postcolonial condition

is a riff off of postcolonial studies such that the word 'condition' brings attention to institutions, discourses, and experiences traditionally eluded in 'postcolonial theory'.

My emphasis on the postcolonial condition is intended to draw attention ot a specific conjuncture that has shaped the lives and experiences of people in rural India. Thus, I am interested in the institutions and discourses which position subjects and which configure their experience in particular ways, and not just with a body of theory that may be labeled 'postcolonial.' I use postcolonial theory becuase it enables me to describe and analyze compellingly the condition of subaltern, rural people in India, their agricultural and ecological practices, and their forms of political organization, and not just because I find it a creative and innovative new theory (although that would have be a suffiecient reason for using it. Gupta 1998, ix, 10-11).

is a riff off of the 'postmodern condition' such that it makes colonialism the central structural principle in the postmodern.

Thus, in using the term 'postcolonial condition,' I index a specific set of locations articulated by the historical trajectories of European colonialism, developmentalism, and global capitalism. I prefer to employ 'postcolonial condition' instead of 'postmodern condition' (see Harvey 1989) because colonialism is not considered a central structuring principle in creating the postmodern condition. According to Stuart Hall (1996: 249): 'In the restaged narrative of the post-colonial, colonisation assumes the place and significance of a major, extended and ruptural wold-historical event. By 'colonisation,' the 'post-colonial' references . . . the whole proces of expansion, exploration, conquest, colonization and imperial hegemonisation which constituted the 'outer face,' the constitutive outside, of European and then Western capitalist modernity after 1492.'

postcolonial condition, n.All

postcolonial condition