Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

Tehseel: Islamic Research Academy, Karachi. No: 4, Jan-June 2019

Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’: Postcolonial Theory,

Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
Faisal Nazir*

Postcolonial theory is often described as derived from or at least heavily

influenced by poststructuralism.1Particularly, in the seminal work of
HomiBhabha, the close association between postcolonial theory and
poststructuralism is clearly noted. This article contends that Bhabha’s
centralization of the experiences of exile and migration in his version of
postcolonial theory aligns postcolonial theory not with poststructuralism
but with postmodernism. Referring to the poststructuralist work of
Derrida, de Man and Foucault and critically evaluating Bhabha’s
approach in its light, the article critiques the postmodernist turn in
postcolonial theory by focusing on the use of the term ‘deconstruction’ in
postcolonial criticism. The article refers to critical readings of Mohsin
Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist to illustrate how the reading
strategy of deconstruction, originally derived from poststructuralism, has
been given a postmodern inflection in postcolonial theory. The article is
divided into three sections. Section 1 describes the dominance of cultural
theory in literary studies and the appropriation of ‘deconstruction’ by
cultural theory. Section II critiques this appropriation of deconstruction
by cultural theory by establishing that cultural theory derives the
understanding of deconstruction from postmodernism and not from
poststructuralism. Focusing on the postcolonial theory of HomiBhabha,
the section differentiates between poststructuralism and postmodernism
and shows Bhabha’s theory as more postmodernist than poststructuralist
in nature. Section III discusses how deconstruction is used as a concept
in the critical reading of Hamid’s novel in relation to post-9/11 global
cultural politics and not as a reading strategy highlighting the
contradictions within the narrative. The article ends with an emphasis on
using deconstruction in its poststructuralist sense of reading practice and
not in its postmodern/postcolonial sense of a concept illustrating a
cultural/political situation.
* Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Karachi

23
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

The Dominance of Cultural Theory in Postcolonial Literary Studies

Deploring the current state of literary criticism in Pakistan, the novelist
Shazaf Fatima Haider in her article, published online in The News on
Sunday on 21 July 2013 with the title “In Search of a Critic,” says, “In the
world of sales and best-seller lists, the distinction between literature and
potboilers is being blurred. It is up to the critics to help the public
distinguish between the two.”2From this statement it appears that the author
believes that there is a distinction between “literature” and “potboilers”,
between what is considered as literary fiction and what as popular fiction
and that it is important that this distinction must be preserved. She also
assigns this task of keeping literary and popular fiction apart to critics.

It is interesting to note that this call for criticism has come not from
academics but from a writer whose first novel became very popular among
literature readers in Pakistan and abroad. As a former and a formal student
of literature, Shazaf Fatima Haider probably feels that her reputation as a
novelist should not be based solely on popularity and magazine reviews
but on more solid grounds such as academic approval. More than that, she
wants to ascertain her place and that of the other already established and
emerging English language writers from Pakistan within or with reference
to the “Pakistani literary tradition”. She writes:
There are many valuable questions that just aren’t considered in sufficient
depth: questions such like — whether Pakistani writing in English is a
breach from or continuum of our tradition of Urdu writing; whether
writers are producing art or ‘kitsch’; whether the writing has integrity,
whether it is ‘Pakistani’ enough and should it even be constrained by
artificial limitations such as geographical boundaries; or where our
identity really comes from[?]3

Pakistani English fiction has received considerable critical attention in

recent years but this criticism has hardly paid attention to the questions that
are important for this emerging young novelist. Most of the books and
journal articles written about Pakistani English fiction discuss the fiction in
relation to issues in global politics such as fundamentalism, terrorism, and
women’s rights. These are important issues in their own right and Pakistani
English fiction does reflect on them in various ways as noted by the critics.
This is also very much in line with global trends in literary criticism in
which the dominant concerns are derived from theoretical discussions
around the topics of violence, identity, gender, and power. For a long time
in the study of literature, ‘theory’ has been setting the agenda and providing
24
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

