Postcolonial theory
Postcolonial Theory
A critical introduction
Leela Gandhi
For Indu Gandhi and Julia Briggs
Copyright © Leela Gandhi 1998
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Gandhi, Leela, 1996-- .
Postcolonial theory: a critical introduction
Bibliography.
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Contents
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 After colonialism
• The colonial aftermath • Postcolonial re-membering
• Gandhi and Fanon: the slave’s recovery
2 Thinking otherwise: a brief intellectual history
• Marxism, poststructuralism and the problem of
humanism • What is Enlightenment? • Descartes’
error • Nietzsche’s genealogy
3 Postcolonialism and the new humanities
• Provincialising Europe • Power, knowledge and
the humanities • Oppositional criticism and the new
humanities • The world and the book
• The postcolonial intellectual
4 Edward Said and his critics
• Enter Orientalism • The Said phenomenon
• Rethinking colonial discourse
5 Postcolonialism and feminism
• Imperialist feminisms: woman (in)difference
• Gendered subalterns: the (Other) woman in the attic
• Conflicting loyalties: brothers v. sisters
• Between men: rethinking the colonial encounter
6 Imagining community: the question of nationalism
• Good and bad nationalisms • Midnight’s children:
vii
viii
1
23
42
64
81
102
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
the politics of nationhood • A derivative discourse?
7 One world: the vision of postnationalism
• Globalisation, hybridity, diaspora • Mutual
transformations • Postnational utopias: toward an
ethics of hybridity
8 Postcolonial literatures
• Textual politics • Postcolonial texts, anti-colonial
politics
9 The limits of postcolonial theory
• The meta-narrative of colonialism • The end of
colonialism
Bibliography
Index
vi
122
141
167
177
189
Acknowledgments
I
wish to thank my colleagues at
the School of English, La Trobe University, for their patience
and support, and Elizabeth Weiss and others at Allen & Unwin
for their advice and enthusiasm. Thanks also to Dipesh
Chakrabarty who gave me access to his work and helped to
shape ideas, to David Lloyd whose writing, likewise, offered
crucial insights into the ‘problem’ of anti-colonial nationalisms,
and to Ruth Vanita whose polemical and stimulating resistance to the claims of postcolonial theory finds utterance in
the ‘critique’ aspect of this book.
I have gained enormously from conversations with Marion
Campbell, Joanne Finkelstein, Raju Pandey and Sanjay Seth,
who were generous with their time and friendship. To Bronte
Adams I owe profound thanks for her reservoir of faith and
encouragement; she brought, as always, both pleasure and
perspective to the activity of reading and writing.
My greatest debt is to Pauline Nestor, who read through
this manuscript and its drafts with care and patience. I learnt
much from her editorial and critical interventions, and her
hospitality and support considerably eased the rough passage
of this book.
vii
Preface
PREFACE
I
n the last decade postcolonialism has taken its place with theories such as poststructuralism,
psychoanalysis and feminism as a major critical discourse in
the humanities. As a consequence of its diverse and interdisciplinary usage, this body of thought has generated an
enormous corpus of specialised academic writing. Nevertheless,
although much has been written under its rubric, ‘postcolonialism’ itself remains a diffuse and nebulous term. Unlike
Marxism or deconstruction, for instance, it seems to lack an
‘originary moment’ or a coherent methodology. This book is
an attempt to ‘name’ postcolonialism—to delineate the academic and cultural conditions under which it first emerged and
thereby to point to its major preoccupations and areas of
concern.
There are correspondingly two parts to the book—the first
offers an account of postcolonialism’s academic and intellectual background, and the second elaborates the themes and
issues which have most engaged the attention of postcolonial
critics. In the main, the intellectual history of postcolonial
theory is marked by a dialectic between Marxism, on the one
hand, and poststructuralism/postmodernism, on the other. So,
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PREFACE
too, this theoretical contestation informs the academic content
of postcolonial analysis, manifesting itself in an ongoing debate
between the competing claims of nationalism and internationalism, strategic essentialism and hybridity, solidarity and
dispersal, the politics of structure/totality and the politics of
the fragment.
Critics on both sides of this divide are persuasive in their
claims, and compelling in their critique of theoretical opponents. Neither the assertions of Marxism nor those of
poststructuralism, however, can exhaustively account for the
meanings and consequences of the colonial encounter. While
the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology and
theorisation of cultural alterity/difference is indispensable to
postcolonial theory, materialist philosophies, such as Marxism,
seem to supply the most compelling basis for postcolonial
politics. Thus, the postcolonial critic has to work toward a
synthesis of, or negotiation between, both modes of thought.
In a sense, it is on account of its commitment to this project
of theoretical and political integration that postcolonialism
deserves academic attention.
Finally, there is the question of postcolonialism’s constituency—the cultural audience for whom its theoretical
disquisitions are most meaningful. In my reading of this field,
there is little doubt that in its current mood postcolonial theory
principally addresses the needs of the Western academy. It
attempts to reform the intellectual and epistemological exclusions of this academy, and enables non-Western critics located
in the West to present their cultural inheritance as knowledge.
This is, of course, a worthwhile project and, to an extent, its
efforts have been rewarded. The Anglo-American humanities
academy has gradually stretched its disciplinary boundaries to
include hitherto submerged and occluded voices from the
non-Western world. But, of course, what postcolonialism fails
to recognise is that what counts as ‘marginal’ in relation to
the West has often been central and foundational in the
non-West. Thus, while it may be revolutionary to teach Gandhi
as political theory in the Anglo-American academy, he is, and
has always been, canonical in India. Despite its good intenix
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
tions, then, postcolonialism continues to render non-Western
knowledge and culture as ‘other’ in relation to the normative
‘self’ of Western epistemology and rationality. Rarely does it
engage with the theoretical self-sufficiency of African, Indian,
Korean, Chinese knowledge systems, or foreground those cultural and historical conversations which circumvent the
Western world.
Nowhere is this book motivated by a desire for postcolonial
revenge. It does not seek finally to marginalise the West—to
render it an excluded and uneasy eavesdropper to cryptic
exchanges between, for instance, Africa and India. Its manifesto, if any, is this: that postcolonialism diversify its mode of
address and learn to speak more adequately to the world which
it speaks for. And, in turn, that it acquire the capacity to
facilitate a democratic colloquium between the antagonistic
inheritors of the colonial aftermath.
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1
After colonialism
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
AFTER COLONIALISM
I
n 1985 Gayatri Spivak threw a
challenge to the race and class blindness of the Western
academy, asking ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1985). By
‘subaltern’ Spivak meant the oppressed subject, the members
of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘subaltern classes’ (see Gramsci 1978),
or more generally those ‘of inferior rank’, and her question
followed on the work begun in the early 1980s by a collective
of intellectuals now known as the Subaltern Studies group.
The stated objective of this group was ‘to promote a systematic
and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of
South Asian studies’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). Further, they
described their project as an attempt to study ‘the general
attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this
is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or
in any other way’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). Fully alert to the
complex ramifications arising from the composition of subordination, the Subaltern Studies group sketched out its
wide-ranging concern both with the visible ‘history, politics,
economics and sociology of subalternity’ and with the occluded
‘attitudes, ideologies and belief systems—in short, the culture
informing that condition’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). In other words,
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
‘subaltern studies’ defined itself as an attempt to allow the
‘people’ finally to speak within the jealous pages of elitist
historiography and, in so doing, to speak for, or to sound the
muted voices of, the truly oppressed.
Spivak’s famous interrogation of the risks and rewards
which haunt any academic pursuit of subalternity drew attention to the complicated relationship between the knowing
investigator and the (un)knowing subject of subaltern histories.
For how, as she queried, ‘can we touch the consciousness of
the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what
voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1988
[1985], p. 285). Through these questions Spivak places us
squarely within the familiar and troublesome field of
‘representation’ and ‘representability’. How can the
historian/investigator avoid the inevitable risk of presenting
herself as an authoritative representative of subaltern consciousness? Should the intellectual ‘abstain from
representation?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 285) Which intellectual is equipped to represent which subaltern class? Is there
an ‘unrepresentable subaltern class that can know and speak
itself?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985] p. 285) And finally, who—if
any—are the ‘true’ or ‘representative’ subalterns of history,
especially within the frame of reference provided by the imperialist project?
The complex notion of subalternity is pertinent to any
academic enterprise which concerns itself with historically
determined relationships of dominance and subordination. Yet
it is postcolonial studies which has reponded with the greatest
enthusiasm to Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. Utterly
unanswerable, half-serious and half-parodic, this question circulates around the self-conscious scene of postcolonial texts,
theory, conferences and conversations. While some postcolonial critics use it to circumscribe their field of enquiry, others
use it to license their investigations. And, above all, the
ambivalent terrain of subaltern-speak has given rise to a host
of competing and quarrelsome anti- and postcolonial subalternities. There is little agreement within postcolonial studies
about the worst victims of colonial oppression, or about the
2
AFTER COLONIALISM
most significant anti-colonial insurgencies. Metropolitan South
Asian, African and West Indian poststructuralists battle Marxists at home; mainstream intellectuals within ‘settler’ colonies
struggle against the claims of indigenous intellectuals and
representatives; and feminist critics contest the masculinist
evasions of nationalist historiography. Thus, while Spivak concluded her provocative essay by categorically insisting that ‘the
subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 308),
postcolonial studies has come to represent a confusing and
often unpleasant babel of subaltern voices. How then, can we
begin to make sense of—or, indeed, take sense from—this
field?
Over the last decade, postcolonial studies has emerged both
as a meeting point and battleground for a variety of disciplines
and theories. While it has enabled a complex interdisciplinary
dialogue within the humanities, its uneasy incorporation of
mutually antagonistic theories—such as Marxism and
poststructuralism—confounds any uniformity of approach. As
a consequence, there is little consensus regarding the proper
content, scope and relevance of postcolonial studies. Disagreements arising from usage and methodology are reflected in the
semantic quibbling which haunts attempts to name postcolonial terminology. Whereas some critics invoke the hyphenated
form ‘post-colonialism’ as a decisive temporal marker of the
decolonising process, others fiercely query the implied chronological separation between colonialism and its aftermath—on
the grounds that the postcolonial condition is inaugurated with
the onset rather than the end of colonial occupation. Accordingly, it is argued that the unbroken term ‘postcolonialism’ is
more sensitive to the long history of colonial consequences.
On a different though related note, some theorists have
announced a preference for the existential resonance of ‘the
postcolonial’ or of ‘postcoloniality’ over the suggestion of
academic dogma which attaches to the notion of postcolonialism. In the main, the controversy surrounding postcolonial
vocabulary underscores an urgent need to distinguish and
clarify the relationship between the material and analytic
cognates of postcolonial studies. In its more self-reflexive
3
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
moments, postcolonial studies responds to this need by postulating itself as a theoretical attempt to engage with a particular
historical condition. The theory may be named ‘postcolonialism’, and the condition it addresses is best conveyed through
the notion of ‘postcoloniality’. And, whatever the controversy
surrounding the theory, its value must be judged in terms of
its adequacy to conceptualise the complex condition which
attends the aftermath of colonial occupation.
In this chapter I will examine some dimensions of, and
possibilities for, the relationship between postcoloniality and
postcolonialism in terms of the decolonising process. The
emergence of anti-colonial and ‘independent’ nation-States
after colonialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to
forget the colonial past. This ‘will-to-forget’ takes a number
of historical forms, and is impelled by a variety of cultural
and political motivations. Principally, postcolonial amnesia is
symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the
need to make a new start—to erase painful memories of
colonial subordination. As it happens, histories, much as families, cannot be freely chosen by a simple act of will, and newly
emergent postcolonial nation-States are often deluded and
unsuccessful in their attempts to disown the burdens of their
colonial inheritance. The mere repression of colonial memories
is never, in itself, tantamount to a surpassing of or emancipation from the uncomfortable realities of the colonial encounter.
In response, postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical
resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath.
It is a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of
revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past. The process of returning to the colonial scene
discloses a relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire
between coloniser and colonised. And it is in the unfolding of
this troubled and troubling relationship that we might start to
discern the ambivalent prehistory of the postcolonial condition.
If postcoloniality is to be reminded of its origins in colonial
oppression, it must also be theoretically urged to recollect the
compelling seductions of colonial power. The forgotten archive
4
AFTER COLONIALISM
of the colonial encounter narrates multiple stories of contestation and its discomfiting other, complicity.
In addition, the colonial archive preserves those versions of
knowledge and agency produced in response to the particular
pressures of the colonial encounter. The colonial past is not
simply a reservoir of ‘raw’ political experiences and practices
to be theorised from the detached and enlightened perspective
of the present. It is also the scene of intense discursive and
conceptual activity, characterised by a profusion of thought
and writing about the cultural and political identities of colonised subjects. Thus, in its therapeutic retrieval of the colonial
past, postcolonialism needs to define itself as an area of study
which is willing not only to make, but also to gain, theoretical
sense out of that past.
The colonial aftermath
The colonial aftermath is marked by the range of ambivalent
cultural moods and formations which accompany periods of
transition and translation. It is, in the first place, a celebrated
moment of arrival—charged with the rhetoric of independence
and the creative euphoria of self-invention. This is the spirit
with which Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children, initially describes the almost mythical
sense of incarnation which attaches to the coincidence of his
birth and that of the new Indian nation on the momentous
stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947: ‘For the next
three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had
prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos
ratified my authenticity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9). Predictably, and
as Rushdie’s Indian Everyman, Saleem Sinai, ultimately recognises, the colonial aftermath is also fraught by the anxieties
and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the
historical burden of expectation. In Sinai’s words, ‘I must work
fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes,
meaning—something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9). To a large extent, Saleem Sinai’s
5
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
obsessive ‘creativity’ and semantic profusion is fuelled by his
apprehension that the inheritors of the colonial aftermath must
in some sense instantiate a totally new world. Saleem Sinai’s
tumble into independent India is, after all, framed by the
crippling optimism of Nehru’s legendary narration of
postcoloniality: ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in
history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an
age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds
utterance . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 116).
To quote Jameson’s observations on postmodernism out of
context, we might say that the celebratory cyborg of
postcoloniality is also plagued by ‘something like an imperative
to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body
to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps impossible, dimensions’ (Jameson 1991, p. 39). In pursuing this imperative,
however, postcoloniality is painfully compelled to negotiate the
contradictions arising from its indisputable historical belatedness, its post-coloniality, or political and chronological
derivation from colonialism, on the one hand, and its cultural
obligation to be meaningfully inaugural and inventive on the
other. Thus, its actual moment of arrival—into independence—
is predicated upon its ability to successfully imagine and
execute a decisive departure from the colonial past.
Albert Memmi, the Tunisian anti-colonial revolutionary and
intellectual, has argued that the colonial aftermath is fundamentally deluded in its hope that the architecture of a new
world will magically emerge from the physical ruins of colonialism. Memmi maintains that the triumphant subjects of this
aftermath inevitably underestimate the psychologically tenacious hold of the colonial past on the postcolonial present. In
his words: ‘And the day oppression ceases, the new man is
supposed to emerge before our eyes immediately. Now, I do
not like to say so, but I must, since decolonisation has
demonstrated it: this is not the way it happens. The colonised
lives for a long time before we see that really new man’
(Memmi 1968, p. 88).
Memmi’s political pessimism delivers an account of
postcoloniality as a historical condition marked by the visible
6
AFTER COLONIALISM
apparatus of freedom and the concealed persistence of unfreedom. He suggests that the pathology of this postcolonial limbo
between arrival and departure, independence and dependence,
has its source in the residual traces and memories of subordination. The perverse longevity of the colonised is nourished,
in part, by persisting colonial hierarchies of knowledge and
value which reinforce what Edward Said calls the ‘dreadful
secondariness’ (Said 1989, p. 207) of some peoples and cultures. So also the cosmetic veneer of national independence
barely disguises the foundational economic, cultural and political damage inflicted by colonial occupation. Colonisation, as
Said argues, is a ‘fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair
results’ (1989, p. 207).
In their response to the ambiguities of national independence, writers like Memmi and Said insist that the colonial
aftermath does not yield the end of colonialism. Despite its
discouraging tone, this verdict is really framed by the quite
benign desire to mitigate the disappointments and failures
which accrue from the postcolonial myth of radical separation
from Europe. The prefix ‘post’, as Lyotard has written, elaborates the conviction ‘that it is both possible and necessary to
break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living
and thinking’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90). Almost invariably, this
sort of triumphant utopianism shapes its vision of the future
out of the silences and ellipses of historical amnesia. It is
informed by a mistaken belief in the immateriality and dispensability of the past. In Lyotard’s judgment, ‘this rupture is
in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is to
say, repeating it and not surpassing it’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90).
Thus, we might conclude that the postcolonial dream of
discontinuity is ultimately vulnerable to the infectious residue
of its own unconsidered and unresolved past. Its convalescence
is unnecessarily prolonged on account of its refusal to remember and recognise its continuity with the pernicious malaise of
colonisation.
If postcoloniality can be described as a condition troubled
by the consequences of a self-willed historical amnesia, then
the theoretical value of postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its
7
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
ability to elaborate the forgotten memories of this condition.
In other words, the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative
and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of
remembering and recalling the colonial past. The work of this
theory may be compared with what Lyotard describes as the
psychoanalytic procedure of anamnesis, or analysis—which
urges patients ‘to elaborate their current problems by freely
associating apparently inconsequential details with past situations—allowing them to uncover hidden meanings in their lives
and their behaviour’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 93). In adopting this
procedure, postcolonial theory inevitably commits itself to a
complex project of historical and psychological ‘recovery’. If
its scholarly task inheres in the carefully researched retrieval
of historical detail, it has an equally compelling political
obligation to assist the subjects of postcoloniality to live with
the gaps and fissures of their condition, and thereby learn to
proceed with self-understanding.
Salman Rushdie sheds light on this necessity in a wonderful
moment of betrayal and reconciliation in Midnight’s Children,
when the anti-hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, reveals the
cultural miscegenation and comic misrecognition of his celebrated birth. Early in the novel, and at the same time as Amina
Sinai struggles to produce her child in Dr Narlinkar’s Nursing
Home, a poor woman called Vanita suffers a neglected labour
in the ‘charity ward’. The child she is about to bear is the
unexpected consequence of an affair with an Englishman,
William Methwold, who boasts direct descent from a particularly imperialistic East India Company officer. When these
children are finally delivered, a somewhat crazed midwife
called Mary Pereira switches Amina’s and Vanita’s babies
around. Thus, Saleem Sinai, hailed by Nehru himself as the
child of independent India, is really the son of a reluctantly
departing coloniser. But this accident, as the adult Saleem
insists, is the allegorical condition of all those who inherit the
colonial aftermath: ‘In fact, all over the new India, the dream
we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118).
In his digressive self-narration, Saleem Sinai simultaneously
8
AFTER COLONIALISM
refuses the guilt of unauthenticity and the desire to withhold
the knowledge of his flawed genealogy. The Sinais, we are told,
eventually reconcile themselves to the fact of Methwold’s
bloodline, namely, to the hybrid inadequacies of their own
postcoloniality. As Saleem explains: ‘when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made
no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents.
In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that
we simply could not think our way out of our pasts . . .’
(Rushdie 1982, p. 118). We might modify this narrative
wisdom slightly to say that, perhaps, the only way out is by
thinking, rigorously, about our pasts.
Postcolonial re-membering
In his comments on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,
the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, announces that memory
is the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between
colonialism and the question of cultural identity. Remembering, he writes, ‘is never a quiet act of introspection or
retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together
of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the
present’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63). Bhabha’s account of the therapeutic agency of remembering is built upon the maxim that
memory is the submerged and constitutive bedrock of conscious existence. While some memories are accessible to
consciousness, others, which are blocked and banned—sometimes with good reason—perambulate the unconscious in
dangerous ways, causing seemingly inexplicable symptoms in
everyday life. Such symptoms, as we have seen, can best be
relieved when the analyst—or, in Bhabha’s case the theorist—
releases offending memories from their captivity. The
procedure of analysis–theory, recommended here, is guided by
Lacan’s ironic reversal of the Cartesian cogito, whereby the
rationalistic truth of ‘I think therefore I am’ is rephrased in
the proposition: ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where
I do not think’ (Lacan 1977, p. 166).
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
In the process of forging the reparative continuity between
cultural identity and the historical past, the theorist/analyst is
also required to recognise the qualitative difference between
two types of amnesia. The mind, as both Freud and Lacan
maintain, engages in either the better known neurotic ‘repression’—Verdrängung—of memory; or, and more devastatingly
in its psychotic ‘repudiation’—Verwerfung (see Bowie 1991,
pp. 107–9). If the activity of Verdrängung censors and thereby
disguises a vast reservoir of painful memories, the deceptions
of Verwerfung tend to transform the troublesome past into a
hostile delirium. The memories and images expelled through
the violence of repudiation enter into what Lacan describes as
a reciprocal and ‘symbolic opposition to the subject’ (Lacan
1977, p. 217). These phantasmic memories thus become simultaneously alien, antagonistic and unfathomable to the suffering
self.
To a large extent, the colonial aftermath combines the
obfuscations of both Verdrängung and Verwerfung. Its
unwillingness to remember what Bhabha describes as the
painful and humiliating ‘memory of the history of race and
racism’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63) is matched by its terrified
repudiation and utopian expulsion of this past. In response,
the theoretical re-membering of the colonial condition is
called upon to fulfil two corresponding functions. The first,
which Bhabha foregrounds as the simpler disinterment of
unpalatable memories, seeks to uncover the overwhelming
and lasting violence of colonisation. The second is ultimately
reconciliatory in its attempt to make the hostile and antagonistic past more familiar and therefore more approachable.
The fulfilment of this latter project requires that the images
expelled by the violence of the postcolonial Verwerfung be
reclaimed and owned again. This is, of course, another way
of saying that postcoloniality has to be made to concede its
part or complicity in the terrors—and errors—of its own
past. In Sara Suleri’s words: ‘To tell the history of another
is to be pressed against the limits of one’s own—thus culture
learns that terror has a local habitation and a name’ (Suleri
1992, p. 2).
10
AFTER COLONIALISM
Thus, we might conclude that the forgotten content of
postcoloniality effectively reveals the story of an ambivalent
and symbiotic relationship between coloniser and colonised.
Accordingly, the reparative proddings of postcolonial
theory/analysis are most successful when they are able to
illuminate the contiguities and intimacies which underscore the
stark violence and counter-violence of the colonial condition.
Albert Memmi has argued that the lingering residue of colonisation will only decompose if, and when, we are willing to
acknowledge the reciprocal behaviour of the two colonial
partners. The colonial condition, he writes, ‘chained the coloniser and the colonised into an implacable dependence,
moulded their respective characters and dictated their conduct’
(Memmi 1968, p. 45). Memmi’s predication of this perverse
mutuality between oppressor and oppressed is really an
attempt to understand the puzzling circulation of desire around
the traumatic scene of oppression. The desire of the coloniser
for the colony is transparent enough, but how much more
difficult it is to account for the inverse longing of the colonised.
How, as Memmi queries, ‘could the colonised deny himself so
cruelly . . . How could he hate the colonisers and yet admire
them so passionately?’ (1968, p. 45)
This situation of hate and desire described by Memmi poses
a problem for ‘oppositional’ postcolonial theory, which scavenges the colonial past for what Benita Parry describes as an
‘implacable enmity between native and invader’ (Parry 1987,
p. 32). The aim of this combative project is to promote, in
Parry’s words, ‘the construction of a politically conscious,
unified revolutionary Self, standing in unmitigated opposition
to the oppressor’ (p. 30). In fact, the colonial archive mitigates
these simple dichotomies through its disclosure of the complicating logic and reciprocity of desire. It shows that the
colonised’s predicament is, at least partly, shaped and troubled
by the compulsion to return a voyeuristic gaze upon Europe.
How should we as theorists respond to this gaze? How does
it fit into the theoretical economy of combat and enmity? We
might gesture toward some answers by saying that the battle
lines between native and invader are also replicated within
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
native and invader. And—as Memmi might say—the crisis
produced by this self-division is at least as psychologically
significant as those which attend the more visible contestations
of coloniser and colonised.
There is a savage account of such postcolonial schizophrenia in Vikram Seth’s epic novel, A Suitable Boy (1993). The
impossibly home-grown, or desi, shoemaker hero, Haresh, is
attempting to impress his suitability upon the heroine’s obnoxious Anglophile brother, Arun Mehra, who has just been
holding forth about the singular joys of Hamely’s toy shop.
Mehra claims to know the exact location of Hamley’s, ‘on
Regent Street, not far from Jaeger’s’. And yet, when Haresh—
of the brown-and-white co-respondent shoes—politely inquires
when the Mehras were last in the imperial capital, we discover
that they have never been to London. There is an awful pause,
long enough for our readerly sympathies to attach themselves
firmly on the side of the shoemaker, before Arun splutters,
‘but of course we’re going in a few months time’. Seth’s harsh
satire on the Arun Mehras exploits the stigma of unauthenticity which haunts the ‘Orient’s’ longing for its conquering other.
And yet, there is a pathos even in the Mehras’ excessive
Anglophilia. Homi Bhabha might say that they are ideologically interpellated by the restrictive confinement of knowledge
and value to the sovereign map of Europe. The Europe they
know and value so intimately is always elsewhere. Its reality
is infinitely deferred, always withheld from them. Worse still,
their questing pursuit of European plenitude, their desire to
own the coloniser’s world, requires a simultaneous disowning
of the world which has been colonised. Arun Mehra can only
sustain his apprentice brown-sahibship by speaking in the
language of his conquerors. A hard day in the office produces
the following ruminations: ‘The British knew how to run
things . . . they worked hard and they played hard. They
believed in command, and so did he . . . What was wrong
with this country was a lack of initiative. All the Indians
wanted was a safe job. Bloody pen pushers, the whole lot of
them’ (Seth 1993, p. 422). And so Arun Mehra loses the
respect of his author and his readers.
12
AFTER COLONIALISM
A more sympathetic gloss on the Mehras might suggest that
their postcolonial investment in Europe is also accompanied
by a progressive, and ultimately crippling, loss of ‘home’. In
an early poem called ‘Diwali’, Seth offers a literary preamble
to the Mehras through a considerably more sympathetic selfportrait (Seth 1994). This poem too considers the deleterious
effects of a colonial education—but with a greater sense of the
irresistible literary and cultural temptations of Europe. Its
ambivalent apotheosis to ‘Englishness’ enacts what Ashis
Nandy has eloquently described as the ‘intimate enmity’ of the
colonial condition (Nandy, 1983). Seth’s poem is spoken from
a cultural crossing where the privileges and passions attached
to the magic of ‘English’ literature are constantly undone and
unworked by an underlying sense of cultural transgression.
Traversing the genealogy of a Punjabi family from rural selfsufficiency to colonised civility, ‘Diwali’ chronicles the effort
it takes for six generations of Punjabi peasants to finally gain
‘the conqueror’s authoritarian seal’, by sending ‘a son to
school’ (Seth 1994 [1981], p. 64). Suddenly, family history is
rewritten as a faltering generational progress into coloniality.
The crisis turns on the paradox that what is eminently desirable through Englishness—‘a job . . . power’—is also, and at
the same time, rendered utterly undesirable, once again,
through the taint of ‘snobbery, the good life’ (1994 [1981],
p. 65) Likewise, and perhaps more painfully, the etymology of
the language that is loved so intimately by the poet belongs
elsewhere and at a distance, to another—sometimes hostile and
abusive—‘tongue’. This younger Seth ponders the impossibility
of crawling, willingly, beside the ‘meridian names’ of the
English poets ‘Jonson, Wordsworth’, in the face of Macaulay’s
prophesy: ‘one taste / Of Western wisdom “surpasses / All the
books of the East”’(1994 [1981], p. 65). Herein lies the
faultline of what Seth describes as the ‘separateness’ and ‘fear’
(1994 [1981], p. 65) attached to the self-conscious acquisition
of English. To speak in the desired way is, from now on, to
also learn how to speak against oneself. It is to concede, as
Seth does toward the end of this poem, that his ‘tongue is
warped’ (1994 [1981], p. 68).
13
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
To make theoretical sense of Seth’s literary illustration of
the colonised’s complicity in the colonial condition, we need
to allow for a more complex understanding of the mechanisms
of power. While the logic of power, as critics like Benita Parry
insist, is fundamentally coercive, its campaign is frequently
seductive. We could say that power traverses the imponderable
chasm between coercion and seduction through a variety of
baffling self-representations. While it may manifest itself in a
show and application of force, it is equally likely to appear as
the disinterested purveyor of cultural enlightenment and
reform. Through this double representation, power offers itself
both as a political limit and as a cultural possibility. If power
is at once the qualitative difference or gap between those who
have it and those who must suffer it, it also designates an
imaginative space that can be occupied, a cultural model that
might be imitated and replicated. The apparent political exclusivity of power is thus matched, as Foucault argues, by its
web-like inclusiveness:
Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads;
they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing
or exercising this power. They are not only its inert or
consenting target; they are also the elements of its articulation.
In other words, individuals are like vehicles of power, not its
points of application (Foucault 1980a, p. 98).
At an obvious level, Foucault’s analysis seems to convey the
quite basic idea that power is best able to disseminate itself
through the collaboration of its subjects. But Foucault’s more
subtle point is that such apparent ‘collaboration’ is really
symptomatic of the pervasive and claustrophobic omnipresence
of power. It is the unavoidable response to a condition where
power begins to insinuate itself both inside and outside the
world of its victims. Thus, if power is available as a form of
‘subjection’, it is also a procedure which is ‘subjectivised’
through, and within, particular individuals. According to
Foucault, there is no ‘outside’ to power—it is always, already,
everywhere.
14
AFTER COLONIALISM
In his book The Intimate Enemy (1983), Ashis Nandy
adapts Foucault’s analysis of power to account for the particularly deleterious consequences of the colonial encounter. For
Nandy, however, modern colonialism is not just a historical
illustration of Foucault’s paradigmatic analysis. It is, more
significantly, a sort of crucial historical juncture at which
power changes its style and first begins to elaborate the
strategies of profusion which Foucault theorises so
persuasively.
Nandy’s book builds on an interesting, if somewhat contentious, distinction between two chronologically distinct types
or genres of colonialism. The first, he argues, was relatively
simple-minded in its focus on the physical conquest of territories, whereas the second was more insidious in its
commitment to the conquest and occupation of minds, selves,
cultures. If the first bandit-mode of colonialism was more
violent, it was also, as Nandy insists, transparent in its selfinterest, greed and rapacity. By contrast, and somewhat more
confusingly, the second was pioneered by rationalists, modernists and liberals who argued that imperialism was really the
messianic harbinger of civilisation to the uncivilised world.
Despite Nandy’s compartmentalisation of militaristic and
civilisational imperialism, modern colonialism did, of course,
rely on the institutional uses of force and coercion. In addition,
it enacted another kind of violence by instituting ‘enduring
hierarchies of subjects and knowledges—the coloniser and the
colonised, the Occidental and the Oriental, the civilised and
the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, the developed
and the developing’ (Prakash 1995, p. 3). The effect of this
schematic reinscription of the colonial relationship is now well
acknowledged. The colonised was henceforth to be postulated
as the inverse or negative image of the coloniser. In order for
Europe to emerge as the site of civilisational plenitude, the
colonised world had to be emptied of meaning. Thus, as
Nandy writes:
This colonialism colonises minds in addition to bodies and it
releases forces within colonised societies to alter their cultural
15
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
priorities once and for all. In the process, it helps to generalise
the concept of the modern West from a geographical and
temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now
everywhere, within the West and outside, in structures and in
minds (Nandy 1983, p. xi).
Colonialism, then, to put it simply, marks the historical process
whereby the ‘West’ attempts systematically to cancel or negate
the cultural difference and value of the ‘non-West’.
Nandy’s psychoanalytic reading of the colonial encounter
evokes Hegel’s paradigm of the master–slave relationship, and
he is not alone in this implicit theoretical debt to Hegel. In
fact, whenever postcolonial theory queries what Irene Gendzier
describes as ‘the Other—directed nature of the reactions of the
colonised and his need to struggle to free himself of this
externally determined definition of Self’ (Gendzier 1973,
p. 23), it evokes categories which are reminiscent of Hegel’s
paradigms.
Hegel’s brief but influential notes on ‘Lordship and Bondage’ are framed by the theorem that human beings acquire
identity or self-consciousness only through the recognition of
others (see Hegel 1910, vol. 1, pp. 175–88). Each Self has
before it another Self in and through which it secures its
identity. Initially, there is an antagonism and enmity between
these two confronting selves; each aims at the cancellation or
death and destruction of the Other. Hence, and temporarily, a
situation arises where one is merely recognised while the other
recognises. However, the proper end of history—viz. the complete and final revelation of historical truth—requires that the
principle of recognition be both mutual and universal. Charles
Taylor captures Hegel’s conclusions in the following aphorism:
‘for what I am, is recognition of man as such and therefore
something that in principle should be extended to all’ (Taylor
1975, p. 153). As harsh realities would have it, though, it
doesn’t quite work out this way. The peculiarly human history
of servitude, or the historical subordination of one self to
another, belies the Hegelian expectation of mutuality.
In his philosophical elaboration of the ‘master–slave relationship’, Hegel maintains that the master and slave are,
16
AFTER COLONIALISM
initially, locked in a compulsive struggle-unto-death. This goes
on until the weak-willed slave, preferring life to liberty, accepts
his subjection to the victorious master. When these two antagonists finally face each other after battle, only the master is
recognisable. The slave, on the other hand, is now a dependent
‘thing’ whose existence is shaped by, and as, the conquering
Other. Or, as Sartre writes of the slave in his monumental
reworking of Hegel’s summary text: ‘I am possessed by the
Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness,
causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it
as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of
what I am’ (Sartre 1969; cited in Gendzier 1973, p. 31).
The postcolonial recovery of the colonial condition, which
we have been discussing, is, in the first place, an attempt to
reveal the coloniser and the colonised as a historical incarnation of Hegel’s master and slave. But the task of postcolonial
theoretical retrieval cannot stop there. For if history is the
record of failure, it also bears testimony to the slave’s refusal
to concede the master’s existential priority. As Nandy tells us,
it is crucial for postcolonial theory to take seriously the idea
of a psychological resistance to colonialism’s civilising mission.
To this end, it needs historically to exhume those defences of
mind which helped to turn the West ‘into a reasonably manageable vector’ (Nandy 1983, p. xiii). In this regard it is worth
recalling that the slave figure in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
also makes the following revolutionary pronouncement: ‘I lay
claim to this being which I am; that is, I wish to recover it,
or, more exactly, I am the project of the recovery of my being’
(cited in Gendzier 1973, p. 31).
Gandhi and Fanon: the slave’s recovery
Colonialism does not end with the end of colonial occupation.
However, the psychological resistance to colonialism begins
with the onset of colonialism. Thus, the very notion of a
‘colonial aftermath’ acquires a doubleness, inclusive of both
the historical scene of the colonial encounter and its dispersal,
17
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
in David Lloyd’s words, ‘among the episodes and fragments
of a history still in process’ (Lloyd 1993b, p. 11). We have
already considered the implications of a theoretical alignment
between the adverse symptoms of the ‘colonial past’ and the
‘postcolonial present’. It is also necessary, as Gyan Prakash
writes, ‘to fully recognise another history of agency and knowledge alive in the dead weight of the colonial past’ (Prakash
1995, p. 5). The task of this ‘full recognition’ requires that
acts of anti-colonial resistance be treated not only as theorisable but, as Prakash would have it, as fully comprehensive,
fully conceptualised ‘theoretical events’ in their own right.
Thus, Prakash insists, we might start to ascertain the first
elaborations of a postcolonial theory itself in historical figures
like Gandhi and Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial Algerian
revolutionary. In so doing, we might be guided by Benita
Parry’s warning against ‘the tendency to disown work done
within radical traditions other than the most recently enunciated heterodoxies, as necessarily less subversive of the
established order’ (Parry 1987, p. 27).
Prakash’s brilliant juxtaposition of Gandhi and Fanon
invites further attention, for in these two figures we find two
radically different and yet closely aligned elaborations of
postcolonial self-recovery. The differences between Gandhi and
Fanon are stark and self-evident. If Gandhi speaks in an
anachronistic religio-political vocabulary, Fanon’s idiom is shot
through with Sartre’s existential humanism. If Gandhi’s
encounter with British imperialism generates a theology of
non-violence, Fanon’s experience of French colonialism produces a doctrinaire commitment to the redemptive value of
collective violence. And if Gandhi enters Indian national politics in middle age, the more impetuous Fanon is dead, after
a career of anti-colonial resistance, at the age of 36.
Yet, there are significant similarities between these two
revolutionary thinkers. Both of them complete their education
in the colonising country—Gandhi to become a reluctant
lawyer and Fanon a despairing psychiatrist—and both prepare
the theoretical underpinnings of their anti-colonialism in a
third country, Gandhi in South Africa and Fanon, despite his
18
AFTER COLONIALISM
Martiniquian roots, in Algeria. It is probably for this reason
that neither Fanon’s nor Gandhi’s resistance to colonialism is
matched by a corresponding nationalism. Both remain wary
of the national elite and eventually seek, although equally
unsuccessfully, the disbanding of nationalist parties in favour
of a more decentralised polity closer to the needs and aspirations of the vast and unacknowledged mass of the Indian and
Algerian peasantry. In addition to these theoretical contiguities,
Gandhi and Fanon are united in their proposal of a radical
style of total resistance to the totalising political and cultural
offensive of the colonial civilising mission. To this end, both
men carefully elaborate Nandy’s notion of a psychological
resistance to colonialism. As Fanon wrote toward the end of
his revolutionary manifesto in The Wretched of the Earth:
‘Total liberation is that which concerns all sectors of the
personality’ (Fanon 1990, p. 250).
The principle underlying Fanon’s project of ‘total liberation’
requires the enslaved figure of the colonised to refuse the
privilege of recognition to the colonial ‘master’. In Fanon’s
words: ‘Colonialism wants everything to come from it. But the
dominant psychological feature of the colonised is to withdraw
before any invitation of the conqueror’s’ (Fanon 1965, p. 63).
Fanon’s image of a resolute colonised subject politely declining
the primacy of Europe appears as the figurative masthead to
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj—a polemical critique of Western
civilisation written in 1909. Whereas Fanon is optimistic and
confident about the colonised’s ability to valiantly resist the
cultural viscosity of Europe, Gandhi’s prickly text laments the
Indian moha, or desire for the superficial glitter of ‘modern’
civilisation. In his words: ‘We brought the English, and we
keep them. Why do you forget that our adoption of their
civilisation makes their presence in India at all possible? Your
hatred against them ought to be transferred to their civilisation’ (Gandhi 1938, p. 66).
In their categorical disavowal of cultural colonialism, both
thinkers attempt, albeit through very different strategies, to
transform anti-colonial dissent into a struggle for creative
autonomy from Europe. And it is this quite specific emphasis
19
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
on creativity rather than authenticity which ultimately prevents
both from espousing a nostalgic and uncritical return to the
‘pre-colonial’ past. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
resounds with an unequivocal ‘no’ to the ‘question of a return
to nature’ (Fanon 1990, p. 253). So also Gandhi’s interrogation
of the West is matched by a series of quite heterodox—even
heretical—revisions of religious and social tradition. Both
thinkers are shaped by an obsession with the rhetoric of
futurity. Fanon’s revolutionary narrative moves with a compelling urgency toward the recognition that ‘the real leap consists
in introducing invention into existence’ (Fanon 1967, p. 229).
We might also recall that Gandhi treats his anti-colonial
interventions as scientific ‘experiments’, geared toward the
discovery of a hitherto unprecedented political style. While
fully acknowledging the complicity or infection of the colonised subject, both men treat the project of national liberation
as an imaginative pretext for cultural self-differentiation from
Europe and, thereby, as an attempt to exceed, surpass—even
improve upon—the claims of Western civilisation. As Fanon
writes in his address to the colonised world: ‘Let us try to
create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of
bringing to triumphant birth’ (Fanon 1990, p. 252). This
defiant invitation to alterity or ‘civilisational difference’ carries
within it an accompanying refusal to admit the deficiency or
lack which is, as we have seen, the historical predicament of
those who have been rendered into slaves.
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks invokes both Hegel and
Sartre to diagnose the condition of the colonised slave as a
symptom of ‘imitativeness’. In Hegel’s paradigm, the slave must
ultimately turn away from the master to forge the meaning of
his existence in labour. He can only regain his integrity by
working over the density of matter to which he is henceforth
confined. However, as Fanon argues, the racialisation of the
master–slave relationship breeds a new and disabling discontent. For whenever the black slave faces the white master, s/he
now experiences the disruptive charge of envy and desire. The
Negro, Fanon writes, ‘wants to be like the master. Therefore
he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the
20
AFTER COLONIALISM
slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.
Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the
object’ (Fanon 1967, p. 221 note). As both Fanon and Gandhi
were to recognise, the slave’s hypnotised gaze upon the master
condemned this figure to a derivative existence. Herein lay the
creative failure of a less than total liberation. In Gandhi’s
extravagant prose, the problem was this: ‘that we want the
English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s
nature but not the tiger . . .’ (Gandhi 1938, p. 30). The only
way forward, accordingly, was to render the tiger undesirable.
Gandhi’s and Fanon’s powerful attempt to demystify the
claims of Western civic society forces the allegorical figure of
the slave to consider its own history as the terrible consequence
of the master’s privileges. Rather than see itself as, or in the
image of, the master, the slave is now urged to see itself beside
the master. It is compelled, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s words,
to envision ‘the image of post-Enlightenment man tethered to,
not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonised
man, that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his
boundaries . . . disturbs and distorts the very time of his being’
(Bhabha 1994, p. 44). It is with this agenda in mind, that
Gandhi and Fanon rewrite the narrative of Western modernity
to include the repressed and marginalised figures of its victims.
