The Politics of Postcolonialism

Empire, Nation and Resistance

Rumina Sethi

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783716081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a period of vast global restructuring, unrestricted capital has eroded the traditional distinctions between nations and nationhood. In The Politics of Postcolonialism, Rumina Sethi devises a new form of postcolonial studies that makes sense of these dramatic changes. Returning to the origins of the discipline, Sethi identifies it as a tool for political protest and activism among people of the third world. Using a sophisticated mix of spatial theory and local politics, she examines the uneven terrain of contemporary anti-capitalism and political upsurges in Africa, Asia and Latin America, emphasising postcolonial politics, dissent and resistance. Her analysis shows that as the traditional means of direct political control have largely lost their hold, postcolonial cultures, now dominated by neoliberalism, are seeking fresh ways to express their discontent. This original and persuasive work frees the discipline from its current preoccupation with hybridity and multiculturalism, giving students of politics, cultural studies and international relations a new perspective on postcolonialism.

1

POSTCOLONIALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: AN INTRODUCTION

The plenitude of signification is such that ‘postcolonial’ can indicate a historical transition, an achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical stance – indeed, in the spirit of mastery favoured by Humpty Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean. (Parry 2004a: 66)

I

In an age replete with innumerable variants of ‘post-ist’ politics, postcolonialism means so many things to so many people that its full implications necessarily lie outside our grasp. Applied indiscriminately to subjects that would never normally have been perceived collectively, its original focus on colonial politics has now extended from issues of minority-ism under European rule to the hegemony of the US in turning the world global, and from the marginality of women and blacks to the exile of those of us settled outside our nations. Nevertheless, any attempt to withstand and oppose an expansive culture of imperialism will require a form of theoretical polemics that is equally wide-ranging.

For years now, postcolonial theorists have been occupied with finding alternatives to this ill-fitting nomenclature. The term ‘postcolonial’ has come under a great deal of scrutiny ever since it was used to refer to ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989: 2). Such an all-embracing definition not only posits colonialism as some sort of continuum with hazy beginnings and no end, not even after a nation’s gaining independence, it also places the literatures and politics of practically the whole world within its ambit. Gradually, studies in postcolonialism became preoccupied with all minority cultures – including feminist writing in the third world, black literatures, dalit writing in India, the literature of the diaspora and the dispossessed of the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean and New Zealand – while also developing an obsessive fixation with stylish, if obscure, theory. In the attempt to ‘world’ postcolonialism further, Homi Bhabha emphasized border crossing by including ‘transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees’ (Bhabha 1994: 12), whereas Williams and Chrisman advocated the inclusion of ‘diasporic communities’, ethnic minorities, and of course, the ‘formerly colonized national cultures’ to widen its ambit (Williams and Chrisman 1993: 373). Ashcroft et al. admitted several essays by African-Americans as ‘postcolonial’ in their later work, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995). With the new imperialism of the superpowers, it seemed that colonialism’s obituary had been rather prematurely declared. ‘Postcolonial studies’ thus became an even bigger discipline than originally envisaged under the older rubric of Commonwealth Literature. Colonialism had never been a metaphor for oppression in such a gargantuan manner.

It was Herder who, in the late eighteenth century, had criticized European subjugation and domination of the globe in his book Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), where eurocentrism was taken to task, especially because of the hegemonic role of European culture through its universalizing tendencies (see Manuel 1968). In order to trace the genesis of postcolonialism, we can return to the notions of ‘pluralism’ and ‘culture’ that Herder spoke of, and which finally gave rise to a discipline standing up for marginalized people and their cultures. The idea of postcolonialism as an offshoot of cultural studies perhaps has its origins in this historical development, as the dominant idea of ‘civilization’ and European ‘culture’ came to be rejected. For Raymond Williams, too, culture ‘was first used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture’ (Williams 1983: 89). Underpinning of this broad humanistic view was a recognition of Europe’s industrial development and its impact on cultures that were ‘underdeveloped’ in the European sense. The reason why postcolonialism became integral to cultural studies lay in its endeavour to reform the institutions of social democracy by adopting an intellectual and political stance that sought to counter all imperial designs. The analysis of power and of social possibilities thus became part of its cultural agenda.

