Reflective Solutions: How Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa! Mirrors the Tension between Postcolonial Theory and Postcolonial Criticism

Introduction While South African playwright Athol Fugard has been praised internationally for his incisive and courageous theater during apartheid era in South Africa, he has also faced accusations of basically being an outsider plight of black Africans. In other words, while he was intellectually involved in campaign do away with that system of oppression, critics claimed his otherness never allowed him become fully engaged in actual struggle for liberation. Because of that, he never saw fight as life and death struggle but rather as form of dialogue whereby all it would take would be some convincing and logic--and propagators of apartheid would be shamed into taking whole edifice down. A similar argument has been made against form of outsider postcolonial theory espoused by intellectuals such as Homi Bhabha, V.S. Naipaul, and Gayatri Spivak. For example, Bhabha argues for theory of cultural identity that is not fixed, that is lacking in essence, that is filled with ambiguity and is constructed rather than being self-evident, something he calls space of enunciation and which challenges our sense of historical identity of as homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by originary Past, kept alive in national tradition of People (37). Challenging this notion of a liminal space ... transitory space, space other, third space that is not here/there, but both (De Toro 20), are writers who argue that this type of theory is merely metaphysics of textualism and cult of linguistic/psychological ambivalence (San Juan 22). San Juan goes as far as claim that indeterminacy, deracinated sensibility, and utopian idealisms put forward by such theorists, majority entrenched in Establishment institutions of West, only served interests of global status quo, and mystify political/ideological effects of Western postmodernist hegemony and prevent change (22). Instead of this, San Juan suggests that we need concern ourselves with the law of uneven and combined [global] development, and spatiotemporal contexts on which [postcolonial] meaning and value hinge (15). In this way, San Juan is closer views of postcolonial theorists such as Said, Ahmad, and Rushdie. According Yacoubi, this view rests in shared notion that history, narrative, and politics are inextricably intertwined and that main obligation of intellectual was to speak out against power, question structures of coercion, injustice, and silencing. The task of intellectual would be create alternative readings of history and culture (193). In this paper, an attempt will be made analyze Fugard's My Children! My Africa! in light of confrontation between orthodox postcolonial theory and postcolonial criticism. The first part of paper consists of brief study of this confrontation. Postcolonial Theory: The New Orthodoxy Criticized In brief, Bhabha's reading of postcolonialism goes beyond politics and political action. It also goes beyond binary oppositions such as colonial/postcolonial. His proposed method of escaping so-called colonial discourse is analyze processes of subjectification (67). He views system of colonial stereotyping as phobia and fetish that threatens closure of racial/epidermal schema for colonial subject and opens royal road colonial fantasy (67). At same time Bhabha denies power of human agency in this process. According Massad, Bhabha seems to be committed depoliticizing deeply political questions (15). Another accusation is that Bhabha does not go far enough in his poststructuralism, and that his work is ambivalent, and remains Eurocentric and essentialist in nature. According Yacoubi: Ambivalence has not rehabilitated existential and epistemological status of real colonized subjects in history. …

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