The Postcolonial Challenge

Towards Alternative Worlds

Couze Venn

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780761971627, 9780761971610
• eBook ISBN: 9781446238431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An outstanding contribution to our understanding of postcolonial theory and its engagement with significant changes within the contemporary world. Couze Venn forces us to rethink the very parameters of the post-colonial and suggests a new political economy for post-modern times. This critical engagement opens up the possibility to reimagine the world from its current narrow European strictures to a world full of alternative possibilities and modernities... This is a timely and ground breaking book that contributes to a much needed reconceptualisation of the postcolony. 
- Professor Pal Ahluwalia, Goldsmiths, University of London

What is postcolonial studies? What are its achievements, strengths and weaknesses? This ground breaking book offers an essential guide to one of the most important issues of our time, with special emphasis on neo-liberalism within world poverty and the ?third world?. It clarifies:

• The territory of postcolonial studies
• How identity and postcolonialism relate
• The ties between postcolonialism and modernity
• New perspectives in the light of recent geo-political events
• Potential future developments in the subject.

1

Rethinking the Scope of the Postcolonial

Postcoloniality and the ‘new world order’

This book begins with the recognition that new forms of colonization are at work in transforming the world today, more insidious and totalizing than previous forms. It intervenes in this moment of danger at the theoretical and methodological levels, interrogating the present conjuncture through a reconceptualization of problems ranging from issues of modernization and identity to the problem of establishing a political economy of postmodern times that could open up new grounds for imagining alternative worlds. In doing so, it develops a critical postcolonial standpoint that extends the focus and terrain of postcolonial theory, drawing still on the discursive formations with which it has been in solidarity, such as feminism, race studies, cultural and development studies, but equally on positions in the social studies of science and technology and in critical phenomenology in order to interrogate the material cultures and the complex character of the apparatuses that constitute the plural lifeworlds of today. The re-orientation in approach is, of course, sustained by the vocabulary and lessons that postcolonial studies has already established in its critical engagement with European colonization and its legacy at the material and discursive levels, for example, the conviction that the relationships between the present and the past, the local and the global, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, the postcolonial and the postmodern are much more intertwined and of longer duration than appears in many accounts in the social sciences. In challenging established boundaries, disciplinary or otherwise, and in seeking to overcome the limitations posed by the dualities of north–south, developed–developing, modern–traditional, centre–periphery, it is concerned not so much with showing their interrelatedness and mutual dependencies, something already accomplished in postcolonial work, but with the underlying problem of opening critical spaces for new narratives of becoming and emancipation. The orientation of this questioning is transmodern, that is, properly postcolonial and post-occidental.

The intervention which this book makes is shadowed by the global ‘war on terrorism’, ‘regime change’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and homicidal fundamentalism that clearly illuminate what is at stake in the new world order which is being put into place. We can now see more starkly the alignment of forces in establishing or resisting the new machineries of what Hardt and Negri (2000) have called Empire. But it does not follow that one therefore knows what is to be done, for it is not a matter of a simple option between existing parties, for instance, between the kind of globalization from above advocated by the Davos World Economic Forum and its tributary organizations, and countervailing fundamentalisms founded in revisionist religious doctrines. We are now living in a time of the clash of fundamentalisms – religious, ethnic, neo-liberal – and the simultaneous archaic and postmodern terrors they inflict. Aligned against such forces, one finds the broad church of the ‘globalization from below’ as evidenced in the great gathering of oppositional movements at Porto Allegre in 2001 and 2002, and Mumbai in 2004 under the banner of the World Social Forum (WSF). The latter has brought together an uneven and disparate combination of a variety of counter-hegemonic social movements committed to resist or challenge in one way or another the ravages and dispossessions produced by existing forms of exploitation based upon gender, capital or race (Fisher and Ponniah, 2003).

