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Verbal Jousting : Postcolonialism |
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What followed colonial literature ? Writing of the Independence
period. But what followed that as disillusionment and scepticism set in ? 'Post-independence'
in English suggests no longer independent. So another term was needed. The Fanonian
'Neo-colonial' might apply to parts of Africa, but the obvious term was 'post-colonial'
used at first to indicate an historical era. Soon, however, 'postcolonial' became
a useful catch-all term to compare and contrast literatures, cultures and societies
that had a history of colonialism. This was initially useful to bring the literature
of the United States and its former colonies into comparison with African and
British Commonwealth literatures, but rapidly was seen as applicable to Latin
America and any society or culture using a Europhone language. By now 'Post-colonial'
had changed from a specific historical period following on from decolonization
after the Second World War to a universal notion of analyzing the lasting effects
of colonialism on the cultures of the colonized.
As the fashion for postcolonialism has caught on it has taken many amazing and
unexpected directions. In one version, which has become common to the academic
world, postcolonial analysis and theory can be applied to any society past or
present, which has experienced any form of conquest, imperialism, or alien domination.
Thus, without meaning to be amusing or ironic, professors of English speak of
Chaucer and postcolonialism, or medieval culture and postcolonialism. As modern
European nations are the products of conquests, nation building, and other cultural,
boundary and linguistic changes, they offer opportunities for many ingenious
postcolonial interpretations.
The main thrust of postcolonial studies, however, is a criticism of European
expansion and imperialism on the non-European world whether in the modern world
or the past. It has increasingly become a way of analyzing and criticizing the
presence of the West outside the West. In such analysis the effects of Europeanization
are assumed to be bad in contrast to some original 'authenticity'. This is paradoxical
as it re-institutes an older nativist anti-colonialism, a nativist nostalgia
for an authentic past, a movement which postcolonialism at first branded as
neocolonialist, backward looking, reactionary, feudalistic. Any analysis in
terms of opposing polarities simplifies realities and recreates the very essentialisms
that post-modern and post-colonial thought is supposed to oppose.
Another version of postcolonialism begins with criticism of notions of nation
and nationalism as recent historical ideas which promote the domination of white
male authority through an ideology of cultural traditions and national unity.
In contrast to the nation are its minorities and marginalized people, notably
women, gays, lesbians, and non-Europeans. This is a version of the Reverend
Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and has been a very influential basis of Post-Marxist
progressive politics. The mixture changes from time to time, according what
is thought dominant. The Irish, for example, were formerly regarded as 'black'
in relationship to British dominance, while the Irish are obviously 'white'
as Europeans in relation to the Third World. At the core of such an approach
is the analysis of society in terms of race, gender, class, and sexualities
especially in relation to power and dominance. The analysis of 'positionality'
derives directly from Foucault and is one of the many ways that European post-structuralist
thought has been incorporated into postcolonialism. In this version women, minorities,
and others outside the white male elite are 'internal colonies' of the nation.
Seen in this way postcolonialism includes multiculturalism, cultural pluralism,
and other terms for recognizing and promoting social equality, cultural difference,
relativism, and separatism in contrast to acculturation and assimilation to
dominant national values.
Postcolonialism can be thought a further, more inclusive development of the
critical and oppositional tendencies found in deconstruction and post-structuralism.
But whereas the European philosophers seemed mostly concerned with theory in
the abstract, the Anglophones rapidly moved on to the specific political content
of discourse. The model was Foucault's concern with how epistemes operate as
forms of power. Postcolonialists assume that in previous and most existing power
relationships those in authority are white Western heterosexual males and their
victims are blacks, non-westerners, women, gays, etc. Within the hierarchy of
power relationships it is assumed that while white women are victims of their
men they themselves are oppressors of black men who are in turn oppressors of
black women. The white working class has improved its position in the world
by its share in the profits of imperialism as have white women. The movement
of decolonization is treated in terms of race. Instead of the United States,
Canada, New Zealand or Australia being regarded as revolutionary new starts
as they freed themselves from European imperialism, they are instead seen as
part of white Western expansionism and imperialism in non-European parts of
the world, as is Israel with its white European and American Jews.