The institutionalization of postcolonial cultural studies began with assertions of freedom and justice, as in Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1967), or in the anthropological enterprise of writers like Chinua Achebe, who set out to rewrite and revise European accounts of the Maghreb and Africa. The critique of the Enlightenment tradition has never been more incisive than when Sartre quotes Fanon: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets go … [L]et us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we’ve no other arms, the waiting knife’s enough’ (Sartre 1967: 11). Prominent spokespersons of the colonized cultures of the world would become the foundational heroes of postcolonialism – figures such as Fanon, who worked for the Algerian resistance movement against France; Césaire, the West Indian poet, his fellow-companion who inspired him; Senghor, later president of Senegal, whose emancipatory statements urged activism among black people; and Gandhi, who led the masses in India to a non-violent revolution against the British. Their best-known literary descendants today are Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, whose writings and commentaries are regarded as intrinsic to what is known as colonial discourse analysis. Significantly, the inclusion of the cultural effects of colonialism within postcolonial studies becomes apparent by the late 1970s, when ‘post’ begins to signify more than simply the historical passing of time. This coincides with the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1978), which dealt with issues of colonial representation and cultural stereotyping.

Following decolonization struggles across the world, the power of the US grew phenomenally, as did the legitimacy of the monopoly of reason appropriated by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Postcolonial studies, at this point, is regarded to have exhibited a marked complicity with the market economy by not making neoliberalism its target. Liberal capitalism, for its part, contributed a great deal to undoing the borders of nation-states with the global spread of multinational corporations. With the growth of market capitalism, postcolonial studies appeared to have a duality of purpose: the promotion of revolutionary pedagogy along with an inbuilt critique of nations and nationalisms as cultural constructions. The demise of the nation, if only in the text-books, carried the risk of removing the very sentiment revolutionaries had fought for. As a discipline, postcolonial studies, rather than pioneering a focus on historical Marxism underpinned by popular struggles of dissent in the third world, began to scrutinize the cultural aspects of issues of race, gender, class and, of course, the nation. Theory, as such, would undoubtedly remain an abstraction unless its proponents succeeded in applying it to concrete instances of economic and social exploitation, or at least in fashioning an agenda replete with acts of resistance to western-dominated discourses.

Among academics, the decline of the nation and the corresponding expansion of the metaphor of marginalization has led to the embrace of concepts like diaspora, hybridity, difference and migrancy – concepts that are all related to the growth of the global economy and have come to be seen in terms of new configurations of dominance. The prioritizing of global capitalism over praxis corresponds to the waning of Marxism and Marxist studies. While there are obvious limits to what literary studies can accomplish in relation to changing the new economic and political realities, the prescriptions of the latter have been imposed, consciously or unconsciously, and hegemonically, through the global pressure to fashion a university curriculum that blunts postcolonial sensibilities. If social, economic and political concerns are to remain at the heart of postcolonial studies, it will need to struggle continuously against the crises introduced by rapidly changing teaching practices as much as by the rising cosmopolitanism of the world.

It is thus that postcolonialism has acquired a whole new range of meanings today, as it moves away from addressing imperial control to servicing neocolonialism. Since ‘colonialism’ is really an anachronistic term for capital expansion, it comes as no surprise that contemporary capital expansion through processes of globalization is often referred to as ‘neocolonialism’. Although globalization can be defined as the creation of global markets, it is also a practice involving the search for low-cost labour (Wallerstein 1983: 39). The capitalist market has now travelled to the ‘point of production’ in tandem with seeking out a cost-effective labour force that will re-export manufactured goods back to the home country (Childs and Williams 1997: 6). Among postcolonialism’s many connotations, one interpretation stands out in the contemporary milieu – that it has less significance as denoting ‘after colonialism’ than in emphasizing the persistence of colonial tendencies in terms of a continuing imperialism.

