Focussing on the value of the writing of the self as a site and agent of transition capable of heterogenizing cultural monoliths, this survey outlines the category of the post(-)colonial as a coercive paradigm the business of which keeps on denying people once colonised the construction of autonomous recognis(ed)ing socio-cultural spaces. Basic economical considerations, the refusal of linear conceptualisations and the impossibility to identify the extent of "the moment of colonisation to the present day", allow for the recognition of post(-)colonialism as one of the "abstract universal", a mode of objectification which locks up subjects into their cells solely specified by colonial relations denying real processes of self-formation. Obliterating post(-)colonialism(s) would un-petrify ex-colonies cultural productions that could be properly analysed in their impossibility to be assimilated to universalising hybrid contexts. The mask of hybridity evades the cogency of the relations of power through which history develops annihilating the local character inscribed in the episteme. And post(-)colonialism, far from conveying counter-discursive energies, emerges as a colonial discourse supporting super imperial homogenising tendencies that threaten also to transform literature into a uniform monolith.
Last modified: 9 May 2001