Postcolonial Theorists
Theorist/Author Books Critical Terms Explanation
Edward Said Orientalism (1978) Orientalism Said argued that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years, since the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus. Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that even most Western scholars could not recognize. His contention was not only that the West has conquered the East politically but also that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the “exotic”, “inscrutable” Orient deviates.
Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised “Other”, contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create “difference” between West and East that can be attributed to immutable “essences” in the Oriental make-up.
Frantz Fanon Black Skin,
White Masks (1967) Internalization
of colonization
by the
colonized Colonization permeates the psyche of the colonized black man to such an extent that he develops not only an inferiority complex but also the desire to be the white colonizer. Fanon says, “For the black man, there is only one destiny and it is white.” For Fanon, being colonized by a language had larger implications for one’s political consciousness: “To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17-18). Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French. French or rather whole European collective consciousness has unredeemable racist structure. In Europe, the black man is the symbol of evil, torturer, Satan, shadow, dirt (physical as well as moral dirtiness), sin, concretely or symbolically the bad side of character. The myth of bad nigger is central to white man’s conceptualization of self. The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. So when a black man learns a European language, he is subjected to its inherent racism and is thereby colonized. To overcome this inferior status, he attempts to win the love of a white woman: ‘Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me, she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.’ Fanon ends the book on a note of appeal: “I have one right alone: that of demanding human behavior from the other…I, the man of color want only this: that the tool never possesses the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever…superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”
Frantz Fanon The Wretched of
the Earth (1986) Role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation As a psychiatrist, Fanon explored the psychological effect of colonization on the psyche of a nation as well as its broader implications for building a movement for decolonization.
Fanon goes into great detail explaining that revolutionary groups should look to the lumpenproletariat for the force needed to expel colonists. The lumpenproletariat in traditional Marxist theories are considered the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness. Fanon uses the term to refer to those inhabitants of colonized countries who are not involved in industrial production, particularly peasants living outside the cities. He argues that only this group, unlike the industrial proletariat, has sufficient independence from the colonists to successfully make a revolution against them. The book also constitutes a warning to the oppressed of the dangers they face in the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a neo-colonialist/globalized world.
Aimé Césaire Negritude The literature of Negritude includes the writings of black intellectuals who affirm black personality and redefine the collective experience of blacks. A preoccupation with the black experience and a passionate praise of the black race, provides a common base for the imaginative expression in association with romantic myth of Africa. The external factor defining the black man in modern society is colonialism and the domination by the white man, with all the moral and psychological implications. Negritude rehabilitates Africa and all blacks from European ideology that holds the blacks to be inherently inferior to the whites so as to rationalize Western imperialism.
Octave Mannoni Prospero and
Caliban: The
Psychology of
Colonization Psychology of the colonizer and the colonized Mannoni states, “Not all people can be colonized; only those who experience this need [for dependency]…Whenever Europeans have founded colonies of the type we are considering, it can be safely said that their coming was unconsciously expected – even desired – by the future subject people. Everywhere there existed legends foretelling the arrival of strangers from the sea, bearing wondrous gifts with them.” So according to him, the white male colonizer acts in obedience to an authority complex while the colonized black man obeys a dependency complex. Both are satisfied. The book was later criticized by writers such as Frantz Fanon.
Albert Memmi The Colonizer and
the Colonized (1957); Decolonization and
the Decolonized (2006)
Interdependent relationship of the colonizer and the colonized Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states.
