Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe

Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics

Sandra Ponzanesi, Adriano José Habed, Sandra Ponzanesi, Adriano José Habed

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786604125
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786604149
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Postcolonial intellectuals have engaged with and deeply impacted upon European society since the figure of the intellectual emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Yet a critical assessment and overview of their influential roles is long overdue, particularly in the light of contemporary debates in Europe and beyond.

This book offers an innovative take on the role of intellectuals in Europe through a postcolonial lens and, in doing so, questions the very definition of "public intellectual," on the one hand, and the meaning of such a thing as "Europe," on the other. It does so not only by offering portraits of charismatic figures such as Stuart Hall, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Hannah Arendt, among others, but also by exploring their lasting legacies and the many dialogues they have generated. The notion of the 'classic' intellectual is further challenged by bringing to the fore artists, writers, and activists, as well as social movements, networks, and new forms of mobilization and collective engagement that are part of the intellectual scene.

Part I

PORTRAITS OF THE INTELLECTUAL

Chapter 1

Antonio Gramsci and Anticolonial Internationalism

Neelam Srivastava

The editors of this essay collection asked us to examine the postcolonial public intellectual in Europe as a figure who has contributed to a more balanced and nuanced understanding of the relationship between Europe and its others. The voice of the postcolonial intellectual gains a specific political urgency at a time in which racism and ethnocentrism have been allowed to enter the mainstream of Western public discourse. European societies have long been characterized by a condition of postcoloniality, in the sense that they have been deeply shaped by global migrations and by their colonial history. But a truly decolonized Europe is in reality a utopian ideal whose political conditions of possibility have not yet been realized. Europeans are very far from having a collective consciousness of the enduring legacy and effects of colonialism on the formation of their identity. Colonialism, as a historical, political, and psychological process, still lacks proper recognition within the public sphere, highlighting a dearth of critical reflection on Europe’s central role in the history of modern capitalist imperialism. Italy is a case in point; its colonial past lies virtually forgotten by the public, and there is little sense of how its colonization of the Horn of Africa is affecting migration patterns to Italy today and is directly linked to racism and discrimination against (East) African migrant communities, sadly attested by many recent episodes. Italian public intellectuals, with few exceptions such as the historian Angelo Del Boca, rarely engage critically with imperialism. A sustained and ongoing critique of Western imperialism, then, can be said to characterize the postcolonial intellectual’s mission. The postcolonial intellectual can serve to highlight the influence of colonial history on European identity, helping its citizens to comprehend better the causes of contemporary xenophobia, religious and cultural stereotyping that permeate the contemporary European public sphere.

Oliver Lovesey (2015) states that “the postcolonial intellectual is a variety of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century diasporic intellectual, often an exile, refugee, or escapee from political, economic, ideological, or cultural oppression” (3). While this definition of the postcolonial intellectual as diasporic is generally very pertinent, I will suggest that it also includes metropolitan intellectuals who embraced anticolonial positions in their political activity and thought. Here I examine the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci as a postcolonial public intellectual, both in the sense that he was actively involved in anti-imperialist struggles as the founder of the Italian Communist Party and in that he offers a powerful, if little remarked upon, critique of Italian imperialism as part of his revolutionary political theory. Through an analysis of Gramsci’s postcolonial credentials, I argue that “anticolonialism” as a political praxis should not be located exclusively outside of Europe, in the colony or postcolony, but is an engagement both within, and against, Europe itself.

Here I aim to focus on the enduring intellectual tradition that has strived to imagine a Europe that is radically anti-imperialist; Edward Said, Zadie Smith, Hannah Arendt, and Banksy are some of the figures analyzed by contributors to this essay collection. I wish to offer a specific interpretation of “postcolonial” that is not equivalent to “diasporic,” though it is premised on solidarity, empathy and political connections with migrants and colonized subjects. In a different but related historical-political context, that of fin-de-siècle radical circles in London, Leela Gandhi (2006) speaks of “self-othering” in relation to prominent British radicals who aligned themselves with anticolonial causes, an identification with the other that enabled them to transcend (albeit imperfectly and temporarily) the imperialist ideological structures in which they had been raised.

