38 Postcolonial theory Towards a worlding of critical psychology Desmond Painter This chapter considers postcolonial theory as both a vantage point for the critique of psychology and a theoretical resource for the development of critical alternatives to and in psychology. Mainstream academic psychology and currently existing critical psychologies alike arguably remain Western-centric in regard to their problematics and theoretical resources, and the locations, institutions, and principal agents of their reproduction. Moreover, critical historiography in psychology reveals the epistemological assumptions and representational practices by which the discipline had historically become entangled with – informed by but also informing – Western colonialism and racism (Bhatia 2002; Richards 2012). Taken at face value, then, postcolonial theory offers first, a critical perspective on the colonial assumptions, representations and omissions that continue to haunt psychology, even in its critical appearances; and second, a burgeoning, often psychologically disposed vocabulary for interrogating ‘postcoloniality’ as it is manifested in the cultural formations and transformations of specific postcolonial societies (i.e. former colonies) and a more generally posited postcolonial condition characterized by both symptomatic returns of colonial trauma and the appearance of new (frequently ‘hybrid’) forms of expression, belonging, and identification within liminal spaces of transnational exchange. Postcolonial theory’s strongest claim, directly relevant to critical psychology, is that it has contributed to a situation where, perhaps for the first time in the Western academy, ‘postcolonial subjects become subjects rather than objects of knowledge’ (Young 2001: 63). This chapter is descriptive but also evaluative. Postcolonial theory certainly clears significant theoretical terrain for renewed critical engagement with and in psychology, not only in relation to its historical complicity with colonialism and racism, but also its more recent and still insufficiently interrogated ‘internationalisation’ (Brock 2006). More specifically, it supports the ‘worlding’ of critical psychology, that is, the ongoing process of revealing and reimaging critical psychology’s established cultural, political, and epistemological horizons; of interrogating its terms of engagement with subjects and situations outside its places of origin; of demanding, in the face of psychology’s self-serving appeals to both the universal and the indigenous in its quest to be ‘international’, a constant demand for theoretical dis-location and ex-centricity (Khanna 2004; Roy and Ong 2011). However, postcolonial theory and (critical) psychology often enter into productive alliance exactly at the point where the former’s politics are vulnerable to critique. Whilst postcolonial theory often presents itself as the academic inheritor of Third World 366 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 366 2/21/2015 8:37:07 AM Postcolonial theory decolonization struggles and its principal protagonists and theorists (Young 2001), this relationship is more complicated. According to Lazarus (2011: 21), postcolonial theory sets itself apart through its political assumptions, which include ‘a constitutive anti-Marxism’, ‘an undifferentiated disavowal of all forms of nationalism and a corresponding exaltation of migrancy, liminality, hybridity, and multiculturality’, ‘an aversion to dialectics’, and ‘a refusal of an antagonistic or struggle-based model of politics’. Decolonization remains on the agenda, but its meaning in postcolonial theory shifts from concerns with the structural position of the Third World (or more recently, the Global South) within the capitalist world system to increasing preoccupation with its cultural and psychological prerequisites. As a consequence, ‘psychology’ (or ‘psychological’ modes of analysis and critique) often appears in postcolonial theory as a substitute for the systematic confrontation of capitalism in its world historical scope. In other words, psychology finds its critical resonance by becoming an integral part of the redefinition of politics within postcolonial theory, a redefinition premised not only on a shift from political-economic to cultural and psychological modes of analysis, but also on the renunciation of ‘modernist’ diagnostics of colonial oppression and accompanying articulations and mobilizations of liberatory possibilities. This raises the question as to whether postcolonial theory’s contribution to exposing and defeating psychology’s Western-centrism functions as a true critique, or whether it instead further advances the contemporary tendency to psychologize politics and to thus to redeploy psychology (even if this psychology might look radically different from mainstream varieties) within the contemporary cultural logic of capitalist imperialism. Postcolonial theory: locations, definitions, and contradictions Two decades ago Jacoby (1995: 30) had already claimed that ‘postcolonial’ had become ‘the latest catchall term to dazzle the academic mind’, whilst Dirlik (1994) referred to the existence of a ‘postcolonial aura’ in the Western academy. What they were referring to at the time was the increasing centrality of a term used not in a descriptive historical sense, to designate societies existing in a time after colonialism, but in a theoretical sense to interrogate the wider cultural effects of