Abstract

This thesis constitutes a critique of postcolonial theory on the grounds that postcolonial theory is the flawed product of a contradictory philosophical undoing of history. Postcolonial thinkers are thwarted in their search for a transformative praxis and theory that can transcend the inequality of power relations in the postcolonial world. In the framework of its critique, I seek to articulate an ontological foundation for the notion of postcolonial agency through the study of the postcolonial subaltern as a historical subject in the world and in time. To accomplish this, I explore thinking about the meaning of postcoloniality in its ontological, anthropological and phenomenological relation to history. Of central importance to this investigation is the interplay of the interpretive idealism of German and French theories of hermeneutics and its classical underpinnings in the interpretation of the mythocentric and logocentric forms of knowledge, the philosophic anthropology of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Gans and Wolfgang Iser, and the deconstructive postcolonial critical discourse of Gayatri Spivak. On the basis of the designation of philosophical paradigms of postcoloniality in relation to time, history and consciousness in the framework of interpretation theory, I explore postcoloniality and subaltern agency in the context of contemporary polemics, Kant's sign of history, the narrative of colonial violence, and psychoanalytic aspects of racial abjection , with especial emphasis on the question of historical judgment and the metaphysics of the subject . Postcoloniality is then subjected to a anthropological critique through a historical survey of the ethnographic text and a refutation of Clifford and Geertz' critiques of ethnographic fieldwork based on references to classical 20th century anthropological texts by Malinowski, Firth, Levi-Strauss and Benedict. This thesis concludes with an elaboration of three main arguments in support of its claim that subaltern agency has meaning and significance: histories of traditional societies reflect a structure that has an exemplary meaning within a consciousness of historicity; sameness and alterity reveal an ontology of universal social consciousness through coalescence of subject and object as methexis ; and the existence of all peoples and cultures is ordered by symbolicity and structure.