Postcolonialism

Tariq Jazeel

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317195337
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism Theory

Postcolonialism is a book that examines the influence of postcolonial theory in critical geographical thought and scholarship. Aimed at advanced-level students and researchers, the book is a lively, stimulating and relevant introduction to 'postcolonial geography' that elaborates on the critical interventions in social, cultural and political life this important subfield is poised to make.

The book is structured around three intersecting parts – Spaces, 'Identity'/hybridity, Knowledge – that broadly follow the trajectory of postcolonial studies since the late 1970s. It comprises ten main chapters, each of which is situated at the intersections of postcolonialism and critical human geography. In doing so, Postcolonialism develops three key arguments. First, that postcolonialism is best conceived as an intellectually creative and practical set of methodologies or approaches for critically engaging existing manifestations of power and exclusion in everyday life and in taken-as-given spaces. Second, that postcolonialism is, at its core, concerned with the politics of representation, both in terms of how people and space are represented, but also the politics surrounding who is able to represent themselves and on what/whose terms. Third, the book argues that postcolonialism itself is an inherently geographical intellectual enterprise, despite its origins in literary theory.

In developing these arguments and addressing a series of relevant and international case studies and examples throughout, Postcolonialism not only demonstrates the importance of postcolonial theory to the contemporary critical geographical imagination. It also argues that geographers have much to offer to continued theorizations and workings of postcolonial theory, politics and intellectual debates going forward. This is a book that brings critical analyses of the continued and omnipresent legacies of colonialism and imperialism to the heart of human geography, but also one that returns an avowedly critical geographical disposition to the core of interdisciplinary postcolonial studies.

1

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND GEOGRAPHY

Information command has ruined knowing and reading.

(Gayatri C. Spivak, 2012, p. 1)

We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they know is what they have made, and extend it to geography …

(Edward W. Said, 1978, pp. 4–5)

In a theatre of its own design, history’s drama unfolds …

(Paul Carter, 1987, p. xv)

Defining postcolonialism is a notoriously difficult task. And so it should remain. Since postcolonial theory’s emergence within literary studies in the 1970s, the broad body of work it has precipitated has steadily worked against definitive categorizations, taxonomies and concrete assumptions. If we can be sure, as much postcolonial scholarship argues, that the legacies of colonialism and imperialism are still with us, that they have indelibly shaped the world as we know and experience it, then we should also be clear that any definition of postcolonialism itself must be partial, provisional, and attenuated to new, unthought strategies for thinking and living through and past the inequities of colonialism in the present. In other words, whatever else postcolonialism is, it is a cluster of perspectives and interventions that interrogate what we think we know, urging us to explore more carefully the historical production of that knowledge. It pushes back against what Gayatri Spivak refers to in the epigraph above as “information command”, by which she means to implicate modernity’s confident epistemic certainties, and in doing so moves towards ways of knowing and reading the world differently.

Geographically, as this book argues, this is of profound importance. As Edward Said remarked in his book Orientalism, a text considered by many to be a founding pillar of postcolonial studies, people make their own geographies as well as their own histories. What Said means, of course, is that if geography is humanly produced, it is done so within and through the heavily textured machinations of colonial imagination, encounter and their legacies. Moreover, as Said’s work so powerfully revealed, these colonial geographies are still very much with us in manifold imaginative and material ways. Another way of putting this is that geography is the “theatre of its own design” to which Paul Carter refers above; for all intents and purposes, it is the theatre in which history unfolds. It is the pervasive spatial medium and cluster of modalities through which we see, experience and imagine the world as we have come to know it. As Carter (1987, p. xv) goes on to stress in The Road to Botany Bay, his exquisite book on travel writing and imperial spatial politics, if history is a series of illusions insofar as it is the narrative that historians write, there is one illusion that sustains it: that of the theatre itself. Of geography.