colonialism (Ashcroft et al. 2007), where these ‘effects’ comprise both the intransigence and transformation of colonial cultures – including quotidian practices, academic, literary, and popular cultural modes of representation, models of personhood and identities, forms of oppression and strategies for liberation – in former colonies and colonial metropoles alike. In fact, most of what had come to be termed postcolonial theory originates from the writing of academics of Third World origin based at (often elite) Western academic institutions, challenging the ‘intellectual sovereignty and dominance of Europe . . . that is, challenging the limits of western ethnocentricity, and the assumption that the white male western point of view is the norm and the true’ (Young 2001: 65), whilst at the same time shifting the spatial and political coordinates of the critique of colonialism. As Dirlik (1994: 332) insists, since ‘postcoloniality has been released from the fixity of Third World locations, the identity of the postcolonial is no longer structural but discursive’. This means that postcolonial theory has forged its academic identity by focusing primarily on epistemology and the politics of representation, relying largely on textual critique and applications of discourse analysis, and privileging (in fact, romanticizing at times) the perspective of exilic displacement. Since then the field has entrenched itself as ‘a major critical discourse in the humanities’ (Gandhi 1998: viii) – first in literature and culture studies departments, ‘where it started as a movement to transcend the marginalization of non-Western literatures in the canon’ (Chibber 2013: 1), but increasingly finding application in related areas in the humanities and social sciences 367 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 367 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Desmond Painter as well (Go 2013; Macleod and Bhatia 2008). Today its founding figures and foundational texts have been canonised (Said’s Orientalism, Spivak’s essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe); its journals and conferences have been institutionalized (the journals Interventions and Postcolonial Studies; the Australian based Institute of Postcolonial Studies and the biennial conferences of the Postcolonial Studies Association); and its reproduction has been ensured by degree programs, postdoctoral fellowships, and a slew of publisher-driven handbooks and course readers. Moreover, postcolonial theory has not only managed to align itself and articulate its theoretical and political ambitions – in the words of Bhabha (1994: 252), ‘to rename the postmodern from the perspective of the postcolonial’ – with the help of in vogue psychoanalytic, postmodernist and poststructuralist writers like Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Young 2001), it has also appropriated some of the iconic theorists and activists of the historical decolonization struggles, most notable of which, from the perspective of critical psychology, is Frantz Fanon (Bhabha 1994; Young 2001). This has afforded postcolonial theory with an enormous amount of cultural capital and academic marketability, whilst nevertheless allowing it to present itself, at least rhetorically, as a radical political discourse and set of practices. However, even though postcolonial theory has managed to extend its influence beyond the specialized study of literary production in European languages emanating from the former colonial dominions to become a major transdisciplinary approach within the humanities as a whole, it remains a difficult field to define without obscuring its internal differences or exaggerating the singularity of its critical orientation. For example, Go (2013: 29) refers to postcolonial theory as a ‘loosely coherent body of writing and thought that critiques and aims to transcend the structures supportive of Western colonialism and its legacies’. More significantly, postcolonial theory owes whatever theoretical coherence it has to how it defines and approaches these supportive structures. As Go (2013: 29) asserts, ‘one of postcolonial theory’s distinct contributions is to emphasize cultural, ideological, epistemic, or even psychological structures’. Another useful definition is offered, ironically, perhaps, by one of the field’s harshest recent critics: [O]ne of the key elements of postcolonial theory is that it critically discloses the cultural logics attendant with empire. In fact, it examines all types of discourses, epistemes, cultural schemas, representations, and ideologies that were part and parcel of Western imperialism – whether embodied in everyday discourses, novels, works of art, scientific tracts, or ethnographies. In this sense, postcolonial theory mounts an assault upon the entire culture of Western global dominance. (Chibber 2013: 29–30, emphasis added) Postcolonial theory can indeed be characterized, despite its internal diversity, by the manner in which it simultaneously centralizes and relativizes culture in its accounts not only of effects of colonialism, but of the nature of contemporary global transformations more generally.This focus on culture is particularly evident in Bhabha’s (1994: 245) characterization of the field as bearing ‘witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for social and political authority within the modern world order’. For Bhabha, significantly, postcolonial theory does not