Postcolonialism Cross-Examined

Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present

Monika Albrecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138344174
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000007824
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Taking a strikingly interdisciplinary and global approach, Postcolonialism Cross-Examined reflects on the current status of postcolonial studies and attempts to break through traditional boundaries, creating a truly comparative and genuinely global phenomenon. Drawing together the field of mainstream postcolonial studies with post-Soviet postcolonial studies and studies of the late Ottoman Empire, the contributors in this volume question many of the concepts and assumptions we have become accustomed to in postcolonial studies, creating a fresh new version of the field. The volume calls the merits of the field into question, investigating how postcolonial studies may have perpetuated and normalized colonialism as an issue exclusive to Western colonial and imperial powers. The volume is the first to open a dialogue between three different areas of postcolonial scholarship that previously developed independently from one another:

• the wide field of postcolonial studies working on European colonialism,

• the growing field of post-Soviet postcolonial/post-imperial studies,

• the still fledgling field of post-Ottoman postcolonial/post-imperial studies, supported by sideways glances at the multidirectional conditions of interaction in East Africa and the East and West Indies.

Postcolonialism Cross-Examined looks at topics such as humanism, nationalism, multiculturalism, nostalgia, and the Anthropocene in order to piece together a new, broader vision for postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century. By including territories other than those covered by the postcolonial mainstream, the book strives to reframe the "postcolonial" as a genuinely global phenomenon and develop multidirectional postcolonial perspectives.

1 Introduction: Postcolonialism cross-examined

Multidirectional perspectives on imperial and colonial pasts and the neocolonial present

Monika Albrecht

Forty years after the rise of the postcolonial theories in the Anglophone academy and the subsequent transformation of scholarly discourses around the globe, the question arises of whether the postcolonial paradigm actually helps us understand the world, particularly the globalized world of the twenty-first century. The sheer number of monographs and anthologies that have appeared in the last decade¹ suggests a continued interest in (though not necessarily the continued relevance of) postcolonial scholarship. Moreover, as Arif Dirlik pointed out, the impact of postcolonial studies reaches far beyond the field as such—if something like “as such” exists—and “postcolonial criticism has infiltrated discourses that have origins quite independent of postcolonialism” (Dirlik 1999, 149). There is certainly no shortage of critique of “the postcolonial” and postcolonial studies either. Over the decades, the field has faced criticism from various quarters, with Neil Lazarus even accusing much of postcolonial scholarship of “culturalism” and of being “ungrounded” (Lazarus 2013, 324f.). In this spirit, critical of the growing provincialism of postcolonial studies, scholars have time and again called for a renewal of postcolonial studies and expressed a desire to push the field in different directions. While the “materialist-poststructuralist opposition” still persists (Bernard, Elmarsafy, and Murray 2015, 4), from around the turn of the century scholars began to consider the present—despite the unaltered “possibility of a return to colonialism in a new guise”—as already “post-postcolonial” (Dirlik 2003, 424; see also Koschorke 2017²). Critique has also centered around the obvious ideological and normative aspects of postcolonial approaches (Cooper 2005, 4; Divine 2008, 5; Albrecht 2012b), and a now oft-quoted PMLA roundtable discussion even posed the question of “The End of Postcolonial Theory” (Yaeger 2007, 633). However, despite this and other prophecies over the years predicting its demise, the field remains extremely prolific in terms of research output and exceptionally creative in its engagement with contemporary and historic manifestations of colonialism and imperialism. As Madina Tlostanova, one of the contributors to this volume (Chapter 9), reasserted more than a decade after Dirlik: “Postcolonial theory has become in the last two decades a well-established and integral element of […] thinking on otherness, ethnicity, race and gender, as well as queer and ecological projects both in the west and in the non-west” (Tlostanova 2012, 130).

