Postcolonial Theory

A critical introduction

Leela Gandhi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000257199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialtheorie

Postcolonial Theory is a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies.Leela Gandhi is the first to clearly map out this field in terms of its wider philosophical and intellectual context, drawing important connections between postcolonial theory and poststructuralism, postmodernism, marxism and feminism. She assesses the contribution of major theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and also points to postcolonialism's relationship to earlier thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Mahatma Gandhi.The book is distinctive in its concern for the specific historical, material and cultural contexts for postcolonial theory, and in its attempt to sketch out the ethical possibilities for postcolonial theory as a model for living with and 'knowing' cultural differences non-violently. Postcolonial Theory is a useful starting point for readers new to the field and a provocative account which opens possibilities for debate.

1
After colonialism

In 1985 Gayatri Spivak threw a challenge to the race and class blindness of the Western academy, asking ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1985). By ‘subaltern’ Spivak meant the oppressed subject, the members of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘subaltern classes’ (see Gramsci 1978), or more generally those ‘of inferior rank’, and her question followed on the work begun in the early 1980s by a collective of intellectuals now known as the Subaltern Studies group. The stated objective of this group was ‘to promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). Further, they described their project as an attempt to study ‘the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). Fully alert to the complex ramifications arising from the composition of subordination, the Subaltern Studies group sketched out its wide-ranging concern both with the visible ‘history, politics, economics and sociology of subalternity’ and with the occluded ‘attitudes, ideologies and belief systems—in short, the culture informing that condition’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). In other words, ‘subaltern studies’ defined itself as an attempt to allow the ‘people’ finally to speak within the jealous pages of elitist historiography and, in so doing, to speak for, or to sound the muted voices of, the truly oppressed.

Spivak’s famous interrogation of the risks and rewards which haunt any academic pursuit of subalternity drew attention to the complicated relationship between the knowing investigator and the (un)knowing subject of subaltern histories. For how, as she queried, ‘can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 285). Through these questions Spivak places us squarely within the familiar and troublesome field of ‘representation’ and ‘representability’. How can the historian/investigator avoid the inevitable risk of presenting herself as an authoritative representative of subaltern consciousness? Should the intellectual ‘abstain from representation?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 285) Which intellectual is equipped to represent which subaltern class? Is there an ‘unrepresentable subaltern class that can know and speak itself?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985] p. 285) And finally, who—if any—are the ‘true’ or ‘representative’ subalterns of history, especially within the frame of reference provided by the imperialist project?

The complex notion of subalternity is pertinent to any academic enterprise which concerns itself with historically determined relationships of dominance and subordination. Yet it is postcolonial studies which has reponded with the greatest enthusiasm to Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. Utterly unanswerable, half-serious and half-parodic, this question circulates around the self-conscious scene of postcolonial texts, theory, conferences and conversations. While some postcolonial critics use it to circumscribe their field of enquiry, others use it to license their investigations. And, above all, the ambivalent terrain of subaltern-speak has given rise to a host of competing and quarrelsome anti- and postcolonial subalternities. There is little agreement within postcolonial studies about the worst victims of colonial oppression, or about the most significant anti-colonial insurgencies. Metropolitan South Asian, African and West Indian poststructuralists battle Marxists at home; mainstream intellectuals within ‘settler’ colonies struggle against the claims of indigenous intellectuals and representatives; and feminist critics contest the masculinist evasions of nationalist historiography. Thus, while Spivak concluded her provocative essay by categorically insisting that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 308), postcolonial studies has come to represent a confusing and often unpleasant babel of subaltern voices. How then, can we begin to make sense of—or, indeed, take sense from—this field?

Over the last decade, postcolonial studies has emerged both as a meeting point and battleground for a variety of disciplines and theories. While it has enabled a complex interdisciplinary dialogue within the humanities, its uneasy incorporation of mutually antagonistic theories—such as Marxism and poststructuralism—confounds any uniformity of approach. As a consequence, there is little consensus regarding the proper content, scope and relevance of postcolonial studies. Disagreements arising from usage and methodology are reflected in the semantic quibbling which haunts attempts to name postcolonial terminology. Whereas some critics invoke the hyphenated form ‘post-colonialism’ as a decisive temporal marker of the decolonising process, others fiercely query the implied chronological separation between colonialism and its aftermath—on the grounds that the postcolonial condition is inaugurated with the onset rather than the end of colonial occupation. Accordingly, it is argued that the unbroken term ‘postcolonialism’ is more sensitive to the long history of colonial consequences.

On a different though related note, some theorists have announced a preference for the existential resonance of ‘the postcolonial’ or of ‘postcoloniality’ over the suggestion of academic dogma which attaches to the notion of postcolonialism. In the main, the controversy surrounding postcolonial vocabulary underscores an urgent need to distinguish and clarify the relationship between the material and analytic cognates of postcolonial studies. In its more self-reflexive moments, postcolonial studies responds to this need by postulating itself as a theoretical attempt to engage with a particular historical condition. The theory may be named ‘postcolonialism’, and the condition it addresses is best conveyed through the notion of ‘postcoloniality’. And, whatever the controversy surrounding the theory, its value must be judged in terms of its adequacy to conceptualise the complex condition which attends the aftermath of colonial occupation.

