Post-Colonial Transformation

Bill Ashcroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134556953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In his new book, Bill Ashcroft gives us a revolutionary view of the ways in which post-colonial societies have responded to colonial control.
The most comprehensive analysis of major features of post-colonial studies ever compiled, Post-Colonial Transformation:
* demonstrates how widespread the strategy of transformation has been
* investigates political and literary resistance
* examines the nature of post-colonial societies' engagement with imperial language, history, allegory, and place
* offers radical new perspectives in post-colonial theory in principles of habitation and horizonality.
Post-Colonial Transformation breaks new theoretical ground while demonstrating the relevance of a wide range of theoretical practices, and extending the exploration of topics fundamentally important to the field of post-colonial studies.

1 Resistance

In her celebrated testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, the author gives an account of an appalling atrocity in the 1970s in which Guatemalan government soldiers force villagers from several villages to watch as their relatives, arrested on suspicion of subversion, are systematically tortured, degraded and burnt alive. The incident stands as a symbol of that cruelty and abuse, that terrorism of power, which colonized societies have continually resisted. It also focuses some exceptionally complex, and controversial, questions of truth and representation, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Yet what it means to resist effectively is a key question, perhaps the question to emerge from her account. When we compare Menchú's response with that of her father, we discover two models of resistance between which post-colonial societies have continually alternated in their reaction to colonial dominance.

Observing her father's response Menchú says: ‘My father was incredible; I watched him and he didn't shed a tear, but he was full of rage. And that was a rage we all felt’ (1983: 178). Her father's stoicism during this act of barbarity was like a rock against the power of the government's terror, and the passage offers him as an example of the Indians' spirit of resistance. ‘[I]f so many people were brave enough to give their lives, their last moments, their last drop of blood,’ he says, ‘then wouldn't we be brave enough to do the same?’ (181). The experience politicized him completely. He became an organizer of resistance groups throughout Guatemala but was killed in the occupation of the Spanish embassy. But we are left with lingering doubts about what he achieved. If Menchú's father was a rock, then the rock was smashed by the sledgehammer of the state, along with all resistance which reduces the struggle to one of brute force.

On the other hand, Rigoberta Menchú's resistance was more elusive and covert, as she organized communities of Indians against the government. In this respect her testimonio demonstrates the fine balance between resistance and transformation in revolutionary activity — opposition is necessary, but the appropriation of forms of representation, and forcing entry into the discursive networks of cultural dominance, have always been a crucial feature of resistance movements which have gained political success. The co-operation of the Indian groups was made possible only by using the colonizing language as well as other culturally alien structures of organization. But Menchú's most effective resistance to the overt brutality of the state, the most resilient opposition to material oppression, is the discursive resistance which gained her a global audience, the resistance located in her testimonio itself. Rigoberta Menchú and her father shared a deep anger against the terrorism of power. But the radically different strategies emerging from that anger compel us to examine the concept of resistance itself.

Resistance has become a much-used word in post-colonial discourse, and indeed in all discussion of ‘Third World’ politics. Armed rebellion, inflammatory tracts, pugnacious oratory and racial, cultural and political animosity: resistance has invariably connoted the urgent imagery of war. This has much to do with the generally violent nature of colonial incursion. In all European empires the drain on resources to fight wars of rebellion was great. Algerians, for instance, fought a sustained war against French conquest for two decades after 1830, led by Abd ElKhader. Although colonial wars were usually of shorter duration, such protracted hostilities were not uncommon, and often led to profound cultural consequences, such as the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 in New Zealand which concluded the Maori wars, falsely ceding Maori mana to the Crown.¹ Armed rebellion began in the Caribbean as early as 1501, and, according to Julio Le Riverend, the Governor of Cuba, Ovando, ‘asked for the complete prohibition of the [slave] trade, for, in previous years, the Negroes had shown an open tendency towards rebellion and conspiracy’ (Riverend 1967: 82). The often unabashedly exploitative nature of colonial economic ventures, the actively racist attitudes of colonists — even those from France, which was determined to assimilate colonial societies into French political and administrative structures — and the overweening assumption of moral authority for colonial expansion, meant that political resentment, the motive for armed resistance, was constant. Indeed, such armed rebellion, from the ‘Indian Mutiny’ to the resistance movements in Kenya, Zimbabwe and other African states, became the very focus of indigenous demands for self-determination.

But we might well ask whether this armed or ideological rebellion is the only possible meaning of resistance, and, more importantly, whether such a history leaves in its wake a rhetoric of opposition emptied of any capacity for social change. Observing the way in which colonial control was often ejected by national liberation movements only to be replaced by equally coercive indigenous élites, we might well ask: What does it really mean to resist? Does the term ‘resistance’ adequately describe cultural relationships, cultural oppositions or cultural influences in the era of globalization? Given the widespread feelings of opposition in colonized communities, ‘resistance’ enacted as violent military engagement, a national liberation struggle, or, for that matter, even as a programme of widespread social militancy, is surprisingly rare. Ultimately, ‘resistance’ is a word which adapts itself to a great variety of circumstances, and few words show a greater tendency towards cliché and empty rhetoric, as it has become increasingly used as a catch-all word to describe any kind of political struggle. But if we think of resistance as any form of defence by which an invader is ‘kept out’, the subtle and sometimes even unspoken forms of social and cultural resistance have been much more common. It is these subtle and more widespread forms of resistance, forms of saying ‘no’, that are most interesting because they are most difficult for imperial powers to combat.