simply navigate the appearance and transformation of culture within the existing temporal, spatial, and political coordinates of Euro-modernist accounts of an international or global world order. Instead, postcolonial theory introduces what is essentially a ‘postmodernist’ break with: the developmental teleologies of both liberal capitalist and Marxian accounts of world history; the equation of political space and identities with the modernist political framework of nation-state and national (or nationalized) cultural identities; and the 368 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 368 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Postcolonial theory reduction of social antagonism to ‘a binary structure of opposition’ such as class struggle or Third World versus First World. Instead, postcolonial theory ‘forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres’ (Bhabha 1994: 248). This means that culture, in both its quotidian and formalized appearances, is reconceptualized in terms that now reflect – beyond the stultifying and violent effects of standardized forms of knowing and modes of representation – its liminal and hybridized transformations and relocations. Culture, that is, as ‘an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, produced in the act of social survival’ (Bhabha 1994: 247). From the perspective of postcolonial theory culture is therefore not reducible to either canonical forms of specialized aesthetic production or romantic narratives of organic popular traditions meant to authenticate ethnic and nationalist claims. Instead, Bhabha foregrounds what he considers to be the transnational and translational dimensions of culture: transnational, ‘because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement’ (247); translational, ‘because such spatial histories of displacement – now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of “global” media technologies – make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue’ (247, emphasis in the original). As the above characterizations and definitions make plain, postcolonial theory attends to culture as both source of domination and site and strategy of resistance in the context of Western colonialism and its aftermath. Regarding the former, the focus has fallen mainly on Western forms of knowing and patterns of representation across a large terrain of colonial textual production: scientific accounts, philosophical reflection, ethnographies, literary writing, travel reports, maps, photographs, cinema, etc. (Ahmad 1992; Ashcroft et al. 1989; Blunt and McEwan 2002; Chrisman and Williams 1993; Clark 1999; Foster 1999; Huggan 2000; Said 1978, 1993; Young 1990). In this respect postcolonial theory may be likened to a form of colonial discourse analysis aimed at deconstructing what Said (1978) has termed ‘orientalism’,Young (1990) ‘white mythologies’ and Coetzee (1989) ‘white writing’: texts in which the colonized ‘Other’ as distorted (dehumanized or exoticized), deprived of agency, and located outside history. Its textual interventions are therefore aimed at ‘disfiguring colonialist configurations and displacing the representations colonialism set in place, and [. . .] writing the colonial world back into the annals of world history’ (Parry 1997: 21). Or, in Chibber’s (2013: 30–31) apt characterization of this aspect of postcolonial theory’s critical vocation: As the cultures of imperialism persist, new and different sorts of knowledge must be produced to help decolonize consciousness. Postcolonial theory grapples with colonialism’s legacies and seeks alternative representations or knowledge that do not fall prey to colonialist knowledge’s misrepresentations and epistemic violence. This is why it is called post-colonial theory: it seeks theories (knowledges), ways of representing the world, and histories that critique rather than authorize or sustain imperialistic ways of knowing. The articulation of alternative representations, knowledges, and politics – of writing history from the vantage point of the ‘subaltern classes’ (Guha 1997), of ‘provincializing’ European social thought and renewing it ‘from and for the margins’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 16), of counteracting the derivative nature of the political futures offered by Third World nationalisms (Chatterjee 1986, 1993; Lazarus 1999), etc. – has been a major source of conceptual, empirical, and political innovation in postcolonial theory. By taking critical distance from Marxist analytics and nationalist politics, in particular, and by forging alliances with various postmodernist and post-structuralist agendas in the humanities (Bhabha 1994; Lazarus 2011), postcolonial theory has become a 369 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 369 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Desmond Painter vibrant site for producing and retooling concepts aimed at capturing culture and agency in quotidian and often aestheticized practices of resistance and transformation. The field is awash with evocative work on ‘alterity’, ‘ambivalence’, ‘appropriation’, ‘creolization’, ‘diaspora’, ‘exile’, ‘frontiers’, ‘hybridity’/‘hybridization’, ‘liminality’, ‘mixedness’, and ‘translation’ (Ahmed 2014; Ashcroft et al. 2007; Young 1995) – a veritable metaphysics of in-between-ness, mobility, and becoming that speaks of a social world dislocated from the assumptions of modern political thought and of ex-centric