PS "From Colonialism to Postcolonialism" (SS 2013) Excerpts taken from: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The

Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures (London/NY: Routledge, 1989)

Post-coloniality and theory The idea of 'post-colonial literary theory' emerges from the inability of European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of post-colonial writing. European theories themselves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false notions of 'the universal'. Theories of style and genre, assumptions about the universal features of language, epistemologies and value systems are all radically questioned by the practices of post-colonial writing. Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need to address this different practice. Indigenous theories have developed to accommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions as well as the desire to describe in a comparative way the features shared across those traditions. The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprise was a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the European world and the systems of representation which this privileged. Nineteenth-century imperial expansion, the culmination of the outward and dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyond Europe, which began during the early Renaissance, was underpinned in complex ways by these assumptions. In the first instance this produced practices of cultural subservience, characterized by one post-colonial critic as 'cultural cringe' (Phillips 1958). Subsequently, the emergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to this formed an important element in the development of specific national and regional consciousnesses (see ch. 4). Paradoxically, however, imperial expansion has had a radically destabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power. In pushing the colonial world to the margins of experience the 'centre' pushed consciousness beyond the point at which monocentrism in all spheres of thought could be accepted without question. In other words the alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial world to the 'margin' turned upon itself and acted to push that world through a kind of mental barrier into a position from which all experience could be viewed as uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious. Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creative energy. The impetus towards decentring and pluralism has always been present in the history of European thought and has reached its latest development in post-structuralism. But the situation of marginalized societies and cultures enabled them to come to this position much earlier and more directly (Brydon 1984b). These notions are implicit in post-colonial texts from the imperial period to the present day. ("Introduction", 11 f.)
Works Cited: Brydon, Diana. "'The Thematic Ancestor': Joseph Conrad, Patrick White and Margaret Atwood", World Literature Written in English 24.2 (Autumn 1984). Phillips, Arthur. "The Cultural Cringe" in: Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1958).

A characteristic of dominated literatures is an inevitable tendency towards subversion, and a study of the subversive strategies employed by post-colonial writers would reveal both the configurations of domination and the imaginative and creative responses to this condition. Directly and indirectly, in Salman Rushdie's phrase, the 'Empire writes back' to the imperial 'centre', not only through nationalist assertion, proclaiming itself central and self-determining, but even more radically by questioning the bases of European and British metaphysics, challenging the world-view that can polarize centre and periphery in the first place. In this way, concepts of polarity, of 'governor and governed, ruler and ruled' (Harris 1960) are challenged as an essential way of ordering reality. Writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Patrick White, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, and Jean Rhys have all rewritten particular works from the English 'canon' with a view to restructuring European 'realities' in post-colonial terms, not simply by reversing the hierarchical order, but by interrogating the philosophical assumptions on which that order was based (Brydon 1984b; Gardiner 1987; Slemon 1987b; Tiffin 1987). (ch.1 "Cutting the ground: critical models of post-colonial literatures", 33)
Works Cited: Brydon, Diana. "'The Thematic Ancestor': Joseph Conrad, Patrick White and Margaret Atwood", World Literature Written in English 24.2 (Autumn 1984). Gardiner, Allan. "J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands: Colonial Encounters of the Robinsonian Kind", World Literature Written in English 27.2 (1987). Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber & Faber, 1960). Slemon, Stephen. "Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing", Kunapipi 9.3 (1987), 1-16. Tiffin, Helen. "Comparative Literature and Post-Colonial Counter-Discourse", Kunapipi 9.3 (1987).

The appropriation of the english language is the first of a range of appropriations which establish a discourse announcing its difference from Europe. These include the adaptation or evolution of metropolitan practices: for example, genres such as 'the ballad' or 'the novel' or even epistemologies, ideological systems, or institutions such as literary theory. But the appropriation which has had the most profound significance in post-colonial discourse is that of writing itself. It is through an appropriation of the power invested in writing that this discourse can take hold of the marginality imposed on it and make hybridity and syncreticity the source of literary and cultural redefinition. In writing out of the condition of 'Otherness' post-colonial texts assert the complex of intersecting 'peripheries' as the actual substance of experience. But the struggle which this assertion entails the 're-placement' of the postcolonial text is focused in their attempt to control the processes of writing. (ch.3 "Re-placing the text: the liberation of post-colonial writing", 78)