We should be clear then that the political imperative for postcolonial geography is a kind of dismantling of this theatre of geographical knowledge; an unpicking of geographical certainties in the light of our awareness that these provide the enabling conditions for histories intimately connected to the Eurocentricities of colonial power. In so doing, in attempting to reveal the colonial productions of the taken-as-given, postcolonial geography is thus an intention towards pluralization, towards spatial difference. To this extent, and as this book suggests, it must remain a radically open and heterogeneous intellectual space always inclined towards the new, the unthought, the not-yet-categorized kinds of spatial difference for which the work of dismantling makes room. This is a book that examines the influence of postcolonial theory in critical geographical thought. It explores the considerable interventions in social, cultural and political life that postcolonial geography is poised to make. In doing so, the book not only demonstrates the importance of postcolonial theory to the contemporary geographical imagination, but it also reveals just how much critical geography has to offer contemporary postcolonial politics going forward.

This introductory chapter does three things: First, it provides a set of interlocking outlines of postcolonialism, in the process historically contextualizing and situating the emergence of postcolonial theory in 1970s literary studies, and in relation to post-structuralism and deconstruction, as well as its antecedent modes of anticolonial writing and politics. By talking specifically through three different ways to conceptualize post-colonialism as an intellectual approach, I gesture towards the traction postcolonial theory has gained in the broad subdisciplinary field of post-colonial geography. Second, I delineate the structure of the book, outlining how the book’s three parts – focusing on Space, ‘Identity’/Hybridity, and Knowledge – provide a useful organizing mechanism through which to narrate the historical and thematic trajectory of post-colonial theory since the late 1970s. Here I also outline the chapters of the book. Third, I outline and expand on three key arguments that run throughout this book and thus collectively constitute something of a statement about postcolonial geography in relation to both the discipline of geography and to postcolonial theory. Briefly summarized, these are that: postcolonial geography should be conceived as methodology, not theory per se; that postcolonial geography is, and should be, at its core concerned with the politics of representation; and finally, that, as per Said’s words above, postcolonial theory has always been an inherently spatial/geographical enterprise.

THINKING THROUGH POSTCOLONIALISMS

Since its emergence and establishment as a distinct subfield of literary studies in the late 1970s, postcolonialism – or postcolonial theory – has made a lasting impact across the humanities (in History and Art History notably) and the social sciences (Anthropology, Sociology and Geography). It is field of enquiry whose points of departure of course are colonialism and imperialism. (Where we can think of colonialism as the establishment of colonies by one political power in another space, usually with some kind of extractive relationship involved, and imperialism as a form of power exerted over another space that may not require the actual establishment of colonies.) Notwithstanding the necessary difficulty of defining it, it can be helpful to mobilize postcolonialism as a plural enterprise, and to thus think of a number of different ways that the term has been used in the annals of postcolonial research. In the chapters that follow, I shift between three interlocking and interchangeable mobilizations of the term that I describe as follows.

First, and quite simply, the term ‘post-colonial’ (written with a hyphen) is often taken to denote a time period after the end of formal colonial rule. If colonialism implies the physical occupation of territory and resources, and the imposition of political and economic systems and ideologies in those territories (see Sharp 2009, p. 3), then in the European ‘Age of Exploration’ alone (from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries), Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, Belgian and British colonizers variously enlisted a vast tapestry of methods – some violent, others more coercive – to facilitate their occupations of equally vast swathes of the non-Western world. In the process, colonizers effectively dispossessed Indigenous populations of land and other resources. Mercantile activity, trafficking of slaves, military conquest, the imposition of colonial governments, geographical and scientific exploration, as well as Christian missionary work have all variously supported the colonial designs of different European empires. Much of the non-Western world has at some point been subject to colonial rule by various European powers who sought to secure their own forms of economic and cultural accumulation under the pretence of developing – or as they would have it ‘civilizing’ – the non-Western world. If it is true therefore that much of the world was once colonial, it is also true that much of it is now, temporally at least, ‘post-colonial’; that is to say, formally independent of colonial rule.

