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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Postcolonial Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

Anticolonialism
Postcolonialism
Postcolonial Theory’s Interventions
Affiliations and Alliances
Critics and Criticism
Modernity, Transnationalism, and Globalization
Postcolonial Politics and Ethics
Postcolonialism versus Decoloniality and Anticolonialism in Latin America
New Directions in Postcolonial Theory

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Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

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Postcolonial Theory by J Daniel Elam LAST REVIEWED: 15 January 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 15 January 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0069

Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

There are a number of good introductions to postcolonial theory. Unique to postcolonial theory, perhaps, is that while each introductory text explains the field and its interventions, alliances, and critiques, it also subtly (or not) argues for a particular variety of postcolonial criticism. Loomba 2005 gives an overall sense of the field, and the theoretical relationships between colonialism and Postcolonialism . Given that postcolonial theory has repeatedly come under attack from outside (and from within) the field, these introductions often argue for the necessity of the field, seen most vibrantly in Gandhi 1998 and Young 2003 . Additionally, there have been a number of very helpful edited volumes, each of which take place at key points in the field’s history, that keep important texts in circulation where they might not otherwise be available; among these remain Williams and Chrisman 1994 and Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-Crooks 2000 . Because so much postcolonial theory is built on or responds to colonial texts, Harlow and Carter 2003 , a two-volume set of colonial documents, is a necessary resource to scholars at all levels. Young 2001 , an understated “historical introduction” to postcolonialism, is an invaluable resource. For students interested in psychoanalytic or psychological approaches to postcolonial theory, Hook 2012 is a good resource.

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds. The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

This collection, though frequently overlooked, is a valuable resource of essays about postcolonial theory at a moment of alleged crisis. The volume includes essays that argue for the expansion of postcolonial studies to new contexts, as well as critiques of the theoretical underpinnings and commitments of the field. Noteworthy essays include those by Walter Mignolo, R. Radhakrishnan, Daniel Boyarin, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Naficy.

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction . New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Gandhi’s introductory text to postcolonial theory is useful for undergraduates, but it is also a helpful resource for anyone working within the field at any stage. The short book covers the emergence of postcolonial theory in the US and UK academic worlds, its subsequent debates and fissures, and possibilities for its political affiliations. The book is mostly neutral in its approach but does offer critiques of certain postcolonial theorists and theoretical trajectories.

Harlow, Barbara, and Mia Carter, eds. Archives of Empire . 2 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Harlow and Carter’s two-volume work is the most extensive collection of legal, philosophical, scholarly, and literary original source materials relating to European colonialism. The collection includes Hegel’s writing on Africa, T. B. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” and Charles Dickens’s image of the “noble savage,” among many others. This is a crucial resource to scholars in postcolonial theory, which has drawn on, responded to, or discussed these key texts.

Hook, Derek. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid . London: Routledge, 2012.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203140529

Hook’s book is a very good introduction to the relationship between postcolonial theory and psychology (and psychoanalysis). Drawing on works by Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and others, Hook analyzes anticolonial, postcolonial, and critical race theory approaches to and critiques of psychology. The book is a good introduction to postcolonial theory, especially for students in the social sciences, and does a good job illustrating the contributions of anticolonial and postcolonial critique to psychology.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism . London: Routledge, 2005.

Loomba’s volume offers a lucid synthesis of postcolonial theory, both as it emerged from colonial rule as well as within the US/UK academy. The book does a particularly good job aligning the historical and theoretical components of the field. Loomba is also interested in the field’s commitment to other forms of political theory, especially feminist thought. The book is ideal for undergraduates. Originally published in 1998.

Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory . New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

This edited volume remains the most widely available source for many important influential essays that are foundational to the field but difficult to find, some of which are listed here ( Senghor 1994 , cited under Anticolonialism ; Hall 1994 , cited under Affiliations and Alliances ). In other cases, it offers a good selection of longer texts for undergraduate classes, like those by Aijaz Ahmad, Cesaire, and Said. The book also includes good examples of early postcolonial literary criticism.

Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction . London: Blackwell, 2001.

This sweeping account of the emergence of Postcolonialism not only offers a phenomenal introduction to anticolonial thought, but it illuminates the ways in which postcolonial theory is directly indebted to anticolonial thought. Young also argues for understanding anticolonial thought and postcolonialism as inherently transnational by foregrounding its circulation across the “tricontinental” world (South America, Africa, and South Asia; a term first coined by Fidel Castro) in the 20th century.

Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonial Theory: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780192801821.001.0001

Young’s primer to postcolonial theory is perfect for scholars new to the field. It provides an overview of the field’s theoretical and political commitments, while also demonstrating how postcolonial theory can be used to examine texts and politics. In the guise of a neutral text, it is actually a vibrant defense of the field and a reconceptualization of its origins. It is also, therefore, an excellent manifesto for the field.

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The Tempest as a Post-Colonial Text: Exploring Power, Identity, and Oppression

William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" has been widely regarded as a post-colonial text due to its themes and portrayal of power dynamics, colonialism, and the effects of colonization on both colonizers and the colonized. This essay aims to delve into the post-colonial elements present in the play, examining how it challenges traditional narratives of colonialism and explores themes of power, identity, and oppression.

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International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT)

The twentieth century brought about a new form of understanding, producing and living art that has become a mean to react against the oppression that different groups suffered for centuries. Post-colonial criticism is an approach of analysis that questions racial identity and gender equity. This study investigates how Shakespeare's plays relate to the social codes and the more recent history of the reception of Shakespearian drama within decolonization movements. The Tempest by Shakespeare is defined as a postcolonial text because the colonised is represented in regarding cultural hybridity in which the Self and the Other enlace the colonial experience. Literature has naturally given a voice to these omitted groups and this play is thought to be an early post-colonial work by some scholars. Shakespeare had intended to criticise the European attack of the new lands to the West, and the theme of colonialism is outrightly presented in The Tempest. Post-colonial reading of the text examines the projection of the colonial experience back to Europe. Slavery, colonialism, and the power of changing other civilisations by the West are themes to make inferences.

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH

Prabha gour

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is indubitably the best playwright of all time. He acquired an unique place in the world of literature. His plays earned international commendation and acceptance as the finest dramatist in the entire history of English literature. His play, The Tempest has been decoded differently by critics as a postcolonial text. In1611 when William Shakespeare wrote the play The Tempest, colonization was a recent concept in Britain. This paper is an attempt to inspect the postcolonial issues such as subjugation, dominance language, power and knowledge etc. and conjointly converse about the complex relationship that exist between the master and slave in The Tempest.

Talent Development & Excellence

Thamir R . S . Az-Zubaidy

William Shakespeare's The Tempest is both created in and influenced by an era when colonialism was coming into being. It begins with the arrival of a European coloniser, Prospero, to an island in the Mediterranean Sea where he imposes his colonial domination, norms and culture on its natives. In addition to exploring these issues, this paper examines questions of racism, slavery, suppression, and the role of language in consolidating the process of colonisation and maintaining the colonisercolonised politics. It also critiques the coloniser's involvement in the exchange of women as gifts for political gains as he does with his daughter Miranda. Moreover, while highlighting the discursive practices of othering the native, Caliban, the paper investigates his attempts to resist cultural and political European colonisation through Caliban's linguistic and political appropriation of Prospero's power.

Zahra Sadeghi

Colonization and imperialism are of those interesting critical conversation throughout the world and this study examines how English theater addressed, promoted, and at times challenged ideologies of colonization and notions of civility and civilization. The Tempest in regarded as a New World drama by many critics because of colonization and civilization debates presented on the London stage and depiction of the colonizers and the colonized to present and, at the same time, question those colonial debates. Shakespeare depicts the New World’s indigenous cultures in an ambiguous way to both present and question the ideologies of empire. This dramatization of the “other” helped sixteenth and seventeenth century audiences to recognize New World indigenous peoples as different rather than uncivilized and reevaluate what they have read or heard of these native peoples. Shakespeare presented the contemporary rhetoric through the medium of the theater and helped audience to visualize the process of conquest and colonization. He helped to civilize audiences about the reality of colonization, civility, and the New World. This theatrical medium makes audiences to challenge those established stereotypes of the New World natives and understand them as different, not inhuman or monster, and ignorant of European language and cultures, but no incapable of being civilized. Shakespeare, in dramatization of the New World, neither support nor oppose the process of colonization but he tries his best to show both sides of the issues and let the audiences to decide whether it is legitimate or not. This ambiguous representation of both colonizers and the colonized encourages the audience to examine colonial debates in as objective manner.

Md. A M I R Hossain

In this paper, my purpose is to focus on the underlying reading of The Tempest in the 21st century attempt with a view to revealing the colonizing attitudes of human psychology and embittered experiences of nations, ethnic groups and race. Shakespeare’s The Tempest during the late 20th century and early 21st century has been influenced by “post-colonialism” from the point of view of either Prospero or Caliban. Post-colonial criticism is dealt with Western colonialism of different nations, creed, and caste with the colonial relations of hegemony and submission, especially with regard to race and gender. Shakespeare has drawn upon the language of prayer and religion as a storehouse of emotion and symbol for which his audience and reader are readily responsive as a mode of intensified expression for the feelings and values. Shakespeare’s curses are the language of fury, hatred, helplessness, and despair wrought to its uttermost. The language of prayer is used in expressions of love, kindness, and gratitude, in outbursts of joy and wonder, and in countless eloquent pleadings for mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. The discourse of prayer, elegant and artful thought is an attempt to euphemize the 21st post-colonial domination of the island. Prospero’s ideas and thoughts extend the discourse of prayer into the life of audience. Caliban’s curses are regarded as an integral part to the dialectical structure and the discourse of prayer in the play for which they belong as cataplectic threats of Prospero. Ariel is being held to his side of a bargain at a time of desperate need; Ferdinand is being tested in self-control and in his respect for Miranda; Prospero’s enemies are subjected to corrective punishments designed to bring them through suffering to self-knowledge and a change of heart. Keywords: Ariel, Caliban, Ferdinand, Post-colonialism, Prospero, The Tempest

Deborah I K E O L U W A Jayeoba

This study seeks to explore and enunciate the characteristics of and pointers to the presence of colonialism which validates the events of colonialism in these three plays: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Aime Casaire’s A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest exposes a Western view and political indifference to colonialism; neither invalidating nor justifying. Aime Casaire’s A Tempest and Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax presents a writing back and questioning as it restructures the narrative of colonialism in its adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Rituparna Paul

The objective is to present a critical study of discursive practices of ‘othering’. The post colonial critics have referred to Caliban as the ‘other’ and this makes ground for us to delve into the politics of unsaid, or things that have been omitted. Hence, the chief focus of a post-colonial investigation of The Tempest is through the character of Caliban, seen not as the ‘deformed slave’ of the dramatis personae but as a native of the island over whom Prospero has imposed a form of colonial domination.

Ramayana Lira

Taking on assumptions about oppression, identity and representation as they are developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, this study proposes the analysis of the 1993 theatrical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It aims to discuss the role of Caliban's monstrosity in the production and how it pertains to issues such as power relations and spectacle. The main benefit of doing an analysis of a performance of a Shakespearean text seems to be the possibility of seeing the play's meaning as contingent, as a result of a series of elements (actor's body, visual clues, the theatrical institution, spectatorship) that release it from the burden of being considered as the work of a single, universal, non- contradictory mind that contemporary criticism has pointed out as the 'Shakespeare Myth'. I conclude that the 1993 RSC production presents a Tempest that, in many ways, reinforces traditional positions about th...

International Review of Humanities Studies

amir mohammad

The paper focuses on how the colonizers who in this play are Prospero and Miranda in particular, endeavor to inflict their own socio-cultural precept including their language to make the colonized fully unprotected in The Tempest as a colonial play, but eventually fail to fulfill this attempt. In addition, the high importance of learning the language of the colonizer by the colonized gets illuminated which finally contributes to Caliban so as to undermine the roots of the colonizer in the colony. This article fully evaluates affected literary works by The Tempest, the importance of transferring the colonizer's language to the colony, and the main colonizer and his manners and attitudes towards the colonized; it also brings forth postcolonial concepts including Mimicry, Orientalism, the double consciousness of the colonized and his unhomeliness. Furthermore, it features the dirge situation of mimic men who come across a disappointing dead end from both colonizers and the colonized. After all, this article reflects on the ever-presence of ambivalence and mimicry in colonial discourse and also the vital importance of violence as an inseparable part of the decolonization.

Injamamul Hoque

From Imperialism to Postcolonialism: Key Concepts

An introduction to the histories of imperialism and the writings of those who grappled with its oppressions and legacies in the twentieth century.

Imperialism, the domination of one country over another country’s political, economic, and cultural systems, remains one of the most significant global phenomena of the last six centuries. Amongst historical topics, Western imperialism is unique because it spans two different broadly conceived temporal frames: “Old Imperialism,” dated between 1450 and 1650, and “New Imperialism,” dated between 1870 and 1919, although both periods were known for Western exploitation of Indigenous cultures and the extraction of natural resources to benefit imperial economies. Apart from India, which came under British influence through the rapacious actions of the East India Company , European conquest between 1650 and the 1870s remained (mostly) dormant. However, following the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, European powers began the “ Scramble for Africa ,” dividing the continent into new colonial territories. Thus, the age of New Imperialism is demarcated by establishment of vast colonies throughout Africa, as well as parts of Asia, by European nations.

These European colonizing efforts often came at the expense of other older, non-European imperial powers, such as the so-called gunpowder empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires that flourished across South Asia and the Middle East. In the case of the Ottomans , their rise coincided with that of the Old Imperialism(s) of the West and lasted until after World War I. These were not the only imperial powers, however; Japan signaled its interest in creating a pan-Asian empire with the establishment of a colony in Korea in 1910 and expanded its colonial holdings rapidly during the interwar years. The United States, too, engaged in various forms of imperialism, from the conquest of the tribes of the First Nation Peoples, through filibustering in Central America during the mid-1800s, to accepting the imperialist call of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which the poet wrote for President Theodore Roosevelt on the occasion of Philippine-American War. While claiming to reject naked imperialism, Roosevelt still embraced expansionism, promoting the creation of a strong US Navy and advocating for expansion into Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and the Philippines to exert American influence .

The Great War is often considered the end of the new age of imperialism, marked by the rise of decolonization movements throughout the various colonial holdings. The writings of these emergent Indigenous elites, and the often-violent repression they would face from the colonial elite, would not only profoundly shape the independence struggles on the ground but would contribute to new forms of political and philosophical thought. Scholarship from this period forces us to reckon not only with colonial legacies and the Eurocentric categories created by imperialism but also with the continuing exploitation of the former colonies via neo-colonial controls imposed on post-independence countries.

The non-exhaustive reading list below aims to provide readers with both histories of imperialism and introduces readers to the writings of those who grappled with colonialism in real time to show how their thinking created tools we still use to understand our world.

Eduardo Galeano, “ Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane ,” Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (NYU Press, 1997): 1 –8.

Taken from the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this classic text, Eduardo Galeano’s introduction argues that pillaging of Latin America continued for centuries past the Old Imperialism of the Spanish Crown. This work is highly readable and informative, with equal parts of impassioned activism and historical scholarship.

Nancy Rose Hunt, “ ‘Le Bebe En Brousse’: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo ,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 3 (1988): 401–32.

Colonialism affected every aspect of life for colonized peoples. This intrusion into the intimate lives of indigenous peoples is most evident in Nancy Rose Hunt’s examination of Belgian efforts to modify birthing processes in the Belgian Congo. To increase birth rates in the colony, Belgian officials initiated a mass network of health programs focused on both infant and maternal health. Hunt provides clear examples of the underlying scientific racism that underpinned these efforts and acknowledges the effects they had on European women’s conception of motherhood.

Chima J. Korieh, “ The Invisible Farmer? Women, Gender, and Colonial Agricultural Policy in the Igbo Region of Nigeria, c. 1913–1954 ,” African Economic History No. 29 (2001): 117– 62

In this consideration of Colonial Nigeria, Chima Korieh explains how British Colonial officials imposed British conceptions of gender norms on traditional Igbo society; in particular, a rigid notion of farming as a male occupation, an idea that clashed with the fluidity of agricultural production roles of the Igbo. This paper also shows how colonial officials encouraged palm oil production, an export product, at the expense of sustainable farming practices—leading to changes in the economy that further stressed gender relations.