In this chapter I will examine some dimensions of, and possibilities for, the relationship between postcoloniality and postcolonialism in terms of the decolonising process. The emergence of anti-colonial and ‘independent’ nation-States after colonialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to forget the colonial past. This ‘will-to-forget’ takes a number of historical forms, and is impelled by a variety of cultural and political motivations. Principally, postcolonial amnesia is symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start—to erase painful memories of colonial subordination. As it happens, histories, much as families, cannot be freely chosen by a simple act of will, and newly emergent postcolonial nation-States are often deluded and unsuccessful in their attempts to disown the burdens of their colonial inheritance. The mere repression of colonial memories is never, in itself, tantamount to a surpassing of or emancipation from the uncomfortable realities of the colonial encounter.

In response, postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past. The process of returning to the colonial scene discloses a relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire between coloniser and colonised. And it is in the unfolding of this troubled and troubling relationship that we might start to discern the ambivalent prehistory of the postcolonial condition. If postcoloniality is to be reminded of its origins in colonial oppression, it must also be theoretically urged to recollect the compelling seductions of colonial power. The forgotten archive of the colonial encounter narrates multiple stories of contestation and its discomfiting other, complicity.

In addition, the colonial archive preserves those versions of knowledge and agency produced in response to the particular pressures of the colonial encounter. The colonial past is not simply a reservoir of ‘raw’ political experiences and practices to be theorised from the detached and enlightened perspective of the present. It is also the scene of intense discursive and conceptual activity, characterised by a profusion of thought and writing about the cultural and political identities of colonised subjects. Thus, in its therapeutic retrieval of the colonial past, postcolonialism needs to define itself as an area of study which is willing not only to make, but also to gain, theoretical sense out of that past.

The colonial aftermath

The colonial aftermath is marked by the range of ambivalent cultural moods and formations which accompany periods of transition and translation. It is, in the first place, a celebrated moment of arrival—charged with the rhetoric of independence and the creative euphoria of self-invention. This is the spirit with which Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, initially describes the almost mythical sense of incarnation which attaches to the coincidence of his birth and that of the new Indian nation on the momentous stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947: ‘For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9). Predictably, and as Rushdie’s Indian Everyman, Saleem Sinai, ultimately recognises, the colonial aftermath is also fraught by the anxieties and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the historical burden of expectation. In Sinai’s words, ‘I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9). To a large extent, Saleem Sinai’s obsessive ‘creativity’ and semantic profusion is fuelled by his apprehension that the inheritors of the colonial aftermath must in some sense instantiate a totally new world. Saleem Sinai’s tumble into independent India is, after all, framed by the crippling optimism of Nehru’s legendary narration of postcoloniality: ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 116).

To quote Jameson’s observations on postmodernism out of context, we might say that the celebratory cyborg of postcoloniality is also plagued by ‘something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps impossible, dimensions’ (Jameson 1991, p. 39). In pursuing this imperative, however, postcoloniality is painfully compelled to negotiate the contradictions arising from its indisputable historical belatedness, its post-coloniality, or political and chronological derivation from colonialism, on the one hand, and its cultural obligation to be meaningfully inaugural and inventive on the other. Thus, its actual moment of arrival—into independence— is predicated upon its ability to successfully imagine and execute a decisive departure from the colonial past.

Albert Memmi, the Tunisian anti-colonial revolutionary and intellectual, has argued that the colonial aftermath is fundamentally deluded in its hope that the architecture of a new world will magically emerge from the physical ruins of colonialism. Memmi maintains that the triumphant subjects of this aftermath inevitably underestimate the psychologically tenacious hold of the colonial past on the postcolonial present. In his words: ‘And the day oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to emerge before our eyes immediately. Now, I do not like to say so, but I must, since decolonisation has demonstrated it: this is not the way it happens. The colonised lives for a long time before we see that really new man’ (Memmi 1968, p. 88).

Memmi’s political pessimism delivers an account of postcoloniality as a historical condition marked by the visible apparatus of freedom and the concealed persistence of unfreedom. He suggests that the pathology of this postcolonial limbo between arrival and departure, independence and dependence, has its source in the residual traces and memories of subordination. The perverse longevity of the colonised is nourished, in part, by persisting colonial hierarchies of knowledge and value which reinforce what Edward Said calls the ‘dreadful secondariness’ (Said 1989, p. 207) of some peoples and cultures. So also the cosmetic veneer of national independence barely disguises the foundational economic, cultural and political damage inflicted by colonial occupation. Colonisation, as Said argues, is a ‘fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results’ (1989, p. 207).

