Segmented Foundations and Pluralism 2211988). Difference, in this context, not only was enshrined in the external subject of
anthropological investigation, but also, reflexively, within the internal structure of the
discipline itself.
The discussion of anthropology may appear,prima facie, unrelated to political
theory. However, this anthropological debate impacted strongly onallforms of cul-
tural study during the last few decades of the twentieth century. In fact, it is largely
the anthropological use of the term ‘culture’, which underpins much of the recent
debates about multiculturalism, group rights, and cultural nationalism in contem-
porary political theory. Admittedly, there are some liberal political theorists who
would not consider any of these latter conceptions as genuine political theory, how-
ever, this kind of dogmatic judgement could arise from literally every dimension of
contemporary theory and will thus be ignored as fatuous.
The second broad dimension of difference argument is postcolonial theory, which
has been defined as a ‘theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colo-
nial aftermath...a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting,
remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past’ (Gandhi 1998: 4). The
key issue here is that the bulk of the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of
empires, colonies and the like, has been largely composed from within the imperial
and colonial university centres. Such history will—according to its critics—inevitably,
if surreptitiously, represent the dominant perceptions of the colonial regimes. Those
who write the history are the dominant participants; the silent subjects (the other)
they write about are the postcolonial peoples. Postcolonial theory is thus concerned
with the idea that formal history (or anthropology) embodies power. This thesis is
embedded, for example, in Edward Said’s well-known discussion of ‘orientalism’—or
more precisely the discursive Western construction of the orient. Colonialism repres-
ents not just a political, economic or military invasion, but also a textual onslaught.
The general impetus of postcolonial theory is thus a critique of this literary onslaught.
Although the actual overt military and political dominance has largely dissipated in
the process of decolonization, nonetheless, a much more indirect form of power
is exercised through academic discourses. Even apparently fair-minded discourses,
such as European or North American liberalism, are tarred with the same brush.
Thus, in the words of one critic, postcolonial theory wishes to ‘undo the Euro-
centrism produced by the institution of the West’s trajectory, its appropriation of the
other as History’ (Prakash in Haynes and Prakash (eds.) 1992: 8). Liberalism, and
consequently liberal pluralism, are often taken as exemplars of this subtle colonial
discourse, masquerading as universal theory. More recently the term ‘postcolonial
liberalism’ has been coined to try to cope with and assess this new development (see
Ivison in Vincent (ed.) 1997c; Ivison 2002).
There are though three areas that can be identified under the broad rubric of post-
colonial theory. One key area, from which postcolonial argument initially developed,
is subaltern studies.^18 The term ‘subaltern’ has both a military and a Marxist origin.
It implies one in a lower rank or subjugated position. The Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, for example, used the term within his writings. In postcolonial theory,
this sense of the subjugated groups can be taken very broadly to include ethnicity,