Rethinking the Postcolonial Intellectual

The term postcolonial intellectual is often used as a shorthand to indicate a scholar, cultural critic, and/or political activist whose ethnic or geographical provenance is outside Europe, who is born in a colony, in a peripheral or semiperipheral region, and who is struggling to come to terms with a hegemonic colonial cultural legacy. The ground-breaking nature of the early-generation postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was that they drew attention to the inherent specificity of any form of knowledge-production; in other words they sought to localize, to provincialize the intellectual, to dismantle his universal position:

The first task of intellectuals, as indeed we are—as to who asks the question about the intellectual and the specific intellectual, the universal intellectual, is to see that the specific intellectual is being defined in reaction to the universal intellectual who seems to have no particular nation-state provenance. (Spivak 1990, 3)

Spivak readily concedes that this perspective was shaped by her profound engagement with poststructuralism, which questioned “the millennially cherished excellence of Western metaphysics” (4). Spivak is known as the foremost “postcolonial critic,” partly because she presents herself as such and partly because she is constructed as such through interviews:

Perhaps by the accident of my birth and production—being born British-Indian and then becoming a sort of participant in the de-colonisation without a particular choice in the matter and then working in the United States, floating about in Europe, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Britain and now Australia, I think I avoided in some ways becoming someone who takes on a master discourse. (Ibid., 6)

In other words, the postcolonial intellectual, in the early years of postcolonial theory, is self-consciously posed as diasporic. Timothy Brennan suggests, rather aggressively, that postcolonial diasporic (read deracinated) intellectuals can often be seen to act as imperial apologists, staking “their claims on anti-Eurocentric principles even as they exemplify key features of Euro-American global culture” (2006, 271). The identification between postcolonial and diasporic is particularly evident in the fierce debates around the intellectual ascendancy of Marxism within the field of postcolonial studies.

Anthony Appiah (1991) remarks that “perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals—a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism—we are indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role” (356). For Appiah, the postcolonial intellectual is implicitly diasporic and often saddled with the burden of ethnic representation. Moreover, the very term intellectual comes to Africa via colonialism. Appiah’s position, obviously, derives from Frantz Fanon. In The Wretched of the Earth (2004), Fanon uses the term intellectuel colonisé (colonized intellectual), whose deracination from his heritage (in Fanon, the intellectual is always male) is implied by his cultural ties to Europe. Arguably, the idea of the colonized intellectual can apply to metropolitan contexts as well. Intellectual life in Europe, as mentioned earlier, is far from being decolonized, and the increasing visibility in mainstream culture of white supremacist and ethnicist political groupings (also known as the “alt-right”) can be read as a public symptom of this failure to liberate contemporary thought from imperialist structures, examples where Europe’s colonial unconscious comes to the surface.

What happens to our understanding of “postcolonial” if we were to consider as postcolonial public intellectuals activists who by birth and culture were European, but who aligned themselves with anticolonial causes, thus effecting a “decolonization of the self” that recalls the political-psychological process undergone by Fanon’s intellectuel colonisé as described in The Wretched of the Earth? What might it mean to consider Gramsci, one of the most important European Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, a postcolonial public intellectual partly because he comes from an experience of colonization internal to Europe? Gramsci’s huge influence on the formation of postcolonial studies as a field has been the subject of extensive analysis (see Brennan 2006; Chambers 2006; Srivastava and Bhattacharya 2012; Langley 2015). As it is well known, the Subaltern Studies Indian editorial collective took its key intellectual inspiration from Gramsci, as did Stuart Hall and Edward Said.¹ We do not need to rehearse here the often contested legacy of his thought among postcolonial scholars; suffice it to say that Gramsci has come to be accepted as a postcolonial thinker on a par with Fanon, Said, and Spivak, not least because of the ways in which his political terminology has become integral to the field. The terms subaltern, hegemony, and passive revolution have been so thoroughly incorporated within postcolonial scholars’ theoretical apparatus that in many instances they have lost their original connection to Gramsci’s work.² He has thus been anointed a postcolonial thinker in his afterlife. But my analysis here is concerned with how Gramsci strove to critically analyze and condemn capitalist imperialism throughout his life; in other words, how he was an active anticolonialist within the period he operated in. “While Gramsci seldom offers us a self-contained analysis of colonialism as a system (though he does occasionally do just that), this may paradoxically be precisely because anti-colonialism is so integral to his thought” (Langley 2015, 85).

