Rehearsals of Liberation: Contemporary Postcolonial Discourse and the New South Africa

Abstract

When co-opted into certain contexts, postcolonial criticism and antiapartheid rhetoric tend to produce conservative rather than emancipatory effects. In the dynamics of their performance, both antiapartheid discourse (exemplified here by Jacques Derrida's “Racism's Last Word” and by nondomestic stagings of Woza Albert!, a prominent antiapartheid play) and postcolonial criticism in the academy risk invoking the imperialism of those contexts. Drawing on the work of the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber and the postcolonial writer and critic Wilson Harris and on contemporary attempts of ethnology and anthropology to re-create themselves as nonimperialist disciplines, I outline a number of options available to postcolonial critics—specific strategies calculated to counteract the neoimperialist politics of the academic milieu and of race-based literary categorization.