The Postcolonial Contemporary

Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

Jini Kim Watson, Gary Wilder, Jini Kim Watson, Gary Wilder

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823280087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kolonialismus & Postkolonialismus

This volume invokes the "postcolonial contemporary" in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity.Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present?In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.

ONE

Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions

Anthony C. Alessandrini

My theoretical ethic is … “antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. After all, that is my work; I am not the first or the only one to do it. But that is what I chose.

—MICHEL FOUCAULT, “Useless to Revolt?”

What Comes after the Postcolonial?

The task we have been set here, as I understand it, is to think through what the editors of this volume have aptly described as “the postcolonial contemporary”—to attempt to map its contours or, at the very least, to help bring its horizons into focus. In this spirit, I am tempted to begin by asking for a moratorium (at the very least, a temporary one) on the very term “postcolonial.” Given the amount of ink that has been spilled for or against the entity that has variously been called “postcolonial studies,” “postcolonial theory,” or sometimes simply “postcolonialism” (the last of these most often used by hostile critics who see it as an ideology rather than as a disciplinary or theoretical formation), there is something refreshing about the idea of stepping out into a different space altogether. My contribution to this conversation is intended to be a move, even if a preliminary one, in this direction.

If I nevertheless continue to use the word “postcolonial” in what follows, it is in the way I understand the term as it has emerged from readings of the work of thinkers and participants in the decolonization struggle such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said: not as a sphere that is somehow separate from the hideous legacy of colonialism, and certainly not as a theoretical or ideological platform to which one must swear allegiance, but instead, as a temporal marker denoting a present that is not identical to the era of high colonialism but is nevertheless saturated by this past. The goal of thinking the postcolonial present, in other words, is to continue to ask the question that underwrites the work of Fanon and Said (among many others): What might come after the postcolonial, and how can the continuing struggle for decolonization bring this future into the present?

To ask this question is also to invite a series of related questions about our postcolonial present. For example: How do we think through the ongoing popular struggles in the Middle East and North Africa that have collectively come to be known as “the Arab Spring,” as well as the counterrevolutionary wave of state repression that has followed—especially at a moment when attention to the latter threatens to obliterate any attempts to remember the former?¹ And this invites another question: How can such a process of thinking through “the Arab Spring” contribute to a larger reexamination of our intellectual frameworks for understanding revolutions, particularly those revolutions that used to be (and still might be) thought of as part of the struggle for decolonization? Our ability to begin to address such questions goes to the very heart of asking what political solidarity and engaged intellectual work might mean today.

It should be said that the relationship between the revolutions and popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, on the one hand, and of actually existing postcolonial studies, on the other hand, is hardly a simple one, and has already been the cause of more than a little debate.² Should these popular uprisings and revolutions be considered as revolts against neocolonial regimes? Should they be understood more properly outside of national contexts, as part of a global movement against neoliberalism? How should the uprisings of 2011 be understood alongside previous revolutionary uprisings in the region—for example, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, the Algerian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent Green Revolution, and the decades-long struggle against settler colonialism in Palestine—many of which were (and in some cases, continue to be) articulated as specifically anticolonial or anti-imperialist struggles? How should the Arab Spring be understood in the aftermath of the U.S.-led wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which continue to have massively destructive repercussions throughout the region, as well as the various forms of resistance to these occupations?

To suggest definitive answers to any of these questions would be foolish. There have, however, been attempts to view the Arab Spring specifically through the lens of postcolonial studies. The most ambitious is Hamid Dabashi’s The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012), which argues, as its title implies, that these popular revolts should be seen as breaking out of the ideological contexts that have defined our thinking about the condition of postcoloniality. Describing the Arab Spring (as well as the Green Revolution in Iran, which he sees as its immediate precursor) as a process of “delayed defiance,” Dabashi argues for understanding these uprisings as representing “liberation movements that are no longer trapped within postcolonial terms of engagement and are thus able to navigate uncharted revolutionary territories.”³ The new itineraries of such emergent uprisings, in other words, need a new framework of understanding, outside those provided by traditional notions of colonialism/postcolonialism. There are limitations to Dabashi’s formulation, but it has the great advantage of reminding us that the postcolonial is, at best, a temporal holding area; contemporary political struggles are in part attempts to move into a different space altogether. Within this framework, the uprisings of 2011 (and the continuing struggles that they have inspired) provide an ongoing challenge to our thinking about the postcolonial contemporary.

