes, Derrida, or Khatibi, and countless others. All these writers write with the awareness that meaning is never given but created, filtered through multiple and changing cultural forces—certainly the ‘post’ in postcolonialism is not a mark of transcendence or of evolution, but consciousness of the slippage of terms, and of the transformation of powers of domination.

Olivia plans to begin learning Arabic this summer in Morocco in order to deepen her understanding of Khatibi, an author whose play with language crucially rests on the interface between French, Arabic, Moroccan dialects, and the multiple languages which in his mind underlie any given tongue.