This is a radical rewriting of history although much of it is implicit in Fanonian
psychology. The idea of history progressing towards modernity and rationalism
is said to be a form of Western imperialism over other peoples. The European
'discovery' of other parts of the world is seen as an undesirable expansionism
and imperialism. All of Europe's role in the history of others is viewed as
bad. Art is seen as ideologically formed for the benefit of elites and a product
of the repression of others ; its appreciation is replaced by analysis of how
it incorporates the ideology of its patrons. In practice this means that Calaban
becomes the main interest of Shakespeare's The Tempestplain ; rather than a
source of disorder and immorality he is the rightful native owner of the island.
The ordered good life idealized in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Parkplain is
seen, as in the recent film by Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Parkplain, 1999),
to be based on a hidden economy in African slavery and Europe's new world plantations.
One question now usually asked is how is the Other represented ? Can a white
write with genuine knowledge of black experience ? Is not such writing, or painting,
or filming, or any use of Others, a form of exploitation ? It therefore follows
that only members of a victim class can speak for that group. A major result
of this revisioning of history is that Western history becomes little more than
a record of invading and exploiting Others, and the canons of Western art, whether
in literature or architecture, are mythifications to be deconstructed to reveal
their ideological biases in their historical contexts. It follows that it is
more progressive to read 'texts' by immigrants, working class women, sexual
minorities, Native Peoples, and non-Westerners than, say, Homer, Dante, Virgil,
Shakespeare.
A major objection to postcolonialism is that many creative artists reject such
a categorization as imposing a meaning on their work and as making them separate
but unequal. Rather than 'writing back' many artists feel that they are telling
the history of or celebrating the new place of multiracialism and their theme
is more likely to be hybridity or the necessity to get beyond simplistic racial
consciousness than a celebration of Otherness. The artists are probably correct
as recent studies of youth have shown that they are seldom conscious of race
even while having sex. Postcolonialism risks becoming a dinosaur of the 1968s
which still lives in the academy and among supposedly progressive politicians.
Perhaps the most influential book on postcolonialism was Edward Saïd, Orientalismplain
(London : Routledge, 1978), which claimed that for many centuries Western ideas
of the non-Western world consist of a racist imperializing episteme. Orientalismplain
can be seen as a version of Erich Auerbach's Mimesisplain, which criticizes
Western representations of Eastern thought as part of a long history of colonialism
traceable from the Greeks onwards. Saïd directly influenced Gauri Viswanathan's
Masks of Conquest : Literary Study and British Rule in Indiaplain (New York
: Columbia University Press, 1989) which argued that all British study of India,
especially the teaching of British literature and Western culture, was part
of imperialism, as any British knowledge mapped the continent for forms of imperialism
while the introduction of modern Western culture alienated Indians from their
own world.
While Saïd recognized that such an analysis risks becoming nostalgia for
a mythic past and origins, his later writings show little familiarity with the
rich body of creative literature and other arts that has resulted from the meeting
of the world's cultures with the West. An influential attempt to argue how such
hybridization produced an oppositional culture within colonialism is Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back : Theory and Practice
in Post-colonial Literaturesplain (London : Routledge, 1989). Ashcroft, Griffiths
and Tiffin claim resistance starts among those who learn the way of the master,
as Calaban learns Prospero's language in order to curse him. Their account is
shaped by a desire to show that the white settler colonials, such as those in
Australia, are part of the movement of decolonization and are not just branches
of European expansion. While they see the white dominated colonies as rebelling
against the white metropolitan culture, many postcolonialists argue that all
whites have oppressed native peoples, the original inhabitants of the colonies.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Cultureplain (London : Routledge, 1994) is both
concerned with how the newly decolonized nations were taking to limited forms
of nativism and with the paradox the new modern culture was partly a product
of hybridity in which the colonized learned and adapted the ways of the colonizer.
Unlike Saïd he has a good knowledge of postcolonial culture and understands
its vitality, but he writes very obscurely whereas Saïd writes with elegance
and acknowledges objections to his claims.
Another of the influences on postcolonialism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
In Other Worlds : Essays in Cultural Politicsplain, (New York : Methuen, 1987).
Spivak, who studied with and translated Derrida, has argued that the real voices
of the colonized are the subalterns, those who do not know the tongue of the
colonial masters, and others outside the power relationships between the imperialist
and the nationalist. She has recognized the paradoxes of nationalism and brought
to attention writing by women in Indian languages. But much of her writing consists
of fragmentary comments, inconsistencies, and obscurities. Students often argue
over what she means. Her work, even more than that of Bhabha and Saïd,
leads from literary to cultural studies in which aspects of politics, society,
and non-elite forms of cultural production are the focus of attention rather
than high art forms. A simple introduction to the work of Saïd, Spivak
and Homi Bhabha is Postcolonial Theory, Contexts, Practices, Politicsplain by
Bart Moore-Gilbert (London and New York : Verso, 1997).