Colin Walter Newbury & Alexander Sydney Kanya-Forstner, “ French Policy and the Origins of the Scramble for West Africa ,” The Journal of African History 10, no. 2 (1969): 253–76.

Newbury and Kanya-Foster explain why the French decided to engage in imperialism in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. First, they point to mid-century French engagement with Africa—limited political commitment on the African coast between Senegal and Congo, with a plan for the creation of plantations within the Senegalese interior. This plan was emboldened by their military success in Algeria, which laid the foundation of a new conception of Empire that, despite complications (Britain’s expansion of their empire and revolt in Algeria, for instance) that forced the French to abandon their initial plans, would take hold later in the century.

Mark D. Van Ells, “ Assuming the White Man’s Burden: The Seizure of the Philippines, 1898–1902 ,” Philippine Studies 43, no. 4 (1995): 607–22.

Mark D. Van Ells’s work acts as an “exploratory and interpretive” rendering of American racial attitudes toward their colonial endeavors in the Philippines. Of particular use to those wishing to understand imperialism is Van Ells’s explication of American attempts to fit Filipinos into an already-constructed racist thought system regarding formerly enslaved individuals, Latinos, and First Nation Peoples. He also shows how these racial attitudes fueled the debate between American imperialists and anti-imperialists.

Aditya Mukherjee, “ Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain,” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 50 (2010): 73–82.

Aditya Mukherjee first provides an overview of early Indian intellectuals and Karl Marx’s thoughts on the subject to answer the question of how colonialism impacted the colonizer and the colonized. From there, he uses economic data to show the structural advantages that led to Great Britain’s ride through the “age of capitalism” through its relative decline after World War II.

Frederick Cooper, “ French Africa, 1947–48: Reform, Violence, and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation ,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 4 (2014): 466–78.

It can be tempting to write the history of decolonization as a given. However, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the colonial powers would not easily give up their territories. Nor is it safe to assume that every colonized person, especially those who had invested in the colonial bureaucratic systems, necessarily wanted complete independence from the colonial metropole. In this article, Frederick Cooper shows how conflicting interests navigated revolution and citizenship questions during this moment.

Hồ Chí Minh & Kareem James Abu-Zeid, “ Unpublished Letter by Hồ Chí Minh to a French Pastor ,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7, no. 2 (2012): 1–7.

Written by Nguyễn Ái Quốc (the future Hồ Chí Minh) while living in Paris, this letter to a pastor planning a pioneering mission to Vietnam not only shows the young revolutionary’s commitment to the struggle against colonialism, but also his willingness to work with colonial elites to solve the system’s inherent contradictions.

Aimé Césaire, “ Discurso sobre el Colonialismo ,” Guaraguao 9, no. 20, La negritud en America Latina (Summer 2005): 157–93; Available in English as “From Discourse on Colonialism (1955),” in I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy , ed. by Fred Lee Hord, Mzee Lasana Okpara, and Jonathan Scott Lee, 2nd ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 196–205.

This excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s essay directly challenges European claims of moral superiority and the concept of imperialism’s civilizing mission. He uses examples from the Spanish conquest of Latin America and ties them together with the horrors of Nazism within Europe. Césaire claims that through pursuing imperialism, Europeans had embraced the very savagery of which they accused their colonial subjects.

Frantz Fanon, “ The Wretched of the Earth ,” in Princeton Readings in Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato , ed. Mitchell Cohen, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 2018), 614–20.

Having served as a psychiatrist in a French hospital in Algeria, Frantz Fanon experienced firsthand the violence of the Algerian War. As a result, he would ultimately resign and join the Algerian National Liberation Front. In this excerpt from his longer work, Fanon writes on the need for personal liberation as a precursor to the political awaking of oppressed peoples and advocates for worldwide revolution.

Quỳnh N. Phạm & María José Méndez, “ Decolonial Designs: José Martí, Hồ Chí Minh, and Global Entanglements ,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 40, no. 2 (2015): 156–73.

Phạm and Méndez examine the writing of José Martí and Hồ Chí Minh to show that both spoke of anticolonialism in their local contexts (Cuba and Vietnam, respectively). However, their language also reflected an awareness of a more significant global anticolonial movement. This is important as it shows that the connections were intellectual and practical.

Edward Said, “ Orientalism ,” The Georgia Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 162–206; and “ Orientalism Reconsidered ,” Cultural Critique no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 89–107.

As a Palestinian-born academic trained in British-run schools in Egypt and Jerusalem, Edward Said created a cultural theory that named the discourse nineteenth-century Europeans had about the peoples and places of the Greater Islamic World: Orientalism. The work of academics, colonial officials, and writers of various stripes contributed to a literary corpus that came to represent the “truth” of the Orient, a truth that Said argues reflects the imagination of the “West” more than it does the realities of the “Orient.” Said’s framework applies to many geographic and temporal lenses, often dispelling the false truths that centuries of Western interactions with the global South have encoded in popular culture.

Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ,” boundary 20, No. 2 (Summer 1993), 24–50.

Gayatri Spivak’s 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” shifted the postcolonial discussion to a focus on agency and “the other.” Explicating Western discourse surrounding the practice of sati in India, Spivak asks if the oppressed and the marginalized can make themselves heard from within a colonial system. Can the subordinated, dispossessed indigenous subject be retrieved from the silence spaces of imperial history, or would that be yet another act of epistemological violence? Spivak argues that Western historians (i.e., white men speaking to white men about the colonized), in trying to squeeze out the subaltern voice, reproduce the hegemonic structures of colonialism and imperialism.

Antoinette Burton, “ Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism and the Domains of History ,” Social History 26, no. 1 (January 2001): 60–71.

In this article, Antoinette Burton considers the controversies around using the social and cultural theory as a site of analysis within the field of imperial history; specifically, concerns of those who saw political and economic history as “outside the realm” of culture. Burton deftly merges the historiographies of anthropology and gender studies to argue for a more nuanced understanding of New Imperial history.

Michelle Moyd, “ Making the Household, Making the State: Colonial Military Communities and Labor in German East Africa ,” International Labor and Working-Class History , no. 80 (2011): 53–76.

Michelle Moyd’s work focuses on an often-overlooked part of the imperial machine, the indigenous soldiers who served the colonial powers. Using German East Africa as her case study, she discusses how these “violent intermediaries” negotiated new household and community structures within the context of colonialism.

Caroline Elkins, “ The Struggle for Mau Mau Rehabilitation in Late Colonial Kenya ,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, no. 1 (2000): 25–57.

Caroline Elkins looks at the both the official rehabilitation policy enacted toward Mau Mau rebels and the realities of what took place “behind the wire.” She argues that in this late colonial period, the colonial government in Nairobi was never truly able to recover from the brutality it used to suppress the Mau Mau movement and maintain colonial control.

Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Decolonization as Moment and Process,” in Decolonization: A Short History , trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Princeton University Press, 2017): 1–34.

In this opening chapter of their book, Decolonization: A Short History , Jansen and Osterhammel lay out an ambitious plan for merging multiple perspectives on the phenomena of decolonization to explain how European colonial rule became de-legitimized. Their discussion of decolonization as both a structural and a normative process is of particular interest.

Cheikh Anta Babou, “ Decolonization or National Liberation: Debating the End of British Colonial Rule in Africa ,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 632 (2010): 41–54.

Cheikh Anta Babou challenges decolonization narratives that focus on colonial policy-makers or Cold War competition, especially in Africa, where the consensus of colonial elites was that African colonial holdings would remain under dominion for the foreseeable future even if the empire might be rolled back in South Asia or the Middle East. Babou emphasizes the liberation efforts of colonized people in winning their independence while also noting the difficulties faced by newly independent countries due to years of imperialism that had depleted the economic and political viability of the new nation. This view supports Babou’s claim that continued study of imperialism and colonialism is essential.

Mahmood Mamdani, “ Settler Colonialism: Then and Now ,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015): 596–614.

Mahmood Mamdani begins with the premise that “Africa is the continent where settler colonialism has been defeated; America is where settler colonialism triumphed.” Then, he seeks to turn this paradigm on its head by looking at America from an African perspective. What emerges is an evaluation of American history as a settler colonial state—further placing the United States rightfully in the discourse on imperialism.

Antoinette Burton, “S Is for SCORPION,” in Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times , ed. Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani (Duke University Press, 2020): 163–70.

In their edited volume, Animalia, Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani use the form of a bestiary to critically examine British constructions of imperial knowledge that sought to classify animals in addition to their colonial human subjects. As they rightly point out, animals often “interrupted” imperial projects, thus impacting the physical and psychological realities of those living in the colonies. The selected chapter focuses on the scorpion, a “recurrent figure in the modern British imperial imagination” and the various ways it was used as a “biopolitical symbol,” especially in Afghanistan.

Editor’s Note: The details of Edward Said’s education have been corrected.

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Postcolonial theory.

Vijay Mishra Vijay Mishra Department of English, Murdoch University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1001
Published online: 30 April 2020

Postcolonial discourse is the critical underside of imperialism, the latter a hegemonic form going back to the beginnings of empire building. In the languages of the colonized—those of the ruling class as well as its subjects—a critical discourse of displacement, enslavement, and exploitation co-existed with what Conrad called the redemptive power of an “idea.” Postcolonial theory took shape in response to this discourse as a way of explaining this complex colonial encounter. But the discourse itself required a consciousness of the colonial experience in its diverse articulations and a corresponding legitimation of the lives of those colonized. This shift in consciousness only began to take critical shape in the mid-20th century with the gradual dismantling of the non-settler European empires. In Africa anti-colonial agitation congealed, as a theoretical problematic, around the idea of négritude , a nativist “thinking” that was built around alternative and self-empowering readings of African civilizations. In the writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire, négritude affirmed difference as it foregrounded an oppositional discourse against a “sovereign” European teleological historiography. The African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o pushed this further by insisting that, where possible, postcolonial writing should be in the vernacular. But even as difference was affirmed, with the emergence of the psychoanalytic–Hegelian writings of Frantz Fanon , the discourse ceased to be defiantly oppositional and moved towards an engagement with the larger principles of Western humanism, including a critique of the instrumental uses of the project of the Enlightenment. Out of this grew a language of a postcolonial theory which could then trace the colonial experience in its entirety, in all its complex modes and manifestations, to uncover the genesis of a critical postcolonial discourse, a discourse shaped in the shadow of the imperialist encounter. However, for the theory to take shape as an analytic it needed something more than a binary exposition or a simple historical genealogy; it required an understanding of those power structures that governed the representation of colonized peoples. The text that gave a language and a methodology for the latter was Edward W. Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism . Although Said did not use the term “postcolonial theory” in the first edition of his work, his argument (after Foucault) of the links between discourse and power provided a framework within which a postcolonial theory could be given shape. Works by two key theorists followed in quick succession: Homi K. Bhabha on complicit postcolonialism and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the subaltern and postcolonial reason. The three—Said, Bhabha, and Spivak—regularly invoked as a triumvirate or a trinity provided solid plinths for the scaffolding of innumerable studies of postcolonialism. Of these studies, in the Anglophone context a few may be cited here. These are: Robert J. C. Young and Bart Moore-Gilbert on critical Western historiography and colonial desire, Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry on the globality of capitalism and the need to historicize scholarship, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam on Eurocentrism, Dipesh Chakrabarty on provincializing Europe, Gauri Viswanathan on the role of premodern thought in postcolonial activism, and Harish Trivedi on postcolonial vernaculars. In all these studies the specters of Marx emerge as ghostly flares, which is why postcolonial theory is not so much an established paradigm with identifiable limits but an idea, a debate which in existential parlance carries a sense of exhaustion, ennui, that has no closure but is always an opening delimited only by a given theorist’s disciplinary boundaries.

postcolonial
subaltern studies
Frantz Fanon
Edward Said
Homi Bhabha
Gayatri Spivak
recognition
specters of Marx
ethnography

Designing, Defining, Declaring an Idea

Colony comes from a rich and important Latin root colo —“to abide, dwell, stay (in a place), to inhabit it”—which is etymologically linked to the Sanskrit root kshi , “to dwell, inhabit. 1 ” From this meaning it developed a set of related meanings: to work (the earth), to cultivate it, and hence metaphorically to work the mind or soul; and to worship the gods. These are diverse meanings for a modern mindset, but in the premodern world in which these terms were formed there is an intrinsic connection between living in a place, working the land, and honoring its gods, the spirits of the land. The subject of the col (colony) was thus an inhabitant or a farmer. From this usage it drifted to refer to a settler in a foreign place, a “colonist” in the modern sense. Yet this drift was not innocent, and in the Latin the other meanings remained active, part of the ideological work it did to justify and legitimate different modalities of invasion: living in (and dominating) a new land, “improving” it by work, and bringing new gods—all strategies that European powers employed in the 500 years of European colonization, beginning with 1492 when Columbus set sail for the “New” World and when Boabdil lost al-Andalus to Isabella and Ferdinand. 2

This contradictory legacy over 500 years then underwent an amnesiac shift in the stock of words of modern European languages. “Colony” came to refer primarily to invasive settlements, not to a neutral “dwelling.” It also lost its deep roots in premodern ways of life, especially religion. All these elements are still present in contemporary forms of colonization, in both its classic, colonial, and postmodern/ postcolonial forms. The realities have not changed, but meaning has slowly seeped out of the term. The word “postcolonialism,” emerging as it did from this complex history, is a neologism (created through affixes added to the headword “colony”) that grew out of older elements to capture a seemingly unique moment in world history, a configuration of experiences and insights, hopes, and dreams arising from a hitherto silenced part of the world, taking advantage of new conditions to “search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era,” “not [as] the end of colonization [but] … a certain kind of colonialism,” creating an altogether different vantage point with “locomotive, portmanteau” qualities from which to review the past and the future. 3 If we accept postcolonial theory as an intentional discourse in a changing and variable historical context (a context whose genesis may be variously located in 1492 when Columbus set sail for the new world, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haitian revolution which began in 1791 , merely two years after the French Revolution, the Barbados slave uprising of April 1816 , or 1947 , when India gained its independence) then the question of what shape this critical stance or attitude took begins to acquire variable centers. 4

In Anglophone postcolonial theory (our brief here) one returns to two “moments” as being critical, if not foundational. The first is what may be broadly called the triumph of the “monolingualism” of the conqueror, which had its symbolic origin in a Minute—Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education, dated 2 February 1835 —aimed principally at creating a citizen who would view reality as the colonizer did. The Minute has been so extensively rehearsed that parts of it made their way even into Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh . 5 What Rushdie did not include was Macaulay’s reading of the primacy of English as a civilizing and cleansing principle.

[These people will form a] class who may be interpreters between us and millions whom we govern,—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from Western nomenclature. 6

This is imperialist Macaulay, but there is a second “moment” worth remembering. A little under twenty years after Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education, on 25 June 1853 , Marx’s essay on “The British Rule in India” was published in the New York Tribune . 7 Marx gives a dismal picture of India as a nation prone to invaders from outside, but also mystified from within through “a religion of sensualist exuberance, … of self-torturing asceticism,” a religion which, as Kevin B Anderson notes, Marx felt was marred by “Hinduism’s deep-seated antihumanism.” 8 Against this less than endearing historical account (which he clearly borrowed from Hegel) Marx argued British imperialism was of a very different kind: “the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before.” 9 Quoting Sir Stamford Raffles on the capitalist ethos of the Dutch East India Company, Marx notes that the British East India Company treated people as property from whom labor could be extracted for the “monopolizing selfishness of traders.” 10 This capitalist enterprise, altogether new for India, “separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all the ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.” 11 The end of cottage industries, the products of the handloom and the spinning wheel (later admired by Gandhi), through the transformation of agriculture, notably to produce cotton for the mills of Lancashire, had the effect of “blowing up their economical basis” thereby producing the “only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.” 12 It is at this point, a point of reversal one may say, that Marx turns to the closed world of Indian communities held together by a barbaric “Oriental despotism” (a function in fact of the social structure of the Indian village itself) not of the colonial kind but one that restrained the human mind itself and isolated it from its natural historical development. Bound to quietism (as Nehru himself acknowledged) the Indian subject lost its sovereignty as a figure of history and subjected itself to a brutalizing worship of nature and religious deities. 13 Marx then observes in a passage cited by Edward Said as an example, even in a great thinker, of the power of the formidable censor of “Romantic Orientalism,” 14

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. 15

The Indian liberationists, notably Gandhi and Nehru, understood Marx’s argument that capitalist incursion in itself leads to an uprising by the proletariat because the contradictions of capitalism are far too obvious. And yet both Nehru and Gandhi failed to successfully create a genuine revolution of the proletariat because, against Marx, as Aijaz Ahmad has argued, Gandhi celebrated a static, changeless India whose superior wisdom opted for a moral vision contained within a primitive system of production. 16 Marx’s reading of British colonialism is the hidden subtext of postcolonial theory: colonization may have been brutal, dehumanizing, racist, exploitative and the rest, but in the narrative of Marx it should have produced a postcolonial insurgency the product of which would have been the right kind of postcolonial nation. The specter of Marx haunts postcolonial theory and continues to do so to this day.

