Reading Postcolonial Theory

Key texts in context

Bibhash Choudhury

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317295716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book is an essential introduction to significant texts in postcolonial theory. It looks at seminal works in the 'moments of their making' and delineates the different threads that bind postcolonial studies. Each chapter presents a comprehensive discussion of a major text and contextualises it in the wake of contemporary themes and debates. The volume:

• Studies major texts by foremost scholars — Edward W. Said, Chinua Achebe, Albert Memmi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Carter, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Robert J. C. Young, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and Sara Suleri

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• Shifts focus from colonial experience to underlying principles of critical engagement

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• Uses accessible, jargon-free language

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Focused, engaging and critically insightful, this book will be indispensable to students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.

1
Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi and Francophone critical theory

Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized is one of the major landmarks in Francophone postcolonial theory. It is significant not only because of its situation as a text which scrutinizes the nature of colonial relationship but also because of the attention it gives to the psychological orientation which lies behind such experiences. While there is no denying that Memmi foregrounds some of the recognizable tropes of Freudian psychoanalysis in the course of his argument, to see his reading strategy simply within such a framework would be an exercise in reduction. The presence of such terms as ‘substitution’, ‘impotence’, ‘complex’, ‘perversion’, ‘guilt’, ‘self-denial’ and ‘drive’ alerts us to the influence of the psychoanalytical apparatus on this work. At the same time, however, it is also evident that this is a reading that is indebted to the Francophone intellectual heritage. Apart from these two obvious frames of critical examination circumscribing Memmi’s argument regarding the issue of colonialism, we can also see it as a response that draws on the legacy of African thought and culture. As Memmi argues in the course of the book, the appropriation of ‘civilization’ by the European mind as a condition and subject to which its response is the only one that matters bespeaks of a tendency that finds it difficult to accommodate alternative positions on it. The difference between the responses to the experience of colonization emanating from the French intellectual tradition on the one hand and the Anglo-American on the other, for instance, shows that interesting markers that reflect the contours of cultural orientation as well as the their seminal minds have approached such a subject. It is commonplace to situate Frantz Fanon at the centre of the Francophone intellectual ambit, with its radius incorporating people such as Albert Memmi and Jean-Paul Sartre. There is considerable substance to such a layout, but the question remains potent still: has Fanon been overplayed as the intellectual motif governing the Francophone mind in respect of colonialism? Before considering the question of Fanon’s impact on Memmi, we could perhaps look at the latter’s approach to the Algerian thinker’s mode and means of dealing with such a subject. In a fascinating essay titled ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, Memmi looks at the complicated situation of Fanon’s identity, caught up as it was in the intertwining matrices of Caribbean, French and Algerian cultures. For a long time, Fanon’s subscription to the French social and cultural worldview channelled his thought, especially in his early years, when he was responding to his Caribbean past. Drawn into this melting pot where the question of identity clashed with the priorities of nationalist duty, Fanon found it difficult to separate his loyalties to the three sources that contributed to his cultural make-up. Memmi reads this dilemma as an instance of that process where clear distinctions between the French, Caribbean and African traces are difficult to negotiate. Fanon’s life thus serves for Memmi as an interesting case through which the actuality of experience offers a challenge to the dominant narratives of nationalism and power. Analysing the interdependence of these experiential traces in Fanon’s life, Memmi comments:

Why did Fanon end by refusing to commit himself to his own people, who were irritated and resentful of his attitude, though in the end, the younger generation rediscovered him by the roundabout way of Africa and revolution? His propensity for repeating ceaselessly: ‘I am an Algerian … we Algerian patriots’, which so irritated the West Indians, can be traced back to the fact that, whether he was aware of it or not, he had no expectation of finding the solution to his problem in his own people.

Fanon therefore broke with France, the French people and Europe; but he could not be content with a verbal rupture; he could not have settled down in Normandy, for example, in order to engage, with several other exiles, in a vague opposition on principle. He had to tear himself loose to the last fibre and eradicate what had constituted his life up to that point. … In a certain manner of speaking it was the West Indies that betrayed Fanon, it was his country which revealed itself incapable of furnishing him with the psychological and historical remedy to his tragic situation.

