Postcolonialism

There is remarkably little agreement among the practitioners of postcolonial criticism, theory, and history regarding exactly what postcolonialism is other than radical intellectual opposition to all forms of Western colonialism, past and present, and an unshakable belief in colonialism's irreparable disfigurement of the modern world. The term postcolonial is quite pliant and a source of vigorous debate. Definitions of postcolonialism as a theory and a field of academic study are abundant and diverse. Not unlike disagreements among religious and revolutionary schismatics, the disputes among postcolonialists are bitter battles about fine points of ideology.

Academic interest in the postcolonial—that is, postindependence—literature of the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean, a literature that represented the interactions between the colonizers and the colonized (and often described the psychological and cultural damage caused by colonization), developed in Great Britain and the United States in the 1970s and the 1980s. Postcolonial academic critics discovered, as Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie put it, that "the Empire writes back to the Centre." Classic postcolonial novels include Things Fall Apart (1958) by Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, The Mimic Men (1967) by Trinidad's V. S. Naipaul, and Another Life (1972) by Saint Lucia's Derek Walcott.

At first, postcolonial studies examined the process by which language and literature was reclaimed by former colonials. Postcolonial literature, like everything Creole, was discovered to be hybrid, meaning a mixture of European and non-European. Postcolonialists argued that imperial rule had created the binary categories of the imperial "self" in opposition to the colonized "other," but hybridity subverted this rigid construction of ruler versus ruled.

Postcolonial literature, and the study of colonial and postcolonial literature, became more ideological in the 1980s and 1990s. In the Caribbean, supposedly, the teaching of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) brought indoctrination not enlightenment. West Indian novelist Merle Hodge writes: "From the colonial era to the present time, one of the weapons used to subjugate us has been fiction."

Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid in Annie John (1985) uses literature and literacy to discipline the title character when she "is forced to copy out Books I and II of Paradise Lost as punishment for her rebelliousness." English is transmogrified into an alien—even if internalized—imperial language, a burden to bear. To the Canadian poet Dennis Lee: "The language [is] drenched with our non-belonging … words had become the enemy."

Edward W. Said (1935–2003) published Orientalism, one of the fundamental texts of postcolonialism, in 1978. Said argued that Eurocentric writing about the Arab Middle East exoticized, eroticized, romanticized, and essentialized the "Orient" and "licensed pillage of other cultures in the name of disinterested scholarship." With Said, the study of colonialism increasingly became the study of colonial discourse. The production of "knowledge" about others not only justified the exploitation and domination of non-Europeans, supposedly, but also facilitated colonial rule. Although Said's Orientalism was the subject of potent scholarly criticism at the time and since, his attack on Western writers opened the door to multitudinous literary critics, anthropologists, and historians who have unpacked colonial discourses from the chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas to the British histories of South Asia. "The conquest of India," wrote anthropologist Bernard Cohn (1928–2003), "was a conquest of knowledge…. The vast social world that was India had to be classified, categorized and bounded before it could be hierarchalized."

One of the most famous subjects of colonial discourse analysis in recent decades has been Shakespeare's drama The Tempest (1611). This virtually plotless play is about the ruler of Milan, Prospero, a scholar and magus, shipwrecked with others on what cannot otherwise be a Mediterranean island with the half-human creature Caliban. In numerous scholarly articles and books, not to mention many stage and film versions, postcolonialists have interpreted The Tempest as a discourse on early English colonialism, primarily American colonialism. In these readings Prospero represents the colonial planter and white male oppressor. Caliban has become a New World cannibal slave or an Afro-Caribbean freedom fighter. The Tempest, in this view, not only displays racial prejudice but also "enacts" colonialism by justifying Prospero's power over Caliban.

Even Shakespeare, it would seem, created colonial "knowledge." The play, however, is more complex than any colonial reading can give it. Two other characters, Sycorax and Ariel, reveal some of the problems of this brave new postcolonialist perspective. Ariel, an airy spirit, was on the island before Sycorax, a witch who gives birth to Caliban, thus making Ariel the island's first true reigning lord. When Sycorax arrived, however, she enslaved Ariel and became the first colonialist (one could say) before Prospero even arrived on the island. Caliban, half-human, is also only a half-native of the island.

Shakespeare's text about an island and its last ruler, Prospero, if it is about anything other than certain universal values, concerns Britain as an island nation. There is no external evidence that seventeenth-century English audiences thought the play referred to the New World. The Tempest has been twisted to fit a preconceived picture of the evils of Western colonialism.