Origins of a Theory: Negritude and Liberation

In spite of Marx’s historical teleology, it could be said that postcolonial theory began not as an ideology but as an “aesthetic” aimed at empowering Caliban with the “power to see .” 17 In the hands of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire (who coined the word “négritude”) an aesthetic was transformed into an ideology of liberation which, although located within a Manichaean binary of the colonizer and the colonized, did not part company from the language of European humanism. For Senghor, negritude was “an instrument of liberation … a contribution to the humanism of the 20th century ,” encompassing as it does “ the sum of the cultural values of the black world .” 18 To understand what these cultural values are one has to “feel” that the African “body” is akin to “spirit-matter” where the body itself is an energizing spirit, a source of knowledge, transcending the Western dualism of spirit and matter as distinct categories. Borrowing from the affective theories of Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin (both with strong mystical tendencies) the African body projects the world as part of a larger synthesis of which it itself is a part. Wolof, the language of Senegal, writes Senghor, has at least three words for spirit— xel , sago , or degal —because matter, which is never dead, itself is an embodied spirit. 19 The sign “Man” is a sign of a collective responsibility—to one’s fellow-men, to nature, to the spirit that inheres in all life forms—and not one of self-definition and individuality. What colonization obfuscates, occludes and finally trivializes is the historical force of the ideas of negritude in Western thinking itself. From St. Augustine to Rimbaud, Picasso, and Braque the interplay of forces and the non-mimetic modes of African art (which for the African always combined social activity with aesthetic judgment) influenced, humanistically, the Western mind. Negritude was the first of the politics of recognition later theorized by Charles Taylor as a system, an idea, that contributed to the civilizing project of humanity. 20 African harmony, its unity of form and movement, its mystical sense of oneness with the earth, with climate, with all life forms, anticipates postcolonial theory’s intervention into areas such as climate change and ecocriticism. 21 More than anything else this was the first unified postcolonial theory to emerge, and one that brought the affective, the body, into the ideas of recognition and liberation together. Lamming had anticipated this, and much of British black grime music (a genre that draws on ragga, hip hop, rap, and the Rastarfari ideology of Bob Marley) continues to reflect this. But, to quote Bart Moore-Gilbert, “the negritudinists’ … essentialist myth of black identity, social or psychic, across the diverse spectrum of black cultures and histories” foreclosed critical discussion; a more historically grounded postcolonial discourse was needed. 22 That discourse came from the pens of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon.

Memmi and Fanon

In his classic work, The Colonizer and the Colonized (in French 1957 ; English translation 1965 ) Albert Memmi had argued that the colonized were the product of a specific period of colonization out of which grew an anti-colonial discourse. 23 Since the “post-” was not available to Memmi as an epistemic category, the “postcolonial” was emphatically oppositional. 24 Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote the Introduction to the first edition of the book (in French), read Memmi’s oppositional (liberationist) rhetoric in the context of a system “born towards the middle of the last (that is nineteenth) century, that will manufacture its own destruction of itself.” 25 In this argument Sartre also reminded the reader of Marx’s observation that the proletariat “bears within it the destruction of bourgeois society.” 26 Memmi’s early study lends itself to this reading even if, 35 years on, Nadine Gordimer in her Introduction to the later edition of the work argued that as a programmatic statement about postcolonial struggle, the application of Memmi’s work is limited because it deals with the Maghrib, not Africa south of the Sahara, where the colonial situation was more dramatically played out. What is true, though, is Memmi’s reading of racism as not “an accidental detail, but … a consubstantial part of colonialism … the highest expression of that colonial system.” 27

Writers on negritude and Memmi had provided a theoretical framework with which to rethink, and indeed to rewrite, the colonial encounter. It was left to Frantz Fanon to give that framework a more powerful philosophical grounding by exploring the psyche of the colonizer through an examination of the dark side of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. Two books of Fanon are pivotal and quite possibly more influential than other works cited by postcolonial theorists. These two books— The Wretched of the Earth (in French 1961 ) and Black Skin, White Masks (in French 1952 )—may be “entered” into more productively through their prefaces written, respectively, by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi Bhabha. 28 The two prefaces, separated by some 25 years, demonstrate two key features of postcolonial theory, both arising out of Fanon’s works. The first, by Sartre, reads Fanon as a revolutionary for whom the anti-colonial struggle never comes to an end, and would require more than an affirmation of one’s past, more than an unqualified insistence on one’s national culture (Fanon calls it “Negro-ism”); the second, by Bhabha, sees in Fanon modes of resistance built into the lives of the colonized, and reads colonization itself as a two-way trauma. We need to make these positions clear because they remain, to this day, the two principal tenets of postcolonial theory: to oppose and by opposing end them, or to theorize a process that has built into it life-worlds that no longer offer non-ambiguous solutions.

In his Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Sartre explores, after Fanon, violence as an existential imperative produced by the colonial condition. Throughout the Preface Sartre appropriates the voice of Fanon, who in turn had appropriated the voice of Aimé Césaire. In the opening pages of his Discours sur le colonialisme ( 1955 ) Césaire had begun with the devastating words: “Une civilisation qui s’avère incapable de résoudre les problèmes que suscite son fonctionnement est une civilisation décadente … L’Europe est indéfendable” [“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization … Europe is indefensible”]. Sartre captures something of the spirit of Césaire’s polemic as he quotes approvingly Fanon’s own diagnosis of Europe: “Europe … is running headlong into the abyss; we should do well to keep away from it.” 29 Against the “simulacrum of phony independence,” which Europe gives his ex-colonies—because the mother country keeps some of its own spitting images in play and in power even after independence—what is needed is a struggle, a fight, among the colonized themselves, led by a unified revolutionary class. The struggle is neither a retreat into a mythic African past, a romantic turn and a withdrawal, nor one around the figure of the Western ideal of the world-historical individual who projects the Law of Reason, the kind, without naming him, one discovers in Gandhi with his cult of suffering and non-violence. What the colonized have inherited from the colonizer is something pernicious, something inhuman, something degrading—the cult of violence, the power of brute force, and brutality itself. Whereas for the negritude theorists black Africa offered an alternative romanticism that may redeem Europe itself, Fanon’s Hegel offered an existential crisis of being; one in which violence—an anti-colonial struggle—would play a role because violence itself was a profoundly colonial legacy. But this reading, incisive as it was, faced a more powerful and pervasive postmodern reading which came from someone who would become a foundational theorist of postcolonialism.

Homi Bhabha’s reading of Fanon’s second book, Black Skin, White Masks , “the only serious competitor to Said’s ( 1978 ) Orientalism as the foundational text of modern Postcolonial Studies,” is so different. Between the two readings of Fanon—Sartre’s and Bhabha’s—the battleground or the direction of postcolonial theory is laid out: one steadfastly oppositional; the other almost accommodating and complicit. 30 Before turning to Bhabha’s critique, we must capture Fanon’s own voice about colonialism by referring to a passage each from The Wretched of the Earth and from Black Skin, White Masks . From the first:

Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. 31

And from the second:

I remember, in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between Negro and European poetry, and a French acquaintance told me enthusiastically, “At bottom you are a white man.” 32

In his reading Bhabha must shift Fanon away from the writer of the “seamless narrative” to the “purveyor of the transgressive and transitional truth.” 33 The latter—“transitional truth”—Bhabha argues, surfaces so dramatically in the “silence of a sudden rupture” in Fanon’s enigmatic pronouncement: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” 34 Bhabha’s reflection on this utterance captures what may be called a key postcolonial “turn” in as much as the theoretical point of view took on a definitive stance in postcolonial theory. Bhabha continues,

That familiar alignment of colonial subjects – Black/ White, Self/ Other – is disturbed with one brief pause and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they are found to rest on the narcissistic myths of Negritude or White cultural supremacy. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement that pushes Fanon’s writing to the edge of things; the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, “exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”. 35

In the hands of Memmi, Fanon, Sartre, and the writers on negritude, colonial history was one of brutal subjugation which required at the cultural level a clear statement of ethnographic equality within difference and at the political level a total dismantling of imperialist structures. To Bhabha, who refers to negritude and White supremacy as myths, the colonial transaction (as “translation”) had fractured the colonized subject to such an extent that the “post-colonial” colonized could never function within an absolute Self–Other binary. The language that Bhabha deploys, seen even in the short passage quoted, is one that would create out of the painful experience of colonization a world view that would forever put to rest systems of absolute difference. The theory that defines this approach, in broad terms, is deconstruction encased at times within a metonymic rendition of the signifier, as found in Lacan’s reading of Freud and deployed by Fanon himself:

It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan’s theory of the mirror period [ stage ], to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. … one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. 36

Homi Bhabha and Cultural “Hybridity”

It is a broad claim to make but it must be made: there is no postcolonial theory without Homi Bhabha, disagreements with him, however intense, notwithstanding. As noted already in Bhabha’s reading of Fanon, he rejects foundationalist historiographies on the grounds that the postcolonial present (with its global flows and hybrid identity politics) finds them attenuating. In the alternative historiography fashioned by Bhabha, anti-colonial nationalist practice repeats, with a difference, an original metropolitan nationalism. Theorists of bourgeois anti-colonial struggle would agree this often happens. For Bhabha, it seems this is the only model of nationalist struggle in the domain of anti-colonialism: a metropolitan nationalism repeated with a difference (an ambivalence) but within a space that is semiotically the same since it is invested with the same bureaucratic and juridical systems. This is a little uncanny, as Bhabha says, because it is a kind of return of the repressed, a compulsive repetition but one to which one desires to return to participate in the (il)logic of having been there before. The colonized subject is thus bound to mimic (the narrative of the struggle presupposes a prior metropolitan grand narrative) and can only exist in a condition of ambivalent hybridity. 37 But in doing so the move, the theory, the premise, undermines, in Neil Lazarus’s words, the “colonialist script” itself. 38

The theory took shape in an early published essay—“Signs Taken for Wonders” ( 1985 )—also included as the sixth chapter in Bhabha’s highly influential The Location of Culture . 39 As Bill Bell says in an historical recontextualization of this essay, “[the essay] constitutes a discourse whose coinages – ‘hybridity,’ ‘sly civility,’ ‘mimicry’ – have passed into such common usage in the past twenty-five years that they have come to colonize the postcolonial imagination with an imaginative power rare within the rarefied world of cultural theory.” 40 The value of the essay, which may be used as representing the entire volume of collected pieces, is that, apart from the postcolonial coinages noted by Bell, it represents for many the special ways in which a postcolonial theorist reads an archive.

The essay begins with a conversation recounted in the January 1818 issue of The Missionary Register between one Anund Messeh, a prized early Brahmin convert to Christianity and now a catechist, and 500 men and women “seated under the shade of the trees” just outside Delhi in May 1817 who were reading, according to Anund Messeh (“Masih,” in Hindi a messenger, a Messiah, is a common surname for Indian converts) “the Gospel of our Lord, translated into the Hindoostanee Tongue.” 41 When told by Anund that the Gospels teach the religion of the “European Sahibs” and the book is in fact theirs, the elder of the group replies, “Ah! No, that cannot be, for they eat flesh,” suggesting that meat eaters cannot be recipients of revelation of what is presumed to be a “Hindu” text. It seems they remain unconvinced even when Anund insists that it is the European Sahibs who were the original recipients of the book and it is they who gave it to them. When asked why they wore white they answer “The people of God should wear white raiment” as a sign of their purity. Anund reads this as a sign of their submission to the God of the Book (Jesus) and asks them to come to Meerut where a missionary priest would baptize them “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” They don’t take this offer and excuse themselves because there is harvesting to be done. But since they meet once a year, the next meeting may well be in Meerut. Anund then explains to them the nature of the Sacrament and Baptism. They are happy to undergo Baptism but baulk at the thought of participating in the holy Sacrament, where wine or sweetened water is shared, because the “Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us.” One wonders how Anund had explained the Christian Sacrament and if indeed he had explained it with reference to communal eating (commensalism) in the Last Supper. To the elder’s retort that the Sacrament would not “do for us” because “the Europeans eat cow’s flesh” Anund seems to suggest that when the Word of God enters the mind of men, real understanding (of the Sacrament) would follow. Anund’s account ends as follows:

They replied, “If all our country will receive this Sacrament, then will we.” I then observed, “The time is at hand, when all the countries will receive this WORD!” They replied, “True!” 42

For Bhabha the incident, as recounted by Anund, is metonymic in the sense that it repeats the moment of the arrival of the Book in colonized societies. The printed book (which can be mechanically reproduced without any variants) had a mystical power in and of itself. The power is then linked to its original owners, the English Sahibs, who with the Book brought a new religion as well as a new polity. To Bhabha the episode is symptomatic of the sly games played by the subaltern, the levels of mimicry and under-cutting in their responses all the more remarkable because these subalterns themselves were Sadhs, a rebellious group like the Kabir Panthis and the Nath Yogis who emphasized oneness of being and wore white. Whereas Anund Messeh was complicit as an instrument of evangelical imperialism, the subalterns recognizing his complicity played along with him.

For the postcolonial theorist Anund is the perfect candidate for the ways in which the self-interest of the local, the indigenous, combined with the global interest of the conqueror. But was Anund Messeh himself both complicit and at the same time a sly mimic who simply gave the master what they, evangelists like Henry Fisher, John Chamberlain and Bishop Wilson, wanted, offering an ironic disturbance even if irony totally bypassed him? 43 In Bhabha’s reading of the event in the Delhi grove, the mimics were the unknown Sadhs and the voice of authority the compliant and baptized Brahmin, now an excitable Christian catechist. In Bell’s reading the mimic is the loquacious and stereotypical sly Indian catechist who plays the game. In this reading Anund’s gloss on the Gospels (“These books teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book”) is not an affirmation of the master text of the masters but one characterized by the theoretical device of bathos, undercutting. Anund then is the sly stereotypical Indian playing a game that Hindus have always played, demonstrating as they always did characteristics of mimicry, sly civility, and hybridity avant la lettre. In the end, as the Indian Mutiny of 1857 rages, Anund leaves Christianity, returns to the religion of his wife who had never converted and comes to a tragic end as he is killed by a Muslim, quite possibly for abandoning his faith in the first place. 44 Either way, Bhabha’s reading has theoretical value and signifies a larger historical context in that it is part of an enunciatory process that goes back to Wilson Harris’s contention that even when a presumed assimilation of contraries has taken place a certain “void” remains and it is through an entry into this “void” (Bhabha’s “Third Space”) that participation in an alien discourse begins to take shape. 45 When, later, Bhabha returns to a “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” the specters of Harris remain. 46

The Ghost of Conrad

V. S. Naipaul once observed: “And I found that Conrad … had been everywhere before me.” 47 This is true of postcolonial theory because, recalling Dostoevsky on Gogol, it, too, has come out of Conrad’s coattails. A recurring starting point of postcolonial theory is related to the project of the Enlightenment, where the subject is fashioned around personal autonomy and the Law of Reason. 48 Individualism, in this regard, is prized as a valuable thing in itself. Other subjects—those who had not been “cooked” by the Enlightenment (or European civilization more generally)—could (and should) strive towards this goal of autonomy. This is how imperialism was structured—Europe went out to “cook” other subjectivities into its own rational design and the process of civilization was connected to how well the native could be like “us.” The turn of the 20th century , however, began to show signs of a “new ethnographic conception of culture” where other ways of speaking about cultural subjects were shown to be equally valid as the new breed of ethnographers advanced a theory of critical cultural relativity against the older cultural essentialism. James Clifford, to whose work I now turn, develops his reading of cultural relativity through a comparison between Conrad and the anthropologist Malinowski, founder of what is now termed ethnography or the study of cultures. 49

The argument hinges on the very straightforward idea that ethnography has yet to find its Conrad. What does Clifford mean by this? Reading through Clifford’s juxtaposition of Malinowski’s Diary and Conrad’s Darkness we immediately note that Malinowski cannot free himself from Eurocentric discourses of self and identity. Malinowski is thus faced with a dilemma—how indeed to represent the truth of “discrepant worlds” even as one works within the discipline of ethnography. So Malinowski goes, in a sense, to Conrad, representing his life in Conradian terms, and rewriting themes from Heart of Darkness .

