| Abstract: |
The tensions and silences within influential «postcolonial» theories, the majority of which are written and published from locations in the First World, can be explored by opening them to a critica1 dialogue with works of so-called «postcolonial» literature. In many respects, these narratives, which are international in readership yet written in Third World locations, challenge the concepr of «postcoloniality» itself; the works of writers like Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Bessie Head and Gabriel García Márquez manifest a lococentrism, an investment in a national place which runs counter to the emphasis on migration, displacement and exile prevailing in current «postcolonial» theory. Focusing upon Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), the article explores the ways that the novel might be used to critique and displace some of the key theoretical presuppositions that pervade the most popular of postcolonial theories. 1 will be suggesting that, through the use of satire, Márquez is positively reinstating and «placing» what will emerge against the postcolonial theorists as an open-ended and dynamic nationalism. |
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