The study of colonial discourse has become an important element in the historical study of colonialism and imperialism. The great histories, chronicles, and "relations" of the early Spanish New World have been retranslated, republished, and analyzed in a myriad of volumes and studies. The "letter" narrative of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the polemics of Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), the castaway narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490–1560), the history of the Incas by Juan de Betanzos (fl. mid-1500s), and the "natural history of the Indies" by José de Acosta (1539–1600), to mention only a few, have been expertly studied and interpreted in the larger context of colonial discourse.

Peter Hulme explores the invention of the Caribs in early colonial discourse and the uses of tales of cannibalism. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, who explicitly follows the key insights of postcolonial scholarship, shows how eighteenth-century Spanish American writers challenged European colonial knowledge based on reinterpretation of noble Indian testimony. The Spanish Empire fell, postcolonialists argue, when Creoles destabilized the categories of colonizers and colonized. Warships are afterthoughts when words are recognized as effective weapons. Critics of discourse analysis, however, maintain that postcolonialists give too much power to words and too little significance to the common activities of colonial realities, that is, planting, working, trading, fishing, constructing, fighting, training, loving, and much more.

It is salutary to recall that what is today referred to as colonial discourse theory was not invented by Edward Said or postcolonialists. In 1949 the Spanish philosopher Edmundo O'Gorman (1906–1995) argued that America did not emerge "full-blown as the result of the chance discovery" but "developed from a complex, living process of exploration and interpretation." O'Gorman's book was entitled La invención de América (The Invention of America). O'Gorman was a scholar of philosophy and history.

A few years later, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), born in Martinique but committed to anticolonialism in Africa, critiqued colonialism in White Skin, Black Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Fanon's books, like Discourse on Colonialism (1955) by fellow Martiniquan author Aimé Césaire (b. 1913), unveiled the racism and corrosive effects of colonialism and colonial discourse. Fanon was a revolutionary as well as a critic. He joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and in his writing he supported the option of armed struggle. Since Fanon, postcolonialists have maintained their radical, even revolutionary, ideological stance and sensibility.

Postcolonialist discourse analysis has dissolved all distinctions between the periods or categories called "colonial" and "modern." Fernando Coronil describes the Western mythology of portraying Europe as a civilization, culturally distinct, which had evolved ("progressed") over centuries, as Occidentalism. Thus, with all the differences and even nuances between colonialism and modernity, or between the Spanish Inquisition and Auschwitz, ended, scholarship and political activism intertwine. "Today I am looking at coloniality at large, and at the coloniality of power and the colonial difference in a modern/colonial world in which we are still living and struggle," writes Walter D. Mignolo. "Globalization and neoliberalism are new names, new forms of rearticulating the colonial difference. The colonial period may have ended, but the coloniality of power continues to order planetary relations."

Historians, political scientists, and anthropologists of India (and also Britain) began their shaping of postcolonial studies through the journal Subaltern Studies, which was published in Delhi beginning in 1982. The term subaltern was taken from Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci's (1891–1937) concept of a dominated group without class consciousness. Subalternity became a general category for the objects of economic, social, cultural, gender, and linguistic domination. Indian scholars not only sought to take the focus away from the elite in Indian society, the British colonials and the privileged princes, but to reveal the subaltern as actors and agents in history. Their aim has been to rescue the neglected and repressed, the "people without history," from the silence and condescension of the grand master narrative of imperial history.

To do this, scholars have attempted to discover the radical consciousness of the underprivileged in colonial India, particularly in times of rebellion. Since the early 1980s Indian historians have led the field of postcolonial studies. Very quickly, however, historians and anthropologists of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and other regions adopted the model and the politics. Staying within a vaguely Marxist tradition, scholars of the subaltern have shifted from social to cultural history, and they seek "fragments" of alternative histories that lie buried in colonial discourse. Historians also explore the issue of Creole, hybrid cultures and identities. Subalternists seek to break down the colonial dichotomies of colonizer/colonized, master/slave, ruler/ruled, white/black, metropolis/colony, and so on. "The goal," according to Arif Dirlik, "indeed, is no less than to abolish all distinctions between center and periphery as well as other 'binarisms' that are allegedly a legacy of colonial(ist) ways of thinking."