Both Heart of Darkness and the Diary portray “a crisis of identity” at the limits of Western civilization. But since the crisis, in the case of Kurtz (leading as the crisis does to moral and spiritual disintegration) is far too great, and is beyond representation, it has to be transformed either into a “horror” or a lie. The latter is what Marlow does when he is asked to tell the truth about Kurtz to his betrothed. He offers a more palatable version of the character, not the mystery of the horror, but the circumspection of reassurance. The betrothed feels relieved, the life of Kurtz is not wasted but put to good use. Honor triumphs, although this honor is possible because Marlow lies. Truth is known only to the small group of listeners on the Nellie . In the world beyond it is the lie that will persist. One is tempted to say that James Clifford—and Malinowski before him—is actually seeing in Conrad’s narrative a parable of ethnography and by extension the postcolonial. The white anthropologist working in liminal societies (but located in a complex linguistic/ cultural formation) constructs cultural differences against the European push to slot cultures into a binary (civilized/ barbaric; raw/ cooked, etc.). This “anthropologist,” however, composes a text beneath which lies a host of other texts, notes of conflicting kinds, that he/she had produced during field work. Marlow’s tale is similarly constructed; it is a fiction, a lie, behind which are truths that exist within contradictory discourses and genres. If one has to find truth one has to locate it through contrapuntal readings of Marlow’s discoveries such as his encounter with the book by one Towsor or Towson “lovingly stitched” (as we discover later by a Russian sailor in harlequin whom Marlow meets), found in a shack by the riverbank. The “dead” and useless book is placed against the vibrant river as the sign of civilization, a commodity which makes more sense to Marlow than the tenebrous river itself. A contrapuntal reading—in fact a postcolonial reading following on Edward Said’s description of a new postcolonial hermeneutic—discloses the triumph of the novel as dialogic form, for it does what ethnography cannot do. 50 There is, of course, the matter of structure itself: in Heart of Darkness , even Marlow’s monological narrative can be undercut through the “ironic” structure of the mediated frame narration. What Clifford is saying is that Conrad provides us with a model of writing about cultures, and the novel form does precisely what a critical ethnography has not been able to do. Conrad’s work is the model for both postcolonial theory and practice.

Chinua Achebe, author of the foundational postcolonial/ African novel Things Fall Apart ( 1958 ), does not buy this reading of Conrad. In a lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts in 1975 and later revised in 1987 Achebe writes how Conrad sets up Africa as a “foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own spiritual grace will be manifest … [an] ‘other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization.” 51 The uncited subtext here is F. R. Leavis’s reading of Heart of Darkness in his influential The Great Tradition ( 1948 ). Deploying the language of high literary criticism and English sensibility, Leavis read Heart of Darkness as an exemplary text that achieved “its overpowering evocation of atmosphere by means of ‘objective correlatives’.” 52

Against Leavis’s emphasis on the work’s sinister and fantastic “atmosphere” and Towser or Towson’s book on seamanship as a “symbol of tradition, sanity, and the moral idea … in the dark heart of Africa,” that gave the right language to an emotion, Achebe isolates phrases such as “ugly,” “the savage,” and contrasts Conrad’s treatment of black men and what seems like Kurtz’s African mistress with Kurtz’s betrothed, the European woman. 53 Denied the full force of language, the black man in the novel speaks twice: once as a cannibal, a second time voicing the famous line “Mistah Kurtz – he dead,” which is mispronounced and incorrectly syntaxed. 54 For Leavis, representing as he does the canonical literary critic/ ideal reader, the latter is a statement about death without “adjectival qualification” or the use of a copula (a sign of predication with the verb to be); for a black critic this is sheer parody of the black man’s failure to master language: “Language is too grand for these chaps; let’s give them dialect,” writes Achebe. 55 As to the argument that it is not Africa but the European mind which is being dismantled and Conrad is in fact even less charitable to the Europeans, Achebe remains unconvinced: “Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?” he writes. The damnation is straightforward and alarming: “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.” 56

To Achebe, whose own training in literary criticism in colonial Nigeria was heavily influenced by Leavis, the pertinent question is whether such a novel can be called a great work of art? Achebe’s answer is an emphatic “No.” He suggests that Conrad has a problem with “niggers” as there is too much in common between Marlow and Conrad’s biographies to deny this identification. For Achebe Heart of Darkness is an offensive and deplorable book because (1) the humanity of black people is questioned, and (2) the illusion is given that this is somehow the truth. Achebe’s reading of Conrad anticipates Said’s argument: the West needs its dark Other. In Achebe’s words, “the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.” 57

Postcolonial defense of Conrad’s work has come from all quarters. Following the lead of Jim Clifford who saw Conrad’s novel as a model for ethnography because of its dialogic form, postcolonial critics have mounted a similar defense. A couple of examples will be sufficient. According to Wilson Harris, Conrad’s work showed that the homogeneous cultural order (upon which the novel form was based) contained a hideous bias, expressed by “horror.” 58 It is this homogeneity, the bias, that produced imperialism, and Conrad deconstructs the form to expose the bias built into the form. Others, including Nico Israel and Edward Said, have turned to the metaphor of the halo in Heart of Darkness : truth is not a kernel (as Achebe finds it) but a series of complex centers depending on how we read the central images of the haze and the light in Conrad. 59 Said himself would return to Conrad (and Flaubert) in Culture and Imperialism ( 1993 ) under the sub-heading “The Native Under Control.” 60 Although later in the section Said would acknowledge “Chinua Achebe’s well-known criticism of Conrad (that he was a racist who totally dehumanized Africa’s native population)” he would add that in his later novels, notably Nostromo and Victory , Conrad treats both the local Indians and the ruling-class Spaniards with the “same pitying contempt and exoticism he reserves for African Blacks.” 61 Conrad, of course, has a European readership to address, and Said notes this, but Said does not read Conrad directly as a spokesperson for imperialism. The person who does so is the narrator Marlow, who “confirms Kurtz’s action: restoring Africa to European hegemony by historicizing and narrating its strangeness” and whose voice Achebe unproblematically identifies with Conrad. Said, however, notes that in James Ngugi’s [Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s] The River Between , Conrad’s dark river at the heart of the continent, is full of life, has a name, and is redemptive. 62

Edward W Said

The reference to Conrad in Said, whose first major publication was on Conrad, takes one to the work that is considered foundational in the history of postcolonial theory. 63 The work in question is Orientalism ( 1978 ), for which he wrote an Afterword in 1994 . One turns to the Afterword to map out the connections between Said’s magisterial work and the advent of postcolonialism, as it is here that postcolonial theory is addressed. Although Said’s own position remains a lot more ambiguous and he does not, in any impartial reading, make a direct, derivational connection between his book and postcolonial theory, the book, as he concedes in the Afterword, has become “several different books” with each theory (postcolonial, multicultural, subaltern, to name three obvious ones) in different ways claiming direct lineage to it as the source text. 64

Orientalism, Said argued, was a system like many others from which liberation was necessary. As Bart Moore-Gilbert glosses, “Western domination of the non-Western world is not some arbitrary phenomenon but a conscious and purposive process governed by the will and intention of individuals as well as by institutional imperatives.” 65 It was for this reason that Said

wanted readers to make use of [his] work so they might then produce new studies of their own that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a generous, enabling mode … The invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses; the analyses of subaltern history; the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast new developments in feminist and minority discourses – to all these … I am pleased and flattered that Orientalism often makes a difference. 66

The modern version of Orientalism—and postcolonial theory addresses this—manifests itself in those binary discourses of difference that relegate minorities and people of color to fixed identities, treating them as racial enclaves, breeds, ethnicities outside of the humanistic ethos of the West. The erstwhile category of the Third World and the present category of the Global South, even as the latter is read as an alternative economic bloc, perpetuate the orientalist discourse of fixed identities and binary absolutisms.

In spite of Achebe’s devastating critique of Conrad, Said’s work—which was not a wholesale denial of the achievements of Western civilization—led, in postcolonial studies, to a “re-reading of the canonical cultural works, not to demote or somehow dish dirt on them, but to re-investigate some of their assumptions, going beyond the stifling hold on them of some version of the master–slave binary dialectic.” 67 He went on to suggest that postcolonial writers such as C. L. R. James, Césaire, Rushdie, and Walcott show how their daring formal achievements “are in effect a re-appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re-formulation.” 68 Although Said himself speaks about how his classic work was an inspiration rather than a direct influence, the impact of his work has been so extensive that the anthropologist Stanley Kurtz in a testimony on Said to the US House Subcommiitee on Select Education ( June 19, 2003 ) could say, distorting Said’s complex book,

The ruling academic paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Eastern studies) is called “post-colonial theory.” Post-colonial theory was founded by Columbia University professor of comparative literature, Edward Said. Said gained fame in 1978 , with the publication of his book, Orientalism . In that book, Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with 19th century intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power. 69

The Subaltern School

In his Afterword Said had singled out the work of the Subaltern School for special attention. He wrote,

Perhaps the most brilliant revisionist work was done not in Middle East Studies, but in the field of Indology with the advent of Subaltern Studies, a group of remarkable scholars and researchers led by Ranajit Guha. Their aim was nothing less than a revolution in historiography, their immediate goal being to rescue the writing of Indian history from the domination of the nationalist elite and restore to it the important role of the urban poor and the rural masses. 70

Frantz Fanon had remarked on phony independence against which a proper revolutionary movement was necessary. The inspirational leader of the Subaltern Studies Group, Ranajit Guha, embraced a similar point of view. There was nothing particularly altruistic in the motives of the Indian nationalist leaders as the subsequent historiography of the nationalist struggle, filtered as it was through the visage of a privileged class, did not and could not (because it had no theoretical apparatus with which to do so) explain, interpret or even acknowledge “the contribution made by the people on their own , that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism.” 71 This unhistorical historiography, a product of a particular class with its privileged class outlook, had no way of handling the contribution of the subaltern classes, whose resistance and modus operandi had little to do with the dominant and privileged indigenous society whose resistance remained principally legalistic and constitutional against the more radical, unorganized, violent, and immediate one of the subaltern. The indebtedness to Antonio Gramsci is clear. In his “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria” Gramsci had made the point that the State, representing in its “unity” the interests of the ruling class, is to be seen in terms of its excluded opposite, the subaltern classes, who lack unity and cannot be unified within the structural definition of a state (which expresses the ideology of a unified class). 72

Excluded from a “vertically” defined politics, the Indian bourgeoisie never spoke for them; their removal from history was complete. Yet their presence should have been self-evident; their silent interactions with the elite obvious. Vivek Chibber, who has written most persuasively on the subject, makes the following perceptive observation on the Guha passages already cited.

Thus, Guha concludes, whereas the European bourgeoisie had come to power by forging a hegemonic coalition with workers and peasants, there would be no parallel experience in the colonial world. The bourgeoisie would exercise dominance, but not hegemony. 73

For postcolonial theory, the subaltern thesis had a larger universal appeal in that the same process was underway elsewhere too: a process of complicity and, by extension, the continuing power of Western, Great Man historiography, where the subaltern is no more than a cypher. And it may well be that the failure to adequately incorporate and acknowledge the subaltern in the narrative of struggle accounts for the failure of independence leaders to create a more inclusive idea of state and civic society.

In subaltern theory, as in postcolonial theory, the “heroic” figure was the silent or silenced marginalized figure of the peasant as revolutionary. This notion of a composite subject in need of redemption (but whose presence was nevertheless real) changed with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s epochal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 74 Whether “sovereign” or a “cypher” the subaltern—in Spivak’s deconstructive thinking—challenged the idea of the human itself because the autonomous [subaltern] subject can only be envisaged as the subject excluded from the Law of Reason. In Spivak’s later work— A Critique of Postcolonial Reason —the figure is conceptualized as the native woman informant foreclosed by/in history. 75 Defined as “that mark of expulsion from the name of Man – a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation” in Kant she has no “autonomy of the reflexive judgement which allows freedom for the rational will.” 76 This excluded native informant is the man in the raw [ dem rohen Menschen ] who comes into his own in the figure of the woman. What Spivak does so astutely is locate the “foreclosed (woman) native informant” in the master texts of Europe (Kant, Hegel, and Marx) and, by extension, in colonial discourses. Hence, insofar as the native informant is foreclosed (used in the Lacanian sense of the forthright rejection of an incompatible idea by the ego on the basis that the idea had never occurred at all) he/she remains the undertheorized subject of postcolonial theory. The project of postcolonialism will be “misinformed” and lacking in the “ethical relation” without this subaltern subject. But there remains the overriding proviso: such an undertaking requires paying close attention to those material conditions that produce (reproduce) the idea of a just society. Postcolonial reason requires the moment of the subaltern woman to check the excess of (muscular) reason, and gender it too. A valuable work of fiction here is Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ( 2017 ) the central theme of which is the loss of humanity’s moral fiber, its belief in the ethical relation. Roy goes to the absolute Other of Indian life—the eunuch, the Hijra, seen by many as a gender apart, neither transgender nor bisexual, as if nature had created something unnatural, grotesque and then mechanically reproduced it—to rework Spivak’s foreclosed native informant into postcolonial life worlds.

The Death of a Theory

“Like most US feminism,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “post-colonialism is a way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist, and so is a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a ‘post-political’ world.” 77 Embedded in Eagleton’s understated dismissal of postcolonial theory is what Aijaz Ahmad has referred to as an absence of historical specificity in the theory. 78 Using Hamza Alavi’s 1972 New Left Review essay as his anchoring point, Ahmad critiques three fundamental simplifications in the theory. 79 The first, a lazy habit of “posting” which has led to a “sort of inflation” that has expanded the common use of the postcolonial (Alavi, like many others, had limited the usage to “independent states that arose out of the near-complete dissolution of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, during roughly the first fifteen years after the Second World War”) to “the American Revolution, the decolonization of Latin America, the founding of Australia.” 80 The “frequent inflation of the term,” says Ahmad, deprives postcolonial theory of any real precision as it is applied to any nation that has undergone a colonial experience be it as imperialist power or colonized subject. 81 The second is the failure to ground a concept in an historical process that would allow the concept, through self-criticism and realignment with new events, to generate new concepts. In other words, the concept itself should be subject to constant critique and reevaluation, but always with reference to its prior history. To make this clear, Ahmad adds, “Decolonization was such an event, and it required theoretical alignment in the very framework of the existing history of the state.” 82 The third, via a qualification of Alavi’s own definition, relates to the need to offer a theory of the state itself that would address both the “normal” and the “ exceptional ” state, the latter characterized by a “military–bureaucratic oligarchy” not uncommon in many postcolonial nations. 83 Drawing on Marx, the postcolonial state must be defined through the coexistence within this state of multi-class structures and prior non-capitalist modes of production and life worlds, precisely the points made by Marx in his 1853 essay on “The British Rule in India.”