Foremost among the forces of subjugating power, one would single out neo-liberalism and its project of establishing the sovereignty, if not hegemony of a postmodern totalizing form of capitalism. Mentioned ad nauseam in every debate, it must nevertheless, like capitalism, be kept in sight in any analysis of postcoloniality. As Fisher and Ponniah put it:

Neoliberal globalization is not simply economic domination of the world but also the imposition of a monolithic thought that consolidates vertical forms of difference and prohibits the public from imagining diversity in egalitarian, horizontal terms. Capitalism, imperialism, monoculturalism, patriarchy, white suprematicism, and the domination of biodiversity have coalesced under the current form of globalization. (2003: 10)

There is a lot to unpack here, and to examine critically, as I shall do in Chapter 4, but the thrust of the argument is to highlight the emergence of a new form of colonization, totalizing in its scope, since it invests every sphere of life, including temporalities of the lived, and leaves no space for alternatives.¹ Hardt and Negri (2003) see in the WSF the expression of an anti-capitalist transnationalism in search of ‘a new democratic cosmopolitanism’, being established through linkages and networks that are concerned with ‘finding what is common in our differences and expanding that commonality while our differences proliferate’ (ibid.: xvii).

As Young (2001, 2003) shows, these differences and commonalities have a history that encompasses colonial struggles of liberation and socialist struggles, as well as the divergences regarding the particularities of locality. These are echoed in differences at the level of theory addressing the wider problems of the analysis of globalization and problems to do with what is to be done politically. One important aspect of these differences appears in the underlying tensions between universalism and particularism that runs through the issues that have surfaced time and again in the history of emancipatory struggles. Mbembe (2001), addressing the problem from the point of view of postcolonial theory, highlights the inadequacy of two kinds of lexicons, generated by the tension between universalist theory and particularist contentions, that have emerged to make sense of Africa as a project of development of the nation. One lexicon is located in the discourse of social theory elaborated within the conceptual framework of Western modernity that tried to understand Africa ‘solely through conceptual structures and fictional representations used precisely to deny African societies any historical depth and to define them as radically other, as all that the West is not’ (ibid.: 11; original emphasis). The other approach can be detected in the discourses that challenge the colonial denigration of the African subject and that seek to validate the memory of a misunderstood Africa and rediscover the assumed ‘essence’ or distinctive genius of the black ‘race’, as, for instance, in the Negritude movement and the more recent black essentialist position. Echoing du Bois’ ([1903] 1989) analysis of double consciousness and Fanon’s (1967) explorations of the splittings of identity arising from the othering of the colonized, Mbembe argues that the scene upon which was played out the tension between universalism and particularism, emancipation and assimilation, has ended in an ‘inner twoness’ or doubleness for colonial subjectivity, and ‘an endless interrogation of the possibility, for the African subject, of achieving a balance between his/her total identification with “traditional” (in the philosophies of authenticity) African life, and his/her merging with, and subsequent loss in, modernity (in the discourse of alienation)’ (2001: 12). The recognition of the historical dimension in these struggles and their theorizations, and the recognition of the co-existing ‘multiple temporalities’ – the linear, fast time of modernity and the slower recurrent time of ‘tradition’, and the home or the domus – in which real subjects find themselves in concrete situations everywhere is a lesson that postcolonial theory must keep on its agenda. The point, however, is that if postcolonial critique is about redrawing the diagrams of possible worlds, one must now abandon these spatial and temporal dichotomies and the political divisions they support and move towards a view of the commonalities that offer the possibility of properly dismantling colonialism in its various forms.

This means that it must break with the narratives of ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ that support the idea of Western modernity, or rather occidentalism (Venn, 2000), as the model of social advancement. Postcolonial critique therefore continues and seeks to complete the work of decolonization. It develops an oppositional analytical standpoint that targets the conditions, the narratives, the relations of power that, in their combined effects, support the iniquitous forms of sociality and the varieties of pauperizations that characterize the current world order. These forms include ‘traditional’ and customary socialities that inscribe gender and communalist ethnic oppressions. Postcolonial interrogation takes for granted the argument that the forces that established the Western form of colonialism and imperialism continue to operate, often in altered forms, through mutations in local circumstances, and through different apparatuses, to constitute what Mbembe (2001) has called the postcolony. The latter concept, though applying more strikingly to Africa in Mbembe’s argument, is marked, first, by the coexistence in the concrete postcolonial world of displacements and entwinements arising from the multiple temporalities ‘made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement’ (ibid.: 14), and, second, by the mutation of the form of governance and sovereignty that operated in colonial conditions into a form of commandment that now rules on the basis largely of the violent production of insecurity and scarcity. It is crucial to point out, in relation to this history, the fact that the process of decolonization has been distorted by the intervention of the cold war, or Third World War, which enlisted countries of the ‘Third World’ on one side or the other and derailed their own alternative projects of development.