Homi K. Bhabha Nation and Narration (1990) Nation as a product of narration Bhabha challenges the tendency to treat post-colonial countries as a homogeneous block. This leads, he argues, to the assumption that there is and was a shared identity amongst ex-colonial states. Bhabha argues that all senses of nationhood are narrativized. In his this book, Bhabha primarily critiques the attempts of nationalist discourse to produce the idea of nation as a complete self-sufficient entity, as “a continuous narrative of national progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the primeval present of the valk “(Bhabha:1) and instead draws our attention to the “recesses of the national culture from which alternative constituencies of peoples and oppositional analytic capacities may emerge – youth, the everyday, nostalgia, new ‘ethnicities’, new social movements, ‘the politics of difference’.” (Bhabha:3) Against the totalizing tendencies of nationalism, Bhabha asserts the locality of culture. He says, “The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor it must be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus faced and the problem of outside / inside must always itself be a process of hybridity…. [which turns] boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated…..The ‘other’ is never outsides or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’” (Bhabha: 4)
Homi K. Bhabha The Location of
Culture (1994)
Hybridity
Theory of third space Bhabha advocates a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis in the West away from metaphysics and toward the “performative” and “enunciatory present” [(1994) The Location of Culture p.178] Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the West to maintain less violent relationships with other cultures. In Bhabha’s view, the source of the Western compulsion to colonize is due in large part to traditional Western representations of foreign cultures.
Bhabha’s argument attacks the Western production and implementation of certain binary oppositions. The oppositions targeted by Bhabha include center/margin, civilized/savage, First/ Third worlds, West/East, North/South, capital/labour and enlightened/ignorant. Bhabha proceeds by destabilizing the binaries insofar as the first term of the binary is allowed to unthinkingly dominate the second.
Once the binaries are destabilized, Bhabha argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions can allow. According to Bhabha, hybridity and “linguistic multivocality” have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of colonization through the reinterpretation of political discourse.
Bhabha’s key argument is that colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power. Bhabha’s arguments have become key in the discussion of hybridity. While he originally developed his thesis with respect to narratives of cultural imperialism, his work also develops the concept with respect to the cultural politics of migrancy in the contemporary metropolis. This critique of cultural imperialist hybridity meant that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with challenging essentialism and has been applied to sociological theories of identity, multiculturalism, and racism.
Bhabha states that the ‘act of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ of the statement. The production of meaning is negotiated through a third space which represents both langue and the parole.’ It is the intervention of this third space which ‘challenges our sense of the identity of culture as a homogenizing unifying force authenticated by an originary past and kept alive in the national tradition of the people.’ It is that third space that answers the ‘meanings and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity’; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistorisized and read a new. By exploring this third space a new revolutionary change can be brought about. This theory of third space proposes that culture is constantly negotiated. Because it is a site for contest of meanings, there is possibility of resistance. If the culture can be imposed, it can be deposed as well.
Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (1983) Nation as “an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. For example the nationhood you feel with other members of your nation when your “imagined community” participates in a larger event such as the Olympics. As Anderson puts it, a nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will 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”. [Imagined Communities. p. 6-7] Members of the community probably will never know one another face to face, however can have similar interests or are both just a part of the same nation. The media also create imagined communities, through targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as the public.
Anderson argues that the main causes of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (e.g. Latin), the movement to abolish the ideas of divine rule and monarchy, as well as the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism (or, as Anderson calls it, ‘print-capitalism’).
Ashis Nandy The Intimate Enemy:
Loss and Recovery of
Self Under Colonialism (1983) Psychological problems posed at a personal level by colonialism, for both colonizer and colonized Nandy argues that the understanding of self is intertwined with those of race, class, and religion under colonialism, and that the Gandhian movement can be understood in part as an attempt to transcend a strong tendency of educated Indians to articulate political striving for independence in European terms. Through his prolific writing and other activities supported by his belief in non-violence, Professor Nandy has offered penetrating analysis from different angles of a wide range of problems such as political disputes and racial conflicts, and has made suggestions about how human beings can exist together, and together globally, irrespective of national boundaries.
Partha Chatterjee The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial
and Postcolonial
Histories (1993) Chatterjee asks why nation states in the third world, which became independent with such high ideals, have been unable to realize their promises of emancipation and freedom to their citizens. Part of the problem, Chatterjee argues, is that while we see the nationalism as being the complete opposite of colonialism, it in fact absorbs much of the value system of colonialism, and acts to benefit middle class elite. He needs us to think through history very carefully and very responsibly. Doing this means that we can neither take Western political science theories and apply them in a ‘modular’ fashion to postcolonial nation-states such as Singapore nor sloppily claim that ‘Asian’ social and political orders are different from ‘Western’ ones without any evidence. Above all, we need to remember that the attitudes we take for granted about civil society, about community, market, and state, are themselves the products of history.