subjectivities that escape the injunctions of both modernist and traditionalist forms of political belonging. Whilst its critique of colonial reason, along with its development of a large corpus of concepts aimed at bringing traumatized and resistant modes of subjectivisation and cultural becoming into analytic focus, underscores the significance of postcolonial theory as a critical discourse, the field has also been the target of vociferous attacks (Dirlik 1994; Lazarus 2011; Parry 2004). Eagleton (1998), for example, claims that postcolonial theory not only homogenizes diverse geopolitical and cultural conditions but, ironically, globalizes a Eurocentric way of seeing. Postcolonial theory becomes, he claims, ‘postmodernism’s way of taking care of everything south of Palermo’ (Eagleton 1998: 24). Kennedy (2003: 17) in turn decries postcolonial theory’s ‘mind-numbing jargon, its often crude essentialisations of the West and the Other as binary opposites, and, above all, its deeply ingrained suspicion of historical thinking’. Likewise harsh, but from within the ambit of postcolonial theory itself, Loomba (1998: xv) characterizes it as an increasingly faddish, personality-driven enterprise, ‘essays by a handful of brand-name critics [who] have become more important than the field itself ’, which functions ‘in increasingly formulaic or reductive terms that are abstracted from concrete situations’. In other words, postcolonial theory risks becoming another (Western) intellectual commodity reflecting and serving established academic interests – of individuals, institutions, fields of study – in times of neoliberal globalization, rather than a theoretical practice which truly disrupts the political economy of knowledge production on a world scale. Equally serious are critiques of postcolonial theory’s politics. As Lazarus (2011: 14) points out, in postcolonial theory ‘Marxism has been obliterated as an enabling political horizon’. This distancing from Marxism, especially as an analytic of imperialism and colonialism, has exposed postcolonial theory to serious challenges regarding its relationship to capitalism (Chibber 2013; Lazarus 2011). First, postcolonial theory is criticized for neglecting the role of capitalism in impacting and even shaping the very cultures of colonialism it sets out to study. For Dirlik (1994), by sidestepping the foundational role that capitalism has played as ‘motive force’ in Western imperialism and colonial cultures, postcolonial theory indeed obscures, in an ideological fashion, that which joins the twenty-first century ‘to a long and yet unbroken history, wrongly supposed by postcolonial theory to have come to a close circa 1975 . . . the history of capitalist imperialism’ (Lazarus 2011: 15). Second, postcolonial theory is also criticized for neglecting to take its own conditions of production and reproduction into serious consideration, hence obscuring the way even seemingly critical academic discourses become subject to capitalist dynamics (Dirlik 1994; Loomba 1998). In fact, according to critics, postcolonial theory not only neglects the role of capitalism, but finds itself drawn into its very logic of global reproduction. To be sure, contemporary capitalism invests in exactly those things postcolonial theory tends to celebrate: cultural difference, the aesthetics of everyday life, and mobility; capitalism almost demands ‘hybridity’ and ‘liminality’ as it seeks ‘the creation of classes amenable to incorporation into or alliance with global capital’ (Dirlik 1994: 354). This means that postcolonial theory stands accused not simply of mystifying the relationship between culture and power in the contemporary world, but for becoming part of the cultural logic of late capitalism. This upends any celebratory account of the contribution 370 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 370 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Postcolonial theory postcolonial theory can make to critical psychology and vice versa from the outset, for as Parker (2006: 53) alludes to, an alliance with psychology easily redoubles the ways in which postcolonial theory ‘recruits and then, through a peculiar act of ventriloquism, speaks for the constituencies that global capitalism is now most keen to work with . . .’ Postcolonial theory and critical psychology Methodical engagements with postcolonial theory in critical psychology are still relatively rare. Hook (2005: 475) refers to postcolonial theory as a ‘theoretical resource’ and a ‘mode of critique’ which, unlike Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism, ‘remains notably absent’ in the self-understanding and development of critical psychology; ‘a broad sway of criticism and theory that has yet to find its way into psychological discourse’ (479). Macleod and Bhatia (2008: 576) start their overview of postcolonial theory and psychology with a similar disclaimer: ‘Postcolonial psychology is not in its infancy, but rather an embryonic stage . . . [T]here are currently few psychology scholars contributing to what is explicitly called postcolonial theory and research’. Finally, Frosh (2013: 141) claims that relationships between psychology and postcolonial theory ‘are mediated in a variety of ways, most of them uncomfortable’. Where this relationship has produced critique, it has primarily been directed at psychology; ‘the converse, a psychological engagement with postcolonialism, is relatively