the framework for critical reflection on literary works. Literary criticism,

particularly the one concerned with Pakistani English fiction, has largely
performed the task of a bridge between theory and fiction, by reading
literary works in the light of theoretical concepts so as to identify how a
literary work engages with a certain concept defined by or in theory.
A brief survey of books and articles that discuss Pakistani English fiction
will provide sufficient evidence. In 2011, The Journal of Postcolonial
Writing took out an exclusive issue on Pakistani English fiction with the
title, “Beyond Geography: Literature, Politics and Violence in Pakistan.”
The “five scholarly articles” in the first half of the journal, according to
David Waterman, cover such issues as Muslim identity and comparative
representation of Islam in fiction by Muslim writers from around the world
(Claire Chambers), the deconstruction of binary oppositions of ‘us’ and
‘them’ arising out of the 9/11 attacks (Peter Morey), KamilaShamsie as a
writer of political fiction (Bruce King, Caroline Herbert), and cultural
heritage of Pakistan and Islamic identity (AnanyaJahanaraKabir).4 Apart
from these ‘scholarly articles’, the recent books published on Pakistani
English fiction discuss similar issues. AroosaKanwal’sRethinking
Identities in Contemporary Pakistani English Fiction: Beyond 9/11
focuses on the way that notions of home and identity have changed for
Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric.5 Madeline
Clements’ Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective
investigates how South Asian writers of Muslim background have
responded in English to the challenge of writing about Islamic faith ties in
the aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks and the ensuing
'War on Terror'.6 Cara Cilano’sContemporary Pakistani Fiction in
English: Idea, Nation, State explores the theme of ‘collective belonging’
and goes on to “look at the literary devices and themes used to portray
idea, nation and state as a foundation for collective belonging”.7
This shows that Pakistani English fiction is read in relation to ongoing
debates in critical and cultural theory that focus on issues of identity,
representation, and global/national politics. This ‘application’ of theory
has led to a situation in which literary texts are considered as mere
illustrations of various critical and cultural theories. According to Patricia
Waugh, “Without the … close and careful reading of the text against its
theorizations, there is that wearisome sense that one knows what one is
going to say about the text beforehand, with the result that, instead of
reading, engagement consists simply in looking for suitable illustration for
an argument and interpretation that is already written.”8 Waugh says this
25
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

while discussing Paul de Man’s essay, “The Resistance to Theory” in

which de Man has identified two kinds of resistances to theory. One kind
of resistance is external and largely comes from the practitioners of
traditional literary criticism for whom theory has been detrimental to
literary studies. The other kind of resistance, according to de Man, is
internal to theory itself and manifests itself in resistance to easy
theorization. It is this resistance which, according to de Man, is impossible
to overcome “since theory is itself this resistance”.9
The kind of theory de Man has in mind is commonly designated as
‘deconstruction’. From the above discussion it emerges that ‘deconstruction’
is just one of the theories of or approaches to literature currently present in
the academy. There are a number of other approaches to the study of
literature which, judging by their ‘application’ on literary works and in
literary criticism, seem to have displaced deconstruction from the central
place it had come to occupy in, at least, American literary criticism in the
1970s. Since the 1980s, Marxist and historicist approaches to literature have
become more influential in literary studies. According to Hillis Miller, “In
fact there has been a massive shift of focus in literary study since 1979 away
from the ‘intrinsic,’ rhetorical study of literature toward study of the
‘extrinsic’ relations of literature, its placement within psychological,
historical, or sociological contexts.” While Miller acknowledges that “the
study of literature has a great deal to do with history, society, the self”, he
insists that “this relation is not a matter of thematic reflection within
literature of these extra-linguistic forces and facts but rather a matter of the
way the study of literature offers perhaps the best opportunities to identify
the nature of language as it may have effects on what de Man calls the
‘materiality of history’.” On the other hand, “Sociological theories of
literature which reduce it to being a mere ‘reflection’ of dominant ideologies
in fact tend to limit its role to that of passive mirroring, a kind of
unconscious anamorphosis of the real currents of power.” The result of
studying literature in this ‘sociological’ way is that the “study of literature
would then tell readers something they could probably learn better
elsewhere, by direct study of historical documents, for example.”10
However, it is not that cultural theory has completely ignored
deconstruction, as Miller seems to suggest. In fact, deconstruction has been
extensively used in at least one kind of cultural criticism designated as
postcolonial criticism. In the writings of HomiBhabha and GayatariSpivak,
the deconstructive thought of Lacan and Derrida has been related to the
study of colonial and postcolonial literature. Bhabha, in particular, has
26
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

championed indeterminacy, uncertainty, in-betweenness and ambivalence as

far as the question of postcolonial cultural identity is concerned. His concept
of ‘hybridity’ as the central concept of postcolonial theory, or, as he puts it
in “The Commitment to Theory,” “as the paradigmatic place of
departure,”11has been very influential, leading many postcolonial critics to
‘apply’ this concept in their reading of specific literary texts. Bhabha may,
however, be found guilty of suggesting that ‘hybridity’ as a textual element,
derived probably from Derrida’s ‘trace’ as the inescapable condition of all
writing, is actually a ‘reflection’ of the real state of cultural identity in the
postcolonial ‘world’. In other words, Bhabha may be seen as confusing “the
materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies.”12 What
is to be asked is if hybridity, in-betweenness, ambivalence are ‘facts’ of a
given cultural situation or if they are ‘effects’ of reading, a certain kind of
reading known as ‘deconstruction’. The postcolonial criticism inspired by
Bhabha’s making of ‘hybridity’ as the ‘paradigmatic place of departure’
reads postcolonial literature as a reflection of postcolonial realities, realities
which can be best understood through the concepts of hybridity,
inbetweenness and ambivalence. Thus, various writers and texts are praised
for ‘deconstructing’ national, cultural and religious identities which are seen
as forced constructions of the ideologies of nationalism, ethnicity and
dogmatic beliefs. The textual and the ‘real’ are in this way collapsed in such
readings of postcolonial literature and the gaps and fissures that a
deconstructive reading identifies in texts are seen as reflections of the reality
of cultural life. Texts, in such readings, derive their value from being
accurate representations of reality, more accurate than those available in
other discourses and media, “confusing” according to de Man, “it [literary
text/language] with a reality from which it has forever taken leave.”13