Post-coloniality and discourse theory The concept of discourse, as developed in the work of Michel Foucault and in those who have extended and questioned his formulation (Said, Althusser, Pcheux, Terdiman etc.), has been useful in locating the series of 'rules' which determine post-coloniality. A discourse in the Foucaultian sense is best understood as a system of possibility for knowledge. What rules, for instance, allow the construction of a map, model, or classifactory system? What rules allow us to identify certain individuals as authors, to identify certain texts as 'literature'? (e.g. Foucault 1966, 1969, 1977a). Edward Said's proposal of orientalism as the discourse which constituted the Orient in the consciousness of the west offers an influential analysis of how the world was constructed in the European mind. The Orient is not merely there, says Said:
Just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities to say nothing of historical entities such locales, regions, geographical sections as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made. (Said 1978: 5)

Just as the two geographical entities, the Occident and the Orient, in Said's terms, 'support and to an extent reflect each other', so all post-colonial societies realize their identity in difference rather than in essence. They are constituted by their difference from the metropolitan and it is in this relationship that identity both as a distancing from the centre and as a means of selfassertion comes into being. To speak of a post-colonial discourse in Foucault's or Said's sense, then, is to invoke certain ways of thinking about language, about truth, about power, and about the interrelationships between all three. Truth is what counts as true within the system of rules for a particular discourse; power is that which annexes, determines, and verifies truth. Truth is never outside power, or deprived of power, the production of truth is a function of power and, as Foucault says, 'we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth' (Foucault 1977b: 12). The discourse of the post-colonial is therefore grounded on a struggle for power that power focused in the control of the metropolitan language (Foucault 1982). Power is invested in the language because it provides the terms in which truth itself is constituted.3 The struggle for power over truth in some senses 'mimics' the metropolitan impulse of dominance, and postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha have sought to address this problem (Bhabha 1984a). Only by stressing the way in which the text transforms the societies and institutions within which it functions (its 'transformative work') can such a mimicry be avoided and replaced by a theory and practice which embraces difference and absence as material signs of power rather than negation, of freedom not subjugation, of creativity not limitation. (ch.5 "Re-placing theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory, 166 ff.)
3

The paradigmatic historical demonstration of this occurred in the Treaty of Waitangi which the British government signed with the Maori chiefs in 1840. The sovereignty over their land which the chiefs were asked to cede, their mana, was translated in the Treaty as Kawanatanga or governance. No Maori would ever cede the sacred condition of sovereignty enclosed in the word mana. Thus the moment of colonial domination in New Zealand was a linguistic moment. Language maintained its power through the ability to disrupt and fracture the modalities of meaning and truth, to constitute the Maori as subject and provide the terms in which political domination was to be effected. But it maintained this power through colonial control of the means of communication of which the Treaty was an eloquent sign.

Works Cited: Bhabha, Homi. "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism" in: The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton: Harvester, 1984). Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1966). Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1969). Foucault, Michel. Language. Counter-Memory. Practice. Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977). (=1977a) Foucault, Michel. "The Political Function of the Intellectual", Radical Philosophy 17 (1977), 12-14. Also in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (Brighton: Harvester). (=1977b) Foucault, Michel. "Afterword: The Subject and Power" in: Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

Hence it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies from its position within and between the two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in its colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world. Thus the rereading and the rewriting of the European historical and fictional record is a vital and inescapable task at the heart of the post-colonial enterprise. These subversive manoeuvres, rather than the construction of essentially national or regional alternatives, are the characteristic features of the post-colonial text. Post-colonial literatures/cultures are constituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices. What is more, post-colonial literature and its study is essentially political in that its development and the theories which accompany this development radically question the apparent axioms upon which the whole discipline of English has been raised. Not only the canon of 'classical texts', the disruption of which by new, 'exotic' texts can be easily countered by a strategy of incorporation from the centre, but the very idea of English Literature as a study which occludes its own specific national, cultural, and political grounding and offers itself as a new system for the development of 'universal' human values, is exploded by the existence of the post-colonial literatures. In spite of the fact that the situation still leaves much to be desired and that there are still many struggles for control to be won, there are three inescapable conclusions that postcolonial literatures force on the future of english studies and its institutions. First, in the same way that the existence of varieties of english has meant that the concept of a standard English has been exploded, the very existence of post-colonial literatures completely undermines any project for literary studies in english which is postulated on a single culture masquerading as the originating centre. Second, as a further implication of this decentring, the English canon is radically reduced within a new paradigm of international english studies. The works from the traditional canon which remain may reflect a radical revision and rereading. For example, what texts from the 'tradition' are selected for consideration and study may alter greatly. Kipling and Haggard may well take the place of George Eliot and Hardy, since their relationship to historical and political realities may come to seem more important. Post-colonial reading strategies acknowledge that readings and the formations which bring them into being are corrigible. They are not immutable 'truths' but changeable social and political constructions. Finally, the concept of literary studies in general will be revitalized by the perception that all texts are traversed by the kinds of complexities which the study of post-colonial literatures reveals. ("Conclusion: More english than English", 196 f.)