(19–20)

This exposition on the dilemma of being Fanon offers an insight on not just the difficulties that plagued Fanon; it in fact opens up the complicated situation of the Francophone intellectual scene. Like Fanon, Memmi’s case also was problematic. A Jew in Arab-dominated Tunisia, Memmi has occupied the margins of an African world invigorated by the French philosophical tradition; yet it is from this in-between space that he has come to present a perspective on the subject of colonialism. Though Fanon and Memmi appear to occupy spaces of marginality in the cultures they represent and respond to, they bear their distinctive personalities upon their arguments to such an extent that the trajectories branch out in separate directions. It is perhaps a testament to the elasticity of the Francophone cultural scene which enables the coexistence of such diverse voices within formats that display signs of commonality on the outside. In this constant pressure of social and cultural energies that draw out the similarities and the contradictions onto the same playing field, thinkers like Memmi and Fanon find their distinct spaces to place their own cases. In the passage on Fanon’s situation, Memmi foregrounds the identity question in a way that implicates both Fanon and the climate he comes from and responds to; while Fanon’s individual condition is unique, it carries marks of a process of cultural engagement that confronts almost all Franco-phone thinkers. It calls for both acknowledgement of and negotiation between structures of knowledge that derive from diverse roots. For Fanon, it is the Caribbean and French inheritance that he must account for, while for Memmi, his Jewish identity alongside the Arabic world-view circumscribes his response to the issue of colonial experience.

Memmi’s French inheritance is unmistakably visible in his writings. Yet his somewhat unique situation – a French-speaking Jew in an Arab-dominated African environment – and his critical engagement with the subjects of identity and domination make it problematic to pigeonhole him in a straightforward category. It is this ambivalence perhaps that make assessments of his intellectual position difficult. On the one hand, there are readings of his situation as a critic whose dependence on the French intellectual apparatus comes in handy in the critique that he mounts on that very heritage; then there are other assessments that locate in his marginality a proviso which he supposedly uses to undercut the narratives of ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’. We could consider the following two positions on Memmi and his Francophone heritage as representations that foreground particular tropes in his writing; the first is by Dominic Thomas and the other by Patrick Williams:

Memmi fastens on the constitutive dimension of these relations, and this gesture is necessary in order to comprehend the ways in which French civilizationist discourse operated.

(Thomas 2007: 48)

Memmi … says that, rather than being surprised at violent anti-colonial revolts, we should be surprised that they are not more numerous and more violent.

(Williams 2003: 188)

In the first instance, the emphasis on the significance of the French connection is driven home through a focus on Memmi’s reading method, with the suggestion that it reflects upon as well as argues the subject within a preset matrix. The second telescopes Memmi’s analysis of revolution as a means of colonial overthrow, where he is placed alongside Fanon as one of the espousers of violence as an agency of release. There is no doubt that such assessments engage with Memmi’s reason, especially in terms of what he proposes in The Colonizer and the Colonized, but it is equally evident that readings such as these keep other aspects of Memmi’s worldview under erasure. Although this has something to do with the analytical priorities of the critics, the difficulty of encapsulation is also a consequence of the ambiguities present in the Francophone intellectual environment. What we could do perhaps in the context of such multiple strands demanding attention is to consider Memmi’s own logic, his selection of tropes, and then try to place his writings in perspective. In an interview with Gary Wilder (1996), Memmi succinctly sums up his priorities as a thinker: ‘Throughout my work I’ve examined domination always in tandem with dependence. To understand the situation you must always look at both of the partners, at what I call the “duo”: parents and children, men and women, colonizer and colonized’ (166). This is an interesting key. Across the spectrum of his writings, does this theme of domination reverberate, does it present a consistent engagement with issues of identity, racism, marginality, occupation and revolution? In many ways, it does. At the same time, such a key is accompanied by the two markers: relationship and dependence. While Memmi’s assessment of his own method provides us an opportunity to consider the strategies at work, there remains the danger, a potent one at that, of such an exercise being a form of reduction. This has been one of the primary issues in assessments of Memmi’s work: if the recurrence of the themes of dependence and domination and the relationships they entail forms the crux of his dialogue with colonial experience, do they leave room for other possibilities? The debate is far from settled. Critics arguing against Memmi’s thesis in The Colonizer and the Colonized, for instance, question the effectiveness of his partnership model in dealing with complexities of actual experience. Readings, however relativist in orientation, must adopt an argumentative frame for its articulation. What makes Memmi’s reading method so effective, in spite of the jury being out on the subject, is his insistent focus on the subject, apart from the consistency with which he manages the critical tropes that serve him in the course of his argument.