Chatterjee highlights the fact that as a modern regime of power, late colonialism could not appeal – except as a very last resort – to brute force or to ideas of sovereignty. Rather, it attempted to justify itself by attaching itself to Enlightenment ideals. Thus, colonialism was often presented by colonialists as a kind of tutelage, in which colonized peoples would eventually be brought up to the level of Europe. Many colonial officials in fact saw themselves as missionaries, bringing light to the darkest corners of the earth, taking on ‘the White Man’s burden’ of educating and enlightening colonized peoples so that they could begin, very slowly, to climb up the ladder of progress which the colonizers have already climbed. Colonialism thus works as governmentality, attempting through institutions such as schools, asylums, and churches to encourage colonized peoples to move gradually towards ‘self-improvement’. This is also a pragmatic strategy, in that relatively few colonizers (and crucially for colonizing governments, little money) are needed to run a colony.
Colonialism, for Chatterjee, is fundamentally flawed not just because it is a cruel and unjust system but because it is inherently contradictory. As a modern regime of power it claims to incite colonial subjects to self-improvement and development, so that they become more rational and leave ‘primitive superstition’ behind. However, the whole basis of colonialism is based on an irrational racist distinction between colonizer and colonized, between ruler and ruled which he calls ‘the rule of colonial difference’.
As some members of the colonized community become educated and ‘improved’ in the colonizer’s eyes, they threaten the very foundations of colonialism. If colonialism as governmentality works, these people should become as ‘rational’ and as ‘modern’ as Europeans, deserving equality with the colonizers. However, granting them such a status would threaten the very foundations of colonialism itself, the rule of colonial difference. Colonialism thus despises the very products it has created, people of mixed cultural heritage who form the middle-class elites of colonized communities. Colonial rulers are much happier with ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ colonized populations because they do not challenge the inherent contradictions of colonialism. The longer colonialism exists, however, the greater the number of middle-class people of mixed cultural heritage who call into question the rule of colonial difference.
The colonial middle classes are often educated by the colonial power and as a result they adopt an Enlightenment world view, the ‘bourgeois-rationalist conception of knowledge’ (Nationalist Thought 11) of the colonizer whereby human race universally progresses from superstition and ignorance to reason and knowledge. Yet they face a problem: How can they become modern, but modern in a different way from the colonizer? How can one progress, but not become ‘Westernized’? To solve this dilemma, they make a fundamental distinction between West and Self, and see the West as possessing cultural attributes (largely material) which need to be appropriated, while maintaining the superior spiritual qualities of the indigenous culture. The colonizer’s culture is seen as ‘decadent’ while the culture of the colonized is seen as morally superior. This leads to the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, which attempts to invent nationhood and a ‘“modern” national culture’ which is not Western, excluding the colonial state from the heart of national culture (The Nation and Its Fragments 6). Nationalists are unwilling for the colonial state to reform ‘“traditional” society’ (9). Rather, they assert that ‘only the nation itself could have the right to intervene in such an essential aspect of its cultural identity’ (9).
This distinction between West and Self is mapped onto another division, that between public and private, the world and the home. The public sphere becomes the area of modernity, a material world. The spiritual, private sphere of the home becomes the area of tradition, where indigenous culture may be preserved in an uncontaminated way. (What is presented as tradition here is often a middle-class, cleaned up version of community practices which is quite remote from the life world of the majority of colonized peoples.) It becomes the first and foremost duty of women (and women alone) to maintain this cultural essence, and thus bear the primary burden of not being Westernized. Women can be educated, and indeed should be so, but they must also be respectable: they thus differentiate themselves from uneducated (an unrefined) previous generations, but also from Western women who move freely in the material world (127).