It follows that the prefix in postcoloniality is not meant to signal the end of the previous period but to stand for the sign of an emancipatory project, that is, it announces a goal yet to be realized: that of dismantling the economic, political and social structures and values, the attitudes and ideas that appeared with European colonialism and its complex combination with capitalism and Western modernity, and it is important to add, with pre-existing forms of exploitation. Postcolonial critique is thus a counter-occidentalism as well as an emancipatory task. A longer and complex history underlies this standpoint about postcolonialism, aligning it with the history of anti-colonial struggles, itself already

a diasporic production, a revolutionary mixture of the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, a complex constellation of situated local knowledges combined with radical, universal political principles … and widespread political contacts between different revolutionary organizations that generated common practical information and material support as well as spreading radical political and intellectual ideas. (Young, 2001: 2)

This view adds to the understanding of anti-colonial struggles as the activities that subvert, disrupt and contest the strategies towards the homogenization and privileging of a centre or an origin or a sovereignty or a world-view which is at the heart of every form of colonization or subjugation, past and existing. In this book colonialism is understood in terms of forms of dispossession supported by these forms of homogenization, often acting in combination. It will be clear also that the point of view of diaspora that I am elaborating undermines the grounds of the discourse of colonialism.

This is the wider theoretical and political frame and the broader spatiotemporal space, or longue durée, that circumscribe the arguments in the book. Yet we know too that when we divert attention from the ‘big picture’, we have to recognize the enormous differences that exist if we were to contrast the everyday lives of people in a village, say, in the Sind province of Pakistan with what happens in a village in England, or in a town in the Midwest of the USA or in Brazil. Indeed, the difference between the same Pakistani village and Karachi is just as striking at the level of technology, customs, laws, the spatial disposition of the material world and the temporal flow of daily life. However, in postcolonial times, all have come under the scrutiny of the new surveillance, intensifying the gaze of the multitude of organizations – governments, NGOs, transnational corporations, experts and researchers – that have for some time taken these places to be the object of their interest. In the ‘informational turn’ of regulatory bodies like the International Monetary Fund, they figure in reports about economic development, health, demographic composition, education, technology, crime, poverty, natural resources, and so on that are used in the strategic calculations of disciplinary forces. In these circumstances one may well ask: where and what is the postcolonial? Once, in the days of the ‘cold war’, and after the Bandung Conference in 1955 of ‘non-aligned’, ‘tri-continental’ nations’ (i.e. from Asia, Africa, Latin America), it was possible to imagine what was called the ‘Third World’ as a space in which the post-independence countries could detach themselves from the legacy of imperialism and the territorial and ideological investment to which the world was being subjected, and thus determine their own destiny. The wars fought across the territories of the ex-colonies in the name of the cold war, together with the strategic interventions of globalizing organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, UN bodies and trade associations have dispelled the illusion of independence or autonomy. Furthermore, differences at the local level have become open to transnational and transregional processes and systems that delimit what is possible at the practical level of social action.

These processes, clearly, relate to globalization; they direct attention to the flows and turbulences and networks in the circulation of goods, peoples, cultures, technologies, and ideas that have come to characterize the global. These flows and networks establish mobile and complex relationships between what Appadurai calls ‘scapes’, that is, the flow of people, communication forms and practices, technology, money, ideologies that can be thought of in terms of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes – to which one should add an infoscape, though it is implied in all these categories. They constitute the ‘building blocks’ for ‘imagined worlds’; they are ‘the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the world’ affecting everything from clothing styles to the working of capital (Appadurai, 1993: 328, 329). I would emphasize the processual co-articulation between these scapes, as I establish in the rest of the book, and particularly in Chapter 4. This heightened sense that the inter-connectedness between the local and the global at these different levels establishes a complex and mobile organism is one element that has led me to look for ways of establishing at the analytical level clearer or more explicit links between postcolonial studies and cognate fields such as cultural studies, political economy, gender studies, the social studies of the technosciences and the theorization of subjectivity. They overlap on the terrain of cultural theory, itself an eclectic bundle of concepts and theories from semiotics, literary studies, philosophy, ethnography, sociology, history, psychoanalysis assembled in opposition to conventional or authoritative protocols for describing the socio-cultural world. This theoretical apparatus is sketched in the methodological section below, and put to work in the postcolonial analysis of modernity, identity and political economy that I go on to develop.