One question this raises is: can one ‘resist’ without violence? Can one even resist without obviously ‘opposing’? The answer to this is obviously ‘yes!’ Gandhi's ‘passive resistance’ to the British Raj is a famous and effective example. But the most fascinating feature of post-colonial societies is a ‘resistance’ that manifests itself as a refusal to be absorbed, a resistance which engages that which is resisted in a different way, taking the array of influences exerted by the dominating power, and altering them into tools for expressing a deeply held sense of identity and cultural being. This has been the most widespread, most influential and most quotidian form of ‘resistance’ in post-colonial societies. In some respects, as in the debate over the use of colonial languages, it has also been the most contentious. Consequently, this engagement with colonial discourse has rarely been regarded as ‘resistance’, because it is often devoid of the rhetoric of resistance. While the soldiers and politicians have gained most attention, it is the ordinary people — and the artists and writers, through whom a transformative vision of the world has been conceived — who have often done most to ‘resist’ the cultural pressures upon them. In most cases this has not been a heroic enterprise but a pragmatic and mundane array of living strategies to which imperial culture has no answer. In this respect ‘transformation’ is contrary to what we normally think of as ‘resistance’ because the latter has been locked into the party-political imagery of opposition, a discourse of ‘prevention’. But post-colonial transformation has been the most powerful and active form of resistance in colonized societies because it has been so relentless, so everyday and, above all, so integral a part of the imaginations of these societies.

Resistance which ossifies into simple opposition often becomes trapped in the very binary which imperial discourse uses to keep the colonized in subjection. As Coetzee's protagonist, Dawn, puts it in Dusklands:

The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of new mythology.

(1974:24–5)

The most tenacious aspect of colonial control has been its capacity to bind the colonized into a binary myth. Underlying all colonial discourse is a binary of colonizer/colonized, civilized/uncivilized, white/black which works to justify the mission civilatrice and perpetuate a cultural distinction which is essential to the ‘business’ of economic and political exploitation. The idea that ‘counterforce’ is the best response to the colonialist myth of force, or to the myth of nurture, both of which underly this civilizing mission, binds the colonized into the myth. This has often implicated colonized groups and individuals in a strategy of resistance which has been unable to resist absorption into the myth of power, whatever the outcome of their political opposition. Dependency theorists who re-write the story of Europe as ‘developer’ into the story of Europe as ‘exploiter’ remain caught in the binary of Europe and its others. The subject of the new history is still Europe. Ironically, the concept of ‘difference’ itself may often be unable to extricate itself from this binary and thus become disabling to the post-colonial subject.

Intellectuals who set so much store by independence in the post-war dissolution of the British Empire were uniformly doomed to disappointment. National élites simply moved in to fill the vacuum. In most cases ‘resistance’ has meant nothing less than a failure to resist the binary structures of colonial discourse. But a difference which resists domination through the transformative capacity of the imagination is one which, ultimately, moves beyond these structures. The importance of transformation should not be regarded as diminishing the struggle for political freedom and self-determination, or refuting the active ‘resistance’ to imperial power. Nor should it be regarded as contrary to the spirit of insurgence. Rather it demonstrates the fascinating capacity of ordinary people, living below the level of formal policy or active rebellion, to foment change in their cultural existence. It is this change which makes active resistance meaningful.

The fixation upon the defensive interpretation of resistance stems from a tendency to homogenize the colonial experience. D. A. Masolo makes the point that, while a family might live under the tyranny of an authoritarian figure, the experiences ofthat relationship by both parents and children, depending on their age, gender and social role, could be entirely different from each other. Similarly, people could give entirely different interpretations of historical episodes based on how they want to identify themselves. ‘They could take a group stand for political or moral reasons on a matter of which they themselves might never have had a direct experience or from which they might have in fact benefited’ (Eze 1997: 284). While Masolo uses this example to demonstrate the difficulty of defining ‘the postcolonial’, we may also use it to indicate the absurdity of locking post-colonial experience into a simple opposition to colonialism.

The emancipatory drive of post-colonial discourse, the drive to re-empower the disenfranchised, is too often conceived in terms of a simplistic view of colonization, of post-colonial response, and of post-colonial identities. The consequent exhortatory tone of decolonizing theory runs the risk of theorizing how the world should be rather than how the world is in the ordinary actions of individuals. Horkheimer and Adorno argue, somewhat crankily, that classical Marxism had falsely imputed truly emancipatory potential to the proletariat, having failed to understand the social reality of the very people who were its object (1975). But in fact, the example of ordinary people in colonized societies reveals that the proletariat operates constantly in a dialectical and transformative mode. It might not be the emancipatory potential of organized ideological resistance as Marx perceived it, and it certainly doesn't include everybody. But transformation is a dominant mode in the post-colonial response to those colonizing forces which appear constantly to suppress and control. Recognizing this fact is all the more urgent given the complete failure of Marxist programmes of ‘liberation’ in post-colonial states in Africa and elsewhere.