Failure to address the ongoing conflict between labor and capital in the contemporary “world-system” has led to a dominant postcolonial theorization that stresses, in the words of Neil Lazarus, heterogeneity and unevenness, “disavows nationalism as such and refuses an antagonistic or struggle based model of politics in favor of one that emphasizes ‘cultural difference’ [and] ‘ambivalence’.” 84 These moves eclipse the powerful narrative of anti-colonial struggles that played such a key role in an earlier anti-imperialist understanding of “postcolonialism.” As a consequence, a class-based materialist critique based on Fanon’s notion of violent resistance is made irrelevant (because, if identities are always in flux, nations are purely imaginary with no memory as such) from which it follows that the celebrated texts are those that explore “in-betweeness,” “hybridity,” “migrancy,” “newness,” “a little of this, a little of that,” and related ideas. The postcolonial literary canon celebrates works that run with these ideas, the exemplary text being Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children ( 1981 ). For Lazarus, two modes of critical inquiry become urgent: first a turn to the specters of Marx and a critical revaluation of class in postcolonial studies and, second, a turn to “minor” works and works in the vernacular. The historical triumph of capitalism—that “achievement” which was able to incorporate peasant, village, and even feudal economies of colonized peoples into a “capitalist world-system”—haunts the postcolonial and requires constant critique through an openness towards the “centrality of capitalism to colonialism.” 85 Gramsci had noted it years before as the ground of an anti-colonial class struggle: “But today flames of revolt are being fanned throughout the colonial world. This is the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their white exploiters and murderers.” 86

If alarm bells had begun to come from the Marxist quarter, they were not limited to only Marxist critiques. They came from liberal humanism too. In 2007 PMLA published the output of a colloquium on “The End of Postcolonial Theory” held at the University of Michigan in November 2006 . 87 The general consensus of the colloquium may be readily summarized. Postcolonial theory, ascendant between the end of the cold war ( 1989 ) and 9/11 ( 2001 ), when “Third world intellectuals … arrived in First world academe,” failed to redress neoconservative power in America. 88 In speaking about the “post” as an epistemic and a temporal marker, one of the PMLA participants, Mamadou Diouf, argued that more attention should be paid to “(dis)connections among colonized societies, groups and Individuals.” 89 Applied to Africa, postcoloniality, he had noted earlier, needs to address “concrete historical processes to pay attention to the violence, cultural and political domination, and economic exploitation of colonial and postcolonial rules.” 90 In the absence of such a reading, postcoloniality, as the Ghananian writer Ama Ata Aidoo observed, is a “most pernicious fiction” of value only to theorization that emerges from white settler countries. Such theorization remains spectacularly unaware of the ethics of postcolonial theory, the point made so powerfully by Spivak in her discussion of the “sign” of the excluded native [woman] informant.

A Theory’s Afterdeath

The critical literature on postcolonial literary theory is vast and near-unmanageable. Indeed in his contribution to the PMLA colloquium Simon Gikandi remarked, “What postcolonial theory is and what work it does depend on one’s disciplinary formation.” 91 Where the theory is at now may be framed with a close reading of essays published in two 2012 issues of New Literary History . 92 The invited essays in volume 43, no. 1 were by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Robert J. C. Young, and one assumes that the then editor of New Literary History , herself a very astute theorist, invited them to write the “target” essays because she felt that they had something new and original to say on postcolonial theory. The respondents to their essays were also carefully chosen. Between the target essays and the careful responses we get a sense of where postcolonial theory is at, its pitfalls and its future displayed with equal vigor. The essays may be used to bring this retrospective on postcolonial theory to a close, with the proviso that when it comes to postcolonial theory both beginnings and ends are inconclusive, depending as they are on the theoretician’s own perspective and preferences.

I begin with the first essay by Dipesh Chakrabarty in which he turns to the definition of the historical subject as it enters the epoch of the Anthropocene, an epoch where humans have become geological agents, the latter explored at some length in his seminal essay published three years earlier. 93 The procedure takes him to postcolonial thinkers and he confesses, “What I have learnt from postcolonial thinkers is the necessity to move through contradictory figures of the human, now through a collapsing of the person of the subject as in liberal Marxist thought, and now through a separation of the two.” 94 And here Homi Bhabha’s account of the new subaltern classes—“the stateless,” “migrant workers, minorities, asylum seekers [and] refugees”—enters Chakrabarty’s thinking. Quoting Balibar, Bhabha says they are neither “outsiders nor insiders.” Bhabha’s point, as Chakrabarty reads it, is that these new subalterns challenge definitions of subjectivity embedded in the narratives of cosmopolitanism and globalization as they are “the human-human and the nonhuman-human.” 95 They offer a contradictory mode of being, an incommensurable idea of subjecthood as they are denied full civic participation even when they exist within borders. They are classic survivors without any degree of recognition, representing as they do contradictory signifiers, neither normative (as the ideal subject in transition celebrated in diaspora theory) nor “onto-existential” as the human grounded in a recognizable and mutually understandable concept of the subject. Chakrabarty extends Bhabha’s incommensurable subjects to argue that the human in the age of the Anthropocene is now viewed “simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as apolitical agent” belonging at once to geological time and historical time. 96 This is something new and dramatic, a consciousness that should permeate all social theories including postcolonial theory. Concludes Chakrabarty, “All progressive political thought, including postcolonial criticism, will have to register this profound change in the human condition.” 97 Our ethical responsibility was once to our fellow men because the Other was to be loved as oneself; now the consciousness of this responsibility is even more marked and urgent because collectively we are a force with no consciousness, just as geological time has no consciousness. The latter was true of the Holocene; it will be true of the Anthropocene as well.

In the second essay, Robert J. C. Young, author of the encyclopedic compendium Postcolonialism , insists, contrary to the disillusionment that marked the PMLA contributors, that “the twenty-first century is already the century of postcolonial empowerment,” because the latter’s political project is “to reconstruct Western knowledge formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures upside down, refashion the world from below.” 98 Young is able to make this bold assertion, offer an idealist definition of postcolonialism that echoes the words of the satirical poet Baal in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses ( 1988 ), because, for him, postcolonialism plays an active role in ensuring a fair and just society. 99

To make the point, Young picks up three urgent themes with which postcolonial theory should be concerned: “indigenous struggles and their relation to settler colonialism, illegal migrants, and political Islam.” 100 These are also cases where the politics of “invisibility” and “unreadability” have obstructed reasoned analysis and critique. Because it does not have a unified theory, postcolonialism must address matters foundational as well as antifoundational simultaneously. Hence the rights of indigenous or First Nation people to return to their sacred or ancestral lands should not stump, override or exclude a “celebration of delocalized hybrid identities.” 101 If indigenous people, refugees and the like are invisible, then Islam, which should be on every postcolonial agenda, too is “unreadable.” The current “demonization” of Islam forgets that long before multiculturalism was invented in Canada it was alive and well in the Caliphate of Cordoba (929–1031). 102 The various historical Islamic polities—from Moorish al-Andalus to Mughal India—are seen by Young as examples of tolerance as these ethically responsible polities acknowledged the necessity of a multicultural social order.

And so where is postcolonial theory now? For Young, one of postcolonial theory’s foundational binaries, the construction of an “Other,” is in need of deconstruction because there is no “Other” as such only “individuals or groups who have been, or feel that they have been, othered by society.” 103 In other words, the principal contemporary Others, as the essay itself has demonstrated, are First Nation people, refugees, minorities within nation states, and Islam. But even as we recognize these “new” Others Young suggests, after Levinas’s move to “auto-heteronomy” that “the psyche is the other in the same.” 104 Here the same defines itself against the Other but in the act unsettles the idea of the same itself and determines its limits. If the Other therefore is within the self, its function is one of making the self “self-aware” in an ethical order where “every other (one) is every (bit) other (the wholly other) [tout autre est tout autre].” 105

The next issue of New Literary History (43, no. 2 ( 2012 )) published responses by Simon During, Benita Parry, Ato Quayson, and Robert Stam and Ella Shohat. Marx remains a powerful force in postcolonial theory even if his presumed grand post-Hegelian Eurocentric bias jettisons minor narratives. Like Ahmad, Lazarus and others, Benita Parry is very clear about the prevailing sense of anxiety among postcolonial scholars about how to validate “its continued significance.” 106 She views Chakrabarty’s and Young’s essays as texts motivated not by a presentation of new knowledge (as Bell did with reference to Bhabha) but as voices eager to capture whatever may be deemed to be under threat here and now. This threat has an insistent social imperative in Young, where it is argued that the current objects of “threat” are principally indigenous people and Islam, both consigned to the domain of “invisibility.” For Chakrabarty the threat is trans-human since humans, as “agents,” are now instruments of geological change. These are very big ideas, ideas that require specialist scholarship, something that no postcolonial theorist is particularly adept at, which is why, it is suggested, postcolonial theorists tend to transform these difficult ideas into an existential experience. And so whereas Marxist doctrine was driven by “redistribution,” the postcolonial is driven by “recognition,” the latter (after Charles Taylor) a central philosophical tenet of multiculturalism. For postcolonial theory the object of this existential angst is the “marginalized.” Without the kinds of knowledge a specialist may bring to the subject, the postcolonial, as in the case of Young, oversimplifies political Islam and applies to it all the badges common to postcolonial theory, badges such as heterogeneity, secularism, open-mindedness, multiculturalism, marginality, diaspora, and the like. In this idealism, marked by an accommodationist (complicit, reconciliatory) rhetoric, there is no theory of either revolutionary violence or class struggle. Instead a degree of humanist romanticism celebrates “premodern consciousness” and even “cultural obscurantism” as Young limits the subject of the postcolonial to varieties of diaspora, the indigenous and Islam even as he argues against positioning any of them as the “Other” of Western modernity. 107 Parry concludes with words that echo those of the participants in the PMLA seminar:

What I have attempted to suggest is that postcolonial studies is in sore need of a different theoretical paradigm if it is to participate in the critique of globalization, and that this can be found in the very legacies of thought absent from these presentations. 108

Young’s idealist or “romantic” reading of postcolonialism leads Ato Quayson to recall Ann Laura Stoler’s reference to a malaise, an exhaustion, a sense of ennui that characterizes postcolonial theory. 109 Endorsing Stoler’s critique Quayson notes “the supreme confidence with which postcolonialism seems to have felt itself capable of mapping out the temporalities and cartographies of empire without a proper understanding of history.” 110 It is the failure to ground postcolonial theory in proper historical contexts that leads to idealist readings of tolerance such as that noted by Young with reference to historical Islam. The latter’s golden age—Spain and the Baghdad Caliphate—is presented as exemplary instances of Islamic tolerance. This may have been true during discrete historical moments, but current Islam, from Boko Haram to ISIS, shows a “violent othering of nonbelievers” which sits uncomfortably with Young’s call for the end of the “other.” Notes Quayson:

It would appear, then, that Young’s argument on tolerance is sensitive to human-to-human relations but not the embedding of humans within the religio-social structures that fundamentally distort their sense of what it is to be human in the first place. 111

Two themes in Chakrabarty and Young—the ecological and the indigenous—are read by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat as humanity’s greatest challenge and therefore postcolonial theory’s urgent concerns. 112 After pointing out common criticisms of postcolonial theory—notably its elision of class, its ahistorical tendencies, its emphasis on old imperialist histories at the expense of neo-imperialism, its stress on hybridity, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism plus the elite standing of its theorists—Stam and Shohat offer their own “history” of postcolonialism. They mark its beginning in the cataclysmic moment of the “various 1492s.” Like Young they speak of al-Andalus as a “model of tolerant multiculturalism avant la lettre” destroyed by a “victorious Spain of the Reconquista ” that immediately instituted ethnic cleansing by demonizing both Muslims and Jews alike. 113 Stam and Shohat find Young’s reference to practices that have grown out of resistance to imperialism and colonialism heartening as they too believe that any study of coloniality/ postcoloniality “must go at least as far back as the Reconquista.” 114 With the other 1492 , of course, began Columbus and the conquest of the New World. What followed was the history of the West as overwhelmingly imperialist and exploitative. This history now requires a deconstructive reading through Young’s own foregrounding of indigeneity and a second look at the history of indigenous communities and their exclusion from the grand narratives of nation states. Their inclusion would also require a different understanding of life-worlds and especially, as one saw in the movement of negritude, the inseparability of man and nature.

Another postcolonial paradigm—and the foundations of this paradigm, epistemologically, is no different from Young’s or even negritude—may be used to make this clear. For this paradigm Stam and Shohat make the case for a post 1492 “Red Atlantic” modelled on Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic.” 115 The “subaltern” figure behind this version of the (Red) Atlantic is the Indian, whose presence, like that of the African remarked on by Senghor, “constructs” Europeans because they are constituted “ in relation to the Indian.” 116 From Montaigne to Lévi Strauss “the philosopher becomes Indian” because in an unremarked two-way traffic not only did the Indian go to Paris but the Parisian went to study the Indian. In this flow of historical ideas and people, Indians affected Jacobin and social revolutions; they influenced European ideas on gender, power, class, equality, and communal property. They are not banished and behind the times but prescient and prophetic, signifying yet another silenced subaltern whose historical role remains unaccented.

Conclusion: The Road Not Taken

As an urgent social theory, the message of postcolonial theory is clear. Fanon had noted the phony independence that “post-1947” brought to the colonies and declared that, post-independence, a revolution from within was necessary. In the long shadow of the specters of Marx, generating new concepts, realigning inequalities, and engaging in a social transformation of postcolonial countries from within, like a “glow that brings out a haze,” is critical to the postcolonial project. To transcend an almost universal sense of ennui or exhaustion that characterizes much postcolonial theory, attention to concrete historical processes acquires urgency. Such an awareness alone can lead to productive readings of texts as varied as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Nigerian study of patriarchy in Purple Hibiscus ( 2004 ), Patricia Grace’s negotiation of “Maoriness” within intergenerational conflict in Dogside ( 2001 ), Andrew McGahan’s study of settler guilt in The White Earth ( 2004 ) or diasporic consciousness in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane ( 2003 ). The awareness would also produce intertextual readings of those “postcolonial counter texts” that challenge a prior, ur- or proto- text. Here, the twinning of Shakespeare and Césaire (via The Tempest and Une Tempête ( 1969 )), of Shakespeare and Virahsawmy (via The Tempest and Toufann ( 2001 )), of Charlotte Brönte and Jean Rhys (via Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966 )) and of Dickens and Peter Carey (via Great Expectations and Jack Maggs ( 1997 )) would confirm the critical purchase that postcolonial theory brings. Only through self-criticism and radical realignments with historical processes and new events can postcolonial theory continue to generate new concepts, maintain its links with prior histories and act as an instrument of change.

Discussion of the Literature

The critical bibliography on Anglophone postcolonial theory is vast. Much of it affirms Emily Apter’s ( 1999 ) reading of postcolonialism as a mobile metaphor with “a locomotive, portmanteau quality.” Unlike other theories—Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis or those like structuralism that grew out of the linguistic turn of the early 20th century —postcolonial theory cannot claim a specific mode of analysis or critical discourse. Instead it may be seen as an explanatory model or a procedure which examines the relationship between culture and imperialism from 1492 onwards. In this reading the “post-” of postcolonial theory is not a temporal or teleological marker suggesting something after an event but a signifier of the colonial encounter in both its “complicit” (that is the colonizer–colonized encounter within the dialectic of imperial power) and its “oppositional” (that is an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist struggle) moments. To do this, the “theory” needed ways of thinking that would subvert a powerful Hegelian historicism with its sovereign European subject. How can one then bypass an “historical narcissism” and engage with the Other with respect and understanding? A different kind of thinking was necessary and this “thinking” drawing on radical versions of European historicism such as Marxism (with its emphasis on class), psychoanalysis (with its emphasis on a non-transcendental subjectivity), creative ethnography (such as négritude ), Manichean dichotomy in the colonizer–colonized situation (as in the works of Fanon), and poststructuralism (with its emphasis on the legitimation of minor narratives against a nation’s grand narrative) is now linked to the works of three influential scholars. These three—Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—referred to by the first major synthesizer of their works, Robert J. C. Young, as “the Holy Trinity” of postcolonial theory, provided approaches to a reading of colonial histories that have become the stock-in-trade of current postcolonial theory and discourse. Apart from Young whose early work ( 1990 ) emphasized the need for a new non-Marxist historicism with which to address postcolonialism but who later adopted a more accommodating position ( 1995 , 2001 ), one of the most important surveys of the current state of postcolonial theory has come from Moore-Gilbert ( 1996 ). Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa’s edited volume ( 2013 ) indicates how postcolonial theory provincializes Europe by making the idea of empire itself central to 18th-century European history. To a number of principally Marxist readers, notably Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry, a criticism of postcolonial theory has been its seeming ahistoricity. Others such as Gikandi ( 1996 ) have examined the culture of Englishness, a thesis taken up later by Young too ( 2008 ) where he argues that “Englishness” developed as an idea in the making of Empire itself. Some of the more important studies have expanded key issues raised by Said, Bhabha and Spivak. Thus Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have rethought “Eurocentrism” ( 1994 ) and examined culture wars in the “postcolonial Atlantic” ( 2012 ) while in a study that has had a huge impact on history and lived experience (capital’s life processes) Dipesh Chakrabarty ( 2000 ) has reexamined “Eurocentrism” by provincializing Europe itself. Works by Trivedi ( 1995 ), Viswanathan ( 1998 ), Erickson ( 1998 ) and Boehmer ( 2005 ) have examined colonial transactions from the point of view of the native “combatants” themselves. A valuable summary of debates may be found in PMLA (2007) and a useful survey of recent works on postcolonial theory in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50th anniversary edition (2015) .