The ‘scholarly’ articles mentioned above may be seen as examples of this

kind of valuation of literary texts. Peter Morey praises Mohsin Hamid’s
novel for deconstructing the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary opposition on which the
‘clash of civilizations’ thesis is based. The idea is that the fictionality of the
‘hoax confession’ calls into question the sincerity and genuineness all
confessional narratives, and thus fiction provides a deeper insight into
‘reality’ than the narratives which are supposed to be genuine representations
of reality. “I wish to argue” writes Morey, “for Mohsin Hamid’s The
Reluctant Fundamentalist as an example of a sort of deterritorialization of
literature which forces readers to think about what lies behind the totalizing
categories of East and West, “Them and Us” and so on – those categories
continuously insisted upon in “war on terror” discourse”.14 This reading of
27
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

Hamid’s novel identifies and appreciates the strategies used by the writer to
‘deconstruct’ binary oppositions deployed in the ‘war on terror’ discourse.
However, deconstruction here is taken as a narrative strategy used by the
writer to make a political point. Textual indeterminacy is taken to be a
representation of political indeterminacy – a clever and deliberate strategy of
avoidance of taking sides in the ‘war on terror’.
A deconstructive reading, however, does not usually lead to this smooth
transition from literature into politics. In fact, deconstructive readings often
disclose the impossibility of such a smooth transition. How, for example, is
one to interpret the opening of the novel: “Do not be frightened by my
beard: I am a lover of America” (Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist)?
Read according to the model Morey has suggested, these opening words are
to be taken ironically, that the speaker is, in reality not, or at least, no longer,
a lover of America. And yet, love is one of the feelings extensively evoked
in the novel – the love Changez feels for Erica. From a deconstructive
perspective, the slipping and sliding of Changez’s discourse is not due
simply to the cleverness of the writer. It is rather due to contradictory
desires, simultaneously existing in the narrative, desires which may more
prominently be identified not in the use of ‘fundamentalism’ in the novel
but in the use of ‘love’ which apparently seems of secondary and only
‘personal’ importance in the novel, that make the narrative deconstructive in
nature. The presence and the nature of these contradictory desires is
explained by Anna Hartnell in her article “Moving through America: Race,
place and resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”.
Describing the novel as the author’s “self-described ‘love story’ about
America” and as “a complex interrogation of American nationalism and US
spaces in the aftermath of 9/11 and the onset of the so-called war on terror”
Hartnell argues that “Hamid’s perspective seems to be much more
convoluted and conflicted than [a] simplistic rendering of American state
power. Indeed, though increasingly marginalized within the post-9/11 US
milieu, Hamid’s Pakistani migrant protagonist is not simply alienated but
also simultaneously drawn to the isolationist and exceptionalist currents of
the American national narrative.” For Hartnell, “This, I suggest, is the
paradoxical premise that conditions The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s
resistance to the racism and national triumphalism that fuelled the Bush
administration’s ‘war on terror’.”15
Hartnell’s reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a better example of
deconstructive reading than Morey’s. Hartnell identifies a paradox at the
heart of the narrative which remains unresolved at the end of the novel.
28
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