Gramsci as a Postcolonial Public Intellectual

The following pages offer a reading of Gramsci as a postcolonial public intellectual because, as I argue, he is part of a broader history of metropolitan anticolonialism that flourished in the interwar period. I align his activism with that of major anticolonial intellectuals who operated from within the metropolis, such as Sylvia Pankhurst, George Steer, and Nancy Cunard, among many others.³ Of course, Gramsci is also a Southern intellectual, and his meridionalismo or Southernism has been an important lens through which scholars have analyzed his attitudes to colonialism. Gramsci could indeed be considered to have been born in colonial conditions, as Sardinia at the time of his birth in 1891 was an impoverished island that, while formally part of the new kingdom of Italy, had long been under the reign of the Savoys (the Savoy dynasty was instrumental in bringing about the unification of Italy effected in 1861). Robert Young argues that Gramsci’s acute perception of the Italian South as a semicolony of the North shaped his Marxism in profound ways: “Gramsci’s interest in colonialism was derived directly from his early life in Sardinia, from his personal experience of the Italian dialectic of colonization and emigration, but was mediated intellectually by his membership of the Comintern and the Italian Communist Party” (2012, 23).

Tom Langley has shown in detail how Gramsci’s preprison writings, especially those published in the Communist weekly he founded, L’Ordine Nuovo, consistently represent Southern Italy as a colonized territory, and fascism as a mechanism of political power that subjected the Italian proletariat to capitalist imperialism. “From Fascism’s earliest days, even before its arrival in power, Gramsci explicitly understood it as a form of internal colonization that was designed to guarantee the incorporation of the labor of the Italian proletariat into a new imperial order” (2015, 63). In relation to these considerations, there are three aspects of Gramsci as a postcolonial public intellectual that I wish to examine here. Firstly, Gramsci clearly grasped the analogies between Italy and especially the Mezzogiorno, and colonized territories, both in economic and in sociocultural terms. In a famous passage of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci argues that after Italian unification, there was a situation of “internal colonialism” with the North exercising political and economic hegemony over the South. Moreover, the forms of racialist discourse projected onto the South were strongly reminiscent of colonial racisms:

The “poverty” of the South was inexplicable to the popular masses of the North; they did not understand that Unification had not happened on an egalitarian basis, but as the hegemony of the North over the Mezzogiorno, as a territorial relationship between city and countryside. In other words, the North, in concrete terms, was a “tentacular parasite” that became rich at the expense of the South. (Gramsci 1975, Q19§24, 2021–22)⁴

Secondly, Gramsci’s explicit support for anticolonial struggles, especially visible in his preprison writings, contained a strong sense that such movements originating from the colonies were integral to the success of revolutionary movements in Europe. In other words, Gramsci’s anticolonialism was integral to his Marxism. The Communist International, especially in the interwar years, developed an extensive programme of support for anticolonial movements across the globe, championing internationalism as a key feature of Marxist ideology. As a Marxist, he was opposed to imperialism, of course, and Lenin’s Theses on the National and Colonial Questions of 1920 also influenced the way he perceived the close analogies between the colonial relationship and his analysis of the Italian South as a “semi-colonial market” of the North (Gramsci 1975, Q19, §26, 2038). But he may have gone further than most Marxists of his generation (and most notably Lenin and the Comintern’s official position) in suggesting that global revolution could actually originate in the non-European world, and that there was much to be learnt from these struggles. There are numerous documents that prove his intense interest in the revolutionary movements in the colonies, and his perception that these struggles could be fundamental for the work of the Communist International because they intended to overthrow capitali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Postcolonial Intellectuals: Universal, Specific or Transversal?
• Intervention: Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Postcoloniality
• Introduction: Postcolonial Intellectuals, European Publics
• PART I: PORTRAITS OF THE INTELLECTUAL
• PART II: REINTERPRETATIONS AND DIALOGUES
• PART III: WRITERS, ARTISTS AND ACTIVISTS
• PART IV: INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENTS AND NETWORKS
• Afterword
• Index
• About the Contributors