The Postcolonial Subject

Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity

Vivienne Jabri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136281495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book places the lens on postcolonial agency and resistance in a social and geopolitical context that has witnessed great transformations in international politics. What does postcolonial politics mean in a late modern context of interventions that seek to govern postcolonial populations? Drawing on historic and contemporary articulations of agency and resistance and highlighting voices from the postcolonial world, the book explores the transition from colonial modernity to the late modern postcolonial era. It shows that at each moment wherein the claim to politics is made, the postcolonial subject comes face to face with global operations of power that seek to control and govern. As seen in the Middle East and elsewhere, these operations have variously drawn on war, policing, as well as pedagogical practices geared at governing the political aspirations of target societies. The book provides a conceptualisation of postcolonial political subjectivity, discusses moments of its emergence, and exposes the security agendas that seek to govern it.

Engaging with political thought, from Hannah Arendt, to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, among other critical and postcolonial theorists, and drawing on art, literature, and film from the postcolonial world, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, postcolonial theory, and political theory.

1
TRACING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECT

It wasn’t easy getting out of the city. There were so many roadblocks and soldiers were all over the place … At every one of the roadblocks the soldiers commented on the food I had at the back. Then they would ask if I thought that people were hungry. When I said no, the soldiers would take some of my food and wave me on.

Ben Okri, Worlds that Flourish

The postcolonial world, having emerged from the violence of colonialism, finds itself once again subject to colonial reason, as violent and dispossessive as it was in its previous articulation.¹ The difference now in late modernity is that the technologies of power used in the control of populations are not manifest in direct rule, but rather through complex forms of government the agents of which might be states, international institutions, or non-governmental organisations, all engaged in practices that have the global as the purview of their operations. The architectonics of this military/socio-political/institutional framework are never fixed and can be mobilised at relatively short notice. This absence of fixity is somehow suggestive of a rapid response mechanism whereby emergencies and conflicts are resolved through practical problem solving.² The technologies drawn upon can range from the use of force to the provision of welfare, to pedagogical exercises the aim of which is the transformation of societies into governable entities. The conditions of possibility that enable this late modern articulation of colonial reason are at once discursive and material, both implicated in a hierarchical constitution of the global order and those who inhabit it. However these are also the conditions within which modes of resistance take place and just as the colonial legacy continues to have its imprint on the present, so too this legacy is present in postcolonial articulations of resistance, defined in this book, as claiming the right to politics.

The postcolonial literature in the social sciences generally and in international relations in particular tends to focus on the implications of discourses and their underlying philosophies, pointing to the politics of representation that deny equality to the postcolonial world, that denigrate postcolonial self-determination, and that universalise at the expense of postcolonial difference.³ The scripting of global politics in terms that exclude or that subsume the postcolonial world confers agency, and hence authorship and legitimacy, to the ‘West’, thereby generating a conceptual schema that is not only inadequate to the task of understanding the international, but one that is framed in both analytical and normative terms. The politics of anamnesis is all too apparent here, in that Europe’s colonial encounters, their genocidal, extractive, and exploitative practices, remain unaccounted in narratives relating to the global political order and its constitution.⁴ More profoundly, the postcolonial world has not been considered as agent involved in the shaping of the international, but, rather, as the recipient of its rules and normative structures. This scripting out of the postcolonial is not confined to realist or liberal perspectives in international theory, but has also been apparent in much critical and poststructural work.⁵

The achievement of the postcolonial critique in international social and political thought is at once both deconstructive and generative of a research programme that seeks to script the postcolonial into the analytics of international and global politics. This scripting is not based on modernisation theory and its ‘developmental’ discourse, one that provides the edifice upon which concepts such as ‘failed states’ are built.⁶ Rather, the lens shifts towards questions relating to postcolonial agency, not in a generalising, simplifying, idealising mode, but in revealing its complex intersection with matrices of power and domination and their contingencies. Considered in this way, postcolonial articulations of agency come to be understood in constitutive terms, so that the international and its discursive and institutional transformation can be as much a product of the agentic assertions of the postcolonial as the attempts of the powerful to constrain or limit transformation along lines that serve structures of domination. The constitutive is revealed when the postcolonial is understood as always already constituted in the discursive and institutional framing of the international, but one that has the capacity to reconstitute and hence transform.⁷ At the same time, this shift of the lens towards postcolonial agency has invited engagements with what is referred to as ‘non-Western’ international relations. In revealing these voices, we gain insight into an alternative framing of the international, its discourses and power structures.⁸

