Abstract
September 11 may thus be an instance where, tragically, “reality” seems to clash with the truth claims of postcolonial studies. If the credo of postcolonial studies is that hybridity is in itself an antidote to every form and kind of fundamentalism, the events of September 11 seemed to prove that hybridity can in fact coexist with fundamentalism. Not entirely in opposition to postcolonial studies but nevertheless trying to call for its extension in disciplinary terms, this paper suggests that there may in fact be a need for us to (re)turn to two paradigms in particular: the growing field of what is called “citizenship studies”, and the method of Critical Race Theory. Both paradigms, it could be argued, put emphasis on both the historical and the national. There may thus not only be a need for thinking “beyond” the postcolonial, but to inquire into the fields which postcolonial studies (despite its impressive disciplinary and geographical scope) tends to disregard; and to ask whether these fields may not in fact be seen as being complimentary to postcolonial studies or even as being productive alternatives to it.
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Aversion of this paper was first presented at the Humanities Colloquium, Jacobs University Bremen, 10 October 2007. I am grateful to Ludwig Pfeiffer for his comments, which made me rethink part of the initial premise of this paper.
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Banerjee, M. “Whiteness of a Different Color”? Racial profiling in John Updike’s Terrorist . Neohelicon 35, 13–28 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-008-4002-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-008-4002-x