In this revised version, industrialisation tells the story of
economic exploitation, democracy is splintered by the protesting voices of the suffragettes, technology combines with
warfare, and the history of medicine is attached relentlessly by
Fanon to the techniques of torture. If Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj
everywhere discerns the structural violence of Western ‘modernity’, Fanon is equally unsparing in his denunciation of the
European myths of progress and humanism: ‘When I search
for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only
a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders’ (Fanon 1990, p. 252). Read together, the Gandhian and
Fanonian critiques of Western civilisation sketch the ethical
inadequacy and undesirability of the colonial ‘master’ whose
cognition, as Nandy writes, ‘has to exclude the slave except
as a “thing” ’ (Nandy 1983, p. xvi). There is no space for
21
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
desire, as Fanon and Gandhi struggle to convey, in the existential limitations of a condition whose ‘humanity’ is founded
on the inhumane pathology of racism and violence.
We know, of course, that the operations of desire are rarely
informed by the reflections of judgment; Seth’s poet-narrator
in ‘Diwali’ desires Western knowledge despite his knowledge
of Western imperialism. In a sense, it is irrelevant to ask
whether Gandhi and Fanon successfully cured the colonised
world of its perverse and self-defeating longing for the conqueror. Nor must we feel compelled to condone their fierce
and uncompromising rejection of all things European. Nevertheless, the careful retrieval of figures like Gandhi and Fanon
is instructive to postcolonial theory. For when this theory
returns to the colonial scene, it finds two stories: the seductive
narrative of power, and alongside that the counter-narrative of
the colonised—politely, but firmly, declining the come-on of
colonialism. It is important to re-member both—to remember,
in other words, that postcoloniality derives its genealogy from
both narratives. We might conclude this introduction by
remembering a possibly apocryphal story about Gandhi. Journalistic legend has it that once, when in England, Gandhi was
asked the following question by an earnest young reporter:
‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of modern civilisation?’. In
some versions of the story Gandhi laughed heartily, in others,
became very serious, before replying: ‘I think it would be a
very good idea’.
22
2
Thinking otherwise: a brief
intellectual history
THINKING OTHERWISE
H
aving sketched out the overarching preoccupations and obligations of postcolonial studies,
we might now turn our attention to the intellectual history of
this new discipline. Although postcolonial theory has been
instrumental, over the last fifteen years or so, in bringing a
new prominence to matters of colony and empire, it is by no
means unique or inaugural in its academic concern with the
subject of imperialism. So too it is methodologically and
conceptually indebted to a variety of both earlier and more
recent ‘Western’ theories. The purpose of this chapter is to
situate postcolonialism within a contemporary and metropolitan theoretical landscape, and to indicate some of its
theoretical influences and points of departure.
Marxism, poststructuralism and the problem of humanism
In the excitement over what appears to be a ‘new’ focus on
colonial issues, students of postcolonialism tend to ignore (or
forget) the long history of specifically Marxist anti-imperialist
thought. Ever since the first decade of this century, Marxist
thinkers—such as Lenin, Bukharin and Hilferding, to name a
23
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
few—have been urging the Western world to concede that the
story of colonialism is a necessary sub-plot to the emergence
of market society in Europe, and to the concomitant globalisation of capital (see Brewer 1980; Hobsbawm 1987; Warren
1980). And yet, despite the rigorous and wide-ranging work
conducted under its aegis, the Marxist engagement with imperialism has secured only a very limited constituency. Few critics
have continued an exclusively Marxist interrogation of empire,
and those who have, are vehemently opposed to the prevailing
postcolonialist orthodoxy. Aijaz Ahmad, for example, has been
especially vociferous in his insistence upon the theoretical and
political incompatibility between Marxist and postcolonialist
positions. As he writes: ‘we should speak not so much of
colonialism or postcolonialism but of capitalist modernity,
which takes the colonial form in particular places and at
particular times’ (Ahmad 1995, p. 7). Postcolonial analysis, in
turn, rarely acknowledges a genealogical debt to its Marxist
predecessors—in fact, its engagement with Marxist theory is
often explicitly antagonistic. In this it is guided, albeit mistakenly, by the assumption that Marxism has failed to direct a
comprehensive critique against colonial history and ideology.
Jameson is instructive in his account of the postcolonialist
bias against Marxism:
The very widely held contemporary belief—that, following the
title of Walter Rodney’s influential book, capitalism leads . . .
to ‘the development of underdevelopment’, and that imperialism systematically cripples the growth of its colonies and its
dependent areas—this belief is utterly absent from the first
moment of Marxist theories of imperialism and is indeed
everywhere contradicted by them, where they raise the matter
at all (Jameson 1990, p. 47).
For reasons of its own very specific reading of the developments of capitalism in the late nineteenth century, Marxism
has been unable to theorise colonialism as an exploitative
relationship between the West and its Others. Accordingly—as
Jameson concedes—it has also neglected to address sympathetically the historical, cultural and political alterity, or difference,
24
THINKING OTHERWISE
of the colonised world and, in so doing, it has relinquished
its potential appeal to postcolonialist thought. Where, then,
does postcolonialism begin? Where, in other words, does it
seek its appropriate intellectual inheritance?
While the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978 is
commonly regarded as the principal catalyst and reference
point for postcolonial theory, insufficient attention is given to
the fact that this ur-text (and its followers) evolved within a
distinctly poststructuralist climate, dominated in the AngloAmerican academy by the figures of Foucault and Derrida.
Indeed, Said’s own work draws upon a variety of Foucauldian
paradigms. In particular, Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as
elaborated in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline
and Punish, informs Said’s attempt to isolate the principle and
workings of Orientalism. In addition, Gayatri Spivak first
gained admission to the literary-critical pantheon through her
celebrated translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1977.
And much of her subsequent work has been preoccupied with
the task of dialogue and negotiation with and between Derrida
and Foucault. Arguably, then, it is through poststucturalism
and postmodernism—and their deeply fraught and ambivalent
relationship with Marxism—that postcolonialism starts to
distil its particular provenance.
Some hostile critics have been quick to attribute the links
between postcolonialism and poststructuralism to temporal
contingency and, therefore, to academic fashion alone. And in
truth the alliance with poststructuralism has indeed enabled
postcolonialism to gain a privileged foothold within the metropolitan academic mainstream. Poststructuralist thought has,
for example, provided a somewhat more substantial impetus
to the postcolonial studies project through its clear and confidently theorised proposal for a Western critique of Western
civilisation. In pursuing the terms of this critique, postcolonialism has also inherited a very specific understanding of Western
domination as the symptom of an unwholesome alliance between power and knowledge. Thus, in a shift from the
predominantly economic paradigms of Marxist thought,
postcolonialism has learnt—through its poststructuralist par25
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
entage—to diagnose the material effects and implications of
colonialism as an epistemological malaise at the heart of
Western rationality. It has also learnt to be suspicious of ‘the
problem of universalism/Eurocentrism that was inherent in
Marxist (or for that matter liberal) thought itself’
(Chakrabarty 1993, p. 422). According to Dipesh
Chakrabarty, it was the recognition of this problem which led
the postcolonialist historians engaged in the Subaltern Studies
collective to be ‘receptive to the critiques of marxist historicism—in particular to the “incredulity toward grand
narratives”—that French post-structuralist thinkers popularised in the English-language world in the 1980s’ (1993, p.
422).
For all its pondering on questions of ‘difference’, however,
Derrida’s and Foucault’s work does not really address the
problem of colonialism directly. It is only in an early essay,
‘George Canguilhem: philosopher of error’, that Foucault
explicitly equates European knowledges and the mirage of
Western rationality with the ‘economic domination and political hegemony’ of colonialism (Foucault 1980b, p. 54).
Similarly, Derrida’s ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of
philosophy’, (Derrida 1974) stands out for its suggestion that
the very structure of Western rationality is racist and imperialist. Both essays are, however, typical of Derrida’s and
Foucault’s oeuvre in their unhesitating challenge to the universal validity of Western culture and epistemology, and it is in
this challenge, as Spivak tells us, that postcolonialist thought
secures its desired intellectual moorings:
Where I was first brought up—when I first read Derrida I
didn’t know who he was, I was very interested to see that he
was actually dismantling the philosophical tradition from
inside rather than from outside, because of course we were
brought up in an education system in India where the name
of the hero of that philosophical system was the universal
human being, and we were taught that if we could begin to
approach an internationalisation of that human being, then
we could be human. When I saw in France someone was
actually trying to dismantle the tradition which told us what
26
THINKING OTHERWISE
would make us human, that seemed rather interesting too
(Spivak 1990, p. 7).
What is the tradition that Spivak is speaking of here? How
is it dismantled through the poststructuralist intervention? And
how does the liberated understanding of what it means to be
a human being reflect upon the postcolonial studies project?
We might begin to address some of these questions by stopping
to examine the shibboleth of Western ‘humanism’—which is
also the name that Derrida and Foucault give to the tradition
they seek to dismantle.
‘Humanism’ is a highly contentious term. As Bernauer and
Mahon point out, for example, ‘Christianity, the critique of
Christianity, science, anti-science, Marxism, existentialism, personalism, National Socialism, and Stalinism have each won the
label “humanism” for a time’ (Bernauer & Mahon 1994, pp.
141–2). These various humanisms are, however, unified in their
belief that underlying the diversity of human experience it is
possible, first, to discern a universal and given human nature,
and secondly to find it revealed in the common language of
rationality. In defence of this belief, Marxist exponents of
humanistic principles, such as Noam Chomsky, Fredric Jameson and Jurgen Habermas have argued that humanism holds
out the possibility of a rational and universal consensus between responsible individuals with regard to the
conceptualisation of a humane, progressive and just social
order. In contrast, poststructuralist and postmodernist antihumanists maintain that any universal or normative
postulation of rational unanimity is totalitarian and hostile to
the challenges of otherness and difference.
For these critics, the very ideas of ‘rationality’ and ‘human
nature’ are historical constructions and therefore subject to
historical investments and limitations. This view is self-evidently appealing to the postcolonial concern with cultural
diversity. At the same time, and somewhat painfully for
postcolonial studies, the debate between Marxist humanists
and poststructuralist anti-humanists remains unresolved on the
subject of ethics and politics. Political mobilisation and ethical
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principles, as Marxist critics forcefully argue, necessarily
require some sort of cross-cultural consensus. For a
postmodern thinker like Lyotard, however, the very process of
reaching consensus is vitiated by a ‘conversational imperialism’. According to Lyotard, the participants in an
ethico-political dialogue are rarely equal, and almost never
equally represented in the final consensus. Insofar as this
dialogue is already projected towards some predetermined
end—such as justice or rationality—it is always conducted, as
Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, ‘within a field of possibilities that
is already structured from the very beginning in favour of
certain outcomes’ (Chakrabarty 1995, p. 757). One of the
participants invariably ‘knows better’ than the other, whose
world view, in turn, must be modified or ‘improved’ in the
reaching of consensus. The heterogeneity of thought, Lyotard
would argue, can only ever be preserved through the refusal
of unanimity and the search for a radical ‘discensus’. Thus,
and we will return to this problem in subsequent chapters,
postcolonial studies critics are left to ponder the apparent
chasm between the poststructuralist insistence on the impossibility of a universal human nature and the opposing Marxist
verdict on the impossibility of a politics which lacks the
principle of ‘solidarity’.
In understanding postcolonialism’s vexed relationship with
humanism, it is important to recognise that postcolonial studies inherits two chronologically distinct, if ideologically
overlapping, approaches to the history and consequences of
humanism. The first is concerned with humanism as a cultural
and educational program which began in Renaissance Italy in
about the mid-sixteenth century and evolved progressively into
the area of studies we now practise and preach as the humanities. The second distinctly poststructuralist approach brings a
more precise meaning and imprecise chronology to bear upon
the notion of humanism. It identifies humanism with the
theory of subjectivity and knowledge philosophically inaugurated by Bacon, Descartes and Locke, and scientifically
substantiated by Galileo and Newton. This philosophical and
scientific revolution is said to find its proper fulfilment in the
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THINKING OTHERWISE
eighteenth century, where it comes to be embraced as the
Enlightenment or Aufklärung.
There are vast differences between the literary humanism
of sixteenth-century Florence and the scientific humanism of
eighteenth-century Europe. Nevertheless, both types of humanism are unanimous in their anthropocentricism or categorical
valorisation of the human subject. Man, as Diderot observes
in the mood of his Renaissance predecessor Petrarch, ‘is the
single place from which we must begin and to which we must
refer everything . . . It is the presence of man which makes
the existence of beings meaningful’ (cited in Gay 1977, p. 162).
Correspondingly, the status of human-ness is intimately bound
up with questions of knowledge. Both thinkers presuppose a
symbiotic and reciprocal relationship between what man is
(and I use ‘man’ advisedly) and what man knows—with one
crucial difference of emphasis. Renaissance humanism and its
inheritors insist that man is made human by the things he
knows, that is, by the curricular content of his knowledge and
education. Accordingly, it is predominantly concerned with the
role and function of pedagogy. In contrast, Enlightenment
humanism and its legatees take ‘humanity’ to be a function of
the way in which man knows things. Its concern, accordingly,
is with the structure of epistemology or the basis and validity
of knowledge. The Enlightenment, as Charles Taylor writes,
generates ‘an epistemological revolution with anthropological
consequences’ (Taylor 1975, p. 5). It changes the way in which
we have come to know the notion of Self. It furnishes, in other
words, the modern understanding of subjectivity.
While both of the humanisms we have been discussing
assert that all human beings are, as it were, the measure of
all things, they simultaneously smuggle a disclaimer into their
celebratory outlook. The humanist valorisation of man is
almost always accompanied by a barely discernible corollary
which suggests that some human beings are more human than
others—either on account of their access to superior learning,
or on account of their cognitive faculties. The historical logic
of these humanist subclauses is illustrated in Thomas
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Babington Macaulay’s infamous minute of 1835 regarding the
introduction of English education in colonial India:
The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed
fully admitted by those members of the committee who
support the oriental plan of education . . . It is, I believe, no
exaggeration to say that all the historical information which
has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable
than what may be found in the paltry abridgments used at
preparatory schools in England (cited in Said 1983, p. 12).
Writing in a similar vein, the Reverend J. Tucker attributes
India’s civilisational inferiority to the pathological deficiency
of the native mind, namely, to the ‘dulness [sic] of their
comprehension’ (cited in Viswanathan 1989, p. 6). Reading
backward from this nineteenth-century debate on colonial
education, we might say that the underside of Western humanism produces the dictum that since some human beings are
more human than others, they are more substantially the
measure of all things. With this in mind, we can begin to direct
a poststructuralist gaze upon Diderot’s contemporaries and
forefathers.
What is Enlightenment?
In November 1784, the liberal German periodical Berlinische
Monatschrift published a response to the question ‘Was ist
Aufklärung’, that is, ‘What is Enlightenment?’. The respondent
was none other than the philosopher Immanuel Kant, considered by many to represent the high point of Enlightenment
rationality. In this brief and occasional essay—by no means a
major piece of work—Kant argues that the Enlightenment
offers mankind a way out of, or exit from, immaturity into
the improved condition of maturity. The Enlightenment, he
maintains, is the possibility whereby man philosophically
acquires the status and capacities of a rational and adult being.
Some two centuries after the publication of Kant’s confident
response, Foucault revisits the scene of the 1784 Berlinische
Monatschrift to reiterate the question: ‘What is Enlighten30
THINKING OTHERWISE
ment?’. By resuscitating this question, Foucault strategically
suggests that Kant’s initial response and, indeed, the very
project of Enlightenment rationality, is far from conclusive.
The historical event of the Enlightenment, he argues, ‘did not
make us mature adults . . . we have not reached that stage
yet’ (Foucault 1984a, p. 49). In making this statement,
Foucault is not so much mourning our collective failure to
become adults, as gesturing toward our philosophical and
ethical obligation to exceed the limits of Kantian maturity, or
what he calls the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment. If Kantian
philosophy instructs us to be, know, do, and hope in universal
ways, Foucault’s response is to interrogate and historicise ‘the
contingency that has made us what we are’. It is only through
this process that we might liberate the alterity and diversity
of human existence or, in his words, discover ‘the possibility
of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do or
think’ (Foucault 1984a, p. 46). To this end, Foucault asks
many questions of Kant and the history of Enlightenment
rationality. One such question, especially meaningful for
postcolonial purposes, focuses on Kant’s suggestion that the
Enlightenment holds out the possibility of ‘maturity’ for all
humanity, for ‘mankind’ at large:
A . . . difficulty appears here in Kant’s text, in his use of the
word ‘mankind’, Menschheit. The importance of this word in
the Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to
understand that the entire human race is caught up in the
process of Enlightenment? In that case, we must imagine
Enlightenment as a historical change that affects the political
and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or
are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what
constitutes the humanity of human beings? (my emphasis;
Foucault 1984a, p. 35)
Through his seemingly open-ended interrogation, Foucault
establishes that the Kantian conception of ‘mankind’ is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Instead of reflecting the
radical heterogeneity of human nature, it restricts the ostensibly universal structures of human existence to the normative
31
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
condition of adult rationality—itself a value arising from the
specific historicity of European societies. It follows that this
account of ‘humanity’ precludes the possibility of dialogue
with other ways of being human and, in fact, brings into
existence and circulation the notion of the ‘non-adult’ as
‘inhuman’. Needless to say, this move also instantiates and sets
into motion a characteristically pedagogic and imperialist hierarchy between European adulthood and its childish, colonised
Other.
Postcolonial theory recognises that colonial discourse typically rationalises itself through rigid oppositions such as
maturity/immaturity, civilisation/barbarism, developed/developing, progressive/primitive. Critics like Ashis Nandy have
especially drawn attention to the colonial use of the homology
between childhood and the state of being colonised. In this
regard, V. G. Kiernan’s observations about the African experience of colonialism are generally revealing:
The notion of the African as minor . . . took very strong
hold. Spaniards and Boers had questioned whether natives had
souls: modern Europeans cared less about that but doubted
whether they had minds, or minds capable of adult growth.
A theory came to be fashionable that mental growth in the
African ceased early, that childhood was never left behind
(cited in Nandy 1983, p. 15 note).
This perception of the colonised culture as fundamentally
childlike or childish feeds into the logic of the colonial ‘civilising mission’ which is fashioned, quite self-consciously, as a
form of tutelage or a disinterested project concerned with
bringing the colonised to maturity. Macaulay’s interventions
into the proper education of colonised Indians, for instance,
are informed by the sense that colonialism is really a ‘developmental’ project. The coloniser, in his understanding, is
principally, if not exclusively, an educator:
What is power worth if it is founded on vice, on ignorance,
and on misery; if we can hold it only by violating the most
sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed and
which, as a people blessed with far more than ordinary
32
THINKING OTHERWISE
measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe
to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and
priestcraft. We are free, we are civilised to little purpose, if
we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure
of freedom and civilisation (cited in Viswanathan 1989, pp.
16–17).
Macaulay’s defence of the pedagogical motivations of colonialism betrays its Enlightenment legacy, namely, the sense that
European rationality holds out the possibility of improvement
for all of humanity. Accordingly, those who are already in
possession of the gospel of rationality are seen to have an
ethical obligation or ‘calling’ to spread the word and proselytise on behalf of their emancipatory creed. Civilised minds, as
Christoph Martin Wieland wrote, are bound to ‘do the great
work to which we have been called: to cultivate, enlighten and
ennoble the human race’ (cited in Gay 1977, p. 13).
The Enlightenment expositions of Kant, Wieland and
Macaulay have gained several followers and sustained many
revisionary accounts of colonialism. For Marx, somewhat
notoriously, the benefits of British colonialism more than
compensated for its violence and injustices. ‘Whatever may
have been the crimes of England’, he argues, ‘she was the
unconscious tool of history’, which raised India—in this
instance—from its semi-barbaric state into the improved condition of modernity (cited in Said 1991, p. 153). Against the
coercive logic of these arguments, we may recall that for
Lyotard, ‘immaturity’ is not so much the failure of modernity
as the possibility of a truly humane philosophy. If the Enlightenment seeks its humanism in the decisive and aggressive
rationality of adulthood, the task of postmodernity, as Lyotard
sees it, is to salvage the tentative philosophical indeterminacy
of childhood:
Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over
the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages,
not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the
human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage
of the adult community, is also what manifests to this
33
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which
calls on it to become more human (Lyotard 1991, pp. 3– 4).
m
Rather than dismissing Lyotard’s account of childhood as
foolishly romantic or essentialising, it is crucial to recognise it
as a rhetorical response to the Kantian policing of human
nature. Seen from a postcolonial studies perspective, his disruption of the boundaries between the human and the
inhuman helps to undo the logic of the colonial civilising
mission—as Spivak would have it—from inside the Western
philosophical tradition.
Descartes’ error
The journey between Kantian adulthood and postmodern
childhood, that is, between the Enlightenment and its critics,
has its basis in an earlier history which officially begins in late
November 1619. This is the birth date of Cartesian philosophy,
recorded by Descartes himself at the beginning of his
Olympica: ‘On the tenth of November 1619 . . . I was full of
enthusiasm and finding the foundations of a marvelous
science . . .’ (cited in Gilson 1963, p. 57). Descartes’ discovery
arguably spawns the Enlightenment philosophy, which Kant
confidently defends in the Berlinische Monatschrift. So also
the poststructuralist/postmodern critique of Western civilisation properly begins with a counter-assessment of
Cartesianism.
The date 10 November 1619 marks the decisive and systematic advent of anti-agnostic secularism in Western
philosophy. It marks Descartes’ attempt to enthrone man at
the centre of epistemology and, simultaneously, to make
knowledge impregnable to doubt. We might say that this date
confirms humanism as the basis for certain knowledge, or
conversely, as Sartre puts it, ‘the Cartesian cogito becomes the
only possible point de départ for existentialism and the only
possible basis for humanism’ (Sartre 1946, p. 191). Generally
speaking, Cartesian philosophy produces three revolutionary
variants on the notion of the Self and its relationship to
34
THINKING OTHERWISE
knowledge and thereby to the external world. These are the
notions of the self-defining subject of consciousness; the allknowing subject of consciousness; and, finally, the formally
empowered subject of consciousness. To clarify our understanding of this self-centred philosophy, we might look at the
methodical process through which each of these notions is
delivered.
Descartes introduces the self-defining subject of consciousness or the self-affirming ego through a simple inquiry into
the things we know for certain. His meditations on this subject
eventually lead to the troubling conclusion that there is nothing
we know that is entirely beyond doubt—with one notable
exception. Even though we may doubt the existence of the
world and of external reality, we know, Descartes argues, that
we exist. We know this even in the painful acuity of doubt as
the very capacity to doubt gestures toward the activity of
thought which, in turn, presupposes the fact of existence or
self-consciousness. If I think, therefore, I am. Paradoxically,
the certainty of my existence is established in the very uncertainty of my doubt. Seen in this way, the Cartesian cogito, or
the ‘I think’ of his famous conclusion, makes, as Bertrand
Russell puts it, ‘mind more certain than matter, and my mind
more certain than the minds of others’ (Russell 1961, p. 548).
In all philosophy which descends from Descartes it follows
that matter is only knowable ‘by inference of what is known
of mind’ (Russell 1961, p. 548). The crux of this philosophy
is, in other words, the all-knowing subject of consciousness—
an entity which insists that our knowledge of the world is
nothing other than the narcissism of self-consciousness. At this
turn in Cartesian philosophy, when the world is rendered into
a giant mirror, man enters the scene of Western knowledge as,
in Foucault’s words, ‘an emperico-transcendental doublet’. He
is postulated as ‘a being such that knowledge will be attained
in him of what renders all knowledge possible’ (Foucault 1970,
p. 318).
The Cartesian celebration of the human subject’s epistemological possibilities is inevitably accompanied by an assertion of
its power over, and freedom from, the external world of objects.
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
This power—founded in knowledge—recognises that nature is
threatening only, and insofar as, it is mysterious and incalculable. In response to this threat, the elaborations of cogito reduce
the unintelligible diversity and material alterity of the world to
the familiar contents of our minds. This opens up the possibility
of ordering or taming the wild profusion of things formally,
according to the structure of the subject’s emancipatory rationality, and similarly to the terms of a mathematical
demonstration. We need to remember here that Descartes
privileges mathematics as the cognitive method most favourable
to the function of rationality or ratio. But, as Weber argued, a
mathematical perception of the world is ultimately a ‘theft’ of
its inherent—uncontainable and unquantifiable—value or
meaning. The offending thief, in this instance, is the formally
empowered subject of consciousness: ‘there are no mysterious
incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can,
in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that
the world is disenchanted’ (Weber 1930, p. 139).
To think of the world mathematically, that is, as mathesis,
thus requires a reductive application of a few abstract and
generalising principles to the multiplicity of particular things.
It requires a progression from theoria, or theory, to praxis, or
practice, rather than the other way around. Seen in this way,
Cartesian mathesis is clearly the basis of the Enlightenment
universalism that we earlier encountered in Kant. It is, as
Foucault writes, ‘an exhaustive ordering of the world as
though methods, concepts, types of analysis, and finally men
themselves, had all been displaced at the behest of a fundamental network defining the implicit and inevitable unity of
knowledge’ (Foucault 1970, pp. 75–6). That is to say, it
proposes a global and unitary view of thought which maintains
that if all things are knowable in the same way, they must be
virtually identical. This is the logic which later leads Foucault
to claim that ‘the history of the order imposed on things would
be . . . a history of the Same’ (1970, p. xxiv). These ‘histories’
of universal knowledge and self-identical subjectivity which
Foucault speaks of are in turn engineered by the humanist
impulse to, as Descartes wrote ‘make ourselves masters and
36
THINKING OTHERWISE
possessors of nature’ (cited in Gilson 1963, p. 74). They
chronicle an equation of power with knowledge which Bacon,
much before Foucault, announced with the tag: ‘the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge’.
Whose sovereignty? Which men? What history? These are
some of the questions that postcolonial studies, along with its
poststructuralist allies, asks of Descartes and the Enlightenment. Let us end this section with the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, which proudly informed its readers in the 1770s
that the discoveries and improvements of eighteenth-century
inventors ‘diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by
conquest or domination’ (cited in Gay 1977, p. 9). In issuing
this statement, the editors of the Encyclopaedia do not dissociate knowledge from the violence of ‘conquest or domination’
so much as announce its even greater capacity for enslavement.
Reason is the weapon of Enlightenment philosophy and,
accordingly, the problem for anti-Enlightenment thought. Is it
possible, after 10 November 1619, to imagine non-coercive
knowledges? Is it possible, as Gandhi would have asked, to
think non-violently?
Nietzsche’s genealogy
The anti-Cartesian turn in Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard,
which we have been following, develops out of a long line of
thinkers stretching from Max Weber to Martin Heidegger,
through to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Each of
these thinkers is concerned with the destructive powers of
Western rationality, and all of them invoke the nihilistic figure
of Nietzsche to bolster their onslaught on the epistemological
narcissism of Western culture—that is to say, the narcissism
released into the world through Descartes’ self-defining, allknowing and formally empowered subject of consciousness.
Nietzsche’s paradigmatic critique, as Foucault points out in
a significant essay entitled ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, is
directed at two foundational humanist myths: the myth of pure
origins and the emancipatory myth of progress and teleology.
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Foucault postulates Nietzsche’s anti-humanism as an excavation at the archaeological site of origins, where it works
relentlessly and systematically to reveal a formative deficiency
in the historical beginnings of all humanist institutions, ideas
and concepts. The Western humanist thinks of the ‘origin’ as
the place of plenitude, presence and truth. The Nietzschian
archaeologist, on the other hand, can only find the residual
traces of malice, theft, greed and disparity at the start of
human history. In other words, s/he discovers that a Fall
prefigures and disfigures the purity of Genesis. Seen as such,
the very idea of Genesis—of unadulterated origins—is shown
as a supplement, or as a mythical compensation for an originary lack. ‘We wished’, Nietzsche writes, ‘to awaken to the
feeling of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this
faith is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance’
(cited in Foucault 1984b, p. 79).
Nietzsche’s ‘destructive’ endeavour directly foreshadows the
method and intent of contemporary deconstructive philosophy
which, likewise, scavenges in the forgotten archives of Western
humanism to reveal its suppressed inadequacies, ruptures and
paradoxes. Thus, for Derrida, as for Nietzsche, the outset of
all emancipatory social discourse betrays the shared origins of
morality and immorality; it is marked by the ‘non-ethical
opening of ethics’ (cited in Norris 1982, p. 39). So also it is
possible to discern an inevitable lack and the persistent naggings of doubt in the confident self-presence and aggressive
certitude of Descartes’ cogito. While the subject who ‘thinks’,
Derrida and Foucault would argue, may not ‘know’ his own
limitations, the uneven history of rationality testifies to the
civilisational failure of the Cartesian project—which begins as
it ends in violence: reason, as Foucault writes in his gloss on
Nietzsche, ‘was born . . . from chance; devotion to truth and
the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of
scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending
discussions, and their spirit of competition—their personal
conflicts that slowly forged the weapons of reason’ (Foucault
1984b, p. 78). Accordingly, the vitiated beginnings of
rationality fulfil their logic in the progressive deterioration,
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rather than emancipation, of humanity. The atavistic flaw of
cogito is re-enacted in a perverse evolution from error to
cumulative error, from petty to genocidal violence: ‘Humanity’,
in Foucault’s somewhat apocalyptic words, ‘does not gradually
proceed from combat to combat until it arrives at universal
reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare;
humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and
thus proceeds from domination to domination’ (p. 85).
By the time Nietzsche’s diatribe on the flawed origins and
teleology of Western humanism is fully absorbed into the
poststructuralist and postmodernist thematic, it acquires two
specific and more clearly articulated objections to the Cartesian
theory of epistemological subjectivity—first, to its philosophy
of identity, and second to its account of knowledge as a power
over objective reality. Both of these objections are especially
resonant for postcolonial studies, as they hold out the possibility of theorising a non-coercive relationship or dialogue with
the excluded ‘Other’ of Western humanism.
The first objection is developed through Heidegger,
Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard, each of whom maintains that
the Cartesian philosophy of identity is premised upon an
ethically unsustainable omission of the Other. For Heidegger—
seen by many to be the ‘archetype and trend-setter of
postmodernism’ (Bauman 1992, p. ix)—the all-knowing and
self-sufficient Cartesian subject violently negates material and
historical alterity/Otherness in its narcissistic desire to always
see the world in its own self-image. This anthropocentric world
view is ultimately deficient on account of its indifference to
difference, and consequent refusal to accommodate that which
is not human. Thus, as far as Heidegger is concerned, the
Cartesian cogito fails adequately to think out the ‘Being of a
stone or even life as the Being of plants and animals’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 206). For Foucault, similarly, that which is
‘unthought’ in cogito becomes a synonym for the Other of
Western rationality: ‘the unthought . . . is not lodged in man
like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in
relation to man, the Other’ (Foucault 1970, p. 326). While
Heidegger seeks the quality of alterity in the natural and
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
non-human world, Foucault substantially extends the notion
of Otherness to cover criminality, madness, disease, foreigners,
homosexuals, strangers, women. Derrida’s name for these
excluded Others is the ‘remainder’, and Lyotard seeks their
irreducible presence in the singularity and plurality of what he
calls the ‘event’.
The poststructuralist/postmodern postulation of the
‘unthought’, the ‘remainder’ and the ‘event’ is crucial for its
illustration of the unsustainable discrepancy between the finitude of the thinking rational subject and the infinite variety
of the world—which is simply in excess of what ‘Western man’
can, or does, think. Examined in this way, the presence of the
Cartesian subject is simultaneously revealed as the locus of
absence, omission, exclusion and silence. This subject is—to
come full circle—diagnosed as the source of the epistemological poverty which informs Western humanism. Far from being
the reservoir of certain and complete knowledge, Cartesian
‘man’, as Foucault writes, ‘is also the source of misunderstanding—of misunderstanding that constantly exposes his thought
to the risk of being swamped by his own being, and also
enables him to recover his integrity on the basis of what eludes
him’ (1970, p. 323).
It is not enough, however, to leave Cartesian man in this
state of benign misunderstanding and forgetfulness. In addition
to simply omitting the Other, Descartes’ philosophy of identity
is also sustained through a violent and coercive relationship
with its omitted Other. As Zygmunt Bauman writes: ‘Since the
sovereignty of the modern intellect is the power to define and
make definitions stick—everything that eludes unequivocal
allocation is an anomaly and a challenge’ (Bauman 1991, p.
9). Accordingly, just as modern rationality has often attributed
a dangerous Otherness to the figure(s) of the deviant, it has
also endeavoured violently to repress all symptoms of cultural
alterity. In a contentious move, writers like Adorno, Horkheimer and Bauman have identified fascism as one product of the
Enlightenment’s fear of alterity. The procedures of the colonial
civilising mission are, arguably, motivated by similar anxieties.
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THINKING OTHERWISE
Lyotard’s observations on the levelling action of Western
humanism are instructive here:
the grand narratives of legitimation which characterise modernity in the West . . . are cosmopolitical, as Kant would say.
They involve precisely an ‘overcoming’ (dépassement) of the
particular cultural identity in favour of a universal civic
identity. But how such an overcoming can take place is not
apparent (Lyotard 1992, pp. 44–5).
Postcolonial studies, we might say, joins postmodernism in an
attempt to analyse and to resist this dépassement.
Before concluding this poststructuralist account of Enlightenment humanism, I would like to briefly return to Kant’s
essay in the Berlinische Monatschrift. In the course of this
essay, Kant tells his readers that the Enlightenment has a
motto: Aude sapere, or ‘Dare to know’. Herein lies the history
of Western humanism and Cartesian rationality. To know with
daring is henceforth to be bold, impudent, defiant, audacious
in the exercise of knowledge. It is, in other words, to concede
mastery as the single motivation for knowing the world. The
poststructuralist and postmodern intervention into this field
delivers the possibility of knowing differently—of knowing
difference in and for itself. In sharp contrast with the Enlightenment, its motto could well be ‘Care to know’. Let us end
with Levinas: ‘It is in the laying down by the ego of its
sovereignty (in its “hateful” modality) that we find ethics . . .’
(Levinas 1994, p. 85).
41
3
Postcolonialism and the new
humanities
POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
I
n the previous chapter a distinction was made between Western humanism and the Western
humanities on the grounds that while the former is concerned
with ways of knowing, or acquiring knowledge, the latter
proposes that man is made human by the things he knows.
We have already examined the principal features of
postcolonialism’s inherited deconstructive bias against Enlightenment humanism. This chapter will supply a context for its
oppositional stance against the traditional humanities.
Provincialising Europe
Ever since its development in the 1980s, postcolonialism has
found itself in the company of disciplines such as women’s
studies, cultural studies and gay/lesbian studies. These new
fields of knowledge—often classified under the rubric of the
‘new humanities’—have endeavoured first, to foreground the
exclusions and elisions which confirm the privileges and
authority of canonical knowledge systems, and second to
recover those marginalised knowledges which have been
occluded and silenced by the entrenched humanist curriculum.
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POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
Each of these disciplinary areas has attempted to represent the
interests of a particular set of ‘subjugated knowledges’, which
is Foucault’s term for ‘knowledges that have been disqualified
as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive
knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the
required level of cognition or scienticity’ (Foucault 1980a, p.
82). These ‘minor’ knowledges, as Deleuze and Guattari write,
embody forms of thought and culture which have been been
violently ‘deterritorialised’ by major or dominant knowledge
systems (Deleuze & Guattari 1986). Foucault’s and Deleuze’s
terminology deliberately invests the struggle over the subject
of knowledge with the language of political insurrection. For
Foucault, the proposal for a radical reclamation of subjugated/minor knowledges helps to expose the hidden contiguity
between knowledge and power, ‘through which a society conveys its knowledge and ensures its survival under the mask of
knowledge’ (Foucault 1977, p. 225). Deleuze, likewise, postulates the ‘reterritorialisation’ of minor literatures as ‘the relay
for a revolutionary machine-to-come’ (Deleuze & Guattari
1986, p. 18).
A characteristic example of this type of project may be
found within feminist/women’s studies, which recognises that
the disempowerment of women has been facilitated, in part,
through their exclusion from the space where knowledge
proper is constituted and disseminated. The acquisition of
knowledge, as Susan Sheridan points out, has been an integral
and established feature of feminist activism since at least the
nineteenth century (see Sheridan 1990, p. 40). The feminist
movement has consistently demanded equal access to the
means of knowledge and also equal participation in the making
of knowledge on the grounds that inherited knowledges are
hopelessly constrained by the preoccupations of the predominantly male institutions within which they have been developed
and validated. The feminist intervention into the humanities
academy has thus posed a challenge to the normative and
universalist assumptions of gender-biased or ‘phallogocentric’
knowledge systems, and attempted, in turn, to make both the
ways of knowing and the things known more representative.
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Its aim has been to enable women to become the active
participating subjects rather than the passive and reified objects
of knowledge.
Postcolonial studies follows feminism in its critique of
seemingly foundational discourses. Unlike feminism, however,
it directs its critique against the cultural hegemony of European
knowledges in an attempt to reassert the epistemological value
and agency of the non-European world. The postcolonial
reclamation of non-European knowledges is, in effect, a refutation of Macaulay’s infamous privileging of a single shelf of
a ‘good’ European library over the entire corpus of ‘Oriental’
literary production. Macaulay’s 1835 minute typifies the historical colonisation of scholarship and pedagogy whereby, as
Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, non-Western thought is consistently precluded from the constitution of knowledge proper.
Third-world historians, as he writes:
feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians
of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate . . . We cannot
even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level
without taking the risk of appearing ‘old fashioned’ or ‘outdated’ (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 2).
This absence of reciprocity is compounded when we consider
that European philosophy has never allowed its cultural ignorance to qualify its claims of universality:
For generations now, philosophers and thinkers shaping the
nature of social science have produced theories embracing the
entirety of humanity; as we well know, these statements have
been produced in relative, and sometimes absolute, ignorance
of the majority of humankind i.e., those living in non-Western
cultures’ (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 3).
Chakrabarty’s arguments touch upon the heart of
postcolonialism’s quarrel with the orthodox humanities. However, while he restricts his focus to the problem of historical
knowledge, postcolonial studies claims that the entire field of
the humanities is vitiated by a compulsion to claim a spurious
universality and also to disguise its political investment in the
production of ‘major’ or ‘dominant’ knowledges. The episte44
POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
mological and pedagogic reterritorialisation of the nonWestern world thus involves a two-fold task: first, to expose
the humanist pretence of political disinterestedness, and,
second, to ‘provincialise’—in Chakrabarty’s terms—the knowledge claims of ‘the ‘‘Europe’’ that modern imperialism and
nationalism have, by their collaborative venture and violence,
made universal’ (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 20).
In order to assess the validity of this invective against the
humanities we need now to cast a critical postcolonial eye
upon the genealogy and formation of humanist knowledge—to
return, as it were, to the first elaboration of the humanities as
a privileged branch of study in sixteenth-century Florence.
Power, knowledge and the humanities
The term ‘humanism’ owes its origins to a secular and anthropocentric cultural and educational program concerned with the
celebration and cultivation of ‘human’ achievements. The history of this pedagogic program is connected, in a circuitous
way, to the emergence of an apparently new Italian word in
the mid-sixteenth century, umanista, which comes to refer to
the teacher, scholar or student engaged in that branch of
studies known as the studia humanitatis, or generally speaking
the liberal arts (see Campana 1946). The emergence of this
word gestures toward the establishment of the liberal arts as
a discipline within the academy—it marks the historical
moment when the humanities became a special teaching subject
at Italian universities, and relatedly, the monopoly of a certain
group of specialists or academics. An academic discipline, as
Paul Bove argues, is ‘an accumulative, cooperative project for
the production of knowledge, the exercise of power, and the
creation of careers’ (Bove 1985; cited in Spanos 1986, p.
52)—and the rise of the umanista in mid-sixteenth century
Italy marks the process whereby a set of vested interests starts
to attach itself to the promotion of the liberal arts.
Notably, while the term umanista can be traced to Renaissance Italy, the phrase studia humanitatis has a much earlier
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Ciceronian etymology, and it carries within itself the notion of
literary study as the only form of knowledge befitting a human
being. As Cicero puts it, ‘to live with the Muses means to live
humanistically’ (Tusculan Disputations, 5, 23, 66; cited in
Curtius 1953, p. 228). Cicero’s epistemological bias, in turn,
evolves out of an even earlier consensus which, in Ernst
Curtius’ words, ‘placed all higher intellectual pursuits under
the sign of the Muses’ (Curtius 1953, p. 230). Thus, Homer’s
Iliad praises the Muses for their knowledge of all things, and
Virgil’s Muses are consistently celebrated as the custodians of
philosophy. Renaissance apologists for the studia humanitatis
enthusiastically draw upon these multiple historical accretions,
whereby poetry or literature are claimed as the foundation of
all human knowledge. The Renaissance humanist Leonardo
Bruni, for instance, defends the natural ascendancy of this new
knowledge on the grounds that it is universal in its reach and,
therefore, uniquely positioned to provide a complete education.
In his words: ‘the litterae are about to return with all their
fertility, to form whole men, not just scholars. They call
themselves studia humanitatis because they shape the perfect
man’ (see Garin 1965, p. 38).
Bruni’s lavish praise of the humanities is significant for three
reasons. First, like Cicero, he upholds the study of ‘letters’ for
its capacity to produce ‘whole’ or representative human beings;
second, his appeal to the ideas of ‘forming’ and ‘shaping’
delivers a specific understanding of pedagogic practice and
thereby of the umanista’s professional role and function; and
finally, by emphasising the relevance of the studia humanitatis
to those who are ‘not just scholars’, he extends the function
of humanistic education outside the academy. Each of these
features in Bruni’s plaudit points to limitations within humanism which constitute the target of what we have been calling
anti-humanist or oppositional criticism. In order to clarify
these limitations we need to explore the field and consequences
of Renaissance humanism more thoroughly.
To begin with, it is important to remember that the educational program of the studia humanitatis was built upon a
series of curricular exclusions, especially of those branches of
46
POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
study associated with medieval scholasticism. Accordingly, and
despite its claims to representativeness, this program
excluded—from the moment of its inception—a range of other
academic fields such as logic, mathematics, the natural sciences, astronomy, medicine, law and theology. Broadly
speaking, and as a variety of commentators have argued, the
quarrel between humanism and scholasticism was essentially
one between the so-called ‘sciences of man’ and the ‘sciences
of nature’ (see Garin 1965, pp. 24–9). In the course of the
ensuing debate, the humanists relentlessly claimed the moral
high ground against the allegedly ‘base’ concerns of non-literary disciplines. Petrarch is characteristically and tellingly
vitriolic on the subject:
Carry out your trade, mechanic, if you can. Heal bodies, if
you can. If you can’t, murder; and take the salary for your
crimes . . . But how can you dare, with unprecedented impertinence, to relegate rhetoric to a place inferior to medicine?