With this shift of the lens towards postcolonial agency in the spatial and temporal location of the international, attention focuses on the substantial expression of such agency, its negotiations with global matrices of power and regulation, and its articulations of resistance. From Al-Qaida’s violence, perpetrated cellularly in the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, to India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests against the rules of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to the United Nations General Assembly recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, to the more recent UNESCO recognition of Palestinian statehood, to the plurality of spaces across the world where the ‘international’ emerges in local spaces and where resistance based on inequalities of class and gender is manifest in such spaces, all these and more represent articulations of agency in the contingencies of power that define the international.⁹ However, these are also diverse forms of negotiation and resistance, diverse in their articulation, in their mobilising potential, their meanings in different socio-political settings, and their constitutive and transformative capacities. Such diversity might at first hand suggest that postcolonial scholarship might be able to critique the exclusion of such forms of agency, and to provide empirical content to its articulation, but that it fails to provide a political theory of postcoloniality as such, including reflection on what it means to be a subject of politics in the ‘aftermath of sovereignty’.¹⁰

The aim in this book is to take up this challenge – to provide an international political theory of the subject of politics in postcoloniality. Locating the subject in relation to the political immediately suggests a conceptualisation that is relational and hence inter-subjective. To talk of the subject of politics is indicative of a subject formed and constituted in relation to community, but also the subject who constitutes community in relations with others. Conventionally in international relations, the question of ‘community’ has been rendered in normative discourse as suggestive of either the ‘communitarian’ or the ‘cosmopolitan’.¹¹ However, this particular debate has tended to eschew the question of politics as a distinctive domain of human interaction, and how politically, the question of ‘limits’, as Rob Walker (2010) highlights, comes into form and places the lens on ‘sovereignty’. In this latter frame, and in an age of interventionist practices in the name of the ‘human’, the debate has primarily recently been constructed in terms of the location of political authority, the choice being either with Kelsen, and the transcendence of sovereignty, or with Schmitt, and its celebration.¹² However, an alternative framing of the question would be to place the lens on politics, the subject of politics, how this subject is specifically constituted as ‘political’, and how such constitution relates to the constitution of political community.¹³

With the focus of this book being on the subject of politics in postcoloniality, the question of interest relates to how the subject of politics emerges, how such emergence relates constitutively to political community and its limits. To suggest the subject claiming the political is hence to acknowledge the contingent matrices within and through which this constitutive and constituting relationship takes place and becomes actualised. One way of capturing the emergence of the subject of politics, in anticipation of Chapter 3, is in terms of the Arendtian notion of ‘founding’ or ‘beginnings’,¹⁴ both concepts that direct attention to declarations of independence, declarations that I argue are core to understanding the postcolonial subject. This should not be taken to mean that the postcolonial subject is entirely ‘captured’ so to speak, by the ‘national’ moment, but acknowledged the constitutive power of the struggle for ‘independence’.¹⁵ The subject in this sense does not stand outside of the political relation but can be denied its articulation and expression. Such denial is directed at the reconstitution of the subject and their extraction from the domain of the political. At the same time such denial and extraction are in themselves acknowledgements of the subject of politics and of the salience of political community. Unravelling the subject in relation to the political is hence to account for the constituted self and the self’s constituting relation to the political and the situatedness of these relations in contingent matrices of power and knowledge.

Locating the postcolonial subject of politics hails forth a temporal and spatial specificity that stems from the colonial legacy. At the same time this is also a legacy that is firmly situated in modernity and modern institutions, the modern state, the modern international, and an international political economy of exchange relations. This legacy is profound in its implications for the postcolonial subject, for this is a subject whose articulation of the political is constitutively dependent on the modern international as a distinct location of politics that historically confers legitimacy to the limits of the national state as political community. To understand the postcolonial subject of politics is hence to unravel the temporal and spatial constitution of the subject and this subject’s struggle for access to the political and the international. The aim in this chapter is exactly to trace the postcolonial subject, focusing in particular on the epistemological and ontological challenges involved in understanding the temporal and spatial constitution of the subject.

The postcolonial critique of international relations as a discipline, as highlighted above, focuses on its essentially Eurocentric conceptual schema and methodologies, arguing that while these are taken to be universally applicable, they nevertheless exclude the non-Western world at worse, and at best merely represent this world from the vantage point of the European. For the postcolonial critic, this vantage point represents the source of continued domination in a postcolonial era still defined by a powerful colonial legacy where even to possess access to the domain of the international is to acquire the tropes – sovereignty, the territorial nation-state, the government of a territorially defined population – that have their genesis in Europe (Grovogui, 1996). Viewing the international from the vantage point of the non-West is hence to, first of all, gain access to the international and on terms equal to that of the European, and second, having gained access, to draw upon the political-juridical structure of the international as guarantor of freedom from resurgent colonial domination and subjugation. So powerful is the legacy of colonial rule that the subject of the postcolonial condition is always already somehow predetermined, somehow stamped, indeed inscribed by the colonial experience. Viewing the international from the vantage point of the non-West is hence to do so through a lens that is already prescribed and shaped by coloniality and the continued desire to resist its continued economic, social, political, and epistemological domination.

