Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory

A Reader

Patrick Williams, Laura Chrisman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317325239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This popular text provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The readings are drawn from a diverse selection of thinkers both historical and contemporary.

Part One Theorising Colonised Cultures and Anti-Colonial Resistance

Introduction

Theorising the nature of colonised subjectivity and of cultural and political resistance raises a number of questions: the place of national and nationalist culture in relation to political liberation; the nature of colonialism’s cultural impact on the psyches of the colonised and vice versa; essentialist and anti-essentialist views of cultural identity. These questions themselves generate concerns, such as the class and gender basis of colonial subjectification. For instance, is there ‘a’ colonised subject, and its binary opposite, ‘a’ coloniser subject, about whom theories can be produced, without regard for the socio-economic class of either party? For psychoanalytically-inclined theorists such as Homi Bhabha in this part, following the Frantz Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks, the answer may appear to be yes. The gendering of anti-colonial resistance and colonial subjectivity remains a crucial, problematic, theoretical and historical issue, as argued by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in this part, and Deniz Kandiyoti (see Part Five). Another set of questions concerns the naturexof historical analysis of the colonised, the political and epistemological implications of modern intellectuals who have rendered themselves transparent and/or have claimed to be able to represent the subjectivity of the colonised Other. Further questions concern the definition and function of ‘the nation’, in whose name much of the resistance discussed here is undertaken.

All too often, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has suggested (see Part Five), theorisations of ‘the’ colonised subject can turn out to be theorisations of the petty-bourgeois or intellectual classes of the colonised, who take themselves to be identical with coloniality itself. Many of the readings in this part are concerned with an analysis of the cultural identity of the class of the colonised intellectual and nationalist leader, and with theorising his relation to the people he aspires to represent. Several of the contributors – Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral -are themselves examples of this class, combining political activism and intellectual production. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak forcefully argues, an awareness of the relation of the intellectual’s inescapable implication in the politics of institutionalised knowledge-production and its corollary, processes of economic production, should inform that intellectual’s theoretical project.

The philosophies of negritude, represented in this part by a speech given by Senghor, and subjected to critiques in the readings by Fanon and Cabral, stand as a highly influential example of black essentialist or nativist theory. Theories of black consciousness date from (at the least) the nineteenth-century work of West African-based Edward Wilmot Blyden, but through negritude in the 1940s and 1950s such theories achieved a more international audience and articulation. Though negritude, which spans West Africa to the diasporic Caribbean, is philosophically and historically particular to French colonisation, it has an anglophone counterpart of sorts in the movements of African, Caribbean and African-American pan-Africanism. By the time Senghor gave this speech to the first Festival of African Arts, in Dakar in 1966, he had been president of Senegal for the six years of its independence. Outlining the distinctiveness and value of a racialised black African culture, he pursues in fact a multiple strategy: Africa, he argues, has affinities with many of the philosophical, scientific and modernist aesthetic innovations of modern European discoveries, thereby undermining the opposition; at the same time, the ‘essential’ values of African culture, such as collectivity, dialogue and humanism, are venerated for their potential to resolve global conflict and introduce an alternative and compassionate world view.

Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan-born psychiatrist and activist for the Algerian National Liberation Front, composed his influential essay ‘On national culture’ in 1959. It was originally delivered to an audience of the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome. Later included in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, the piece differs from the rest of that book in its relative abstraction. Among the reading’s most noted features is its attack on negritude as a concept which mirrors the racialisation and continental dynamics of colonialism itself, and constitutes a metaphysical rather than a materialist politics. Fanon’s own materialism, however, could be said to abandon him when it comes to the category of ‘the nation’, which serves as an unproblematic given (its origins in colonialism are not an issue) and as a transcendent value, much as ‘Africa’ serves Senghor. Fanon’s thought pursues a complex and elusive course; at times, for example, ‘culture’ is definable as a kind of second-order aesthetic and critical commentary on – and morale-booster for – established political and social achievements; at other times, as in the last section of the reading, ‘culture’ seems to be defined anthropologically; and at others, it signifies the as-yet-unimaginable space of emancipated nationhood.

Fanon distinguishes ‘culture’ from pre-coloniaL aesthetic traditions and customs, and to the extent that he implies a certain class of the modern intelligentsia possesses a monopoly on cultural production, he could be said to have taken on board a romantic and francocentric notion of culture; the flipside, perhaps, of his nihilistic and absolutist perception of colonialism as having totally destroyed the possibility of culture itself within the communities it has colonised.

