Post-colonial Feminist, Interpolation

This chapter is entitled “Post-colonial Feminist Interpolation”. Bill Ashcroft’s (2001) Post-colonial Transformation critically engages with Althusser’s concept of interpellation in respect to limitations in the latter’s formulation of agency. Principal to this critique is the notion that “the colonial subject may engage imperial culture by using it as a communicative medium or consuming it as cultural capital” (ibid.: 45). Irrespective of the process of utilisation, it is argued that engagement with imperial culture is intensely involved with consumption and production, the magnitude and force of this implication is such as to present the potentiality of transformation in the hegemony of the dominant culture itself. Analysing these happenings of autonomous agency has proved a complex endeavour for post-colonial feminism. As Ashcroft interjects, “The most contentious problems in post-colonial theory continue to be those hinging on the capacity of the colonized subject to intervene in colonial discourse to contest it, change it or generally make the voice of the colonized heard” (ibid.). For, post-colonial feminist, an epistemological jeopardy inherent in anticolonial and decolonial discourse theory is the formulation of “absolutes” and their depiction as an impervious hegemony accomplished in its totality effect of silencing resistance to colonialist delineation. Conversely, Ashcroft enlists the post-colonial supposition: “Can the subaltern speak?” (ibid.). This chapter presents an interview with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and [Prof. Emerita] Jane Bryce, journalist and feminist of post-colonial theory. The principal objective of this chapter is to formulate Ashcroft’s concept of “interpolation” as a counter-point to Althusser’s conception of “interpellation” and in so doing advance post-colonial feminist praxis as an efficacious interventionist strategy for securing the human right to communicative action.