Postcolonialism Meets Economics

S. Charusheela, Eiman Zein-Elabdin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415287258
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135142773
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

In the last half century, economics has taken over from anthropology the role of drawing the powerful conceptual worldviews that organize knowledge and inform policy in both domestic and international contexts. Until now however, the colonial roots of economic theory have remained relatively unstudied. This book changes that. The wide array of contributions to this book draw on the rapidly growing body of postcolonial studies to critique both orthodox and heterodox economics. This book addresses a large gap in postcolonial studies, which lacks the type of sophisticated analysis of economic questions that it displays in its analysis of culture. The intellectual and disciplinary terrain covered within this book spans economics, history, anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, political science and women's studies.

Part I
The space of postcoloniality

1 Articulating the postcolonial (with economics in mind)^*

Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin

Fortunately, it is not necessary to explain why these countries must develop.

(Mboya 1970: 266)

Postcolonial critique saw its original flourishing in the field of literary criticism, exemplified in the classic contributions of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, with vital influence from the Subaltern Studies historians.¹ It has since proceeded to a number of other disciplinary areas, ranging from African philosophy (Mudimbe 1988, Appiah 1992) and anthropology (Escobar 1995) to feminism (see Mongia 1996). As a result of this wide reach many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have been to some extent ‘de-colonized,’ that is, at least presented with a vocabulary that provokes some reflection on Western cultural hegemony. Economics, alone, remains largely unaware of postcolonial contributions.¹ This is all the more significant since, through the postwar project of international development, economics has played a key role in the attempt to reconstitute the lives of those formerly colonized by Europeans worldwide, (the ‘less developed’), to comply with the vision of an industrial modernity.³

In this essay, I broadly sketch out what may be taken as the beginning space of a postcolonial critique of economics (also see Zein-Elabdin 2001). I articulate the basic problematic of postcoloniality as a critical revision of the hegemonically defined themes of history, culture, and knowledgefrom a subaltern perspective. This revision encompasses three related tasks: a historical one that recasts all pasts and futures in a different, post-European light; an ontological one to renegotiate the definitions of social being and meaning; and an epistemological task that contests conceited and exclusionary apprehensions of knowledge. In economics, the modernist construction of these themes takes most intense shape in the discourse on development such that much of the groundwork of postcoloniality entails confronting and displacing this discourse. However, a postcolonial study of economics cannot begin at the level of development theory or policy, otherwise it dissolves into development economics. It must begin with a scrutiny of the cultural construction of the subject matter of economics itself, namely, its non-economic core.

The parameters of this core are generally defined by the thick understandings of being, knowledge, and history that situate Western modernity vis-à-vis a putative ‘non-modern’ and, therefrom, deploy the current cultural hegemony that is economics.⁴ The late meeting of post-colonial thought and economics has to do with the as yet unchallenged status of this core in the discipline. This foundational sense of an onto-logically superior, knowing, and uniquely historical modern subject (male or female) is not limited to mainstream analysis but extends to heterodox scholarship. Thus it is important to state at the outset that a postcolonial critique of economics takes a panoramic view of the discipline. In this view, small ideas as well as large debates between different schools give way to what they all share in common as their metaphysical world understandings, broadly shaped by the academic discourses of philosophy and anthropology and which constitute their non-economic core. Postcolonial critique, then, does not form a multiculturalist attempt to assert the inherent entitlement of ‘non-Western cultures’ to a different worldview. Instead, the postcolonial seeks to transform economics’ imagination of its own self and, therefore, reexamine its adequacy for grasping all contemporary social practice and materiality.

