Postcolonial Criticism

Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, Willy Maley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891918
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Post-colonial theory is a relatively new area in critical contemporary studies, having its foundations more Postcolonial Criticism brings together some of the most important critical writings in the field, and aims to present a clear overview of, and introduction to, one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of contemporary literary criticism. It charts the development of the field both historically and conceptually, from its beginnings in the early post-war period to the present day. The first phase of postcolonial criticism is recorded here in the pioneering work of thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. More recently, a new generation of academics have provided fresh assessments of the interaction of class, race and gender in cultural production, and this generation is represented in the work of Aijaz Ahmad, bell hooks, Homi Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. Topics covered include negritude, national culture, orientalism, subalternity, ambivalence, hybridity, white settler societies, gender and colonialism, culturalism, commonwealth literature, and minority discourse. The collection includes an extensive general introduction which clearly sets out the key stages, figures and debates in the field. The editors point to the variety, even conflict, within the field, but also stress connections and parallels between the various figures and debates which they identify as central to an understanding of it. The introduction is followed by a series of ten essays which have been carefully chosen to reflect both the diversity and continuity of postcolonial criticism. Each essay is supported by a short introduction which places it in context with the rest of the author's work, and identifies how its salient arguments contribute to the field as a whole. This is a field which covers many disciplines including literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy, geography, economics, history and politics. It is designed to fit into the current modular arrangement of courses, and is therefore suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses which address postcolonial issues and the 'new' literatures in English.

1
From Discourse on Colonialism^*

AIMÉ CESAIRÉ

* Reprinted from Discourse on Colonialism (1955; reprinted New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 9–32, 57–61.

Césaire was many things: poet, activist, politician, a man who was an inspiration to many - notably those from his native island of Martinique such as Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant. His brand of negritude had a harder edge than that of Senghor, and it is this which connects his work with that of Fanon. It is the island’s history that contributes so much to Césaire’s poetry, notably his Return to my Native Land, but it also informs his whole world-view. The nature of colonial society in Martinique was a direct reflection of this history, its class hierarchies conditioned by its economic role for the French, based largely on sugar cultivation. An elite pledged its allegience to France and French culture, but in the cane fields it was a different world, a black world of grinding poverty and ceaseless toil (powerfully evoked in Joseph Zobel’s novel Black Shack Alley, 1980). It was this world which Césaire sought to emancipate and it was his understanding of it and its intimate links with colonialism that informed his poet’s vision rather than some image of a ‘pure’ Africa. But Césaire’s poetics were backed by a rigorous analysis of colonialism and nowhere did he state this more fully than here in his Discourse on Colonialism which must be viewed as a founding text for post-colonial criticism. From its very beginning we can feel the weight of Césaire’s denunciation. The early almost hypnotic repetition of the word civilization prepares the ground for his contention that Western civilization, in the shape of Europe, is ‘morally, spiritually indefensible’. It is the relation between this civilization and colonialism that Césaire sets out to explore and unmask. Slowly, he suggests, inexorably, this Europe proceeds towards savagery. Colonialism, in his analysis, is nothing less than the prelude to Nazism. Hitler was the logical outcome of the colonial process. A civilization which justifies colonialism and colonization is a sick civilization, one which ‘calls for Hitler, I mean its punishment’. This is not simple assertion. Reaching back into the archive of European colonialism Césaire cites the horrors already perpetrated, the ears and heads severed, the villages and towns razed to the ground, ‘the societies drained of their essence’. The purported benefits of colonization - roads laid, the ‘parody of education’ - are as nothing in comparison with what has been lost in the destruction of non-European civilization. In his defence of the latter Césaire comes remarkably close to the position adopted by underdevelopment theorists in the 1970s: ‘The great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about.’ Indeed, when he talks of the disruption of natural economies we might be tempted to draw links with the representatives of modern ecology movements who, like Césaire, but using a slightly different vocabulary, suggest that if Europe refuses to change its ways it will have ‘drawn up over itself the pall of mortal darkness’. This text, which was written in the 1950s, places the blame for ‘Western civilization’ firmly on the shoulders of the European bourgeoisie. The two major problems he sees as being the proletariat and the colonial problem and this demonstrates, in part, his allegiance to the Communist Party. But his views evolved and in 1956 he resigned his party membership. No longer, he felt, could the mission of the colonized be subsumed under the rubric of proletarian revolution. In his letter of resignation he stated his new vision which made it clear that he felt questions of race and colonialism should take central stage in any analysis of the modern world. In this way his work and thought prefigures many of the latter developments in postcolonial theory, notably Bhabha’s reception of the work of Fanon.

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

The fact is that the so-called European civilization - ‘Western’ civilization - as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of ‘reason’ or before the bar of ‘conscience’; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.

Europe is indefensible.

Apparently that is what the American strategists are whispering to each other.

That in itself is not serious.

What is serious is that ‘Europe’ is morally, spiritually indefensible.

And today the indictment is brought against it not by the European masses alone, but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.

The colonialists may kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in Black Africa, crack down in the West Indies. Henceforth the colonized know that they have an advantage over them. They know that their temporary ‘masters’ are lying.

Therefore that their masters are weak.

And since I have been asked to speak about colonization and civilization, let us go straight to the principal lie which is the source of all the others.

Colonization and civilization?

In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them.

In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously - and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship-owner, the gold-digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

Pursuing my analysis, I find that hypocrisy is of recent date; that neither Cortez discovering Mexico from the top of the great teocalli, nor Pizzaro before Cuzco (much less Marco Polo before Cambaluc), claims that he is the harbinger of a superior order; that they kill; that they plunder; that they have helmets, lances, cupidities; that the slavering apologists came later; that the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the yellow peoples, and the Negroes.

That being settled, I admit that it is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds; that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies; that for civilizations, exchange is oxygen; that the great good fortune of Europe is to have been a crossroads, and that because it was the locus of all ideas, the receptacle of all philosophies, the meeting place of all sentiments, it was the best center for the redistribution of energy

But then I ask the following question: has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best?

I answer no.

And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been despatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and ‘interrogated’, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind - it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been - and still is - narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.

I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.

And this being so, I cannot help thinking of one of his statements: ‘We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law.’

That rings clear, haughty, and brutal and plants us squarely in the middle of howling savagery. But let us come down a step.

Who is speaking? I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western humanist, the ‘idealist’ philosopher. That his name is Renan is an accident. That the passage is taken from a book entitled La Réforme intellectuelle et morale, that it was written in France just after a war which France had represented as a war of right against might, tells us a great deal about bourgeois morals.

The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity. With us, the common man is nearly always a declasse nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to his first estate. Regere imperio populos, that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Discourse on Colonialism
• 2 On National Culture
• 3 An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• 4 Orientalism Reconsidered
• 5 Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
• 6 ‘Race’, Time and the Revision of Modernity
• 7 West Indian Literature and the Australian Comparison
• 8 Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject
• 9 Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse: What is to be Done?
• 10 From In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index