How can you make a mistress inferior to the servant, a liberal
art to a mechanical one? (See Garin 1965, p. 24.)
The hierarchy of knowledges proposed by Petrarch self-evidently draws upon corresponding markers of social
hierarchy—the relationship of the liberal arts to the natural
sciences is, accordingly, like that of the mistress to the servant.
Thus, Petrarch complicates the humanist claim to representativeness both by excluding certain types of knowledge from
the curricular boundaries of the studia humanitatis and also by
hinting at categories of people (i.e. servants and mechanics) who
might not be considered adequately or representatively human.
Similar clues regarding the insidious exclusions of humanist
knowledge inhere in his distinction between the ‘liberal’ and
‘mechanical’ arts and in the disparaging comment he addresses
to murderous doctors—‘take the salary for your crimes’, which
reinforces the social differentiation between the pure activity of
‘artists’ and the manual labour of ‘artisans’.
It is also worth noting that Petrarch’s separation of the
liberal and mechanical domains is built upon a politically
charged discrimination—especially resonant for postcolonial
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
scholars—between civilised and barbaric cultural activity. The
project of the studia humanitatis, as Heidegger points out in
his ‘Letter on humanism’, has always relied on an opposition
between the normative idea of humanistic man or Homo
humanus, on the one hand, and the aberrant idea of barbaric
man or Homo barbarus, on the other. In his words:
Humanitatis, explicitly so called, was first considered and
striven for in the age of the Roman Republic. Homo humanus
was opposed to Homo barbarus. Homo humanus here means
the Romans . . . whose culture was acquired in the schools
of philosophy. It was concerned with . . . scholarship and
training in good conduct (Heidegger 1977, p. 200).
Renaissance humanism takes over these discriminations from
its Roman predecessors, and in so doing, it starts to reveal a
fundamental contradiction at the heart of its project. While
claiming the capacity to produce representative human beings,
it imposes a series of cultural, social and economic constraints
on the very quality of human-ness.
Seen in these terms, and once again through Foucault’s
hypothesis about dominant knowledge systems, the cultural
and educational project of the studia humanitatis, can be seen
to function, ‘as a double repression: in terms of those whom
it excludes from the process and in terms of the model and
the standard (the bars) it imposes on those receiving this
knowledge’ (Foucault 1977, p. 219). Foucault’s observation
about the regulatory mechanisms of major knowledges brings
us back to Bruni, whose praise of the humanities, it will be
remembered, celebrated the umanista’s capacity to ‘shape’ and
‘form’ his students in a particular way. What exactly were
these students being shaped into? And what does this concern
with the formation of pedagogic subjects tell us about the
humanistic claims to disinterestedness? Both of these questions
have a direct bearing on the role of the humanities outside the
academy—they point to what we might call the political
motivations of the studia humanitatis.
In his recent book, The Western Canon, the critic Harold
Bloom argues that the traditional humanities are politically
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POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
unmotivated. The activity of reading, he insists, is solitary
rather than social, and literature is, therefore, unlikely to
provide a sound basis for social change: ‘real reading is a lonely
activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen’
(Bloom 1994, p. 526). Although his arguments are often quite
compelling, Bloom neglects to observe that humanism proper
has consistently regarded literary education as a necessary
apparatus for the proper functioning of the State. In other
words, humanism has always functioned as an ‘aestheticomoral ideology’ which is concerned with, and directed toward,
the moulding of ideal citizen-subjects (see Cantimori 1934, p.
86). So, for example, the Florentine humanist Brucioli praises
the liberal arts on the grounds that, ‘only those disciplines are
worthy of being called the best for the training of youth which
are needed for the government of the Republic’ (cited in
Cantimori 1934, p. 97).
Furthermore, humanism, as we have seen, regarded itself
as an academic and pedagogic pursuit of perfected human
nature or humanitas. Accordingly, while proponents of humanism argued that this ideal human nature was embodied in, and
expressed through, various forms of human activity and
organisation—such as language and literature, the family and
civic life—most humanists were of the opinion that the State
was the archetypal and representative form of humanitas.
Hence it followed, for writers like Brucioli, that the State
should also be posed as the logical and proper end of all studia
humanitatis. It is in this spirit that Bruni prefaces his translation of Aristotle’s Politics with the assertion that:
among the moral doctrines through which human life is
shaped, those which refer to states and their governments
occupy the highest position. For it is the purpose of those
doctrines to make possible a happy life for all men . . . The
more universal the well-being, the more divine it must be
considered to be (see Garin 1965, p. 41).
Brucioli, likewise, sees the best examples of human nature
embodied in those who have the capacity to command rather
than obey. In his words, ‘not all parts of the soul are of the
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same value, but some command while others obey, and those
which command are best, so the Prince is the summit of the
people . . .’ (cited in Cantimori 1934, p. 93).
The Renaissance humanist valorisation of the State as the
proper end of knowledge recurs in all subsequent manifestations of humanism. It is certainly a powerful component of
the nineteenth-century humanist revival which occurs under
the aegis of German idealism. Schiller’s paradigmatic text,
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, for instance, recalls
the Florentine reasoning we have been discussing, in its insistence that the primary objective of aesthetic education is the
realisation of the rational State:
Each individual human being, one might say, carries within
him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype
of a human being, and it is his life’s task to be, through all
his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging
unity of this ideal. This archetype, which is to be discerned
more or less clearly in every individual, is represented by the
State, the objective and, as it were, the canonical form in
which the diversity of individual subjects strive to unite
(Schiller 1966, p. 17; cited in Lloyd 1985, p. 165).
For Schiller, as for his Renaissance predecessors, the State’s
canonicity derives from its capacity to embody the best and,
therefore, the most representative qualities of human nature.
The same idea is, of course, more famously reiterated in
Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy’. In Arnold’s words,
‘culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a
firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one
to us in our best selves’ (Complete Prose Works, vol. 5, p.
135).
In all its historical manifestations, humanist thought is
clearly unified in its aspiration to establish a symbiotic relationship between culture—or knowledge—and the State.
Nevertheless, the humanist attempt to make knowledge eternally amenable to power is almost always accompanied, as I
have been suggesting, by corresponding protestations about
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the disinterestedness of humanist pedagogy. As Arnold insists
in his ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’:
the rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness.
And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping
aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’ . . .
By steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior,
political, practical considerations about ideas . . . (Complete
Prose Works, vol. 3, pp. 269–70).
There are two observations to make in response to Arnold’s
rule of disinterestedness. First—like Seneca and Petrarch—
Arnold uses the norm of disinterested inquiry to discredit all
those allegedly ‘ulterior’, ‘political’ and ‘practical’ interests
which, for one reason or another, pull away from, and are
therefore unassimilable within, the dominant consensus represented in the State. The character and name of these
disqualified interests have, of course, varied historically. Arnold
identifies them within the uncultured and ‘jealous’ working
classes—recognisably the descendants of Renaissance
meccanicos. At other times, these discordant interests have
been identified with numerous ‘minority’ groups, or with the
ungovernable and uncivilised subjects of empire. Second, the
Arnoldian appeal to disinterestedness effectively works to conceal the fact of the State’s investment in the production of
knowledge and culture—it serves to disguise the collaboration
between knowledge and dominant interests. As a strategy,
disinterestedness helps to bolster the State’s fallacious claim to
universality. In summary, as Marx and Engels argue, the ruling
class is compelled ‘to present its interest as the common interest
of all members of society, that is, expressed in an ideal form:
it has to give its ideas the form of universality, to present them
as the only rational, universally valid ones’ (Marx & Engels
1975, vol. 5, p. 60; cited in Guha 1992, p. 70).
In a final note on the collusion between humanism and the,
albeit concealed, interests of the State, it is important to
recognise that humanism has flourished whenever these established interests have been under threat or in need of
reaffirmation. While we do not have the space here to detail
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the historical contiguity between various humanist and nationalist revivals, it is worth mentioning that humanism has almost
always accompanied and supported the emergence of unified
and centralised nation-States. Thus, Italian humanism carries
within it an appeal for some sort of unification among the
Italian States, and the nineteenth-century German idealist version of humanism, likewise, communicates a call for the
unification of Germany. So, also, Arnold’s totalitarian humanism expresses an anxiety about the potential anarchism of the
wilful and uncontainable ‘populace’ at home, and abroad in
the colonies. Arnold’s humanism, in particular, asserts the need
to maintain the integrity and sovereignty of Europe in the face
of its multitudinous and barbaric Others.
Oppositional criticism and the new humanities
In view of the preceding discussion, we can now begin to
summarise the motivations of the ‘new humanities’, or oppositional and anti-humanist criticism. Edward Said echoes
Foucault in his claim that such criticism must ideally, perhaps
even impossibly, ‘think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and
abuse; its social goals are non-coercive knowledge produced
in the interests of human freedom’ (Said 1983, p. 29). We
might argue more specifically that an oppositional critical
discourse like postcolonialism counters the exclusions of
humanist thought through an attempt to make the field of
knowledge more representative. This project relies upon two
types of critical revelation or ‘showing’. First, it takes upon
itself the sometimes self-important function of revealing the
interests which inhabit the production of knowledge. As Stuart
Hall writes of the cultural studies project:
. . . when cultural studies began its work . . . it had . . . to
undertake the task of unmasking what it considered to be the
unstated presuppositions of the humanist tradition itself. It
had to bring to light the ideological assumptions underpinning
the practice, to expose the educational program . . . and to
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try and conduct an ideological critique of the way the humanities and the arts presented themselves as parts of disinterested
knowledge (Hall 1990b, p. 15).
Second, the investigative function of oppositional criticism
also draws attention to, and thereby attempts to retrieve, the
wide range of illegitimate, disqualified or subjugated knowledges mentioned earlier in this discussion. Habermas describes
this function as an ‘emancipatory knowledge interest’ which
‘takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed’ (Habermas 1972, p. 315).
While Foucault also refers to this project in similar terms as
an attempt to achieve an insurrection of subjugated knowledges, he is sensitive to the dangers of a utopian desire simply
to invert the existing hierarchy of knowledges. A simple inversion, he maintains, will merely duplicate the institutions being
attacked and thereby constitute another orthodoxy—in this
case, the orthodoxy of heterodoxy: ‘is it not perhaps the case
that these fragments of genealogies are no sooner brought to
light, that the particular elements of the knowledge that one
seeks to disinter are no sooner accredited and put into circulation, than they run the risk of re-codification, of
re-colonization’ (Foucault 1980a, p. 86). Foucault’s intervention compels oppositional criticism to contemplate the
difficulties of dissociating the recovery of subjugated knowledges from the will to power.
In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari suggest—somewhat
elusively—that subjugated knowledges and literatures must
resolutely replace the desire to become ‘major’ or canonical,
with an opposite dream: ‘a becoming-minor’ (Deleuze &
Guattari 1986, p. 27). Although the precise implications of
this project remain unclear, we might say that all ‘minor’
knowledges need to retain the memory of their subjugation
and deterritorialisation and, therefore, of their creative affinity
with other fields of ‘non-culture’. A more philosophically
complex version of this suggestion may be found in the
procedures of what Heidegger calls Lichtung. The word carries
within itself the double sense of ‘light’ and ‘clearing’—it
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designates a bringing to light which is also a clearing of space:
‘In the midst of beings as a whole, there an open place occurs.
There is a clearing, a lighting’ (Halliburton, 1981, p. 43). Such
is the illumination and expansiveness of Heideggarian Lichtung
that it enables the most restrictive human consciousness to
experience the simultaneity of the familiar and the uncanny,
the established and the emergent, home and not-home, the
humane and, equally, the barbaric. Seen in these terms,
Lichtung is the reminder that identity is always underpinned
by the presence of its Other, or that every major knowledge
carries within itself the possibility of a countervailing
minor-ness.
In its utopian mode, oppositional criticism aspires to the
condition of Heidegger’s Lichtung. Whether its aspirations are
successful is, of course, another matter. But we can end this
section with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s suggestive claim that
‘the post in postcolonial, like the post in postmodern is the
post of a space clearing gesture . . .’ (Appiah 1992, p. 240).
In this postcolonial ‘clearing’/Lichtung it might finally be
possible to recognise the epistemological valency of nonEuropean thought. Or, as Chakrabarty writes, in the newly
liberated space of postcolonial pedagogy we might start to
imagine ‘(infra)structural sites’ where the dreams of provincialising Europe ‘could lodge themselves’ (Chakrabarty
1992, p. 23).
The world and the book
Postcolonialism, then, derives from the anti-humanism of
poststructuralism and the ‘new humanities’ a view of Western
power as a symptom of Western epistemology and pedagogy.
And insofar as the postcolonial critique of colonial modernity
is mapped out principally as an intervention into the realm of
Western knowledge-production, it paves the way for a privileged focus on the revolutionary credentials of the postcolonial
intellectual. Postcolonialism is not alone or eccentric in its bias
toward academic activism—thinkers from within leftist tradi54
POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
tions have always defended the public responsibilities of the
intellectual figure. Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist Italian political philosopher, famously upheld the everyday social influence
of the ‘organic intellectual’. Althusser, the French pioneer of
structural Marxism, likewise praised teachers for their resistance to the State ideology embedded within educational
institutions. Similarly, Foucault’s equation of knowledge and
power confers a unique radicalism upon the dissident or
oppositional thinker. Yet, notwithstanding these precedents,
postcolonialism’s investment in its intellectuals has been bitterly contested by its antagonists. While postcolonial theorists
have attempted variously to defend the politics of their academic practice, recent critics of postcolonial theorising have
asserted the unsustainable distance between the self-reflexive
preoccupations of the postcolonial academy, on the one hand,
and the concerns arising from, and relevant to, postcolonial
realities, on the other.
Some vigilant and self-critical postcolonial theorists agree
that the academic labour of postcolonialism is often blind to
its own socially deleterious effect. Among this group, Gayatri
Spivak is salutary in her warning that recent concessions to
marginality studies within the first-world metropolitan academy inadvertently serve to identify, confirm, and thereby
exclude certain cultural formations as chronically marginal
(Spivak 1993, p. 55). The celebratory ‘third worldism’ of
postcolonial studies, Spivak cautions, may well perpetuate real
social and political oppressions which rely upon rigid distinctions between the ‘centre’ and the ‘margin’ (see 1993, p. 55).
Spivak’s warnings accrue, in part, from Foucault’s paradigmatic resistance to the intellectual valorisation of marginality.
As he argues:
One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of
‘marginality’ that would be the legitimate concern of a free
and disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of
mechanisms of exclusion brought to bear by the economic or
ideological requirements of power. If ‘marginality’ is being
constituted as an area of investigation, this is only because
relations of power have established it as a possible object . . .
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(Foucault 1978, p. 98; cited with contextual modifications in
Spivak 1993, p. 59).
Although both Foucault and Spivak contest the academic
institutionalisation of ‘marginality discourse’, neither is willing
to concede an absolute schism between intellectual activity and
political realities. In sharp contrast, anti-postcolonial criticism
repeatedly foregrounds the irresolvable dichotomy between the
woolly deconstructive predicament of postcolonial intellectuals
and the social and economic predicament of those whose lives
are literally or physically on the margins of the metropolis.
Critics like Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad, in particular, are
unrelenting in their exclusion of all theoretical/intellectual
activity which lacks adequate referents to ‘everyday’ sociality.
Thus, Ahmad’s recent article, ‘The politics of literary
postcoloniality’, announces an ethical distinction between the
tiresome domain of postcolonial literary theory and the considerably more ‘fulsome debate on . . . the type of postcolonial
states which arose in Asia and Africa after postwar
decolonisations’ (Ahmad 1995, p. 1).
This distinction is self-evidently premised upon the assumption that structural shifts in forms of governance affect more
people more directly than imaginative shifts in critical methodologies. While Ahmad’s claim is incontestable in itself, his
objections take a disablingly prejudicial turn when he begins
to treat all postcolonial theoretical practice as purely recreational. In his reasoning, postcolonial theorising—indeed, all
theorising outside the social sciences—is a luxury based upon
the availability of ‘mobility and surplus pleasure’ to a privileged few, while the vast majority of others are condemned to
labour ‘below the living standards of the colonial period’
(1995, pp. 16, 12). In other words, while postcolonial subjects
must work to stay alive, postcolonial intellectuals are free to
partake ‘of a carnivalesque collapse and play of identities’
(1995, p. 13). Ahmad’s polemic—here, as elsewhere—is specifically targeted against the postcolonial preoccupation with
questions regarding the formation of subjectivities. As far as
he is concerned, these self-indulgent and solipsistic questions
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abjure the ‘real’ politics of the collectivity. A similar bias
appears in Arif Dirlik’s article, ‘The postcolonial aura: third
world criticism in the age of global capitalism’, which argues
that the predominantly ‘epistemological and psychic orientations of postcolonial intellectuals’ are ethically incompatible
with and irrelevant to the ‘problems of social, political and
cultural domination’ (Dirlik 1994, p. 331).
Ahmad’s and Dirlik’s objections accrue from the recognition
of a radical split between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ realm
of human/social experience. Fredric Jameson has accounted for
this split in terms of a dichotomy ‘between the poetic and the
political, between what we have come to think of as the
domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public
world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political
power’ (Jameson 1986, p. 69). Jameson’s analysis points to a
contestation which is fundamentally marked, as he acknowledges, by the theoretical distinctions between Freud and Marx.
While this contestation has assumed a number of forms in a
number of divergent contexts, it has been most clearly articulated in the theoretical differences between psychoanalytic and
socialist feminists. Whereas psychoanalytic feminists have been
primarily concerned with the formation and deformation of
female subjectivity, their socialist adversaries have emphasised
the singular importance of class identity, and concomitantly
stigmatised the realm of ‘feeling’ as non-political and regressive
(see Kaplan 1985). This prejudice against feeling is sustained
partly by the assumption that the condition of ‘interiority’—
required by feeling —presupposes a receding away from the
social into the narcissistic pleasures of fantasy and the imagination. Seen as such, the cult of feeling privileges individual
desire over collective necessity, and the fulfilment of personal
longings at the cost of social agency. Thus, female subjectivity
comes to represent, in Kaplan’s words, ‘the site where the
opposing forces of femininity and feminism clash by night’
(Kaplan 1985, p. 154).
Dirlik and Ahmad, to turn the discussion once again to
postcolonialism, rehearse this bias against ‘inwardness’ with
one crucial difference. In their analysis it is the intellectual
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
work and content of postcolonialism which comes to occupy
the space, and thereby earn the stigma conventionally reserved
for the luxury of ‘feeling’. For both critics, postcolonial theorising is—like bourgeois interiority—a matter of class or, in
this case, institutional privilege. According to Dirlik, for
instance, postcolonialism happens ‘when Third world intellectuals have arrived in the First world’ (Dirlik 1994, p. 329).
Dirlik’s metaphor of arrival—of ‘having arrived’—is resonant with the charge of opportunism or ‘having made it’ in
the first world; it implicitly predicates the professional success
of postcolonial intellectuals upon a contingent and constitutive
departure from the ‘third world’. Seen in these terms, the
postcolonial intellectual’s journey becomes a flight from collective socialities—from the materiality of the beleaguered
‘third world’—into the abstraction of metropolitan theory. For
Dirlik, therefore, postcolonialism is not so much a description
of a global condition, as a narrowly conceived ‘label to
describe academic intellectuals of Third world origin’ (1994 p.
330). On a similar note, Ahmad’s book-length polemic on
postcolonial theory insists that postcolonial intellectuals are
merely ‘radicalised immigrants located in the metropolitan
university’, who are uniformly marked by a ‘combination of
class origin, professional ambition and a lack of prior political
grounding in socialist praxis’ (Ahmad 1992, p. 86). Seen
through this glass, and darkly, the postcolonial intellectual
emerges as a travelling theorist who has, in the manner of
Rushdie’s buoyant migrant ‘floated upward from history’.
The postcolonial intellectual
While there is much to learn from Ahmad’s and Dirlik’s vigil
against ‘an opportunistic kind of Third-Worldism’ (Ahmad
1992, p. 86), we need to guard against their generalising
assumption that any attempt to think the ‘third world’ from
the ‘first’ is bound to maintain, in Ahmad’s words, ‘only an
ironic relation with the world and its intelligibility’ (1992, 36).
From another perspective, their objections can be invoked—
58
POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
more usefully—to interrogate the incommensurability between
the oppositional stance of postcolonial intellectuals and their
co-option within the very institutions they allegedly critique.
As Cornel West argues, all cultural critics who attempt to
contest the operations of power within their own institutional
contexts find themselves in a disabling double bind: ‘while
linking their activities to the fundamental, structural overhaul
of these institutions, they often remain financially dependent
on them . . . For these critics of culture, theirs is a gesture
that is simultaneously progressive and coopted’ (West 1990,
p. 94).
The problem of ‘positionality’ accordingly devolves upon
the progressive intellectual the task of continually resisting the
institutional procedures of co-option—such an intellectual
must relentlessly negotiate the possibility of being, in Spivak’s
elusive terminology, ‘outside in the teaching machine’. The task
becomes more urgent when we reconsider Foucault’s and
Spivak’s warnings about the centre’s parasitic relationship to
the margin. Neocolonialism, as Spivak reminds us, ‘is fabricating its allies by proposing a share of the centre in a seemingly
new way (not a rupture but a displacement): disciplinary
support for the conviction of authentic marginality by the
(aspiring) elite’ (Spivak 1993, p. 57). Spivak’s statement indirectly raises a number of open-ended questions: can
postcolonialism be ethically professed only from within allegedly ‘postcolonial’ locations? Should third-world intellectuals
in the first-world academy restrict their study to mainstream
culture? Is it possible to disseminate marginalised knowledges
without monumentalising the condition(s) of marginality? And
finally, if facetiously, do intellectuals count anyway?
It is appropriate, in the context of these queries, to consider
that, subsequent to the ‘explosion’ of marginality studies, the
first-world academy is now involved, as Spivak puts it, ‘in the
construction of a new object of investigation—“the third
world”, “the marginal”—for institutional validation and certification’ (1993, p. 56). Far from being disinterested, this
investigation testifies, in many ways, to the persisting Western
interest in the classification, analysis and production of what
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
we might call ‘exotic culture’. And to this end, it relies upon
the dubious good offices of the native (intellectual) informant.
In recent years, the problem of the native intellectual as a
native informant has been forcefully posed within the United
States. academy through the intervention of a wide variety of
‘internally colonised’ or ‘minority’ communities. Among these,
Chicana/o communities have been prominent in their conflictual engagement with the role and function of ‘ethnic’
intellectual/academic representatives. The work of a writer like
Angie Chabran, for instance, is informed by the anxiety that
the Chicana/o intellectual—indeed, the whole enterprise of
Chicana/o studies—uncritically assists in the anthropologisation of the Chicana/o people (Chabran 1990). Rosaura Sanchez
elaborates this anxiety by pointing to the insidious relationship
between the apparently neutral field of ‘area studies’ and the
considerably more biased field of ‘public policy’. ‘The state
interest in gathering information’, Sanchez contends, ‘calls for
the establishment of academic programs that can oversee a
systematic and complex collection of data as well as interpret
it for decision makers in this society’ (Sanchez 1990, p. 299).
While these critics are necessarily alert to the covert operations of governmentality within the academy, their
misgivings—much as those of Dirlik and Ahmad—often result
in a categorical mistrust of intellectual activity in and of itself.
In an argument which questions the fetishisation of intellectual
authority, Chabran, for instance, reasserts the primacy of
experience over theory. She appeals to the instructive status of
the intellectuals’ pre-institutional history in the fields, the
family and the factory, on the grounds that we have to consider
‘the shaping way in which experience directs us to ask certain
questions of [a] particular theory which theory alone does not
lead us to ask’ (Chabran 1990, p. 242). Despite its irrefutable
good sense, Chabran’s claim leaves two questions unanswered.
First, is experience the only valid precondition for theory? If
so, and second, can one then speak about anything which is
outside one’s realm of experience? In other words, can a white
intellectual profess a valid interest in non-white communities,
or a heterosexual intellectual in gay communities, or, for that
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POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
matter, a contemporary intellectual in medieval communities?
Taken to an extreme, the unilateral privileging of experience
over theory—or activism over the academy—works to disqualify or debar the social validity of almost all intellectual activity.
Thus, while a critic like Mike Featherstone proscribes the
activities of literary intellectuals on the grounds that ‘we have
to raise the sociological objection against the literary intellectual’s license in interpreting the everyday, or in providing
evidence about everyday lives of ordinary people’ (Featherstone
1988, pp. 199–200), Iain Chambers celebrates the experiential
complexity of the contemporary world for its total dissolution
of the vainglorious intellect. ‘A certain intellectual formation’,
in his words, ‘is discovering that it is losing its grip on the
world’ (Chambers 1987, p. 20).
This resurgence of anti-intellectualism within leftist thinking
is distressing when we consider that right-wing governments
and lobbies are also engaged in the ruthless excision of intellectual work from national and budgetary agendas. Painfully,
we seem to have inherited a world where, as John Frow argues,
both the left and the right seem to collude in their objections
to non-utilitarian activity. In his words:
The problem is most deeply that of the possible place of
critical thought in a capitalist society—that is, in a society
that seeks to harness knowledge more or less directly to the
generation of profit. Whereas once we could envisage spaces
of exception to the logic of capital accumulation, these ethical
and aesthetic spaces are disappearing in the face of a more
totalizing rationality. One indication of this is the way in
which, in the discourses both of the New Right and of their
near cousins the technocratic left, an economic vocabulary is
used to discredit the study of the humanities (Frow 1990,
p. 357).
Utilitarianism, as Frow points out, has a variety of liberal
and illiberal manifestations. At either extreme, however, it is
marked by a reverence for the notion of quantifiable or visible
effects. For left-thinking utilitarian critics, furthermore, visibility is seen to be the exclusive preserve of experience or praxis,
and theory suffers by contrast as its effects are neither imme61
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
diately apparent nor quantifiable. Ironically, the current antiintellectual bias within the left is entirely out of step with
Marxism’s long-standing insistence on the necessary coalition
between thought and everyday life.
It is instructive here to recall Raymond Williams’ understanding of culture as ‘whole way of life’ within which artistic
and intellectual labour coexist through necessary linkages with
other social activities (Williams 1981, p. 10–14). Williams’
concession to the thought content of any given social order
also appears—although from often entirely divergent positions—within the work of Habermas and Foucault. Habermas,
for instance, argues that the schism between the contrary
realms of purely empirical and purely transcendental knowledges is invariably mediated by those forms of knowing which
are essential to the cultural reproduction of social life. These
mediating knowledges, which he calls ‘cognitive interests’, refer
to the complex processes of learning and mutual understanding
which always accompany the activities of work and interaction. Knowledge, he argues, does not have to be either ‘a mere
instrument of an organism’s adaptation to a changing environment nor the act of a pure rational being removed from the
context of life in contemplation’ (Habermas 1972, p. 197).
Habermas undoes the demarcation between knowledge and
human interest by postulating cognition as a necessary effect
of social life. Foucault takes this proposition a step further by
shifting the focus from knowledge to the question of thought
itself, so as to argue that all forms of activity—of doing—are
always informed, if not produced, by forms of thinking.
Foucault’s interest in making this claim is motivated by a
definitive resistance to the idea that social life is necessarily
more real and therefore more relevant than the activity of
thought:
We must free ourselves from the sacrilization of the social as
the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something
so essential in human life as thought. Thought exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is
something that is often hidden, but which always animates
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POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE NEW HUMANITIES
everyday behaviour. There is always a little thought even in
the most stupid institutions (Foucault 1989, p. 155).
There are serious limitations, as Foucault tells us, to a
critique of academic activism which insists upon the fundamental irrelevance of all knowledge production. The
intellectual’s armchair is, indeed, a considerably less hazardous—and possibly less effective—political location than the
revolutionary battleground. Even so, it remains a crucial sphere
of influence—a place from which it is possible both to agitate
thought within ‘stupid institutions’ and also, as Foucault maintains, to propose ‘an insurrection of knowledges that are
opposed . . . to the effects of the centralising powers that are
linked to the institution’ (Foucault 1980a, p. 84). If the
postcolonial intellectual has a political vocation, then it
inheres, as we have been arguing, in a commitment to facilitate
a democratic dialogue between the Western and non-Western
academies, and in so doing, to think a way out of the
epistemological violence of the colonial encounter. But equally,
this commitment comes with an infrequently heeded obligation
of humility. Despite the protestations of some postcolonial
critics, postcolonial theory speaks to a very limited constituency and, as Dirlik and Ahmad insist, there is always more to
politics than theory.
63
4
Edward Said and his critics
EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
T
he principal features of
postcolonialism’s intellectual inheritance—which we covered in
the preceding two chapters—are realised and elaborated in
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1991, first published in 1978).
Here, as elsewhere in his extensive oeuvre, Said betrays an
uneasy relationship with Marxism, a specifically
poststructuralist and anti-humanist understanding of the contiguity between colonial power and Western knowledge, and
a profound belief in the political and worldly obligations of
the postcolonial intellectual. This chapter will provide some
contexts for understanding the canonisation of this book as a
postcolonial classic through a consideration of its academic
influence and theoretical limitations.
Enter Orientalism
Commonly regarded as the catalyst and reference point for
postcolonialism, Orientalism represents the first phase of
postcolonial theory. Rather than engaging with the ambivalent
condition of the colonial aftermath—or indeed, with the history and motivations of anti-colonial resistance—it directs
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
attention to the discursive and textual production of colonial
meanings and, concomitantly, to the consolidation of colonial
hegemony. While ‘colonial discourse analysis’ is now only one
aspect of postcolonialism, few postcolonial critics dispute its
enabling effect upon subsequent theoretical improvisations.
Gayatri Spivak, for example, has recently celebrated Said’s
book as the founding text or ‘source book’ through which
‘marginality’ itself has acquired the status of a discipline in the
Anglo-American academy. In her words, ‘the study of colonial
discourse, directly released by work such as Said’s, has . . .
blossomed into a garden where the marginal can speak and
be spoken, even spoken for. It is an important part of the
discipline now’ (Spivak 1993, p. 56). The editors of the
influential Essex symposia series on the sociology of literature
also invoke the spirit of Spivak’s extravagant metaphor to
argue that Said’s pioneering efforts have single-handedly moved
matters of colony and empire ‘centre stage in Anglo-American
literary and cultural theory . . .’ (Barker et al. 1994, p. 1).
While these accounts testify to the valency of Said’s dense
text in the metropolitan Western academy, others eagerly
confirm his influence on the ‘third world’ academy. Zakia
Pathak, Saswati Sengupta and Sharmila Purkayasta have written passionately about the long awaited and messianic arrival
of Orientalism into the alienated and alienating English Studies
classroom in Delhi University. Said’s Orientalism, they claim,
finally taught them how to teach a literature which was not
their own:
To deconstruct the text, to examine the process of its production, to identify the myths of imperialism structuring it, to
show how the oppositions on which it rests are generated by
political needs at given moments in history, quickened the text
to life in our world (Pathak et al. 1991, p. 195).
A similar mood informs Partha Chatterjee’s assessment of
Said’s book in terms of its impact on his own intellectual
formation as a ‘postcolonial’ historian. His essay nostalgically
recalls a revelatory first reading of Orientalism through an
uncertain season in Calcutta:
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
I will long remember the day I read Orientalism . . . For me,
child of a successful anti-colonial struggle, Orientalism was a
book which talked of things I felt I had known all along but
had never found the language to formulate with clarity. Like
many great books it seemed to say to me for the first time
what one had always wanted to say (Chatterjee 1992, p. 194).
Each of the accounts I have been citing attempts, in a
different way, to postulate Said’s book as a canonical ‘event’,
and while Spivak and the editors of the Essex symposia series
measure its canonicity in terms of its public and disciplinary
impact, Chatterjee invites us to participate vicariously in the
intellectual frisson of a private encounter between an uninitiated reader and a great book. Taken together, these appraisals
decisively testify to Orientalism’s revolutionary impact on intellectual formations, structures and lives, both in the West and
in the postcolonial non-West. There are, of course, a host of
other more discontented critics who have remained impervious
to the cognitive charms of this book, and who have contested
its phenomenal status and pre-eminence. Nevertheless, as Tim
Brennan asks of Said’s detractors: ‘Why . . . was it Orientalism
. . . that changed the drift of scholarship in several disciplines,
found readers in a number of languages, crept into the most
unlikely footnotes, and inspired a feature-length film?’ (Brennan 1992, p. 78). Before addressing these questions directly
we might briefly summarise some of the themes and concerns
of this volume.
Orientalism is the first book in a trilogy devoted to an
exploration of the historically imbalanced relationship between
the world of Islam, the Middle East, and the ‘Orient’ on the
one hand, and that of European and American imperialism on
the other. While Orientalism focuses on the well-rehearsed field
of nineteenth-century British and French imperialism, the two
subsequent books in this series, The Question of Palestine
(1979) and Covering Islam (1981) foreground the submerged
or latent imperialism which informs the relationship between
Zionism and Palestine and that of the United States and the
Islamic world.
Said’s critics claim that these books are unremarkable in
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
the fact of their attention to the violence of imperialism.
Insofar as they engage in an extended critique of imperial
procedures, they are simply more updated versions of a wellestablished tradition of anti-colonial polemic which, as Aijaz
Ahmad writes, is ‘virtually as old as colonialism itself’ (Ahmad
1992, p. 174). We have already encountered some early and
significantly more contentious versions of this tradition in
Gandhi and Fanon. What, then, is the particular contribution
of Orientalism and its sequels to the defiant counter-hegemonic
chorus of its predecessors? How do Said’s books diagnose the
Western will to power differently? Initially, we might say that
the Orientalism series as a whole elaborates a unique understanding of imperialism/colonialism as the epistemological and
cultural attitude which accompanies the curious habit of dominating and, whenever possible, ruling distant territories. As
Said writes in his recent book Culture and Imperialism:
Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps
even impelled by impressive ideological formations which
include notions that certain territories and people require and
beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated
with that domination (Said 1993, p. 8).
Orientalism is the first book in which Said relentlessly
unmasks the ideological disguises of imperialism. In this
regard, its particular contribution to the field of anti-colonial
scholarship inheres in its painstaking, if somewhat overstated,
exposition of the reciprocal relationship between colonial
knowledge and colonial power. It proposes that ‘Orientalism’—or the project of teaching, writing about, and
researching the Orient—has always been an essential cognitive
accompaniment and inducement to Europe’s imperial adventures in the hypothetical ‘East’. Accordingly, it claims that the
peculiarly ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient’ (Said 1991 [1978], p. 3) is
inextricable from the peculiarly Western style of studying and
thinking about the Orient. In other words, its answer to the
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
way the East was won suggests that we reconsider some of
the ways in which the East was known.
The Said phenomenon
In order properly to assess the phenomenal success of Orientalism, we need to return to the scene of its publication in
1978. Books, as Said insists in his collection of essays entitled,
The World, the Text and the Critic, should be judged in terms
of their circumstantiality or their implication in the social and
political imperatives of the world in which they are produced.
As he writes: ‘My position is that texts are worldly, to some
degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny
it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life,
and of course the historical moments in which they are located
and interpreted’ (Said 1983, p. 4). In subsequent works, such
as Culture and Imperialism, Said develops this position further
to argue that while all texts are ‘worldly’, great texts or
‘masterpieces’ encode the greatest pressures and preoccupations of the world around them. They successfully reveal and
formalise prevailing structures of attitude and reference and,
in so doing, indicate both the possibilities and the limits of
these structures.
Raymond Williams makes a similar point in his very useful
distinction between ‘indicative’ or ‘subjunctive’ texts. Whereas
the former simply indicate what is happening in the world, the
latter, he argues, gesture toward a radical perspective or
impulse which is neither socially nor politically available, nor,
for that matter, entirely permissible within the prevailing social
order. Thus, ‘subjunctive’ texts are always ‘attempting to lift
certain pressures, to push back certain limits; and at the same
time, in a fully extended production, bearing the full weight
of the pressures and limits, in which the simple forms, the
simple contents, of mere ideological reproduction can never
achieve’ (Williams 1986, p. 16). How far do Said’s and Williams’ criteria for canonicity apply to Orientalism? Is it
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
possible, or even appropriate, to think of it as a radically
‘subjunctive’ text?
Said’s detractors have implicitly invoked the logic of Williams’ distinction between ‘indicative’ and ‘subjunctive’ texts
to insist that Orientalism is utterly, even boringly, symptomatic
and indicative of what was happening in the Anglo-American
academy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These critics insist
that the academic world of Said’s book was still recovering
from the cataclysmic events of 1968. As is now well known,
this date commemorates the accidents of a utopian revolution
which swept across Europe, bringing workers and students
together in a combined and unprecedented offensive against
authoritarian educational institutions and the capitalist state.
The agitation, of course, spluttered to a pathetic end on the
streets of Paris—partly due to the disorganised character of
the offensive itself, and partly due to the betrayal of the
movement by its Stalinist leaders. The failures of 1968 brought
in their wake a serious and disillusioned reconsideration of
Marxist theory and its omissions. To some extent, this reconsideration was articulated, as we saw in the previous chapter,
through poststructuralism—a theoretical enterprise which
acquired academic prominence in the period directly leading
up to the publication of Orientalism.
Few critics dispute the continuities between poststructuralist
theory and Orientalism. While some have attempted sympathetically to historicise the extent of Said’s debts to, and
departures from, his theoretical predecessors, others have
chosen to hold poststructuralism against him. Thus, for critics
like Aijaz Ahmad, poststructuralism and its inheritors are
unforgivably implicated in the demise of Marxist thinking. The
reactionary content of poststructuralist theory, Ahmad maintains, is confirmed when we consider that its perverse ascent
to dominance has been accompanied by the rise of right-wing
governments and movements throughout the Anglo-American
world. Thus, Reaganism, Thatcherism, the defeat of social
democracy in Germany and Scandinavia, and the conservative
backlash in France are all said to provide the definitive backdrop to the theoretical mal-condition of the Anglo-American
69
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
academy in the late 1970s. Ahmad also argues that in the
absence of any serious or legitimate ‘leftist’ thought, most
intellectuals of this reactionary era guiltily took refuge in token
and flabby forms of ecologism and ‘third worldism’. In his
words:
The characteristic posture of this new intellectual was that he
or she would gain legitimacy on the Left by fervently referring
to the Third World, Cuba, national liberation, and so on, but
would also be openly and contemptuously anti-communist;
would often enough not only not affiliate even with that other
tradition which had also descended from classical Marxism,
namely social democracy, nor be affiliated in any degree with
any labour movement whatsoever, but would invoke an antibourgeoisie stance in the name of manifestly reactionary
anti-humanisms enunciated in the Nietzchean tradition and
propagated now under the signature of anti-empiricism, antihistoricism, structuralism and post-structuralism . . . (Ahmad
1992, p. 192).
The objective of Ahmad’s polemic, in this instance, is to
provide a context for Orientalism. Insofar as he believes that
the late 1970s were a misguidedly anti-Marxist, viciously
poststructuralist and sentimentally tree-hugging and thirdworldist time, he also believes that Said’s book is entirely—and
in Raymond Williams’ sense of the word—‘indicative’ of this
ethos. There is great substance in Ahmad’s specific objections
to Orientalism, but there is also reason to argue that in his
account of the circumstantiality of this book, he protests a
little too much. Although Said’s text exhibits all the limits and
constraints of its historically specific relation to Marxism,
poststructuralism and the third world, it is also able to push
against these structural and formal limits in interestingly ‘subjunctive’ ways.
Let us start by addressing the question of Marxism. Ever
since the writing of Orientalism, Said has been consistently
critical about the epistemological and ontological insufficiency
of Marxist theory. His objections in this regard have been
informed by a refusal to modify specific acts of criticism or
politics in advance through labels like ‘Marxism’ or ‘liberal70
EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
ism’. Criticism, as he writes, is most like itself ‘in its suspicion
of totalising concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in
its impatience with guilds, special interests, imperialised
fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind’ (Said 1983, p. 29).
Said’s account of critical/political activity advocates a movement away from premeditated systems of knowledge toward
heterogeneous ‘events’ or acts of knowing. This is, of course,
very similar to Lyotard’s—and to an extent, Foucault’s—disavowal of any intellectual or ethical subscription to totality.
And, indeed, there is no doubt that Said’s general objections
to Marxist orthodoxy are historically mediated by the
poststructuralist and postmodernist incredulity toward universalising and totalising ‘grand narratives’. At the same time,
and unlike Foucault and Lyotard, his specific disenchantment
with Marxism is not occasioned by the experiences of 1968,
which, as Terry Eagleton puts it, produced a violent reaction
against ‘all forms of political theory and organisation which
sought to analyse, and act upon, the structures of society as
a whole. For it was precisely such politics which seemed to
have failed’ (Eagleton 1983, p. 142). For Said, somewhat
differently, the radical failure of Marxist categories arises from
his perception of their inability to accommodate the specific
political needs and experiences of the colonised world. As he
says with reference to the Palestinian experience, ‘the development of a theoretical marxism in the Arab world did not seem
to meet adequately the challenges of imperialism, the formation
of a nationalist elite, the failure of the national revolution’ (see
Sprinker 1992, p. 261). In Orientalism, Said substantiates the
cultural inadequacy of Marxist theory by drawing attention to
the blindness of Marx himself to the world outside Europe.
Marx, as is well known, defends the emergence and spread
of European capitalist or bourgeois society as the universal
precondition for social revolution. In this context, he identifies
European colonialism as the historical project which facilitates
the globalisation of the capitalist mode of production and,
thereby, the destruction of ‘backward’ or pre-capitalist forms
of social organisation. In many of Marx’s writings, specifically
his 1853 journalistic analyses of British rule in India, there is,
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
thus, an implicit link between the progressive role of capital
and the progressive role of colonialism. As Marx writes:
‘England has to fulfil a double role in India: one destructive,
the other regenerative—the annihilation of the Asiatic society
and the laying of the material foundations of Western society
in Asia’ (Marx 1973, p. 320; cited in Said 1991 [1978], p.
