Abstract

The dissertation contends that postmodernist ideas such as anti-realism, relativism, the rejection of history and the retreat from class pervade the field of postcolonial studies and compromise its ability to criticize imperialism and analyze postcolonial literature. ;In the first two chapters I argue that postcolonialism's anti-Marxism frequently stems from an erroneous identification of Stalinism with socialism. I show the continuing relevance and usefulness of the tradition of socialism from below represented by Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky for understanding and challenging imperialism and its legitimating ideologies. ;In chapter three I show that when postcolonial theorists delink racist discourses from their material moorings they perpetuate the idea, central to the ideology of race, that racism is a permanent feature of human society. Through a close analysis of Hakluyt's travel narratives, and drawing on writers such as Eric Williams and Lerone Bennett, I develop a Marxist analysis of the origins of racism. ;The fourth chapter critiques colonial discourse theory as it is applied to early modern culture. Literary critics produce historically inaccurate readings when they locate "colonial discourse" in the early seventeenth century. I critique this "presentism"--reading contemporary concerns back into periods prior to their inception--in criticism concerned with "race and colonial discourse" in Othello, The Tempest and Renaissance travel writing. ;Chapter five argues that when disconnected from any material struggle, cultural nationalism is politically regressive. The poststructuralist anti-essentialist critique is unable to refute the idea that nations correspond to distinct, pristine cultural traditions. The Marxist internationalist tradition, especially Lenin's theory of "two national cultures in every national culture," provides a class-based counter to cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism. ;The final chapter shows how a particular strain of feminist postcolonial criticism of Caribbean literature rejects cultural nationalism as a masculinist response to imperialism. Instead these authors contend that anti-imperialism resides in the formal and linguistic patterns of women's texts. This typical postmodernist move distorts readings of the literature and disables real resistance to imperialism. By contrast, I show how Marxism enables superior readings of Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and A Small Place