Morey, on the other hand, takes all the ambiguities and paradoxes in the
narrative as deliberately planned by the writer to make a political point.
This is the way most postcolonial literature is frequently read by the critics
and commentators. Hybridity, inbetweenness, indeterminacy have become
characteristic features of postcolonial literature, and having become
themselves the “paradigmatic place of departure” in postcolonial analyses,
need to be seen as constituting a ‘discursive formation’ which itself needs
to be deconstructed. In other words, when not discovered or identified
through a reading of the text, but taken as a model or framework for
reading postcolonial literature, hybridity loses its deconstructive potential
and instead becomes a ‘deconstructive formula’ – an oxymoron.
Poststructuralism, Postmodernism and Postcolonial Theory
The centrality of hybridity, migrancy and inbetweenness in postcolonial
theory has, however, not gone unchallenged. Marxist critics have always
been critical of the incorporation of poststructuralist strategies in
postcolonial theory. Benita Parry has questioned the usefulness of
deconstructive readings of colonial and postcolonial writing for the political
agenda that postcolonialism supposedly aims to follow. Her main point is
that postsructuralist reading strategies are unhelpful in pursuing the political
objectives of postcolonialism. According to Parry, “The postcolonialist shift
away from historical processes has meant that discursive or “epistemic”
violence has tended to take precedence in analysis over the institutional
practices of the violent social system of colonialism. Similarly, cultural
resistance has been privileged in analysis over diverse oppositional political
expressions, while the intrinsically antagonistic colonial encounter has been
reconfigured as one of ambivalence and negotiation” (Parry, 75; italics
original). The result of this critical shift is that “a historical project of
invasion, expropriation, and exploitation has been reconstituted as a
symbiotic encounter; the contradictory, volatile, but all the same structural
positions occupied in analysis by the oppositional conceptual categories of
colonizer and colonized have been displaced by categories of complicity,
mutuality, and reciprocity; and the conflicting interests and aspirations
immanent to colonial situations have been dissolved into a consensus”
(Parry 76; italics original).16
Yet, as the above discussion of Bhabha’s theorization of postcolonialism
shows, critics have found deconstruction a useful practice in postcolonial
writing and reading, leading to a politics of emancipation and freedom.
According to Margaret Scanlan, certain postcolonial writers, finding
themselves standing “on the treacherous fault-line between the binaries of
29
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

terrorist discourse,” have “transform[ed] that fault-line into a living,

breathing space in which the human consequences of rigid and lethal
polarities become visible.”17 The continued celebration of hybridity and
inbetweenness in postcolonial criticism is, as can be seen through Scanlan’s
words, due to their potential for creating a ‘third space,’ a space which
cannot be located or demarcated anywhere once and for all but emerges at
the borderline of polarities whenever and wherever they are constituted. In
other words, postcolonial criticism celebrates the dislocation particularly
associated with migrancy and hybridity since this dislocation permanently
defers any relocation in such totalizing discourses as nation, culture, race etc.
However, it is significant to note that in postcolonial criticism two kinds of
dislocations and indeterminacies are often confused, the textual
indeterminacy and the cultural indeterminacy. It is my contention that while
the concept of textual indeterminacy has its roots in poststructuralism, the
idea of cultural indeterminacy is derived from postmodernism, and while
there are similarities between poststrucutralism and postmodernism, they are
not the same. According to Simon During, postcolonial theory “which fused
postcolonialism with postmodernism in [its] rejection of resistance along
with any form of binarism, hierarchy or telos … came to signify something
remote from self-determination and autonomy. By deploying categories such
as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence … all of which laced colonised into
colonising cultures, postcolonialism effectively became a reconciliatory
rather than a critical, anticolonialist category.”18 According to AtoQuayson,
“… the discussion of what constitutes postmodernism often highlights
borrowings from linguistic metaphors and their application to social and
cultural discourses. Indeed, easily traceable to the theoretical genealogy of
postmodernism has to be the poststructuralism(s) that proliferated in the
1960s. In fact, for some, postmodernism is the operationalization of concepts
developed initially within poststructuralism.”19. Without engaging in the
chicken and egg debate, it may be gathered from Quayson’s words that both
postmodernism and poststructuralism are developments out of the ‘linguistic
turn’ that occurred in philosophy and related disciplines in the 1960s.

However, Hans Bertens in his book The Idea of the Postmodern: A History has
described a different ‘genealogy’ of the two approaches and has expressed his
preference for keeping them separate. According to Bertens, there are two
moments of close interaction between poststructuralism and postmodernism:

In the course of the 1970s, postmodernism was gradually drawn into a

poststructuralist orbit. In a first phase, it was primarily associated with the
30
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

deconstructionist practices that took their inspiration from the

poststructuralism of the later Roland Barthes and, more in particular, of
Jacques Derrida. In its later stages, it drew on Michel Foucault, on Jacques
Lacan’s revisions of Freud, and, occasionally, on the work of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The translation of Jean-François Lyotard’s La
Condition postmoderne(1984; original edition 1979), in which a prominent
poststructuralist adopted the term postmodern, seemed to many to signal a
fully-fledged merger between an originally American postmodernism and
French poststructuralism.20

In its first phase or moment (“1970s and the early 80s”), poststructuralist
postmodernism, derived from Barthes and Derrida, remained “linguistic,
that is, textual in its orientation” and “[i]ntent upon exposing the workings
of language—and especially its failure to represent anything outside itself,
in other words, its self-reflexivity—this Derridean postmodernism largely
limited itself to texts and intertexts.”21 For Bertens, this postmodernism
did not engage with the “questions of subjectivity and authorship” which it
had itself given rise to and emphasized:

