Postcolonial Transitions in Europe

Contexts, Practices and Politics

Sandra Ponzanesi, Gianmaria Colpani

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783484478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is the notion of postcolonial Europe an oxymoron? How do colonial pasts inform the emergence of new subjectivities and political frontiers in contemporary Europe? Postcolonial Transitions in Europe explores these questions from different theoretical, geopolitical and media perspectives. Drawing from the interdisciplinary tools of postcolonial critique, this book contests the idea that Europe developed within clear-cut geographical boundaries. It examines how experiences of colonialism and imperialism continue to be constitutive of the European space and of the very idea of Europe. By approaching Europe as a complex political space, the chapters investigate topical concerns around its politics of inclusion and exclusion towards migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, as well as its take on internal conflicts, transitions and cosmopolitan imaginaries. With a foreword by Paul Gilroy

Part I

POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Chapter 1

European Racial Triangulation

Anca Parvulescu

Two directions have become discernible in postcolonial theory in the last decade, both of which are reflective of attempts to reorient a field perceived to be in crisis. On the one hand, some scholars have called for the field’s reconfiguration. As this argument goes, postcolonial theory has run its course in relation to the historical moment of decolonization, and it proves inadequate or insufficient in relation to our global moment. On the other hand, scholars have called for an expansion of postcolonial theory’s reach, beyond its original (and much-debated) anchoring in the postcoloniality of South Asia, into Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, China, the Caucasus, and Europe. This chapter constitutes a reflection on this second impulse. What happens to postcolonial theory when it accepts its status as “traveling theory,” to borrow Edward Said’s phrase? Particularly, what happens to postcolonial theory when the “postcolonial” is conjoined with that which it was initially supposed to decenter, “Europe”? How does postcolonial theory look like once it travels not to the postcolonies in East Europe, where it should have traveled a long time ago, but to the former colonial West European metropolis? If the word “postcolonial” designates various forms of resistance and agentive transformation in the aftermath of colonialism and neocolonialism and if “Europe” is almost synonymous with colonialism, is “postcolonial Europe” an oxymoronic formulation, with potentially regressive overtones? On its journeys to Europe, as Said might wonder, does postcolonial theory risk ossification and domestication or is it likely to be reinvigorated?

John McLeod acknowledges that “in speaking of postcolonial London I am in danger of recentralizing the Western metropolis” (2004, 14). He is responding to other postcolonial theorists, like Gayatri C. Spivak, who consider the study of postcolonial migration, on which the idea of “postcolonial London” is premised, to be Eurocentric.1 McLeod warns, however, that the postcoloniality of London is not commensurate with that of a former colony. What the term “postcolonial London” names, for McLeod, is the effect decolonization had and continues to have on the former colonial metropolis. Both colony and colonial metropolis have been transformed by decolonization, albeit in radically different ways. The two are postcolonial, therefore, in radically different ways. McLeod proposes that the task for the postcolonial critic who acknowledges that the European metropolis has never been immune to the cultural exchanges that shadowed colonial capitalist exploitation is to trace various sites of ensuing transculturation (McLeod 2014).

In case one might be tempted to consider such transculturation to be a recent development, one would do well to revisit the globalizing rhetoric of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto:

[The bourgeoisie] draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what is called civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. (Marx and Engels 1986, 228)

As the “most barbarian nations” are compelled to enter the empire of capitalism, they “adopt” cultural forms traveling from colonial centers. Aamir Mufti reads these statements for their unacknowledged underside: “What they [Marx and Engels] could not fully conceive of, but a conception of which is nevertheless compatible with the contingency that they ascribe to modern ‘civilization’, is the possibility that this attempt to create ‘a world after its own image’ transforms the original itself” (1998, 113). Capitalist colonial exchange impacted not only “the most barbarian nations” but also “what is called civilization.”

Today, in addition to the study of decolonization in its longue durée, in the former colony and in the former colonial metropolis, postcolonial theory needs to identify and analyze the neocolonial dimensions of neoliberalism, flexible capitalism writ global. Neoliberalism’s global reach does not render the postcolonial core/periphery distinction anachronistic, as it is often argued, only insufficient. In addition to focusing on the ex-colonies of former empires, European as well as non-European, today’s postcolonial theory also attends to peripheries and semi-peripheries of neocolonial centers that do not coincide with (nor function in the same way as) the old colonial metropolises. The challenge for the field is thus to bring into focus the workings of two closely knit but not always overlapping international divisions of labor (Cheah 2010, 189). In this framework, “Europe” (a colonial and neocolonial space with old and new, external and internal peripheries) becomes one object (certainly not a privileged object) of postcolonial analysis.

In the following, I propose that one way to bring the “postcolonial” and “Europe” together, in relation to both non-European and East European postcolonialities, is to become more attentive to the operations of race in contemporary Europe. One of the projects of postcolonial theory should be to attend to the racialization of the “new subalterns” (more on this category later) in Europe. We cannot speak of a “post” in relation to Europe’s colonial past as long as we continue to deny (or exceptionalize) the existence of a European racial field. I offer a brief reflection on postcoloniality and race, insisting on the centrality of race and racialization to postcolonial intervention. Against a particular genealogy of resistance to race as a category of analysis, I argue, with Said ([1983] 2000), in favor of the critical translation of “traveling theory,” in this case critical race theory. In particular, I retool the concept of “racial triangulation” (Kim 2000), which emerged in the United States, and propose its translation to the European context, as a lens through which to understand some of the complexities of the contemporary European racial field. As a case study, I read a scene from Michael Haneke’s film Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000), which offers an occasion to analyze a contemporary postcolonial encounter in a Parisian street.