154). Said responds to this pronouncement by arguing that
the Marxist thesis on socioeconomic revolution is ultimately
and ethically flawed from the perspective of the colonised
world—first, because its vision of progress tiredly reiterates
nineteenth-century assumptions of the fundamental inequality
between East and West; and second, because it views the
colonised ‘Orient’ simply as the abstract illustration of a theory
rather than an existential mass of suffering individuals. And
finally, it is inadequate because Marx follows the insidious
logic of the colonial civilising mission in postulating Europe
as the hyperreal master-narrative, which will pronounce the
redemption of poor Asia. Thus, even socialism, as Fanon
writes, becomes ‘part of the prodigious adventure of the
European spirit’ (Fanon 1990, p. 253). Or, to put this differently, colonialism becomes a practical and theoretical exigency
for the fulfilment of Marx’s emancipatory vision.
Said’s critique of Marxist theory arrives at a poststructuralist destination insofar as it demonstrates, once again, the
always-already complicity of Western knowledges with the
operative interests of Western power. And yet, the geographical
and cultural parameters for Said’s poststructuralist ‘demonstration’ are, as I have been arguing, radically different from those
deployed by Foucault and Derrida in their revisionist critique
of Western epistemology and cultural hegemony. For while
these poststructuralist luminaries challenge the conceptual
boundaries of the West from within Western culture, they are,
as Homi Bhabha writes, notoriously and self-consciously ethnocentric in their refusal to push these boundaries ‘to the
colonial periphery; to that limit where the west must face a
peculiarly displaced and decentred image of itself “in double
duty bound”, at once a civilising mission and a violent subjugating force’ (Bhabha 1986, p. 148). Thus, while Derrida
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
brilliantly details the internal inadequacies, betrayals and elisions of what he calls the system of ‘Western metaphysics’, he
neglects adequately to theorise those external factors or
civilisational Others which render this system unalienably
‘Western’. So also, Foucault’s scrupulous attention to the discursive structure and order of Western civilisation remains
culturally myopic with regard to the non-European world.
In this context, Orientalism needs to be read as an attempt
to extend the geographical and historical terrain for the
poststructuralist discontent with Western epistemology. It
argues that in order to fully understand the emergence of the
‘West’ as a structure and a system we have also to recognise
that the colonised ‘Orient’ has ‘helped to define Europe as its
contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 1991
[1978], p. 2). Thus, Said’s critical pursuit of Marx out of the
streets of Paris into Asia is symptomatic of the way in which
his work, to quote Homi Bhabha again:
dramatically shifts the locus of contemporary theory from the
Left Bank to the West Bank and beyond, through a profound
meditation on the myths of Western power and knowledge
which confine the colonised and dispossessed to a half-life of
misrepresentation and migration (Bhabha 1986, p. 149).
In conclusion, it would falsify Said’s project if we simply
attributed his critique of Marxism to his blind adherence to
poststructuralism. For as we have seen, his objections to
Marxism are fundamentally similar to his objections to
poststructuralism. Both turn on the sense that these otherwise
mutually antagonistic theories are in fact united in their tendency toward a crippling ethnocentrism. Having said this, we
need also to recognise that Said is, as his critics point out,
disablingly impervious to the accomplishment and value of the
theories and knowledges he chooses to critique. He tends to
underestimate his own intellectual debt to his poststructuralist
predecessors and, perhaps more dangerously, fails to engage
with the enormous contribution of Marxism to the ‘third
world’. Marxism, despite Said’s objections, is not so much
complicit with imperialism as it is an account of the necessary
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complicity of capitalism and colonialism. What it delivers
theoretically, is a set of categories that we can work with,
through which we might understand ourselves—and our
implication in the history of capitalist/European imperialism—
differently (see Chakrabarty 1993, pp. 421–3). Moreover, and
as Gayatri Spivak repeatedly argues, it is profoundly enabling
and useful to rethink the present relationship between the
‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds through Marxist accounts of the
globalisation of capital and the international division of labour.
As she argues, Marxist thought relies on the:
possibility of suggesting to the worker that the worker produces capital because the worker, the container of labour
power, is the source of value. By the same token it is possible
to suggest to the so called ‘Third World’ that it produces the
wealth and the possibility of the cultural self-representation
of the ‘First World’ (Spivak 1990, p. 96).
In other words, it is possible to arrive at the conclusions of
Said’s Orientalism without necessarily debunking the entire
project of Marxist epistemology. Then again, it is only with
hindsight, only after Orientalism, that postcolonial scholars
and theorists have been able to imagine the seemingly impossible collusion of poststructuralist scepticism with Marxist
historicism.
Rethinking colonial discourse
I have been arguing that Orientalism, The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam each extend Foucault’s paradigmatic
account of the alliance between power and knowledge to
colonial conditions. Foucault, as we have seen, explores the
contiguity of power and knowledge in order to explicate the
ways in which knowledge transforms power, changing it from
a monolithic apparatus accumulated within the State into a
web-like force which is confirmed and articulated through the
everyday exchanges of ‘know how’ or information which
animate social life. Accordingly, as Sneja Gunew writes, power
‘is reproduced in discursive networks at every point where
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
someone who “knows” is instructing someone who doesn’t
know’ (Gunew 1990, p. 22). While Said listens carefully to
Foucault’s influential account of power, he is ultimately more
interested in questions of knowledge or—more specifically—in
exploring and critiquing the conditions under which knowledge might be transformed and vitiated through the contagion
of power. Here Said seems to invoke the anarchist maxim that
power corrupts to argue that power is especially corrupting
when it comes into contact with knowledge. This, as he tells
us, is the lesson to be learnt from Orientalism:
If this book has any future use, it will be . . . as a warning:
that systems of thought like Orientalism, discourses of power,
ideological fictions—mind-forg’d manacles—are all too easily
made, applied and guarded . . . If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the
seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time. Now perhaps more than before (Said 1991
[1978], p. 328).
Said’s concern for the deleterious effect of power on knowledge elaborates his conviction that intellectual and cultural
activity does, and should, improve the social world in which
it is conducted. Nowhere does Said eschew the ‘worldliness’
or political texture of human knowledges. His introduction to
Orientalism labours to refuse the distinction between ‘pure’
and ‘political’ knowledge on the grounds that no self-respecting scholar or writer can ethically disclaim their involvement
in the actuality of their circumstances. Thus, knowledge is
most like itself when it undertakes to counter and oppose the
unequal distribution of power in the ‘world’. It belongs, as
Said writes, ‘in that potential space inside civil society, acting
on behalf of those alternative acts and alternative intentions
whose advancement is a fundamental human and intellectual
obligation’ (Said 1983, p. 30). Likewise, knowledge is least
like itself when it becomes institutionalised and starts to
collaborate with the interests of a dominant or ruling elite.
Said takes Orientalism as a paradigmatic instance of
institutionalised and ‘degraded’ knowledge, to be opposed
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through an adversarial or oppositional counter-knowledge. His
analysis of this field is built upon three fairly idiosyncratic
‘meanings’ of ‘Orientalism’, which he supplies at the beginning
of his book. First, Said invokes the conventional understanding
of ‘Orientalism’ as a field of specialisation or academic pursuit
of the Orient. Strictly speaking, ‘Orientalism’ designates the
pioneering efforts of eighteenth-century scholars and enthusiasts of Oriental cultures—such as William Jones, Henry T.
Colebrooke and Charles Wilkins—who undertook the first
translations of texts like the Bhagavad Gita, Shakuntala and
portions of the Upanishads. Said is somewhat more liberal in
his view that ‘Orientalism’ includes the activities of any professional Western academic—historian, sociologist,
anthropologist, area studies expert or philologist—currently or
previously engaged in studying, researching or teaching the
‘Orient’. Second, he abandons the disciplinary confines of
Orientalist tradition to argue, rather expansively, that Orientalism also refers to any, and every, occasion when a Westerner
has either imagined or written about the non-Western world.
So Orientalism becomes an imaginative cast of mind or style
of thought which covers roughly two millennia of Western
consciousness about the East. Homer, Aeschylus, Dante are all,
by this reasoning, rebaptised as Orientalists. Third, Said finally
delivers his principal understanding of ‘Orientalism’ as an
enormous system or inter-textual network of rules and procedures which regulate anything that may be thought, written
or imagined about the Orient. It is clear that this third
description subsumes the first and the second meanings of
‘Orientalism’. It also marks the historical juncture at which
any Western attempt to ‘know’ or directly engage with the
non-Western world is mediated, as James Clifford argues, by
a tendency to dichotomise the relationship between the ‘Occident’ and the ‘Orient’ into an us–them contrast, and then, to
essentialise the resultant ‘Other’; to speak, that is, in a
generalising way about the Oriental ‘character’, ‘mind’ and so
on (Clifford 1988, p. 258).
In effect, Said’s final description delivers an understanding
of Orientalism as a discourse—in Foucault’s sense of the term.
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
Sociolinguistic theory tells us that discourses, or discursive
formations, are always linked to the exercise of power. They
are modes of utterance or systems of meaning which are both
constituted by, and committed to, the perpetuation of dominant social systems. In every society, as Foucault writes, ‘the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,
organised and redistributed by certain numbers of procedures
whose role is to ward off its dangers, to gain mastery over its
chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality’
(Foucault 1987, p. 52). Discourses are, in point of fact, heavily
policed cognitive systems which control and delimit both the
mode and the means of representation in a given society.
Accordingly, colonial/Orientalist discourses are typical of discursive activity whenever they claim the right to speak for the
mute and uncomprehending Orient and, in so doing, relentlessly represent it as the negative, underground image or
impoverished ‘Other’ of Western rationality. In other words,
Orientalism becomes a discourse at the point at which it starts
systematically to produce stereotypes about Orientals and the
Orient, such as the heat and dust, the teeming marketplace,
the terrorist, the courtesan, the Asian despot, the child-like
native, the mystical East. These stereotypes, Said tells us,
confirm the necessity and desirability of colonial government
by endlessly confirming the positional superiority of the West
over the positional inferiority of the East. What they deliver,
in his words, is the unchanging image of ‘a subject race,
dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for
them better than they could possibly know themselves’ (Said
1991 [1978], p. 35).
Said’s project has been exemplary in its protest against the
representational violence of colonial discourse and, indeed, in
its commitment to the onerous task of consciousness raising
in the Western academy. At the same time, Orientalism is often
theoretically naive in its insistence that the Orientalist stereotype invariably presupposes and confirms a totalising and
unified imperialist discourse. Accordingly, a wide variety of
recent critics have revisited Orientalism to argue that cultural
stereotypes are considerably more ambivalent and dynamic
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than Said’s analysis allows. Homi Bhabha, in particular, argues
that the negative Orientalist stereotype is an unstable category
which marks the conceptual limit of colonial presence and
identity. It is fundamentally threatening as the banished or
underground ‘Other’ of the European self, and insofar as it
embodies the contradictory expulsions of colonial fantasy and
phobia, it actualises a potentially disruptive site of pleasure
and anxiety. In Bhabha’s words:
Stereotyping is not only the setting up of a false image which
becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much
more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, guilt,
aggressivity; the masking and splitting of ‘official’ and fantasmic knowledges . . . (Bhabha 1986, p. 169).
Bhabha’s psychoanalytically informed claims about the
inderterminate and explosive structure of the colonial stereotype are complemented by a growing critical awareness about
the historically radical uses of Orientalism—both within the
West and within the colonised non-West. Scholars such as
Richard Fox and Partha Chatterjee argue that anti-colonial
nationalist movements regularly drew upon affirmative Orientalist stereotypes to define an authentic cultural identity in
opposition to Western civilisation. Gandhian cultural resistance, Fox argues, typically ‘depended upon an Orientalist
image of India as inherently spiritual, consensual, and corporate’ (Fox 1992, p. 151). Correspondingly, enthusiastic Indian
nationalists responded to perjorative stereotypes about India’s
caste-dominated, other-worldly, despotic and patriarchal social
structure with reformist zeal and agency. Thus, Orientalist
discourse was strategically available not only to the empire but
also to its antagonists. Moreover, the affirmative stereotypes
attached to this discourse were instrumental in fashioning the
‘East’ as a utopian alternative to Europe. Countless scholars,
writers, polemicists, spiritualists, travellers and wanderers
invoked Orientalist idealisations of India to critique—in the
spirit of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj—the aggressive capitalism and
territorialism of the modern West. And, as critics such as
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EDWARD SAID AND HIS CRITICS
Dennis Porter and Parminder Kaur Bakshi argue, the underground and radically dissident tradition of nineteenth-century
homosexual literature drew much of its sustenance from the
liberated alterity of the Orient (see Porter 1983; Bakshi 1990).
Writers like E.M. Forster and Edward Carpenter, among
others, imagined, wrote, thought and discovered the Orient,
stereotypically, as a safeguard against the political and personal
repressions of imperial Europe.
If Orientalism is a limited text, then it is so primarily
because it fails to accommodate the possibility of difference
within Oriental discourse. Sometimes, in his obdurate determination that Orientalism silenced opposition, Said, ironically,
silences opposition. So also he defeats the logic of his own
intellectual egalitarianism by producing and confirming a
reversed stereotype: the racist Westerner. After Orientalism, it
becomes our task not only to demonstrate the ambivalence of
the Oriental stereotype, but also—and crucially—to refuse the
pleasures of an Occidental stereotype. We might start to see
the shape and possibility of this refusal by returning to the
Orientalist archive so as to listen more carefully to the Orientalists themselves. How, for example, should we respond to
William Jones, Orientalist par excellence, when he starts to
speak vitriolically about the uncivilised cultural insularity of
Europe?
Some men have never heard of the Asiatick writings, and
others will not be convinced that there is anything valuable
in them; some pretend to be busy, and others are really idle;
some detest the Persians, because they believe in Mahomed,
and others despise their language, because they do not understand it: we all love to excuse, or to conceal, our ignorance,
and are seldom willing to allow any excellence beyond the
limits of our own achievements: like the savages, who thought
the sun rose and set for them alone, and could not imagine
that the waves, which surrounded their island, left coral and
pearl upon any other shore (Jones 1991, p. 158).
Since, here we have an Orientalist critique of the exclusions
which run through Western knowledges—an inversion of colonial oppositions, whereby it is the epistemological arrogance
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of Europe which earns the charge of savagery, surely Jones’
appeal on behalf of non-European knowledges exceeds the
bounds of Said’s book, and begs to be accommodated in a less
formulaic rereading of Orientalism.
80
5
Postcolonialism and feminism
POSTCOLONIALISM AND FEMINISM
I
n Culture and Imperialism, Said
concedes that Orientalism fails to theorise adequately the
resistance of the non-European world to the material and
discursive onslaught of colonialism. This recent book announces its departure from Said’s earlier and disablingly
one-sided account of the colonial encounter: ‘Never was it the
case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western
intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there
was always some form of active resistance and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out’
(Said 1993, p. xii). However, despite this apparent recantation,
Said stubbornly refuses to elevate anti-colonial resistance to
the status of anti-colonial critique. The culture of resistance,
he argues, finds its theoretical and political limit in the chauvinist and authoritarian boundaries of the postcolonial
nation-State—itself a conformity-producing prison-house
which reverses, and so merely replicates, the old colonial
divisions of racial consciousness. Moreover, in its exclusively
anti-Western focus, anti-colonial nationalism deflects attention
away from internal orthodoxies and injustices—‘the nation can
become a panacea for not dealing with economic disparities,
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
social injustice, and the capture of the newly independent state
by a nationalist elite’ (1993, p. 262). Thus, Said insists, a
comprehensive dismantling of colonial hierarchies and structures needs to be matched by a reformed and imaginative
reconception of colonised society and culture. It requires an
enlightened intellectual consensus which ‘refuses the short term
blandishments of separatist and triumphalist slogans in favour
of the larger, more generous human realities of community
among cultures, peoples, and societies’ (1993, p. 262). In other
words, the intellectual stirrings of anti-colonialism can only be
properly realised when nationalism becomes more ‘critical of
itself’—when it proves itself capable of directing attention ‘to
the abused rights of all oppressed classes’ (1993, p. 264).
Said’s intervention urges postcolonialism to reconsider the
significance of all those other liberationist activities in the
colonised world—such as those of the women’s movement—
which forcefully interrupt the triumphant and complacent
rhetoric of the anti-colonial nation-State. ‘Students of
postcolonial politics’, he laments, ‘have not . . . looked enough
at ideas that minimise orthodoxy and authoritarian or patriarchal thought, that take a severe view of the coercive nature
of identity politics’ (1993, p. 264). And yet, despite the force
of Said’s appeal, it is difficult for postcolonialism to entirely
withdraw its loyalties from anti-colonial nationalism. Accordingly, it has always been troubled by the conflicting claims of
nationalism and feminism. In this chapter we will focus on the
discordance of race and gender within colonised cultures with
a view to elucidating some of the issues surrounding the
contiguities and oppositions between feminist and postcolonial
theory.
Imperialist feminisms: woman (in)difference
Until recently, feminist and postcolonial theory have followed
what Bill Ashcroft et al. call ‘a path of convergent evolution’
(Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 249). Both bodies of thought have
concerned themselves with the study and defence of
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marginalised ‘Others’ within repressive structures of domination and, in so doing, both have followed a remarkably similar
theoretical trajectory. Feminist and postcolonial theory alike
began with an attempt to simply invert prevailing hierarchies
of gender/culture/race, and they have each progressively welcomed the poststructuralist invitation to refuse the binary
oppositions upon which patriarchal/colonial authority constructs itself. It is only in the last decade or so, however, that
these two parallel projects have finally come together in what
is, at best, a very volatile and tenuous partnership. In a sense,
the alliance between these disciplinary siblings is informed by
a mutual suspicion, wherein each discourse constantly confronts its limits and exclusions in the other. In the main, there
are three areas of controversy which fracture the potential
unity between postcolonialism and feminism: the debate surrounding the figure of the ‘third-world woman’; the
problematic history of the ‘feminist-as-imperialist’; and finally,
the colonialist deployment of ‘feminist criteria’ to bolster the
appeal of the ‘civilising mission’.
The most significant collision and collusion of postcolonial
and feminist theory occurs around the contentious figure of
the ‘third-world woman’. Some feminist postcolonial theorists
have cogently argued that a blinkered focus on racial politics
inevitably elides the ‘double colonisation’ of women under
imperial conditions. Such theory postulates the ‘third-world
woman’ as victim par excellence—the forgotten casualty of
both imperial ideology, and native and foreign patriarchies.
While it is now impossible to ignore the feminist challenge to
the gender blindness of anti-colonial nationalism, critics such
as Sara Suleri are instructive in their disavowal of the much
too eager ‘coalition between postcolonial and feminist theories,
in which each term serves to reify the potential pietism of the
other’ (Suleri 1992, p. 274). The imbrication of race and
gender, as Suleri goes on to argue, invests the ‘third-world
woman’ with an iconicity which is almost ‘too good to be
true’ (1992, p. 273).
Suleri’s irascible objections to the postcolonial–feminist
merger require some clarification. They need to be read as a
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
refusal to, as it were, surrender the ‘third-world woman’ to
the sentimental and often opportunistic enamourment with
‘marginality’, which—as we have seen in an earlier chapter—
has come to characterise the metropolitan cult of ‘oppositional
criticism’. As Spivak writes, ‘If there is a buzzword in cultural
critique now, it is “marginality”’ (Spivak 1993, p. 55). We
now take it on trust that the consistent invocation of the
marginal/subjugated has helped reform the aggressive canonicity of high Western culture. And yet, even as the margins
thicken with political significance, there are two problems
which must give pause. First, as Spivak insists, the prescription
of non-Western alterity as a tonic for the ill health of Western
culture heralds the perpetration of a ‘new Orientalism’.
Second, the metropolitan demand for marginality is also
troublingly a command which consolidates and names the
non-West as interminably marginal. By way of example, we
might reconsider Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of ‘minor’
or ‘deterritorialised’ discourses in their influential study, Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze & Guattari 1986). These
discourses or literatures, the authors inform us, inhere in
‘points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third
World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enter
into things, an assemblage come into play’ (1986, p. 27). In
Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary manifesto, the third
world becomes a stable metaphor for the ‘minor’ zone of
nonculture and underdevelopment. Moreover, its value inheres
only in its capacity to politicise or—predictably—‘subvert’
major, that is to say, more developed, cultural formations.
Once again, then, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, the margin is at
the service of the centre: ‘When a cultural identity is thrust
upon one because the centre wants an identifiable margin,
claims for marginality assure validation from the centre’
(Spivak 1993, p. 55). The ‘third-world woman’ is arguably
housed in an ‘identifiable margin’. And as critics like Suleri
and Spivak insist, this accommodation is ultimately unsatisfactory.
In an impressionistic and quasi-poetic book Woman,
Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha firmly attributes the rise of
the ‘third-world woman’ to the ideological tourism of West84
POSTCOLONIALISM AND FEMINISM
ern/liberal feminism. Trinh’s book elaborates its critique
through a fictionalised—and yet all too familiar—account of
the paternalistic and self-congratulatory tokenism which sustains ‘Special Third World Women’s’ readings, workshops,
meetings and seminars. In every such event, Trinh argues, the
veneer of cross-cultural, sisterly colloquium disguises an
unpleasant ideology of separatism. Wherever she goes, the
‘native woman’ is required to exhibit her ineluctable ‘difference’ from the primary referent of Western feminism: ‘It is as
if everywhere we go, we become Someone’s private zoo’ (Trinh
1989, p. 82). This voyeuristic craving for the colourful alterity
of native women seriously compromises the seemingly egalitarian politics of liberal feminism. The consciousness of
difference, identified by Trinh, sets up an implicit culturalist
hierarchy wherein almost inevitably the ‘native woman’ suffers
in contrast with her Western sibling. By claiming the dubious
privilege of ‘preparing the way for one’s more “unfortunate”
sisters’, the Western feminist creates an insuperable division
between ‘I-who-have-made-it and You-who-cannot-make-it’
(1989, p. 86). Thus, Trinh concludes, the circulation of the
‘Special Third World Women’s Issue’, only serves to advertise
the specialness of the mediating first(?) world woman.
In her influential article ‘Under Western eyes: feminist
scholarship and colonial discourses’, Chandra Talpade
Mohanty similarly discerns the play of a discursive colonialism
in the ‘production of the “Third World Woman” as a singular
monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts’
(Talpade Mohanty 1994, p. 196). Talpade Mohanty uses the
term ‘colonialism’ very loosely to imply any relation of structural domination which relies upon a self-serving suppression
of ‘the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question’ (1994, p.
196). The analytic category ‘third-world woman’ is, thus,
colonialist for two reasons—first, because its ethnocentric
myopia disregards the enormous material and historical differences between ‘real’ third-world women; and second, because
the composite ‘Othering’ of the ‘third-world woman’ becomes
a self-consolidating project for Western feminism. Talpade
Mohanty shows how feminists working within the social
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sciences invoke the narrative of ‘double colonisation’ principally to contrast the political immaturity of third-world
women with the progressive ethos of Western feminism. Thus,
the representation of the average third-world woman as ‘ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domesticated,
family-oriented, victimised’, facilitates and privileges the selfrepresentation of Western women ‘as educated, modern, as
having control over their own bodies and “sexualities”, and
the “freedom” to make their own decisions’ (1994, p. 200).
In other words, the implied cultural lack of the ‘third-world
woman’ fortifies the redemptive ideological/political plenitude
of Western feminism. To a large extent, Trinh’s and Talpade
Mohanty’s critiques of liberal-feminist imperialism draw upon
Said’s understanding of colonial discourse as the cultural privilege of representing the subjugated Other. Both Said’s
Orientalist offenders and Talpade Mohanty’s feminist opportunists, seem to speak the third world through a shared
vocabulary which insists: they cannot represent themselves;
they must be represented. The ‘third-world woman’ can thus
be seen as yet another object of Western knowledges, simultaneously knowable and unknowing. And as Talpade Mohanty
laments, the residual traces of colonialist epistemology are all
too visible in the:
appropriation and codification of ‘scholarship’ and ‘knowledge’ about women in the third world by particular analytic
categories employed in writings on the subject which take as
their primary point of reference feminist interests which have
been articulated in the US and western Europe’ (1994, p. 196).
Gayatri Spivak deserves mention here for her relentless
challenge to all those specious knowledge systems which seek
to regulate the articulation of what she calls the ‘gendered
subaltern’. Although most of Spivak’s scattered oeuvre touches
upon the touchy politics of knowing the Other, her early essay
‘French feminism in an international frame’ (1987) is exemplary in its attention to the narcissism of the liberal-feminist
investigator. In this essay, Spivak details the problematic elisions which run through Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese
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Women—a text which emerged out of the sporadic French
academic interest in China during the 1970s. Spivak’s essay
pursues Kristeva’s itinerant gaze to the sun-soaked expanse of
Huxian Square, where a crowd of unspeaking women picturesquely awaits the theorist’s peroration. In her characteristic
style, Spivak starts to interrupt Kristeva’s musings and, in so
doing, foregrounds the discrepancy between the visible silence
of the observed Chinese women and the discursive cacophony
of the observing French feminist. Spivak’s exercise makes a
simple point: we never hear the object(s) of Kristeva’s investigation represent themselves. Yet, in the face of her mute native
material, Kristeva abandons all scholarly decorum to hypothesise and generalise about China in terms of millennia, and
always, as Spivak wryly observes, ‘with no encroachment of
archival evidence’ (Spivak 1987, p. 137). Eventually, as
Kristeva’s prose starts to slip away from any reference to the
verity of the onlooking gathering at Huxian Square, her fluency becomes an end in itself; a solipsistic confirmation of the
investigator’s discursive privilege. Indeed, as Spivak points out,
the material and historical scene before Kristeva is only ever
an occasion for self-elaboration:
Her question, in the face of those silent women, is about her
own identity rather than theirs . . . This too might be characteristic of the group of thinkers to whom I have, most
generally, attached her. In spite of their occasional interest in
touching the other of the West, of metaphysics, of capitalism,
their repeated question is obsessively self-centred: if we are
not what official history and philosophy say we are, who then
are we (not), how are we (not)? (Spivak 1987, p. 137).
Spivak’s incisive reading catches the authoritative knower
in the act of ‘epistemic violence’—or authoritarian knowing.
About Chinese Women is really a book about Kristeva: a text
which deploys, once again, the difference of the ‘third-world
woman’ as grist to the mill of Western theory. Trinh’s concluding remarks on the generic third-world women’s seminar are
relevant here: ‘We did not come to hear a Third World member
speak about the First(?) World, We came to listen to that voice
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of difference likely to bring us what we can’t have and to
divert us from the monotony of sameness’ (Trinh 1989, p. 88).
The critics we have been reviewing raise significant and
trenchant objections to the Western feminist investment in
postcolonial matters. And yet their own critique suffers from
serious limitations. Trinh, Talpade Mohanty and Spivak each
idealise and essentialise the epistemological opacity of the ‘real’
third-world woman. By making her the bearer of meanings/experiences which are always in excess of Western analytic
categories, these critics paradoxically re-invest the ‘third-world
woman’ with the very iconicity they set out to contest. This
newly reclaimed figure is now postulated as the triumphant
site of anti-colonial resistance. Trinh’s rampant prose valorises
the racial, gendered body itself as a revolutionary archive,
while Spivak, somewhat feebly, urges the academic feminist to
speak to the subaltern woman, to learn from her repository
of lived experience. If these proposals for change are somewhat
suspect, it is also worth noting that each of the critics under
consideration is guilty of the sort of reversed ethnocentrism
which haunts Said’s totalising critique of Orientalism. In refuting the composite and monolithic construction of ‘native
women’, Spivak et al. unself-consciously homogenise the intentions of all Western feminists/feminisms. As it happens, there
are always other stories tell—on both sides of the fence which
separates postcolonialism from feminism.
Gendered subalterns: the (Other) woman in the attic
In its more irritable moments, then, postcolonial theory tends
to regard liberal feminism as a type of neo-Orientalism. Said,
we may recall, diagnoses Orientalism as a discourse which
invents or orientalises the Orient for the purposes of imperial
consumption: ‘The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then,
is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces
that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire’ (Said 1991 [1978], pp.
202–3). Liberal feminism, it is argued, similarly throws in its
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lot with colonial knowledge systems whenever it postulates—
or ‘worlds’—the ‘third-world woman’ as a composite and
monolithic category for analysis.
As Talpade Mohanty argues:
Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the ‘third
world’, there would be no (singular and privileged) first world.
Without the ‘third-world woman’, the particular self-presentation of western women . . . would be problematical . . . the
definition of ‘the third-world woman’ as a monolith might
well tie into the larger economic and ideological praxis of
‘disinterested’ scientific inquiry and pluralism which are the
surface manifestations of a latent economic and cultural colonization of the ‘non-western’ world (Talpade Mohanty 1994,
pp. 215–16).
Thus, the axioms of imperialism are said to repeat themselves
in every feminist endeavour to essentialise or prescriptively
name the alterity/difference of native female Others.
The domestic quarrel between postcolonialism and feminism does not end here. If Western feminism stands convicted
for its theoretical articulation of the ‘third-world woman’, it
is also blamed for the way in which it simultaneously occludes
the historical claims of this figure. To a large extent, both
‘faults’ inhere in the privilege of ‘representation’ claimed by
hegemonic feminist discourses. They are two sides of the same
coin. Thus, liberal academic feminism is said to silence the
‘native woman’ in its pious attempts to represent or speak for
her. Kristeva’s About Chinese Women, as we have seen, is a
case in point. In her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Spivak
famously elaborates some other contexts wherein contesting
representational systems violently displace/silence the figure of
the ‘gendered subaltern’. As she writes:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and
object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into
a pristine nothingness, but a violent shuttling which is the
displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernisation (Spivak 1988 [1985], p.
306).
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This essay argues that the ‘gendered subaltern’ disappears
because we never hear her speak about herself. She is simply
the medium through which competing discourses represent
their claims; a palimpsest written over with the text of other
desires, other meanings.
Spivak’s earlier essay, ‘Three women’s texts and a critique
of imperialism’ (1985), offers another take on the ‘disappearance’ of the ‘gendered subaltern’ within liberal feminist
discourses. Her arguments here open up a crucial area of
disagreement between postcolonialism and feminism. Rather
than chronicle the liberal feminist appropriation of the ‘gendered subaltern’, this essay queries the conspicuous absence of
the ‘third-world woman’ within the literature which celebrates
the emerging ‘female subject in Europe and Anglo-America’
(Spivak 1985, p. 243). Spivak argues that the high feminist
norm has always been blinkered in its ‘isolationist admiration’
for individual female achievement. A rereading of women’s
history shows that the ‘historical moment of feminism in the
West’ was itself defined ‘in terms of female access to individualism’ (1985, p. 246). Yet nowhere does feminist scholarship
stop to consider where the battle for female individualism was
played out. Nor does it concern itself with the numerous
exclusions and sacrifices which might attend the triumphant
achievements of a few female individuals. Spivak’s essay is
posed as an attempt to uncover the repressed or forgotten
history of Euro-American feminism. Once again the margins
reveal the mute figure of gendered subalterneity: ‘As the female
individualist, not quite/not male, articulates herself in shifting
relationship to what is at stake, the ‘‘native female’’ as such
(within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from a share in
this emerging norm’ (1985, pp. 244–5).
Spivak furnishes her theoretical hypothesis with a sensitive
and well-known critique of Jane Eyre. While feminist critics
have conventionally read this novel as an allegorical account
of female self-determination, Spivak in contrast argues that
Jane Eyre’s personal progress through Brontë’s novel is predicated upon the violent effacement of the half-caste Bertha
Mason. Bertha’s function in the novel, we are told, ‘is to render
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indeterminate the boundary between human and animal and
thereby weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter
of the Law’ (1985, p. 249). Jane gradually claims the entitlements lost by her dark double. Her rise to the licit centre of
the novel, Spivak insists, requires Bertha’s displacement to
the fuzzy margins of narrative consciousness—it is fuelled, in
this sense, by the Creole woman’s literal and symbolic selfimmolation.
Spivak’s polemical reading of Jane Eyre firmly situates this
cult text of Western feminism in the great age of European
imperialism. The cultural and literary production of nineteenth-century Europe, she argues, is inextricable from the
history and success of the imperialist project. Thus, and insofar
as feminism seeks its inspirational origins in this period, it
must also reconsider its historical complicity with imperialist
discourses. The terms of Spivak’s general challenge to feminism
are elaborated in Jenny Sharpe’s recent book, Allegories of
Empire (1993). Sharpe further complicates the negotiations
between feminism and postcolonialism by exhuming the difficult figure of the female imperialist, thereby exposing women’s
role in not only the politics but also the practice of empire.
How might feminism respond to the individual achievements
of this figure? Recent critics and historians have argued that
the feminist battle for individual rights was considerably more
successful in the colonies than ‘at home’. While European civil
society remained undecided as to whether women possessed
the attributes and capacities of individuals, its colonial counterpart—in places like India—was considerably more amenable
to the good offices of the white female subject. The imperial
‘memsahib’, as Rosemary Marangoly George argues, ‘was a
British citizen long before England’s laws caught up with her’
(Marangoly George 1993, p. 128). And yet she was only
anchored as a full individual through her racial privileges.
The figure of the ‘feminist imperialist’—much like that of
the ‘third-world woman’—fractures the potential unity between postcolonial and feminist scholarship. By way of
example we might briefly turn to Pat Barr’s early book, The
Memsahibs. This nostalgic and eulogistic study betrays the
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faultlines of a narrowly ‘feminist’ approach to the ideologically
fraught figure of the female imperialist. Barr is fierce and
persuasive in her desire to reclaim the ‘memsahib’ from the
satirical pen of male writers like Kipling and also from the
apparent neglect of the masculinist archive: ‘What they did
and how they responded to their alien environment were
seldom thought worthy of record, either by themselves or by
contemporary chroniclers of the male-dominated imperial scenario’ (Barr 1976, p. 1). So also and correctly Barr teaches us
to read the memsahib’s life in hot and dusty India as a career.
Her favourite ‘memsahib’, Honoria Lawrence, makes a vocation out of good humour: ‘Irritable she sometimes was, but
never frivolous, nor procrastinating when it came to the duty
of cheering her absent husband . . .’ (1976, p. 71). Honoria’s
letters and diaries—enthusiastically cited by Barr—consistently
professionalise the activities of wife- and mother-in-exile,
housekeeper and hostess. She writes, in this vein, of the hiatus
prior to her marriage and departure for India as an enervating
period of unemployment: ‘the unemployed energies, the unsatisfied desire for usefulness would eat me up’ (1976, p. 35).
Empire transforms such a life of indolence into work. The
‘wives of the Lawrences and their followers’, as Barr records,
‘were vowed to God just as definitely as their husbands, were
as closely knit in a community of work and religion’ (1976,
p. 103).
Barr’s analysis confirms the soundness of her feminist credentials. She is ideologically pristine in the way in which she
encourages her readers to appreciate the domestic labour of
her heroines. And yet how might postcolonialism even begin
to condone this feminist investment in imperial career opportunities. As it happens, the ‘contribution’ of the ‘memsahib’
can only be judged within the racial parameters of the imperial
project. This, then, is Barr’s conclusive defence of her protagonists: ‘For the most part, the women loyally and stoically
accepted their share of the white people’s burden and lightened
the weight of it with their quiet humour, their grace, and often
their youth’ (1976, p. 103). Not content to stop here, Barr
goes on to valorise the grassroots feminism of her protagonists.
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The ‘angel’ in the colonial home, we are told, joins the ranks
of colonial missionaries to universalise the gospel of bourgeois
domesticity. In the fulfilment of this endeavour she regularly
turns her evangelical eye upon the glaring problem of the
backward ‘Indian female’. The indefatigable Annette Ackroyd
braves the collective wrath of Indian patriarchy to instruct
‘pupils in practical housework and to the formation of orderly
and industrious habits’ (Barr 1976, p. 166), while her compatriot, Flora Annie Steele, promises the Punjabi Education Board
a ‘primer on Hygiene for the Girls’ Middle School examination
to take the place of the perfectly useless Euclid’ (Barr 1976,
p. 160). However, whereas Barr sees only a history of selfempowerment in the figures of the well-meaning memsahibs
Steele and Ackroyd, the postcolonial critic is prevented from
such unreserved celebration by the recognition that these women’s constitution as fully fledged ‘individual subjects’ is, in the
end, inextricable from the hierarchies which inform the imperial project. Once again, their achievements/privileges are
predicated upon the relative incivility of the untutored ‘Indian
female’. Meanwhile, in the wings, Spivak’s ‘gendered subaltern’
silently awaits further instruction.
Conflicting loyalties: brothers v. sisters
In the course of its quarrel with liberal feminism, postcolonialism—as we have been arguing—fails conclusively to resolve
the conflicting claims of ‘feminist emancipation’ and ‘cultural
emancipation’. It is unable to decide, as Kirsten Holst Petersen
puts it, ‘which is the more important, which comes first, the
fight for female equality or the fight against Western cultural
imperialism?’ (Holst Peterson in Ashcroft et al. 1995, p. 252).
These are not, of course, new questions. For if contemporary
liberal feminism derives its ancestry in part from the imperialist ‘memsahib’, postcolonialism, no less, recuperates
stubborn nationalist anxieties about the ‘woman question’
which typically dichotomise the claims of ‘feminism’ and ‘anticolonialism’. Frantz Fanon’s apology for Algerian women in
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his book, A Dying Colonialism is a case in point. Fanon
postulates the ‘veiled Algerian woman’ as a site for the playing
out of colonial and anti-colonial rivalries. Accordingly, the
colonial critique of Algerian patriarchy is read as a strategic
attempt to fragment the unity of national revolution. The
coloniser, Fanon tells us, destructures Algerian society through
its women: ‘If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian
society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer
the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where
they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep
them out of sight’ (Fanon 1965, pp. 57–8). Fanon’s rhetoric
self-consciously politicises the veil or the haik, thereby reconstituting colonialism as the project of ‘unveiling Algeria’.
Against this, nationalism appropriates the feminine haik as a
metaphor for political elusiveness. The Algerian woman
becomes a fellow revolutionary simply through her principled
‘no’ to the coloniser’s ‘reformist’ invitation. She learns also to
revolutionise her feminine habit: ‘she goes out into the street
with three grenades in her handbag or the activity report of
an area in her bodice’ (1965, p. 50). Fanon’s appeal to the
loyalties of Algerian women elaborates a characteristic nationalist anxiety which Spivak brilliantly summarises in the
sentence: ‘White men are saving brown women from brown
men’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 296). Thus, in Fanon’s understanding, the claims of brown compatriotism must necessarily
exceed the disruptive petition of white (feminist) interlopers.
The veiled Algerian woman, he confidently announces, ‘in
imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of
existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of
struggle and preparing for combat’ (1965, p. 66). Despite the
force of Fanon’s argument, interloping feminist readers may
very well question his authoritative representation of Algerian
womanhood and find themselves in agreement with Partha
Chatterjee’s recent book, The Nation and Its Fragments, which
argues that nationalist discourse is finally ‘a discourse about
women; women do not speak here’ (Chatterjee 1993b, p. 133).
Seen in these terms, postcolonial theory betrays its own uneasy
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complicity with nationalist discourses whenever it announces
itself as the only legitimate mouthpiece for native women.
In another context, the publication of the American author
Katherine Mayo’s accusatory book, Mother India, in 1927
(republished in 1986) distils some further controversies surrounding the Western feminist intervention into the ‘native
woman question’. This sensationalist book reads, as Gandhi
observed, like a drain inspector’s report. Under the guise of
‘disinterested inquiry’, Mayo embarks on a furious invective
against the unhappy condition of Indian women. In page after
page she inventories the brutishness of Indian men, the horrors
of child-marriage, the abjection of widowhood and, of course,
the atavistic slavishness, illiteracy and unsanitary habits of
Indian wives. Mayo’s book, understandably, caused an uproar.
Most prominent male Indian nationalists penned furious
rejoinders to her allegations, and a spate of books appeared
under titles like Father India: A Reply to Mother India, A Son
of Mother India Answers and Unhappy India. In the face of
Mayo’s assessment of Indians as unfit for self-rule—on account
of their heinous attitudes toward women—sane critics like
Gandhi and Tagore, calmly dismissed the book as another tired
apology for the colonial civilising mission. Other more
traumatised critics, in their anti-feminist vitriol, betrayed troubling aspects of the nationalist possessiveness about ‘native
women’.
The anonymous but indisputably male author of the hysterical Sister India, for example, insists that Mayo’s feminist
criterion are simply foreign to India. He invokes the rhetoric
of cultural authenticity to argue that the emancipation of
Indian women must be couched in an indigenous idiom.
Mayo’s recommendations are flawed primarily because they
invite Indian women to become poor copies of their Western
counterparts:
It would be an evil day for India if Indian women indiscriminately copy and imitate Western women. Our women will
progress in their own way . . . We are by no means prepared
to think that the Western woman of today is a model to be
copied. What has often been termed in the West as the
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emancipation of women is only a glorified name for the
disintegration of the family (‘World Citizen’ 1927, p. 163).
Not only does Sister India demonise Western feminism, it
also reveals the extent to which the nation authenticates its
distinct cultural identity through its women. Partha
Chatterjee’s work on Indian anti-colonial nationalism is
instructive here—drawing attention to the subtle nuances of
the nationalist compromise with the invasive hegemony of
colonial/Western values. Indian nationalists, he argues, dealt
with the compulsive claims of Western civilisation by dividing
the domain of culture into two discrete spheres—the material
and the spiritual. It was hard to contest the superiority and
domination of the West in the material sphere. But on the
other hand, as texts like Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj proclaimed, no
cultural rival could possibly match the superiority of India’s
spiritual essence. Thus, as Chatterjee writes, while it was
deemed necessary to cultivate and imitate the material accomplishments of Western civilisation, it was compulsory to
simultaneously preserve and police the spiritual properties of
national culture. And in the catalogue of the nation’s spiritual
effects, the home and its keeper acquired a troublesome preeminence. In Chatterjee’s words: ‘The home in its essence must
remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material
world—and woman is its representation’ (Chatterjee 1993b,
p. 120).
