Class: Postcolonial StudiesProfessor Mutombo MpanyaThe Discoursesof Nationalism as Anti-National in Postcolonial StudiesBy RodrigoGomes Guimaraes Ihope here to approach, as much as possible, an analysis of discursiveformations (Foucault, 1972) surrounding certain texts read in thePostcolonial Studies class. In thisanalysis, I hold that power is a very important ingredient in knowledgeformation. Language is central tocultural and historic events, and while not being a pure reflection of thoseevents, or being at the origin of all action, language is nevertheless alwayspart of power relations, in both their production and reproduction. Of the forms of language, I will discusstexts as a mechanism through which power relations can be constructed, whilealso remaining attentive to the way our assumptions on the utility of languageto describe forms of oppression can be new forms of oppression themselves. Thus, there is a way in which the start ofthis text can be a sort of academic subversion, or altogether different fromclaims to any truth about texts. This isbecause, as always relational, texts depend upon social and cultural contextsof interpretation, utilization, and fixation of meanings. If all discourses on liberation do multiplethings, so do any analysis of those, and this has to do in great part to theinterpretation of texts, their social practice in the world. Texts are always already social, and alwaysreproduce the context of their formation in many ways, in all itsproblematics. Thus, we can try to see,for example, how the presence of colonialism is what makes possible thelanguage of postcolonial studies, and what forms of statements are made. Just in order to try to think over to whatdegree the writing of the postcolonial authors of fiction chosen for thiscomparison, in writing against colonialism, reflect to us the impossibility ofa non-dualistic discourse, of us and them, the colonizer and thecolonized, although many theoretical works in the field have questioned thebasis of violence in most cases, against sociocultural differences on whichthat duality is kept. ChinuaAchebe, with his book Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, with WeepNot Child, have as central to the drama of the book, the conflicts,suffering, oppression, continuity, and discontinuity of the reality ofcolonialism. Aime Cesaire, in Discourseon Colonialism, writes, in a more general sense, an analysis of colonialdiscourse and practice, directed to the role of Europe in colonialism. These three texts will be central to ananalysis here of to what degree the language created through colonialism,particularly on nationalism and the oppositional politics of the relationsbetween colonizers and colonized hold their stances, as totally separableentities. Cesaire'stext is a reminder of the presence of colonialism as defeating for allinvolved, both colonizer and colonized. His text is a real proof of how the colonized can speak back tocolonization. Though I say this, I haveto remind myself that this speaking back is not divided by a fine line fromthe brutality of colonialism. Thepremise of many postcolonial authors, such as Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon are proof, is that resistancebrings about new forms of domination, and one needs to always be attentive tothese. Forms of nationalism for example,abound as both liberatory and as newforms of domination in ex-colonies, for most nation-states that exist today