The Routledge Companion To Postcolonial Studies

John McLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134344017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies offers a unique and up-to-date mapping of the postcolonial world, and is composed of essays as well as shorter entries for ease of reference. Introducing students to the history of the great European empires and the cultural legacies created in their wake, this book brings together an international range of contributors on such topics as:

• the colonial histories of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal
• the diverse postcolonial and diasporic cultural endeavours from Africa, the Americas, Australasia, Europe, and South and East Asia
• the major theoretical formulations: poststructuralist, materialist, culturalist, psychological.

With a comprehensive A to Z of forty key writers and thinkers central to contemporary postcolonial studies and featuring historical maps, this is both a concise introduction and an essential resource for any student of postcolonial culture, whatever their field.

1
INTRODUCTION

JOHN MCLEOD

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES: SOME KEY ISSUES

In the opening chapter of J. G. Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip (1978), the narrator offers a panoramic vista of 1930s Singapore which contrasts the affluent European suburb of Tanglin, home to many colonial settlers, with the crowded, unruly and vibrant enclave of Chinatown and the docks, where the majority of the Tamils, Malays and Chinese live and work. Two different populations coexist in the same location, and their two contrasting experiences of the city inevitably are intimately connected. Yet colonial Singapore is also a deeply divided city: the maintenance of an apparent hierarchy and distance between people is central to its colonial existence, as the narrator notes with pointed irony:

up here in Tanglin people moved in a quiet and orderly way about their daily affairs, apparently detached […] from the densely packed native masses below. And yet they moved, one might suppose, as the hands of a clock move. Imagine a clock in a glass case; the hands move unruffled about their business, but at the same time we can see the workings of springs and wheels and cogs. That ordered life in Tanglin depended in the same way on the city below, and on the mainland beyond the Causeway, whose trading, mining and plantation concerns might represent wheels and cogs while their mute, gigantic labour force are the springs, steadily causing pressures to be transmitted from one part of the organism to another … and not just at that time or just to Tanglin, of course, but much further in time and in space: to you thousands of miles away, reading in bed or in a deck chair on the lawn, or to me as I sit writing at a table.

(1984:12)

I have quoted this passage at length because we might use it to begin to discern the shape, range and some of the key concerns and problems which often preoccupy postcolonial studies. In particular, Farrell’s words point to at least four issues which scholars in the field, new and old, are minded to take into consideration when engaging in postcolonial thought.

First, Farrell invites us to attend to the demographical and geographical consequences of European, and in this instance British, colonialism: its irreversible impact beyond Europe on lived, and built, environments, population change and demographics. Colonialism was so often a matter of terrain: seizing lands, attacking and disenfranchizing the existing inhabitants of those lands, and changing the function, prior purpose and meanings of the now-colonized terrain. As the Martinician intellectual Frantz Fanon described it at the beginning of his book Les Damnés de la Terre (1961, trans. The Wretched of the Earth) the colonized location is often a perversely organized one, geographically divided to cement and maintain the imaginary differences between colonizer and colonized. In contrasting the elegant and spacious European quarters often found in colonial towns with the haphazard, impoverished and cramped enclaves of the colonized, Fanon writes that ‘[t]his world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species’ (1967:30). The divisive territorial consequences of colonialism express and underwrite other kinds of distinctions and discriminations which often mark out colonized people as lacking the same the levels of humanity, and human rights, as the European colonizers. Colonialism transformed place, reorganizing and restructuring the environments it settled; and it also changed the people involved – on all sides – who lived in colonized locations.

Second, Farrell’s sentences attend to the material and economic realities of colonialism. The colonized ‘native masses’ were often co-opted into a vast European capitalist machine which had begun to expand in the late sixteenth century, and which enabled the European colonial powers and the many individuals who pursued the aims and objectives of colonialism to amass vast fortunes and unimaginable wealth. Nearly always this involved the exploitation of, and trade in, the colonies’ natural resources – the mass production of food-stuffs, the mining of precious metals and fuels – as well as its disenfranchized people. Colonialism could not have prospered without the Atlantic slave trade, which engendered the forced migration of millions of African people to the Americas as captives of Europeans; or the system of indentured labour which brought South and East Asian people to the Caribbean; or the genocidal annihilation of indigenous people in North and South America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific, whose presence hindered the capitalist designs of European entrepreneurs, keen to make their fortunes (note that this is not an exhaustive list). Colonial wealth would not have been possible without the killing, enslavement and exploitation of colonized peoples – the multitude whose interests and rights were more often than not ignored by colonial authorities. To be blunt, the fortunes and success of modern Europe – perhaps of modernity itself – depended squarely on the pecuniary pursuits of empire. Empire, colonialism and colonized peoples are not marginal, or additional, to the history of Europe, but lie at its very heart; just as the European nations have irreversibly altered the histories of the terrain and populations they colonized.