Subalternity has been extended to women, the subaltern of the subaltern according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an original member of the subaltern studies historians. Feminist and postcolonialist historians have discovered that while gender and imperialism may have been ignored by scholars in the past, the subjects are inextricably intertwined. Gender is a question of imperial plunder, subdued labor, political alliance, cultural identity, missionary evangelization, and much more. "The vast, fissured architecture of imperialism was gendered throughout by the fact that it was white men who made and enforced laws in their own interests," writes the historian Anne McClintock.

In the 1990s Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that Indian history itself, the academic discourse of history, was in a position of subalternity. History, whether it is "Indian," "Egyptian," or "French," is an academic discourse, a knowledge system, that has developed to justify the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois order in the West. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to Chakrabarty, European imperialism and third world nationalism universalized the discourse of history. His solution is to "provincialize Europe," that is, imagine the world as radically heterogeneous. Chakrabarty, of course, is not the only postcolonialist to want to put "history on trial."

Chakrabarty in his antihistoricism, along with sub-alternists, anti-Orientalists, and "poco" literature critics, all share opposition to what postcolonists generally refer to as "coercive knowledge systems" and the universalizing knowledge claims of Western civilization. Postcolonialism as a theoretical position stands against the "imperial ideas" of linear time, hypermasculinity, progress, narcissism, and aggressivity, and the omnipotent colonizing "self" and the marginal colonized "other." It seeks a decentering in multidimensional time, ambivalence, syncreticism, and hybridity. Postcolonialists assert the validity of other, non-Western cultures and often adopt a stance of political advocacy and commitment for those oppressed, subaltern, underprivileged, or in some way disadvantaged people whom they study and write about in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, or East Asia.

Criticism of postcolonialism comes from all directions. Radical critics like Arif Dirlik suggest that postcoloniality's emphasis on discourse, categories, and historicism ignores real-world problems of military and police power, economic development, income inequality, and globalization. Postcoloniality developed, Dirlik notes, because of the increased visibility of academic intellectuals of third world origins as pacesetters in cultural criticism. They have made a career out of "marginality" in the intellectual centers of the Western world.

Other critics have questioned the potency of literary practices. Postcolonialist discourse theorists proclaim that knowledge (or misknowledge) about another culture translates into the exercise of power over the subject culture, but rarely do they try to explain how this colonial discourse of power works in practice. Other, more conservative critics argue that outrage from the West should be focused on loci of mass murder and terrorism rather than the faux colonialism of the banana republic.

Pragmatic colonial historians have pointed out that postcolonialist insights regarding the role of the colonized and exploited in history, the artificiality of colonial dichotomies, the value and reality of hybridity, and so on, are not exactly original or even profound except, perhaps, in the inscrutable theoretical manner and language in which they are expressed. Similarly, many critics have often noted the inaccessibility of the language of postcolonialist writers, pointing to its dense, clotted, and evasive style. One of the most notable aspects of postcolonialist writing is the pervasiveness of jargon, the specialized and often invented vocabulary and idiom of what is seen as an academic fashion. This type of writing reflects a self-important posturing within the academy and a radicalism that only appeals to other cultists who know the special code and how to qualify a term like "discovery" as politically charged through the use of inverted commas or quotation marks. Academic postcolonialism, like colonialism, has become a discourse that critics and cronies can analyze and endlessly argue about.

In the early twenty-first century, postcolonial studies has become an important part of the academic and intellectual world. There are postcolonial studies institutes, departments, programs, journals, book series, conferences, and internet websites around the globe. Postcolonial studies in pursuit of radical politics are established within the most exalted academic institutions of Western Europe and the United States, as well as in the postcolonial nations. Postcolonial studies institutes, programs, and professors are also distributed thickly and widely throughout academia. North Carolina State University, for example, supports and hosts Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, a multidisciplinary journal published on the World Wide Web. The National University of Singapore has brought together scholars from various disciplines from across the world to sustain The Postcolonial Web, a site with terms, theories, definitions, historical contexts, debates, opinion pieces, critical essays, and bibliographical materials.

Other recent specialized journals include such titles as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies ; Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy; Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture; Post Identity; Social Identity; and Inscriptions. Congenial publications such as Representations, Critical Text, October, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, Ariel, Third Text, Public Culture, New Formations, and others publish postcolonialist studies and essays. Princeton University Press has published the series Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. The entire Duke University Press catalogue in one way or another is postcolonialist, but to look at just one part of the world, the Duke University Press has created the series Latin American Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations. Today one cannot read about or study Western colonialism or anticolonialism without the influence, to some degree or another, of postcolonialism.

see also Imperialism, Liberal Theories of; Imperialism, Marxist Theories of; Neocolonialism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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