Yet, one can also examine the success story and the infiltration of contemporary thought with postcolonial tenets and ideas from another angle. To begin with, from a reverse point of view, it actually seems odd that mainstream postcolonial studies have managed to establish and normalize colonialism as an issue exclusive to Western colonial and imperial powers and their non-Western victims. It would be worth investigating how and why this selective framework of exploration and explanation could become so successful in the first place. “Postcolonial theory” can be defined “as that branch of contemporary theory that investigates, and develops propositions about, the cultural and political impact of European conquest upon colonized societies, and the nature of those societies’ responses” (Ashcroft 2012b, xv). But how do we actually explain this strange consensus on the history of European or Western colonialism and why it is deemed to be the foundation of postcolonial critique? In the postcolonial “master narrative,” as the anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman dryly stated some time ago, “most of world history disappears” (Salzman 2008, 244). Indeed, a recent publication labels the “world” it allegedly deals with The Postcolonial World (Singh and Kim 2017). Ironically though, the cover picture, part of a world map designed by Indian visual artist Reena Saini Kallat (cf. Figure 2 in Lionnet, Chapter 3), shows areas of the world to which this book on The Postcolonial World does not even get close—such as the Soviet/Tsarist Empires and the Ottoman Empire and other Islamic empires. If one would draw an actual map of this kind of Postcolonial World, there would be large gaps. The postcolonial paradigm is at once all-encompassing and highly reductive. It is all-encompassing in the sense that postcolonial scholars share “a commitment to tell a more inclusive, more truly global story” (Brennan 2013, 143), and “promise […] that the theoretical modes of postcolonial studies have the potential to chart the worldwide contemporary condition” (Parry 2012, 341). It is reductive in the sense that its key concepts, which are applied to this worldwide condition, came into being on the basis of this very restrictive framework of the West and the formerly colonized non-West.

The phrase “postcolonial mainstream” is not meant to lump together the wide and manifold field of postcolonial studies and wrongfully make it uniform. “Postcolonial mainstream” points to nothing other than the one feature that contributions to postcolonial scholarship have in common, namely that, diverse as they may otherwise be, the matrix on which they are mapped is the assumption that colonialism and post-colonialism³ are tantamount to Western colonialism and post-colonialism. Postcolonial scholars define the characteristics of their field as “a common political and moral consensus towards the history and legacy of western colonialism” (Young 2016, 5; my emphasis). This self-confinement to an overall unidirectional discursive framework results, amongst other things, in a stubborn reverse division of the world into West and non-West. A division that, within an unaltered binary framework, only reverses prestige and value. While postcolonial scholars, at least from the 1990s onwards, strived to soften the deep division “between colonizing perpetrators and colonized victims” so customary for earlier phases of postcolonial studies “by introducing concepts of ‘hybridity’ (Homi Bhabha) or intermediary ‘contact zones’ (Mary Louise Pratt),” they certainly did not question “the guiding fundamental oppositions between identity and alterity” (Osterhammel 2017, 64). The postcolonial reverse division and revaluation of the world—despite its complex deconstructive, poststructuralist, and/or culturalist guise—is therefore still in place. What’s more, “dichotomous models” such as the postcolonial self-confinement to a unidirectional West/non-West framework “in essence […] presume a mono-motivational anthropology and in turn a mono-causal methodology” (Osterhammel 2017, 64). Against this backdrop, my own chapter in this volume (Chapter 10), which takes up questions posed by Sheldon Pollock and Katherine Fleming, develops the alternative concept of a multidirectional post-colonial framework. This critical endeavor should not be misunderstood as an attempt to trivialize or justify colonial enterprises and does not suggest that “this was and is the case everywhere in the world.” A multidirectional post-colonial framework is also not just a matter of methodological questions; it is not about a mere broadening of the geo-political and geo-historical realm of investigation. Instead, it aims at unthinking this division of the world, both customary and reverse, and all that this division entails. The critique of many of the contributors to this volume is likewise fundamentally different from previous interrogations of the postcolonial paradigm. Its difference lies in its targeting of key assumptions and categories of the field, beginning with the supposed normality of colonialism and post-colonialism as Western colonialism and post-colonialism.

