Post-Colonial Allegory and the Empire of Rape

[First para.]:  "In her article entitled "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonialism,'" Anne McClintock criticizes the term post-colonical for being "prematurely celebratory and obfuscatory" (298). The binary opposition of colonial/post-colonical, she argues, shifts theory away "from the binary axis of power (colonizer/colonized--itself inadequately nuanced, as in the case of women) to the binary axis of time, an axis even less productive of political nuance" (292). McClintock's article deals primarily with the military and political policies of nations that have been labelled post-colonial to reveal how the term cannot adequately account for the multiplicity of powers and histories that constitute these places. My emphasis here lies more with literature than with government policy, but like McClintock, I am leery of the celebratory tone of much post-colonial theory, and I am similarly interested in the political nuances that are often effaced by post-colonial discourse. How is resistance figured and reconfigured in post-colonial writing and theory, and what forms of power do these figurations disguise? What political nuances attend the intersection of the binaries of colonizer/colonized and male/female in post-colonial writing? How is post-colonial discourse inadequate when dealing with the nuances of feminist issues? These are some of the broad questions I wish to raise in this essay."