Postcolonial Studies

A Materialist Critique

Benita Parry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134307401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Dissertations littéraires

This powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with a first series of essays vigorously challenging colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. She then turns to literature with a series of detailed readings that not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view.

Part One

Directions and dead ends in postcolonial studies

1 Beginnings, affiliations, disavowals

I have collected these thematically interrelated essays written over some fifteen years in the expectation that they will stand or fall as interventions in the volatile and contested postcolonial discussion. As such some of the chapters advance arguments I would no longer present in their initial form or vocabulary, and contain concessions made out of politesse or diffidence to theoretical positions I now consider unsustainable. Times have changed since the earlier of these pieces appeared and the volume and vigour of work advancing Marxist/Marxisant positions within postcolonial studies has abated the predominance of a textual idealism. All the same it remains important to urge more historically grounded directions and greater discrimination in the enquiries of an ecumenical and proliferating field where the material impulses to colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression, have receded from view.¹

Amongst the many sober definitions of the term are those denoting a historical transition, a cultural location, a discursive stance, an epochal condition distinguished by the entry into metropolitan cultures of other voices, histories and experiences,² and an achieved transition. For many participants in the discussion, the plenitude of signification in ‘postcolonial’ has enabled a diversity of studies – and indeed both the subjects of enquiry and the theoretical positions are bewilderingly various. The verso to the advantages of a wide-open explanatory field is an arbitrary and ill-considered usage of the term within and beyond the academy. So capacious is the ground on which participants in the discussion have chosen to operate that one commentator has detached its sphere of enquiry from both the anterior historical situation and its consequences by contending that postcolonial studies is more concerned ‘with the lived condition of unequal power sharing globally and the self-authorization of cultural, economic, and militaristic hegemony’ than ‘with a particular historical phenomenon such as colonialism, which may be plotted as a stage of capitalist imperialism’.³ This refusal to engage with the prior terms which the ‘postcolonial’ is said to displace or supersede⁴ serves to occlude both the capitalist trajectory of the imperial project and the capitalist nature of contemporary globalization.

Without underestimating the importance of much work done under the emblem of postcolonial studies, I want to suggest that some influential critical practices have promoted otiose revisions of colonialism and myopic perspectives on the postcolonial. When English and cultural studies departments took the lead in developing what was to become ‘a postcolonial critique’, the linguistic turn was in the ascendant within literary theory, and cultural studies was in the process of relinquishing its materialist beginnings in pursuit of ‘an essentially textualist account of culture’.⁵ With the arrival of modes where the analysis of the internal structures to texts, enunciations and sign systems had become detached from a concurrent examination of social and experiential circumstances, the stage was set for the reign of theoretical tendencies which Edward Said has deplored for permitting intellectuals ‘an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history’.⁶ As postcolonial studies became saturated by premises predicated on the priority of signifying processes, the field emerged as an exemplary instance of such levitation. It is then no accident that despite the active participation of materialists, the discussion has come to be seen as inextricably associated with ‘post’ theories and has appeared concerned to rearticulate colonialism and its aftermath from a theoretical position freed from the categories of political theory, state formation and socio-economic relationships.⁷

The abandonment of historical and social explanation was soon apparent in the work of those postcolonial critics who disengaged colonialism from historical capitalism and re-presented it for study as a cultural event. Consequently an air-borne will to power was privileged over calculated compulsions, ‘discursive violence’ took precedence over the practices of a violent system, and the intrinsically antagonistic colonial encounter was reconfigured as one of dialogue, complicity and transculturation. As Simon During has suggested, ‘Postcolonialism came to signify something remote from self-determination and autonomy. By deploying categories such as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence . . . all of which laced colonized into colonising cultures, postcolonialism effectively became a reconciliatory rather than a critical, anti-colonialist category’.⁸ Because a negotiatory cultural politics deduced from partial (in both senses of the term) readings of colonialism’s texts displaced the record of repressive political processes, the contradictory, volatile but all the same structurally conflictual positions occupied by the heterogeneous categories of colonizer and colonized were muted, and the incommensurable interests and aspirations immanent in colonial situations conjured into mutuality. The vaporizing of conflict in colonial situations by those preoccupied with uncovering a middle ground has little to do with acknowledging the necessary and often coerced ‘intimacies’ between ruler and ruled, or with understanding the discrepant experiences of the parties as constituting one history. It has everything to do with the dissemination of emollient retrospects lacking in conceptual credibility and amenable to neither intertextual confirmation nor empirical validation. Such vanities dissolve when exposed to the light of investigative studies: ‘at the precise moment (1870–1912) when the labour and products of tropical humanity were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy’, Mike Davis has written in Late Victorian Holocausts, ‘millions died . . . not outside the “modern worldsystem”, but in the very process of being incorporated into its economic and political structures’.⁹