Thus anti-colonial nationalism shares a thematic with colonialism, even when the problematic is exactly opposite. Nationalism accepts the notions of progress towards reason and modernity propounded by colonialism. Freed from the rule of colonial difference, however, nationalism can bring modernity to the citizens of the new nation in a way that colonialism never could. Colonialism presents itself as governmentality, but deeply, at the last resort, it must resort to force, to sovereignty, a pre-modern form of power. In its lack of representativeness, colonialism can never realize the project of modernity; nationalism can. The middle-classes in the emergence of nationalism take it upon themselves to educate the masses and lead them: “[The member of the colonial elite] had grown used to referring to himself, like the educated European, as a member of ‘the middle class.’ Not only was he in the middle in terms of income, but he also assumed, in the sphere of social authority, the role of the mediator. On the one hand, he was claiming that those who had wealth and property were unfit to wield the power they had traditionally enjoyed. On the other hand, he was taking upon himself the responsibility of speaking on behalf of those who were poor and oppressed. To be in the middle now meant to oppose the rulers and lead the subjects.” (The Nation and Its Fragments 92)
The middle classes achieve hegemony in the private sphere, producing a sense of what it means to be ‘Indian’, or ‘Jamaican’, or ‘Nigerian’ to which all future citizens assent. During the colonial period, the middle classes may initially participate in civil society institutions of the colonial public sphere. Later, however, they will carve out an autonomous space outside of the colonial public sphere. After independence, hegemonic control is expressed largely through the institutions of political society, in an expanded state which now acts in the nation’s interests.
Anti-colonial nationalism achieves what Chatterjee terms a passive revolution. The middle-classes take over the apparatus of the colonial state, but no fundamental political revolution occurs. Much of the space which was occupied by civil society institutions in the colonial era comes to be occupied by institutions of political society with a close affiliation with the state. As a result, subaltern classes still remain oppressed even after independence.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern
Speak? (1988) Subaltern
Strategic essentialism This essay perhaps best demonstrates Spivak’s concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is “post-colonialism” a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that ‘postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss’ (Ashcroft. et al 28). In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci’s term ‘subaltern’ (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a ‘voice’ or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the ‘epistemic violence’ done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to ‘speak for’ the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos – a totalizing, essentialist ‘mythology’ as Derrida might describe it – that doesn’t account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.
By reserving the crisis of subjectivity to Europeans and the authenticity of experience to ‘subalterns,’ poststructuralists end up recapitulating a number of problems: (1) Foreclosing culture and theory for the oppressed who “only” have recourse to concrete experience, which gets valorized as “untouchably” authentic (double-meaning intentional) (2) Giving up on even attempting to understand/speak to the experience of “others” since it is their own and unknowable (3) Creating and relying on a ‘native informer’ class.
Spivak herself is (arguably) from the ‘native informant’ class (though born shortly before independence) and deals with issues of translation in her work (critiquing translatability of Western ideas of subjectivity). Since she has invited us to consider how position influences politics/theory, how does her position influence her work?
Spivak says the Subaltern can’t speak because by having a single “voice” you are being essentialist, reductionist, bipolar (“master and slave dialectic”) and not looking at class. (This is a continuation of the dialogue of the Indian Subaltern Studies Project of the 1980’s.)
Spivak coined the term ‘strategic essentialism’, which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, the attitude that women’s groups have many different agendas makes it difficult for feminists to work for common causes. ‘Strategic essentialism’ is about the need to accept temporarily an ‘essentialist’ position in order to be able to act.
Anne McClintock Imperial Leather In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock argues that to understand colonialism and postcolonialism, one must first recognize that ‘race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other – if in contradictory and conflictual ways.’ She further explains that imperialism ‘is not something that happened elsewhere – a disagreeable fact of history external to Western identity. Rather, imperialism and the invention of race were fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity. The invention of race in the urban metropoles...became central not only to the self-definition of the middle class but also to the policing of the “dangerous classes”: the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, the militant crowd and so on. At the same time, the cult of domesticity was not simply a trivial and fleeting irrelevance, belonging properly in the private, “natural” realm of the family. Rather, I argue that the cult of domesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimension of male as well as female identities – shifting and unstable as these were.’5
Anne McClintock forcefully argues that a large part of colonial expressions of distaste for African treatment of women and consequent reformist zeal arose in the fact that women’s work effectively removed African men from the control of colonial power, ideology, and economic pressures:
Missionaries and colonists voiced their repugnance for polygyny in moral tones, placing it firmly within the discourse of racial degeneration. The practice of polygyny was seen to mark African men, as Haggard had marked King Twala, as wallowing in the depths of sexual abandon: the “African sin.” Yet colonial documents readily reveal that the assault on polygyny was an assault on African habits of labor that withheld from the resentful farmers the work of black men and women. The excess labor that a black man controlled through his wives was seen as a direct and deadly threat to the profits of the settlers. As Governor Pine complained: “How can an Englishman with one pair of hands compete with a native with five to twenty slave wives?...”