There has been fundamental criticism of postcolonial studies before⁴ but in a different way. Neil Lazarus—along with Benita Parry and a few others, one of postcolonialism’s toughest critics—dedicated much of his “work since the 1990s” to a “contestation of particular ideas and assumptions predominant in postcolonial studies.” In his seminal study The Postcolonial Unconscious, Lazarus would “call into question concepts and theories that have seemed to [him] to lack accountability to the realities of the contemporary world-system that constitutes their putative object” (Lazarus 2011a, 1). Moreover, in a subsequent essay, he likewise criticizes postcolonial scholars for their “tendency to cast colonialism as a political dispensation and to refer it, in civilizational terms, to ‘the west’ (or, in some versions, ‘the north’)” (Lazarus 2012, 120). In fact, “the postcolonialist idea of ‘the west’ as the super-agent of domination in the modern global order strikes [him] as being deeply misconceived” (117). However inspiring as his critique consistently is, as he does not call for a widening of the postcolonial horizon to the neglected areas of the globe, he goes in a different direction to that proposed by this volume. Lazarus argues against the inclusion of post-Soviet nations (other areas of the world he does not discuss) in postcolonial scholarship on the basis of the assumption that “colonialism,” whatever else it may have included, “as an historical process involved the forced integration of hitherto uncapitalized societies, or societies in which the capitalist mode of production was not hegemonic, into a capitalist world-system” (120). At the same time, though, by advocating a replacement of “the West” by the Western capitalist world-system, he confirms the idea of colonialism and post-colonialism as Western colonialism and post-colonialism.

To suggest, as I do, that other political and economic systems produced comparable conditions to those of Western colonialism does not imply a minimization of the capitalist world-system “as the pre-eminent force shaping social development over the course of modern history” (Lazarus 2012, 121). It does imply, though, that excluding other systems of colonialism or imperialism deprives post-colonial studies of the opportunity to compare, for instance, colonial practices, or forms of resistance to them, in a way that may considerably differ from comparisons within the familiar areas of the postcolonial map. As I will argue in the following text, it is not just a matter of a conceptual assignment of colonialism to the West (instead of to the Western economic system, as Lazarus suggests), but of an actual assignment of colonialism to the West that led to the “epistemological dead end” (Berman 2011, 173) of the postcolonial paradigm and the circular reasoning that emerges from its assumptions.

This does not relieve future analyses of colonial and post-colonial phenomena from the obligation to apply a solid economic framework to their arguments. By “solid economic framework,” I mean one which takes the material base of colonialism and its beneficiaries seriously, adequately gets to grips with the economic exploitation of one group by another, and avoids mystification of the materialist reality. A mystification which Lazarus rightly ascribes to large parts of postcolonial studies (Lazarus 2011a, 17). A starting point could be, for instance, the work of economic historians of the Ottoman Empire such as Şevket Pamuk, who analyzed the “penetration of capitalism into the Ottoman Empire” (Pamuk 1988, 127). As Selim Deringil argues, in the wake of the penetration of Western capitalism, the Ottomans clearly began to adopt an increasingly “colonial stance toward the peoples of the periphery of their empire” (Deringil 2003, 313).

While there has been fundamental criticism before, there is scattered evidence that in the present situation some of postcolonialism’s discontents tend to just leave the field behind, arguing for instance that “postcolonial studies stressed the importance of ‘othering’ and put the category of difference in the center of historical analysis. We believe that it is time to go a step further” (Rohland 2018). As I will show in the following introduction, the thought pattern of “going a step further,” which suggests a new approach but leaves untouched or even builds on previous achievements, may be problematic in the case of the postcolonial paradigm. Considering the fact that “postcolonial criticism has infiltrated” many contemporary discourses and disciplines (Dirlik 1999, 149), the misguidance generated by the postcolonial paradigm should not be underestimated. As Robert Young put it, rejoicing what is in my view anything but a favorable outcome: “Postcolonial critique has been so successful that by the beginning of the twenty-first century the concepts and values of postcolonial thought have become established as one of the dominant ways in which Western and to some extent non-Western societies see and represent themselves” (Young 2016, ix). As indicated also by others,⁵ the postcolonial mainstream has successfully ensured that its premises can now be considered more or less accepted far beyond the field of postcolonial studies. Indeed, the postcolonial paradigm is a prime example for Michel Foucault’s claim that “the discourse” not only “makes it possible to construct the topic in a certain way. It also limits the other ways in which the topic can be constructed” (Hall 1992, 201; my emphasis). The just quoted keywords “othering” and “difference” are fine examples of this idea. If not confronted and addressed properly as highly problematic, these concepts in all their ideological ramifications may very well reassert themselves, sneaking in via the backdoor. Before going a step further, it might therefore be appropriate to take a moment as I will in the section Towards multidirectional perspectives of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Postcolonialism cross-examined: Multidirectional perspectives on imperial and colonial pasts and the neocolonial present
• PART I Post-colonial complexities
• PART II Case studies in light of unchanged asymmetries
• PART III Towards a multidirectional approach to the postcolonial
• PART IV Yet another major challenge
• Index