At the same time there is a reluctance to reiterate dualisms and oppositions – the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ being one such – that inform essentialist discourses that inadvertently confer primacy to a logocentric European subject through what we might understand as the culturalisation of the ‘other’, where this other is only identifiable through tropes of cultural difference, exoticised, nativised, and forever determined by the signifying effects of culture. The culturalisation of the ‘other’ is hence as complicit in the reproduction of a hierarchical conception of subjectivity as are discourses that simply assume Europe as the universal terrain of the international. As Homi Bhabha (1994: 25) points out:

The Language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics. The challenge lies in conceiving of the time of political action and understanding as opening up a space that can accept and regulate the differential structure of the moment of intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction. This is a sign that history is happening – within the pages of theory, within the systems and structures we construct to figure the passage of the historical.

There is then the intersubjective terrain of a back and forth and the spaces created in-between. To understand the claim to the political by the postcolonial subject is hence to reveal the ways in which articulations of struggle and antagonism at once draw from structural continuities in the form that they take and the substantive content that they express while understanding at the same time that such articulation and expression might constitute ‘instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle’ (Babha, 1994: 25). We might therefore state, in anticipation of what is to come, that the postcolonial subject’s relationship to the international is one that is not determined by the colonial legacy, but generates a new political relationship that is not confined to the relationship between the West and the postcolonial, but includes relationships within, through the constitution of forms of political community suggestive of a space of hybridity, negotiation, and articulation.

The language of critique is at the same time concerned with revealing the location of the subject of postcoloniality in relation to power and resistance. How does power operate in the present and what form does resistance take in a context wherein the international and its structure have and continue to undergo profound transformation, politically and juridically, as well as sociologically and economically? Power reveals its operations through the discourses and institutions of the state, of the international and of a transnational terrain of movement and circulation that is not just of the market and its interactions, but also of human beings on the move, of ideas and affiliations, and communicative practices the implications of which are comparable in their global effects to the rise of the industrial revolution (Findlay and O’Rourke, 2007). Articulations of resistance in the postcolonial world are as much of this terrain as are operations of power, and underline the monumental task that is the former in relation to the latter.

This chapter provides the epistemological and ontological backdrop to the question that frames this investigation; namely, how is the claim to the political articulated and how do these articulations relate to postcolonial resistance? As I highlight in the Introduction to the book, the aim is to trace the postcolonial subject as this subject traverses three distinct and at the same time inter-related temporal and spatial locations: colonial modernity, the postcolonial international, and the late modern cosmopolitan. The form that the claim to the political takes is intimately related to these locations and has at its core ‘independence’ and the founding of political community, moments that run through and connect the anti-colonial struggles of the past with contemporary articulations of the political in the context of the late modern cosmopolitan.

An epistemological quest for the postcolonial subject

It is all too easy for the hegemonic discourses of European social science generally, and the science of politics in particular to simply assume the universality of concepts and theoretical frameworks, a universality that derives from the conferred ontological primary of the European self. ‘Knowing’ the postcolonial subject hence becomes a matter of the incorporation of the ‘other’ into established and un-problematised discursive formations authored in the West. As I state above and as argued by other postcolonial scholars, the assumed primacy of such discursive formations is as much of orthodoxy as it is of certain modes of critique. Where the former takes its universality for granted, the latter, while acknowledging difference and providing powerful critiques of logocentricism, nevertheless include the ‘other’ through forms of exoticism or even nativism, tropes that reify cultural difference so that culture is seen as a mark of essential difference rather than a matter that is of the political (Said, 1993; Spivak, 1999).

Both forms of epistemic framing are present in Michel Foucault’s writings, even though Foucault’s analytics have had an undeniable influence on much postcolonial writing including this one. The first form, that of negation, can be seen in Foucault’s lecture, ‘What is Enlightenment’ (1984a). He states: ‘We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible’, where the Enlightenment,

is an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located to a certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalisation of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.¹⁶

The ‘ontology of the present’ and the ‘critical ontology of self’ that this present allows is inaugurated in the European context, and specifically in the French Revolution, which becomes, as Homi Bhabha (1994: 243) highlights, ‘his sign of modernity’. For Bhabha, the ‘Eurocentricity of Foucault’s theory of cultural difference is revealed in his insistent spatializing of the time of modernity’. The Eurocentricism of Foucault’s reading of modernity is revealed through a postcolonial reading, one that interrogates this signification of modernity from the point of view of those other, colonial spaces where the ‘reflective relation to the present’ would not be located in Europe. The point I want to make here is that while Foucault, in this particular text, provides the tropes through which we might think critically, and indeed, provide a conception of what it means to be ‘critical’, at the same time this is a spatialised ethos that most definitely does not consider non-European moments of critique and self-reflection.

The second form of epistemic framing is not one of negation but of an essentialised, culturalised nativism wherein culture remains unproblematised and is instead reified as the marker of difference. This emerges in Foucault’s engagement with ...