With respect then to post-colonial aesthetics and post-colonial artists and so forth,
the point that I'm making is that the aesthetics are precursors to the theory,
that post-colonialism,
post-colonial criticism follows post-colonial aesthetic experimentation.
And that when you look at the work of African writers like Wole Soyinka,
when you look at the work of painters like Gordon Bennett,
Aboriginal painter in Australia or Arnaldo Roche Rabell in Puerto Rico,
that you're seeing a particular poignant use
of aesthetics to say something,
to contest something, to challenge received tradition,
to place within a very vigorous dialogue,
received, understood, practices, norms,
ways of approaching and understanding the world.
Out of this framework then,
I'm arguing that post-colonial aesthetics,
post-colonial artists, are saying as a first point,
the separation of the Third World from the First in aesthetics or art is illegitimate,
that the tendency to,
in canon versus multiculturalism debates,
to see that the Third World is completely
cleaved or separated from the first as representing
some cultural aesthetic construct that is so distinctive and a set of
values and organization and so forth that is so distinctive from the First is legitimate.
The point being made that these systems are in dialogue with each
other and that Third World artists are really raising questions about identity,
authority, freedom, and rights that are working through the ground of
particular received traditions coming out of the West.
And that one of these areas then is
this very powerful critique of classical realism,
the realism that you find in the 19th century novel,
that you find in the manner of paintings of the 17th century,
that stabilizes the self-sufficient subject that is really sitting on
top of a hierarchy of discourses.
So that if we're reading Jane Austen's Emma,
it's Emma that gives us our moral anchor.
We know where we are in terms of her understanding of the world.
And if we are looking at Herman Melville's Moby Dick,
a similar saying, whenever Ahab appears on the deck,
he is surrounded by a world that is bureaucratically organized.
So you get the first mate,
the second mate, the third mate,
the first harpooner, the second harpooner, the third harpooner.
They are raised around Ahab as the world is socially organized with respect to class,
with respect to race,
with respect to First World,
Third World, et cetera.
That's the point of contestation that then,
what you find often in the post-colonial novel is an implosion of that subjectivity,
the foregrounding of polyglot characters that seem to flash on the surface of
the novel rather than consolidate over time,
and therefore, the voice,
the reasoning of a single position is not necessarily privilege.
What you have is a plurality of points of view.
So these works are drawing.
I am arguing on a wellspring of a plurality of traditions and borrowing indiscriminately.
They are engaging hybridity or a kind of impurity.
There's a whole literary tradition in the Caribbean known as mongrelism,
which is this idea that we are all, in some way,
dynamically connected, that even in
the ethnicities of people that have evolved out of the Caribbean,
that the links between the different ethnic houses are tremendously powerful.
And that these ought to be identified as strengths rather than weaknesses.
And there is also the preoccupation with the fate of communities,
with the fate of the group over the self-sufficient subject.
And I'll illustrate some of this as we go along when we look at some of
the examples of post-colonial aesthetics,
some of the paintings and some of the novels and some of the music,
and then I will go on to talk somewhat about education.