But as Childs and Williams (1996, p. 1) write, this raises the question, “after whose colonialism?”, as well as what form different colonialisms took? For it is certainly true that many now independent states and territories have undergone multiple colonialisms and forms of colonization. For example, popular historical narratives of Sri Lanka, one of the case studies that this book mobilizes, have it that the Portuguese held the former colony of Ceylon from 1505–1658, the Dutch from 1658–1796, and then the British from 1796–1948. However, the ‘rule’ of these three powers was spatially and politically differential through that period, such that it was only in 1815 that the British achieved a territorially contiguous rule over a whole island that had until that point administratively been a series of fragmented sovereign and colonial territorial entities (see Wickramasinghe 2006, pp. 1–43).

Second, however, just because the local viceroy or governor packs up and goes home, the effects of colonial power do not cease. In this very respect, ‘postcolonialism’ (written this time without a hyphen) is a term that does a lot more than simply signal a time period after colonialism. Indeed, despite the importance of formal and temporal post-coloniality, much emergent critical postcolonial scholarship has aimed at recognizing the continued and troubling presence and influence of colonialism within the period we designate as after-the-colonial (see McClintock 1992; Nash 2002, p. 220). In other words, much postcolonial scholarship seeks to explore the ongoing effects that colonial encounter, dispossession and power have in shaping the familiar social, spatial and political structures, as well as the uneven global interdependencies of the world as we know it. By the same token, much of this postcolonial scholarship, as we shall see, has also sought to draw attention to the presence of new, less territorial and more ideological, forms of empire building (think of North American (US) cultural imperialism, for example). In this mobilization of the postcolonial, therefore, the critical value of the term is in the way it draws attention to the very difficulty of confident declarations about the end of colonialism. As Ashcroft et al. (1989, p. 2) put it, this mobilization of the postcolonial should suggest a critical engagement with the entirety of “culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day”. Its potential, in other words, is precisely its non-linear logic, the ways it can ask: in what sense are we actually after, or beyond, the subjugating effects of colonial power? And, in what ways can we thus think against the grain of colonial power’s lingering effects both at home and abroad? As this book shows, these very questions can form the basis for useful critical geographical engagements of the world at hand.

Third, and bringing these two mobilizations of the term together, the ‘postcolonial’ can also usefully be thought in relation to related ‘posts’ in social theory: post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-positivism, for example. The emphasis here is not so much on chronology or temporality, but rather on the ways that the post signals the challenge to conceptually transcend the primacy of the prior term. In this sense, just as post-structuralism designates attempts to critically engage and thus supersede the strictures of structuralism, post-colonial/postcolonial texts and interventions may consciously seek to push past and beyond the condition of coloniality in its widest sense. In Childs and Williams’ words (1996, p. 4),

texts which are anti-colonial, which reject the premises of colonialist intervention … might be regarded as post-colonial insofar as they have ‘got beyond’ colonialism and its ideologies, broken free of its lures to a point from which to mount a critique or counter attack.

What this last mobilization of the postcolonial raises is the further point that postcolonialism has been a mode of intellectual work not confined to just literary theory and other intellectual orientations within the academy. For many beyond university space, postcolonialism is in fact more familiar as a term designating a wide genre of literary fiction written by authors whose works seem to both speak somehow of the ‘postcolonial condition’ and likewise critically engage postcolonial cultural, political and social contexts. For example, in the English language alone authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureshi, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Angela Levy, Bernadine Evaristo, Preti Taneja, Rohinton Mistry, Romesh Gunesekera, Shyam Selvadurai, Derek Walcott and many more, have all written forms of literary fiction that consciously wrestle with the social, spatial and cultural manifestations of colonialism’s iniquitous and lasting legacies.

These three ways of setting the postcolonial to work have emerged from a recent and abundant history of postcolonial scholarship. None is more or less correct than the other, but each, either independently or together, offers different tools and strategies for thinking critically about, and intervening in, colonialism’s social, cultural, political economic, and not least spatial effects. All, in one way or another, imply valuable modalities of engaging with colonial history and power, and all are used in the chapters that follow.