This, then, is the context for the nationalist trepidation
about the ‘Westernisation’ of Indian women. The irate author
of Sister India takes his cue from nationalist discourse in his
anxiety that Mayo’s book might urge the custodians of
national (spiritual) domesticity to bring Europe imitatively into
the foundational home. Chatterjee’s sources reveal that the
nationalist investment in ‘authentic’ Indian womanhood
resulted in the nomination of a new enemy—the hapless
‘memsahib’. As he writes:
To ridicule the idea of a Bengali woman trying to imitate the
ways of a memsaheb . . . was a sure recipe calculated to evoke
raucous laughter and moral condemnation in both male and
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female audiences . . . What made the ridicule stronger was
the constant suggestion that the Westernised woman was fond
of useless luxury and cared little for the well-being of the
home (1993b, p. 122).
Thus, in order to establish the necessary difference between
Indian and Western women, (male) nationalism systematically
demonised the ‘memsahib’—as a particularly ugly passage
about Katherine Mayo from Sister India exemplifies: ‘She is
an old maid of 49, and has all along, been absorbed in the
attempt to understand the mystery of sex. If she were a married
lady, she would have easily understood what the mystery was
. . . As soon as she gets married, she will be an improved girl,
and an improved woman’ (‘World Citizen’ 1927, pp. 103–4).
In this account of nationalist anxieties about Western ‘feminism’ we can discern the historical origins of the postcolonial
animosity toward liberal feminism. Equally, it is important to
note that the traumatic nationalist negotiation of the ‘woman
question’ establishes a direct and problematic enmity between
‘brown men’ and ‘white women’. No one has understood or
articulated this historical hostility more eloquently than E. M.
Forster in his A Passage To India. The native men of Forster’s
Chandrapore despise the memsahibs. ‘Granted the exceptions’,
as Forster’s Aziz agrees, ‘all Englishwomen are haughty and
venal’ (Forster 1979, p. 33). This disdain is, of course, amply
reciprocated, and as Mrs Callendar, the wife of the local civil
surgeon, observes: ‘the best thing one can do to a native is to
let him die’ (1979, p. 44). Forster’s fictional counterpart,
Fielding, accurately diagnoses the implacable hostility between
‘memsahibs’ and ‘native men’: ‘He had discovered that it is
possible to keep in with Indians and Englishmen, but that he
who would also keep in with Englishwomen must drop the
Indians. The two wouldn’t combine’ (1979, p. 74). These
tensions, announced from the very beginning of the novel,
famously explode in the Marabar Caves incident. From this
point onward, the superior race clusters around the inferior
sex, while the inferior race announces its allegiance to the
superior sex. Between the female victim, Adela Quested, and
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the colonised underdog, Dr Aziz, the choices are, indeed, very
stark. The choices between the obnoxious Katherine Mayo and
the awful author of Sister India are starker still. Yet this is,
surely, a very old quarrel and it is possible for postcolonialism
and feminism to exceed the limits of their respective histories.
Between men: rethinking the colonial encounter
A productive area of collaboration between postcolonialism
and feminism presents itself in the possibility of a combined
offensive against the aggressive myth of both imperial and
nationalist masculinity. In the last few years, a small but
significant group of critics has attempted to reread the colonial
encounter in these terms as a struggle between competing
masculinities. We have already seen how colonial and colonised
women are postulated as the symbolic mediators of this (male)
contestation. If anti-colonial nationalism authenticated itself
through female custodians of spiritual domesticity, the male
imperial ethic similarly distilled its ‘mission’ through the figure
of the angel in the colonial home. Anne McClintock’s recent
book, Imperial Leather, points to some aspects of the empire’s
investment in its women. As she writes: ‘Controlling women’s
sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of
empire-builders was widely perceived as the paramount means
for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial
body’ (McClintock 1995, p. 47). Other writers have also
drawn attention to ways in which the colonial civilising mission represented itself through the self-sacrificing, virtuous and
domesticated figure of the ‘white’ housewife. The figure of
woman, Jenny Sharpe argues, was ‘instrumental in shifting a
colonial system of meaning from self-interest and moral superiority to self-sacrifice and racial superiority’ (1993, p. 7).
In this context, McClintock usefully foregrounds the hidden
aspect of sexual rivalry which accompanied the restitution and
reinvention of imperial/anti-colonial ‘manliness’ and patriarchy. She argues that the masculinity of empire was articulated,
in the first instance, through the symbolic feminisation of
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conquered geographies, and in the erotic economy of colonial
‘discovery’ narratives. Vespucci’s mythic disclosure of the virginal American landscape is a case in point: ‘Invested with the
male prerogative of naming, Vespucci renders America’s identity a dependent extension of his, and stakes male Europe’s
territorial rights to her body and, by extension, the fruits of
her land’ (1995, p. 26). In another context, Fanon shows how
this threat of territorial/sexual dispossession produces, in the
colonised male, a reciprocal fantasy of sexual/territorial repossession: ‘I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.
When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp
white civilisation and dignity and make them mine’ (Fanon
1967, p. 63). Needless to say, these competing desires find
utterance in competing anxieties. Sharpe’s work suggests that
the discourse of rape surrounding English women in colonial
India positions Englishmen as their avengers, thereby permitting violent ‘strategies of counterinsurgency to be recorded as
the restoration of moral order’ (Sharpe 1993, p. 6). Correspondingly, Fanon insists that the ‘aura’ of rape surrounding
the veiled Algerian woman provokes the ‘native’s bristling
resistance’ (Fanon 1967, p. 47).
Fanon’s exploration, in Black Skin, White Masks, of the
sexual economy underpinning the colonial encounter in Algeria
leads him to conclude that the colonised black man is the ‘real’
Other for the colonising white man. Several critics and historians have extended this analysis to the Indian context to argue
that colonial masculinity defined itself with reference to the
alleged effeminacy of Indian men. The infamous Thomas
Macaulay, among others, gives full expression to this British
disdain for the Indian apology for maleness:
The physical organisation of the Bengali is feeble even to
effeminacy. He live[s] in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits
are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid.
During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of
bolder and hardy deeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are
qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally
unfavourable (cited in Rosselli 1980, p. 122).
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In other words, India is colonisable because it lacks real men.
Macaulay’s description fully illustrates what Ashis Nandy
describes as the colonial homology between sexual and political dominance. By insisting upon the racial effeminacy of the
Bengali (not quite) male, Macaulay reformulates the colonial
relationship in terms of the ‘natural’ ascendancy of men over
women. Accordingly, he renders as hyper-masculine the
unquestioned dominance of European men at home and
abroad. As Nandy writes:
Colonialism, too, was congruent with the existing Western
sexual stereotypes and the philosophy of life which they
represented. It produced a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance symbolised the dominance
of men and masculinity over women and femininity (Nandy
1983, p. 4).
The discourse of colonial masculinity was thoroughly internalised by wide sections of the nationalist movement. Some
nationalists responded by lamenting their own emasculation,
others by protesting it. Historians have drawn attention, in
this regard, to the reactive resurgence of physical and, relatedly,
militaristic culture within the Indian national movement.
Ashis Nandy elides the story of Indian nationalism’s derivative masculinity to tell an altogether different—and
considerably more interesting—story about dissident androgyny. The Intimate Enemy (1983) theorises the emergence of a
protest against the colonial cult of masculinity, both within the
Indian national movement and also on the fringes of nineteenth-century British society. Nandy’s analysis reclaims diverse
figures like Gandhi and Oscar Wilde. Gandhi, as Nandy shows
us, repudiated the nationalist appeal to maleness on two
fronts—first, through his systematic critique of male sexuality;
and second, through his self-conscious aspiration for bisexuality or the desire, as he put it, to become ‘God’s eunuch’ (see
Mehta 1977, p. 194). Gandhi’s radical self-fashioning gives
‘femaleness’ an equal share in the making of anti-colonial
subjectivity. So also, by refusing to partake in the disabling
logic of colonial sexual binaries, he successfully complicates
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the authoritative signature of colonial masculinity. From the
other side, Wilde similarly protests the dubious worth of manly
British robustness. As with Gandhi, his critique of conventional
sexual identities and sexual norms threatens what Nandy
describes as ‘a basic postulate of the colonial attitude in
Britain’ (Nandy 1983, p. 44). There are countless other examples—Edward Carpenter, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf
are all, as Nandy writes, ‘living protests against the world view
associated with colonialism’ (1983, p. 43). Postcolonialism and
feminism own a potential meeting ground in these figures—in
Carpenter’s thesis about the ‘intermediate sex’ and in Woolf’s
contentious delineation of androgyny. And perhaps there is
some hope of a cross-cultural and inter-theoretical accord in
Woolf’s passionate and feminist critique of bellicose colonial
masculinity in Three Guineas:
We can still shake out eggs from newspapers; still smell a
peculiar and unmistakable odour in the region of Whitehall
and Westminister. And abroad the monster has come more
openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He
has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty;
he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions
not merely between sexes, but between the races. You are
feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they
were shut out, when they were shut up, because you are Jews,
because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion (Woolf [1938] reprinted 1992, p. 304).
Much like Wilde and Gandhi, Woolf’s denunciation of aggressive masculinity supplies the basis of a shared critique of
chauvinist national and colonial culture. While some critics
have fruitfully explored the terms of such a critique, its full
potential awaits theoretical elaboration.
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6
Imagining community: the
question of nationalism
IMAGINING COMMUNITY
A
s we have seen, the encounter
with feminism urges postcolonialism to produce a more critical
and self-reflexive account of cultural nationalism. In this chapter, we will consider some grounds for a postcolonial defence
of the anti-colonial nation. It is generally acknowledged—even
by the most ‘cosmopolitan’ postcolonial critics—that nationalism has been an important feature of decolonisation struggles
in the third world. Thus, for all his reservations about cultural
particularism, Said concedes that:
Along with armed resistance in places as diverse as nineteenthcentury Algeria, Ireland and Indonesia, there also went
considerable efforts in cultural resistance almost everywhere,
the assertions of nationalist identities, and, in the political
realm, the creation of associations and parties whose common
goal was self-determination and national independence (Said
1993, p. xii).
Accordingly, postcolonial critics recognise that any adequate account of the colonial encounter requires a theoretical
and historical engagement with the issue of Asian and African
nationalisms. And in this regard, a number of questions present
themselves: are these insurgent nationalisms purely or simply
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IMAGINING COMMUNITY
reactions against the fact of colonial dominance? Is the idea
of the ‘nation’ germane to the cultural topography of the third
world, or is anti-colonial nationalism a foreign and ‘derivative’
discourse? And, finally, is it possible to reconcile the oftenaggressive particularism of Asian and African nation-States
with the late twentieth century dream of internationalism and
globalisation?
Good and bad nationalisms
In seeking to negotiate the complex implications arising from
‘the nationalism question’, postcolonial studies is forced to
make an intervention into a vexed discourse. So while Benedict
Anderson famously argues that ‘nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our times’
(Anderson 1991, p. 3), at the same time, and paradoxically,
competing or ‘separatist’ appeals for nationhood are generally
regarded as symptoms of political illegitimacy. It would appear,
then, that while some nations are ‘good’ and progressive,
others are ‘bad’ and reactionary. In his illuminating essay,
‘Nationalisms against the State’, David Lloyd attributes the
persistence of this chronic distinction between ‘good’ and
‘bad’, or ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, nationalisms to a deeper
contradiction that has always occupied the troubled heart of
the discourses surrounding nationalism (Lloyd 1993a). The
selective and current bias of Western anti-nationalism, he
maintains, emerges out of a historically deep-seated metropolitan antipathy toward anti-colonial movements in the third
world. Thus—in response to the threat of decolonisation movements—liberalism has been unable to adjudicate between, on
the one hand, the world historical claims of Western nationalism, and, on the other, the specifically anti-Western and
oppositional development of cultural nationalism in the ‘third
world’. Western anti-nationalism, Lloyd suggests, has a history
in imperialist thought which postcolonialism cannot afford to
ignore. What, then, are the conditions under which nationalism
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has obtained the theoretical endorsement, and hostility, of
Western scholars and critics?
For many theorists, the unquestionable legitimacy of
nationalism accrues from its labour on behalf of modernity.
Writers like Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson, in particular,
defend nationalism as the only form of political organisation
which is appropriate to the social and intellectual condition of
the modern world. Gellner attributes the emergence of nationalism to the epochal ‘shift’ from pre-industrial to industrial
economies, and argues that, as forms of social organisation
become more complex and intricate they come to require a
more homogenous and cooperative workforce and polity.
Thus, industrial society produces the economic conditions for
national consciousness—which it consolidates politically
through the supervisory agency of the nation-State. In Gellner’s
words:
. . . mobility, communication, size due to refinement of
specialisation—imposed by the industrial order by its thirst
for affluence and growth, obliges its social units to be large
and yet culturally homogenous. The maintenance of this kind
of inescapable high (because literate) culture requires protection from a state . . . (Gellner 1983, p. 141).
In a similar vein, Anderson argues that the birth of nationalism in Western Europe is coeval with the dwindling—if not
the death—of religious modes of thought. The rationalist
secularism of the Enlightenment brings with it the devastation
of old systems of belief and sociality embedded in the chimeral
mysteries of divine kingship, religious community, sacred languages and cosmological consciousness. Nationalism,
Anderson tells us, fills up the existential void left in the wake
of paradise: ‘What was then required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning
. . . few things were (are) better suited to this end than an
idea of the nation’ (Anderson 1991, p. 11). The nation, then,
is the product of a radically secular and modern imagination,
invoked through the cultural forms of the novel and newspaper
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in the godless expanse of what Anderson calls ‘homogenous
empty time’.
Gellner’s and Anderson’s accounts of the teleological necessity—indeed, inevitability—of the modern nation-State reveal
a Hegelian bias. As is well known, Hegel posits the story of
‘mankind’ as the story of our progression from the darkness
of nature into the light of ‘History’. The prose of ‘History’, in
turn, delivers the narrative of modernity. ‘History’ is the vehicle
of rational self-consciousness through which the incomplete
human spirit progressively acquires an improved sense of its
own totality. In other words, ‘History’ generates the rational
process through which the alienated essence of the individual
citizen acquires a cohesive and reparative identity in the
common life of the nation. Thus, for Hegel, the overlapping
narratives of ‘Reason’, ‘Modernity’ and ‘History’ reveal their
proper ‘end’—the final truth of their significance—in the consolidated form of the nation-State (see Hegel 1975).
Hegel’s monumental and influential defence of civil society
furnishes the ideology of nation-ness and, concomitantly,
points to the process through which the nation-State has been
rendered as the most canonical form of political organisation
and identity in the contemporary world. In these post-Hegelian
times, ‘productive’ international conversations and transactions
can only be conducted between nations and their real or
potential representatives. So, also, individual subjectivity is
most readily and conveniently spoken through the idiom of
citizenship. And yet—to return to an earlier point in this
discussion—despite general assumptions about the universal
desirability of nation-ness, how is it that liberal thinkers remain
hostile to the growing cacophony of national desires in some
parts of Asia, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe? Why
is it so widely acknowledged that these ‘new’ nationalisms are
retrogressive, narcissistic, transgressive, uncontainable?
In answer to some of these questions, Lloyd directs attention to a fundamental ambivalence which marks even the most
enthusiastic (Western) celebrations of ‘progressive’ nationalism.
In the same works which highlight its irreducible modernity,
nationalism is also, and paradoxically, postulated as the
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catalyst for ‘pre-modern’ or ‘atavistic’ sentiments (Lloyd
1993a). While it is acknowledged that the historical momentum toward the nation-State fulfils the Hegelian expectation
of a successively expansive and rational civil society, writers
such as Gellner and Anderson concede that the poetics of
‘national belonging’ are often underscored by ‘irrational’,
‘superstitious’ and ‘folkloric’ beliefs or practices. How else can
we explain the alacrity with which citizens are willing both to
kill and to die for their nations?
Tom Nairn’s work offers an instructive response to the
self-doubt which troubles most liberal engagements with
nationalist discourse. It is Nairn’s contention that the genetic
code of all nationalisms is simultaneously inscribed by the
contradictory signals of what he calls ‘health’ and ‘morbidity’:
‘forms of “irrationality” (prejudice, sentimentality, collective
egoism, aggression etc.) stain the lot of them’ (Nairn 1977,
pp. 347–8). If the rhetoric of national development secures a
forward-looking vision, the corresponding—and equally powerful—rhetoric of national attachment invokes the latent
energies of custom and tradition. Thus, nationalism, figured
like the two-faced Roman god Janus, or like Walter Benjamin’s
‘Angel of History’, is riven by the paradox that it encourages
societies to:
propel themselves forward to a certain sort of goal
(industrialisation, prosperity, equality with other peoples etc.)
by a certain sort of regression—by looking inwards, drawing
more deeply upon their indigenous resources, resurrecting past
folk-heroes and myths about themselves and so on (Nairn
1977, p. 348).
Notably, however, rather than simply condemning the atavistic
underpinnings of nationalism, Nairn reads the nostalgic yearnings of nationhood as compensatory—as an attempt to
mitigate the onerous burden of ‘progress’: ‘Thus does nationalism stand over the passage to modernity, for human society.
As human kind is forced through its strait doorway, it
must look desperately back into the past, to gather strength
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wherever it can be found for the ordeal of development’ (1977,
p. 348–9).
Nairn’s analysis offers a vital understanding of nationalism’s
structural vulnerability—of its intrinsically unstable, selfdeconstructing discourse. While embodying the idea of
universal progress and modernity characteristic of the
European Enlightenment, nationalism—it would appear—also
incorporates the conditions for an internal critique of its own
foundational modernity. It is thus both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, both
normalising and rebellious:
. . . the substance of nationalism as such is always morally,
politically, humanly ambiguous. This is why moralising perspectives on the phenomenon always fail, whether they praise
or berate it. They will simply seize on one face or another of
the creature, and will not admit there is a common head
conjoining them (1977, p. 348).
Of course, as Nairn recognises, the ideology of modernity
is unlikely to concede the dangerous hybridity of its favourite
child. And it is at this point in his argument that we can begin
to formulate a postcolonial understanding of the impulse
underpinning Western anti-nationalism. In the light of Nairn’s
analysis, could we, for instance, diagnose metropolitan antinationalism as an attempt to purge European nationalism of
its own atavism, and in so doing, to project ‘regressive’
nationalisms elsewhere? Indeed, much Western anti-nationalism is informed by the assumption that the progressive history
of the nation swerves dangerously off course in its anti-colonial
manifestation, and that relatedly cultural nationalism tragically
distorts the foundational modernity of nation-ness. Eric
Hobsbawm’s reflections on contemporary nationalisms argue
just such a case:
. . . the characteristic nationalist movements of the late twentieth century are essentially negative, or rather divisive . . .
[They are mostly] rejections of modern modes of political
organisation, both national and supranational. Time and again
they seem to be reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to
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erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world
(Hobsbawm 1990; cited in Lloyd 1993a, p. 2).
Hobsbawm’s critique of inaccurate or deluded late twentieth
century nationalisms is chronologically inclusive of anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa. And in this regard, his
insistence on the erroneously anti-modern nature of these
insurgent nationalisms carries within it the echo of an earlier
Hegelian perception of the ‘lack’ characterising the ancient
cultures of the ‘East’. Hegel’s philosophy of history notoriously
conveys the notion that civilisation (and modernity) travels
West. In this scheme of things, the non-West is consigned to
the nebulous prehistory of civilisation and, thereby, of the
completed and proper nation-State. Thus, nationalism outside
the West can only ever be premature and partial—a threat to
the enlightened principles of the liberal state and, thereby,
symptomatic of a failed or ‘incomplete’ modernity (see Hegel
1910; Butler 1977, pp. 40–64).
Nothing in the preceding discussion is meant to condone
the horrific violence justified in the name of nationalism. East
or West, we are now aware of the xenophobia, racism and
loathing which attends the rhetoric of particularism. Nationalism has become the popular pretext for contemporary
disquisitions of intolerance, separating Croatians and Serbians,
Greeks and Macedonians, Estonians and Russians, Slovaks and
Czechs, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Israelis and Palestinians,
Hindus and Muslims. And while we have been focussing
primarily on the Western/liberal squeamishness about nonWestern nationalisms, some of the most compelling recent
critiques of nationalist ideology have emerged out of distinctly
postcolonial quarters. In particular—as we have seen—Said’s
Culture and Imperialism stands out for its relentless disavowal
of the ‘third world’s’ post-imperial regression into combative
and dissonant forms of nativism.
It is Said’s contention that in their desperate assertions of
civilisational alterity, postcolonial nations submit all too easily
to a defiant and puerile rejection of imperial cultures. The
result is a form of reactionary politics, whose will-to-difference
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is articulated through the procedures of what Nietzche has
called ressentiment and Adorno, after him, theorised as ‘negative dialectics’. In other words, enterprises such as Senghor’s
négritude, the Rastafarian movement, Hindu nationalism and
Yeats’ occultism are each, according to Said, limited by an
essentially ‘negative’ and defensive apprehension of their own
society and, relatedly, of ‘civilised’ European modernity (Said
1993, p. 275). For Said, this project is ultimately self-defeating
as it merely reiterates the binary oppositions and hierarchies
of colonial discourse. Thus, Yeats’ mysticism, his nostalgic
revival of Celtic myths, his recalcitrant fantasies of old Ireland
are already underscored by the jaundiced colonial cognition of
Irish backwardness and racial difference. To accept nativism,
in other words:
. . . is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial,
religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself.
To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences
like négritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon
history for essentialisations that have the power to turn human
beings against each other’ (Said 1993, p. 276).
Said’s irate critique of overheated nativism is predicated
upon his own overarching cosmopolitanism. He holds the view
that nationalism—especially in its anti-colonial manifestation—
is both a necessary and now entirely obsolete evil. If
nationalism fuels the oppositional energies of decolonisation
struggles, the accomplishment of postcolonial independence
should sound the death knoll for fanatical nation-making.
History requires the graceful withering away of all nationStates. However, while this vision may be, in itself,
pre-eminently desirable, Said’s argument is inclined to capitulate to the liberal perception of anti-colonial ‘nativism’ as the
only remaining obstacle to the democratic utopia of free and
fair internationalism. A more just analysis demands that we
first reconsider the discursive conditions which colour the
somewhat paranoid antipathy toward the bogey of ‘nativism’.
In this context, we need to pay renewed attention to Seamus
Deane’s claim that insofar as colonial and imperial nations
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characteristically universalise themselves, ‘they regard any
insurgency against them as necessarily provincial’ (Deane 1990,
p. 9). While anti-colonial insurgency may very often, as Said
points out, seek its deliverance in a defiant provincialism, it is
equally true that the charge of ‘nativism’ is all too readily
invoked to pronounce the illegitimacy of insurgency. Nativism
or atavism constitute, as we have seen, the indispensable and
convenient Other to the arrogant discourse of modernity. This
deceptively neat opposition between positive or modern and
negative or non-modern nationalisms renders all local, plural
and recalcitrant varieties of nationalism as inevitably inadequate and subordinate. Lloyd’s comments on Irish national
movements are, once again, startlingly apposite:
In the writings of nationalism we can observe, as it were, the
anxieties of canon formation, since negation largely takes
place through the judgement that a given cultural form is
either too marginal to be representative or, in terms that
recapitulate those of imperialism itself, a primitive manifestation in need of development or cultivation (Lloyd 1993b,
p. 5).
Furthermore, it is important to recognise that forms of
nationalism which refuse the singular content of modernity are
not necessarily all designed to turn human beings against each
other. Mercifully there is still a world of difference between
Yeats’ occultism and the Taliban militia’s fanatical edict against
female literacy in wartorn Afghanistan. And modernity itself,
far from being simply a benefit, can also be read, as Nairn
reasons, as an ‘ordeal’, which demands the palliative energies
of so-called ‘atavistic’ enterprises.
Midnight’s children: the politics of nationhood
From another perspective, the postcolonial attachment to
nationalism is informed by the historical apprehension that the
condition of Asian and African ‘postcoloniality’ has been
mediated and accomplished through the discourses and structures of nation-ness. Thus, the project of becoming
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postcolonial—of arriving into a decisive moment after colonialism—has usually been commemorated and legitimated
through the foundation of independent nation-States. So, also,
nationalism has supplied the revolutionary vocabulary for
various decolonisation struggles, and it has long been acknowledged as the political vector through which disparate
anti-colonial movements acquire a cohesive revolutionary
shape and form. Or, to put this differently, through its focus
on a common enemy, nationalism elicits and integrates the
randomly distributed energies of miscellaneous popular movements. Thus, for example, Indian nationalism, as Ranajit Guha
writes, achieves its entitlement through the systematic mobilisation, regulation, disciplining and harnessing of ‘subaltern’
energy (Guha 1992).
In another context, Fanon similarly foregrounds nationalism’s capacity to distil a shared experience of dominance.
Nationalism, Fanon argues, responds to the violence of colonialism by augmenting a vertical solidarity between the
peasantry, workers, capitalists, feudal landowners and the
bourgeoisie elite. Moreover, this consolidated counteroffensive
serves another end—it revolutionises the most retrograde and
moribund aspects of the colonised society: ‘This people that
has lost its birthright, that is used to living in the narrow circle
of feuds and rivalries, will now proceed in an atmosphere of
solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of the nation as it
appears in the various localities’ (Fanon 1990, p. 105).
Although Fanon’s writings maintain a deep ambivalence
toward the political desirability of an entrenched and centralised postcolonial nation-State, he remains unequivocally
committed to the therapeutic necessity of anti-colonial national
agitation. While nationalism comes under suspicion as the only
legitimate end of decolonisation, it is nevertheless postulated
as the principal remedial means whereby the colonised culture
overcomes the psychological damage of colonial racism. Thus,
in The Wretched of the Earth Fanon privileges nationalism for
its capacity to heal the historical wounds inflicted by the
‘Manichean’ structure of colonial culture which confines the
colonised to a liminal, barely human existence. In this context,
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nationalism responds to the urgent task of rehumanisation, of
regaining an Edenic wholeness. It becomes a process of
reterritorialisation and repossession which replaces the ‘twofold citizenship’ of colonial culture with a radically unified
counter-culture. By challenging the fallacious racial priority of
the coloniser, the native, Fanon tells us, discovers the courageous idiom of equality: ‘For if, in fact, my life is worth as
much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor
freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am
no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give
a damn for him’ (Fanon 1990, p. 35). In his extensive writings
on swaraj—or self-rule—in India, Gandhi defends the nationalist project in similar terms for its incitement to abhaya, or
fearlessness. So also, Ngugi, Cabral and Mboya, among others,
have variously extolled the recuperative benefits of anti-colonial nationalisms within Africa.
Writers like Benita Parry add a further dimension to the
defence of anti-colonial nationalism by arguing that the
memory of anti-colonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa might
help to politicise the abstract discursivity of some postcolonial
theory. Parry maintains that the ideologically correct censuring
of ‘nativist’ resistance is tantamount to a rewriting of the
anti-colonial archive. Given its poststructuralist inheritance,
recent postcolonial critique tends to favour those varieties of
counter-hegemonic anti-colonialisms which subvert rather than
reverse the chronic oppositions of colonial discourse. This
theoretical bias—fully developed in some of Homi Bhabha’s
work—seeks evidence for the dispersed and dislocated subjectivity of the colonised which, we are told, defies containment
within colonialism’s ideological apparatus. Within this reasoning, the native insurgent is shown to confound the logic of
colonial domination through a refusal to occupy his/her designated subject position within colonialism’s discursive
cartography. In fact, for a writer like Bhabha, the slippery
colonised subject is intrinsically unassimilable within the ideological boundaries of Fanon’s Manichean colonial city. Without
discounting the transgressive availability of such polysemic
anti-colonial subjectivities, in deference to a sense of realpolitik
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we still need to listen carefully to, for example, Fanon’s
categorical delineation of a situated, monolithic and combative
national identity. And, as Parry argues, in order to do justice
to the politics elaborated by anti-colonial revolutionaries like
Fanon, ‘it is surely necessary to refrain from a sanctimonious
reproof of modes of writing resistance which do not conform
to contemporary theoretical rules about discursive radicalism’
(Parry 1994, p. 179). It may well be true that nativism fails
ultimately to divest itself of the hierarchical divisions which
inform the colonial relationship. Nevertheless, anti-colonial
counter-narratives, as Parry insists:
did challenge, subvert and undermine the ruling ideologies,
and nowhere more so than in overthrowing the hierarchy of
coloniser/colonised, the speech and stance of the colonised
refusing a position of subjugation and dispensing with the
terms of the coloniser’s definitions (1994, p. 176).
Even if nationalism is theoretically ‘outmoded’, it still constitutes the—albeit forgotten—revolutionary archive of
contemporary postcoloniality.
A derivative discourse?
The energies of the anti-colonial nationalisms under review
are, as we have seen, fuelled by an indomitable will-to-difference. In its intensely recuperative mode, national consciousness
refuses the universalising geography of empire, and names its
insurgent cultural alterity through the nation—as ‘Indian’,
‘Kenyan’, ‘Algerian’ etcetera. And yet herein lies the paradox
at the heart of anti-colonial nationalism. It is generally agreed
that nation-ness and nationalism are European inventions
which came into existence toward the end of the eighteenth
century. Anderson, among others, persuasively argues that this
newly contrived European nation-ness immediately acquired a
‘modular’ character which rendered it capable of dissemination
and transplantation in a variety of disparate terrains. In his
words, ‘The “nation” proved an invention on which it was
impossible to secure a patent. It became available for pirating
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by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands’ (Anderson 1991, p. 67).
By consigning all subsequent nationalisms to a typology of
‘piracy’, Anderson refuses to recognise the possibility of alternative, variant and different nationalisms. In this reading all
‘post-European’ nationalisms are altogether divested of creativity. They are, at best, surreptitious and vaguely unlawful
enterprises posing or masquerading as the real thing.
Of course, Anderson’s pessimistic insistence on the homogeneity of all nationalisms can be seen as severely limited and
open to contestation. Nevertheless, as Partha Chatterjee’s sensitive reading of anti-colonial nationalisms reveals, the terms
of Anderson’s analysis do vitiate the imagining of nation-ness
in colonies like India (Chatterjee 1993a). And so it is that the
project of Indian nation-making is plagued by anxieties of
imitativeness, by the apprehension that Indian nationalism is
just a poor copy or derivation of European post-Enlightenment
discourse.
There is a general consensus among liberal historians that
the formative lessons of nationalism were literally acquired in
the colonial classroom through the teaching and transmission
of European national histories. Anderson contends that the
vast network of colonial educational apparatuses variously
enabled Vietnamese children to absorb the revolutionary
thought of Enlightenment philosophes, Indian children to coopt the principles of the Magna Carta and the Glorious
Revolution, and Congolese children to discover the energies
which underscored Belgium’s independence struggle against
Holland (Anderson 1991, p. 118). In a similar vein the historian Percival Spear claims the achievements of Indian
nationalism for Europe. In an account which reads very much
like Anderson’s description of the secular ‘dawn’ of European
nationalism, Spear maintains that Westernisation/modernity
forges its way through the mist of pre-modern religiosity,
replacing old gods with the new sentiments of nationalism
(Spear 1990, p. 166). In this way, then, the literature of the
rulers hoists itself on its own petard by communicating to its
subject audience the values of civil liberties and constitutional
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self-government. No one, Spear tells us, ‘could be in contact
with Englishmen at that time for long or read Shakespeare
(prescribed reading in the colleges) without catching the infection of nationalism’ (1990, p. 166). Spear’s historiography
corroborates the view that anti-colonial nationalism remains
trapped within the structures of thought from which it seeks
to differentiate itself—that, in short, it takes Europe to invent
the language of decolonisation. So, also, Anderson claims that:
The nineteenth-century colonial state . . . dialectically engendered the grammar of the nationalisms that eventually arose
to combat it. Indeed one might go so far as to say that the
state imagined its local adversaries, as in an ominous prophetic
dream, well before they came into existence (Anderson 1991,
p. xiv).
Plagued by such anxieties of derivativeness, anti-colonial
nationalists were doubly troubled by the knowledge that colonialism was itself a type of nationalism. In other words, the
problem was not just that the lessons of anti-colonial nationalisms were taught paradoxically by the (colonial) oppressor,
but rather that the rapacious territorial energies of nineteenthcentury colonialism were themselves fuelled by the ideology of
nineteenth-century nationalism. Imperialism, as earlier writers
in the Marxist tradition were well aware, is simply the aggressive face of European nationalism. After postcolonialism, the
idea of imperialism has almost exclusively come to imply the
processes and consequences which accompanied the historical
domination of the ‘third world’ by the ‘first’, with the ‘third
world’ designated as the proper object of imperialist histories.
Thus, most recent studies of ‘imperialism’ tend to foreground
its impact upon the economy, culture and politics of formerly
imperialised nations. Yet, writers such as Lenin, Bukharin and
Hilferding understood imperialism not as the relationship between coloniser and colony, but rather as a relationship of
antagonism and rivalry between the ruling elite in competitive
European nation-States (see Brewer 1980; Jameson 1990). The
consequent scramble for markets and territories resulted in
what Anderson calls the birth of ‘official nationalism’—an
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enterprise which combined dynasticism and nation-ness to
expand or stretch ‘the short, tight skin of the nation over the
gigantic body of the empire’ (Anderson 1991, p. 86). On a
similar note, David Cannadine’s detailed study, ‘The British
Monarchy, c. 1820–1977’ (Cannadine 1983), suggests that the
rituals of monarchism were reinvented between 1877 and 1914
in order to produce self-consciously the British nation as
empire. Similar trends in Germany, Austria and Russia
deployed the rhetoric of dynastic aggrandisement to instantiate
the symbiosis of nationalism and imperialism (Cannadine
1983, p. 121). In this regard, the crisis of imitativeness within
anti-colonial nationalism assumes existential proportions. For
its problem is not simply, as Chatterjee puts it, to produce ‘a
different discourse, yet one that is dominated by another’
(Chatterjee 1993a, p. 42), rather it has to consider that, ‘it is,
mutatis mutandis, a copy of that by which it felt itself to be
oppressed’ (Deane 1990, p. 8).
In this regard, we need also to recognise that if nationalism
permeates the expansionist politics of empire, it is equally
constitutive of imperialist ideology, of the logic which compounds the crude rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice. This point
is compellingly elucidated in Tzvetan Todorov’s monumental
analysis of Enlightenment thought (Todorov 1993). Todorov
discerns the incipience of colonial thinking in the debate
between nationalism and cosmopolitanism which obsessed
thinkers as diverse as Montesquieu, Cloots and Maurras.
Montesquieu famously retained an exemplary and clear commitment to the ethics of an esprit général, whereby the claims
of the ‘citizen’ were to remain secondary to those of the ‘man’,
and those of the world were automatically to supersede those
of the nation.
Other lesser thinkers resolved the conflict between home
and the world through an insidiously Kantian sleight of hand:
the interests of a particular country were defensible insofar as
these interests were universalisable, namely, if they could be
postulated as standing for the benefit of the entire universe.
Hence, Cloots defends the promotion of French interests by
arguing that there is no article in the Declaration of Rights
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which does not apply to all men of all climes (see Todorov
1993, p. 189). In Maurras we find a similar sophistry: ‘It is
a doctrinal truth, in a philosophy very remote from daily life,
that the fatherland is in our day the most complete and the
most coherent manifestation of humanity . . .’ (cited in
Todorov, 1993, p. 190). Ironically, this reasoning is unapologetically exhumed in Julia Kristeva’s strange book, Nations
Without Nationalism (1993). While Kristeva begins soundly
enough with a lament about particularism, her argument gradually builds up to the conclusion that the French nation
transcends the pitfalls of patriotism on account of its unique
universality. In words strikingly reminiscent of Maurras she
asks: ‘where else one might find a theory and a policy more
concerned with respect for the other, more watchful of citizens’
rights . . . more concerned with individual strangeness?’ (pp.
46–7).
Reasoned liberal thinkers have long argued that in its
positive aspect nationalism—much like the family—ought to
provide an education in good international manners, teaching
citizens to gain their cosmopolitan bearings in the wider world.
Kristeva and the thinkers examined by Todorov proceed somewhat differently, by postulating the European nation as an
elastic universal project capable of accommodating the rest of
the world—of raising it to the level of the mother/fatherland
(see Todorov 1993, p. 254). Colonialism, thus, becomes the
logical outcome or practical application of the universal ethnocentrism which characterises much late eighteenth and
nineteenth century European nationalism. In a peculiar sense,
it exemplifies the cosmopolitan impulse which so agitates the
guilty conscience of ‘enlightened’ nationalisms. As Todorov
writes:
From this viewpoint, the history of humanity is confused with
that of colonization—that is, with migrations and exchanges;
the contemporary struggle for new markets, for supplies of
raw materials is only the end result—rendered harmless owing
to its origins in nature—of that first step that led the human
being to cross her own threshold. The most perfected race
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will unfailingly win, for perfection is recognised by its own
ability to win battles (1993, p. 257).
Anti-colonial nationalism responds to this painful symbiosis
between imperialist and nationalist thought in a variety of
ways. It attempts, for instance, to be selective in its borrowings
from colonialist nationalism, and it consoles itself with the
understanding that while the colonial nation-State can only
confer subjecthood on the colonised, the projected postcolonial
nation-State holds out the promise of full and participatory
citizenship. And yet, insofar as nationhood is the only matrix
for political change, does the anti-colonial will-to-difference
simply become another surrender to the crippling economy of
the Same—‘a copy of that by which it felt itself to be
oppressed’? In Bernard Cohn’s judgment, Indian nationalism
spoke almost exclusively through the idiom of its rulers (Cohn
1983). Terence Ranger similarly maintains that African nationalisms simply dressed their radicalism in European
hand-me-downs. And Edward Said reads Conrad’s Nostromo
to insist that postcolonial nation-States, more often than not,
become rabid versions of their enemies: ‘Conrad allows the
reader to see that imperialism is a system. Life in one subordinate realm of experience is imprinted by the fictions and
follies of the dominant realm’ (Said 1993, p. xxi).
To what extent can we—as postcolonial critics—concede
the mimetic nature of anti-colonial nationalisms, or submit to
the paradox that the very imagining of anti-colonial freedom
is couched in language of colonial conquest? For Chatterjee,
the fault lines of Indian nationalism emerged at the very
moment of its conception, in its desire to counter the colonial
claim that the non-Western world was fundamentally incapable
of self-rule in the challenging conditions of the modern world
(Chatterjee 1993a, p. 30). Insofar as Indian nationalism prepared to embark on a project of indigenous self-modernisation,
it announced its suicidal compromise with the colonial order:
‘It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged
the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the
very intellectual premises of “modernity” on which colonial
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domination was based’ (Chatterjee 1993a, p. 30). As a consequence, nationalist discourse surrendered its ‘meaning’ to a
European etymology. Accordingly, nationalist production
‘merely consists of particular utterances whose meanings are
fixed by the lexical and grammatical system provided by . . .
the theoretical framework of post-Enlightenment rational
thought’ (1993a, p. 39).
Without denying the acuity of this analysis, we might
proceed by foregrounding a crucial distinction between—to
borrow Jayprakash Narayan’s phraseology—the ‘outward’
attributes of nationalism and the ‘mental world of those who
comprise it’ (Narayan 1971, p. xv). To properly pursue this
separation between the people-who-comprise-the-nation and
the State-which-represents-the-nation, it is useful to think of
nationalism, through a literary analogy, as a genre. It is
commonly understood that the nation-State is the proper end
of nationalism, that is, the point at which the narrative of
nation-making achieves its generic closure and therefore its
distinctive generic identity. In these terms, we might say that
the foundation of the postcolonial nation-State embodies the
paradigmatic moment of generic conformity between anti-colonial nationalism and its antagonistic European predecessor. As
Lloyd tells us, the project of State formation is ‘the locus of
‘‘Western’’ universalism even in decolonising states’, for it
heralds the violent absorption of the heterogeneous nationalist
imagination within the singular trajectory of world historical
development (Lloyd 1993b, p. 9). Moreover, the generic continuity between anti-colonial movements and colonial regimes
is sharply elucidated in the simple transference of State
machinery—which marks the inaugural moment of
postcoloniality. In this transfer, nationalist revolutionaries
simply come to inhabit the bureaucratic machinery created for
the implementation of colonial rule. And as Jayprakash Narayan has written of Congress rule in post-independence India:
‘One of the more malignant features of that machine is its
continued adherence to the British imperialist theory that it is
the duty of the people to obey first and then to protest’
(Narayan 1971, p. xviii).
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As we have seen, liberal accounts of nationalism insist that
the process of nationalisation is entirely congruent with the ends
of the nation-State. Thus, the awakening of national consciousness is said to instantiate a teleology of inexorable rationality
and development which finds its completed form in the regulative economy of the State. Nationalism, Gellner maintains,
‘emerges only in the milieux in which the existence of the state
is very much taken for granted’ (Gellner 1983, p. 5). And yet it
is obvious that the enterprise of anti-colonial nationalism
invokes energies which—in Lloyd’s formulation—are intrinsically against the apparatus of the State (see Lloyd 1993a). For
anti-colonial nationalism first acquires its meaning and its
impetus through the etymology of struggle, and, as writers such
as Dharampal and Guha argue, this struggle is often spoken in
a distinctly popular, indigenous and pre-colonial idiom (see
Dharampal 1971; Guha 1983b). Thus, rather than being simply
‘derivative’, the insurgent moment of anti-colonial nationalism
not only contradicts the pre-eminence of the State, but it also
furnishes its dissent through the autonomous political imagination of the people-who-comprise- the-nation. So also there is a
sense in which the recalcitrant elements, characters, and actions
invoked and energised by anti-colonial nationalism are ultimately in excess of the generic closure proposed by the
postcolonial nation-State (see Lloyd 1993a). And these indomitable features remain in circulation as vestigial traces of
different imaginings struggling to find expression within the
monotonous sameness which infects the postcolonial State.
Tragically, as Dharampal points out, so long as the postcolonial
State retains a certifiably colonial belief in an infallible State
structure: ‘It not only keeps intact the distrustful, hostile and
alien stances of the state-system vis a vis the people but also
makes the latter feel that it is violence alone which enables them
to be heard’ (Dharampal 1971, p. lx).