The standpoint it constructs has been directed in this book into an interrogation of modernity and modernization from the point of view of its genealogy and its constitutive relation with capitalism and colonialism (Chapter 2), a complex I have called occidentalism (Venn, 2000, see below), and the analysis of postcolonial identity from the point of view of the imaginary institution of the social world (Castoriadis, 1987), conscious of the fractured or disjointed temporalities and signifying practices that make up the experiential reality of that world (see Chapter 3). Colonialism, of course, attempts to subsume the different temporalities, thus literally the different lifeworlds, within the timeframe of the subjugating power. The chapter on modernity attempts to make visible the peculiarities of modernity as a period, arguing that a genealogy shows that postcolonial thought must be attentive to both the taken-for-granted aspects of modernity buried in the minds of people everywhere – as in the positive evaluations, say, about science and technology – inscribed in the concept and in the process of modernization, as well as the unexamined features of modernity that continue to have effects precisely because they are invisible, for instance, the basis for individualism in the presupposition of the unitary, rational, self-centred, autonomous character of the modern subject. This resilient relay concept is still central in law and in the social sciences; we find it in psychological accounts of every aspect of human behaviour; in judgements about rights and responsibilities and culpabilities take it for granted; it can be detected in interpretations of new technology and research in cybernetics in relation to the human and to artificial intelligence; it is posited as a given in the technologies of new (increasingly neo-liberal) governance that takes the individual to be the primary focus of all its regulatory and disciplinary machinery; it reappears in the form of the ego-centric ideology sustaining consumer culture; it lives on in the efforts to redraw the map of equitable redistribution and capabilities that some radical liberal thinkers like Nussbaum and Sen have been making (see Chapter 4) and, it goes without saying, it has become essentialized in the foundation of neo-liberalism.

There is no doubt that the task of making sense of this complex set of interrelated problems is a difficult one. The comprehensive scope of the book comes up against the hazards inherent in any project that attempts to combine in a coherent way apparently quite disparate areas and interests. The solution proposed here has been to organize the material in terms of key themes that have surfaced both in the literature on postcoloniality and in the ‘globalization from below’ movement exemplified in the concerns of the World Social Forum. This organization of the material is clarified in what follows.

A methodological assemblage for postcolonial critique

I must emphasize that the critical ambitions of the book would not have been possible without the many fine Introductions² to ‘postcolonialism’ and postcolonial theory that already clarify the conceptual ground upon which postcolonial critique has been established so far. They provide the detailed accounts of the key texts and authors, and explanations of the main disciplinary approaches, sufficient to enable the reader to tackle the complex theoretical apparatuses, such as poststructuralism and Marxism, that are deployed in the field; they help to make sense of the debates and disputes that have enlivened postcolonial studies, for instance, regarding issues to do with the when, what, where, which and whose of postcoloniality (see Childs and Williams, 1997; Stuart Hall, 1996); they point to the political and theoretical stakes fought out through these debates. They make it unnecessary for me to repeat these arguments, except where they enable me to try and relocate critique in the wake of the kinds of developments that I have indicated and that have conjoined to determine the context in which the postcolonial as a field of study needs now to be reconsidered. This context is marked, as I noted at the beginning, by the profound changes that are reshaping the world at the level of culture and knowledge, and by the increase in the scale and intensity of exploitation and violence across the world, exceeding even that experienced in the period of the European colonial enterprise of subjugation. The two periods are clearly not unconnected; indeed, the continuities as well as discontinuities emerge as soon as one examines the conditions for the current conflicts in any particular region, from the Congo to the Philippines to Israel/Palestine.

In this book, the linkages are constructed through analytical threads that run through the different chapters and are relayed in terms of several reconstituted problematics common to them, regarding respectively modernity, subjectivity and agency, political economy. Among the analytical threads, I will highlight the following: (1) occidentalism; (2) genealogy and critical phenomenology; (3) subjectivity, diaspora and creolization; and (4) disciplinary ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Rethinking the scope of the postcolonial
• 2 Modernity, modernization and the postcolonial present
• 3 Question of identity and agency
• 4 Towards a postcolonial political economy
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index