If representations do not and cannot represent the world, then inevitably all
representations are political, in that they cannot help reflecting the
ideological frameworks within which they arise … In the absence of
transcendent truth it matters, more than ever, who is speaking (or writing),
and why, and to whom. Deconstructionist postmodernism largely ignored
these and other political questions that the demise of representation had
given prominence to. As a result, with the increasing politicization of the
debate on postmodernism in the early 1980s, its textual, self-reflexive,
orientation rapidly lost its attraction.22

The second phase or moment in the close interaction between

poststructuralism and postmodernism came about in the 1980s with the
greater influence of the poststructuralist work of Michel Foucault on
theorists of postmodernism. Though this Foucauldian postmodernism, like
the Derridean one, also addresses the questions of textuality and
representation, it goes further and engages with questions of power and
authority. According to Bertens,

This postmodernism interrogates the power that is inherent in the

discourses that surround us—and that is continually reproduced by them—
and interrogates the institutions that support those discourses and are, in
turn, supported by them. It attempts to expose the politics that are at work
31
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

in representations and to undo institutionalized hierarchies, and it works

against the hegemony of any single discursive system—which would
inevitably victimize other discourses—in its advocacy of difference,
pluriformity, and multiplicity.23

Particularly relevant here is the influence this postmodernism has had on

postcolonial theory and criticism. According to Bertens,

Especially important are its interest in those who from the point of view of
the liberal humanist subject (white, male, heterosexual, and rational)
constitute the ‘Other’—the collective of those excluded from the
privileges accorded by that subject to itself (women, people of color, non-
heterosexuals, children)—and its interest in the role of representations in
the constitution of ‘Otherness’.24 (Bertens 7-8)

For Bertens, it is this Foucauldian poststructuralist postmodernism that has

been extremely influential on such literary-political discourses as
“feminism and multiculturalism.”25

In concluding his discussion of the relationship between (French)

poststructuralism and (American) postmodernism, Bertens argues for keeping
the two concepts separate. The main difference he identifies between the two
is that questions of subjectivity and authorship, questions which
Derrideanpoststructuralism ignores or does not engage with, are central to
postmodernism. This, for Bertens “is enough to suggest a substantial distance
between postmodernism and poststructuralism.”26According to Bertens, “The
postmodernist Weltanschauung borrows freely from all available
poststructuralist positions but cannot be identified with any single one of
them, transcending them in its openly political orientation.”27

The above discussion shows that deconstruction as a specific variant of

poststructuralism has remained engaged almost exclusively with the
‘linguistic turn’ and though it may be seen as problematic to reduce every
phenomenon, be it cultural, political, economic, to the textual, this is what
deconstruction has continued to do (and has been accused of doing) since
the foundational work of Derrida. What Parry and other Marxist critics
question is the usefulness of the textual approach for the emancipatory
project of postcolonialism. However, deconstruction, or a ‘hermeneutics of
suspicion’ as Ricouer calls such approaches, remains suspicious of all
kinds of totalizations be they in the name of imperialism or in the name of
nationalism. History of the postcolonial states shows that this suspicion is
32
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

not misplaced – the emancipatory discourse of nationalism itself became a

highly tyrannical discourse in postcolonial states right after the
achievement of freedom, leading to the oppression of many marginal
groups within the newly freed nation states, a fact well demonstrated by
the writings of postcolonial writers and critics.

It is in the light of these developments that a disappointment with the

experience of national freedom and the ensuing dislocations and
relocations caused by migration, forced or voluntary, led to the
formulation and deployment of the concepts of postcolonial hybridity and
migrancy in postcolonial theory and criticism. However, as it happens with
concepts and theories generally, hybridity and migrancy have themselves
become a ‘discursive formation’ in their turn and have lost their
deconstructive potential. This has happened due to close alignment of
postcolonialism with postmodernism. In postcolonial theory, the
experience of migration and dislocation has been read through the
framework of postmodern nomadism. The close association of the
postmodern with the postcolonial can be seen in the chapter on “The
Postcolonial and the Postmodern: A Question of Agency,” in
Bhabha’sLocation of Culture. After stating that ‘contingency’ and
‘indeterminism’ are “the mark of the conflictual yet productive space in
which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification emerges within
the regulated boundaries of social discourse,” Bhabha goes on to argue:

In this salutary sense, a range of contemporary critical theories suggest that

it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history - subjugation,
domination, diaspora, displacement - that we learn our most enduring
lessons for living and thinking. There is even a growing conviction that the
affective experience of social marginality - as it emerges in non-canonical
cultural forms - transforms our critical strategies.28

A few lines later, displacement, migration and diaspora become for

Bhabha the exclusive sources of postcolonial culture:

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is

transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in
specific histories ofcultural displacement, whether they are the 'middle
passage' of slavery and indenture, the 'voyage out' of the civilizing mission,
the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the
Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within
and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial
33
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

histories of displacement – now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of

