Laura Chrisman. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Editor: Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Volume 5, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.
Postcolonial studies designates a broad, multidisciplinary field of study that includes practitioners from literary, cultural, and media studies, history, geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political economy. Postcolonial studies is the analysis of the phenomenon of imperialism and its aftermath: slavery, colonialism, nationalism, independence, and migration. Its eclectic disciplinary and methodological range differentiates postcolonial studies from its subdivision field of “postcolonial theory,” which is dominated by practitioners of literary studies who conceptualize narrative structures, representations of cultural difference, and strategies of subject-formation in colonial and postcolonial texts.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) initiated the entry of post-colonial studies into the metropolitan academies of Europe and the United States. Said’s study draws upon the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault to explore constructions of “the Orient” by European and American politicians, scholars, and artists. The intellectual origins of postcolonial studies are more debatable. Deconstructionist or postmodernist practitioners (including Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak) regard Orientalism as the inaugural text of postcolonial studies, while for Marxist or materialist practitioners (including Timothy Brennan, Benita Parry, and E. San Juan, Jr.), the field’s origins are much earlier, with the predominantly Marxist anti-colonial writings of activist-intellectuals that include George Antonius, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Simon Bolivar, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Walter Rodney, Jean-Paul Sartre, Léopold Senghor, and Eric Williams.
Many prominent contemporary practitioners originate from Asia (Aijaz Ahmad, Bhabha, Said, San Juan, Jr., Spivak); Africa (Chinua Achebe, Mahmoud Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, V. Y. Mudimbe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka); and Latin America and the Caribbean (E. Kamau Brathwaite, Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, Eduoard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid). Of these, the majority have relocated to Europe or North America, where there is no intellectual monopoly on postcolonial intellectual practices but where practitioners enjoy the lion’s share of material resources to publish and distribute postcolonial academic materials.
Colonial Encounters
Materialist postcolonial scholars understand colonialism to be a territorial expression of political-economic expansionism. Its foundations in domination, appropriation, and exploitation place the colonizer and colonized populations in a fundamentally antagonistic relationship that Fanon famously described as “Manichean.” Deconstructionists tend instead to understand colonialism as a cultural, epistemological, or psychological condition, and they perceive its political dimension as a “will to power” that operates autonomously of material determinants. In general, deconstructionists regard Fanon’s Manicheanism as a binary opposition that requires breaking down. Accordingly, they interpret colonial dynamics as ambivalent, indeterminate, or negotiated.
All practitioners share an understanding that colonies played a constitutive role in the emergence and development of metropolitan Europe. These global dependencies have been studied in all spheres of human activity: cultural, economic, subject-formation. Ann Laura Stoler and others have developed Foucault’s ideas of power/knowledge, discourse, and governmentality. This Foucauldian wing analyzes the production and regulation of colonial identities through modes of government, sexuality and gender, and educational systems. Colonial discourse analysis is concerned with knowledge production by various agencies of empire about colonized “others” (travel writers, missionaries, administrators, merchants, ethnographers, and so forth). Some practitioners emphasize the “epistemic violence” performed by these discourses; others emphasize their self-deconstructive qualities. Marxist studies have instead used concepts of ideology to explore the relations between imperialist ideologies and material practices, and consider the ways in which imperialist activities have denied and distorted indigenous social, cognitive, and cultural structures. Deconstructionists reason in spatial terms: space confers a single homogeneous political, social, ideological, and cultural identity upon its occupants (the West, Europe, Africa). Materialists criticize this approach for being monolithic, and explore instead the dynamic social-economic processes and diverse human agencies that, for them, operate within certain spaces.
Nationalism
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) has been influential in its suggestion that nationalism is constitutively paradoxical, the expression of a historical rupture that must assert itself as an historical continuity. This has encouraged studies of the temporality of nationalism and highlighted the function of print capitalism in the development of national identities. Divisions between materialism and deconstructionism feature in studies of nationalism as they do in debates over colonialism. Materialists analyze historical anticolonial nationalist resistance as a collective and liberatory struggle for self-determination; deconstructionists analyze it as a master narrative derived from and complicit with the West. The Western source is, for some deconstructionist thinkers, the Enlightenment, for others, humanism, for others, colonialism, and for others, European nationalism.
According to materialists, anticolonial nationalism has historically mobilized leaders and masses as a political unity that represents the needs and desires of the entire colonized population. Materialist scholars apply class analysis to differentiate between socialist, populist nationalisms and bourgeois nationalisms. Their approach rests on a dialectical understanding of the reciprocal transformability of leaders and masses as political agents.
