THE TOPIC OF KAFKA AND POSTCOLONIALITY emerges from the productive supplementation of the hermeneutic and philological traditions of Germanistik with cultural studies paradigms. This disciplinary self-revision has lead to a new awareness of the multiple ways in which the signifying practices of politics, history, and social processes interact with literary texts. One of the most fertile of cultural studies approaches, postcolonial theory interrogates the historical ramifications and discursive articulations of the interaction between metropolitan centers and colonial peripheries, focusing on imperialism, resistance, decolonialization, as well as cultural or political forms of neo-colonialism. Topics commonly discussed include the subversion of Western discourse by the uncanny inscription of the signs of the foreign in processes of crosscultural hybridization; the problematic of the silenced, suppressed, or manipulated “native” voice; the authenticity of indigenous cultures; and the signifying body of the colonized subject.

There, are, however, significant problems of cross-disciplinary mediation. Russell A. Berman cautions against the uncritical application to German colonialism of postcolonial theories about hybridity and transculturalism as developed by critics such as Homi K. Bhabha and Mary Louise Pratt. The “underlying assumption” of these theories “appears to be that British imperialism is the normative imperial structure,” Berman says, going on to argue that the British situation was very different from German colonialism, its particular position in European Enlightenment, and Germany’s supposedly more flexible notions of cultural Otherness (15). Berman is certainly right to oppose the disciplinary hegemony of theories derived from British and, one might add, French imperialisms. Unfortunately, though, there are as yet no postcolonial theories in German studies that have the conceptual breadth and analytic effectiveness of the models proposed by Bhabha, Edward W. Said, Rey Chow, and other critics who are working in U.S. cultural studies and do not primarily focus on German cultural material. Nonetheless, these figures have made significant theoretical contributions to the very issues of hybridity and crosscultural communication that Berman is concerned with in his study of German colonialism. Therefore, it seems to me, one should bring together Anglo-French colonial theories and German texts in a conceptual field of mutual illumination and critique, allowing for an eclectic borrowing and translating of current theoretical terms within the indigenous field of German colonial literature.