Some versions of anti-colonial thought have attempted to
break this nexus between dissenting nationalism and the State.
For example, Fanon remains circumspect about the desirability
and creativity of the postcolonial state. His writings are almost
prophetic in their predictions about the imaginative lethargy
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of bourgeoisie-led national governments, ‘who imprison
national consciousness in sterile formalism’ (Fanon 1990, p.
165). In Fanon’s understanding, such governments inevitably
privilege the imitative scramble for ‘international prestige’ over
and above the dignity of all citizens. Fanon’s vision of a
government ‘for the outcasts and by the outcasts’ (1990, p.
165) was reflected to a large extent in Gandhi’s utopian dream
of a decentralised polity. Notoriously, Gandhi desired that the
Indian National Congress disband upon independence to give
way to autonomous, self-sufficient and self-regulating village/local communities. Once again, nowhere did Gandhi
conceive of the nation-State as the logical fruition of the
anti-colonial movement. From a different perspective his friend
and critic, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, retained a life-long
opposition to the conformity-producing rhetoric of nationalism. For Tagore, nationalism was a system of illusions,
designed progressively to homogenise and normalise small,
individual sentiments of insurgency. Recently, the Nigerian
Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, has added his voice to this
committed band of dissenters. Once again, his focus is upon
the ‘leadership dementia’ which has lead to the disintegration
of the Nigerian nation (Soyinka 1996, p. 153). For Soyinka,
the postcolonial nation needs to be re-imagined along the lines
of its original conception, as a revolutionary and dissident
space from which—indeed, through which—it was possible to
refuse the totalitarianism and violence of colonial governments.
This, then, is its inheritance, its responsibility to the world:
‘our function is primarily to project those voices that, despite
massive repression, continue to place their governments on
notice’ (Soyinka 1996, p. 134).
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7
One world: the vision of
postnationalism
ONE WORLD
I
n the preceding chapter an
attempt was made to postulate the colonial encounter as an
adversarial confrontation between two competing nationalisms. It was argued that colonialism owes at least some of its
inheritance to the violent and expansionist energies of
European nationalism. So also it was observed that the history
of decolonisation has generally, and perhaps most effectively,
been articulated through the resistant counter-energies of anticolonial nationalism. We saw that anti-colonial revolutionaries
such as Fanon and Gandhi and postcolonial critics such as
Said and Parry alike concede the positive role of anti-colonial
nationalisms in mobilising and organising the aspirations of
oppressed and colonised peoples the world over. Nevertheless,
each of these writers also tends to believe that oppositional
nationalism is—or at least ought to be—a transitional and
transitory moment in the decolonising project. This chapter
will focus more closely on some of the theoretical and political
conditions which contribute to such reservations about the
permanence and versatility of anti-colonial nationalism. We
will consider arguments detailing the limited political and
discursive range of ethnic/racial identity and cultural
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nationalism, and in so doing, sketch out some features of the
postcolonial engagement with the globalisation of cultures.
This discussion will draw attention to the postcolonial desire
for extra- or post-national solidarities, and consider concepts
and terms such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘diaspora’ which have come
to characterise mixed or globalised cultures.
Globalisation, hybridity, diaspora
For all its revolutionary and therapeutic benefits, there are, as
Fanon has written, many pitfalls to national consciousness.
Foremost among these are uncritical assertions and constructions of cultural essentialism and distinctiveness. Fanon, as
Bhabha points out, ‘is far too aware of the dangers of the
fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of
colonial culture to recommend that “roots” be struck in the
celebratory romance of the past or by homogenising the history
of the present’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 9). For Fanon, as we have
seen in earlier chapters, the entrenched discourse of cultural
essentialism merely reiterates and gives legitimacy to the insidious racialisation of thought which attends the violent logic of
colonial rationality. Accordingly, ‘the unconditional affirmation
of African culture’ reinstates the prejudices embodied in ‘the
unconditional affirmation of European culture’ (Fanon 1990,
p. 171).
Clearly, the nationalist work of psychological and cultural
rehabilitation is a crucial and historically expedient phase in
the liberation of a people consigned, as Fanon puts it, to
barbarism, degradation and bestiality by the harsh rhetoric of
the colonial civilising mission. Nonetheless, aggressive
asservations of cultural identity frequently come in the way of
wider international solidarities. In Fanon’s understanding, the
claims of these larger and more expansive solidarities are
finally more compelling than those of national culture. Ideally,
national consciousness ought to pave the way for the emergence of an ethically and politically enlightened global
community. The consciousness of self, Fanon writes, ‘is not
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the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought
teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National
consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that
will give us an international dimension’ (1990, p. 199).
On a similar note, Stuart Hall, among others, is salutary
in his warning that the assertions of dissident ‘culturalisms’
should, at best, be regarded as a necessary fiction or, as a form
of ‘strategic essentialism’—relevant only to the particular exigencies of the colonial encounter (see Hall 1989). After
colonialism, it is imperative to imagine a new transformation
of social consciousness which exceeds the reified identities and
rigid boundaries invoked by national consciousness.
Postcolonialism, in other words, ought to facilitate the emergence of what we might, after Said, call an enlightened
‘postnationalism’. Nativism, as Said writes, ‘is not the only
alternative. There is the possibility of a more generous and
pluralistic vision of the world’ (Said 1993, p. 277).
The vast majority of postcolonial critics and theorists seem
to agree that the discourse surrounding ‘postnationalism’ offers
a more satisfactory reading of the colonial experience and,
simultaneously, the most visionary blueprint for a postcolonial
future. It is often argued that the perspective offered by
anti-colonial nationalism restricts the colonial encounter to a
tired impasse or opposition between repression, on the one
hand, and retaliation, on the other. Notwithstanding the historical and political truth of this reciprocal antagonism, the
anti-colonial perspective neglects to acknowledge the corresponding failures and fissures which trouble the confident
edifice of both colonial repression and anti-colonial retaliation.
Rarely did the onslaught of colonialism entirely obliterate
colonised societies. So, also, far from being exclusively oppositional, the encounter with colonial power occurred along a
variety of ambivalent registers.
Postnationalism pursues such indeterminacies in the colonial encounter in order to bridge the old divide between
Westerner and native through a considerably less embattled—if
more politically amorphous—account of colonialism as a cooperative venture (see Said 1993, p. 269). In this, it is concerned
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ONE WORLD
with the fulfilment of two principal objectives. First, it seeks
to show how the colonial encounter contributed to the mutual
transformation of coloniser and colonised. In other words, the
old story of clash and confrontation is retold with an eye to
the transactive/transcultural aspect of colonialism. As Harish
Trivedi writes: ‘it may be useful to look at the whole phenomenon as a transaction . . . as an interactive, dialogic, two-way
process rather than a simple active–passive one; as a process
involving complex negotiation and exchange’ (Trivedi 1993,
p. 15). Second, this gentler perusal of the colonial past produces a utopian manifesto for a postcolonial ethic, devoted to
the task of imagining an inter-civilisational alliance against
institutionalised suffering and oppression (see Nandy 1986).
Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth concludes with a strikingly
similar, indeed prescient, vision for postcolonial futurity: ‘The
human condition, plans for mankind and collaboration between men in those tasks which increase the sum total of
humanity are new problems, which demand true inventions’
(Fanon 1990, p. 252).
Fanon’s hyperbolic utopianism has found a favourable constituency among postcolonial writers of divergent theoretical
persuasions. Generally speaking, there seem to be three conditions which have prepared contemporary postcolonial
thought for this discursive turn toward postnationalism. First,
a growing body of academic work on globalisation insists that
in the face of the economic and electronic homogenisation of
the globe, national boundaries are redundant or—at least—no
longer sustainable in the contemporary world. The random
flow of global capital is accompanied, as Arjun Appadurai
writes, by an unprecedented movement of peoples, technologies and informations across previously impermeable
borders—from one location to another (see Appadurai 1990).
This McDonald’sisation of the world demands postcolonial
attention, for in some sense, colonialism was the historical
harbinger of the fluid global circuits which now—so compellingly—characterise the discomfiting propinquities of
modernity. In her astute reading of imperial travel narratives,
Mary Louise Pratt draws attention to the fact that colonial
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Eurocentrism was engendered by a peculiarly ‘planetary consciousness’, which produced a ‘picture of the planet
appropriated and redeployed from a unified European perspective’ (Pratt 1992, p. 36). The imperial gaze, in other words,
delivered a distinctively globalised perception of the disparate
world. In addition, albeit perversely, the colonial encounter
itself accelerated the contact between previously discrete and
autonomous cultures. Imperialism, as Said argues, enforced a
necessary contiguity or overlap between diverse and mutually
antagonistic national histories. After colonialism, the independence of India marked a crucial event in the histories of
both modern India and modern Britain. The experience of
empire, Said writes, ‘is a common one’. Accordingly, the
condition of the postcolonial aftermath pertains ‘to Indians
and Britishers, Algerians and French, Westerners and Africans’
(Said 1993, p. xxiv). Postcoloniality, we might say, is just
another name for the globalisation of cultures and histories.
A second imperative for the postnationalisation of
postcolonial theory grows out of a growing critical suspicion
of what we might call ‘identitarian’ politics. A variety of
critics—whom we have encountered in earlier chapters—have
detected a metropolitan hand in the preservation and perpetuation of essentialised racial/ethnic identities. Working out of
Thatcherite Britain, Stuart Hall observes the insidious—and
ostensibly multiculturalist—procedures whereby the convenient
Othering and exoticisation of ethnicity merely confirms and
stabilises the hegemonic notion of ‘Englishness’. In these circumstances, ethnicity is always-already named as marginal or
peripheral to the mainstream. By contrast, Englishness, or
Americanness, is, of course, never represented as ethnicity (see
Hall 1989, p. 227).
The metropolitan constitution of ethnicity as a ‘lack’ leads
critics such as Rey Chow and Gayatri Spivak to question and
complicate the longing ‘once again for the pure Other of the
West’ (Spivak 1990, p. 8). Rey Chow discerns a neo-Orientalist
anxiety in the anthropological desire to retrieve and preserve
the pure, authentic native. In our survey of Said’s work we
have already encountered a reading of the parasitic relationship
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between Western knowledge production and the non-Western
world. In the face of contemporary globalisation, Chow
argues, this relationship is now under threat. The native is no
longer available as the pure, unadulterated object of Orientalist
inquiry—she is contaminated by the West, dangerously unOtherable. So it is that the contemporary Orientalist blames
living third-world natives for their modernity, their inexcusable
‘loss of the ancient non-Western civilisation, his loved object’
(Chow 1993, p. 12).
Chow’s reading of the neo-Orientalist discourse of ‘endangered authenticities’ is wonderfully corroborated in Hanif
Khureshi’s recent novel The Buddha of Suburbia. Khureshi’s
Anglo-Indian hero Karim, in pursuit of thespian aspirations,
agrees to participate in an audition organised by the seedy and
decidedly B-grade theatre director Shadwell. As it happens,
Karim’s unregenerate South London accent seriously belies
Shadwell’s expectations of exoticism. Karim, he finds, is a
culturally impoverished and disappointingly British lad who
has absolutely no stories to tell about eccentric aunties and
Oriental wildlife. But Karim does land a part—as Mowgli, the
native protagonist of Kipling’s imperialist classic. Not content
to let his new actor explore the subtle nuances of his assigned
role, Shadwell instructs Karim to work harder on his Indian
accent, and also to smear himself with brown polish before
he appears on stage. Ironically, Gayatri Spivak finds the
postcolonial intellectual in a similar position to Khureshi’s
Karim. Where the West once insisted on the illegitimacy of
non-Western knowledges, now—Spivak laments—‘we
postcolonial intellectuals are told that we are too Western’
(Spivak 1990, p. 8).
And yet, as Spivak is well aware, the metropolitan investment in the pure non-West is all too often assisted by an
opportunistic postcolonial scramble for the ethnic margin. ‘I
could easily construct’, she tells us, ‘a sort of “pure East” as
a “pure universal” or as a “pure institution” so that I could
then define myself as the Easterner, as the marginal or as
specific, or as the para-institutional’ (1990, p. 8). But where
Spivak is able to resist the dubious appeal of marginality, lesser
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thinkers secure their professional privileges through the discourse of ‘minor-ness’ and alterity. In a curious reversal of
Disraeli’s colonialist truism, the East—as Rey Chow points
out—has become a career for the displaced Easterner. Chow
writes scathingly about the language of victimisation and
‘self-subalternisation’ which, she argues, ‘has become the
assured means to authority and power’ in the metropolis
(Chow 1993, p. 13). This professionalisation of the margin is
doubly insidious as it makes a mockery of those who must
continue to fight neglected and real battles ‘at home’: ‘What
these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression
of their critical and oppositional import, and thus depriving
the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful
demand’ (Chow 1993, p. 13).
Thus, the critical mood of disaffection with ‘identitarian’
politics which we have been discussing, grows out of the
conviction that the rhetoric of racial/ethnic essences has been
co-opted and thereby emptied of meaning by an unwholesome
partnership between neo-Orientalism and postcolonial opportunism. Correspondingly, this critique is accompanied by an
urgent appeal for a new, regenerative, postcolonial politics
which refuses its share in the advantages of alterity, which is
willing to act in and for the world without seeking cover under
the bounded signs of race/nation/ethnicity, and which, as Trinh
T. Minh-ha writes, insists upon its own radical indeterminacy:
‘Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands in that
undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in
and out’ (Trinh 1991, p. 74).
Finally, to conclude this account of the growing contiguity
between postcolonialism and postnationalism, we need to consider the pervasive postcolonial exhaustion with the mantric
iteration of the embattled past. This mood, à la Tina Turner,
of not wanting to fight no more, is fuelled by the conviction
that the adversarial basis of old solidarities lacks contemporary
credence. In conservative Britain, for instance, old racial oppositions come in the way of other more urgent alliances
organised along the axes of class, gender, sexuality. So also, as
Hall writes, black politics can no longer be conducted in terms
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of an uncompromising antithesis between a bad, old, essential
white subject and a new, essentially good black subject (see
Hall 1989).
Said perceives a similar impasse in old national animosities.
His observations spring from a particular disenchantment with
the postcolonial ‘rhetoric of blame’ which, as he argues, is
responsible for the violence and misunderstandings which
come in the wake of escalated hostilities between the Western
and non-Western world. The world, as he writes, ‘is too small
and interdependent to let these passively happen’ (Said 1993,
p. 20). As well, the politics of blame and ceaseless confrontation are all too often co-opted and manipulated by what we
might call the postcolonial right. A host of fundamentalist and
reactionary movements have, for too long, taken cover under
the garb of anti-Western sentiment to, in Said’s words, ‘cover
up contemporary faults, corruptions, tyrannies’ (1993, p. 17).
Finally, for all the blindness of unequivocal anti-nationalism,
postcolonial theory has been susceptible to the general disillusionment with national cultures. Caught between the harsh
extremes of ethnic cleansing, on the one hand, and the militaristic American purification of the un-American world on
the other, postcolonialism ponders a ceasefire. Its hope, via
postnationalism, is this: that it be possible to inaugurate a
non-violent revision of colonial history, and that politics may
become genuinely more collaborative in times to come.
Mutual transformations
As I have been arguing, postcolonialism pursues a postnational
reading of the colonial encounter by focussing on the global
amalgam of cultures and identities consolidated by imperialism. To this end, it deploys a variety of conceptual terms and
categories of analysis which examine the mutual contagion and
subtle intimacies between coloniser and colonised. In this
regard, the terms ‘hybridity’ and ‘diaspora’, in particular, stand
out for their analytic versatility and theoretical resilience.
By and large, the language of hybridity seems to derive its
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theoretical impetus from Fanon’s astute reading of colonial
oppression as a catalyst for the accelerated mutation of colonised societies. It is Fanon’s contention in A Dying
Colonialism that the unpredictable exigencies of the decolonising project radically unsettle centuries-old cultural patterns in
colonised societies. The shifting strategies of anti-colonial
struggle, combined with the task of imagining a new and
liberated postcolonial future, generate a crisis within the social
fabric. As old habits give way to the unpredictable improvisations of revolutionary fervour, the colonised world submits to
the momentum of political renovation and cultural transformation. ‘It is the necessities of combat’, Fanon observes, ‘that
give rise in Algerian society to new attitudes, to new modes
of action, to new ways’ (Fanon 1965, p. 64). Accordingly, his
analysis of the Algerian Revolution underscores the accompanying revolution in the status of Algerian women and the
concomitant modification of traditional family life and values.
This period also witnesses a significant revision of customary
attitudes to science, technology and other such purveyors of
colonial modernity. While anti-colonial nationalism invokes the
myths of pure origin and cultural stability, in point of fact, as
Fanon writes, ‘the challenging of the very principle of foreign
domination brings about essential mutations in the consciousness of the colonised, in the manner in which he perceives the
coloniser, in his human status in the world’ (1965, p. 69).
Fanon’s insistence upon the fundamental instability and
consequent inventiveness of anti-colonial conditions is
reworked by a variety of postcolonial theorists to produce the
discourse of hybridity. Most writers focus on the fact that the
political subject of decolonisation is herself a new entity,
engendered by the encounter between two conflicting systems
of belief. Anti-colonial identities, as Stuart Hall argues, do not
owe their origins to a pure and stable essence. Rather, they
are produced in response to the contingencies of a traumatic
and disruptive breach in history and culture (see Hall 1990b).
So also Homi Bhabha, albeit in more opaque prose, discerns
the emergence of a radically protean political entity at the
moment of anti-colonial insurgency. The grim polarities of the
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colonial encounter, he maintains, are necessarily bridged by a
‘third-space’ of communication, negotiation and, by implication, translation. It is in this indeterminate zone, or ‘place of
hybridity’, where anti-colonial politics first begins to articulate
its agenda and where, in his words, ‘the construction of a
political object that is new, neither the one nor the other,
properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as
it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of
politics’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 25). Mary Louise Pratt productively
extends Hall’s and Bhabha’s analyses to argue that the coloniser—as much as the colonised—is implicated in the
transcultural dynamics of the colonial encounter. For Pratt,
this encounter can also be read less violently as a ‘contact’—
which requires a novel form of cross-communication between
speakers of different ideological/cultural languages. This need
for interaction within radically asymmetrical conditions of
power invariably produces an estrangement of familiar meanings and a mutual ‘creolisation’ of identities (Pratt 1992, pp.
4–6)
The notion of ‘in-between-ness’ conjured up by the term
‘hybridity’ is further elaborated through the accompanying
concept of ‘diaspora’. It should be emphasised that the notion
of ‘diaspora’ tends to lose some of its historical and material
edge within postcolonial theory. Although ‘diaspora’ evokes
the specific traumas of human displacement—whether of the
Jews or of Africans scattered in the service of slavery and
indenture—postcolonialism is generally concerned with the
idea of cultural dislocation contained within this term. While
‘diaspora’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘migration’,
it is generally invoked as a theoretical device for the interrogation of ethnic identity and cultural nationalism. Its value,
much like that of its companion term ‘hybridity’, inheres, as
Paul Gilroy points out, in the elucidation of those processes
of ‘cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed
racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents’ (Gilroy 1993,
p. 2). Accordingly, diasporic thought betrays its poststructuralist origins by contesting all claims to the stability of meaning
and identity. In its postcolonial incarnation, such thought
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reviews the colonial encounter for its disruption of
native/domestic space. Thus, in Bhabha’s characteristic interjections, colonialism is read as the perverse instigator of a new
politics of ‘un-homeliness’. If colonialism violently interpellates
the sanctuary and solace of ‘homely’ spaces, it also calls forth
forms of resistance which can, as Fanon observes, no longer
be accommodated within the familiar crevices and corners of
former abodes. In this sense, colonialism is said to engender
‘the unhomeliness—that is the condition of extra-territorial
and cross-cultural initiation’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 9). Not surprisingly, diasporic thought finds its apotheosis in the ambivalent,
transitory, culturally contaminated and borderline figure of the
exile, caught in a historical limbo between home and the
world. Said, more than any other postcolonial writer, submits
all too easily to an over-valorisation of the unhoused, exilic
intellectual: ‘the political figure between domains, between
forms, between homes, between languages’ (Said 1993, p.
403). But as he himself recognises, all exiles do not become
troublingly extra-institutional postcolonial theorists. For all
those millions of violently dispossessed refugees produced in
this century, there is still some reason to mourn the loss of
home and of belonging. Accordingly, the notion of diaspora
is least problematic when it illustrates the necessary mobility
of thought and consciousness produced by the cultural adhesions of colonialism. As Rey Chow suggests, postcolonialism
needs to focus upon the epistemological implications of ‘diaspora’ and ‘migrancy’ in order to produce forms of knowledge
which are dislocated, deterritorialised and in circulation as a
‘form of interference’ (Chow 1993, p. 142).
As we have seen, the happy conjunction of diasporic
thought and the discourse of hybridity assists postcolonialism
in its search for evidence regarding the mutual transformation
of coloniser and colonised. In recent years, much postcolonial
attention has focussed on questions regarding the reconfiguration and unsettling of Western/colonial identity. A significant
incentive for work in this direction was provided by James
Clifford’s seminal essay ‘Travelling cultures’ (1992), which
gestured toward the possibility of rethinking colonialism not
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only as the expression of settled European nationalism, but
rather more interestingly as a historically nuanced culture of
travel. Although the colonial adventure was predicated on a
triumphant moment of ‘return’, it could also be read as a type
of migration or diaspora which relied upon a massive movement of European populations. Indeed, as Pratt’s work so
persuasively argues, the experience—and accompanying narrative—of travel was instrumental in the fashioning of imperial
identity. On the basis of this understanding, it then becomes
possible to reverse the twin discourses of hybridity and diaspora in order to disclose the instability and adulteration of
colonial culture and subjectivity.
Antony Pagden’s fascinating review of Enlightenment
thought draws attention to the historical anxieties of cultural
impurity which accompanied the nomadic progress of colonialism (Pagden 1994). Thus, in Diderot, Pagden finds a severe
denunciation of the restlessness and rootlessness which draw
the colonial traveller further away from the self-defining esprit
national of the stable metropolis. Diderot’s fears for the loss
of the coloniser’s identity are echoed in Herder who laments
the horrors of hybridity and cultural miscegenation which must
attend the unnatural mingling of disparate nations. These
anxieties are, in turn, framed by the familiar apprehension that
colonial settlers might submit to the civilisational depravity of
their victims or, in other words, ‘go native’. Notably, the
colonial archive itself records the administrative imperative
to—at least—‘appear native’ in the performance of governmental power. The evangelical activities of colonial missionaries
frequently required the paradoxical and threatening indigenisation of the gospel, and in colonial India, the Curzon
administration chose, somewhat curiously, to proclaim its
hegemony through the transculturated form of the displaced
Mughal Darbar (see Cohn 1993).
Fears about the disquieting ‘nativisation’ of the colonial
edifice also feed into speculations about the possible corruption
of metropolitan culture itself by the wandering coloniser. For
how, European anti-colonialists argued, could the metropolitan
homeland remain immune to the products of its tyrannies
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abroad? As Pagden writes, ‘the same routes that had carried
the colonist out would also allow his vices . . . to seep back
into the motherland’ (Pagden 1994, p. 139). These nervous
queries about the ‘immorality’ of colonialism uncover a central
paradox at the heart of imperialism: namely, the profound
discrepancy between the inflated claims of the civilising mission
and the harsh reality of colonial violence. As I have argued in
a previous chapter, the ethical and epistemological centre of
Western rationality was effectively emptied of its meanings by
the harsh progress of the colonial mission. In Gyan Prakash’s
words: ‘the mission to spread civic virtue with military power,
or propagate the text of the “Rights of Man” in the context
of slave and indentured labour, could not but introduce rifts
and tensions in the structure of Western power’ (Prakash 1995,
p. 4).
The troubling reciprocity between the metropolitan centre
and the colonial periphery is sounded through the knowledge
that the metropolis is not safe from the cultural contagion
of its own ‘peripheral’ practices. This colonial world, as Said
argues, circulates in the shadowy margins of most cultural
narratives produced by imperialism. An attentive postcolonial
rereading of these cultural texts reveals, for instance, that the
civilised realm of Austen’s Mansfield Park is sustained by the
distant slave plantation of Antigua, and that Pip’s economic
stability in Dickens’ Great Expectations is garnered from the
remote expanses of colonial Australia. On a more literal note,
the dynamic of colonial travel also brings the periphery into
the centre by enforcing, in the first instance, the involuntary
migration/diaspora of enslaved or indentured labour. The
scattering of Africa into the West, as Alioune Diop once
observed, was conducted according to the dictates of Western
hegemony. Subsequent waves of voluntary and unwanted
migrations continue to challenge the cultural and demographic stability of the Western world. The colonial voyage
out, Said writes, has met its unsettling counterpart in the
postcolonial journey in.
In this context, critics such as Bhabha and Pratt also argue
that the figure of the colonised ‘native’ is instrumental in the
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contamination/hybridisation of colonial meanings. Pratt maintains that metropolitan modes of understanding are seriously
confounded when the native combines a selective appropriation of colonial idioms with indigenous themes (see Pratt
1994). For Bhabha, the colonised subject is rather more ontologically incalculable. As he argues, this figure’s ambivalent
response to the colonial invader: ‘half acquiescent, half
oppositional, always untrustworthy—produces an unresolvable problem of cultural difference for the very address of
colonial cultural authority’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 330). Needless
to say, the ‘native’ is herself not entirely immune to the
slipperiness of her own interactions with colonialism. If the
single figure of the colonised native becomes the unstable site
of cross-cultural meanings and interactions, another—more
significant—instability informs the ad hoc fabrication of wider
anti-colonial solidarities. Let us not forget that the tenuous
vertical solidarities of anti-colonial nationalism presuppose a
unity of differences. The heterogeneous community soldered
together under the shallow rubric of the postcolonial nationState bespeaks its own political hybridity. The internal
differences of the anti-colonial community, as I argued in the
previous chapter, are always in excess of the postulated
postcolonial nation. Stuart Hall’s various observations on race
politics underscore a similar heterogeneity and hybridity at the
heart of ‘essential’ black identity. So also Paul Gilroy’s magisterial work on the African diaspora highlights the
irrepressible cultural diversity which goes into the making of
‘black experience’ and which has always informed the governing tropes of a recognisably transnational ‘black aesthetics’
(Gilroy 1993). There is no denying that the experience of
colonial/racial oppression meets its immediate and necessary
antithesis in the language of racial identity and cultural nationalism. But, as Gilroy insists, the themes of postcoloniality
eventually transcend the boundaries of ethnicity and nationalism to proclaim a considerably more generous ‘double
consciousness’ (1993, p. 1).
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Postnational utopias: toward an ethics of hybridity
For all its hyperbolic claims, the discourse of hybridity and
diaspora is not without its limitations. Despite postcolonial
attempts to foreground the mutual transculturation of coloniser and colonised, celebrations of hybridity generally refer
to the destabilising of colonised culture. The West remains the
privileged meeting ground for all ostensibly cross-cultural conversations. Moreover, within the metropolis, multicultural
celebrations of ‘cultural diversity’ conveniently disguise rather
more serious economic and political disparities. In this context,
it is also crucial to remain wary of claims which favour
‘hybridity’ as the only ‘enlightened’ response to racial/colonial
oppression. The dangers of ‘enlightened hybridity’ are amply
demonstrated in Ashcroft et al.’s recently announced objections
to the aggressively postcolonial claims of the indigenous peoples of ‘settled colonies’ which, arguably, compete with the
corresponding claims of ‘white settler’ Australians and Canadians. These critics maintain that while settler culture is able
to concede its own cultural unauthenticity, indigenous groups,
by contrast:
have so often fallen into the political trap of essentialism set
for them by imperial discourse . . . The result is the positioning of the indigenous people as the ultimately marginalised, a
concept which reinscribes the binarism of centre/margin, and
prevents their engagement with the subtle processes of imperialism (Ashcroft et al. 1995, p. 214).
By postulating the discourse of essentialism as just another
unhealthy symptom of ‘false consciousness’, Ashcroft et al.
deliver a death blow to the value of any decisively oppositional
politics. But if the language of hybridity is to retain any
seriously political meaning, it must first concede that for some
oppressed peoples, in some circumstances, the fight is simply
not over. Hybridity is not the only enlightened response to
oppression.
While keeping these qualifications in mind, there is no denying
that the postnational promise of a genuine cosmopolitanism
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remains seriously appealing. However, we need to recognise
that the appeal of this discourse inheres in its unembarrassed—
and potentially embarrassing—utopianism, namely, in its
efforts to imagine a benevolent system of ethics in the language
of hybridity. So far we have focussed our attention on the
possibilities arising from a postnational rereading of the colonial encounter. In this final section, we might gesture toward
some of the features which constitute this postnational ethics
of hybridity.
For all its animosity, the colonial encounter produced a rich
body of thought which concerned itself with a visionary
commitment to the end of all institutional suffering. Much of
this thought began with a critique of ‘Western civilisation’, but
its aim—in so doing—was to instigate a reform within the very
structures of Western rationality. Thus, Gandhi’s uncompromising repudiation of modernity, as we saw in a previous
chapter, emphasised the transcultural benefits of a non-violent
sociality. The oppressors, he maintained, had to be liberated
from their worst selves. And, of course, no one was better
qualified for this task than the oppressed. Fanon calls upon a
similar ethical commitment from the people whom he designates ‘the wretched of the earth’. In his words: ‘The Third
World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim
should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has
not been able to find the answers’ (Fanon 1990, p. 253).
In a sensitive reading of this colonial archive, Ashis Nandy
suggests that the future of what we have been calling a
‘postnational ethic’ must begin by ‘recognising the oppressed
or marginalised selves of the First and the Second world as
civilisational allies in the battle against institutionalised suffering’ (Nandy 1986, p. 348). In other words, Nandy suggests
that the boundaries between colonial victors and colonised
victims be replaced by a recognition of the continuity and
interface between these old antagonists. Inevitably, such a
move poses a challenge to the discrete and ‘pure’ identities of
both victor and victim. Following in the footsteps of Aimé
Césaire—the father of ‘négritude’—the inchoate form of
postnational ethics urges the recognition that oppressors are
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themselves the victims of their own modes of oppression. In
Césaire’s words: ‘colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser,
to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him,
to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence,
race hatred, and moral relativism’ (Césaire 1972, p. 13). A
muted reading of Césaire’s prose draws attention to the simple
fact that, and as Nandy points out, imperfect societies all too
often exploit their own human instruments of oppression. In
Fanon’s diagnostic writing, for example, a great deal of attention is devoted to the psychological and emotional disorders
of men required to perform tortures by the French colonial
administration in Algeria.
This emphasis on the victimisation of the victor is not
intended to elide the palpable suffering of those directly
oppressed by colonialism. Rather, its objective is to facilitate
a complex system of cross-identification—of ethical hybridity—connecting former political antagonists. Relatedly, an
analysis of the ‘contaminated’ victor needs to be complemented
by an analysis of the victim as a sometimes-collaborator,
sometimes-competitor, with the oppressive system. As Nandy
writes:
The temptation is to use a psychological mechanism more
congruent with the basic rules of the oppressive system so as
to have a better scope to express one’s aggressive drives. The
temptation is to equal one’s tormentors in violence and to
regain one’s self-esteem as a competitor within the same
system (Nandy 1986, p. 354).
These arguments form the basis of Fanon’s objection to the
racialisation of thought continued by the rhetoric of anti-colonial cultural essentialism, and, as we saw in the previous
chapter, the basis of wide-ranging arguments against the imitative deadlock of anti-colonial nationalisms. By foregrounding
the parallel ‘contamination’ of the victims of colonialism,
Nandy draws attention to the hybrid and unstable identities
of both coloniser and colonised. Accordingly, he argues that
the ethic of a postnational/postcolonial utopia can only begin
to address the requirements of its inter-civilisational alliance
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by first conceding the contiguity between masters and slaves.
In his words:
. . . a violent and oppressive society produces its own special
brands of victimhood and privilege and ensures a certain
continuity between the victor and the defeated, the instrument
and the target . . . As a result, none of these categories remain
pure. So even when such a culture collapses, the psychology
of victimhood and privilege continues and produces a second
culture which is only manifestly not violent or oppressive
(1986, p. 356).
In an appendix to the discussion so far, we might briefly
query the larger relevance of the postnational/postcolonial
ethic: does it pertain only to the exigencies of the colonial
encounter and its aftermath, or does it have anything to say
to ethics itself about the constitution of the ethical individual?
Throughout this book, it has been my contention that
postcolonial theory arises out of, and extends, the field of
Western philosophy/theory. Accordingly, I believe that its accidental speculations on ethics, no less, reinforce some significant
recent attempts to critique the well-worn Kantian understanding of moral agency and value. As is well known, the
Kantian belief in the pre-eminence of moral value is predicated
upon certain expectations of the ethical subject (Kant 1981,
1964, 1961). To be moral agents in the Kantian sense, we
must rigorously stand aloof from the contingencies of our
human-ness—from the domain of ‘luck’ which informs all the
special circumstances of human nature. So, also, we must
consistently maintain a strict independence from our desires
and attachments at any given moment. Such a transcendental
and unified ethical agent is constitutively free from the heterogeneity of her own consciousness, from the distractions of
her experience. As Michael Sandel has written in his critique
of Kant and Rawls:
A self standing at a distance from the interests it has puts the
self beyond the reach of experience, to make it invulnerable,
to fix its identity once and for all. No commitment could grip
me so deeply that I could not understand myself without it.
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No transformation of life purposes could be so unsettling as
to disrupt the contours of my identity. No project could be
so unsettling that turning away from it would call into
question the person I am (Sandel 1982, p. 62).
However, as Sandel contends, this bounded and ‘pure’
ethical agent ultimately inhabits a disenchanted world. For our
sense of value—our moral character—is predicated upon the
‘contaminating’ attachments of human existence. We are fashioned by the contingencies and contradictions of our lives, and
rarely does an ethical action or decision proceed from the
dictates of a single imagination or a single set of feelings (see
Nussbaum 1986, p. 40). The cognitively human ethical agent,
as Sandel suggests, is a constitutively hybrid entity. In certain
moral conditions the appropriate conception of the self would
have to include its ‘intersubjective’ obligations: its sense of
itself as embracing ‘more than a single human being’ (Sandel
1982, p. 62). So also we must concede the ‘intrasubjective’
complexity of any given self:
. . . that for certain purposes, the appropriate description of
the moral subject may refer to a plurality of selves within a
single, individual human being, as when we account for inner
deliberation in terms of the pull of competing identities, or
moments of introspection in terms of occluded self-knowledge
. . .’ (1982, p. 63).
In these critiques of Kant we can begin to discern elements
of what we have been calling a postnational/postcolonial ethics
of hybridity. In such a guise, postcolonialism arguably has
something to say to ethical thought in general. Its proposal
for a non-violent reading of the colonial past through an
emphasis on the mutual transformation of coloniser and colonised, and its blueprint for a utopian inter-civilisational
alliance against institutionalised suffering is, indeed, salutary.
The postcolonial turn to the rhetoric of postnationalism seriously humanises the world we have inherited. But, as always,
we need to ensure that the euphoric utopianism of this discourse does not degenerate into a premature political amnesia.
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8
Postcolonial literatures
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
T
he contesting themes of
nationalism and postnationalism which we have been discussing govern the critical concerns of postcolonial literary theory.
It is to this specialised branch of postcolonialism that we will
now direct our attention.
Despite its interdisciplinary concerns, the field of postcolonial studies is marked by a preponderant focus upon
‘postcolonial literature’—a contentious category which refers,
somewhat arbitrarily, to ‘literatures in English’, namely, to
those literatures which have accompanied the projection and
decline of British imperialism. This academic privileging of
postcolonial literature is informed by recent critical attempts
to postulate the colonial encounter primarily as a textual
contest, or a bibliographic battle, between oppressive and
subversive books.
Following the impact in the mid-1980s of ‘cultural materialism’ upon literary theory, critical practice has been urged to
concede the material underpinnings of all culture. Texts, as is
now commonly agreed, are implicated in their economic and
political contexts. Few critics would dispute the understanding
that all literature is symptomatic of, and responsive to,
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historical conditions of repression and recuperation. While
postcolonial literary theory invokes these cultural materialist
assumptions in its account of textual production under colonial
and postcolonial conditions, it goes a step further in its claim
that textuality is endemic to the colonial encounter. Texts,
more than any other social and political product, it is argued,
are the most significant instigators and purveyors of colonial
power and its double, postcolonial resistance. Thus, as Chris
Tiffin and Alan Lawson insist: ‘Imperial relations may have
been established initially by guns, guile and disease, but they
were maintained in their interpellative phase largely by textuality’ (Lawson & Tiffin 1994, p. 3). Conversely, it follows that
the textual offensiveness of colonial authority was met and
challenged, on its own terms, by a radical and dissenting
anti-colonial counter-textuality:
Just as fire can be fought by fire, textual control can be fought
by textuality . . . The post-colonial is especially and pressingly
concerned with the power that resides in discourse and
textuality; its resistance, then, quite appropriately takes place
in—and from—the domain of textuality, in (among other
things) motivated acts of reading (Lawson & Tiffin 1994, p.
10).
By recasting postcoloniality as a literary phenomenon, critics
like Tiffin and Lawson implicitly, if accidentally, privilege the
role and function of the postcolonial literary critic—whose
academic expertise suddenly provides the key to all oppositional and anti-colonial meanings. This chapter will examine
some significant literary-critical accounts of the colonial
encounter. The next section will go on to counter the textual
co-option of imperial history by pointing to the political limits
of ‘postcolonial literature’.
Textual politics
Most textual mappings of the colonial encounter take their
cue from Said’s monumental reading of imperial textuality.
Readers may recall that Said’s Orientalism treats European
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colonialism as a ‘discourse’, namely, as the project of representing, imagining, translating, containing and managing the
intransigent and incomprehensible ‘Orient’ through textual
codes and conventions. It is Said’s contention that colonial or
Orientalist discourse manifested itself as an influential system
of ideas, or as an inter-textual network of interests and meanings implicated in the social, political and institutional contexts
of colonial hegemony. In writing the ‘Orient’ through certain
governing metaphors and tropes, Orientalists simultaneously
underwrote the ‘positional superiority’ of Western consciousness and, in so doing, rendered the ‘Orient’ a playground for
Western ‘desires, repressions, investments, projections’ (Said
1991 [1978], p. 8). Colonial textuality, in Said’s terms, produced the ‘Orient’ as colonisable. Its imaginative command
over the ‘Orient’ can, thus, be read as a rehearsal for militaristic and administrative domination. On a similar note, Elleke
Boehmer’s recent and lucid study of colonial and postcolonial
literature describes British colonialism as a ‘textual takeover’
of the non-Western world (Boehmer 1995, p. 19). Her account
foregrounds imperial textual production as an attempt,
through writing, to domesticate the alarming alterity of ‘recalcitrant peoples, unbreachable jungles, vast wastelands, huge
and shapeless crowds’ (Boehmer 1995, p. 94). By recasting the
new colonised terrain within familiar narrative and generic
moulds, colonial writing exemplified, in Boehmer’s words, ‘an
attempt at both extensive comprehension and comprehensive
control’ (1995, p. 97).
Boehmer, among others, follows Said in her attention to
the textual reactiveness of British colonialism. Indeed, the
colonised world does appear to have driven colonisers and
their wives into a frenzied verbosity which expressed itself
variously in travelogues, letters, histories, novels, poems, epics,
legal documents, records, memoirs, biographies, translations
and censuses. And, concomitantly, the Empire itself came to
define the textual self-representation and narrative sensibility
of metropolitan British culture. As Said writes in Culture and
Imperialism, imperial notations and allusions furnish the
‘structures of attitude and reference’ which sustain the stable
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world of the Victorian novel. Thus, imaginative texts achieve
a double function: on the one hand they help to garner
imperial possessions, and on the other, they supply
national/colonial culture with an exalted self-image of its
geographical and material provenance. In other words, if
Orientalist texts authorise European Atlantic power over the
Orient, the Victorian novel—according to Said—authorises
imperialism as the bedrock of British cultural identity. Its
narrative mode and fictional content prove indispensable to
the consolidation of imperial authority. In Said’s words: ‘imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that
it is impossible . . . to read one without in some way dealing
with the other’ (Said 1993, p. 84).
Recent studies of imperial textuality are also mindful of an
alleged complicity between nineteenth-century colonial ideology and the emergence of English literature as an academic
discipline in the colonies. These accounts argue that the
‘English text’ effectively replaced the Bible—and thereby, the
evangelical ambitions of Christian missionaries—to become the
most influential medium for the colonial civilising mission. As
evidence for this argument, critics frequently cite Macaulay’s
infamous minute of 1835, which defended the introduction of
‘English Education’ in colonial India on the grounds that ‘a
single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia’. Macaulay’s valorisation
of English literature at the cost of indigenous literatures is
taken as a paradigmatic instance of canon formation. Arguably, his hierarchy of literary value establishes English literature
as the normative embodiment of beauty, truth and morality,
or, in other words, as a textual standard that enforces the
marginality and inferiority of colonised cultures and their
books. Thus, literature, as the authors of The Empire Writes
Back insist, ‘was made as central to the cultural enterprise of
Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation’
(Ashcroft et al. 1989, p. 3).
Gauri Viswanathan’s influential book Masks of Conquest
(1989) affirms the mutually reinforcing relationship between
literary studies and British rule in India from yet another
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perspective. She claims that the British administration in India
used English literature strategically to contain the anticipated
threat of native insubordination. Fearful of a native reaction
to the coercive features of direct military rule, English administrators endeavoured to ‘mask’ or disguise their material
investments by presenting English studies as proof of their
disinterested humanist commitment to the pedagogic enlightenment of their subjects. The planned dissemination of English
literature, Viswanathan tells us, was intended to manage negative perceptions of empire, not only by representing colonial
rule as an educational mission, but also—and more insidiously—by circulating and popularising the human face of
English culture and Englishmen. In sharp contrast to the
unpalatable violence of European colonialism, ‘the English
literary text, functioning as a surrogate Englishman in his
highest and most perfect state, becomes a mask for economic
exploitation . . . successfully camouflaging the material activities of the coloniser’ (Viswanathan 1989, p. 20). By presenting
English literature both as an opiate of the masses and also as
a proxy for colonial government, Viswanathan foregrounds the
controlling mechanisms of imperial textuality. In the course of
her analysis, English Studies becomes—somewhat incredibly—
the most substantial weapon in the colonial arsenal. As she
writes: ‘A discipline that was originally introduced in India
primarily to convey the mechanics of language was thus transformed into an instrument for ensuring industriousness,
efficiency, trustworthiness, and compliance in native subjects’
(1989, p. 93).