Deconstructionists, who see the concept of political unity as a ruse, question such an understanding. They contend that it is the interests of a male social elite that nationalism actually served (and serves) and that these interests conflict with the interests of women, the peasantry, workers, and the poor. The deconstructionist critique of nationalism rests on a categorical or structural (as opposed to a dialectical and historical) understanding, which posits that these heterogeneous groups are fixed in their autonomous, essentially cultural, differences. Any claim, or attempt, to unify them does violence to those differences; any attempt to politically represent, or “speak as” the entire dominated population is actually an exploitative act of “speaking for,” that is, another example of self-consolidation through others.
Resistance
Debates over nationalism have intensified studies of anticolonial resistance in general. The conventional historical distinction between primary resistance (physical opposition to initial colonial invasion) and secondary resistance (constitutionalist struggles against an established colonial administration) has been augmented and contested by a broad range of studies. These have examined spontaneous political uprisings, local insurgencies, and industrial action, and have tended to focus analysis on the consciousness of the resisters. The indirect, everyday, cultural, religious articulations of anticolonial resistance have also been energetically analyzed and theorized, as have women’s resistances. In this context, Bhabha’s notions of “sly civility” and “mimicry” have been widely circulated.
Some practitioners have been prompted by a postmodern politics of difference, while others have seen their work as an extension of Marxist and nationalist politics. Both tendencies, however, evaluate the material value of culture and debate the relationship between cultural and political expressions of resistance. Some have analyzed a dialectical relationship; others have seen culture as necessarily preceding political forms. Still others have seen culture as following from politics.
In general, recent critical studies of resistance have disputed developmental models that posit a qualitative linear progression of resistance and consciousness “from protest to challenge.” For some, this model denies the heterogeneity of resistant currents at work in any one historical movement or moment; others object to the teleological worldview, or belief in the idea of progress, to which this model subscribes.
Decolonization, Postindependence, and Neocolonialism
The debate over nationalism extends to the nation-state and to nationalism’s legacy in postindependent societies. Deconstructionists argue that the state is an alien structure imposed by colonialism. By adopting it as their goal and means of social liberation, anticolonial nationalists doomed themselves to cultural inauthenticity and to political failure. Against this, materialists have argued that the state, as a political structure, has its origins in precolonial, not colonial, polity. They suggest that in a world increasingly governed by global capitalism, the state potentially provides an important safeguard of human needs. As a structure it is uniquely accountable to, and transformable by, its populations; the nation-state remains a tool to oppose neocolonialism.
Both tendencies agree that there are serious difficulties besetting much of the postcolonial world. Materialists regard and study political corruption, ethnic and religious conflicts, patriarchal practices, gross socioeconomic inequality, and national debt as originating in colonialism and in contemporary global configurations of capitalism that follow a neocolonial dynamic. Postmodernists interpret these same phenomena as arising from the structural flaws of nationalism itself.
Historical and Regional Contexts
Academic postcolonial studies initially focused largely on the imperial metropoles, colonies, and former colonies of Britain and France. It has subsequently expanded to include critical analysis of other European imperialisms (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, German) and that of the United States. The field has additionally investigated transnationalism, race, ethnicity, diaspora, and globalization, which now operate as autonomous academic fields. The institutional relationship of postcolonial to ethnic studies and to area studies varies; in some instances, mergers of these previously discrete programs and departments have occurred.
Different regions are associated with different intellectual concerns and contributions. The study of race, for example, has been particularly pronounced in work from (and about) Africa and the Caribbean, challenging orthodox political economy by arguing that, historically, enslaved labor did not precede but was integral to the development of metropolitan capitalism. This work insists on the economic as well as the ideological significance of race.
Postcolonial intellectuals from these regions have also developed negritude and pan-Africanist scholarship that argues for the liberatory value of racial identification. At the same time the strikingly multicultural and multiracial qualities of Caribbean history have led to scholarly studies of cultural plurality and mixing: creolization, metissage, mestizaje, and syncretism are ideas that have been heavily debated in and regarding the Caribbean.
Postcolonial studies originating from (or about) Asia have arguably shown the heaviest imprint of poststructuralism applying Foucauldian, Derridean, and Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas. From India emerged Subaltern Atudies, an influential collective of historians. Its original Gramscian-Marxist orientation produced studies of colonialism as “domination without hegemony” (Ranajit Guha), and studies of the resistance history and consciousness of subalterns (a term describing subordinated social agents). At the start of the twenty-first century, subaltern studies has moved towards deconstructionism.