Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: IN1975, Erna Brodber suggested that social work needed a "methodological shift from traditional social work practice" in order to work with "the individual-in-his-community.Emphasis would be on helping the individual to grow within his community and on helping him to make use of the resources within his community towards his further growth" (Yards 61).If, however, the primary goals of "cultural engineering by imperialism" have been "the destruction of Africa[n-based] cultures, and the construction, in their place, of foreign cultures of the colonizer" (Saakana 9), how are Jamaican individuals within their community to negotiate the gap between the community as it has been constructed by imperialism and the community which might be constructed in such a way as to empower individuals?Postcolonial theory has been struggling with this point for some time, concerning itself more perhaps with theorizing the present polyvalent state of affairs than with positing future, truly /««/colonial, states of community.As postcolonial critics, we most often look at issues related to writing "back" to a colonial centre 1 or living on the periphery of colonial space, finding it difficult to posit a theoretical space in which the centre might not hold.Postcolonial writers, however, have sometimes been less reticent.A comprehensive theory of "possibilities" of existence beyond the colonial dialectic might profitably base itself on work being done in the area of Postcolonial or Commonwealth fiction.' 2 Erna Brodber's Myal: a novel (1988), for instance, begins by identifying "contemporary" local and global levels and processes of imperialist cultural and social "spirit thievery."This text ultimately, however, constructs an active, supportive community which both
Source: Ariel
Author: Catherine Nelson-McDermott
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1889439953