The Americas

The place of America in the field of postcolonial studies is a matter of keen debate, the principal terms of which were rehearsed in three interrelated articles from the early and mid-1990s. The first of these was a polemical essay by anthropologist J. Jorge Klor de Alva, which was published originally in 1992 in Colonial Latin American Review and reappeared in a revised and expanded version in another publication three years later. Confronting an increase in the number of applications of postcolonial theory to ‘(Latin) American experience’ (sic), Klor de Alva asked rhetorically, ‘is an error being committed when scholars apply tools and categories of analysis developed in the twentieth century for understanding British colonialism, especially in India and Africa, to make sense of the experiences of sixteenth to eighteenth century Latin America?’ (264), and contended that ‘(Latin) American experience has been “colonized” after the fact’ (241). Essentially, Klor de Alva's thesis was that the American experience of colonialism differed so radically from that of colonized peoples in territories such as India, Indonesia, South Africa and Algeria that neither the category of ‘colonialism’ nor those of ‘decolonization’ and ‘postcolonialism’ could be made to serve a ‘useful’ purpose in the interpretation of ‘the complex political and cultural processes that engendered postcontact and postindependence American societies’ (248).

Written clearly as a provocation, Klor de Alva's essay was not without quirkiness or partiality. For one thing, it rested on a clever preemptive strategy which entailed the prior calling into question of the concept of colonialism, or, at least, of a certain way of understanding colonialism, in order to disqualify the concepts of decolonization and postcolonialism that followed from it. Yet, in the process, Klor de Alva proposed a definition of postcoloniality as ‘a form of contestatory/oppositional consciousness, emerging from either preexisting imperial, colonial, or ongoing subaltern conditions, which fosters processes aimed at revising the norms and practices of antecedent or still vital forms of domination’ (245), that is virtually identical to standard characterizations of the postcolonial.