Postcolonial critics have been sharply insightful in examining the question of cultural hegemony. Indeed, they have interrogated history (Prakash 1990, Chakrabarty 1992), culture (Appiah 1992, Bhabha 1994), and knowledge (Said 1978, Mudimbe 1988). Nevertheless, they have not challenged the disciplinary authority of economics. This in large part, follows from the success of this discipline in authorizing itself as ‘science,’ relying on its mathematized positivism that gives it an aura of universal truths not open to interrogation, and serves to unnerve many in other disciplines from approaching its cryptic texts. What I would like to suggest here is that a postcolonial interrogation of economics shows remarkable continuity with contributions in literary criticism and history that have been dismissed by some on materialist or political grounds (see Mongia 1996). For example, the notion of subalternity (Spivak 1988) offers a rich analytical framework for looking at both the position of former European colonies in economics and their current subjection to the dictates of the industrial world. The term's double entendre of social/structural and individual/subjective subservience better captures the organic relationship between economic and cultural subordination (than the term dependency, for instance). Of course, the articulation of postcoloniality in economics entails some adaptation of the conceptual framework of postcolonial theory in order to move analytically from questions of individual subjectivity to a social and global politico-economic context. Here, I do not plan to undertake this task – since this essay is not concerned with actual economies and economic problems. My purpose is to underscore the continuity of postcolonial critique across disciplines and, hence, its potential for undermining the disciplinary shield of economics.

In the first part of the essay, I map out the postcolonial space along the themes of history, culture, and knowledge, while self-critically indicating some of the tensions inherent to a postcolonial revision of each theme. I do not offer a full analysis of any of these themes, but merely point out how their modernist construction broadly underpins both mainstream and critical thinking in economics, focusing on the three archetypal schools, neoclassical, Marxian, and Institutionalist.⁵ In the second portion of the essay, I argue that the postcolonial method for revision must be counter-disciplinary, namely, it requires writing over current discourse as well as writing across and against the grain of established disciplines. The essay is framed around Africa as a discursive locus of cultural subalter-nity in economics, currently designated as the least developed’ world region and remaining a vast workshop for speculations on social change and progress (most recently, the Symposium on Economic Growth in Africa in the Journal of Economic Perspectives).⁶

Articulating the postcolonial

The term postcolonial cannot be but highly contested and, like all ‘posts,’ it is also problematic.⁷ Yet, it imposes itself like a strong historical imperative. In part, postcolonial refers to the status of societies formerly colonized by Europeans in various parts of the globe at different times, but all designated in the postwar period as third world or less developed. This spatial conception is fully cognizant of the sizable, and often profound, differences between and within different world regions (see, for instance, De Alva's (1995) discussion of the “postcolonization” of Latin America). In this sense, the postcolonial, much like the third world, is only justified by its continued presence, not as an essential entity but, as a historical discursive site of subalternity, with relatively clear geo-political, economic boundaries that set it apart from currently dominant regions. Some have argued that globalization renders the third world irrelevant as an economic category (Berger 1994). But although globalization has muddied the picture in some ways, by no means has it reduced the extent of global polarization, nor has it diminished the financial and technological monopoly held by industrial countries (see World Bank 1999).

More than a geographic depiction, the postcolonial enunciates a certain critique of colonialism and its extension in the current hegemony of industrial modernity. This critique comprises a doubleness of being at once an insurgence against this hegemony, as well as recognition of its dimensions within postcolonial identity(s) and sociality(s), economy(s) and culture(s). The doubleness of postcoloniality – as resistance to and part formation by Western hegemony – has been articulated by postcolonial critics as an “impossible ‘no’ to a structure, which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately” (Spivak 1996: 204), and as hybridity and in-betweenness, and therefore contingency and ambivalence (Bhabha 1994).⁸ This doubleness and hybridity reveals itself as inherent tensions such that each desire to repudiate the colonial is partly offset by the presence of an obverse that betrays the desire's fragility and highlights the vulnerability of the postcolonial project. Tensions lie between the paradigmatic emphasis on colonialism and the desire to transcend its history, between asserting cultural difference and realizing the inescapable Westernness of postcoloniality, and between the wish for epistemic authority and the daunting dominance of the Western episteme.⁹ Bearing these unavoidable tensions, the postcolonial selfconsciously approaches the formidable task of revising the notions of history, culture, and knowledge.