Third, Farrell points to the unequal imaginative distinctions between the beneficiaries of colonialism and the disenfranchized natives which normalized a sense of detachment between (in Albert Memmi’s terms) the colonizer and the colonized. If the colonizers were deemed civilized, then the colonized were declared barbaric; if the colonizers were thought of as rational, reasonable, cultured, learned, then the colonized were dismissed as illogical, awkward, naïve, ignorant. European colonialism required, and made possible, inequalities of power that pivoted around apparently real yet ultimately imagined differences between colonizer and colonized.

These invented differences, which encouraged and supported endless physical acts of dispossession and cruelty, were both complex and stark. The simultaneous contempt for, and reliance on, the colonized – for labour, local knowledge, identity – made the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized at times a strangely intimate one, notable for its ambivalence and contradiction, although the operation of power in the colonies was not necessarily less effective because of this. Without the exertions of colonized peoples, colonialism could not succeed: in many parts of the world the colonizers depended on the energies, input and skills of the colonized to make possible the wealth they pursued. Reflecting on the education of Indian peoples in 1835, the British poet and politician Lord Thomas Macaulay argued that ‘[w]e must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (2006:375). This sentiment demonstrates the extent to which colonial powers paradoxically needed the very people whom they often considered ‘infrahumans’ (Gilroy 2004a: 49) to succeed in their colonial aims, as well pointing out the extent to which colonialism irrevocably transformed the identities of those involved, and on both sides. The terms ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ are not simply words which substitute precisely for, in this instance, ‘British’ and ‘Indian’; rather, they describe particular new kinds of identities, inseparable from each other, that are generated by the establishment of colonialism. As Memmi points out, ‘the colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized’ (1990:122).

To enter into colonial relations, willingly or by force, then, is to be changed irrevocably. For Europeans travelling to colonial lands as well as those disenfranchised by Europe’s empires, colonialism required and shaped certain kinds of behaviour, described and imposed new models of identity, and recodified cross-cultural relationships through European-derived models of difference and inequality. These colonial relationships, often characterized by an ambivalent mix of dependency and disdain, consequently were much more complex and variable than that implied by the simple, stark polarity of colonizer and colonized. And we must not forget those Europeans who admired the cultures of colonized peoples, or protested against their exploitation, as well as those colonized individuals who willingly serviced colonialism and prospered moderately themselves through their careful complicity with colonialism. That said, the unequal oppositional power relations required by colonialism unavoidably structured the lives of those who were caught up in the fortunes of empire, regardless of their position or point of view. Memmi’s deliberate abstraction of that relationship in his binary couplet of the colonizer and the colonized importantly recognizes the primacy of these Manichean power relations which (re)produced the conflicted realties of colonial life.

Fourth, and finally for now, the quotation from Farrell’s novel suggests that there remains an important hinge between distant times and places – in this instance, Singapore of the 1930s and 1940s – and the period after the decline of the European empires (Farrell was writing in the mid-1970s, by which time decolonization in the British empire was well established). This linking is both a historical or material one, and a cultural one too. The administrative and governmental realities of European colonialism may no longer be in the ascendancy at the end of the twentieth century with the coming of independence in many nations across the globe, yet colonialism’s historical and cultural consequences remain very much a part of the present and still have the capacity to exert ‘pressures’ today. This is not to suggest that, despite the decline of the European empires in the twentieth century, nothing has changed. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, the new, globalized world order of the twenty-first century is no longer primarily defined by the competing imperial aspirations of Europe’s ‘Great Powers’, who furthered their fortunes and ambitions primarily through acts of colonial settlement. That period of history is over. Yet as they also point out, today ‘[t]he geographical and racial lines of oppression and exploitation that were established during the era of colonialism and imperialism have in many respects not declined but instead increased exponentially’ (2000:43). As others also point out, the world today remains firmly indebted to the history, geography and imagination of European colonialism – indeed, for Hardt and Negri, colonialism has not so much stopped as been surpassed by a new political, juridical and economic global structure, which they term ‘Empire’. Think of contemporary globalization, the North’s primacy over the South, or the militaristic ‘war on terror’. Or consider current transnational economic inequalities, patterns of migration and demographic change, racism and its murderous consequences the world over, poverty and disease in Africa, the unresolved military conflicts in Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir. Each has at least a part of its origins in the consequences of colonialism, and remains hinged to that history in a changed and changing world today.

