The Postcolonial World

Jyotsna G. Singh, David D. Kim, Jyotsna G. Singh, David D. Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367363567
• eBook ISBN: 9781315297675
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine:

• Affective, Postcolonial Histories
• Postcolonial Desires
• Religious Imaginings
• Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices
• Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts
• Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities
• Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies
• Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism

The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.

Part I

Affective, Postcolonial Histories

Chapter One

On postcolonial happiness

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

On the 2nd of March 2014 I was part of an extraordinary spectacle, popularly described as “the greatest show on earth”: the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, specifically, the competition in which schools of samba parade in front of a nearly 100,000 strong audience in a structure called the sambódromo. It was Sunday, the first of the two main days of the parades, reserved for Rio’s best samba schools (their ranking is determined through a combination of seniority and selection rounds). A Brazilian friend gifted me her entry ticket so that I, and an accompanying Spanish friend, could attend along with two friends of hers (tickets are limited and we had only four tickets amongst the five of us). This act of double altruism (a free ticket and the sacrifice of a place) was fuelled by my friend’s conviction that an opportunity to enter the sambódromo was so special that it had to be granted to the visiting foreigner. An element of national pride was definitely involved: to cede one’s place thus was to enable the visitor to understand Brazil in all its spontaneity, its generosity, and its capacity to generate happiness or felicidade. Closely linked to felicidade is joy or alegria – a feeling experienced in and through the body. During Carnival, alegria connects all those who give themselves up to a week of spontaneous and organized partying. The palpable force of alegria peaks during the parades in the sambódromo. As expressed in one of the samba songs I heard chanted that night, “sou brasileiro, vou festejar / Meu palco é a rua e a luz, o luar” (I am Brazilian, I will party / My stage is the street and the light, the moonlight). To party in this fashion, drawing on a mythical conjunction of urban planning (rua, “street”) and natural bounty (luar, “moonlight”), is the essence of being Brazilian.¹

I was in Brazil for a three-week period of fieldwork, which included the seven principal days of the Rio carnival. Through this experience crystallized certain observations about postcolonial happiness – its premises, its possibilities, even its impossibilities – which earlier visits to Brazil had already triggered.² In this essay, I present those observations, formulated in silent dialogue with my very different experience of postcoloniality in South Asia.³ I thereby lever the essay towards a broader consideration of the place of happiness within postcolonial discourse. Theories and analyses of postcolonial subjectivity focus overwhelmingly on the “unhappiness effect”: trauma and its aftereffects, oppression, displacement and deracination, and pervasive melancholia as the result of long histories of being either colonized or colonizing cultures.⁴ Is this scholarship’s only major insight about postcolonial cultural production? What are the choices – conscious and unconscious – that make us (re)produce studies of unhappy states of being through the postcolonial cultural archive, and what do those reveal about us as scholars? This essay thinks through postcoloniality by shifting the hermeneutic paradigm from trauma to alegria, and, in a concurrent move, from textuality to the body. In probing the mechanisms that generate a citizenry’s sense of collectivity through the production of happiness, it asks, via the case of Brazil: what does it mean to insist that a person can be happy, that a nation can be happy? This examination cannot do away with melancholia altogether. In the words of one of Brazil’s most-loved songs, which also invokes the carnival as paradigm, “tristeza não tem fim / felicidade, sim” (sadness has no ending, happiness does).⁵ We need to probe the relationship between happiness and melancholia, including their mutually interruptive temporalities, in the postcolonial frame. How does the promise of happiness battle with the ghosts of melancholia to form the postcolonial subject?⁶

The enchantment of melancholia

At the time of writing, a bibliographical search for “postcolonial happiness” throws up not a single hit. There seems to be no scholarly examination yet of the idea and possibility of postcolonial happiness that starts, not from a position of suspicion or skepticism, but from unambiguous acceptance that there can be “happiness” under the sign of postcoloniality. This observation is made not to insist on this essay’s pioneering status, but to begin asking why this lacuna should exist. The study of postcolonial subject-formation was initially dominated by the dismantling of colonial discourses that were textual rather than embodied in their expression; these analyses, influenced by Foucauldian understandings of knowledge as power, focused on processes of colonial subject-formation through the subject’s interpellation in these discourses, rather than on affective states of being.⁷ When, with the work of Homi Bhabha, psychoanalytical models entered the frame, the intention was to open up spaces of becoming rather than being. Bhabha foregrounded interstitial sites and liminal conditions whereby the colonial, and, subsequently, postcolonial subject could be seen as creatively responding to dominant regimes through surreptitious forms of retaliation (“sly civility”) that exploited the potential of the margin (the “third space,” the “in-between”).⁸ The subsequent wave of scholarship that self-identified as “postcolonial” largely iterated the ubiquity of these practices in the colonial past and in the diasporic and (in keeping with the 1990s zeitgeist) the “multicultural” present. This continued focus on process meant that the emotional and affective domains of postcolonial subjectivity were in the vanguard of neither critical enquiry nor the fashions it triggered.⁹ When they ultimately did come to occupy the vanguard, it was overwhelmingly in the form of “bad” or “negative” affects and feelings: trauma, melancholia, alienation, disillusionment, and disappointment.