Postcolonialism finds itself in a particular predicament today: it purports to be a liberatory practice but it remains nevertheless coeval with modes of oppression, particularly after its appropriation within the United States’ university curricula. Its crisis results from its origins having been both political and historical – postcolonialism emerged out of struggles against colonization, and being part of that history it is grounded in confrontation with authority and aggression. Today, however, the end of European subjugation does not imply the end of the existence of western superpowers with their neocolonial tendencies. The increasing pressures of the west have led to the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in universities all over the world. This means that while it is no doubt still seen as a subversive discipline, it is also perceived to be implicated in western hegemony, all the more so given its compatibility with other contemporary theoretical approaches such as those of postmodernism and poststructuralism.¹

Correspondingly then, pressure has been placed on postcolonial studies to illustrate its usefulness in the context of globalization against apologists for the free-market economy, as well as to take a passionate stance for the defence of the marginalized and the powerless. Viewing the current condition of global capitalism and the rise of the ‘new’ imperialism from the point of view of postcolonial writing, one is confronted by issues that draw attention to the fact that what began as a deeply versatile discipline for introducing more activism into the academy, ended up in mere codification therein, creating a schism between ‘post-colonialism’ and ‘postcolonial studies’. The different implications of these terms will be elaborated upon later in the chapter, but suffice it to say here that the former is taken, in this book, as referring to a condition of living, a practice, a political belief or set of political beliefs that come into effect in a situation of oppression or marginalization, and that can help counter that oppression through protest, resistance and activism. The latter term, by contrast, underpinned as it is by ‘postcolonial theory’, is a discipline that was set up to examine the literature of political protest and resistance among people of the third world, but which has come to represent university curricula abounding in issues of hybridity and multiculturalism as these are taught in elite institutions of the world. The two – postcolonialism and postcolonial studies – have largely been mixed up in academic criticism, adding to the confusion. Most academic analyses use the former in place of the latter.

So, what are the politics of postcolonialism? By the ‘politics of postcolonialism’, I do not intend to indicate governmental functioning or the process of state-building, but the different agendas that the former colonized countries employ in resolving their identity crises by combating and intervening in the legacies of imperialism and neocolonialism, be it in terms of nation-formation or even enthusiastic forays into trade and stock exchange controlled by the west. In other words, politics here stands for both resistance strategies as well as comprador advantages. The term ‘politics’ is increasingly important when tracing the connections between postcolonialism, nationalism and globalization, areas covered in this book. By widening the term ‘politics’ in the world we inhabit today, we can envisage the former colonies as constituting the neocolonial empire of the United States (and to some extent, Europe), giving a new twist to the earlier implication of the term, which, as it takes on implications of global give and take, economic hegemony, and the rise of a new kind of diasporic identity, makes it necessary to interrogate the growing power of the United States. By pursuing these implications, the present book aims to introduce new readers not only to the meaning and nature of postcolonialism, but, more importantly, to its contemporary manifestations and its close engagement with globalization.

‘Postcoloniality’, which would be the state or the condition of being postcolonial, is itself not an unproblematic term any longer. Since the word ‘politics’ is laden with multifarious meanings and nuances, the postcolonial critic must try to find an equation between the critique of postcoloniality and its liberatory potential, arriving thereby at a ‘politics’ capable of working for the entire constituency of postcolonial scholars and critics. The variants of postcolonialism along with their particular agendas can be taken up by identifying their differences from the Marxist approach. Marxism as praxis can be differentiated from postcolonialism as textualism by following Aijaz Ahmad’s distinction between the two as outlined in his book In Theory (1993). My discussion here, in very broad strokes, turns and overturns the terrain of early postcolonial theory and its chief proponents from a Marxist perspective to expose the contradictions and paradoxes within which postcolonialism operates in the academy. Although Marxism has been hugely discredited, it has not been possible to shrug off its reservations about postcolonial studies. The Marxist critics of postcolonial studies, who bemoan its closeness to poststructuralism, narrate the histories of colonialism, decolonization and freedom struggles, keeping in mind the all-important part played by the people. Its critics – Ahmad and Dirlik are particularly vociferous in this regard – would like postcolonialism to be an instrument of people’s politics. The postcolonial practitioners, for their part, consider postcolonialism as a necessary intervention in the dominant discourse of European humanism which stretches into contemporary globalism. What is common to both views is the platform across which their critical commentaries are mounted – that postcolonial thought as well as Marxism are eurocentric, having originated in the western academy. Unfortunately both Marxism and postcolonial studies maintain a distance from each other to their mutual cost.