Introducing Postcolonial Literature

I am Daniele Nunziata , a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Oxford. In my current research, and previously during my DPhil, I have been focusing primarily on literature which may be described as ‘postcolonial’. People outside this discipline often ask me what this is and how they might learn more about it. Like most literary movements, it can difficult to establish when postcolonialism first began, but it very generally refers to writing (including theory, poetry, and fiction) which speaks against, or came after (hence the prefix), colonialism. In many of the cases I consider in my research, this would include works which resist and/or came after the end of the British Empire’s rule over territories across the world.

For instance, some of my family come from, and live in, Cyprus. All of it was under the control of the British Empire until 1960, and literature which speaks to this history and what came after it might well be described as ‘postcolonial’. Similar claims can be made of, say, literature from South Asia in the years leading up to and following 1947; or from Nigeria which, like Cyprus, became independent in 1960. Postcolonialism also involves important reflections on life and politics after – as well as before – decolonisation.

It should be noted that this brief introduction is an extremely simple description of an enormous field which inevitably fails to contain the wide convolutions of colonial history. Some writers of fiction might produce texts which a publisher or scholar identifies as ‘postcolonial’, but the writer themself might not wish to use this term to describe their own composition. Be careful when using any general markers when classifying culture, particularly markers as powerful and substantial as ‘postcolonial’.

At this university, there are many useful resources to help gain greater insight into this field, including the postgraduate seminar series, Postcolonial Writing and Theory at Oxford. There are also multiple MSt programmes – including ‘World Literatures in English’ and ‘Comparative Literature and Critical Translation’ – which enable students to consider postcolonial and comparative ways of approaching literary and cultural studies. Research collectives like OCCT at St Anne’s College provide similar homes for these ways of approaching texts.

Below is a list of notable works – three pieces of theory or academic research, and three pieces of fiction – which are essential reading if you wish to consider learning more on the postcolonial discipline.

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978). One of the most important works in helping to bring the field to life, Orientalism is a meticulous study of how writers in Britain and France have often written about countries across Asia and North Africa using a specific series of stereotypes which present a place they call the ‘Orient’ in a particular and pejorative way. These stereotypes were then used to justify British and French colonisation of the territories being described. Said was a Palestinian writer who spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) . Fanon was a philosopher and psychiatrist, born in French-ruled Martinique, who worked in metropolitan France and Algeria. This written work is partly based on his time as a psychiatrist in colonised Algeria (1953 1957) and analyses the physiological impact of imperialism on the minds of individuals, including the role played by violence in these contexts.
Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (2005). There are many works from the illustrious career of Oxford’s own Professor of World Literature, Elleke Boehmer, which could be included on this list. This specific monograph illustrates the necessity of evaluating questions of gender within postcolonialism and is an important piece of intersectional thinking and research. Boehmer is also an author of novels and short stories, including her most recent collection, To the Volcano (2019), which brings together the moving lives of multiple characters and families across the world who feel the pressures of inequality on the Global South. This brings us to…

It was nearly impossible to shortlist just three texts. Ultimately, I have picked three which were recognised in the 2019 list of 100 Novels that Shaped Our World and which also happen to have postcolonial themes.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958). This is one of most well-known and beloved examples of ‘postcolonial’ fiction. Tracing the life of the tragic hero, Okonkwo, in the years leading up to, and following, the arrival of Christian missionaries to an Igbo village in what is now Nigeria, the novel shows how the protagonist and his family react to the sudden cultural changes in advance of British imperialism. It was followed by two sequels, no Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), which continue to follow Okonkwo’s family through successive time periods.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000). Winning the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, White Teeth gives a compelling insight into British life during the 1970s, largely following the experiences of two best friends, Samad and Archie, who met serving in World War II. This is an important capsule of life in the time period it depicts, exploring how culture and religion impact a person’s identity, including within the British-Bangladeshi community.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). This novel moves between the narrative viewpoints of three characters who view the onset of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) and experience the horrors it unleashes. The reader is forced to confront this painful part of the history of Biafra, moving beyond single-sentence references in British or American history textbooks. If you are not already familiar with Adichie’s fiction, you may have read or heard extracts from her powerful TED talk which was published as an essay, We Should All Be Feminists (2014). To quote her, a feminist is “a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes”.

Dr Daniele Nunziata is a Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. He completed his DPhil at St Hugh's College analysing postcolonial Cypriot literature. His other research concerns writing from the Middle East and Africa and has been published in PMLA , the Journal of Postcolonial Writing , and the Studies in World Literature book series. The primary themes of his creative writing include post/colonial history and diasporic cultural identities.

Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart book cover

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies

Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 14, 2020 • ( 0 )

Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s—together with such other counterdiscourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies. Postcolonial (mostly literary) studies is one of the latest “tempests” in a postist world replacing Prospero’s Books (the title of Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film) with a Calibanic viewpoint. The beginning of this new project can be approximately located in the year 1952, when the academy was still more attendant to works such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and in anticipation of Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero (1953). In other words, the project of validating modernism, a project so heavily indebted to “primitive” (other) cultures and, directly or indirectly, to colonialism, was on the verge of being institutionalized. In the meantime, the connection between colonialism, modernism, and structuralism has been fairly well established and has provoked a similar awareness of the considerably more problematic correlation between the postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial.

It was precisely during this decade of the 1950s that a great shift occurred. This was the period of the end of France’s involvement in Indochina (Dien Bien Phu), the Algerian war, the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya, the dethroning of King Farouk in Egypt. It was the time when Jean-Paul Sartre broke with Albert Camus for reasons intrinsic to colonial studies, namely, opposing attitudes toward Algeria. In 1950 Aimé Césaire’s pamphlet on colonialism, Discours sur le colonialisme , appeared. Two years later, Fidel Castro gave his speech “History Shall Absolve Me,” and Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks . In London the Faber and Faber publishing house, for which T. S. Eliot was a reader at the time, issued Nigerian Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinker , which led to “curiosity” about Anglo-African writing. It was the year the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term “Third World,” a term scrutinized ever since. Some see this term as derogative (mainly in the Englishspeaking world), while the term has become a staple in the French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking worlds.

Also in the 1950s, the founders of colonialist discourse, Fanon, Césaire, and Albert Memmi, published their works, which became foundational texts of colonialist discourse some decades later. In 1958 the Western narrative paradigm in which an author-anthropologist fabricates the other was seriously questioned in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart , which clearly illustrates the sensationalism and inaccuracy of Western anthropology and history. The 1960s then saw major developments in the critical formulation of the problematic, with the appearance of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), including Sartre’s preface, which legitimized for many the issues raised and postulated the Western “Manichean delirium” (good versus bad, black versus white, etc.). In Fanon’s book Western racism is seen as a form of scapegoating that permits the West to cling to its power and leads to violent reaction by the colonized. A year before, the Caribbean novelist George Lamming had given us his Calibanic reading of a classical text, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest , in The Pleasures of Exile (1960). The 1970s then saw further increases in colonialist studies with Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” essays (1971 and 1986) and Edward Said ‘s Orientalism (1978), which most likely is the central text in the establishment of PCS. While Said could still deplore that the literary establishment had declared the serious study of imperialism off limits, the 1980s established the centrality of the colonialist debate with its focus on how imperialism affected the colonies and how the former colonies then wrote back in an attempt to correct Western views.

“To be colonized,” according to Walter Rodney, “is to be removed from history.” And Memmi, defining the situation of the colonized, claims that “the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history” ( Colonizer 91). Postcolonial writing, then, is the slow, painful, and highly complex means of fighting one’s way into European-made history, in other words, a process of dialogue and necessary correction. That this writing back into history becomes institutionalized precisely at the moment when postmodernism questions the category of history should make us think about the implications of postmodernism in relation to the postcolonial.

The designation “postcolonial” has been used to describe writing and reading practices grounded in colonial experience occurring outside of Europe but as a consequence of European expansion and exploitation of “other” worlds. Postcolonial literature is constituted in counterdiscoursive practices. Postcolonial writing is also related to other concepts that have resulted from internal colonialization, such as the repression of minority groups: Chicanos in the United States, Gastarbeiter in Germany, Beurs in France, and so on. It is similarly related to women voicing concern and frustration over colonialization by men, or a “double” colonialization when women of color are concerned. Among the large nomenclature, which includes so-called Third World literature, minority discourse, resistance literature, response literature (writing back or rewriting the Western “classics”), subaltern studies, othering discourse, colonialist discourse, and so on, the term “postcolonial” (sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not) has gained notoriety in recent years and clearly has replaced “Commonwealth literature” or “Commonwealth studies.” It may even be on its way toward replacing “Third World literature” or “studies.”

PCS is not a discipline but a distinctive problematic that can be described as an abstract combination of all the problems inherent in such newly emerging fields as minority discourse, Latin American studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, Third World studies (as the comparative umbrella term), Gastarbeiterliteratur, Chicano studies, and so on, all of which participated in the significant and overdue recognition that “minority” cultures are actually “majority” cultures and that hegemonized Western (Euro-American) studies have been unduly overprivileged for political reasons. The Australians Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in their influential The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) define “postcolonial” “to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (2). This undoubtedly makes PCS an enormously large field, particularly since these critics see literature as offering one of the most important ways to express these new perceptions. In other words, PCS is the study of the totality of “texts” (in the largest sense of “text”) that participate in hegemonizing other cultures and the study of texts that write back to correct or undo Western hegemony, or what Gayatri Spivak has called “our ideological acceptance of error as truth” ( In Other 109). The emphasis, therefore, is bound to be on the political and ideological rather than the aesthetic. By no means, however, does this exclude the aesthetic, but it links definitions of aesthetics with the ideology of the aesthetic, with hegemony, with what Louis Althusser has termed the Ideological State Apparatus, and connected with these issues, it obviously has to question the genesis of the Western canon. In other words, PCS is instrumental in curricular debates and demands a multicultural curriculum. It also perceives the former disciplines as participating in the colonizing process and is therefore bound to cross borders and be interdisciplinary. We cannot disconnect postcolonial studies from previous disciplines, nor can we attribute a definable core to such a “field.” Cultural and postcolonial studies are deliberately not disciplinary but rather inquisitive activities that question the inherent problems of disciplinary studies; they “discipline the disciplines,” as Patrick Brantlinger said about cultural studies.

In a way, cultural and postcolonial studies are what comparative literature always wanted or claimed to be but in reality never was, due to a deliberate and almost desperate clinging to Eurocentric values, canons, cultures, and languages. The closest parallels in the many debates within the field of comparative literature from the 1950s and 1960s are those involving the French comparatist René Etiemble, who pleaded for an open and planetary comparativism that would address questions of coloniality and examine literatures outside the EuroAmerican center. No discipline is unaffected by the colonialist paradigm, and every discipline, from anthropology to cartography, needs to be decolonized.

Frantz Fanon/New Frame

The word “postcolonial” shows up in a variety of journal titles since the mid-1980s but is used as a full title in a collection of interviews with a leading Indo-American critic, Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), as a subtitle to the book by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), and again in a subtitle by the Canadian and Australian critics Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (1990), thus showing clearly the preoccupation with the term in discourse from British Commonwealth countries. Benita Parry, one of the leading critics of the various attempts to come to terms with the colonialist formation, still speaks of colonial discourse. The term was probably used for the first time by Australian Simon During in his 1985 Landfall essay. Max Dorsinville had used “post-European” already in 1974, while Helen Tiffin used “commonwealth literature” still in 1984 but switched to the new term by 1987. By now, and largely due to Australian efforts, the terms “postcolonial literature” and “postcolonial culture” are well established.

This shift in terminology clearly is due to a wave of various postist constructions, such as “postindustrial,” “poststructuralism,” “postmodernism,” “post-Marxism,” and even “postfeminism.” However, it hardly can make sense to speak of, say, South African literature as postcolonial, even though it has many or most of the characteristics we associate with postcolonial literature. Needless to say, the term has a jargonizing quality and lacks precision. Postist terminology in general is to be understood as a signpost for new emphases in literary and cultural studies, indicative of the long-felt move from the margin (minorities) to the center that is also the major contribution of Derridean Deconstruction . Both came into being in the wake of developments since Charles de Gaulle’s referendum and the new emphasis on countries that had gained flag-independence in the 1960s. Robert Young points out that it is significant that Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard, and Hélène Cixous were all either born in Algeria or personally involved with the events of the war (1).

Though seldom identical with the other “post”— postmodernism—PCS is nevertheless involved in a broad network of conflicting attempts at intervention into the master narrative of Western discourse. It is part of postal politics and a series of inventions and interventions that the Western post(al) network suddenly seems to be assimilating. The urge of postmodernism is to incorporate or coopt almost everything, including its oppositional other. Even the postcolonial paradigm is not free of such absorption, so that one can already speak of the postmodern colonialization of the postcolonial. To preserve in this multifarious network some unitary sense without falling prey to homogenizing tendencies that underlie most theories, one may assume that the postcolonial critics and writers basically claim that the term “postcolonial” covers the cultures affected by the imperial process; in other words, postcolonial critics inevitably homogenize as “imperialist” critics did before them. The difference is that they typically profess an awareness of the problematics to a degree the others did not.

We can single out various schools of postcolonial criticism, those who homogenize and see postcolonial writing as resistance (Said, Barbara Harlow, Abdul Jan- Mohamed, Spivak) and those who point out that there is no unitary quality to postcolonial writing (Homi Bhabha, Arun P. Mukherjee, Parry). Among the key terms and main figures associated with postcolonial discourse one often finds the following: “Orientalism” (Said); “minority discourse” (JanMohamed); “subaltern studies” (Spivak and Ranajit Guha); “resistance literature” (Harlow); “The Empire Writes Back” (Tiffin, Ashcroft, Stephen Slemon, During); “Third World literature” (Peter Nazareth, Fredric Jameson, Georg M. Gugelberger); “hybridity,” “mimicry,” and “civility” (Bhabha). Generally speaking, the term “postcolonial” is used when texts in various forms of English are explored and when Canada and Australia are brought into the debate, while “Third World literature” is used more by those who approach the problem from a comparative point of view. Marxists also tend to use the term “Third World,” while nonMarxists often accuse them of using pejorative language.

Diana Bryden ( Past the Last Post 193) distinguishes postcolonial criticism by such writers as Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin ( Empire Writes Back ) from that developed by the U.S.-based Jameson, Henry Louis Gates, and Spivak. The main dividing line at present appears to be a postcolonial discourse by those who come from a EuroAmerican literary and critical background (Jameson, Harlow, Gugelberger), those who come originally from so-called Third World places but reside in the West (Spivak, Said, JanMohamed, Bhabha, Nazareth), and those from Third World countries adamantly opposed to the homogenizing tendencies of some of these critics (Mukherjee, Aijaz Ahmad).

Another way of ordering this manifold discourse could be via reference to the foundational texts: Fanonists such as JanMohamed, Said, Bhabha, and Parry; Calibanic critics such as Retamar and José David Saldivar founding their discursive practices on José Marti’s concept of “Our America”; empire-ists such as Tiffin and Ashcroft; and Marxist deconstructionists such as Spivak.

https://literariness.org/category/postcolonialism/

https://literariness.org/category/cultural-studies/

PCS is foremost a shift in emphasis, a strategy of reading, an attempt to point out what was missing in previous analyses, and an attempt to rewrite and to correct. Any account of PCS will have to come to terms with the (equally problematical) concept of postcoloniality. Kwame Anthony Appiah has said that “postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Westernstyle, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery” (348). In other words, PCS is not really performed by those who have been colonized and gained problematical flag-independence, nor is it the discourse that pushes former marginalized subjects into the center, as is often assumed in the many canon debates. PCS is a dialogue leading to the significant insight that the Western paradigm (Manichean and binary) is highly problematical. In other words, PCS does not necessarily imply the change that Western and nonWestern intellectuals foresee but remains constituted in a particular class of well-educated people who should not confuse their theoretical insights with change. Though it is a correcting instrument that believes in facilitating change, no change is likely to occur with academic debates. Postcolonial discourse problematizes one face of the response to former Western hegemonic discourse paradigms, but it does not abolish anything; rather, it replaces one problematic with another. As Parry states, “The labour of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony” (55).