rare, given the stance of apolitical naivety that academic psychology commonly adopts’ (Frosh 2013: 141). Despite this, there is an obvious kinship between the objectives that drive the field of postcolonial studies and those that give shape to the project of critical psychology. First, postcolonial theory offers a potential vantage point from where critiques of Western psychology as ‘a cultural construction with specific historical roots’ (Danziger 1997: 181), and more pointedly, of its political effects within the context of imperialism and colonialism might be advanced (Bhatia 2002; Brickman 2003; Burman 2007; Khanna 2004). Second, postcolonial theory presents critical psychology with a rich set of theoretical resources and political strategies, frequently attuned to issues of subjectivity, colonial trauma, and liberation, which might be employed to open up new spaces and develop new modes of enquiry in critical psychology (Hook 2005, 2011; Oliver 2004; Ward 2013). Thirdly, and primarily through engaging with and further elaborating upon existing ‘psychological’ styles of critique within postcolonial theory (Fanon 1967; Memmi 1965; Nandy 1983), critical psychology might also contribute to the further development of postcolonial theory (Frosh 2013; Hook 2011). According to Frosh (2013: 141–142), then, ‘it can perhaps be claimed that psychology and postcolonial theory need each other’. Postcolonial theory and the critique of psychology The postcolonial critique of mainstream psychology focuses on how the discipline has ‘furthered the cause of European imperialism in colonial and postcolonial contexts’ (Bhatia 2002: 377), targeting in particular the discipline’s historical contributions to scientific racism (Richards 2012; Teo 2005), its ethnocentric and ‘orientalist’ depictions of colonial others (Bhatia 2002; Bulhan 1993; Burman 2007; Brickman 2003), its political role in colonial government in countries like South Africa and India (Butchart 1998; Kumar 2006; Louw 2002; Nandy 1983), the Western biases of its epistemologies and methodologies (Ozaki, David and Abelmann 2008; Smith 1999; Teo 2005), and the uneven, still Western-centred nature of its current ‘internationalisation’ (Staeuble 2006). Importantly, such critiques extend also to critical psychology, forcing it to interrogate the extent to which it likewise remains locked into the ‘eurocentric order of the social sciences’ (Staeuble 2006). Macleod and Wilbraham (2006), for example, base their appeal 371 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 371 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Desmond Painter for an engagement with postcolonial theory on the perceived need to problematize the relationship between local and global in critical psychology. In a critique directed specifically at Parker’s (e.g. 2002, 2005) programmatic contributions to the field, they argue that his ‘partial mentions and elisions around colonialism and post-colonialism, and his lack of sustained engagement with postcolonial theorists, mean that considerable amounts of analytical labour is required to ground Parker’s work in our local problematics’ (33). It is certainly crucial to dislocate critical psychology from its Western-centrism – by extending its gaze to incorporate non-Western or ‘subaltern’ experiences (e.g. Swartz 2005) and by forcing it to engage the contemporary world from the vantage point of regions that, instead of merely following in the developmental slipstream of the West, have arguably become forerunners of global cultural shifts and changing political futures (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Connell 2007). But whilst postcolonial theory offers tools with which to facilitate the dislocation of the unilateral development of even critical psychology within the political economy of global social science production and consumption, it also poses important limits in this regard. Postcolonial theory is itself located in (frequently elite) Western universities, from where it is often uncritically exported to non-Western contexts to ‘extend the field of academic discourse (in seminars, conferences, journals devoted to the elaboration of a particular esoteric terminology)’ (Parker 2006: 52). Of course, postcolonial theory can be ‘indigenized’ – but the same is true for Marxism, post-structuralism, and feminism. Whilst it may thus indeed stimulate the politics of location and representation and the development of critical alternatives to mainstream, Western approaches in psychology (Macleod and Bhatia 2008), it is certainly no panacea. In the words of Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2010), postcolonial rhetoric itself remains in need of decolonization. Postcolonial theory as resource for critical psychology For others, the appeal of postcolonial theory lies less in its capacity to add to the critique of psychology, and more in what it offers critical psychologists in terms of resources for critical analysis (Hook 2005, 2011; Ward 2013). The canonical texts of this tradition are understood to offer theoretical resources for studying identity, subjectivity, oppression and resistance – specifically in the context of the complex psychic and cultural landscapes of postcolonial societies – beyond the existing categories of both mainstream and critical psychology. Hook (2011), for example, relies heavily on the work of Homi Bhabha (1994), Frantz Fanon (1967), Steve Biko (1978), and