While many of the major postcolonial theorists are literary critics, other outside
influences include the notion that perceptions of reality, especially ideas
of history, tradition, and belonging, are socially constructed. The seminal
book is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origins
and Spread of Nationalismplain (London : Verso, 1983) which showed how the nineteenth-century
novel had transformed older ideas of the State (the government as function and
power) into the Nation (something organic based on the folk, a language, religion,
and customs).
The essays collected in Homi K Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narrationplain (London
: Routledge, 1990), treat politics and history as forms of story making. They
critically examine various ideas of the nation to show how they are ideological
responses to specific historical situations. Another influential book was James
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture : Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Artplain (Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Press, 1988), which was part
of the self-consciousness that had developed among anthropologists after the
meditations of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Anthropologists no longer felt that
they were objective observers ; rather they felt they were imposing Western
values on what they described and their work was part of Western imperialism.
Cultural anthropology replaced field work as anthropologists wrote books criticizing
the history of the discipline.
This ever increasing expansion of postcolonialism is criticized in a collection
of essays edited by Bruce King, New National and Post-Colonial Literatures :
An Introductionplain, Oxford : Clarendon Press : 1996). Once a term starts meaning
anything you want it to mean it becomes useless. For critics with a formation
in literary studies, the increasing politicizing of postcolonialism for a criticism
of the West seems like a replay of the Cold war by those who lost it. This book
includes Stephen Slemon's survey of the many ways postcolonalism has branched
into such further concepts as postcoloniality, and essays by Tiffin and Griffith
criticizing the Americanization of postcolonialism as part of America's cultural
wars and the lack of understanding of the processes of decolonization and hybridization
shared by both white and black former colonies.
In response to the way postcolonialism conceptualizes in totalizing terms (such
as epistemes, discourses, race, gender) lacking nuance and awareness of social,
cultural and historical specificity, an opposing movement is concerned with
a more detailed study of the complexities of identity. Bruce King studies the
social and cultural networks in former colonies (Modern Indian Poetry in Englishplain,
New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1987), the economics of the production
of art (Derek Walcott and West Indian Dramaplain, Oxford : Oxford University
Press, 1995) and the nature and conflicts of an career as an artist (Derek Walcott
: A Caribbean Lifeplain, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2000). The Literature,
Culture, and identity series (London and New York : Continuum) is specifically
concerned with examining multiple, conflicting, and changing identities in colonial
and postcolonial cultures. Its first books have been Mineke Schipper's Imagining
Insiders : Africa and the Question of Belongingplain (1999), Gillian Whitlock's
The Intimate Empire : Reading Women's Autobiographyplain (2000) and Nuruddin
Farah's Yesterday, Tomorrow : Voices from the Somali Diasporaplain (2000), a
examination of the adaptation, and lack of adaptation, of Somali refugees in
exile.
Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literaturesplain. (London : Verso,
1992) is an important criticism of postcolonialism from the perspective of an
Indian Marxist who is also an Urdu novelist. Ahmed sees postcolonial theory
as a product of 1968 and its romanticization of the Third World as a revolutionary
force assumed to replace the proletariat of classical Marxism. Ahmed claims
such a view is sentimental nonsense which ignores the actual non-Western world
and its many differences. He objects to Saïd's totalization of the Third
World and the failure to understand that Western knowledge and modernization
is a necessary part of a struggle against a continuing feudalism. The Third
World of Saïd or Salman Rushdie is a concept of a wealthy, well-educated,
Westernized expatriate elite that tells a no longer revolutionary, supposedly
progressive Western intelligentsia what it wants to hear. Ahmed criticizes Fredric
Jameson (The Political Unconsciousplain, Ithaca : Cornell U Press, 1981) for
interpreting the literature of the Third World as an allegory of the national
liberation struggle. This imposes a single-minded vision on most of the world
and denies the universal humanism and shared brotherhood which should be common
to Marxists.
For many critics and writers within the former British empire the really important
theorist is the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris, whose own version of Magic Realism
rewrites history so that there are no longer victims and victors but a continuing
process of intermingling, revisioning, and changing of roles. This is a new
world vision without the burden of history, which contrasts with those academic
debates which look for a difference between postcolonialism and post-colonialism.
Adele King