Amilcar Cabral, agronomist and Secretary-General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), presents an interestingly contrasting theory of culture’s role in national liberation movements, reflecting the differences between French and Portuguese forms of colonialism, as well as historical and political differences between the resistance movements of Algeria and Guinea-Bissau. His paper was originally delivered in 1970, as a memorial lecture for Eduardo Mondlane, in Syracuse University, New York. By this time, the national liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde had been underway for at least seven years and was somewhat closer to success than Fanon’s Algeria of his 1959 speech.

Whereas Fanon argues that it is ‘the people’, Cabral argues that it is ‘popular culture’ which forms the basis of the anti-colonial political struggle. Also, while for Fanon national culture cannot exist within the history and domination of colonialism, for Cabral the operations of national culture are in a dialectical relationship with history. Culture (this culture would, for Fanon, constitute ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’ rather than culture proper) continues throughout the period of domination, reflecting Cabral’s view (and experience) of colonialism’s power as never being total; colonialism’s cultural hegemony, he argues, does not extend to the subaltern classes beyond the metropole. Unlike Fanon, Cabral theorises the relationship of cultural processes to the forces and relations of economic production. In a way, Cabral’s greater attention to, and positive evaluation of, the strength and role of popular culture is the corollary of his holistic concern for the structures of the social totality in which culture functions; for Fanon, the sphere of politics alone constitutes that totality. Fanon’s position represented here (which is not that of The Wretched of the Earth as a whole) leads him to a notion of ‘the nation’ which excludes consideration of the ways in which, as Cabral argues, the ‘multiplicity of social and ethnic groups … complicates the effort to determine the role of culture in the liberation movement’. With respect to the coordinates of the national culture, Cabral fluctuates as much as does Fanon: such a culture features as a ‘harmony’, which preserves the differences of different social groups within it, and yet also as a ‘unity’.

Indian-born, United States-based Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides an anti-foundationalist critique of the concept of a colonial subaltern subject accessible to and representable by disinterested intellectuals, a concept developed by, among others, the influential South Asian journal Subaltern Studies. Spivak’s project combines the theoretical and political insights of Marxism, feminism and deconstruction, placing them in a non-dialectical dialogue. Theorising the production of blindspots as inevitable but contestable consequence of knowledge/power, she focuses on the figure of the subaltern South Asian woman, whose contradictory constructions and control by traditional patriarchal authority and by English colonialism, instanced in the history of sati (widow-burning), provide an illustration of the aporias of colonial discourse theory, and a challenge to both empiricist and idealist notions of‘the subaltern’ subject’s historical representability. Spivak’s theme and scholarship can be seen to serve a double function; not only do they establish the complexity and material specificity of histories and historiographies of colonialism, but they also can be read allegorically, as a constellation of contemporary dynamics of global capitalism dependent upon the material labour and the discursive silencing of the subaltern woman.

Spivak’s feminism produces a deconstruction of the coloniser/colonised polarity, pointing to the neglect of gender found in that conceptualisation. Indian-born, British-based critic Homi Bhabha also deconstructs that polarity, arguing not for the discontinuous social groups and narratives which such a binarism disguises or denies but for the psychoanalytic ambivalence which is constitutive of the identities of the coloniser and colonised subject alike. Taking up Fanon’s critique of historicism, and his pursuit, in his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, of a non-historicised approach to colonial subjectivity, Bhabha focuses on the spatialised and image-based dynamics of colonial subjectivity, founded on the politics of dislocation for both coloniser and colonised. Discussing the co-existence in Fanon’s thought of Marxist/Hegelian, existentialist/phenomenological and psychoanalytic methodologies, Bhabha argues for the irreducibility of the analysis of colonial subjectivity to any single theoretical paradigm.

1 □ Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century

Léopold Sédar Senghor

DOI: 10.4324/9781315656496-1

During the last thirty or so years that we have been proclaiming negritude, it has become customary, especially among English-speaking critics, to accuse us of racialism. This is probably because the word is not of English origin. But, in the language of Shakespeare, is it not in good company with the words humanism and socialism? Mphahleles¹ have been sent abut the world saying: ‘Negritude is an inferiority complex’; but the same word cannot mean both ‘racialism’ and ‘inferiority complex’ without contradiction. The most recent attack comes from Ghana, where the government has commissioned a poem entitled ‘I hate negritude’ – as if one could hate oneself, hate one’s being, without ceasing to be.

No, negritude is none of these things. It is neither racialism nor self-negation. Yet it is not just affirmation; it is rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of one’s being. Negritude is nothing more or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the African personality. It is no different from the ‘black personality’ discovered and proclaimed by the American New Negro movement. As the American Negro poet, Langston Hughes wrote after the first world war: ‘We, the creators of the new generation, want to give expression to our black personality without shame or fear. … We know we are handsome. Ugly as well. The drums weep and the drums laugh.’ Perhaps our only originality, since it was the West Indian poet Aimé Césaire who coined the word negritude, is to have attempted to define the concept a little more closely; to have developed it as a weapon, as an instrument of liberation and as a contribution to the humanism of the twentieth century.

