Postcolonial Studies

An Anthology

Pramod K. Nayar, Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118780985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

This new anthology brings together the most diverse and recent voices in postcolonial theory to emerge since 9/11, alongside classic texts in established areas of postcolonial studies.

• Brings fresh insight and renewed political energy to established domains such as nation, history, literature, and gender
• Engages with contemporary concerns such as globalization, digital cultures, neo-colonialism, and language debates
• Includes wide geographical coverage – from Ireland and India to Israel and Palestine
• Provides uniquely broad coverage, offering a full sense of the tradition, including significant essays on science, technology and development, education and literacy, digital cultures, and transnationalism
• Edited by adistinguished postcolonial scholar, this insightful volume serves scholars and students across multiple disciplines from literary and cultural studies, to anthropology and digital studies

Part One
Framing the Postcolonial

The essays in this, the opening section of the volume, carry some of the classic texts that “made” the discipline of postcolonial studies and the methodologies of postcolonial theory. Many of the older essays here deal with questions of identity, nationhood, and the nature of colonial discourses. These essays instituted lines of inquiry, and have been reproduced here for a sense of continuity. Frantz Fanon examines the nature of “blackness,” pointing to the objectification of the black body by the European which the black man then internalizes so that he is “sealed” (as Fanon calls it) into the object-condition of being black. Homi Bhabha argues for the fractured nature of colonial discourses. Bhabha’s work calls into question any coherent and unified sense of colonial discourse and passive colonized response, thus marking a major shift in the evaluation of the former. Edward Said’s epochal Orientalism, from which we reproduce here the introduction, defined the sweeps and swathes of colonial discourse. Said’s work offered a methodology for reading the political aesthetic of European writing, and so has played a key role in literary and cultural examinations of the colonial era. Fredric Jameson’s identikit declarations on postcolonial literatures that nearly set an agenda for reading and writing “postcolonially” find their riposte in Aijaz Ahmad’s nuanced reading of the condition of postcoloniality and the imperatives of allegory that Jameson prescribes. Separated by some years, and even decades, the later essays in this section throw up new questions, domains, and concerns for the postcolonial project and thereby set the agenda for new debates to emerge. Gayatri Spivak extends her thinking on the “subaltern” to consider the singularities of the very term and the “subject.” Yet, even as Spivak calls for a more scrupulous attention to the subaltern minus the universalisms, Dipesh Chakrabarty positions postcolonial criticism, with all its foregrounding of the local and the particular, within global-universal and contemporary concerns, such as global warming. Enlightenment universalisms come up against local contexts and differences, but retain considerable purchase here. Robert Young’s essay, like Chakrabarty’s, seeks to establish new mandates for postcolonial studies, arguing that the postcolonial remains. Young’s essay foregrounds the necessity of retaining the postcolonial political stance in the age of continuing empires for its focus on emancipation. Lisa Lau’s essay makes a case for the Oriental who/that capitalizes upon the identity “Third World” – to bring back that rhetorical-polemical label – in order to obtain cultural purchase in the global literary marketplace. In the age of globalized postcolonial authors, issues of representation such as the ones Lau raises, are crucial in understanding the politics behind authorship, publishing, and academic study. Some of the issues and debates inaugurated by Young, Lau, and Chakrabarty will find supporting and contestatory arguments in the essays in subsequent sections.

1
The Fact of Blackness

Frantz Fanon

“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!”

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given sufficient attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.

The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other. Of course I have talked about the black problem with friends, or, more rarely, with American Negroes. Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world. In the Antilles there was also that little gulf that exists among the almost-white, the mulatto, and the nigger. But I was satisfied with an intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really dramatic. And then. …

And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.

For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for “denegrification”; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction. Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,”¹ but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other … and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. …

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”

On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a...