The academic manifestations of postcolonialism, predominantly postcolonial theory and postcolonial studies, have been criticized for developing right-wing tendencies and severing links with what was taken to be their responsibility following decolonization struggles – namely, to maintain an adequate historical representation of the condition of the formerly oppressed and support the creation of an equitable, anti-eurocentric world through public-spirited debate rather than textual obscurantism. Despite the disconcerting nature of postcolonial studies, nowhere do I imply that it has reached the end of the road, as several critics have stated over the last decade, even though a reconceptualization of postcolonialism is on the cards in the context of increasing globalization.² One significant concern here is to offer some kind of defence against accusations of eurocentrism and location politics, which I attempt later, to level the battlefield so that we might make room for further discussion on the direction postcolonial studies can take in the future.

Postcolonial studies has received its strongest criticism for its alleged ‘metaphysics of textualism’ (to use San Juan’s expression in his analysis of Bhabha and Spivak) that ‘void[s] the history of people’s resistance to imperialism, liquidate[s] popular memory, and renounce[s] responsibility for any ethical consequence of thought’ (San Juan 1998: 22). Postcolonial identities cannot be recuperated by recounting cases of ambivalence or the simultaneous presence of sameness and difference, but by emphasizing historically specific acts of resistance. These ‘acts’ could be those of movements resisting colonial powers, of national integration movements, or acts of resistance to new imperial controls over recklessly globalizing economies. Postcolonial studies, by addressing representations of alterity and the ambivalent relations between centre and periphery, tends to lose its historical-material reality and begins to reproduce itself in purely theoretical terms. As theory, comprising strategies of reading and textualism, sweeps aside the political expression of a transformative history, silencing the subalterns who need more than ever to speak, postcolonial studies leads to a marked disappointment among exponents of Marxism as it begins to rely more and more on poststructuralist methodologies. Bhabha’s idea of the self-as-other and the other-as-self – both of which serve to make colonialism a very problematic category in which ‘slippage’, ‘excess’ and ‘difference’ between binaries cannot be easily dismissed (Bhabha 1994: 86) – has provoked his critics to ask how, if it can be perceived only as a process of rapidly eroding self-images, identity can be visualized at all. Where would one locate the politics of struggle and resistance which are necessary parts of decolonization movements?

Outside the generalized academic pronouncements concerning hybridization, local struggles continue in their specificity, while inside the academy, national identity and native locations are well-nigh lost. By its very dismissal of foundationalism, postcolonial studies loses sight of the world of real events such as those real national struggles, and of local identities which it benefits every nation to preserve.³ There arises, thus, an increasing rift between postcolonial theory on the one hand, which forms the vanguard of postcolonial studies, and what can be called postcolonial practice on the other. The former is underwritten by the ‘high’ theory of Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, incorporated by their disciples in the academy (especially Said, Spivak and Bhabha), and the latter espoused by a host of other critics who condemn the encroachment of French theory into postcolonial criticism (see Moore-Gilbert 1997: 1). The disavowal of real struggles has become so suspect that those who insist that terms such as ‘nationhood’, ‘Marxism’, ‘citizenship’, ‘constitutionality’ and ‘revolution’ are acceptable even today are curiously not called ‘postcolonial’ critics even as they inhabit a postcolonial world.⁴ Indeed, the only critics deemed to be ‘postcolonial’ are those who are also ‘postmodern’ (Ahmad 1995a: 10). The divide between postcolonial theory ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Postcolonialism and its Discontents: An Introduction
• 2 The End of the Nation?
• 3 Globalization and Protest
• 4 The United States and Postcolonialism
• 5 Conclusion: New Directions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index