As Farrell’s sentences importantly remind us too, not only do these consequences continue to impact on the way in which we, in our different positions, experience the world and its relative opportunities; they also impact on how we regard and represent the world. Farrell’s passage closes with our attention firmly focused on the acts of reading and writing, and reminds us that even today these seemingly innocuous activities cannot be separated from – indeed, they may be(come) complicit in – the business of colonialism, as well as its aftermath. Postcolonial studies lays a challenge at our door: as well as needing to understand the material consequences of European colonialism, in the past and present, we must also become inquisitive about the ways in which we come to this understanding, through the knowledge we make and the language and terms we use in making it.

The realm of culture – of reading, writing and representation – does not exist fully beyond the social, historical and material matters of the globe. As Edward W. Said has suggested, culture may well normalize, legitimate and encourage European colonialism:

Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with such words and concepts as ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’, ‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ‘expansion’, and ‘authority’.

(1993:8)

At one level – not the only one, of course, but an important one nonetheless – colonialism was a matter of representation. The production of culture (literature, music, painting, etc.) could also reproduce imperial ideological values, and cultural creativity contributed greatly to lubricating the machine of colonization. Of course, as Said also argues, cultural practices could equally work to challenge, question, critique and condemn colonialist ways of seeing; but the crucial point to grasp is that the act of representation itself is also securely hinged to the business of empire. As Said’s list of vocabulary hints, the very language we use may well be complicit in perpetuating forms of knowledge which support a colonialist vision of the world. Indeed, many of those who pursue postcolonial studies believe that by challenging and changing the ways in which we make the world meaningful, we might find new conceptual modes (however modest) of resisting, challenging and even transforming prejudicial forms of knowledge in the past and the present. The serious political and ethical goals of postcolonial studies often find their genesis in this transformative reflex.

Terrain, people and their relationships, capital and wealth, power and its resistance, historical continuity and change, representation and culture, knowledge and its transformation: postcolonial studies often involves a prolonged engagement with these issues, and several others besides, in a number of related cultural contexts – either individually, or (as is more frequent) in interdisciplinary clusters. Again, the above is not an exhaustive list, but it does open a vista on the varied and diverse work which is often regarded, or names itself, as part of the rhetoric of postcolonial studies. The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies will also open up a number of vistas on selected European empires, postcolonial locations, conceptual reformulations and key contemporary writers and thinkers in the field, as a way of engaging the reader with the important historical and cultural consequences which persistently preoccupy the field.

HINGING THE POSTCOLONIAL

Postcolonial studies is similar to all modes of academic enquiry, in that it involves asking certain kinds of questions about selected aspects of the world. Although it often focuses on locations with a history of colonialism and often tries to understand the world at different times from something like the point of view of its subjugated peoples, it is not a field of study which is exclusive to selected nationalities, cultures or races. The postcolonial may well be seen by some as ‘the discourse of the colonized’ (Ashcroft 2001:12) in Bill Ashcroft’s reductive but forceful phrase; but it is not illegible to, nor protected from critique by, any group of people. To borrow the words of Paul Gilroy, addressed primarily to the descendents of African slavery, the...

Table of contents

• Also available from Routledge
• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• A NOTE ON THE TEXT
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• Part I COLONIAL EMPIRES
• Part II POSTCOLONIAL LOCATIONS
• Part III POSTCOLONIAL FORMULATIONS
• Part IV A–Z: FORTY CONTEMPORARY POSTCOLONIAL WRITERS AND THINKERS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED
• INDEX