'global' media technologies - make the question of how culture signifies, or
what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue.29
Furthermore,
The transnational dimension of cultural transformation – migration,
diaspora, displacement, relocation - makes the process of cultural translation
a complex form of signification. The natural(ized), unifying discourse of
'nation', 'peoples', or authentic 'folk' tradition, those embedded myths of
culture's particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great, though
unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware
of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.30
Thus, in a matter of a few paragraphs, Bhabha has reduced the postcolonial
exclusively to the transnational. What is forgotten in this reduction is the
local and the indigenous. However, in Bhabhaesque postcolonial theory, the
migration and/or displacement need not be actual or material, it may even be
mental or ‘intellectual’. This is the way the intellectual has been
characterized in postcolonial theory, as an exile or migrant, even if living
within his/her nation or society. In this reduction of postcolonial experience
to transnational movement and crossing of borders, actual or mental,
postcolonial theory has found the postmodernist discourse of nomadism
very attractive. Migrancy, dislocation and exile are the cultural formations
privileged in postmodern discourse. Dick Pels describes his aim in writing
the article “Privileged Nomads: On the Strangeness of Intellectuals and the
Intellectuality of Strangers” as follows:
In this article, I will be especially concerned with the way in which this
discourse of nomadism has recently turned into a cognitive plaything of
the educated elite, into its newest fad in self-stylization and self-
celebration. It hence takes issue with a powerfully suggestive, but also
risky and misleading set of metaphors which celebrate the traveller, the
migrant, the exile, the stranger or the nomad as the quintessential
postmodern subject, and especially, as the quintessential role model of the
[post]modern intellectual.31
What Pels further says about the postmodern intellectual can, without
much alteration, be applied to the postcolonial intellectuals as
characterized by Bhabha above:
Typically, (post)modern intellectuals like to think of themselves as `on
the move' (towards a `place called elsewhere'), `in transit', `moving
34
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

across frontiers', `in a state of diaspora' or `living between worlds'. They

tend to sacralize the desirable state of `ambivalence', `contingency',
`diffraction', `hybridity' or even `monstrosity' (in the sense of combining
unfitting, disparate identities) (see Haraway, 1991, 1992; Law, 1991),
and preferably adopt the pose of the dislocated `traveller', `tourist' or
`ethnographer' (who Levi-Strauss already described as a `professional
stranger'). Nothing worse than being suspected to be `native',
`sedentary',`rooted' or `immobile'.32

The italicized words in the above quotation show how similar is the
vocabulary of the two apparently dissimilar approaches to two sets of
dissimilar experiences – the Third World migrancy and the First World
nomadism.

This conflation of postcolonialism with postmodernism in the works of the

major theorists of postcolonialism, no matter how careful these theorists
have been of giving rise to generalizations, has created a situation in
literary criticism in which these concepts are applied to literary works in a
ready-made fashion. As EllekeBoehmer has pointed out, this has led to a
privileging of postmodernist literary works in postcolonial literature, and
to a disparagement of the realist or ‘traditional’ literary works’.33 Such
narrative strategies as magical realism and the writing of non-linear
narratives, mixing of genres, parody and pastiche, are considered to be
exemplary postcolonial narrative strategies, strategies that exclusively can
do justice to the postcolonial experience.
This is where a difference may be noted between poststructuralism and
postmodernism. While poststructuralism remains committed to linguistic
analysis and the act of reading, and remains wary of all frameworks and
generalizations, postmodernism has become a general framework, a
Weltanschauung as Bertens defines it, for emancipatory politics in the
academic and the literary world. Deconstruction is taken as a tool which can
be used to identify blind spots in various discourses. On the other hand, the
texts that are seen to ‘self-deconstruct’ themselves, texts in the genre of
parody, magical realism, and absurdism, are privileged as exemplifying the
insights of deconstruction and poststructuralism. What is ignored in such
celebrations of deconstructive work is that it is a double edged sword and,
when done carelessly, often leads to what Paul de Man has identified as the
critics’ blindness towards his/her own claims and biases.34 Describing the
modern critics’ appreciation for the author who self-demystifies his fiction,
de Man identifies their preference for the “literary mind [that] espouses the
35
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

pattern of a demystifying consciousness; literature finally comes into its

own, and becomes authentic, when it discovers that the exalted status it
claimed for its language was a myth. The function of the critic then naturally
becomes coextensive with the intent at demystification that is more or less
consciously present in the mind of the author.”35 This is the kind of criticism
that Pakistani English fiction has been receiving in recent times. The critics
merely have to underline the demystification already at work in the works of
Pakistani writers, and so Mohsin Hamid appears to deconstruct ‘clash of
civilization’ narratives, and KamilaShamsie appears to display a post-
migratory imagination.