“An Educated (though Stupid) White Man”? Rereading Foucault on Iran

Why, then, revisit the work of Michel Foucault as part of this attempt to engage with the revolutions of our moment as they “navigate uncharted revolutionary territories,” to use Dabashi’s words? After all, critics have noted that Foucault had relatively little to say about colonialism and anticolonial struggles, in any direct way, throughout most of his body of work. I have nothing to add to this more general point regarding the Eurocentrism of Foucault’s work, except perhaps a proposal to place it within two larger contexts. The first is the general (and continuing) lack of engagement with postcolonial studies within French scholarship more generally; Achille Mbembe, among others, has described this as a form of provincialism within French thought from which we might, at last, begin to break away today.⁴ The second context is the complex and layered history, still being told, of the interconnections between poststructuralist thought and French colonialism, especially in North Africa. As Robert J. C. Young pointed out twenty-five years ago (although many critics still have not managed to assimilate the point), “If so-called ‘so-called poststructuralism’ is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence.”⁵ Indeed, it is the conjunctural nature of poststructuralist thought, emerging as it did in a historical moment saturated by struggles for decolonization in Algeria (and elsewhere), that makes it particularly valuable for us to think with in a contemporary moment equally saturated by revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) impulses and uprisings.

In what follows, I propose to revisit, not just Foucault’s writings on Iran and the Iranian Revolution, but also the more recent body of work that responds to the period referred to by his hostile critics as Foucault’s “Iranian adventure.” It is important to specify what I am not proposing to do in this essay. For one thing, I am not suggesting that Foucault’s Iranian writings can simply and directly be applied to the task of understanding the revolutions and uprisings of the Arab Spring. I’m not at all convinced that they can, and in any case, it is equally not my intention to somehow “make sense of the Arab Spring” through a reading of Foucault. Nor am I going to weigh in on the “correctness” of Foucault’s analysis of the Iranian Revolution. Indeed, I am not even going to do an extended close reading of Foucault’s writings on Iran, a task that has already been performed thoroughly and brilliantly by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (2016). Instead, I simply ask us to turn our attention to one aspect of Foucault’s self-described “antistrategic” theoretical ethos as it is expressed in his writings on Iran. What makes these texts exemplary for a reinvigorated form of postcolonial studies today, I suggest, is precisely their openness to the singularity of ongoing revolutions, which allows Foucault to remain attuned to the possibilities that might emerge from revolutions in the process of their unfolding (this includes attention to those possibilities that he already suspects will subsequently be foreclosed, at least in the short term). The hostile reception accorded to these writings, by contrast, suggests the temptation to subject ongoing revolutions to the standards of our already existing theories of what revolutions “should” be. For a postcolonial studies that wishes to remain open to understanding, and thus supporting, new forms of resistance that have the potential to arise from ongoing revolutions like those of the Arab Spring, then, Foucault’s writings, while they do not bear a one-to-one relationship to our postcolonial present, nevertheless contain some vitally important lessons.

Doing such work means, perhaps paradoxically, beginning with the reception of Foucault’s writings on Iran before moving to his actual texts—that is, beginning from where we find ourselves nearly four decades after his texts were first published. The key text here is Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson’s 2005 book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, which advertises itself as providing the first complete English translation of Foucault’s journalistic writings and interviews on Iran from 1978 and 1979, as well as responses (mostly hostile) from other French commentators. As for Afary and Anderson’s own analysis, the subtitle “the seductions of Islamism” reveals a great deal about their larger approach, not only to Foucault on Iran, but to his body of work more generally. Babak Rahimi, in his detailed review of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, sums up Afary and Anderson’s reading of Foucault: “Having depicted a belligerent and even (yes!) an anti-modern Foucault, who was allegedly unapologetic for the Islamists’ atrocities after the revolution, … the book misleadingly presents Foucault as an educated (though stupid) white man who was naively seduced by the obscurantist features of Khomeini and Islamism.”⁶

My intention is not to pur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial Contemporary
• 1. Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions
• 2. When Revolution Is Not Enough: Tracing the Limits of Black Radicalism in Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun and In Another Place, Not Here
• 3. Mysterious Moves of Revolution: Specters of Black Power, Futures of Postcoloniality
• 4. Reading Du Bois’s Revelation: Radical Humanism and Black Atlantic Criticism
• 5. Deprovincializing Anticaste Thought: A Genealogy of Ambedkar’s Dalit
• 6. The Postcolonial Avant-Garde and the Claim to Futurity: Edwar al-Kharrat’s Ethics of Tentative Innovation
• 7. Neither Greek nor Indian: Space, Nation, and History in River of Fire and The Mermaid Madonna
• 8. For a Marxist Theory of Waste: Seven Remarks
• 9. Goolarabooloo Futures: Mining and Aborigines in Northwest Australia
• 10. Buenos Aires’s La Salada Market and Plebeian Citizenship
• 11. The Speed of Place and the Space of Time: Toward a Theory of Postcolonial Velo/city
• 12. The Wrong Side of History: Anachronism and Authoritarianism
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index