The fundamental unit of Zulu society was the homestead (urmuzi, imizi), in which a single male (umnumanzana) held authority over his wife or wives, their children, livestock, gardens and grazing lands. Each homestead was more or less independent, with women growing food on land held in trust for the chief of the clan. Each wife worked her own fields, living with her children in a separate house that took its name from her. A strict gendered division of labor prevailed, as women did most of the agricultural and domestic work hoeing, planting, gathering and tending the crops, building and tending the houses, making implements and clothes, taking care of the daily cooking and the houses, as well as the bearing and raising of the children.6
She also identifies European discourse about Africa as a part of larger discourse of European Porno-tropics. The European porno-tropics had a long tradition. As early as the second century A.D., Ptolemy wrote confidently of Africa that “the constellation of Scorpion, which pertains to the pudenda, dominates that continent.” Leo Africanus agreed that there was “no nation under heaven more prone to venerie” than “the Negros.” Francis Bacon’s Hermit was visited by the Spirit of Fornication, who turned out to be a “little foule, ugly Aethiope.” John Ogilby, adapting the writings of Olfert Dapper, rather more tactfully informed his readers that west Africans were distinguished by “large propagators,” while the planter Edward Long saw Africa as “the parent of everything that is monstrous in nature.” By the nineteenth century, popular lore had firmly established Africa as the quintessential zone of sexual aberration and anomaly – “the very picture,” as W. D. Jordan put it, “of perverse negation.” The Universal History was citing a well-established and august tradition when it declared Africans to be “proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lusts.” It was as impossible, it insisted, “to be an African and not lascivious, as it is to be born in Africa and not be an African.”7
Chandra Talpade Mohanty Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses (1986) Third World woman In this essay, Mohanty articulates a critique of the political project of Western feminism in its discursive construction of the category of the “Third World woman” as a hegemonic entity. Mohanty states that Western feminisms have tended to gloss over the differences between Southern women, but that the experience of oppression is incredibly diverse, and contingent on geography, history, and culture.
Robert J C Young White Mythologies:
Writing History
and the West (1990) In this book, Young argued that Marxist philosophies of history had claimed to be world histories but had really only ever been histories of the West, seen from a Eurocentric--even if anti-capitalist--perspective.
Robert J C Young Colonial Desire (1995) Hybridity In this book, Young examined the history of the concept of hybridity, showing its genealogy through nineteenth-century racial theory and twentieth-century linguistics, prior to its transformation into an innovative cultural-political concept by postcolonial theorists in the 1990s.
Robert J C Young Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) It offers the first comprehensive account of the history and theoretical production of all the major anti-colonial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the globe and traces their relation to the development of postcolonial theory. Stressing the significance of the work of the Third International, as well as Mao Zedong’s reorientation of the landless peasant as the revolutionary subject, Young points to the importance of the Havana Tricontinental of 1966 as the first independent coming together of the three continents of the South – Africa, Asia and Latin America – in political solidarity, and argues that this was the moment in which what is now called ‘postcolonial theory’ was first formally constituted as a specific knowledge-base of non-Western political and cultural production.
Robert J C Young Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction
(2003) Young links this genealogy of postcolonialism to the contemporary activism of the New Social Movements in non-Western countries. This last book, intended as an introduction to postcolonialism for the general reader, is written in a highly accessible style and unorthodox format, mixing history with fiction, cultural analysis with moments of poetic intensity that stage and evoke postcolonial experience rather than merely describe it. Instead of approaching postcolonialism through its often abstract and esoteric theories, the book works entirely out of particular examples.