However, de Man describes this very “conception of literature (or literary

criticism) as demystification as the most dangerous myth of all
….”36Discussing the case of Husserl’s blindness towards the application of
his own method on himself, de Man states: “Similarly, demystifying critics
are in fact asserting the privileged status of literature as an authentic
language, but withdrawing from the implications by cutting themselves off
from the source from which they receive their insight.” Elaborating the
“implications”, de Man writes: “The self-reflecting mirror-effect by means
of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from
empirical reality, its divergence, a sign, from a meaning that depends for its
existence on the constitutive activity of this sign, characterizes the work of
literature in its essence.” According to de Man, “One entirely
misunderstands this assertion of the priority of fiction over reality, of
imagination over perception, if one considers it as the compensatory
expression of a shortcoming, of a deficient sense of reality … It [literature]
transcends the notion of a nostalgia or a desire, since it discovers desire as a
fundamental pattern of being that discards any possibility of satisfaction.”
Referring to Rousseau’s admission of finding in himself a “void thatnothing
could have filled,” de Man asserts, “Poetic language names this void with
ever-renewed understanding and, like Rousseau’s longing, it never tires of
naming it again. This persistent naming is what we call literature.”37

A Deconstructive Approach to Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

It is interesting that Mohsin Hamid’s narrator discovers just such a void in
himself during the course of his narrative. While thinking of Erica, he
comes to the realization that their relationship had failed because he “lacked
a stable core” and that he had “nothing of substance to give her”.38Towards
the end of the narrative, Changez shares his understanding of the
constitution of the self in the postmodern/postcolonial world of dislocations:
36
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore

one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a
relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the
autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of
us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us.39

In Pakistani English fiction there are few, if any, comparable

acknowledgements of the splitting and fissuring of identity due to contact
with others, of the divided self which now is constituted by otherness. And
this particular realization in this novel comes about through the experience
of travel, from the Third World to the First World (and back), and thus
Changez’s story seems to exemplify the postcolonial/postmodern
intellectuals’ journeys and their arrival at hybridity, indeterminacy and
inbetweenness.

Yet Changez’s arrival at the state of hybridity and indeterminacy is not or

not solely due to the journey to the First World, but due to the unsettling
experiences of other regions of the Third World that he visits as an
employee in a multinational company. It is his unsettling experiences in
the Philippines and in Chile that mould him into becoming a critic of
American financial and economic policies. Towards the end of the novel,
Changez is seen as a charismatic teacher, a lecturer, whose public
addresses are attended by everyone from the liberal to the conservative
people. These elements in the text can lead a reader towards a Marxist
interpretation.As Bart Moore-Gilbert states, “…Changez's resistance is
linked to the long tradition of leftist pursuit of social and political justice
… Hamid's textsuggests that it may be premature to dismiss left
politics,particularly as a locus of opposition toAmerican-led globalization
and itsanalogues, notably 'the war on terror'.”40

The irony here is that a Marxist interpretation will not be entirely

consistent with a postmodernist-postcolonial interpretation exemplified by
Peter Morey above. For the Marxist reader, the text will have to be
interpreted as foregrounding a class conflict and the evil elements of a
capitalist economy and its cultural theme only an ideological cover over
the ‘real’ issues, while for the postmodernist/postcolonial reader, the class
conflict and critique of capitalism will be seen only as a cover to ensnare
the careless reader not paying attention to the narrator’s hints at his own
unreliability. Both interpretations would aim at appropriating the text into
the larger frameworks they bring to the text in order to draw
37
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

favourableconclusions from the text towards their political claims. Yet the
text remains resistant to such appropriations.

Positioned inbetween the Marxist hostility towards American capitalism

and the postmodern-postcolonial celebration of a planned textual
indeterminacy, the text itself remains a “multidimensional space in which
a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”41(Barthes,
Death of the Author, page?). The value of Hamid’s novel, therefore, does
not reside in its being a Marxist or a postmodernist narrative but rather in
being resistant to such readings and to political appropriations. As Paul de
Man has said, “When modern critics think they are demystifying literature,
they are in fact being demystified by it …” (de Man, Crisis, 18). It is when
demystifying criticism is itself read against the text that it attempts to
demystify, that the ideological biases of the criticism come out into the
open. While Marxist critics are always fairly open about their critical
program, the literary text hardly turns out to be the best object to pursue
that objective through. The postmodern-postcolonial criticism, though, is
more ambiguous about its critical program. However, many critics have
identified a cosmopolitan drift in postcolonial theory and criticism. Peter
Morey’s reading of Hamid’s novel as an example of ‘world literature’
highlights its value for the discourse of cosmopolitanism of which ‘world
literature’ is one source of material. In his reading of Hamid’s novel as a
hoax confession, Morey does not consider the possibility that the hoax
may be the form of parody itself – that the confession may be a genuine
one, though reluctantly given in the form of parody.