The transition from the realist model in cultural studies should be seen in the context of a wider shift within social theory itself away from materialist understandings of historical processes and the symbolic order, and towards collapsing the social into the textual.¹⁰ The scanting, indeed denigration, of social explanation has not gone unchallenged: questions have been asked of the widespread determination to ‘institute culture as the authoritative subject of a discourse on social relations’, and more, as ‘the principle, the condition of valid social judgment’,¹¹ and its pursuits have been faulted for casual analytic procedures, a lack of historical awareness and political consciousness, and exorbitant claims to providing a total account of the social world.¹² These strategies have led the social theorist Nancy Fraser to urge the restoration of political economy to its proper place in critical theory,¹³ while Fredric Jameson has remarked that matters of power and domination are now articulated on levels other than the systemic ones of ‘the economic system, the structure of the mode of production, and exploitation as such’.¹⁴

The larger intellectual context inhabited by postcolonial studies is intimated in the counter-attacks launched by ‘post’-critics on antagonists they see as unreconstructed Marxists. On detecting ‘an attempt at consensus-building among Left Conservatives . . . founded on notions of the real’, a group of such theorists in 1998 theatrically announced: ‘A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the specter of Left Conservatism’. ¹⁵ Those who in defiance of the current fundamentalism continue to produce Marxist cultural analysis have now to contend with critics prepared to travesty their practices. In her essay ‘Merely Cultural’, claiming the theoretical high ground for ‘the cultural’ or the ‘post-Marxist’ left, Judith Butler insouciantly chastises an ‘orthodox Left’ for discounting the importance of the cultural and seeking ‘to separate Marxism from the study of culture’.¹⁶ But only the most recalcitrantly mechanistic Marxists – and where are they now? – fit Butler’s profile. If Marxist critics reject procedures which subordinate the real to the cultural and the semiotic, they take full account of both the cultural and the semiotic as social practices, as the negotiated processes within which subjectivities, cognition and consciousness are made and remade under determinate historical and political conditions. Moreover Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Brecht – not to speak of Gramsci, who pioneered the study of culture as a mode of political struggle – remain central to the contemporary Marxist cultural critique, while the irreducible connections between base and superstructure are continuously, and with increasing finesse, being thought and rethought within a Marxism attentive to the notion of a socio-economic formation within which a nexus of heterogeneous and contradictory determinations interact.

Of this connection Fredric Jameson has proposed that it is not a ‘model’, but ‘a starting point and a problem, something as undogmatic as an imperative simultaneously to grasp culture in and for itself, but also in relationship to its outside, its content, its context, and its space of intervention and of effectivity’ (The Cultural Turn, p. 47); and in its defence Terry Eagleton has provocatively written: ‘Culture is the child of a oneparent family, having labor as its sole progenitor . . . At least one reason for trying to make some sense of the much derided base/superstructure image is that, in a kind of Copernican iconoclasm, it at least succeeds in powerfully dislodging culture from its idealist supremacy’.¹⁷ Perhaps then the charges made against a left orthodoxy may serve to advance the case for restoring ‘the real’ to critical theory. At the Third International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference held at Birmingham, UK, in the summer of 2000, one session called itself ‘The (Dis)loyal Opposition: The Return of “Conservative” Cultural Studies’. The abstract lists Marxism as amongst the heresies within present-day cultural studies and asks: ‘Have such forms of cultural analysis been vanquished, or have they never gone away? . . . are they the scabrous phantoms of a political consciousness that cultural studies has sought to suppress? . . . What is the future of “conservative” cultural analysis within the trend-fixated field of cultural studies? Who dares to-day to take on the mantles of post-post-Marxism, [post-post]-humanism?’¹⁸

Recent as the field is, postcolonial studies quickly moved from its beginnings in colonial discourse analysis, which itself was part of the larger investigation undertaken during the 1980s, into systems of representation designed to validate institutional subordination and silence the voices of competitors. All had recourse to the same range of critical paradigms.¹⁹ According to Peter Hulme the disciplinary area known as colonial discourse analysis came into being as a critique of the continental theoretical work it enlisted, and for Hulme it was Edward Said’s singular achievement to have brought together ‘the rhetorical power of the textual readings offered by discourse analysis . . . with a “real” world of domination and exploitation, usually analyzed by a Marxism hostile to poststructuralism’s epistemological scepticism’.²⁰ Thus, Hulme maintains, Said, who recognized ‘the scrupulously ethnocentric nature’ of Foucault’s undertaking, chose to emphasize the inherent possibilities of this work in the interests of extending to a global terrain the concept of discourse with the constant implication of textuality within networks of history, power, knowledge and society.

In freely acknowledging a debt to continental theory, western Marxism and Anglo-Saxon cultural criticism, Said not only interrogated its privileged inclusions and its absences, observing the massive indifference of these modes to colonialism as constitutive of metropolitan society and culture, but he also called attention to the failure of their authors to recognize that anti-colonialist critics such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and C. L. R. James had confronted the contradictions and hierarchies in the thought of European modernity long before prominent theorists in Europe, North America and Britain had got round to it.²¹ Said’s own writings then can be seen to negotiate an alliance between metropolitan theory and the analyses developed by liberation movements, in the process producing elaborations which were not in either source. However, a consideration of what came to constitute the most influential practices within postcolonial theory will suggest the distance travelled from the initial project of unmasking the making and operation of colonial discourses – an undertaking which for all its diversity, shared a concern with the specific historical conditions and social purposes of ideological representation.²² By no means all the studies that can be subsumed under colonial discourse analysis were attentive to the indigenous systems of thought and hermeneutic traditions which metropolitan writing had mistranslated or traduced; nor were they necessarily concerned with recovering signs of native resistance.²³ All the same, these dimensions were not programmatically ruled out.