While postmodern literature tends to postulate the death of history, postcolonial writing insists on the historical as the foundational and all-embracing. Similarly, postmodernism refuses any representational quality, though the representational mandate remains strong in postcolonial writing and at times even relies on the topological. Postcolonial critical activity is “the deimperialization of apparently monolithic European forms, ontologies, and epistemologies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 153). If postmodernism is identified with the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson), postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism. In a sense it is the only true counterdiscourse we are left with, truly “past the last post.”

In conclusion, we must reemphasize that despite apparent similarities between postmodern and postcolonial modes of writing (particularly in cross-cultural texts by, for example, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Gabriel García Márquez), the postmodern aestheticization of politics only appears radical (a kind of radical chic-ism) but is essentially conservative and tends to prolong the imperial, while the postcolonial frequently appears conservative or is bound to use a conventional mimetic mode (related to realism and its many debates) but is essentially radical in the sense of demanding change.

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What Comes After Postcolonial Theory?

Published: 14 July 2023
Volume 62 , pages 577–606, ( 2023 )

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Bhrigupati Singh ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8877-3563 1 , 2

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This essay explores possible paths after postcolonial theory, with the after understood not as a negation, but as a form of inheritance and the creation of routes, such that an aftermath need not have a resentful or self-hating relation and nor simply an acceptance of given pictures of ‘western’ thought. The route explored here is neither fully secular nor religious, and nor from a radically alternative ontology, but rather prompted by three enduring concerns within the global humanities, explored in three sections of this paper. The first section ‘Political Theologies as an Alternative to the Dichotomy of Religion and Secularism’, asks what the difference and proximity between theology and theory may be, if we acknowledge the at times less visible theological genealogies of ‘secular’ social and critical theory. Rather than taking such genealogies only to be an effect of Eurocentrism, or as the lasting hegemony of Protestant Christian assumptions, we examine other ways of navigating tentative movements across ontological borders. The second section, ‘Theory as Darsan (Pilgrimage/Path/School)’ suggests that rather than thinking of concepts as anchored entirely to given territories or identities or as tools of ‘generalization’, we might place the word theory in relation to its genealogical kin, theos and theoria/darsan , as the formation of contemplative styles that emerge through forms of recurrent journeying within and across territories, following the tracks of others. As an instance of such journeying, we focus on a particular thinker, Stanley Cavell, whose writing suggests ways of remapping geographies of thought, in ways that could be significant for global thought, across so-called western and non-western territories. How might such journeys be continued? Section 3: ‘A Darsan: the Killing of Birds, Some Centuries Apart’ offers one such journey, three minor coordinates of a world map, located in three poetically enshrined bird killings, in Valmiki’s Ramayana , in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner , and in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker , each of which incants a curse of unsettlement, and a fault line in relation to being human. This article hopes to contribute to debates on decolonization, currently underway in universities across the world, and seeks to offer a possible alternative to static conceptions of west and non-west.

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Marx/Bourdieu: Convergences and Tensions, Between Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Emancipation

Conclusion: Towards a Cosmopolitan Humanism

Afterword: Peru and Theory

By postcolonial thought, I do not only mean a particular branch of the humanities or literary theory, but rather, a form of dissatisfaction that might be expressed across a range of disciplines. In specifying this dissatisfaction, my interest in this essay is not so much in the important body of work that points to the colonial foundations of the humanities and social science. Rather, my interest is more in postcolonial attempts to find ‘one’s own voice’ without necessarily being ascribed a subject position. To take an instance of this particular form of discomfort from outside of literary theory, in Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India ( 1995 ), Veena Das expresses a form of what we might call postcolonial dissatisfaction with two major subject positions available to European and ‘native’ anthropologists of India in the late 1970s/1980s: either Louis Dumont’s Eurocentrism (and the implicit negation of ‘modern’ Indian aspirations as inauthentic) or A.K. Saran’s (and others) assumption of a contrasting ‘native’ voice, based on the supposed stability of national or ethnic belonging. As I have argued (Singh, 2018 ), Critical Events develops a conceptual vocabulary distinct from these two perspectives, by showing the fragility and violence of ‘modern’ forms of belonging, and the extent to which nationalist/ethnic discourse and sentiment builds on ‘older’ ontologies of sacrifice, kinship, and martyrdom.

On the relation between theoreia as pilgrimage and the Indic darsan (a term for ‘seeing’ the divine, but also denoting philosophical routes, or ‘schools’), see Rutherford ( 2000 ). My sincere thanks to Nomaan Hasan for pointing me to this reference.

Daniel Smith for instance describes the sharply contrasting trajectories of Derrida’s mode of negative transcendence ( différance — an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’), as distinct from Gilles Deleuze’s form of affirmative immanence, and difference ‘internal to being’ ( 2012 : 49).

Key texts that mark this shift towards recognizing the centrality of Ambedkar for postcolonial thought in India would be Illaiah ( 1996 ), Guru ( 2009 ), Rao ( 2009 ), Nāgarāj ( 2011 ), Vajpeyi ( 2012 ), Kumar ( 2012 ), Guru and Sarrukai ( 2018 , 2019 ), among many others.

I borrow this evocative phrase, ‘knot of the soul,’ from Stefania Pandolfo ( 2018 ).

As Davidson indicates, this question of ‘scheme’ and ‘world’ not being a relation of correspondence has been a central concern within the Anglophone (‘analytic’) tradition of philosophy, as with Quine’s classic paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ ( 1953 ) that Davidson responds to, in a current of thought further continued in Richard Rorty’s early works as well (1979/2009, 1989 ), building on Quine and Davidson. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this paper for emphasizing the centrality and continuity of this question within the analytic tradition.

With Spinoza, as Jacqueline Lagrée argues, the composite expression theologico-political remains a matter of debate, connoting a range of possible conjunctions including juxtaposition, strict separation, subordination, and interdependence ((De Vries & Sullivan, 2006 : 26).

Alongside Agamben’s rereading of Schmitt, the emphasis on political theology (in a monotheistic vein) in recent continental philosophy can be traced to many thinkers, including the later Derrida’s writing on the messianic in Benjamin and Marx ( 2012 ), Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard’s argument on the ‘political theology of the neighbor’ ( 2005 ), and Badiou’s turn to St. Paul ( 2003 ) among others.

The first, concerted attempt that I know of to pluralize the concept of political theology, which has been very helpful within my own scholarly trajectory is Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan’s edited volume Political Theologies ( 2006 ).

As distinct from Hobbes’s Leviathan, the mythological figures I was most drawn to for my own conception of sovereignty in conceptual and ethnographic terms are the twin deities Mitra and Varuna, as outlined in Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty ( 1988 ).

Weber for instance, I would contend, may be read not as an unknowing Christian, but rather, as a sharper thinker of political theologies than Schmitt, in showing how theological ideas become ‘secularized,’ not as sovereign fiat, but as a lived ethos. With Durkheim, in my earlier work, I strongly differentiate between two ways of reading Durkheim, as a thinker of social structures (where the church, is indeed a theos , or animating image) but also as importantly, as a theorist of ‘currents’ and energies in ways that inhabits and exceeds the idea of a church (Singh, 2012 , 2021 ).

I place atheists in quotes following the Genealogy of Morals , where Nietzsche describes atheism as expressing ‘not so much the remnant as the kernel ’ of ascetic ideals, ‘one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences…’ ( 2006 : 160; emphasis in original).

A key figure within a non-European genealogy of doubt would be Al-Ghazali, whom it is speculatively argued that Descartes had read in translation. A series of articles in the journal Philosophy East and West undertake fruitful comparisons, beginning with Sami Najm’s groundbreaking essay, ‘The Place and Function of Doubt in the Philosophies of Descartes and Al-Ghazali’ ( 1966 ). Within South Asia, the closest kin (falling somewhere between Descartes and Shakespeare) would be the fifteenth century poet-philosopher Kabir. The word sanka (doubt) recurrently appears in Kabir’s compositions (Wakankar, 2010 ). In Kabir, sanka is most often related to the fear of one’s own death and ways of putting such fears to rest, in ways quite distinct from skepticism in Cavell’s sense of the term as outlined above.

As Nietzsche writes in 1881: ‘Emerson. I have never felt so much at home in a book, so much in my own house as,—I ought not to praise it, it is too close to me’ (cited in Hummel, 1946 : 80).

Among the most memorable essays on these variations remains A.K. Ramanujam’s ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ ( 1991 ).

The Sahariyas are governmentally classified as a ‘Primitive Tribal Group’ (a sub-group among ‘Scheduled Tribes,’ a British colonial classification inherited by the postcolonial Indian state), although they self-identify as Hindus. I summarize some of the complex debates around the categories and classifications of caste and tribe in Singh ( 2015a , b : 35).

On the politics of the term Balmiki, and the ‘Hinduization’ of the sanitation castes of north India, see Lee ( 2015 ) and Jaoul ( 2020 ).

‘Sanskritization’ is one of the founding theses of Indian sociology, defined by M.N. Srinivas as ‘the process by which a “low” Hindu caste or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology, and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently “twice-born” caste’ (Srinivas, 1969 : 6).

Vaudeville’s references to the Valmiki text and the Balakanda (the segment in which the crane-killing episode appears, sometimes said to be a ‘later’ addition to the text) are from the Baroda edition of the Valmiki Ramayana (Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1963 ).

My sincere thanks to Vivek Narayanan for many years of conversation on the Ramayana and for sharing segments of his stunning poetic rendering of the epic, and a gift of scholarly essays around the krauncha - vadha episode that allowed me to develop the thoughts I share here.

As Vaudeville clarifies: ‘In Vedic literature, kraunca is a musical term for a note or tone […] When used in reference to birds, kraunca does not apply to a particular species, but to a whole class of aquatic birds endowed with a krunc -like voice, a class which includes, besides the kraunca , the hamsa and sarasa birds. Birds of that class regularly appear in Indian folk-tales as love-messengers […] and the female of those species frequently appears as a symbol of an afflicted wife, mourning in separation.’ ( 1963 : 330).

Hindu ‘tribes’ such as Bhils and Sahariyas in present-day central India often self-identify with the other ‘Nishad’ characters in the Ramayana as well, such as Shabri and Eklavya. In Sanskrit literature, as Vaudeville clarifies, ‘The Nishadas appear in later Samhitas and in the Brahmanas as wild non-Aryan tribes of hunters, fisher- men and robbers. It seems that the word is a general term for non-Aryan tribes, rather than the name of a particular one.’ ( 1963 : 332).

Narayan’s translation (spirit’s soul-scream) is apt in a different register, as the hamsa in nirgun (‘formless’) traditions of bhakti poetry is depicted at times as a metaphor for the atma (‘soul’/spirit).

It is worth quoting Vaudeville’s explanation of the term sloka in full: ‘In the Rg-Veda, sloka means a cry, also the noise of the Soma pressing stones, of chariots. In RV 3. 53, 10, sloka is given as the cry of the hamsa bird and the priests themselves are compared to hamsas […] The Valmikian episode under consideration is another illustration of this association, but it introduces a romantic element, apparently based on popular belief: the cry of those water-birds is caused by sorrow or mourning, soka , so that the sloka sung by kraunca birds is really “born of sok a” and expresses pathos, karunam .’ ( 1963 : 331).

Interestingly, the Kashmiri theorists construct their argument on karuna by reinterpreting a key detail, as the hunter having killed the female crane, with the subsequent expression of soka emanating from the male crane. For more on this switch of genders, see Masson ( 1969 ).

See for instance Wendy Doniger’s masterful summary of androgyny myths across cultures, and the question of how gender ‘splits’ (Doniger & O'Flaherty, 1982 : 276), and what is understood as being prior to that split.

For Das’s discussion of curses (and the effects of passionate words not in the nature of immediate action but over longer horizons of time), traversing Gandhari’s curse on Krishna, and Valmiki’s manisada pratistham , and the echo of this curse in Kalidasa, with the suggestion of Rama as the hunter, and the further resonance of this moment in Anandvardhana and Abhinavagupta’s commentaries on the origin of poetry, see Das ( 2023 ).

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Singh, B. What Comes After Postcolonial Theory?. SOPHIA 62 , 577–606 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00964-1

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

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By Sandra Marker

November 2003

Around the world today, intractable conflict is found in many areas that were once colonized or controlled by Western European or Soviet powers (i.e., Africa, the Balkans, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America). The source of many of these protracted conflicts, in large part, lies in past colonial or Soviet policies, and especially those regarding territorial boundaries, the treatment of indigenous populations, the privileging of some groups over others, the uneven distribution of wealth, local governmental infrastructures, and the formation of non-democratic or non-participatory governmental systems. It is therefore essential, if one wants to understand intractable conflict and its causes , to examine not only the issues and problems of the moment, but also influential historical factors -- most notably, past colonial and Soviet policies -- and their lingering effects.

Colonial and Soviet Expansionism

Western colonial expansion began during the 15th century when Spanish and Portuguese explorers conquered "new" lands in the West Indies and the Americas. It continued for over 400 years, and ended with the start of the first World War. By that time western powers such as Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, spurred on by their competitive desire to acquire new lands and resources, had colonized the whole of Africa and the areas that we know today as the Americas, Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and many parts of Asia.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) likewise embarked on an expansionist period that took place during the first half of the 20th century. By mid-century, due to lands gained through an aggressive expansionist policy and through post-World War II treaties, the Soviet Empire gained control of all of Russia and most of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

During these periods of expansion, Western European and Soviet powers formed new colonial multiethnic provinces (e.g., Rhodesia, French Indonesia, German East Africa) and satellite states (e.g., Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). They did so with little regard for the people living in the newly controlled areas, or for existing geographic or cultural boundaries. Populations that had previously identified themselves as distinct, based on their cultural, ethnic, and/or religious heritage, were forced to unify under a single national identity . The new multiethnic colonial territories and Soviet states were maintained, upheld, and controlled through the use of violence, and through the implementation of imperialist policies. Certain populations were denied their political, economic, social, and human rights . Imperialist policies promoted ethnic rivalry by favoring one group above the others, distributed resources in an unequal manner, disallowed democratic governments, and prohibited local participation in governmental decisions and actions.

Issues Affecting Postcolonial and Post-Soviet States

By the 1960s, after years of fighting for independence, most Western colonial territories (e.g., India, Indonesia, Algeria) had gained self-rule. Sovereignty , however, did not bring with it freedom from imperialist influences. Colonial legacies were visible in the desire of the new governments to keep the boundaries that were created during colonial times, in the promotion of ethnic rivalry, in the continuation of inhumane and unjust actions against minority populations, and in the practice of distributing the country's resources in an uneven manner. Also, after being under foreign rule for decades, newly independent governments often lacked governmental institutions, good governance skills, and the governing experience needed to effectively rule their newly sovereign nations. In most cases, the transition from colonial province to independent state was a violent and arduous journey.

Many post-Soviet states (e.g., Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia) experienced similar problems. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, conflicts involving borders, ethnic rivalry, human-rights violations, and the uneven distribution of resources raged through former Soviet regions (e.g., the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe). In addition, many post-Soviet governments were plagued by a lack of governmental institutions, good governance skills, and governmental experience.

Issues of particular importance included:

"Over a hundred new nations were born during the process of de-colonization. Most of these new nations, however, ... had not existed at all as nations before colonization, or they had not existed within the post-colonial borders."[1]

Most colonial and Soviet satellite borders were created either through conquest, negotiation between empires, or simply by administrative action,[2] with little or no regard for the social realities of those living in the areas.[3] Nevertheless, many of the leaders and governments of postcolonial and post-Soviet states have fought to keep the territorial boundaries created by past imperialist governments. As a result, a number of boundary conflicts have arisen within post-colonial and post-Soviet territories. Parties to these conflicts justify and legitimate their side's position, using different historical boundaries as evidence for their claims. For example, the Libya-Chad conflict involves a dispute over 114,000 square kilometers of territory, known as the Aouzou Strip.[4] Libya justifies its claims to this territory based on ancient historical boundaries, while Chad justifies its stance based on boundaries established during the colonial period.

Ethnic Rivalry/Group Status

Colonial and Soviet powers often created situations that encouraged ethnic rivalry. For example, when the Soviets took control of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, they created boundaries that separated members of the same ethnic group (i.e. the Tajiks) into different multiethnic regions. "This enabled the Soviet authorities to continuously be called upon by the people of the region to help them manage conflicts that were bound to emerge as a result of these artificial divisions."[5] European and Soviet imperialists also sometimes favored one ethnic or religious group over other groups in the region. This practice of favoring one group, or of giving one group a higher status in colonial society, created and promoted inter-group rivalries.

The conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots has its roots in ethnic rivalry encouraged during British colonial rule. During this time, Turkish and Greek populations were often played against one another as a means of maintaining control on the island. For example, as Greek Cypriots pushed for self-rule, the British encouraged Turkish Cypriots to actively oppose them. By the time the British pulled out of Cyprus in 1960, they had helped cleave deep divisions between the Greek and Turkish populations. The new independent nation, equally ruled by Greeks and Turks, soon was embroiled in ethnic conflict. Greek Cypriots wanted the entire island to become part of Greece, while Turkish Cypriots wanted the northern part of the island to become an independent Turkish state. Consequently, hostilities between the two groups escalated to the point of violence. Decades later, ethnic rivalries that were encouraged during British rule, continue to impact the people of Cyprus as violence between Greeks and Turks continues to periodical erupt on the island state.

Unequal Distribution of Resources

The practice of favoring one ethnic, religious, racial, or other cultural group over others in colonial society, or of giving them a higher status, helped to promote inter-group rivalries, and often contributed to the unequal distribution of resources. Favored or privileged groups had access to, or control of, important resources that allowed them to enrich their members, at the expense of nonmembers. For example, under Soviet rule the elite of the northern province of Leninabad (now the province of Sugd in Tajikistan) were given almost exclusive access to governmental positions. As a result of their control of governmental policies, they sent a disproportionate share of the country's development and industry to this northern sector. The consequence of this action was that by 1992, over half of the country's wealth had been distributed to this one province.[6]

Today, many post-colonial and post-Soviet states continue the practice of favoring one group over others, whether it be a minority European settler population (as in South Africa), a minority European alliance group (e.g., Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda, Burundi) or an internal ethnic group (e.g., India).[7] As a result, we see numerous conflicts being caused in part, by dominant groups enacting and enforcing governmental, economic, political, and other social policies that distribute resources unequally among their nation's members.

Sri Lanka is an example of how the unequal distribution of wealth during colonial times, continues to affect ethnic relations today. Under colonial rule, Tamils, because of their higher rate of English-language skills, had easier access to higher education than did the Sinhalese. The better educated Tamil, thus dominated governmental and academic jobs, especially in the fields of medicine, science, and engineering. After independence, the Sinhalese majority implemented changes in the state's university admission policy that gave them an advantage in gaining access to higher education, specifically to science admissions. This policy resulted in a marked increase of Sinhalese working in the fields of medicine, science, and engineering, and a clear decline of Tamils. Today, as the admission policy to higher education is more equitable than in the past, the animosity created by first, colonial, and then post-colonial policies that promoted unequal access to education and thus, jobs, continues to breed distrust and conflict in the region.

Human Rights

The status, privilege, and wealth of colonial and Soviet ruling populations were often maintained and upheld through the use of policies that violated the human rights of those living in the colonized areas. Unjust policies subjected colonized populations to the loss of their lands, resources, cultural or religious identities, and sometimes even their lives. Examples of these brutal policies include slavery (e.g., British-controlled West Indies), apartheid (e.g., South Africa), and mass murder (e.g., the Incas of Peru, Aborigines of Australia, Hungarians after the 1956 uprising).

Today, many post-colonial and post-Soviet governments have adopted unjust colonial practices and policies as a means to preserve their dominant status. Rights with regards to traditional lands, resources, and cultural language are denied to many populations, as groups that were marginalized under colonial occupation continue to be marginalized under postcolonial governments, most notably indigenous populations such as in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, the Ashaninka of Peru, and the indigenous peoples of West Papua. Human-rights violations, including horrific events of mass murder and genocide, can be found in postcolonial and post-Soviet states such as Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, El Salvador, and South Africa.

Lack of Governmental Institutions, Skills, and Experience

For the most part, colonial and Soviet satellite societies were repressive and undemocratic in nature. Domestic governmental systems and structures were controlled and operated either from abroad or by a select domestic, privileged group. Consequently, when liberation came, these states lacked the internal structures, institutions, and 1egalitarian way of thinking needed to create good governance systems. The result is that many postcolonial and post-Soviet states, although independent, are still ruled by repressive and restrictive regimes. For example, Melber (2002) states, "(t)he social transformation processes in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa can at best be characterized as a transition from controlled change to changed control."[8]

Intractable conflicts are found in many areas that were once colonized or controlled by Western European or Soviet powers such as Africa, the Balkans, and Southeast Asia. Most of these conflicts such as the one in Kashmir, Chechnya, and Cyprus are large and complex, and involve multiple issues ranging from human rights to good governance. Imperialist practices and policies, especially those concerning boundaries, ethnic rivalry, the uneven distribution of resources, human-rights violations, and lack of good governance can be found at the heart of protracted problems. For this reason, it is vital that those wishing to transform or resolve protracted conflict, acknowledge the past, and take into account the effects past imperialist policies continue to have on today's post-colonial and post-Soviet societies.

[1] Mark N. Katz. "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996, p. 29.

[2] Mark N. Katz. "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996.

[3] Mark N. Katz. "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996.

[4] Posthumus, Bram. Chad and Libya : Good Neighbors, Enemies, Brothers - But Never Trusting Friends. Click here for document.

[5] Randa M.Slim "The Ferghana Valley: In the Midst of a Host of Crises." In Searching for Peace in Central and South Asia : An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Activities , eds. Monique Mekenkamp, Paul van Tongeren, and Hans van de Veen, p. 141-142

[6] John Schoeberlein, "Bones of Contention: Conflicts over Resources." In Searching for Peace in Central and South Asia : An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding Activities , eds. Monique Mekenkamp, Paul van Tongeren, and Hans van de Veen, p. 88.

[7] Mark N. Katz, "Collapsed Empires." In Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict , ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Olser Hampson and Pamela Aall, 25-37. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1996.

[8] Henning Melber, "Liberation without Democracy? Flaws of Post-Colonial Systems in Southern Africa" http://www.dse.de/zeitschr/de102-7.htm 2002.

Use the following to cite this article: Marker, Sandra. "Effects of Colonization." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: November 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/post-colonial >.

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Home / Novel / Things Fall Apart as a Postcolonial Novel | Effects of Colonialism

Things Fall Apart as a Postcolonial Novel | Effects of Colonialism

Literature that deals with the people who lived once under colonialism, is called postcolonial literature. Countries of almost every continent went through colonialism. Africa was the most affected continent as colonialism and imperialism caused major changes in the lives of Africans. Things Fall Apart is a novel that deals with postcolonial literature, in which Chinua Achebe portrays theme of colonialism and its demerits. He proved that colonialism either sieged cultural development of Igbo society or entirely replaced it with the new culture. He was not the only one who managed to write novels on colonialism. Heart of Darkness is also an example in which the writer described the miserable condition of Africans when they suffered under British rule.

History is not enough to believe and categories Things Fall Apart as a postcolonial novel and to understand the theme of colonialism in it. Being students of literature, we must gather some evidence from the book to prove that it is about the people of that continent, which was colonized the most. In order to do this, we have to divide the novel into three parts. In fact, Chinua Achebe already completed this task for us. Hence, he divided the novel into three parts; in first part, he portrays life of Nigerians before colonialism; in second part, he depicts the disturbed life of people when whitemen entered in their society; thirdly, at the end he elucidates the miserable condition of the people along with protagonist of the play after colonialism.

Things Fall Apart as a Postcolonial Novel

It has become obvious from the summary of the novel that Chinua Achebe hit the cultural lives of Nigerian people in his play Things Fall Apart to show the postcolonial condition of the people and to paint colonialism as its major theme. He shows the effect of imperialism through cultural conflicts ; therefore, we must stick to the cultural clashes to understand that the play really is a postcolonial novel and we should add it in the list of literature with the effect of colonialism.

Condition of People Before Whitemen

We must know how Igbo people were living before whitemen entered their country. It is necessary to acknowledge the lifestyle of those people to know how colonialism affected them.

People of Ibo society had different beliefs; they had their own customs. They used to believe in myths. People had their own beliefs about the earth and about the sun. Death played a vital role in their lives. They had stories about stars, moons and about the sun. Their beliefs on ghosts were very strong. They did not question any evidence from their forefathers about the folk tales they told them; instead they believed them blindly. Men were symbols of masculinity and they did the earnings whereas women were considered weak and were bound to household activities. A man could have more than one wife. People had an earth goddess, whom they worshiped. At the end of novel, we realize that all these things vanish from Ibo society due to which we call Things Fall Apart a novel that deals with theme of colonialism, hence, falls in postcolonial literature.

In addition, the yam season was full of festivals. A person’s wealth and wives were dependent upon the production of yam crop. They did not have kings, instead they had their own tribal customs. Every tribe had their own head, who decided the matters between people of his tribe. Okonkwo along with other characters of Things Fall Apart is a good example of it. Thus, these were the main customs and beliefs of Igbo society that were really sacred to them. In the novel Things Fall Apart , the writer shows us through this major theme that before colonialism they were living happily while following these traditions.

Interference of Whitemen in Ibo Society

In Chapter-15 and Chapter-16, the readers realize the interference of whitemen at Abame village. A whiteman enters the society on a bicycle, which the people call iron-horse. When they consult the oracle, it is prophesied that the whiteman followed by others would cause destruction of the village. People of the society kill the whiteman and ties his bicycle to a tree; however, whitemen who follow him subsequently discover it and angrily destroy the village Abame.

Obierika tells the whole incident to Okonkwo. He calls the people of society foolish as they committed murder of an innocent person. Chinue Achebe very skillfully compares the incident with Okonkwo’s thinking. On one hand, protagonist of the play shows sympathy on murder of an alien but on the other hand the writer shows destruction of the city from the hands of whitemen. Meaning thereby that the whitemen instead of conducting an inquiry and finding the responsible person of the incident destroy the whole village.

Chinua Achebe, in this way, sketches a theme of colonialism and shows cruelty of whitemen in his novel Things Fall Apart during postcolonial period. Colonialism was not for the welfare of the people, instead whiteman came there to create fear in their minds. The incident shows that they went there to make them slaves.

Acceptance of whitemen

It is also noteworthy that some people open-heartedly accepted colonialism. Nwoye’s example in this regard is in front of us. When missionaries preach Christianity and tell him about the new God, he accepts it. Their new method of worship and believing in only one God really impresses him, resultantly, he changes his mind regarding traditional concepts of Igbo society. In this way, somehow we see the writer expressing his impartial opinions. He shows two types of people in the novel. In the first group are those who reject the idea of a new religion whereas the people who accept the interference of whitemen fall in group two. In this way, the writer sincerely expresses his unbiased opinions.

Postcolonial Condition of Igbo Society in Novel Things Fall Apart

Tragedy starts when the whitemen interfere in the society. It is too late when Okonkwo returns to his home. Numbers of people have already accepted colonialism. He resists but it is in vain . As the customs of Igbo society were entirely interlinked with the religion and whitemen entered there with a new religion; therefore, it was impossible to take the christianity alongside their own beliefs. Moreover, believing on christianiy was meant to accept that their forefathers told them lies. As a Result, Igbo society’s culture faded day by day. It also caused chaos among them. Brother went against brother and father against son. It is evident from the relationship between Okonkwo and his son in the third part of the play.

Theme of Colonialism in Novel Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe was against colonialism. It is, therefore, he tried his best to present an anti-colonial ideology in his book along with other themes of Things Fall Apart . Some of the critics, however, are of the view that Chinua Achebe was not against colonialism but against the conduct of whitemen towards the African people. They further argue that in his novel, he does not talk about the social issues but about the nostalgic customs under which every African lived once. Indeed, there is no doubt that Things Fall Apart is a postcolonial novel and colonialism is its major theme but it can also never be ignored that Chinua Achebe laments on the customs and lifestyle that were entirely changed due to the interference of whitemen in Igbo society.

Definition of postcolonial literature is not the literature that was written after colonialism but the literature that deals with it. Every novel in which the writer talks about the effects of colonialism should be called a postcolonial novel. In view of the definition, we can safely say that Chinua Achebe elucidates impacts of colonialism on his society, hence, his novel Things Fall Apart definitely interpret this theme due to which it falls in the category of postcolonial literature.

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“The Effects of Colonialism Are Still Felt in Our Lives Today”

The recently launched digital platform “affect and colonialism web lab” touches on many issues, from the black lives matter movement to migration.

Sep 03, 2021

The Affect and Colonialism Web Lab has just been launched, with the first videos and podcast episode now available. Image Credit: https://affect-and-colonialism.net/

“Colonialism isn’t just something that began in the sixteenth century and ended four centuries later. It's still present in our world today,” says Jonas Bens. The social and cultural anthropologist at Freie Universität Berlin is an editor for the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab, a new multimedia platform that will serve as a discursive space to parse out the multifaceted impacts of colonialism across the world. Through podcasts, videos, and a digital exhibition, researchers, artists, and activists will investigate how colonialism continues to shape aspects of life today. Freie Universität’s online magazine campus.leben spoke with Bens about the project, which was distinguished within the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s Ideas Competition – International Research Marketing in 2020.

Let’s begin with a short definition of terms: What does “affect” mean in this context?

We use “affect” to refer to the realm of feeling and emotions, but it’s actually a very comprehensive term that encompasses phenomena we find difficult to pin down, like moods and atmospheres.

How does this come to bear on your digital platform “Affect and Colonialism”?

Colonialism put structures in place that are so enduring they still govern our world. This becomes especially clear when we observe how much people are emotionally affected when they are confronted with them in everyday life.

Could you give us some specific examples?

Discussions about renaming streets that honor controversial historical figures, what we should do with ethnographic collections of dubious origin like that of the Humboldt Forum, and whether children’s books that contain racist terms should be rewritten are all specific, contemporary examples of how we are constantly grappling with colonialism. Growing numbers of young people are passionately engaged in campaigns to tackle climate change head-on – calling on us to take fewer flights, drive less, or adopt a vegan lifestyle – climate change itself being a product of a colonial economic system.

All of these conflicts provoke very strong emotional reactions, for example, among a section of the white population who grew up with certain terms and traditions that were considered perfectly fine for decades, and are now all of a sudden unacceptable.

On a global scale, we dicsuss different attitudes toward migration, which is the result of an unequal world that still retains colonial structures. The Black Lives Matter movement is fundamentally tied to colonialism-related issues that remain unresolved, as many African Americans who sense that their overall situation has hardly improved since the onset of colonialism and slavery are now protesting for freedom from an oppressive atmosphere of white supremacy.

Jonas Bens, a social scientist, is a member of the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab’s coordination team. Image Credit: Personal collection

Colonialism is a remarkably broad topic – both in terms of chronology and content. How are you planning to approach this issue with the Web Lab?

The Web Lab is designed to be a platform that brings together people from across the world who research colonialism and how it manifests itself palpably in people’s lives. But we’re not just interested in purely academic work; artists, political activists, and journalists are welcome to showcase their projects on our website.

We want to go beyond the formats that are dominant in academia like printed books or written essays to adopt videos, podcasts, and other formats that allow agile interventions and easy access. All in all, we want to create a mosaic made up of different perspectives. This is the core concept of our Web Lab: it is decentralized, non-hierarchical, and brings perspectives from around the world together in one place.

Who is the Web Lab for?

The content we publish via the Web Lab will be oriented toward a wide audience. At the same time, we want the platform to create global networks between people who are working on the topic of colonialism. We also have a digital fellowship program dedicated to overcoming the boundaries between academia and art. Jaider Esbel, an indigenous Brazilian artist from Boa Vista, and Luiza Prado, a Berlin-based Brazilian researcher and artist, are currently collaborating to create a digital exhibition that will also be available via the Web Lab.

This interview originally appeared in German on August 19, 2021, in campus.leben , the online magazine of Freie Universität Berlin.

Interview by Melanie Hansen

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Article contents

Designing, Defining, Declaring an Idea

Origins of a Theory: Negritude and Liberation

Memmi and Fanon

Homi Bhabha and Cultural “Hybridity”

The Ghost of Conrad

Edward W Said

The Subaltern School

The Death of a Theory

A Theory’s Afterdeath

Conclusion: The Road Not Taken

Discussion of the Literature

Further Reading

Introducing Postcolonial Literature

Literary Theory and Criticism

Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies

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