‘History’

The Subaltern Studies historian Gyan Prakash once wondered “how the ‘third world writes its own history’” (1990: 383). The question has at least two edges. The first is to reclaim the privilege of those formerly colonized to interpret not only their own, but history at large and, in addition, to establish their own readings of history as intrinsically equivalent to those offered by the colonizers. The second, and more crucial, edge is to reclaim the authority of subalterns to be the agents of change in their own lives. Thus, the postcolonial task is not one of filling gaps in currently written histories of former colonies. Nor is it an archeological search to retrieve a glorious pre-colonial past.¹⁰ Rather, it is to acquire the epistemic and material authority to effect change.

In dominant (pre-poststructuralist) narratives, history served as a synonym for modern European consciousness where others constituted a part of World History only to the extent of their compliance with a European notion of a historical being. This general perception prevailed in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment accounts (see Burns and Rayment-Pickard 2000), but one may take a single familiar thread from Hegel's Philosophy of History as an acute example. Hegel (1956: 162) argued that “[t]hose peoples therefore are alone capable of History…, who have arrived at that period of development…at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e., possess self-consciousness,” maintaining that only Europeans had reached this stage of self-consciousness. His claims about Africa are widely cited: “it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. …What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History” (99).¹¹ This form of transcendentalism turns on a claim of knowledge of the Other's own self-consciousness, which can be asserted only if this Other comprehends itself in the same manner in which Europeans do.

This transcendentalism, organically bound up with the vision of history as knowable a priori according to general laws, has grounded economic analysis from classical political economy to contemporary scholarship (Zein-Elabdin 1998, 2001). Hegel's most direct influence in economics appears in the Marxian tradition as already noted by critical Marxists (Callari and Ruccio 1996). Marxist ideology provided a tremendous impetus for liberatory struggles in formerly colonized regions but, unfortunately, given its Hegelian origins, classical Marxism never had room for non-European modernity. As Said (1978) pointed out, this was voiced in Marx's own assessment that “whatever may have been the crimes of England [in India] she was the unconscious tool of history.”¹² The neo-Marxian notion of underdevelopment, although critical of colonialism, maintained faith in a knowable historical path guided by the modern European experience, hence Walter Rodney's (1972) attempt to show that Africa's path of development was derailed by the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. Historicism, of course, much predates Marx or Hegel (Burns and Rayment-Pickard 2000), and is, therefore, not limited to Marxian-based scholarship in economics. Its traces can be also spotted in the various stages-of-growth models common in the neoclassical literature (e.g., Rostow 1960, Easterlin 1996).¹³ Such a vision of social change has provided the basis for writing the history of postcolonial societies in terms of economic distortion, lack, and transition to maturity.

What troubles these societies’ desire for historical prerogative is the inescapable problem of isolating the colonial and of then transcending its history, clearly confounded by the increasingly fluid boundaries of the West, especially for postcolonial intellectuals, whose world conceptions have been imprinted by colonial assimilation (Chakrabarty 1992). For this problem, the language of Self and Other is highly deficient. Much more, the incidence of hegemony and oppression persists in multiples of social regimes throughout the contemporary world. These phenomena suggest that the colonial can best be rendered metaphorically, as a surrogate for all forms of domination, past and present, Western and non-Western, although this metaphor does not substitute for a historical understanding of colonialism or the current politico-economic global hierarchy. So far, much of postcolonial scholarship has addressed ‘peripheral’ societies only to the extent of their engagement with the European ‘metropole’ (Dirlik 1997), thereby presenting Europe as an exceptional (as well as a coherent, homogeneous) place. For example, the African encounter with Islam and Arabia, significant as it is (see Brenner 1993), remains comparatively overlooked. Indeed, current social irruptions in the Sudan and Nigeria, among other countries in the region, manifest violent renegotiation of some oppressive structures of this ‘pre-colonial’ encounter that were eclipsed during ‘colonial’ occupation.

It is theoretically untenable to continue to view Europeans as unique masters of conquest while hoping to transcend colonial history. Truly transcending colonial history requires the rejection...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Economics as Social Theory
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction: economics and postcolonial thought
• PART I: The space of postcoloniality
• PART II: Economics as a colonial discourse of modernity
• PART III: Economics as a contemporary hegemonic discourse
• PART IV: Toward a non-modernist economic analysis
• Index