But, once again, what is negritude? Ethnologists and sociologists today speak of ‘different civilizations’. It is obvious that peoples differ in their ideas and their languages, in their philosophies and their religions, in their customs and their institutions, in their literature and their art. Who would deny that Africans, too, have a certain way of conceiving life and of living it? A certain way of speaking, singing and dancing; of painting and sculpturing, and even of laughing and crying? Nobody, probably; for otherwise we would not have been talking about ‘Negro art’ for the last sixty years and Africa would be the only continent today without its ethnologists and sociologists. What, then, is negritude? It is – as you can guess from what precedes – the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe. It is, as John Reed and Clive Wake call it, a certain ‘way of relating oneself to the world and to others’.² Yes, it is essentially relations with others, an opening out to the world, contact and participation with others. Because of what it is, negritude is necessary in the world today: it is a humanism of the twentieth century.

‘The Revolution of 1889'

But let us go back to 1885 and the morrow of the Berlin Conference. The European nations had just finished, with Africa, their division of the planet. Including the United States of America, they were five or six at the height of their power who dominated the world. Without any complexes, they were proud of their material strength; prouder even of their science, and paradoxically, of their race. It is true that at that time this was not a paradox. Gobineau, the nineteenth-century philosopher of racial supremacy, had, by a process of osmosis, even influenced Marx, and Disraeli was the great theoretician of that ‘English race, proud, tenacious, confident in itself, that no climate, no change can undermine’. (The italics are mine.) Leo Frobenius, the German ethnologist, one of the first to apprehend the rich complexity of African culture, writes in The Destiny of Civilizations: ‘Each of the great nations that considers itself personally responsible for the “destiny of the world” believes it possesses the key to the understanding of the whole and the other nations. It is an attitude raised from the past.’

In fact, this attitude ‘raised from the past’ had begun to be discredited toward the end of the nineteenth century by books like Bergson’s Time and Free Will, which was published in 1889. Since the Renaissance, the values of European civilization had rested essentially on discursive reason and facts, on logic and matter. Bergson, with an eminently dialectical subtlety, answered the expectation of a public weary of scientism and naturalism. He showed that facts and matter, which are the objects of discursive reason, were only the outer surface that had to be transcended by intuition in order to achieve a vision in depth of reality.

But the ‘Revolution of 1889’ – as we shall call it – did not only affect art and literature, it completely upset the sciences. In 1880, only a year before the invention of the word electron, a distinction was still being drawn between matter and energy. The former was inert and unchangeable, the latter was not. But what characterized both of them was their permanence and their continuity. They were both subject to a strict mechanical determinism. Matter and energy had, so to speak, existed from the beginning of time; they could change their shape, but not their substance. All we lacked in order to know them objectively in space and time were sufficiently accurate instruments of investigation and measurement.

Well, in less than fifty years, all these principles were to be outmoded and even rejected. Thirty years ago already, the new discoveries of science – quanta, relativity, wave mechanics, the uncertainty principle, electron spin – had upset the nineteenth-century notion of determinism, which denied man’s free will, along with the concepts of matter and energy. The French physicist, Broglie, revealed to us the duality of matter and energy, or the wave-particle principle that underlies things; the Germany physicist, Heisenberg, showed us that objectivity was an illusion and that we could not observe facts without modifying them; others showed that, on the scale of the infinitely small as on that of the immensely great, particles act on one another. Since then, the physico-chemical laws, like matter itself, could no longer appear unchangeable. Even in the field, and on the scale, where they were valid, they were only rough approximations, no more than probabilities. It was enough to scrape the surface of things and of facts to realize just how much instability there is, defying our measuring instruments, probably because they are only mechanical: material.

It was on the basis of these discoveries, through a combination of logical coherence and amazing intuition, of scientific experiment and inner experience, that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was able to transcend the traditional dichotomies with a new dialectic, to reveal to us the living, throbbing unity of the universe. On the basis, then, of the new scientific discoveries, Teilhard de Chardin transcends the old dualism of the philosophers and the scientists, which Marx and Engels had perpetuated by giving matter precedence over the spirit. He advanced the theory that the stuff of the universe is not composed of two realities, but of a single reality in the shape of two phenomena; that there is not matter and energy, not even matter and spirit, but spirit-matter, just as there is space-time. Matter and spirit become a ‘network of relations’, as the French philosopher Bachelard called it: ener...