The Ends of Postcolonialism: Rethinking Autonomy, Cosmpolitanism and Diaspora
Diana Brydon

Against those who argue that postcolonial theory has reached a dead end (Hardt & Negri) and that it is time to move "beyond postcolonial theory" (San Juan Jr.), I argue that the project of postcolonialism needs to be more fully articulated, particularly in relation to defining the goals (or "ends") of such work and to defining the object of study and its limits. As many critics have asked: when and where does postcolonialism begin and end, not just temporally, but also spatially and methodologically? (For the best of such work, see Stuart Hall). To focus these questions, I will consider how Canada's participation in that cultural phenomenon termed "the black Atlantic" (Paul Gilroy) poses challenges for the teaching and theorizing of postcolonialism in Canada today. David Scott, in Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, suggests that when a concept such as postcoloniality becomes normalized, it becomes time "to ask whether the critical yield" continues to be productive, and "if not, to ask what set of questions is emerging in the new problem-space that might reconfigure and so expand the conceptual terrain in which an object is located" (8-9). In considering how this new set of questions might be posed, I take seriously Kobena Mercer's rhetorical question in "A Sociography of Diaspora": "...could it also be said that one of the ironies of the nineties was that the keywords of postcolonial thinking perhaps became globalized as merely commonplace rather than critically interrogative?" (234). In considering this question as part of a larger project that will study aboriginality/indigeneity, hybridity/creolization, border theory and subaltern studies, the postcolonial keyword I will investigate here is diaspora. What cultural work is it accomplishing? Can theorized attention to some of the keywords of contemporary globalization debates, such as autonomy and cosmopolitanism, re-energize the critically interrogative capacities of a postcolonial discourse that often seems more interested in extended autocritique than in decolonization? Whereas the rediscovered lure of cosmopolitanism variously theorized by Anthony Kwame Appiah, Homi K. Bhabha and Bruce Robbins appears to derive from the encounter of postcolonialism with globalization, and to complement postcolonial valorizations of diaspora, discourses of autonomy, primarily but not entirely advanced by those suspicious of globalization's empire, further problematize this relation in ways that I believe may be productive for retheorizing non-repressive futures for humanity as a whole.