POSTCOLONIALITY AND RACE

In an essay that attempts to redefine and expand the scope of postcolonial studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty declares:

European intellectuals, whether discussing refugees from outside Europe or internal migrants from the ex-colonies and the question of “Eastern Europe,” are increasingly debating postcolonial theory and are even producing their own readers and translations of postcolonial writings. Europe today is clearly a new frontier of postcolonial studies—and not because the classical peasant-subaltern subject can be found in Europe. No, it is because the new subalterns of the global economy—refugees, asylum seekers, illegal workers—can be found all over Europe. (Chakrabarty 2012, 8)

The “classical” subaltern subject in fact can be found in Europe.2 The countries considered to belong to East Europe have a history as colonial subjects to Russian, Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian, Polish, and Lithuanian empires. This history carries into the present and translates into hierarchies and stratifications along the lines of “modernization” and “structural adjustment.” Many East Europeans thus find themselves on the unenviable side of the international division of labor and its attendant forms of mobility. The rub when it comes to East Europe is to acknowledge the presence of multiple colonial and postcolonial histories in any given geography. It is not unusual for an East European locale to find itself in a postcolonial relation to the Ottoman Empire or Russia (sometimes both) and, following different postcolonial temporalities, in a semi-colonial relation to parts of West Europe and, today, the European Union. It is not unusual for the same East European locale to have a colonial history itself, in relation to one or more of its neighbors. Add to this already multi-nodulous formation the quasi-postcolonial “postcommunist condition,” the aftermath of half a century of Soviet hegemony, and the critical task becomes quite challenging, but ever more necessary.

Chakrabarty is thus right in pointing out that the existence of “the new subalterns” at the heart of the West European metropolis imposes the need to think of “Europe” as an object of postcolonial inquiry. It is paramount, however, to acknowledge that the new subalterns come from former West European colonies, as well as newer peripheries and semi-peripheries, including East Europe. Let us then return to Chakrabarty and bring out one of the consequences of his argument: “It cannot be without significance that what brought Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and Isaac Julien together to read Fanon in the London of the late 1980s and the 1990s was the struggle against racism in a postimperial Britain” (2012, 2). Too often postcolonial theory is divorced from a study of race, racism, and racialization—in Europe and elsewhere. Too often, in the European context, the resistance to postcolonial theory takes the form of a rejection of race as a category of analysis. My goal is to bring these categories to bear on the conversation on “postcolonial Europe,” so that they can help us elucidate the condition of its “new subalterns.”

In a highly polemical essay, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (1999) argued, with a passion that raises the question of its own economy, that race is an American particularism, not translatable into other contexts, such as Brazil or Europe. To invoke race as a category of analysis, the two sociologists contended, is to participate in the globalization of an “American problem,” leading to the “homogenization and submission to fashions coming from America” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 46–47). At work in such analyses is, according to them, nothing less than “imperial reason”:

The recent as well as unexpected discovery of the “globalization of race” (Winant, 1994, 1995) results, not from a sudden convergence of forms of ethnoracial domination in the various countries, but from the quasi-universalization of the US folk-concept of “race” as a result of the worldwide export of US scholarly categories. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 48)

Readers of Bourdieu are familiar with his long-standing engagement with the institutional conditions of knowledge production. In the global moment, Bourdieu and Wacquant argued, it is US-based scholars (including US-based postcolonial scholars and theorists of race), who, in tacit complicity with major institutions of publishing, impose their particularisms on French academics, who come to occupy the position of the colonized and marginalized. In the course of their argument, Bourdieu and Wacquant effect a distinction between European colonialism and one of colonialism’s most pernicious and enduring effects: racialism. In an effort to fight what they perceive as the dangers of globalization in the scholarly world, they bracket off the fact that colonialism was already a form of globalization and that one of the forms it took was that of the globalization of racial thought. Today we are witnessing, in the context of renewed globalization, the legacies of such old patterns of globalization.

Bourdieu and Wacquant’s argument has been refuted on many fronts, but critical race theory—and, to some extent, postcolonial theory—continues to be perceived, especially in France, as “American.”3 David Theo Goldberg (2006), among others, has offered an implicit rejoinder to Bourdieu and Wacquant by coining the phrase “racial europeanization.” Race is not an American problem: European colonialism produced modern race, not only “out there” in the colony (including the United States), but in Europe as well. Race, in turn, made Europe; race is one modality in which Europeanization has unfolded and continues to unfold. This remains the case when the European hegemonic approach to race is one of denial.4 For Goldberg, denial is in fact the European relation to race, most often taking the form of an automatic relegation of race to a strictly anti-Semitic European past.

We know that contemporary critical discourses on race have two major, interrelated...