Postcolonial futures: the afterlife of the colonized

How would the ‘colonized’ negotiate the aftermath of decolonization? This is the pivotal issue in Albert Memmi’s follow-up to The Colonizer and the Colonized, published almost half a century later, Decolonization and the Decolonized. One of the questions occupying Memmi at the end of The Colonizer and the Colonized was that of the possible response of the colonized to the postcolonial situation. If decolonization was achieved through the agency of revolution, the ouster of the ruling class was not actually the end of the matter; rather, it inaugurated a series of issues, which the erstwhile-dependent subject would have to address. It would also involve the realization of certain myths that he had projected during the revolutionary phase as being part of his constitution. Is the transition so simple? The Colonizer and the Colonized takes issue with the experience of colonialism and offers a reading of the constituents involved in it, analysing their responses and circumstances in which their worldviews are made and played out. The book also looks forward to the issue of a postcolonial understanding of the world following decolonization. The issue, however, finds its appropriate platform in Decolonization and the Decolonized, where the arguments relating to identity, governance and migrancy are elaborated at length. As Memmi points out, the former colonized is transformed into a ‘citizen’, an altogether new category, one whose habit he must put on and make do, assume responsibilities that were not part of the equation during the period of his subjection. The status of the citizen, his worldview and the circumstances of his existence, however, cannot be seen in isolation. Other categories insist that they be counted – those of nationalism, exile and corporation, to name a few – and it is in this enmeshing of conflicting trajectories that the decolonized subject faces a new world order. But it is necessary to consider the ideal, the model which fuelled the imagination of the colonized as he found himself on the throes of his much-anticipated freedom. The opening paragraph of Decolonization and the Decolonized sums up the picture with remarkable clarity and precision:

The end of colonization should have brought with it freedom and prosperity. The colonized would give birth to the citizen, master of his political, economic, and cultural destiny. After decades of imposed ignorance, his country, now free, would affirm its sovereignty. Opulent or indigent, it would reap the rewards of its labour, of its soil and subsoil. Once its native genius was given free rein, the use of its recovered language would allow native culture to flourish.

(3)

This ideal, however, is far removed from the experiences that characterize life and practice in the decolonized countries. The postcolonial future is embroiled in ‘poverty’, ‘corruption’, ‘diversions, excuses and myths’, ‘conflicts’ and ‘sickness’ – all of these are Memmi’s terms – and it is a real challenge to put up a semblance of order in such a world, fraught as it is with problems that only intensify in an increasingly competitive global environment. It is interesting that Memmi exposes the ideal behind the hypothetical narratives that contributed to the futuristic imagination of the colonized in his analysis of decolonization. For it is a narrative gone wrong, not just in its material form, but it has in fact given rise to circumstances and issues that weren’t part of the colonial world. How should one approach this yawning gap between ‘fiction and reality’? Exemplifying the problems associated with the new world, Memmi takes the cases of the intellectual and the writer in decolonized societies. The intellectual’s inability to propose a cogent framework for the negotiation of the crises at hand is actually a reflection of a lack that is not easy to fill. This is the lack of a tradition which would serve the former colonized intellectual to tackle the circumstances of his new life; the case is no different for the writer. What should be the language of the writer? If he decides to write in the acquired language of the colonizer, he would be doing so without compulsion; his cultural inheritance, on the other hand, makes it clear that there is a disconnect between the subject and the medium in which it is represented. Analysing this dilemma in Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi observes:

Paradoxically, it’s harder to be a writer in the postcolonial period than during colonization. Before, the decolonized wrote in the language of the colonizer, the only language he knew well, even when directed against the colonizer. … But now, not having learned any other, the writer should use this same language to examine his own society. Continuing to ply his craft, he should depict the incompetence, the egotism, the profitable complicity of the ruling classes, the pressures from his own government.

(36–37)

The colonial aftermath presents a bleak picture; beset by conflicts and contradictions, wants and corruption, decolonized societies are trapped in the cusp of change. The pressures of globalization and the continuous political brinkmanship that shape the contours of development in a fast-changing international world order demand immediate responses from the newly freed countries. Memmi suggests that this would require a reorientation of existing categories where the former colonized peoples cannot afford to thwart the wheel of contemporary existence. It would entail a negotiation between the cherished ideals of the colonized and those that invigorate the priorities of the developing world. This is a struggle that shows no sign of relenting.

The nature of colonial relationship

In spite of the fact that Albert Memmi’s analysis of colonial experience draws sustenance from his understanding of the situation in Tunisia, the overarching predicament through which he frames his argument extends beyond the immediate historical or spatial circumstances. This is one of the important principles in the book. While there is an underlying narrative that thrives on the conditions of life experience in Tunisia under colonial occupation, the imperatives through which Memmi builds his thesis have had their appeal elsewhere as well. This does not imply, however, that the primary argument of the book is a kind of a floating signifier, ready for adoption in societies that have similar structures. General frames can serve as effective tools in the business of categorization, but the specific nature of the conditions must be accounted for sufficiently in the analysis. The enduring appeal of Memmi’s thesis (and also the criticism it has consistently invited) lies in his enhancement of the duality that places the colonizer and the colonized at opposing extremes, the one pitted against the other.

We now look at The Colonizer and the Colonized for Memmi’s insights on the subject. In Memmi’s argument this association is characterized by the condition of ‘dependence’. Commenting on this, he writes in the preface: ‘The colonial relationship which I had tried to define chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependence, moulded their respective characters and dictated their conduct’ (ix). This characteristic, however, does not operate in a vacuum, or in a space given to neutrality. It is the political arrangement where the conduct of both parties is marked by the tug-and-pull of economic understanding, among others. No wonder, Memmi is convinced, such an operative scheme is designed to bring to fruition a structure of privileges. The processes through which the colonial relationship brackets life in the occupied world are governed by the logic of control. The arrangement is such that the patterns evident in civic or political life manifest a lopsided view of things. On the one hand, the dynamics of social conduct in a colony penetrate the personality traits across the divide, and on the other, there is a design in place which functions to perpetuate the colonial relationship. The myths of colonization constitute one of the engines of this apparatus: it fabricates dimensions of the self and contributes to the veneer of inevitability, the brush with which relationships in the colonial situation are coated and varnished.

Appreciating the importance of The Colonizer and the Colonized as a study of effects that determine the nature of life in a colonial set-up, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to the book, observes: ‘Colonialist practice has engraved the colonialist idea into things themselves; it is the movement of things that designates colonizer and colonized alike’ (xxvi). The trappings of colonization, then, move beyond specific events, individuals and institutions, even though these particulars may engineer and sometimes serve as registers articulating the experience in colonial society. For Memmi, the nature of the relationship is such that reconciliation of terms within the parameters of existence, which situate the two parties at two extremes, is unimaginable. According to this thesis, possibilities of assimilation are ruled out; the colonial relationship functions, in this view, by reference to a philosophy of inequality, justified, legitimized and perpetuated through the very apparatus that structures the divide. It is inevitable that Memmi’s argument here, which admits no possib...