The Cul-de-Sac of Postcolonial Theory: Negotiation or Negation?

The escalating wave of migration and its discontents that the world is witnessing now challenges some aspects that form the backbone of postcolonial theory through revealing the inefficiency and invalidity of all the previous givens. Policed borders render the concept of hybridity and the horizon invalid. The attempt at eluding the politics of polarity could not survive the discursive and physical practices of several dislocated localities. Consequently, the “contact zone” that has always been the pride of the West, upon the assumption of hybridity, is shrinking now, if not fading. What should have been cultural negotiation came down to be cultural negation. This paper reads the status of the women asylum seekers who are locked in Yarl’s Wood Center in the U.K. as an example of the stark violations practiced against immigrants and refugees in general, and in the case of women, as an example of turning the female body into an arena onto which conflicting power relations are inscribed. However, the main goal of this reading is to prove the failure of postcolonial theory to cope with the fierce return of borders, material and symbolic. To do this, the paper assumes that the life stories of the women stand as a text/narrative that yields itself to analysis.