Since roughly 2000, postcolonial studies have been in dialogue with scholarship on collective memory, which in turn has been “closely connected with the study of the Holocaust and World War II, and, more recently, other wars, genocides, and dictatorships.”¹⁰ Given that “wars, genocides, and dictatorships” have been the enduring leitmotifs of decolonization, it is unsurprising that scholars interested in probing the conditions of postcolonial existence have frequently turned to the sophisticated methodologies for examining trauma that were developing as “Holocaust Studies.”¹¹ The founding moments of postcolonial nation-states, officially celebrated as glorious achievements of independence, were exposed as subtended by private and unofficial experiences of psychological and physical violence. The story of decolonization was unmasked as profoundly traumatic with ever-evolving repercussions.¹² The over-determination of the “postcolonial” by “South Asia” means that the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 has dominated this turn. A strong alliance with feminist politics also developed.¹³ Even as the theoretical apparatus for “Partition Studies” was taken from Holocaust Studies and its loci classici for the investigation of trauma, particularly Freud on mourning and melancholia, empirical evidence was furnished by retrieved histories of fugitive experience, especially those of women, by South Asian feminist writers, collectives, and publishing houses.¹⁴ Their powerful example dominated scholarly interventions into the politics of memory and forgetting around South Asian postcoloniality. The Indian Partition became the privileged site for investigating the South Asian postcolonial experience as fundamentally traumatic and minoritizing;¹⁵ more recently, the War of Bangladesh’s Liberation in 1971 and other manifestations of eruptive violence, such as the Naxalite Movement, are being drawn into the confluence of postcolonial studies and trauma studies.¹⁶ In the meanwhile, a new memory studies has emerged through a renewed (pre)occupation with sites of twentieth century traumas that have undergone political, if not memorial, changes in the post–Cold War period.¹⁷

If trauma has become established as the foundational condition for the postcolonial subject, its corollary affect has been articulated as melancholia. Scholarship has revised and complicated the original Freudian binary between (“good”) mourning and (“bad”) melancholia, and a range of vernacular effects has also been proposed as valid modes of articulating melancholic affects.¹⁸ Despite these revisionisms, the negative quality of melancholia remains undisputed; indeed, it is understood as intimately constitutive of its hermeneutic potential – as in Ranjana Khanna’s discussion of “critical melancholia.”¹⁹ The focus on melancholia has allowed the retrieval of individual postcolonial experiences that have been, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “brushed under the carpet” of nationalist master-narratives.²⁰ Furthermore, there is a new convergence between postcolonial and queer investments in the disruptive capacity of melancholia and allied unhappy affects. Most prominent here is Sara Ahmed’s influential book, The Promise of Happiness, which declaredly writes from a position of “skeptical disbelief in happiness as a technique for living well,”²¹ and rejects the temptations of the “happiness archive” to “follow,” instead, “the weave of unhappiness, as a kind of unraveling of happiness, and the threads of its appeal.”²² Assembling “feminist killjoys,” “unhappy queers,” and “melancholic migrants,” Ahmed’s inquiry into the “promise of happiness” is, despite the book’s title, a thoroughgoing critique of happiness. While it is not clear what a revolutionary utopia from this perspective might entail, it certainly includes a call for the “freedom to be unhappy.”²³ Ahmed does admit in closing that “the struggle against happiness as a necessity is also a struggle for happiness as a possibility,” which might materialize if we adopt a “politics of the hap.”²⁴ Yet this concluding move is one of infinite deferral, reducing the “happy” (a feeling in the here and the now) to the “hap” (always tinged by contingency and futurity).

How do you solve a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Affective, Postcolonial Histories
• Part II: Postcolonial Desires
• Part III: Religious Imaginings
• Part IV: Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices
• Part V: Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts
• Part VI: Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities
• Part VII: Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies
• Part VIII: Postcolonialism Versus Neoliberalism
• Conclusion: What is the postcolonial world? Assembling, networking, traveling
• Index