Critics who are in agreement with Viswanathan’s hypothesis
likewise maintain that English Studies was instrumental in
confirming the ‘hegemony’ or ‘rule by consent’ of European
colonialism. Accordingly, the successful inauguration of this
discipline in the colonised world is said to mark the juncture
at which native populations came to internalise the ideological
procedures of the colonial civilising mission. Writers like
Ashcroft et al. develop this thesis in a more extravagant and
metaphorical vein, by foregrounding the textual invasion, or
‘interpellation’, of colonised subjectivities. Thus, the eagerly
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assimilated English text is shown to spread the subtle infection
of colonialist imperatives within the unsuspecting native body.
Urged to memorise choice passages from English literary masters, the colonial child submits to the secret logic of spiritual
and political indoctrination. The very ‘recitation of literary
texts’, these critics argue, ‘becomes a ritual act of obedience’
(Ashcroft et al. 1995, p. 426).
These revisionist readings of colonial pedagogy are symptomatic of a prevailing mood of introspection among many
‘postcolonial’ English Departments. The rhetoric of suspicion
surrounding English literature is matched by a range of ‘syllabus reform’ programs, geared toward an overhaul of the
traditional Eurocentric curriculum with a view to excluding
canonical offenders in favour of submerged textual ‘outsiders’.
A related focus on postcolonial pedagogical practice addresses
questions arising from the apparent discrepancy between the
antagonistic worlds of the colonial text and the postcolonial
classroom. These efforts often take the form of consciousnessraising exercises directed against the ongoing ‘naturalisation’
of the colonial canon. Rather than permit students to pursue
a mystified ‘love of Shakespeare’, postcolonial pedagogy undertakes to historicise the received curriculum—and inherited
literary affections—with a view to revealing what Viswanathan
describes as ‘imperialism’s shaping hand in the formation of
English Studies’ (Viswanathan 1989, p. 167).
Many of these recent pedagogic rumblings were anticipated
by the Kenyan writer and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o as
early as 1968. In late October of that year Ngugi and some
of his other colleagues in the English Department at the
University of Nairobi composed a contentious paper entitled
‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ (Ngugi 1972).
Far from settling for a mere reformation of teaching practices,
Ngugi and his co-authors challenged the dubious cultural and
pedagogical pre-eminence of English literature within a
decolonised African context. They maintained that insofar as
literature was duty-bound to illuminate the spirit animating a
people, it was far more appropriate that the unauthentic
discourse of Englishness be replaced by a radical centralisation
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of authentically African literature and language. English literature would find a place within this new disciplinary schema,
but in keeping with its brief enrolment in African history, it
would be accommodated where it belonged—at the margins
of African culture. In colonial India, Gandhi’s regular invectives against English education revealed a similar belief in the
legitimate cultural primacy of Indian literatures and languages.
In anticipation of post-independence India, where English
would remain the privileged language of administration and
the ruling elite, he objected with some fervour to ‘the harm
done by this education received through a foreign tongue . . .
It has created a gulf between the educated classes and the
masses. We don’t know them and they don’t know us’ (Collected Works vol. 14, p. 16).
Notably, Gandhi’s and Ngugi’s uncompromising textual/cultural inversions do not find much favour in postcolonial
literary-critical discourse. The authors of The Empire Writes
Back, for instance, reserve judgment about anti-colonial ‘abrogation’ or the unequivocal rejection, in their words, ‘of the
metropolitan power over the means of communication’
(Ashcroft et al. 1989, p. 38). In the name of Fanon’s famous
objections to the derivative logic of négritude, Ashcroft et al.
continually reiterate the well-worn postcolonial maxim that
the reversed scramble for cultural primacy only serves to
reinforce the old binaries which secured the performance of
colonial ideology in the first place. Accordingly, the categorical
refusal of imperial culture is, at best, a necessary evil in the
decolonising process. In itself, ‘abrogation’ or inversion represents an incomplete or failed radicalism which needs to acquire
the more subtle political habits of ‘appropriation’ or ‘subversion-from-within’. The anti-colonial ‘appropriator’ challenges
the cultural and linguistic stability of the centre by twisting
old authoritarian words into new oppositional meanings. Such
is the power of this creative intervention that, ‘without the
process of appropriation the moment of abrogation may not
extend beyond a reversal of the assumptions of privilege, the
“normal”, and correct inscription, all of which can simply be
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taken over and maintained by the new usage’ (Ashcroft et al.
1989, p. 38).
It is helpful to think of this stipulated shift from abrogation
to appropriation as a shift from ‘unlearning English’, to the
project of ‘learning how to curse in the master’s tongue’. This
latter mode, in turn, marks the emergence of what we might
call a ‘Caliban paradigm’. Toward the beginning of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (a play much appropriated for
postcolonial ends), there is a well-known altercation between
Miranda, daughter of the proto-colonial settler Prospero, and
Caliban, the dispossessed (ab)original inhabitant of the island
in which the play’s action is located. Miranda itemises
Caliban’s ingratitude for her pedagogic gifts of language and,
consequently, self-knowledge: ‘When thou didst not, savage, /
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing
most brutish, I endowed thy purposes/ With words that made
them known’ (I.ii.355–8). In response, Caliban names but one
dubious benefit of his linguistic indoctrination: ‘You taught me
language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’
(I.ii.363–4). While the fictional Caliban speaks somewhat
parodically, his speech symbolically illustrates the logic of
protesting ‘out of’, rather than ‘against’, the cultural vocabulary of colonialism.
The dynamics of the ‘Caliban paradigm’ are seen to generate a host of creative anxieties among anti-colonial literary
practitioners. Nationalist writer-appropriators must both recognise and subvert the authority of imperial textuality. They
must submit to what Boehmer has perceptively called a ‘double
process of cleaving’. This schizophrenic performance involves,
in her words:
cleaving from, moving away from colonial definitions, transgressing the boundaries of colonialist discourse; and in order
to effect this, cleaving to: borrowing, taking over, or appropriating the ideological, linguistic, and textual forms of the
colonial power (Boehmer 1995, pp. 106–7).
Troubled by the paradox of borrowing or owning a vocabulary
whose moral meanings must be repudiated or disowned, the
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anti-colonial writer re-enacts the overarching dilemma of
nationalist thought in the colonial world. Anti-colonial nationalism, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, is also shaped by
a complicated relationship of debt and defiance to Enlightenment thought. Its historical burden, as Partha Chatterjee
writes, inheres in the obligation to simultaneously be ‘a different discourse, yet one that is dominated by another’. And yet,
as Chatterjee probes: ‘How far can it succeed in maintaining
its difference from a discourse that seeks to dominate it?’
(Chatterjee 1993a, p. 42).
These postcolonial queries about the imaginative anxieties
which accompany the emergence of anti-colonial political/literary formations bear some resemblance to Harold Bloom’s
earlier speculations on poetic influence. In The Anxiety of
Influence (1973), Bloom famously absorbed Freud’s account
of the Oedipal struggle into literary theory, to argue that all
literary activity was, in effect, the scene of a struggle between
a ‘beginning poet’, or ephebe, and the crippling influence of
powerful literary ‘forefathers’. The ephebe circumvents this
influence, not through an ‘abrogation’, but rather through a
deliberate and creative misreading or misprision of literary
predecessors. Thus, the moment of poetic ‘departure’ or ‘difference’ is ushered in under the guise of
incomprehension—through an apparent inability to read as
required.
Several assumptions in Bloom’s hypothesis find their way
into Homi Bhabha’s feted account of ‘colonial mimicry’. Taken
as a general description of those colonial meanings/identities
which are ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994, p.
86), mimicry designates, first, the ethical gap between the
normative vision of post-Enlightenment civility and its distorted colonial (mis)imitation. Thus, in Bhabha’s words:
‘Between the Western sign and its colonial signification there
emerges a map of misreading that embarrasses the righteousness of recordation and its certainty of good government’
(1994, p. 95). But ‘mimicry’ is also the sly weapon of anticolonial civility, an ambivalent mixture of deference and
disobedience. The native subject often appears to observe the
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political and semantic imperatives of colonial discourse. But
at the same time, she systematically misrepresents the foundational assumptions of this discourse by articulating it, as
Bhabha puts it, ‘syntagmatically with a range of differential
knowledges and positionalities that both estrange its ‘‘identity’’
and produce new forms of knowledge, new modes of differentiation, new sites of power’ (1994, p. 120). In effect, then,
‘mimicry’ inheres in the necessary and multiple acts of translation which oversee the passage from colonial vocabulary to
its anti-colonial usage. In other words, ‘mimicry’ inaugurates
the process of anti-colonial self-differentiation through the
logic of inappropriate appropriation.
In this sense, ‘mimicry’ has become the new slogan of
postcolonial literary analysis. The emerging consensus on
postcolonial literary practice has it that the most radical
anti-colonial writers are ‘mimic men’, whose generic misappropriations constantly transgress the received and orthodox
boundaries of ‘literariness’. Accordingly, the paradigmatic
moment of anti-colonial counter-textuality is seen to begin
with the first indecorous mixing of Western genres with local
content. By this reasoning, anti-colonial texts become political
when, for instance, the formal shape of the European novel is
moulded to indigenous realities, or when the measured sound
of English is accented through an unrecognisable babel of
native voices.
Most postcolonial literary critics refer to Raja Rao’s
Kanthapura (1971 [1938]) as the classic example of radical
mimicry. Rao’s eloquent story about the revolutionary impact
of Gandhian thought upon the residents of a small Indian
village begins with some famous prefatory remarks about the
challenge of narrating rural India through an English idiom.
The ‘telling’, as Rao confesses, is not ‘easy’: ‘One has to convey
in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.
One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a
certain thought movement that looks maltreated in an alien
language’ (pp. i–ii). What follows in the text is an ‘adulteration’ of ‘proper’ English with the cadences and ‘tempo’ of
Indian speech. It is worth mentioning that Ngugi resolved a
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similar discrepancy between the English language and African
realities through a decisive political commitment to only write
in his native Gikuyu. In contrast—and conveniently for
postcolonial literary theory—Rao refuses, for personal rather
than political reasons, to relinquish the English language as
the medium for his Indian stories. Instead, he appropriates
English on the grounds that it is ‘not really an alien language
to us’, and in so doing, he exemplifies the ‘hybridity’ and
‘syncretism’ favoured by postcolonial literary criticism. In his
words, ‘We cannot write like the English. We should not. We
cannot write only as Indians’.
Postcolonial literary critics are agreed that writers like
Rao—and unlike Ngugi—are exemplary for their refusal
merely to replace a Western cultural paradigm with its nonWestern counterpart. If Rao’s ‘mimic’ mode subverts the
authority of imperial textuality, it also forecloses, once and for
all, any appeal to an ‘authentic’ or ‘essential’ Indian-ness. Thus
positioned as the iconic emblem of an indeterminate hybridity,
the anti-colonial nationalist writer is now eagerly absorbed
into a critique of third-world cultural nationalism.
Accounts of postcolonial counter-textuality begin by affirming the contiguity between the anti-colonial novel and
anti-colonial nationalism. In general, postcolonial theory subscribes whole-heartedly to Benedict Anderson’s insistence upon
the textual underpinnings of nation-ness. It is Anderson’s
contention that nations are imaginative and cultural artefacts
rather than empirical and scientific entities. They are imagined
into coherence because ‘the members of even the smallest
nations never know most of their fellow-members, meet them,
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image
of their communion’ (Anderson 1991 [1983], p. 6). The novel
and the newspaper are, in this context, the two principal print
forms capable of containing and representing, in one place,
the impossible diversity that is the nation. Thus, the novel
becomes a sort of proxy for the nation. Its pages communicate,
in Anderson’s words, ‘the solidity of a single community,
embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward
through calendrical time’ (1991 [1983], p. 27). In keeping with
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Anderson’s assertions, critics like Fredric Jameson argue that
the emergent third-world novel is especially committed to the
rendition of nationalist realities (Jameson 1986). It is certainly
the case that the newly discovered textures of realist prose in
colonies like India, quickly lent themselves to the sociopolitical
concerns of nationalism. In addition, socialist anti-colonial
thought sanctioned the view that cultural/literary ‘labour’ was
indispensable to the nationalist task of social transformation.
In other words, the anti-colonial novelist was often, although
not always, a nationalist.
And yet postcolonial literary theory rarely applauds nationalism as a feature of the counter-textuality of the anti-colonial
writer/novelist. Far from conceding that the anti-colonial novel
authenticates the anti-colonial nation, it argues that this novel
irrevocably dilutes the imaginary essence of the nation through
a Western dialect. If nation-ness is itself engendered within a
colonial grammar, its narration in the novel form is, thus,
doubly derivative. Seen in these terms, the quintessential
‘hybridity’ of the anti-colonial novelist/writer demonstrates
that, as Ashcroft et al. maintain, ‘it is not possible to return
to or to rediscover an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity, nor
is it possible to create national or regional formations entirely
independent of their historical implication in the European
colonial enterprise’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989, pp. 195–6). Much
like the nation she narrates, this novelist becomes the Janusfaced bearer of a split consciousness or a double vision. Apart
from the ‘impurity’ of her cultural influences, the anti-colonial
writer also suffers from the cultural alienation endemic to the
nationalist elite in general. Anti-colonial nationalists, as Boehmer writes, ‘often tended to have more in common with the
middle-class counterparts in other colonies struggling for selfrepresentation than with the disenfranchised masses of their own
countries’ (Boehmer 1995, p. 114). In the hands of such storytellers, cultural nationalism does not really stand a chance.
Accordingly, the syncretic narrative, celebrated by postcolonial
critics, becomes a distorting mirror in which the anti-colonial
nation is forced to recognise its own estrangement.
The textual mapping of the colonial encounter, which we
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have been discussing, concludes with the new ‘migrant’ novel.
It is often argued that the counter-textual mood of anti-colonial or nationalist writing finds its apotheosis in the
cosmopolitan restlessness of writers such as Salman Rushdie,
Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje and Bharati Mukherjee.
Postcolonial literary theory, as we have seen, tends to privilege
‘appropriation’ over ‘abrogation’ and multicultural ‘syncretism’ over cultural ‘essentialism’. While the anti-colonial novel
is shown to betray these symptoms despite itself, the ‘migrant’
novel is entirely explicit in its commitment to hybridity. Positioned on the margins or interstices of two antagonistic
national cultures, it claims to open up an in-between space of
cultural ambivalence. As Homi Bhabha writes in his gloss on
Derek Walcott, such writing refuses (is unable?) to ‘oppose the
pedagogy of the imperialist noun to the inflectional appropriation of the native voice’, preferring instead, ‘to go beyond
such binaries of power in order to reorganise our sense of the
process of identification in the negotiations of cultural politics’
(Bhabha 1994, p. 233). Edward Said is also eloquent in his
praise of the nomadic energies of such writers, whom he sees
as transgressing the confinement of both imperial and provincial orthodoxies. The migrant novel is inaccessible, then, to
the possessive prose of cultural nationalism. So also its transculturated narrative is postulated as a serious challenge to the
cultural stability of the metropolitan centre. In Said’s words:
‘The authoritative, compelling image of empire . . . finds its
opposite in the renewable, almost sporty discontinuities of
intellectual and secular impurities, mixed genres, unexpected
combinations of tradition and novelty’ (Said 1993, p. 406).
Whereas the anti-colonial novel tentatively appropriated the
language of empire from afar, writers like Rushdie are believed
to transform—from within—the geographical and imaginative
space of the Western metropolis. In conclusion, Rushdie’s
tropicalised London—parodically renamed Ellowen
Deeowen—may well be, as Bhabha writes, an unrecognisable
terrain, distorted ‘in the migrant’s mimicry’ (Bhabha 1994, p.
169). But whether this mimicry can be taken as the highpoint
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of postcolonial politics is a question that we might address,
more critically, in the next section.
Postcolonial texts, anti-colonial politics
The textual mapping of the colonial encounter relies upon a
narrative of competing or contesting textualities. In these
terms, all colonial texts are seen as repressive, and on the other
side of the binary, all postcolonial/migrant texts are invested
with radically subversive energies. Moreover, following the
controversy surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses,
Salman Rushdie has emerged as the paradigmatic exponent of
migrant (textual) dissidence, as the voice, in other words, of
postcolonial heterodoxy. Notwithstanding the individual
insights of postcolonial literary theorists, this account of the
colonial encounter suffers from some serious conceptual inadequacies and political evasions.
In the first place, we need to qualify the generalising
assumption that all colonial texts are repressive. The colonial,
as Boehmer writes, ‘need not always signify texts rigidly
associated with the colonial power’ (Boehmer 1995, p. 4). In
a previous chapter we already discussed the limits in Said’s
account of Orientalist texts. Far from always-already collaborating with the material investments of colonialism, several
Orientalists laboured to counter the ethnocentric assumptions
of metropolitan culture. Relatedly, the Orientalism of sexual
dissidents like Carpenter and Forster was predicated upon an
idealistic understanding of the East as a utopian alternative to
the ethical and political violence of empire. On a different
note, Boehmer draws attention to the fact that colonial texts
very often betrayed the uncertainties and anxieties of empire.
Colonialist writing, in her words, ‘was never as invasively
confident or as pompously dismissive of indigenous cultures
as its oppositional pairing with postcolonial writing might
suggest’ (1995, p. 4). And, just as colonial writing was not
unequivocal in its affirmation of empire, the pedagogic circulation of the ‘English text’ in the colonies did not necessarily
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secure the compliance of native subjects and the concomitant
hegemony of European colonialism.
While accounts of colonial pedagogy are consistently sensitive to the intentions of colonial administrators, they remain
oblivious to the complex and complicating reception of the
English text in the colonial world. Gauri Viswanathan, for
instance, confidently claims that ‘it is entirely possible to study
the ideology of British education quite independently of an
account of how Indians actually received, reacted to, imbibed,
manipulated, reinterpreted, or resisted the ideological content
of British literary education’ (Viswanathan 1989, p. 11). Even
if we concede, as Viswanathan suggests, the self-sufficient
enclosure of colonial systems of representation, an account of
the material effects of colonial ideology and pedagogy is surely
incomplete in the absence of any reference to the recipients of
English education. In this regard, we might briefly draw attention to the selective literary ‘taste’ of Indian readers, to their
confident judgment of the European canon and, finally, to the
threatening critical facility with which native students
approached their curriculum.
The anti-colonial archive suggests that rather than being
the passive objects of an authoritarian and alien pedagogy,
Indian readers remained obdurately selective in their response
to the English syllabus. Viswanathan herself provides the
untheorised example of some Calcutta citizens whose petition
for a properly English education was accompanied by the
disclaimer that ‘they would take that which they found good
and liked best’ (Viswananthan 1989, p. 43). Especially noteworthy is the unauthorised receptivity of Indian readers to the
Romantic poets in general, and Shelley in particular. Indeed,
Shelley’s canonisation in Sri Aurobindo’s book The Future
Poetry as the ‘sovereign voice of the new spiritual force that
was at the moment attempting to break into poetry’ (Sri
Aurobindo 1991, p. 125), goes entirely against the grain of
contemporary English critical opinion. The Future Poetry,
which was first serialised between 1917 and 1920, also
deserves attention more generally for its comprehensive and
often very critical account of British literary history.
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Aurobindo’s survey of European literature is animated by
various reservations about the literary worth of the Elizabethan
dramatists, Milton, and the ‘Augustans’—whom he holds
responsible for ‘the death of the true poetic faculty’ (1991, p.
88).
This active response to English literature is but one example
of the interpretative autonomy and acumen of native readers
and students. There is evidence to suggest that this accomplished reader/student was soon perceived as a threat by the
colonial administration. Notably, when Sir George Campbell,
Lieutenant-Governer General of Bengal in 1871 to 1874,
introduced riding and walking tests for candidates applying
for the subordinate civil services, there was a general consensus, and fear, that Indian applicants would effortlessly excel
in the written and literary component of the exam. Physical
endurance was another matter, and Sri Aurobindo was among
the many ‘effete’ Bengali intellectuals whose bureaucratic aspirations were thwarted by an inability to pass the riding test.
If imperial textuality finds one of its limits in the critical
response of anti-colonial readers, the obligatory subversiveness
of postcolonial literature is seriously limited by the notion of
‘textual politics’ favoured by postcolonial literary theory. In a
move which effectively replaces politics with textuality, such
theory delivers a world where power is exclusively an operation of discourse, and resistance a literary contest of
representation. Not content with what Said has called the
necessary ‘worldliness’ of texts, the rhetoric of textual politics
enters into a competitive and antagonistic relation with the
realm of the ‘social’. For instance, Homi Bhabha’s theoretical
invitation to acknowledge ‘the force of writing’ slips into a
passionate defence of textuality ‘as a productive matrix which
defines the ‘‘social’’ and makes it available as an objective of
and for action’. Textuality, he insists, ‘is not simply a secondorder ideological expression or a verbal symptom of a
pre-given political subject’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 23). Bhabha’s
textual bias is shaped by a quite legitimate and eloquent
resistance to the crippling dichotomy between theory and
activism. However, such are the overcompensations of his
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prose, that his cogent defence of the political relevance of
thought tends to give way to an unsustainable assertion of
textual pre-eminence. Thus, in the beginning—before the first
murmuring of political consciousness—we find the word, and
the word is with postcolonial writing. Bhabha’s insistent claim
that ‘the political subject—as indeed the subject of politics—is
a discursive event’ (1994, p. 23), anticipates a theoretical
model where textuality starts to elide the materiality and
contingency of the world itself.
When textual politics becomes doctrinal in this way, it starts
to treat the text as an end in itself, or as an improvement
upon the hopeless inadequacy of political realities. Jonathan
White’s close reading of postcolonial fiction in an essay entitled
‘Politics and the individual in the modernist historical novel’
offers a telling example of this tendency. White claims that the
postcolonial novel is the last repository of revolutionary consciousness in a world increasingly bereft of political and
historical content. In this regard, the work of writers like
Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie may, he argues, have
a major role to play in ‘redressing such an inadequacy’ (White
1993, p. 209). In making these contentions, White not only
favours the novel for its pedagogic capacity to disseminate
political information but also, and more disturbingly, suggests
that we might start to think of ‘the novel as an alternative
way of doing history and politics’ (1993, p. 209). Thus, we
acquire a new perspective on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,
whereby the novel’s textual plenitude compensates for its
author’s view of India’s political and historical impoverishment. The novel, White concedes, offers an uncompromising
and ‘pessimistic perspective about India’ (p. 237)—an account
of nationalist failure and historical ‘grotesquery’. But, in his
words, ‘one other reality, the teeming inventiveness of consciousness and hence of narration, constantly lightens that
burden, which would otherwise be intolerable’ (p. 237). Notwithstanding the stunted historicity of the Indian nation, we
can still gain solace from the fact that India is ‘equally
embodied in . . . the positive growth of the text’ (p. 237). So,
where Bhabha permits writing to prefigure the ‘social’, White
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gives it the licence to disfigure political realities. Rushdie’s
narration is valorised at the cost of the world he narrates.
After Midnight’s Children, we may rest assured that ‘India, is
not solely (in the old cliché) a teeming begetter of peoples but,
also, a begetter of teeming narrative’ (p. 238).
White’s textually obsessed analysis of Midnight’s Children
is partly motivated by the curious political and historical
circumstances which have made Rushdie into the emblematic
figure of textual politics. In the face of the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s fatwa, The Satanic Verses has emerged as a ‘textual
event’—and Rushdie’s teeming narrative does indeed deliver a
writing which, in White’s words, ‘is full of risk’ (p. 228). Any
liberally motivated response to Rushdie’s painful predicament
would defend his right to write. Nevertheless, it is possible to
recognise Rushdie’s decision to go on writing and publishing
as unmistakably political, without claiming self and language
as the last locus of political agency.
In a sense, Rushdie’s own textual absorption of politics
owes its inheritance to the deep political evasiveness which
characterises the bourgeois English novel. Here we find that a
similar investment in textual coherence and narrative style has
replaced the grittiness of the political. In an instructive essay,
Simon During offers some relevant comments regarding
Edmund Burke’s influence on the unmotivated prose of this
genre. Burke, During tells us, ‘locates liberty not in thought,
not in national will, ultimately not even in tradition, but,
almost unawares, in a personal freedom embedded in the act
of writing. It goes without saying that to find liberty there is
not to require socio-political change, it is barely to find liberty
at all’ (During 1990, p. 146). While it would be foolish to
push the analogy between Burke and Rushdie, the postcolonial
universalisation of Rushdie’s predicament does produce a similar mishandling of ‘liberty’. Rushdie’s personal freedom is,
indeed, chronically and inescapably embedded in writing. But
the concerns of the world about which he writes exceed the
exertions of textual jouissance. Decolonisation, as Boehmer
puts it,
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can never be focused primarily at a discursive level . . . the
struggle for selfhood is much more than the subject of selfreflexive irony. In a third-world context, self-legitimisation
depended, and depends, not on discursive play but on a day
to day lived resistance, a struggle for meanings which is in
the world as well as on paper (Boehmer 1995, pp. 221–2).
At the outset of this chapter it was argued that postcolonial
literary theory owes its preliminary politicisation of textuality
to ‘cultural materialism’. In its subsequent textual investments,
however, it starts to betray the influence of yet another theoretical/critical genealogy, which requires some elaboration.
Deconstruction is, of course, the immediate and obvious precursor for the postcolonial turn toward textuality. As is well
known, Derrida’s influential reclamation of writing begins with
a rejection of the bias toward speech which underpins Western
metaphysics. Logocentric metaphysics, Derrida tells us, has
traditionally repressed writing itself and, concomitantly, ‘suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin
and status of writing’ (see Norris 1982, p. 29). Positioned thus,
as the unheeded victim of Western epistemology, writing announces its revolutionary counter-claims. In Derrida’s hands,
the anarchic scene of textual dissemination begins to contest
all embedded hierarchies of value and meaning. From now on
it is texts alone which will puncture the narcissism of Western
knowledge. As Norris writes in his commentary on Derrida:
‘Writing is that which exceeds—and has the power to dismantle—the whole traditional edifice of Western attitudes to
thought and language’ (Norris 1982, p. 29). Seen through this
Derridean vector, it is not surprising that postcolonial literary
theory seeks its anti-colonial counter-narrative in the written
word. But we might also note—and we have discussed this
more fully in a previous chapter—that deconstruction itself
stands charged of the political evasions which trouble its
followers. A variety of critics have attributed the textual focus
of deconstruction to the political disenchantment produced by
the cataclysmic events of 1968. For Eagleton, the valorised
deconstructive text becomes a convenient proxy for political
action. In his somewhat ascerbic words: ‘Unable to break the
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structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible
instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least,
was likely to beat you over the head for doing so’ (Eagleton
1983, p. 142).
From deconstruction, then, postcolonial literary theory
receives an ambivalent inheritance: on the one hand, it learns
to glean and defend the radical energies of writing and, on the
other, it acquires the habit of investing texts with values that
cannot be located or fulfilled in reality. And it is here that we
can begin to discern the hidden symptoms of New Criticism—
that suppressed discourse which inhabits the secret enclaves of
both postcolonial and poststructuralist literary theory. For our
purposes, it is enough to acknowledge that the New Critics
postulated the poetic text as a sacrosanct object, hermetically
sealed from the contaminations of both rational enquiry and
the materialistic world which occasioned such enquiry. Seen as
such, the literary text projected an alternative—a newer, better
and improved world where the privileged reader could discover
a refuge from, and a resistance to, the encroachments of
modern industrial society. As is well acknowledged—and here,
we need to stretch our genealogy even further back in time—
New Criticism is itself informed by a specifically Romantic
understanding of the poetic word. And it is within Romanticism, I would like to argue, that postcolonial literary theory
finds its particular textual provenance. Much like New Criticism after it, the Romantics, as Eagleton puts it, discover in
literature, ‘one of the few enclaves in which the creative values
expunged from the face of English society by industrial capitalism can be celebrated and affirmed’ (Eagleton 1983, p. 19).
So also, if literature compensates for the inadequacies of the
world, the poetic ‘imagination’ and ‘creative faculty’ are now
endowed with the political energies necessary for the work of
social transformation. The poet/writer, in other words, is fashioned as a revolutionary par excellence.
This postulation of Romanticism as the ‘originary moment’,
if you like, of textual politics, is particularly pertinent. For in
the textual obsessions of postcolonial literary theory we might
read the first symptoms of a process whereby metropolitan
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culture obtains a specifically ‘romantic’ investment in
postcolonial literature and its migrant writers. These texts/writers are often seen to embody energies and values allegedly
lacking or under threat in the postcolonial world. And these
values, as we have seen already, are animated by a single
concept, namely, ‘hybridity’.
In fact, a distinctly ‘romantic’ vocabulary marks the prose
of several postcolonial literary theorists. A collection of essays
entitled: Recasting the World: Writing After Colonialism (ed.
J. White 1995) professes its overarching concern with the
‘notion of recasting realities through writing’ (p. ix). Its editor,
Jonathan White, locates in the postcolonial text the potential
to both cope with the ‘terrors’ of the colonial aftermath, and
engender an improved ethico-political future. Accordingly,
Nadine Gordimer is cited to elaborate ‘more fully the workings
of transformative powers unleashed by mere words on the page
(p. 2). In a similar gesture, Derek Walcott’s commitment to
poetic composition becomes an act of ‘ongoing political commitment in its own right’—a creative antidote to counter ‘every
prevailing individual and societal tendency to decompose’ (p.
5). White discerns, in a writer like Walcott, echoes of Blake—
pre-eminent among the Romantics for his belief in the
ameliorative agency of the poetic imagination. The authors of
The Empire Writes Back find in the novels of Trinidadian
writer Michael Antony a similar demonstration of ‘the transformative power of the imagination’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989, p.
97). So also, their analysis of the Guyanese novelist and critic,
Wilson Harris, is inflected by a strikingly romantic vocabulary:
‘cultures must be liberated from the destructive dialectic of
history, and imagination is the key to this. Harris sees imaginative escape as the ancient and only refuge of oppressed
peoples, but the imagination also offers possibilities of escape
from the politics of dominance and subversion’ (Ashcroft et
al. 1989, p. 35).
Notably, while these accounts ‘romanticise’ the postcolonial
writer’s vision for ‘marginalised’ postcolonial societies, they
simultaneously insist—as evident in the title of Ashcroft et al.’s
volume—that postcolonial texts characteristically ‘write back
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to’ the metropolitan centre. Thus, metropolitan culture designates itself as the privileged addressee—the chosen
audience—of the romantic postcolonial text. Indeed, as critics
like Timothy Brennan, among others, argue, the privileged
postcolonial text is typically accessible and responsive to the
aesthetic and political taste of liberal metropolitan readers. The
principal pleasures of this cosmopolitan text accrue from its
managed exoticism. It is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the West—
its appropriative modality delivers new stories in reassuringly
old ways. Paradoxically, and as Brennan observes, the writers
whom Western reviewers select as ‘the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World’, have invariably numbered
those who:
allowed a flirtation with change that ensured continuity, a
familiar strangeness, a trauma by inches. Alien to the public
that read them because they were black, spoke with accents
or were not citizens, they were always like that public in
tastes, training, repertoire of anecdotes, current habitation
(Brennan 1989, p. ix).
Read in this light, the discourse of literary hybridity
becomes a sort of guilty political rationalisation of readerly
preference. And it is in the attempt to make the ‘cosmopolitan’
or ‘migrant’ writer authentically representative of the ‘third
world’ that postcolonial literary theory becomes dangerously
prescriptive. Thus, the pages of a volume such as The Empire
Writes Back assume an instructive tone with regard to the
‘appropriate’ form of postcolonial literature. Throughout this
book, we encounter the following imperatives (with my
emphasis): ‘all postcolonial literatures are cross-cultural’
(Ashcroft et al. 1989, p. 39); ‘the postcolonial text is always
a complex and hybridised formation’ (p. 110); ‘colonialism
inevitably leads to a hybridisation of culture’ (p. 129); ‘hybridity is the primary characteristic of all post-colonial societies
whatever their source’ (p. 185); ‘it is not possible to return to
or rediscover an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity’ (p. 196).
In its striking resistance to the possible heterogeneity of
postcolonial experience and literary production, this discourse
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is painfully and ironically evocative of Orientalism. Moreover,
its rigid directives and injunctions exhibit the stark procedures
of canon formation. As with any other emergent canon,
Ashcroft et al.’s selection of the best and most representative
postcolonial texts is predicated upon the systematic exclusion
of others. In the main, their theoretical embargo falls most
heavily upon any ‘located’ or ‘situated’ literatures, namely,
those which are not written in English, and those which—as
we have been arguing—lay any claim to cultural alterity and
authenticity. Hence, the claim that literatures in, for instance,
regional Indian languages are entirely on par with the ‘quantity
and quality of the work in English’, is met with the following
response: ‘This may well be the case, though until much more
extensive translations into English from these languages have
been produced it is difficult for non-speakers of these languages to judge’ (p. 122). But what does ‘judgment’ refer to
here—what is being judged and by whom? In the face of this
bias against the slightest symptoms of linguistic/cultural difference, postcolonial literary theory clears a privileged space for
the voice of what Brennan has called anti-colonial liberalism.
The emergence of this voice is marked by a shift away from
the old ‘realist novel’ of the revolutionary middle classes
toward its antagonist—the new ‘bourgeois novel’. Much like
its historical predecessor, which During names the novel of the
civil imaginary, this new narrative is characterised by a dislocation from, indeed, antagonism toward, the nation form (see
During 1990). Notably, and in a characteristically deconstructive gesture, Bhabha invites such writing to ‘disseminate’—and
render rhetorical—the solidity and force of national culture.
His theoretical faith is reserved only for those ‘counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its
totalising boundaries—both actual and conceptual—disturb
those ideological manoeuvres through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities’ (Bhabha 1994, p.
149). Accordingly, far from producing the nation out of its
fictional plenitude, the postcolonial novel endeavours, instead,
to betray the fictionality of nationhood. In Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the nation is narrated by an imposter—whose
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unreliable narration systematically distorts the chronology and
significance of national history. So also Shame gives the lie to
the national achievements of Pakistan—leaving in its place, a
hollow and corrupt landscape, bereft of hope and meaning.
The evacuated and fictional space of nationalism is now
animated by the new fictions of exile and migrancy. But we
might pause here to consider Sara Suleri’s suggestion that
‘perhaps it is time for critical discourse to examine more
rigorously the idiom of exile, in order to determine how
inevitably its language must accrue a vertiginous absence of
responsibility’ (Suleri 1992, p. 184). To put this differently,
need we concede the necessary ‘politics of migrancy’? Especially when we consider that the migrancy of writers like
Rushdie is predicated upon the luxuries of mobility. Already,
Bhabha’s catalogue of the new migrant sensibility enumerates
only the limited resources of high-capitalist urban art that few
have access to; the ‘eye of the aeroplane’, ‘a Warhol blowup,
a Kruger installation, or Mapplethorpe’s naked bodies’
(Bhabha 1990, pp. 6–7) do not constitute the staple culture
of most migrants. So also, as Aijaz Ahmad has written:
Among the migrants themselves, only the privileged can live
a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure, between
Whitman and Warhol as it were. Most migrants tend to be
poor and experience displacement not as cultural plenitude
but as torment; what they seek is not displacement but,
precisely, a place from where they might begin anew, with
some sense of a stable future. Postcoloniality is also, like most
things, a matter of class (Ahmad 1995, p. 16).
In the absence of any solidarities—whether nationalist or
socialist—the postcolonial novel finds its provenance in the
small pleasures of subjectivity; its content is almost entirely
shaped by personal journeys, attachments, memories, losses.
Accordingly, it seems more than a little curious that these
iterative and skilful portraits of artists as young—and not so
young—men should be authorised to represent the public voice
of the postcolonial world. The problem is compounded when
we consider that, albeit mistakenly, Rushdie’s The Satanic
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POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
Verses stands charged of ‘literary colonialism’ by the very
world he allegedly delivers in a radical counter-narrative to
empire. Here is a pre-eminently ‘hybrid’ text which has exacerbated the very polarities and binaries which it is discursively
obliged, if not equipped, to refuse. The controversy following
the fatwa has only served to revive the tired dichotomies
between Western civilisational plenitude and non-Western lack.
Indeed, Rushdie himself invokes a similar rhetoric in his open
letter to Rajiv Gandhi, written in response to India’s pre-emptive proscription of The Satanic Verses:
The right to freedom of expression is at the very foundation
of any democratic society, and at present, all over the world,
Indian democracy is becoming something of a laughing stock.
When Syed Shahabuddin and his fellow self-appointed guardians of Muslim sensibility say that ‘no civilised society’ should
permit the publication of a book like mine, they have got
things backwards. The question raised by the book’s banning
is precisely whether India . . . can any more lay claim to the
title of a civilised society (see Appignanesi & Maitland 1990,
p. 35).
Rushdie’s invective against India here—composed well
before the imposition of the fatwa—is, in a sense, characteristic
of his larger oeuvre. This is not to suggest that postcolonial
writing is obliged to be unthinkingly ‘patriotic’. Rather, we
might consider the fact the Rushdie’s narrative renditions of
the Indian nation have always been pathologically and
unequivocally reductive. What he offers in novel after novel is
a lament, or a complaint against the culture he has eschewed
for the transitions of migrancy. Once again, Suleri is instructive
in her claim that the postcolonial imperative to invert the terms
of Orientalist myth-making produces a narrative written ‘in a
context of romance gone wrong, a context that does not lead
to the evocative absence of romance, but to the horror of
Conrad’s imperial parable’ (Suleri 1992, p. 182). This, then,
is the governing paradox of the postcolonial canon: that
metropolitan culture has acquired a romantic investment in a
literary narrative which is markedly anti-romantic in its
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perception of the postcolonial world. Here we can only find
the language of critique; a hybridity that is predicated precisely
upon an abrogation of the postcolonial nation. And yet,
despite the influential liberal enmity toward nationalism, this
abstract and imaginary force bears, as argued earlier, the traces
of countless histories of struggles—histories which, in turn,
continue to inform the ethical apparatus of countless peoples.
And as During writes, ‘To reject nationalism absolutely or to
refuse to discriminate between nationalisms is to accede to a
way of thought by which intellectuals—especially postcolonial
intellectuals—cut themselves off from effective political action’
(During 1990, p. 139).
Without seeking to determine the shape of an alternative
orthodoxy, we might still observe that perhaps what postcolonial literature needs is a properly romantic modality; a
willingness to critique, ameliorate and build upon the compositions of the colonial aftermath. It is possible, in other words,
to envision a transformed and improved future for the
postcolonial nation. We might conclude with the journalistic
romanticism which underwrites the Times of India’s rejoinder
to Rushdie:
No, dear Rushdie, we do not wish to build a repressive India.
On the contrary, we are doing our best to build a liberal India,
where we can all breathe freely. But in order to build this
India, we have to preserve the India that exists. That may not
be a pretty India, but it’s the only India we have (Appignanesi
& Maitland 1990, p. 209).
Is this where a counter-narrative to the postcolonial
counter-narrative might begin?
166
9
The limits of postcolonial
theory
THE LIMITS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
I
n conclusion, it could be said
that postcolonialism is caught between the politics of structure
and totality on the one hand, and the politics of the fragment
on the other. This is one way of suggesting that postcolonial
theory is situated somewhere in the interstices between Marxism and postmodernism/poststructuralism. It is, in a sense, but
one of the many discursive fields upon which the mutual
antagonism between these competing bodies of thought is
played out. Seen as such, postcolonialism shifts the scene of
this long-standing contestation to the so-called ‘third world’.
The meta-narrative of colonialism
Postmodern/poststructuralist
commentators
argue
that
postcolonialism is in danger of becoming yet another totalising
method and theory. On the other side, Marxist and materialist
critics have vociferously made the charge that postcolonial
analysis lacks the methodological structure, and will to totalise,
necessary for right thinking and left politics. As we have seen,
the debate about ‘totalities’ and ‘fragments’ is ultimately concerned with the status of knowledge, ethics and politics in the
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contemporary world and, less grandiosely, within the set of
disciplines which constitute the humanities.
At one extreme, and similarly to feminism, postcolonialism
approaches such questions of epistemology and agency universally; that is to say, as questions which are relevant to a
generalised ‘human condition’ or a ‘global situation’. Just as
feminist theory/criticism is ‘one branch of interdisciplinary
inquiry which takes gender as a fundamental organising category of experience’ (Greene & Kahn 1985, p. 1),
postcolonialism of the sort defended by the authors of The
Empire Writes Back takes colonialism, or more specifically,
European colonialism, as a way to organise the experience of
‘more than three-quarters of the people living in the world
today’ (Ashcroft et al. 1989, p. 1). As is now well known and
well acknowledged, feminism has been forced to concede that
‘woman’ as a monolithic category of analysis across classes
and cultures fails—in Chandra Mohanty’s words—to account
for ‘women—real, material subjects of their collective histories’
(Talpade Mohanty, 1994). Experience, in other words, is crisscrossed by determinants other than those of gender or, we
might add, colonialism alone.
The postcolonial deference to the homogenising and allinclusive category ‘colonialism’ fails, first, to account for the
similarities between cultures/societies which do not share the
experience of colonialism. Second, and similarly to feminism,
it fails to account for differences, in this case the culturally
and historically variegated forms of both colonisation and
anti-colonial struggles. As Aijaz Ahmad writes in one of his
many critiques of matters postcolonial: ‘the fundamental effect
of constructing this globalised trans-historicity of colonialism
is one of evacuating the very meaning of the word and
dispersing that meaning so wide that we can no longer speak
of determinate histories of determinate structures . . .’ (Ahmad
1995, p. 9). This sort of semantic vacuum is most evident in
the claim, made by some Australian and Canadian commentators, that settler societies stand in the same relationship to
colonialism as those societies which have experienced the full
force and violence of colonial domination. Such claims entirely
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THE LIMITS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
neutralise, in the name of subject formation, the widely divergent logics of settlement and struggles for independence.
