Proximity and the Post Colonial Part 2

". . . crossing borders previously thought to be impermeable" (Flemming, 24).

By itself this sounds so lovingly optimistic. The breakdown of controlled access. However, Flemming is not Post Colonial, and he sees this as the destruction of proximity, a vital component of citizenship and community. It is literary the kriptonite of democracy. An empirical Post Colonial observation of these permeable borders reveals something more negative than positive. (Warning: I am going to speak generally and broadly) The transition from Colonial to Post Colonial is the traditionally defined by the change in proximity from the colonizer and the colonized. I.E. the colonizer leaves. What they usually leave behind is a discursive influence that determines political structures, socioeconomic status, and communication networks. The utopian idea that when the Colonizer leaves, the Colonized take control of the community. What has been happening however is that the colonized have regained control over the geographical network but not the discursive network.

Thus borders between post colonial communities and the colonizer are only permeable because their discourses are now shared and parallel due to a previous close proximity, which gave way to a colonized community. Thus values of community, discourse, production, economics, genre etc. are fed continuously in the post colonized.

Blogging for instance has grown widely in Post Colonial networks. Groups like Rising Voices provide grants and instruction for implementing the technological and educational needs to bring blogging platforms to these communities. They even have an instructional manual on how to set up a local wifi network in poor agricultural communities. They even had a discussion on their listserv about whether or not blogging hurt or helped indigenous knowledge.

The idea is that these communities become more self sustaining through blogging. In a word, blogging is a forum where communities resolves conflict (going with Flemming's lexicon here). That conflict, matters of concern, or something to that affect, in these post-colonial communities has been everything from preserving a language (though many blog in English) to protecting indigenous land.

I guess what I am getting to is that issues of proximity are more complex that Flemming seems to want to admit. The colonized history of the wold prevents us from limiting conversations of community direct and current proximity. I'm not saying that shared discourses between two geographic, political entities makes a community, but it does have impact how community functions in each of those places.