Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Indigeneity is one of the most contentiously debated concepts in postcolonial studies. According to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, the way in which it “intersects with notions of race, marginality, imperialism, and identity, leads to a constantly shifting theoretical ground, a ground continually contested. … At its simplest the argument boils down to a dispute over whether … the indigenous people of an invaded colony are the only ‘truly colonised’ group” (1995: 213). When one considers that it is also woven together in an intricate web of ideas such as hybridity, essentialism, authenticity, diaspora, Third World, and Fourth World, and the way those ideas are developed and “owned,” that shifting theoretical ground seems even more like quicksand. Even the term itself is disputed, as some Native American scholars prefer to think in terms of “indigenousness” as more descriptive of the place of indigenous groups in the Americas – thus deliberately divorcing themselves from what has emerged as the mainstream of postcolonial theory. Before one can adequately analyze “indigeneity,” postcoloniality itself must be considered. The idea of the postcolonial , referring to “a general process of decolonisation which, like colonisation itself, has marked the colonising societies as powerfully as it has the colonised (of course, in different ways),” has gained a great deal of ... log in or subscribe to read full text