This was the effect of privileging immanent critiques of colonial discourse which as one theorist put it, would ‘tamper with the authority of Europe’s storylines’ as the critic who occupies the heritage of imperialism ‘intimately but deconstructively’ negotiates and attempts to change what s/he necessarily inhabits ‘by reversing, displacing and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’,²⁴ or in the words of another, ‘attempts to intervene in and interrupt the western discourses on modernity’.²⁵ When questioning these directions Laura Chrisman has suggested that ‘anti-colonial movements . . . become a fundamental element in the theorisation of colonial discourse’, which should be construed ‘less as a self-determining and pre-determined condition of power/knowledge, and more as a product of struggle and contestation with the oppositional (physical and cultural) presences of the colonized’.²⁶ This serves as a reminder that it was the writings of liberation movements that had inaugurated the interrogation of colonialism and imperialism. Nonetheless, the relationship of the newer debate to the prior discussion is less intimate than one could expect of a filial relationship; and indeed it appears that those preoccupied with authoring a ‘postcolonial positionality’ that is ‘neither inside nor outside the history of western domination but in a tangential relation to it’²⁷ have deliberately distanced themselves from the confrontational inscriptions of the anti-colonialist critique.²⁸

However, amongst the numerous retrospects on the beginnings of postcolonial studies Robert Young’s recent overview is concerned to situate its practices as operating ‘within the historical legacy of Marxist critique on which it continues to draw but which it simultaneously transforms according to the precedents of the great tricontinental anticolonial intellectual politicians’.²⁹ The designation of postcolonial criticism as ‘a form of activist writing that looks back to the political commitment of the anti-colonial liberation movements and draws its inspiration from them’ (Postcolonialism, p. 10) is a brave statement in an intellectual environment where so many postcolonial critics are disposed either to ignore, relegate or misconstrue this body of theory. Young however goes on to modulate his account of the field’s genesis by introducing poststructuralism as another and metropolitan begetter, contending that ‘the colonial apparatus, the imperial machine’ is the structure to which poststructuralism is ‘post’: ‘Its deconstruction of the idea of totality was born out of the experience of, and forms of resistance to, the totalising regimes of the late colonial state, particularly French Algeria’ (p. 415); and it was, according to Young, Derrida, the Algerian-born Jew ‘neither French nor Algerian, always anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan, critical of western ethnocentrism from Of Grammatology’s very first page, preoccupied with justice and injustice, [who] developed deconstruction as a programme for intellectual and cultural decolonization within the metropolis’ (p. 416).³⁰

If Young is not displacing Marxism with deconstruction in accounting for the ancestry of the postcolonial critique, then perhaps he is placing deconstruction amongst ‘the great tricontinental anti-colonial intellectual’ traditions according to which the Marxist legacy was transformed within postcolonial studies – a possibility supported by Young’s description of his own work as an attempt to translate deconstruction’s philosophical and literary strategies ‘into the more painful framework of colonial and postcolonial history’ (p. 412). Young is sanguine about bringing the distinctive theoretical projects into alignment within postcolonial studies; yet the rejection by poststructuralism of the Marxist notions underpinning left anti-colonial thinking – the capitalist system, structural divisions, nationalism, an emancipatory narrative, universalism – suggests that the discrepancy between the informing premises is not readily negotiated. This is a problem observed by Tim Brennan when accounting for the paradoxical position of Marxism within a field where prominent theoretical tendencies have sought to suppress a parentage in anti-colonial liberation movements: ‘If in the postcolonial discussion an undifferentiated Marxism has played a frequent role, it has done so usually as an example of how a certain brand of Eurocentrism promoted technological or disciplinary modernity, and therefore, by definition was antagonistic to non-Western forms of emergence’.³¹

All the same and despite disavowals, residues of Marxism can be seen to circulate as if unconsciously and without acknowledgement in the discussion: on the one hand Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is pervasive and resonances can be heard both of his notion that the inventions of cultural activity kept the ideological world in movement, and of Raymond Williams’s contention that the maintenance of domination depended on ‘continuous processes of adjustment, reinterpretation, incorporation, dilution’, conducted in relation to ‘alternative’, ‘oppositional’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultural formations.³² On the other hand the Marxist analysis of colonialism has been eschewed. At stake is whether the imperial project is historicized within the determining instance of capitalism’s global trajectory, or uprooted from its material ground and resituated as a cultural phenomenon whose intelligibility and functioning can be recuperated from tendentious readings of texts. For where ‘the politics of the symbolic order’ displaces the more demanding politics operating in real-world situations, and a theoretical commitment to rejecting fixed subject-positions as ontologically faulty and dyadic polarit...