Evaluation, Identity, and Postcolonial Politics

Abstract

This thesis is concerned to examine the implications of relativist conceptions of value and identity for postcolonial discourse. Postcolonialism appears to be fundamentally dependent on relativist conceptions of value and identity for its various critiques of colonialism. Nonetheless, there is a well rehearsed caution within the discourse as to the commensurability of the political aims of postcolonialism with the oft claimed quietism attendant on a relativist approach. This thesis begins by considering evaluative and identificatory practice in relativist terms in order to elaborate what I take to be the crucial problematics these conceptions bring to bear on postcolonial discourse. Rather than arguing for a relativist approach, however, I examine in particular the possibility of arguing from a relativist standpoint to a position of committedly postcolonial political agency. My subsequent examination of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon shows the potential for what is, on the face of it, an understanding of contingent and negotiable identity to be subsumed into a politics which evidences an undercurrent of what I would call "colonial escapism"; that is to say, the kind of examination of the colonial drive which, although critical, finally stops short of any kind of historical redress or postcolonial culpability. The fictions of J. M. Coetzee, on the other hand, seem to me to represent an examination of the legacy of colonialism which maintains a critical and committed political perspective while following the implications of a relativist approach to their logical limits. The result is a picture of individual agency and political potential that is severely limited, yet which nonetheless suggests an approach to relational dynamics which reveals a potential for a conception of improvability.