The activity of transformation gives us a different way of looking at what Bhabha calls the ambivalence of colonial discourse. For rather than a kind of flaw in the operation of colonial discourse, a self-defeating need to produce in the colonized subject an imitation which must fail, because it can never be an exact copy, ambivalence may be regarded as a much more active feature of post-colonial subjectivity. It maybe seen to be the ambivalent or ‘two-powered’ sign of the capacity of the colonized to ‘imitate’ transformatively, to take the image of the colonial model and use it in the process of resistance, the process of self-empowerment. Ambivalence is not merely the sign of the failure of colonial discourse to make the colonial subject conform, it is the sign of the agency of the colonized — the two-way gaze, the dual orientation, the ability to appropriate colonial technology without being absorbed by it — which disrupts the monologic impetus of the colonizing process.

Fundamentally, transformation is based on sui generis conceptions of modernity which evade the culture of ‘development’, which is, more or less, a simple euphemism for Westernization. While the term ‘development’ came into the English language in the eighteenth century conveying a sense of unfolding over time, ‘development’, understood as a preoccupation of public and international policy to improve welfare and to produce governable subjects, is of much more recent provenance (Watts 1993b). It is generally recognized that, because of their deep Eurocentrism and dismissal of the colonized world as ‘lacking’, Western development models have all but completely collapsed. However, constructing new conceptions of modernity represents, in global terms, the most far-reaching and enterprising goal of post-colonial transformation. Modernity is itself the expansive and persuasive signifier of the dominance of Western culture since the Renaissance. Yet new conceptions of modernity lie at the heart of the process of transformation itself, for the modern can be ‘used’ and ‘resisted’ at the same time. Strategies and techniques maybe used without necessarily incurring the wholesale absorption into the culture of Western modernity. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, ‘we must hold the past sacred, but the future even more so’ (cited in Verhelst 1987:62).

There is perhaps no more striking demonstration of the link between resistance and transformation than the culture which developed in the Caribbean. African slaves were unable to transport their culture with them to the plantations in any coherent way. Members of different language groups were placed together on plantations either through the exigencies of the system or to prevent conspiracy. The resulting heterogeneity limited what could be shared culturally. Yet Afro-American cultures took on a form generated from this heterogeneity, a dynamism adapted to the physical and social conditions with which they had to deal. In this process, both the various slave and non-slave populations absorbed aspects of the various African heritages. What developed was a culture of such creative adaptation that its transformative capacities were able to resist absorption into the dominant culture.

Ralph Ellison puts this situation very convincingly, in regard to music:

Slavery was a vicious system, and those who endured it tough people, but it was not (and this is important for Negroes to remember for the sake of their own sense of who and what their grandparents were) a state of absolute repression.

A slave was, to the extent that he was a musician, one who expressed himself in music, a man who realized himself in the world of sound. Thus, while he might stand in awe before the superior technical ability of a white musician, and while he was forced to recognize a superior social status, he would never feel awed before the music which the technique of the white musician made available. His attitude as a ‘musician’ would lead him to possess the music expressed through the technique, but until he could do so he would hum, whistle, sing or play the tunes to the best of his ability on any available instrument. And it was, indeed, out of the tension between desire and ability that jazz emerged …

… Negroes have taken, with the ruthlessness of those without articulate investments in cultural styles, whatever they could of European music, making of it that which would, when blended with the cultural tendencies inherited from Africa, express their own sense of life — while rejecting the rest.

(1964:247–9)

This description of black music is true for every act of cultural engagement between a colonized person and the range of apparently awesome cultural technologies with which he or she is faced. Every one of those technologies is open to appropriation and transformation, whether in technique, location of use, social utility or cultural significance. Yet one gets a clear sense, from Ellison's description, of the integrity, the agency, the resistance involved in the process by which colonial subjects take hold of any imperial technology, and make it work for them. The consequences of the ‘transformative resistance’ of black music throughout the world have been strikingly obvious. It is a prominent example of what we mean by the term ‘transcultural’. Indeed, if we think carefully, it is impossible to talk sensibly about culture without invoking this concept of transculturation, of a ‘contact-zone’ between cultures. Individual cultures are never cocooned from the dynamic flow of cultural interchange. ‘Culture has “life”’, says Mintz,

because its content serves as resources for those who employ it, change it, incarnate it. Human beings cope with the demands of everyday life through their interpretative and innovative skills, and their capacity for employing symbolism — not by ossifying their behavioral ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Resistance
• 2 Interpolation
• 3 Language
• 4 History
• 5 Allegory
• 6 Place
• 7 Habitation
• 8 Horizon
• 9 Globalization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index