In their response to the ambiguities of national independence, writers like Memmi and Said insist that the colonial aftermath does not yield the end of colonialism. Despite its discouraging tone, this verdict is really framed by the quite benign desire to mitigate the disappointments and failures which accrue from the postcolonial myth of radical separation from Europe. The prefix ‘post’, as Lyotard has written, elaborates the conviction ‘that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90). Almost invariably, this sort of triumphant utopianism shapes its vision of the future out of the silences and ellipses of historical amnesia. It is informed by a mistaken belief in the immateriality and dispensability of the past. In Lyotard’s judgment, ‘this rupture is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is to say, repeating it and not surpassing it’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90). Thus, we might conclude that the postcolonial dream of discontinuity is ultimately vulnerable to the infectious residue of its own unconsidered and unresolved past. Its convalescence is unnecessarily prolonged on account of its refusal to remember and recognise its continuity with the pernicious malaise of colonisation.

If postcoloniality can be described as a condition troubled by the consequences of a self-willed historical amnesia, then the theoretical value of postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its ability to elaborate the forgotten memories of this condition. In other words, the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past. The work of this theory may be compared with what Lyotard describes as the psychoanalytic procedure of anamnesis, or analysis—which urges patients ‘to elaborate their current problems by freely associating apparently inconsequential details with past situations—allowing them to uncover hidden meanings in their lives and their behaviour’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 93). In adopting this procedure, postcolonial theory inevitably commits itself to a complex project of historical and psychological ‘recovery’. If its scholarly task inheres in the carefully researched retrieval of historical detail, it has an equally compelling political obligation to assist the subjects of postcoloniality to live with the gaps and fissures of their condition, and thereby learn to proceed with self-understanding.

Salman Rushdie sheds light on this necessity in a wonderful moment of betrayal and reconciliation in Midnight’s Children, when the anti-hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, reveals the cultural miscegenation and comic misrecognition of his celebrated birth. Early in the novel, and at the same time as Amina Sinai struggles to produce her child in Dr Narlinkar’s Nursing Home, a poor woman called Vanita suffers a neglected labour in the ‘charity ward’. The child she is about to bear is the unexpected consequence of an affair with an Englishman, William Methwold, who boasts direct descent from a particularly imperialistic East India Company officer. When these children are finally delivered, a somewhat crazed midwife called Mary Pereira switches Amina’s and Vanita’s babies around. Thus, Saleem Sinai, hailed by Nehru himself as the child of independent India, is really the son of a reluctantly departing coloniser. But this accident, as the adult Saleem insists, is the allegorical condition of all those who inherit the colonial aftermath: ‘In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118). In his digressive self-narration, Saleem Sinai simultaneously refuses the guilt of unauthenticity and the desire to withhold the knowledge of his flawed genealogy. The Sinais, we are told, eventually reconcile themselves to the fact of Methwold’s bloodline, namely, to the hybrid inadequacies of their own postcoloniality. As Saleem explains: ‘when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118). We might modify this narrative wisdom slightly to say that, perhaps, the only way out is by thinking, rigorously, about our pasts.

Postcolonial re-membering

In his comments on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, announces that memory is the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural identity. Remembering, he writes, ‘is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63). Bhabha’s account of the therapeutic agency of remembering is built upon the maxim that memory is the submerged and constitutive bedrock of conscious existence. While some memories are accessible to consciousness, others, which are blocked and banned—sometimes with good reason—perambulate the unconscious in dangerous ways, causing seemingly inexplicable symptoms in everyday life. Such symptoms, as we have seen, can best be relieved when the analyst—or, in Bhabha’s case the theorist— releases offending memories from their captivity. The procedure of analysis–theory, recommended here, is guided by Lacan’s ironic reversal of the Cartesian cogito, whereby the rationalistic truth of ‘I think therefore I am’ is rephrased in the proposition: ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’ (Lacan 1977, p. 166).

In the process of forging the reparative continuity between cultural identity and the historical past, the theorist/analyst is also required to recognise the qualitative difference between two types of amnesia. The mind, as both Freud and Lacan maintain, engages in either the better known neurotic ‘repression’—Verdrängung—of memory; or, and more devastatingly in its psychotic ‘repudiation’—Verwerfung (see Bowie 1991, pp. 107–9). If the activity of Verdrängung censors and thereby disguises a vast reservoir of painful memories, the deceptions of Verwerfung tend to transform the troublesome past into a hostile delirium. The memories and images expelled through the violence of repudiation enter into what Lacan describes as a reciprocal and ‘symbolic opposition to the subject’ (Lacan 1977, p. 217). These phantasmic memories thus become simultaneously alien, antagonistic and unfathomable to the suffering self.

To a large extent, the colonial aftermath combines the obfuscations of both Verdrängung and Verwerfung. Its unwillingness to remember what Bhabha describes as the painful and humiliating ‘memory of the history of race and racism’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63) is matched by its terrified repudiation and utopian expulsion of this past. In response, the theoretical re-membering of the colonial condition is called upon to fulfil two corresponding functions. The first, which Bhabha foregrounds as the simpler disinterment of unpalatable memories, seeks to uncover the overwhelming and lasting violence of colonisation. The second is ultimately reconciliatory in its attempt to make the hostile and antagonistic past more familiar and therefore more approachable. The fulfilment of this latter project requires that the images expelled by the violence of the postcolonial Verwerfung be reclaimed and owned again. This is, of course, another way of saying that postcoloni...