Volume: 1  Number: 1  Page: 6–26

Decolonising Subjects from the Discourse of Difference

Narcisa Paredes-Canilao University of the Philippines Baguio

This paper makes a case for the recovery of non-Western discourses for decolonisation and intercultural exchange by engaging with the critique that postmodern difference has empowered postcolonial criticism but has militated against decolonisation projects such as resistance and cultural recovery. This irony is traced to postcolonial theory's appropriation of the poststructuralist discourse of difference in areas outside the latter's cultural and intellectual milieu. The first part shows that: (1) ‘difference’ remains caught within the Western dualism it purported to have ‘gone beyond’, (2) it tends to reinstate a view of identity construction as an othering process, and (3) it is basically an elite's discourse. The second part shows how non-Western discourses of harmony, e.g. Chinese jen and tao and Filipino kapwa, are more discursively and culturally empowering for decolonisation, and how they construct an egalitarian multiculturalism as well as challenge the market-driven discourses of individualisation and privatisation now being circulated as inevitable responses to globalisation. The paper ends with recommendations for scholars to continue work started in the 1960s to the early 1990s of recovering non-Western discourses and forms of life marginalised or consigned to oblivion, but this time, with more rigour and urgency.

Keywords: difference, harmony, non-Western discourses, multiculturalism, Philippines, postcolonial

© 2006 N. Paredes-Canilao

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