Equally, they confer a seamless and undiscriminating
postcoloniality on both white settler cultures and on those
indigenous peoples displaced through their encounter with
these cultures. For postcolonial critics like Helen Tiffin, accordingly, disparate societies such as Bangladesh and Australia are
unified upon the somewhat dubious premise that their ‘subjectivity has been constituted in part by the subordinating
power of European colonialism’ (Adam & Tiffin 1991, p. vii).
Tiffin’s faith in the notion of a uniformly subordinated
subjectivity invites contestation, not least of all because both
subjectivity and power are so differently and unevenly inflected
across cultures and histories. While ‘subjectivity’, in Tiffin’s
usage, seems to point to the state of creative ‘interiority’, this
term also refers to the condition through which people are
recognised as free and equal—or ‘full’—individuals within civil
society. As it happens, the story of political subjectivity has
always been fraught by exclusions of gender, race, class, caste
and religion. Civil society has consistently refused admission
and participation to those who, in Carole Pateman’s words,
‘lack the attributes and capacities of “individuals”’ (Pateman
1988, p. 6). Thus, for Rosseau, women were exempted from
subjectivity and for Cecil Rhodes, likewise, black Africans were
to be denied the benefits of ‘mature’ and ‘full’ individuality:
‘The native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise.
We must adopt the system of despotism . . . in our relations
with the barbarous of South Africa’ (cited in Nandy 1992, p.
58). Similar divisions marked the edifice of colonial government in India. As Chatterjee says: ‘The only civil society that
the government could recognise was theirs; colonised subjects
could never be its equal members’ (Chatterjee 1993b, p. 24).
In this case, racial difference, much as sexual difference,
becomes synonymous with political difference. Thus, unlike
the colonisers who possess the privileges of citizenship and
subjectivity, the colonised exist only as subjects, or as those
suspended in a state of subjection. In India, the nationalist
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
struggle begins as a repudiation of this second-rate civil society
of subjects—as a struggle for subjectivity.
The arguments of writers like Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths
fail to convince primarily on account of their refusal to address
adequately the ideological wedge between histories of subjectivity and histories of subjection. There is a fundamental
incommensurability between the predominantly cultural ‘subordination’ of settler culture in Australia, and the
predominantly administrative and militaristic subordination of
colonised culture in Africa and Asia. A theory of postcolonialism which suppresses differences like these is ultimately flawed
as an ethical and political intervention into conditions of
power and inequality. Equally, pious protestations of
postcoloniality from once-colonised nations such as India must
engage with the differences between internal histories of subordination, kept in place by the continuing exclusions of
postcolonial civil society.
The end of colonialism
Critics such as Robert Young have recently suggested that
postcolonialism can be best thought of as a critique of history
(see Young 1990). This is a contentious claim and one which
has been vigorously debated between Marxist and postmodernist/poststructuralist commentators. While Marxist theorists
have been unequivocally dismissive of the postcolonial allergy
to history, their opponents, as we have seen, have responded
by including Marxism itself into their critique of historicism
or historical reasoning.
The postcolonial chapter of the debate on history has a
number of complex ramifications. In summary, however, a
variety of postcolonial commentators have argued that ‘history’ is the discourse through which the West has asserted its
hegemony over the rest of the world. This idea becomes clearer
when we consider that Western philosophy, at least since
Hegel, has used the category of ‘history’ more or less synonymously with ‘civilisation’—only to claim both of these
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THE LIMITS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
categories for the West, or more specifically, for Europe. In
Hegel’s notorious formulation, civilisation—and by implication
history—moves West. The unhappy corollary to this assertion
is that Western imperialist expansion has all too often been
defended as the pedagogical project of bringing the ‘underdeveloped’ world into the edifying condition of history.
Colonialism, in terms of this logic, is the story of making the
world historical, or, we might argue, a way of ‘worlding’ the
world as Europe. Hence the situation where, in Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s words, ‘Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian”,
“Chinese”, “Kenyan”, and so on’ (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 1).
The postcolonial/poststructuralist intervention into this problem focuses accordingly on ‘history’ as the grand narrative
through which Eurocentrism is ‘totalised’ as the proper
account of all humanity. Accordingly, postcolonial historiography declares its intention to fragment or interpellate this
account with the voices of all those unaccounted for ‘others’
who have been silenced and domesticated under the sign of
Europe.
Against these claims, some critics have complained that certain
versions of postcolonial analysis simply reinstate the exclusionary
systems of universal history. Anne McClintock develops this
critique by arguing that the prefix ‘post’ in postcolonialism
confers on colonialism ‘the prestige of history proper . . . Other
cultures share only a chronological and prepositional relation to
a Euro-centred epoch that is over (post) or not yet begun (“pre”)’
(McClintock 1992, p. 3). Thus, despite its oppositional claims,
postcolonial historiography runs the risk of paradoxically reunifying the diversity and alterity of the colonised world under the
sign and spectre of Europe—forcing all temporalities and cultures
into a hyphenated relationship with colonialism. In other words,
postcolonialism semantically delivers the idea of a world
historicised through the single category of colonialism. There are
several negative implications which follow on from here.
Most evidently, the organisation of the immediate past
under the rubric of colonialism tends to reduce the contingent and random diversity of cultural encounters and
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non-encounters within that past into a tired relationship of
coercion and retaliation. According to Tiffin, for instance,
postcolonialism consists of two ‘archives’ which are produced,
first, ‘by the subordinating power of European colonialism’,
and second, through ‘a set of discursive practices, prominent
among which is resistance to colonialism’ (Adam & Tiffin
1991, p. vii). Seen as such, ‘colonialism’ supplies a category
through which history becomes coherent, and therefore knowable, as a movement between imperial subordination and
anti-colonial resistance. While there is no denying that the
colonial encounter is marked by the story of Western dominance and resistances to it, we also need to acknowledge that
this story is endlessly complicated by the failure, inadequacy
and refusal on both sides of dominance and resistance. By
attending more carefully to the silence of the archive we need
to interrogate this construction of history as certain knowledge, to ask, in other words: ‘Who gets known in and as
history?’—or—’Who are those groups and events of whom
“colonial” history is ignorant?’.
These are some of the questions asked of colonial
historiography by the Subaltern Studies collective. Briefly, we
might refer to their suggestion that it is primarily within elite
institutions—whether colonial or nationalist—that ‘history’
acquires visibility and structure. Writers within this collective
argue that the archival version of ‘colonial’ history frequently
fails to accommodate or speak to the opaque and contradictory
processes which characterise the politics of the people. These
politics comprise, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, those ‘plural
and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable, even retrospectively, in accordance with schemas
which seek to naturalise and domesticate this heterogeneity’
(Chakrabarty 1992, p. 20). One of the reasons why such
struggles remain undocumented at the institutional sites where
history proper is produced is because their functional unpredictability very often causes them to swerve from the ideals of
proper insurgency. As Ranajit Guha writes: ‘Blinded by the
glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness the historian
sees nothing, for instance, but solidarity in rebel behaviour
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THE LIMITS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
and fails to notice its Other, namely, betrayal’ (Guha 1983, p.
40). In a footnote to the argument so far, we might also add
that the postcolonial binary of coercion/retaliation not only
minimises the function of what Simon During speaks of as ‘the
consent of the colonised to colonialism’ (During 1992, p. 95),
but equally and perhaps more significantly, it obscures the role
of those people and groups whom Ashis Nandy describes as
the ‘non-players’ (Nandy 1983, p. xiv). By this Nandy means
both the ‘other’ West which refuses to participate an imperial
world view, and the non-West which is able to live with this
alternative West, ‘while resisting the loving embrace of the
West’s dominant self’ (p. xiv.) In the spirit of the Subaltern
Studies project, Nandy takes care to distinguish these nonWestern non-players from the recognisable subjects of history
proper, namely, ‘the standard opponents of the West, the
counterplayers [who] are not, in spite of their vicious rhetoric,
outside the dominant model of universalism’ (p. xiv). Unfortunately, the frequent postcolonial elision of
‘non-players’—Western and non-Western—disablingly ignores
those countless, unrecorded histories of affect, conversation
and mediation; in other words, histories of what Gandhi calls
ahimsa, or non-violence.
Moreover, to continue this critique of postcolonial ‘world
history’, the notion of an academic ‘post’-colonialism carries
within it a suggestion of cognitive mastery—a detached perspective or vantage point from which it is possible to discern
and to name the completed and clear shape of the past as
colonialism. In this sense, the textual incoherence of history
can be said to acquire meaning and definition only through
the retrospective and unifying gaze of the postcolonial critic.
Implicit here is the idea—central to the assumptions of optimistic philosophy and universal history—that clarity occurs
progressively in time. Docherty summarises this view as being
based on the conviction that:
the meaning of an event is not immediately apparent, as if it
were never present-to-itself: its final sense—to be revealed as
the necessity of goodness—is always deferred . . . and thus
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POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
always different (or not what it may appear to the local eye
caught up in the event itself) (Docherty 1993, p. 9).
Docherty’s summary points to a theory of meaning that consists in the movement away from immediacy/particularity
towards distance/universality—arguably, the ground covered
by the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonialism’. Insofar as this movement
towards meaning may also be seen as one through which
politics attains to theory, postcolonialism, of the sort I have
been discussing so far, runs a double danger. On the one hand,
it leaves itself open to the charge of depoliticisation, and on
the other—and somewhat more seriously—by appearing to
monopolise the privileged space of theory it can very often be
seen to deny theoretical self-consciousness to the playing and
non-playing participants in ‘colonial time’.
Finally, whenever postcolonialism identifies itself with the
epochal ‘end’ of colonialism, it becomes falsely utopian or
prematurely celebratory. The problem, once again, arises from
the term itself. As Anne McClintock argues, the term postcolonialism is haunted by an unacknowledged commitment to
the principle of linear time and therefore to the idea of
‘development’ implicit in this view of time (McClintock 1992,
p.2). The teleological promise of linear time—that is to say,
its belief in the benign purposiveness of history and nature—
carries within it the double charge of Progress and
Perfectibility. We might argue, accordingly, that the ‘post’ in
‘postcolonialism’ invests the meaning of simple chronological
succession with the utopian charge of progressiveness. The
prefix ‘post’, in Lyotard’s words, ‘indicates something like a
conversion’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90)—it suggests a change of
heart and the emergence of a new and better world. More
specifically, it produces the illusion of an enlightened supersession of colonial trouble and, in Simon During’s words, it
gestures toward ‘a historical break which is healing gaps and
struggles between North and South, developed and underdeveloped, and so on’ (During 1992, p. 88). Needless to say, this
suggestion of an improved and unified world order fails to
account either for the increased divisiveness between and
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THE LIMITS OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
within contemporary societies, or for the persistence of colonial formations the world over. Equally, it ignores problems of
‘neocolonialism’—held in place by transnational corporations
and the international division of labour, linking first-world
capital to third-world labour markets.
A parallel concern is that the postcolonial utopia or
notional ‘new world’ continues to be spoken through a Western lexicon and vocabulary. We may recall, for instance,
George Bush’s aggressive ‘new world order’ through which the
world is increasingly nuanced and assimilated as America, and
in the name of which the Gulf War was rationalised. Less
offensively, the tendency in postcolonial theory to simply, and
wishfully, extend European categories beyond colonial meanings also occurs, as During argues, ‘when academic
subdisciplines, founded on a certain Eurocentrism, transmute
towards the new order—when for instance, studies in “Commonwealth Literature” or “New Literatures in English”
become studies in “post-colonial literature”’ (During 1992, p.
96). In this guise, postcolonialism may continue—although
with the best intentions—to simply deliver old wine in new
bottles.
The influential work of Ashcroft et al. once again provides
an example of this sort of accidental elision. These commentators describe postcoloniality euphorically, as ‘an
unprecedented assertion of creative activity’ in those societies
which emerged after the ‘dismantling’ of British imperial power
(Ashcroft et al. 1995, p. 1). At the same time, they seem to
insist that this new postcolonial creative assertiveness is not so
much a gesture, however flawed, towards a cultural difference,
as it is a cultural compromise, produced through the encounter
between colonial structures and indigenous processes. In their
words, ‘Post-colonial literatures are a result of this interaction
between imperial culture and the complex of indigenous practices . . . imperial language and local experience’ (1995, p. 1).
The language used by these writers sets up, albeit inadvertently,
an implicit hierarchy between imperial structure/language/
culture on the one hand and indigenous process/practice/
experience on the other. So also the imperial contribution to
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the process of cultural collaboration seems to claim all the
attributes of ‘theory’, that is to say, those categories which
shape thought and facilitate meaning. Somewhat starkly on
the other side stands the raw material of indigeneity—the
empirical substance of experience and practicality waiting to
be shaped into theoretical self-consciousness. Ashcroft et al.’s
crucial distinctions between empire and indigeneity can also
be clarified in terms of the Saussurian categories of parole, or
actual speech, and langue, or the objective grammar of signs
which makes speech possible in the first place. By carelessly
insinuating the priority of a European langue over and above
the possibility of non-European parole, these critics once again
repeat the tired colonialist assumption that it takes the West—
in the shape of either theory or history —to bring the ‘rest’
to the condition of intelligibility. In this guise, postcolonialism
becomes little more than the benign face of colonial rationality
or, to return to Lyotard’s notes on the meaning of ‘post’, a
false rupture which ‘is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing
the past, that is to say, repeating it and not surpassing it’
(Lyotard 1992, p. 90).
But of course, as Lyotard adds, ‘post’ does not have to
signify movements of amnesia and repetition; it is also
equipped to furnish ‘a procedure in “ana-”: a procedure of
‘analysis, anamnesis, anagogy and anamorphosis which elaborates an ‘initial forgetting’ (p. 90). In its reflective modality,
thus, postcolonialism also holds out the possibility of thinking
our way through, and therefore, out of the historical imbalances and cultural inequalities produced by the colonial
encounter. And in its best moments it has supplied the academic
world with an ethical paradigm for a systematic critique of
institutional suffering. So, after such knowledge, what forgiveness?
176
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188
Index
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
Ackroyd, A., 93
Adam, I., 169, 172
Adorno, T., 37, 40, 109
Afghanistan, 110
Africa, x, 3, 32, 56, 102, 103,
105, 108, 110, 112–14 passim,
118, 121, 123, 126, 131, 134,
135, 146–7, 150–1, 169, 170,
171
Ahmad, A., 24, 56–8, 60, 63, 67,
69–70, 164, 168
Algeria, 93–4, 99, 102, 126, 130,
138
Fanon, 9, 17–22, 67, 72, 93–4,
99, 111–13, 120–5 passim,
130, 132, 137–9, 147
alterity, ix, 27, 84, 128, 136, 163,
175
and imperial textuality, 143, 144
and nativism, 108–10
Cartesianism and repression of
cultural alterity, 40–1
civilisation difference, 20
excluded by Marxism, 24–5, 73
myth of pure origins, 37–9, 130
Otherness
INDEX
and identity, 54
Cartesianism and omitted
Other, 39–40
colonised as Other, 15, 31–4,
47–8, 52
essentialised Other, 76
master–slave relationship,
16–17, 20–1, 112
of colonised black man, 99
poststructural views, 39–41
poststructuralism, ix, 14–16,
26–7, 31–2, 36–41, 72–3, 83
v. consensus, 27–8
see also cultural essentialism;
cultural nationalism;
third-world woman
amnesia see postcolonial
remembering
Anderson, B., 103–4, 106,
113–16, 151–2
anti-colonial nationalism, 149
and anti-colonial textuality,
151–3
and cultural nationalism, 20,
78, 96, 98, 102–3, 106–7,
189
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
108, 118, 123, 129, 130,
135, 138
and feminism, 82–3, 93–8
and nativism, 108–10
diverse forms, 168–9, 170
masculinities, 100–1
politics of nationhood, 110–13
problem of derivativeness,
113–21, 138
copy of oppressing system,
115–16
ideology of modernity, 118–19
imperialist/nationalist
ideology, 117–18
nationalism taught by
oppressor, 114–15
transfer of State machinery,
119–21
resistance, 78, 81–2, 88
Fanon, 17–22, 93–4, 99,
111–13, 120–1, 123–4,
130, 137–9
Gandhi, 17–22, 95–6, 100–1,
112
role in postcolonial theory,
112–13
Said’s critiques, 81–2, 108–10
solidarities, 111, 135
transitional phase, 122
Western ambivalence to new
nationalisms, 106–10 passim
will-to-difference, 108, 113, 118
see also Western nationalism
anti-colonial textuality, 142
and colonial vocabulary
abrogation and
appropriation, 134–5,
147–8, 150–1, 153
Caliban paradigm, 148–9
mimicry, 149–51
and nationalism, 151–3
colonial encounter as textual
contest, 141–2, 154–6
critical response of colonised to
colonial literature, 155–6
see also colonial textuality
Antony, M., 161
190
Appiah, K. A., 54
Arnold, M., 50–2
Ashcroft, W., 82–3, 136, 144–8,
152, 161–3, 168, 170, 175–6
Asia, 1–3, 56, 72, 102, 103, 105,
108, 110, 112, 170
Aurobindo, S., 155–6
Austen, J., 134
Australia, 134, 136, 168–70
Austria, 115
Bacon, F., 28, 37
Bakshi, P. K., 79
Bangladesh, 169
Barker, F., 65
Barr, P., 91–3
Bauman, Z., 39, 40
Benjamin, W., 106
Bernauer, J., 27
Bhabha, H., 9, 10, 12, 21, 72, 73,
78, 112, 123, 130–2, 134–5,
149–50, 153–4, 156–7, 163–4
Blake, W., 161
Bloom, H., 48–9, 149
Boehmer, E., 143, 148, 152, 154,
158–9
Bove, P., 45
Bowie, M., 10
Brennan, T., 66, 162–3
Brewer, A., 24, 115
Bronte, Charlotte, 90–1
Brucioli, 49
Bruni, L., 46, 48, 49
Burke, E., 158
Butler, 108
Cabral, 112
Campana, A., 45
Campbell, G., 156
Canada, 136, 168
Cannadine, D., 116
Cantimori, D., 49, 50
Carpenter, E., 79, 101, 154
Cartesianism, 25–7, 30–1, 36–41
passim, 72
and Enlightenment, 34, 36
INDEX
association of knowledge and
power, 36–7, 39–40
Cogito, 9, 34–6, 38, 39
mathematical method and unity
of knowledge, 36, 41
poststructuralist critiques, 26–7,
36–41 passim, 72
rational consensus, 27–8
self-defining, all-knowing,
formally empowered subject
of consciousness, 34–6, 37
theory of subjectivity and
knowledge, 28, 29, 35–6
Cesaire, A., 137–8
Chabran, A., 60
Chakrabarty, D., 26, 28, 44–5,
54, 74, 171, 172
Chambers, I., 61
Chatterjee, P., 65–6, 78, 94, 96,
114, 116, 118–19, 149, 169
Chicana/o studies, 60
China, x, 87, 171
Chow, R., 126–8, 132
Cicero, 46
Clifford, J., 76, 132–3
Cloots, 116–17
Cohn, B., 118, 133
Colebrooke, H. T., 76
colonial aftermath, 166
and will-to-forget, 4, 7–8, 10
doubleness, 17–18
fear of failure, 5
moment of arrival, 5–6, 110
need for self-invention, 6–7
problem of derivativeness,
113–21, 138
Said’s vision, 109
troubled relation to past, 5, 6–7
colonial civilising mission see
colonial pedagogy
colonial encounter
cultural transformations, 94, 130
diaspora, 129–32
double representation of power,
14–16
hybridity, 129–40 passim
master–slave relationship,
16–17, 20–1, 139
psychological resistance,
17–22, 111–12
mutual transformations, 4, 11,
129–35, 140
anti-colonial solidarities, 135
cross-communication, 126,
130–1, 137–8
figure of colonised native,
134–5
loss of colonial identity,
133–4, 137–8
mutation in consciousness of
colonised, 130
of anti-colonial identities, 130
parallel contamination, 138–9
oppositional view, 11–12, 81–2,
102, 112, 124, 171–3
as cooperative venture, 124–5
as textual contest, 141–2,
154–6
competing masculinities,
98–101
postcolonial therapeutic
recovery of past, 4–11
passim, 14, 20
and complicity of colonised,
4–5, 10–11, 14, 20, 173
presence of desire, 4, 11–12,
20–2
postnational reading, 124–5,
129–35, 140
colonial masculinities, 92, 98–101
critiques, 100–1
cult of masculinity, 99–100
colonial pedagogy, 13, 18
civilising mission, 17, 19, 32–4,
40–1, 72, 83, 93, 95, 116,
123, 133–4, 144–6, 169, 171
resistance, 17–22
coloniser as educator, 32–4
English a privileged language,
147
English literature as textual
standard, 144
English studies, 144–7
191
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
and civilising mission, 144–6
and colonised subjectivities,
145–6, 155
and promotion of
Englishness, 145
as check on threat of
insubordination, 144–5
selective and critical response
of colonised, 154–6
formative lessons of
nationalism, 114–15
influence of Enlightenment,
31–3, 40–1
Macaulay’s 1835 minute, 30,
32–3, 44, 144
role of memsahibs, 93
see also colonial textuality;
Renaissance humanism
colonial textuality, 148
and consolidation of imperial
authority, 91, 143–4
and exalted cultural self-image,
143–4
as controlling mechanism,
142–3, 145
as inter-textual network, 143
canonicity of English literature,
144
colonial encounter as textual
contest, 141–2, 154–6
selectivity of colonised readers,
154–6
travel narratives, 125–6, 134
utopian and other alternatives,
154–5
Victorian novel, 90–1, 134,
143–4
see also anti-colonial textuality;
colonial pedagogy
colonialism, 16, 113–21
see also colonial encounter;
colonial pedagogy; colonial
textuality; Western nationalism
Conrad, J., 118, 165
Cuba, 70
cultural essentialism, 151, 163
192
and national consciousness,
123–4
essentialised Other, 76
ethnic/racial identity, 122
identitarian politics
Englishness, 126
essential black identity,
128–9, 135, 137–8
ethnicity as marginal, 126
neo-Orientalism and
endangered authenticities,
126–7
Othering and exoticisation of
ethnicity, 126
postcolonial opportunism,
127–8
myth of pure origin, 37–9, 130
settler cultures, 136
v. enlightened postnationalism,
124, 136
v. international solidarities, 123
v. multicultural syncretism,
151–2
cultural materialism, 141–2, 159
cultural nationalism, 20, 78, 96,
98, 102–3, 106–7, 108, 118,
123, 129, 130, 135, 138
see also anti-colonial nationalism
cultural studies, 42, 52–3
Curtius, E., 46
Curzon administration, 133
Darbar, M., 133
Deane, S., 109–10, 116
Deleuze, G., 43, 53, 84
Derrida, J., 25, 26, 27, 37–40
passim, 72–3, 159
Descartes, R., 9, 28, 34, 35–41
passim
Dharampal, 120
diaspora, 123–32 passim
as mobility of thought and
consciousness, 131, 132
disruption of native/domestic
space, 132
idiom of exile, 132, 164–5
INDEX
loss of Western/colonial identity,
133–4
migrant novel, 152, 153, 162–3,
164
migration of slave labour v.
postcolonial immigration, 134
unhomeliness, 12–13, 132
Dickens, C., 134
Diderot, D., 29, 30, 133
difference see alterity
Diop, A., 134
Dirlik, A., 56–8, 60, 63
Disraeli, B., 127
Docherty, T., 173–4
During, S., 158, 163, 166, 173–5
Eagleton, T., 71, 159–60
education see colonial pedagogy
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 37
Engels, F., 51
English language, 13, 176
anti-colonial abrogation and
appropriation, 134–5,
147–51, 153
English a privileged language,
147
see also anti-colonial textuality
English studies
as academic discipline, 144–5
canonicity of English literature,
144
colonial functions
check on threat of
insubordination, 144–5
civilising mission, 144–6
promotion of Englishness, 145
dominance challenged by
postcolonial pedagogy, 146–7
postcolonial English
Departments, 146
selective and critical response of
colonised, 155–6
Enlightenment humanism, 114,
116, 119, 133, 149
and colonial civilising mission,
32–3, 40–1
and revisionary accounts of
colonialism, 33
human-ness as way of knowing,
29, 42
Kant’s moral agent, 139–40
Kant’s rational adult, 30–4, 41
and non-adult as non-human,
32
defence of childhood, 33–4
exclusive concept of
humanity, 31–2
Foucauldian critique, 31–2
inferiority of childish,
colonised Other, 32, 169
universalism, 30–4 passim, 36
Nietzschian anti-humanism, 70
myth of progress, 37
myth of pure origins, 37–9,
130
poststructuralist critique, 25–7,
72
theory of subjectivity and
knowledge, 28, 29
see also Cartesianism
epistemology see knowledge
Essex Symposia series, 65–6
existentialism, 17–18, 20, 27, 34
Fanon, F., 9, 17–22, 67, 72, 93–4,
99, 111–13, 120–1, 122,
123–4, 125, 130, 132, 137–9,
147
Featherstone, M., 61
feminism, 81–101
and poststructuralism, 83
conflicting loyalties, 93–8
female imperialist
and gendered subaltern,
88–93 passim
as individual subject, 91–3
female individualism, 90–1
feminist/women’s studies, 42–4
passim
imperialist feminisms, 82–8
relation to postcolonialism,
82–5, 88–9, 91, 93, 94, 101,
102, 168
193
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
socialist v. psychoanalytic
feminism, 57
v. anti-colonial nationalism,
82–3, 93–8
see also third-world woman
Forster, E. M., 79, 97, 154
Foucault, M., 14–15, 25–7, 30–2,
35–40, 43, 48, 52–3, 55, 56,
59, 62–3, 71–7 passim
Fox, R., 78
France, 69, 73, 116–17, 126
Freud, S., 10, 57, 149
Frow, J., 61
Galileo, 28
Gandhi, M. K., x, 17–22, 37, 67,
78, 95, 96, 100, 101, 112, 121,
122, 137, 147, 150, 173
Gandhi, R., 165
Garin, E., 46, 47, 49
Gay, P., 29, 33, 37
Gellner, E., 104–6, 120
Gendzier, I., 16–17
German idealism, 50, 52
Germany, 69, 116
Gilroy, P., 131, 135
globalisation of capital, 24, 57,
71–3, 125
globalisation of cultures
and possibility of consensus,
27–8
cultural identity v. international
solidarities, 123
ethical agent as hybrid entity,
140
imperialist global view, 126
role of national consciousness,
123–4
Said’s view, 81–2
utopian postnational ethic, 109,
124–5, 136–40, 174–5
rationale
fluid global circuity, 125–6
post-national solidarities,
128–9
suspicion of identitarian
politics, 82, 126–8
194
Gordimer, N., 157, 161
Gramsci, A., 1, 55
Greene, C., 168
Griffiths, G., 170
Guattari, F., 43, 53, 84
Guha, R., 1, 51, 111, 120, 172–3
Gunew, S., 74–5
Habermas, J., 27, 53, 62
Hall, S., 52–3, 124, 126, 128–9,
130, 131, 135
Halliburton, D., 54
Harris, W., 161
Hegel, G. W. F., 20, 105, 106,
108, 170–1
master–slave paradigm, 16, 17
Heidegger, M., 37, 39, 48, 53–4
Herder, 133
history
grand narratives, 26, 71, 72
Hegelian account, 16, 104–6,
108, 170–1
postcolonial debate, 170–6
passim
Hobsbawn, E., 24, 107–8
Holst Petersen, K., 93
Homer, 46, 76
Horkheimer, M., 37, 40
humanism
and postcolonialism, 28, 168
assumed superiority of Western
man, 29–30
assumption of universal,
rational human nature, 27–30
passim
literary v. scientific, 29–30, 42
term, 27, 45
see also Enlightenment
humanism; Renaissance
humanism
humanities
canonical v. subjugated
knowledge systems, 42–5
passim, 53–4
exclusion of non-Western
thought, 44
power, knowledge and the
INDEX
humanities, 43, 45–52, 53,
54, 55
State as proper end of
knowledge, 49, 50
see also English studies; new
humanities; Renaissance
humanism
hybridity, ix
analytical limitations, 136
colonial encounter, 130–1,
135–6, 138–9
ethical agent, 139–40
textuality, 149–54 passim, 156,
160–5 passim
utopian postnational ethics of
hybridity, 82, 124, 125–9
passim, 136–40, 174–5
idealism, 50, 52
imperialism see under Western
nationalism
India, x, 17–22, 26, 30, 32–3, 37,
44, 65, 67, 71–3, 78, 91–3,
95–101 passim, 108–9, 111–14
passim, 118–22 passim, 126,
127, 133, 136–7, 144–7 passim,
150–1, 153–8 passim, 163–6
passim, 170, 171, 173
Indonesia, 102
Ireland, 102, 109
Islamic World, 66, 109
Jameson, F., 6, 24, 25, 27, 57,
115, 152
Jones, W., 76, 79–80
Kant, I., 30–1, 33–4, 36, 41, 116,
139–40
Kaplan, C., 57
Khan, C., 168
Khureshi, H., 127
Kiernan, V. G., 32
Kipling, R., 92, 127
knowledge
knowing differently, 41
knowing investigator v.
unknowing subject, 2, 86–9,
94–5
poststructuralist critique of link
with power, x, 15–16, 43, 64
problems of representation, 2,
44, 86–90, 94–5, 111, 128
subjugated knowledges, 15–16,
42–5, 52
and Lichtung, 53–4
see also colonial pedagogy;
colonial textuality;
humanism; humanities;
Orientalism (Said);
postcolonial intellectual
Kristeva, J., 86–7, 89, 117
Lacan, J., 9–10
Lawrence, H., 92
Lawson, A., 142
Levinas, 41
Lloyd, D., 18, 50, 103, 105–6,
107–8, 110, 119–20
Locke, J., 28
Lyotard, J., 7–8, 28, 33–4, 37, 39,
40, 41, 71, 174, 176
Macaulay, T. B., 29–30, 32–3, 34,
44, 99, 144
McClintock, A., 98, 174
Mahon, M., 27
Marangoly George, R., 91
marginality, ix
marginality studies, 55–6, 59, 65
postcolonial concern, 55–6, 82–4
Marx, K., 51, 57, 71–3, 170
Marxism, 51, 55
critique of colonialism, 23–4,
114, 115
events of 1968, 69
globalisation of capital, 24, 57,
71–3, 125
Marx on British rule in India,
33, 71–2
Marxist-humanism, 27–8
political basis of postcolonial
theory, ix, 167
195
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
poststructuralist critiques, 24–8
passim, 69–74 passim, 170
principle of solidarity, 27–8
Said’s critique, 64, 69–74
social democracy, 69–70
socialist feminism, 57
utilitarianism, 61–2
master–slave relationship, 16–22
passim, 111–12, 139
Maurras, 116–17
Mayo, K., 95–8
Mboya, T., 112
Mehta, V., 100
Memmi, A., 6–7, 11–12
memsahibs, 91–3, 96–8 passim
migrancy see diaspora;
postcolonial intellectual;
postcolonial textuality
Milton, John, 156
mimicry, 149–51, 153–4
Montesquieu, C., 116
moral philosophy
critique of Kant’s concept of
moral agent, 139–40
hybrid ethical agent, 140
postnational utopian ethic,
138–9, 174–5
Mukherjee, B., 153
Nairn, T., 106–7, 110
Nandy, A., 13, 15–17, 19, 21, 32,
100–1, 125, 137–8, 169, 173
Narayan, J., 119
national consciousness, 113, 123–4
nationalism see anti-colonial
nationalism; Western nationalism
Nehru, J., 6
New Criticism, 160
New Critics, 160
new humanities, 42–63, 175
concerns
contiguity between knowledge
and power, 43, 52, 55
dominant knowledge systems,
42–5, 70
recovery of marginalised
knowledges, 42–5, 52–4
196
feminist/women’s studies, 42–4
passim
role of oppositional criticism,
52–5
and Heidegger’s Lichtung,
53–4
South Asian studies, 1–2
see also postcolonial studies
Newton, I., 28
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 112, 146–7,
150–1
Nietzsche, F., 37–41, 70, 109
Norris, C., 38, 159
Nussbaum, M., 140
Okri, B., 153
Ondaatje, M., 153
Orientalism, 44, 84, 88, 142–4,
154, 163, 165
Orientalism (Said), 25, 33, 64–82,
88, 142–3
and Marxism, 64, 69–74
and poststructuralism, 64,
69–74 passim
as subjunctive text, 68–70
criticised, 66–7, 69–70
revolutionary impact, 25, 64–5
themes
colonial discourse analysis,
64–5, 67–8, 74, 77–80
colonial knowledge and
power, 64, 67, 70–6 passim
European and American
imperialism, 65
Orientalism
and Western thinking, 67–8
meanings, 76
Otherness see alterity
Pagden, A., 133–4
Pakistan, 164
Palestine, 66, 71
Parry, B., 11, 14, 18, 112–13, 122
Pateman, C., 169
Pathak, Z., 65
pedagogy see colonial pedagogy;
INDEX
humanities; Renaissance
humanism
Petrarch, 29, 47–8, 51
Porter, D., 79
postcolonial intellectual
academic activism, 54–5
discourse of minor-ness and
alterity, 128
figure of the exile, 132
leftist anti-intellectualism, 61–2
privileged, 57–8
problem of positionality, 58–9
role of third-world intellectuals,
59–60
Said’s view of political
obligations, 64, 132
theorising as inward, 57–8
theorising v. social realities,
55–7, 58–9
thought v. experience, 60–3
postcolonial literary theory,
141–66 passim
and cultural materialism, 141–2,
159
and deconstruction, 159–60, 163
and hybridity, 161–3, 165–6
and New Criticism, 160
and Romanticism, 160–2, 165–6
new slogan of mimicry, 150
paradox of postcolonial canon,
165–6
re-reading of anti-colonial
counter-textuality, 154–7
see also anti-colonial textuality;
colonial textuality;
postcolonial textuality
postcolonial remembering, 9–17,
140, 176
postcolonial studies, 25, 58, 65
and new humanities, 42, 44–5
and subaltern studies, 1–3, 26,
172–3
constituency, ix–x
internal divisions, 2–3
meta-issues, 167–76
debate on history, 170–6
passim
diverse colonialisms, 168–9,
172
diverse subjectivities, 169–70
postcolonial English
Departments, 146
postcolonialism as theory, ix
procedure of analysis-theory,
8–10 passim
theoretical remembering,
10–11, 14
therapeutic retrieval of
colonial past, 4–5, 7, 8–9
of complicity in colonial
condition, 10–11, 14, 20
of presence of desire,
11–12, 20–2
of resistance, 17–22
of subordination, 10
postcoloniality as condition
as condition troubled by
historical amnesia, 4, 6–7,
140
troubled relation with past,
6–7, 10–14 passim
terminology, 3–4, 129–30,
171–2, 174–6
see also feminism; Marxism;
Orientalism (Said);
postcolonial literary theory;
postnationalism;
poststructuralism
postcolonial textuality, 154–66
and nation-ness, 151–2, 163–4
and subjectivity, 164–5
migrant novel
and metropolitan centre, 153,
160–1
as third world representative,
162–3
hybridity, 152, 153
politics of migrancy, 164
new bourgeois novel, 163–4
Rushdie, 153–4, 157–8, 163–6
textual politics, 142, 156–9
postnationalism, 122–40
contiguity with postcolonialism
colonial experience as
197
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
cooperative venture,
123–5, 129–36, 138–9
postnational utopias, 82, 109,
125–9 passim, 136–40,
174–5
ethics of hybridity, 137–8
enlightened postnationalism,
124, 136
poststructuralism, 25, 131
analysis of power, 14–16
antagonistic relationship with
Marxism, 24–8, 74, 170
and Said’s critique, 69–74
passim
critique of Western
epistemology, ix, 25–7, 30–1,
36–41 passim, 72
deconstruction, 159–60
power/knowledge link, 43, 48,
54–6, 64, 72–4
theoretical basis of
postcolonialism viii–ix, 25–7,
167
theorisation of cultural alterity,
ix, 14–16, 26, 31–2, 36–41,
72–3, 83
power, 37
coercive v. seductive, 14
double representation, 14–16
master–slave relationship, 16–22
passim, 111–12, 139
see also knowledge; Western
nationalism
Prakash, G., 15, 18, 134
Pratt, M. L., 125–6, 131, 133,
134–5
psychoanalysis, 8–10 passim, 78,
149
psychoanalytic feminism, 57
Purkayasta, S., 65
Ranger, T., 118
Rao, R., 150–1
rationalism see Cartesianism;
Enlightenment humanism
Rawls, J., 139–40
Reaganism, 69
198
religion, 104
Renaissance humanism
and German idealism, 50, 52
Arnold’s totalitarian humanism,
50–2 passim
claims to disinterestedness, 45,
48, 50–1
concern with pedagogy, 29, 45
human-ness as content of
knowledge, 29, 42
humanism v. scholasticism, 47
origins, 42, 45–7, 49
production of whole or
representative human beings,
46, 48, 50
and capacity to command,
49–50
constraints on human-ness,
47–8
Homo humanus v. Homo
barbarus, 47–8
relation with the State, 50–1
collusion, 51–2, 55
flourishes where State under
threat, 51–2
moulding of ideal citizen
subjects, 49
State as proper end of
knowledge, 49, 50
role beyond the academy
extension of education, 46
political motivations, 48, 49,
50
studia humanitatis or liberal
arts, 45–52
exclusions of minor curricula
and social categories, 46–7,
51
umanista
academic monopoly, 45
forming and shaping role, 46,
48, 49
Rhodes, C., 169
Romanticism, 155, 160–2 passim,
165–6
Rousseau, J., 169
INDEX
Rushdie, S., 5–6, 8–9, 58, 153–4,
157–8, 163–6
Russell, B., 35
Russia, 116
Said, E., 7, 52, 86, 102, 108–9,
118, 122, 124, 126, 129, 132,
134, 143–4, 153, 156
see also Orientalism (Said)
Sanchez, R., 60
Sandel, M., 139–40
Sartre, J. P., 17, 18, 20, 34
Scandinavia, 69
Schiller, J., 50
Seneca, L. A., 51
Sengupta, S., 65
Seth, V., 12–14, 22
settler colonies, 3, 136, 168–70
Shakespeare, W., 146, 148
Sharpe, J., 91, 98–9
Shelley, P. B., 155
Sheridan, S., 43
social democracy, 69–70
socialist feminism, 57
South Asian studies, 1–2
Soyinka, W., 121
Spanos, W. V., 45
Spear, P., 114–15
Spivak, G., 1–3, 25, 26–7, 34,
55–6, 59, 65–6, 74, 84, 86–7,
88, 90–1, 93–4, 126–7
Sprinker, M., 71
Steele, F., 93
stereotyping, 77–9, 99–100
Strachey, L., 101
subaltern studies, 172–3
Subaltern Studies group, 1–3, 26,
172–3
subalternity, 1–3, 26, 86–93
passim, 111, 128
Suleri, S., 10, 83–4, 164–5
Tagore, R., 95, 121
Talpade Mohanty, C., 85–6, 88,
89, 168
Taylor, C., 16, 29
textuality
books and their
circumstantiality, 67–8
indicative v. subjunctive texts,
67–8
linked to power, 77, 141–2
see also anti-colonial textuality;
colonial textuality;
postcolonial textuality
Thatcherism, 69, 126
third-world woman
Algerian women, 93–4
and postcolonial-feminist
merger, 82–5, 88–9, 91, 93,
94, 101
conflicting feminist loyalties,
93–8
female v. cultural
emancipation, 93
feminism v. anti-colonial
nationalism, 96
individualistic norm v. female
imperialism, 90–3, 96–8
passim
double colonisation, 83, 86
Indian woman, 95–7
native woman question, 93–5, 97
v. anti-colonial nationalism, 93–7
Western feminist articulation,
82–8
absence of gendered
subaltern, 86–93 passim
colonialist category, 85–6, 89
essentialised, 85, 88, 89
iconic status, 83, 88
marginalised, 83–4
object of Western knowledge,
86–7, 88–9
Othered, 85–6, 88
representation, 94–5
self-consolidating project, 85–6
Westernisation, 95–7
Tiffin, C., 142, 169–70, 172
Todorov, T., 116–17
travel, 125–6, 132–4
Trinh, T., 84–8 passim, 128
Trivedi, H., 125
Tucker, J., 30
199
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
United States, 66, 129, 175
utilitarianism, 61–2
utopianism, 154–5
postnational utopias, 125,
136–40, 174–5
Vietnam, 114
Virgil, 46
Viswanathan, G., 30, 33, 144–6,
155
Walcott, D., 161
Warren, B., 24
Weber, M., 36, 37
West, C., 59
West Indies, 3
Western nationalism
as genre, 119–20
as progressive
and Enlightenment rationalist
secularism, 104–5, 107
and shift to industrial
economies, 104
canonical form of
organisation and identity,
105
Hegelian account, 104–6,
108, 170–1
homogenous, 104–5, 114
ideology of modernity,
104–10 passim, 114,
118–19
myth of progress, 37
as regressive
atavistic underpinnings, 106–7
European imperialism, 115–18
and nationalism, 115–18
and nationalism/cosmopolitanism
debate, 116–17
global perspective, 126
Marxist view, 114, 115
militaristic v. civilisational
colonialism, 15
modularity, 113
universalisable interests,
109–10, 116–17
hostility to new nationalisms,
103–4
anti-modern, 106–10 passim
as projection of own atavism,
107
obstacle to internationalism,
103–4, 109
provincial, 109–10
masculinity of empire, 98–101
nationalism a European
invention, 113–14
role of colonial discourse
consolidation of imperial
authority, 91, 143–4
controlling mechanism,
142–3, 145
exalted cultural self-image,
143–4
see also anti-colonial nationalism
Western philosophy see
Cartesianism; Enlightenment
humanism
White, J., 157–8, 161
Wieland, C. M., 33
Wilde, O., 100–1
Wilkins, C., 76
Williams, R., 62, 68–70
Woolf, V., 101
Yeats, W. B., 109–10
Young, R., 170
Zionism, 66
Index compiled by Geraldine Suter
200