Conclusion
Deconstructive criticism proper, as opposed to other forms of literary
criticism (such as postcolonial criticism) that make use of deconstructive
strategies, values literature or fiction because it resists political and/or
discursive appropriation. Mohsin Hamid’s novel cannot be easily drafted
into a Marxist or a postmodernist politics, though a case can be made for
both – and that is the contradictory situation it represents. While
postmodernist-postcolonial criticism has come to idealize the migrant’s
position, a cultural phenomenon made into a textual one, and to celebrate
all texts that appear to be composed from that position, deconstructive
criticism insists on all positions as divided and self-contradictory, and
places high value upon those texts in which this division is faced with full
force. In particular, it resists making of any paradigmatic place of arrival a
paradigmatic place of departure.
38
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

ENDNOTES
1- See Benita Parry’s “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies” and Simon Gikandi’s,
“Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse” in Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
2- Shazaf Fatima Haider, “In Search of a Critic” n.p.
3- Shazaf Fatima Haider, “In Search of a Critic” n.p.
4- David Waterman, review of Journal of Postcolonial Writing: Special Issue on Pakistan, ed.
MuneezaShamsie, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistani Studies 3.no. 2 (2011): 109-112
5- AroosaKanwal, Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani English Fiction: Beyond 9/11,
(Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan) 2016
6- Madeline Clements, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective, (Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan) 2016
7- Cara Cilano, Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation, State, (New York:
Routledge) 2013
8- Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press) 2006, 17
9- Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed.
David Lodge and Nigel Wood, (Delhi: Pearson Education) 2003, 347
10- J. Hillis Miller, “Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time,” in The J. Hillis Miller
Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2005, 262-264
11- HomiBhabha, “The Commitment to Theory” in The Location of Culture, ed. HomiBhabha,
(London: Routledge) 1994, p. 21
12- De Man, Resistance, p. 339
13- De Man, “Criticism and Crisis” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, ed., Paul de Man, (New York: Oxford University Press) 1971, p. 17
14- Peter Morey, “The Rules of the Game Have Changed”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:2
(2011), p. 138
15- Anna Hartnell, “Moving through America: Race, place and resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The
Reluctant Fundamentalist”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 46:3-4, p. 336
16- Benita Parry, “Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies”, in Cambridge Companion to
Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed., Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
2004, pp. 75-76
17- Margaret Scanlan, “Migrating from Terror”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46:3-4 (2010), p.
267
18- Simon During quoted in Benita Parry, “Institutionalization”, p. 76
19- AtoQuayson, “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism”, in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, eds.,
A Companion to Postcolonialism, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing) 2005, p.90
20- Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, (London: Routledge) 1995, pp. 5-6
21- Ibid, p. 6
22- Ibid, p. 7
23- Ibid, p. 7
24- Ibid, pp. 7-8
25- Ibid, p. 8
26- Ibid, pp. 15-16
27- Ibid, p. 16

39
Deconstructing ‘Deconstruction’ Faisal Nazir

28- HomiBhabha, “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism: A Question of Agency” in The Location of

Culture, ed., HomiBhabha (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 172, italics added.
29- Ibid, p. 172
30- Ibid, p. 172, italics added
31- Dick Pels, “Privileged Nomads.” Theory, Culture and Society, 16:1 (1999), p. 63
32- Ibid, p. 63, italics added
33- EllekeBoehmer, "Questions of neo-Orientalism," Interventions: International Journal of
Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 18-21.
34- Paul de Man. Blindness and insight: Essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1971)
35- Ibid, p. 14
36- Ibid, p. 14. Italics added.
37- Ibid, pp. 17-18
38- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, (Karachi: Oxford University Press) 2007, p. 89
39- Ibid, p. 105
40- Bart Moore-Gilbert, “From ‘the Politics of Recognition’ to ‘the Policing of Recognition’:
Writing Islam in HanifKureishi and Mohsin Hamid”, inCulture, Diaspora and Modernity in
Muslim Writing, eds., Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and AminaYaqin, (New York: Routledge)
2012, p. 194
41- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 2nd
edition, eds., David Lodge and Nigel Wood, (Delhi: Pearson Education) 2003 p. 149

Abstract
This article establishes clear distinction between postmodernism and
post-structuralism and argues that such key terms in Bhabha’s
theorization of postcoloniality as ambivalence, inbetweenness and
hybridity are derived from a postmodernist approach to issues of
culture and indent and that this is a move away from the centrality
accorded to language and linguistic issues in post-structuralism.
Referring to the poststructuralist work of Derrida, de Man and Foucault
and critically evaluating Bhabha’s approach in the it’s light, the article
critiques the postmodernist turn in the postcolonial criticism.
Keywords:Post-modernist turn, ambivalence, in betweenness and
hybridity, Bhabha’s approach.

40