others to develop a psychoanalytic account of racism which positions itself in critical relation to both experimental and discursive approaches to the phenomenon in social psychology. Whilst this amply demonstrates that resources from postcolonial theory can be used to develop sophisticated theory in critical psychology, there is also a danger inherent in this kind of work: psychology remains in a rather uncritical position vis-à-vis the political and the historical. In Hook’s work, for example, racism is clearly rendered a psychological phenomenon; and despite the fact that he presents his work programmatically as a ‘critical psychology of the postcolonial’ (Hook 2011), both the particular historical dynamics of the postcolonial society he invokes, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and specific aims of the activist-authors like Fanon and Biko he engages with, often serve as little more warrants for the development of a discourse on racism which becomes universal precisely on account of being translated into psychological terms. Rather than contributing to a critique of the psychologization of political discourse and the consolidation of speaking rights for psychological experts on matters of politics, then, ‘postcolonial critical psychology’ risks serving the agenda of an internationalization of psychology by other means. 372 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 372 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Postcolonial theory Critical psychology as postcolonial critique Critical psychology might also be mobilized to contribute to the further development of postcolonial theory and its associated critical agendas (Frosh 2013; Hook 2005, 2011; Ward 2013). According to Hook (2005: 475), ‘much postcolonial theory is explicitly psychological in both its concerns and its critical resources’; the further contribution of more precisely tailored psychological perspectives to postcolonial theory is therefore warranted. In particular, according to Ward (2013: 171), ‘the application of psychology to the study of postcolonialism offers a deeper understanding of the effects on the psyche of [. . .] those who experienced colonial traumas (including slavery and indenture, forced migration, and colonization)’. For Frosh (2013: 147) the relevance of psychoanalysis in particular to postcolonial theory may be attributed to the insight that colonial power is rooted in the ‘capacity of the colonizer to remove the source of subjecthood from the colonizer’ – a theme that can indeed be traced back to anticolonial critics and anticolonial and postcolonial theorists like Memmi (1965), Fanon (1967), Biko (1978), Nandy (1983), Spivak (1988), and Bhabha (1994). However, even though writers like Fanon and Biko employed ‘psychological’ modes of critique to describe the effects of colonialism and racism upon the colonized, their attempts to decolonize consciousness were forged as strategies of resistance within historically specific political movements, not in the interests of codifying a psychology of colonialism for its own sake. Appropriating these traditions of critique in the interest of fostering developments in academic psychology presents significant risks. Whereas it is undoubtedly laudable to think of possibilities of ‘developing modalities of psychological praxis directed towards promoting social justice and decolonisation’ (Stevens, Duncan and Sonn 2010: 20), terms like ‘trauma’ and ‘decolonization’ might become so thoroughly psychologized they merely operate to further mystify postcolonial theory’s relationship to capitalism and to advance psychology’s global academic interests. Conclusion Postcolonial theory presents critical psychology with a number of prospects and risks. On the prospective side, it challenges Western-centric patterns of production and consumption in critical psychology. On the risky side, it harbours political contradictions which are often abetted by an alliance with psychology, and which therefore makes ‘postcolonial critical psychology’ vulnerable to charges of pyschologization and even psychological imperialism. Academic psychologists therefore need to engage postcolonial theory reflexively, so that it does not merely serve to rebrand as ‘critical’ the continued production of colonizing psychologies, or to advance an all-too-easy postcolonialization of psychology and psychologization of postcolonial critique. Further reading Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (eds) (1995) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Bulhan, H. A. (1985) Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Plenum Press. Huggan, G. (ed.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Website Resources Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20 Postcolonial Studies: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20 Postcolonial Studies Association: http://www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/ Southern Psychologies blog: http://southernpsychologies.wordpress.com/ 373 6241-822-1pass-PIIIa-038-r02.indd 373 2/21/2015 8:37:08 AM Desmond Painter References Ahmad, A. (1992) In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. London:Verso. Ahmed, S. (2014) ‘Mixed orientations’, Subjectivity, 7(1), 92–109. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (2007) Postcolonial Studies:The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. 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