Postcolonial theory and wheel-spinning

I hesitate to publish this response, because I worry it is too negative. Perhaps given some distance from the texts, I might feel differently. But my response to today's reading was primarily frustration. It seems like every article we have read for this micro seminar says much of the same thing; the Western hegemonic discourse is bad, incorporating non-Western theory and literary works are good. Other scholars have tried their best, and some of them have done well explaining certain parts of this Euro-centricism, but inevitably, they all somehow perpetuate the hegemonic discourse in some way. Spivak beats Eagleton and other scholars over the head with this perpetuation in her Literature chapter, all the while responding (primarily in the footnotes) to criticisms of her own work. In Krishnaswamy's article, he criticizes not only Spivak, but theories on the subaltern in general by saying, "theories associated with subaltern studies and postcolonial studies have not fared much better in their attempts to analyze or evaluate Dalit literature, in part because these theoretical models are dominated by the binary colonizer and colonized, and in part because they are overly reliant on a terminology of mobility and hybridity" (414). Of course, Shih's article implicitly, if not explicitly, criticizes postcolonial studies for not being able to accommodate the liminal nature of Taiwanese culture. But it seems like much of this is just patting themselves on the back. Are we ever going to accomplish the kind of teaching and discussion of world theories that each of these articles proposes? If left up to the scholars of these three articles, I don't know. I hesitate to speculate about Shih, considering I only have read the introduction to a book-length discussion of Taiwanese hybridity. But at the very least, it seems Spivak's chapter does not offer any real solutions for confronting this imperial discourse. Though Krishnaswamy offers examples of latent, emergent, and alternative explicit literary theories that could be included in pedagogy, he fails to provide a model or a method for integrating these works and avoiding Euro-centricism. He himself cites the Norton Anthology's overwhelming proportion of white, male theorists to minority theorists ( fifteen out of over 140 theorists), but acknowledges the Norton's attempt to become more inclusive. Though he clearly sees their current efforts to include any minority or non-Western theory as a failure, he does not offer any ideas on how his suggestions for non-Western theory can be incorporated. With the best intentions of talking about these thinkers, but without a methodology for integration (or timeline, for that matter, demonstrating at what point we will have conquered Eurocentricism) offered convincingly by any of the post-colonial writers we've encountered so far, I wonder if his attempts to "initiate such an epistemologically inclusive and methodologically open-ended study of 'world literary knowledges'" will succeed, or if they will end up in the same boat as the Norton Anthology: trying hard, but still failing (408).