POSTCOLONIALISM: A NARRATIVE AND STRUCTURE

Many of postcolonial theory’s political, intellectual and cultural antecedents can be traced to the middle decades of the twentieth century. For example, négritude, a body of Francophone anti-colonial scholarship and literary production that critically engaged the Black experience in France’s colonies, was deeply involved in the task of disavowing colonialism and promoting Pan-African and Caribbean solidarities from the 1930s onwards. Emerging from Paris, in particular from the meetings and writings of three black students from different French colonies – Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) who came from Martinique, Léon Damas (1912–1978) from Guiana, and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal – négritude emerged as the positive self-affirmation of black peoples, and the ‘black world’, through forms of literary and cultural expression in the face of French colonialism and racism (see Césaire 1995 [1939]; Damas 1947; Senghor 1948, for examples). It was an expression of revolt against French colonialism, and one whose anti-colonial influence rippled through the mid-twentieth century and well beyond the Francophone world. Other Francophone writers from the 1950s onwards have also had a significant influence on the development of postcolonial theory: Éduoard Glissant (1928–2011), for example, whose writing attempted to destabilize ‘standard’ French language so as to bring Antillean modes of life and relation into representation (Wing 1997, p. xii), and Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), whose significant anti-colonial and ethnopsychiatric writings pointed towards a political philosophy for decolonization (particularly in the context of Algeria) (Appiah 2008, p. viii). Like Césaire, both Glissant and Fanon came from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. In the Anglophone North American and Caribbean context, the writings and political work of figures like W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), and C. L. R. James (1901–1989), generated various intellectual, philosophical and political resources, as well organizational collectives, for thinking and working against the legacies of slavery and the lasting presence of a colonialism that was not yet post in the first half of the twentieth century.

These and other writers associated with négritude, and early to mid-twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist-inspired anti-colonial scholarship more generally, have been key figures in the development of post-colonial theory since the late 1970s. As such, some of them make appearances in the chapters that follow, either directly or through their reinterpretation in the work of subsequent readers. However, in their own historical and political conjunctures, these intellectuals, activists and black radicals did not routinely refer to their own intellectual production as in any sense ‘postcolonial’. Indeed for many of these writers, colonialism’s ‘post-’ – its end, that is to say – was an imagined future, even if it was a future strongly anticipated through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Their concerns at this time were more immediately and avowedly ‘anti-colonial’. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall (2017, p. 45) remarked of his own upbringing in 1930s and 1940s Jamaica, these kinds of anticolonial political and intellectual formations were “within – not ‘post’ – colonialism”.

It is for this reason that I choose in this book not to locate post-colonial studies’ origins in this earlier, important and diverse body of work spanning négritude, black Marxism, and anticolonial politics (the latter of which, of course, had its South Asian and Latin American instantiations as well), despite the significant influence this tapestry of radical ferment has undeniably had. Instead, the book locates the origins of a body of scholarship that has emerged as postcolonialism within 1970s literary studies. It is, I suggest, from this point onwards that a field of explicitly postcolonial theorization, and its subsequent intersections with Human Geography, can be traced.

To narrate the thematic development of what, in itself, is a complex weave of postcolonial scholarship since its emergence in literary studies in the 1970s, this book is structured in three main parts. Each focuses on what I distil as a key conceptual orientation of postcolonial theory, and likewise the ways that this orientation has influenced geographical scholarship and vice versa. In the rest of this section I briefly introduce and narrate the thematic logic of each of these parts, stressing that which both disambiguates and connects them. They are, in turn, Space, ‘Identity’/Hybridity, Knowledge. It will become obvious that though this organizational structure follows a loose historical chronology, there is significant ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Postcolonial theory and geography
• 2 A brief history of postcolonial geography
• Part I: Spaces
• Part II: ‘Identity’/hybridity
• Part III: Knowledge
• Bibliography
• Index