Understanding Movements in Modern Thought
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Understanding Movements in Modern Thought
Series Editor: Jack Reynolds This series provides short, accessible and lively introductions to the major schools, movements and traditions in philosophy and the history of ideas since the beginning of the Enlightenment. All books in the series are written for undergraduates meeting the subject for the :first time.
understanding postcolonialism Published
Understanding Empiricism Robert G. Meyers
Understanding Postcolonialism Jane Hiddleston
Understanding Existentialism Jack Reynolds
Understanding Poststructuralism James Williams
Jane Hiddleston
Understanding German Idealism Understanding Psychoanalysis Will Dudley Matthew Sharpe & Joanne Faulkner Understanding Hegelianism Robert Sinnerbrink
Understanding Rationalism Charlie Heunemann
Understanding Hermeneutics Lawrence Schmidt
Understanding Utilitarianism Tim Mulgan
Understanding Naturalism Jack Ritchie
Understanding Virtue Ethics Stan van Hooft
Understanding Phenomenology David R. Cerbone
Forthcoming titles include
Understanding Feminism Understanding Pragmatism Peta Bowden & Jane Mummery Axel Mueller Understanding Environmental Philosophy Andrew Brennan & Y. S. Lo
ACUMEN
Contents
Acknowledgements
vi
1
1 Introduction © Jane Hiddleston, 2009
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by Acumen Acumen Publishing Limited Stocks:field Hall Stocks:field NE437TN www.acumenpublishing.co.uk ISBN: 978-1-84465-160-3 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-84465-161-0 (paperback)
British Library Catalogning-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
2 Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms
25
3 Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective
54
4 Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism
76
5 Derrida and Bhabha: sel£ other and postcolonial ethics
98
6 Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place
126
7 Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe
151
8 Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline 178
Questions for discussion and revision Guide to further reading Bibliography Index
186 189 193 199
Typeset in Minion Pro. Printed and bound in the UK by Athenaeum Press Limited. contents
v
one
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford, and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford for granting me a sabbatical during which to complete this project. Chapter 1 contains extracts from my article "Dialectic or Dissemination? Anti-colonial Critique in Sartre and Derrida' (Sartre Studies International 12[1] [2006]), and Chapter 4 reuses some material from my essay "Jacques Derrida' (in Postcolonial Thought in the Francophone World, C. Forsdick & D. Murphy [eds] [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009]). I am grateful to the editors of both for allowing me to reprint this material. I would like to thank the series editor, Jack Reynolds, for suggesting this project in the first place, and Tristan Palmer at Acumen for his work in bringing the book to fruition. The anonymous readers also offered invaluable advice and comments, and I am grateful to them for helping me to sharpen the final version. Kate Williams has also been a scrupulous editor and has helped to produce a more polished text. Discussion of 'aspects of the book came up in seminars and meetings with a number of graduate students at Oxford, and I benefited greatly from trying out my ideas with them. Finally, I am immensely grateful for the help and support of friends and colleagues, and above all, to Colin, for everything. Jane Hiddleston Oxford
vi
understanding postcolonialism
Introduction
Postcolonialism is a broad and constantly changing movement that has aroused a good deal of both interest and controversy. Inaugurated in earnest during and after the fight for independence in the remaining British and French colonies around the 1950s and 1960s, it has developed rapidly to become today a major area of intellectual innovation and debate. While the term first became popular in North American university campuses, and in particular in literary departments, it is now widely used both inside and outside Western academic institutions and attracts ever-growing numbers of commentators as well as students. The term "postcolonialism" can generally be understood as the multiple political, economic, cultural and philosophical responses to colonialism from its inauguration to the present day, and is somewhat broad and sprawling in scope. While "anti-colonialism" names specific movements of resistance to colonialism, postcolonialis:n refers to the wider, multifaceted effects and implications of colomal rule. Postcolonialism frequently offers a challenge to colonialism, but does not constitute a single programme of resistance; indeed, it is considered consequently by some to be rather vague and panoptic in its ever more ambitious field of enquiry. This book will focus on the philosophical dimensions of postcolonialism, and will demonstr~te the diversity of conceptual models and strategies used by postcolomal philosophers rather than by political thinkers or literary write~s. Po~t colonial philosophy will be shown to feed into these, but detailed discussion of the politics, economics and literature of postcolonialism is beyond the scope of this study. introduction
The term "postcolonialism" is a highly ambiguous one. In order to understand its meanings and implications it is first necessary to define the colonialism to which it evidently refers. Colonialism should be conceived as the conquest and subsequent control of another country, and involves both the subjugation of that country's native peoples and the administration of its government, economy and produce. The act of colonization is a concrete process of invasion and a practical seizing of control, although it is important for postcolonial studies that this material, empirical manifestation of colonization is at the same time backed up by a colonial ideology that stresses cultural supremacy: Colonialism is from this point of view both a specified political and economic project, and a larger discourse of hegemony and superiority that is enlisted to drive and support that concrete political act. The colonial project involves the literal process of entering into a foreign territory and assuming control of its society and industry, and, on a more conceptual level, the post facto promulgation of a cultural ideology that justifies the colonizer's presence on the basis of his superior knowledge and "civilization': "Colonialism" is close in meaning to "imperialism: although at the same time slightly different. If colonialism involves a concrete act of conquest, imperialism names a broader form of authority or dominance. Colonialism is in this way one active manifestation of imperialist ideology, but imperialism can also be understood as a larger structure of economic or political hegemony that does not have to include the direct rule and conquest ofanother country. Imperialism could, then, continue after the end of colonial rule, .and indeed, many critics have described the United States's current dominance of global markets as a new form of imperialist rule. This conception of imperialism shows that the term is wide-ranging, but it certainly helps to conceptualize both past and present forms of economic and cultural dominance. Imperialism is also now associated with capitalism, and with the attempt by Western states to impose their Capitalist system on the rest of the world. Colonial conquest and settlement was one way in which those states accomplished the spread of their capitalist ideology, but even after decolonization this ideology continues to exert its pressure on the ex-colonies and the "Third World" (and the use of this term itself stresses the subordinate status of the countries to which it refers). If these are the distinctions between colonialism and imperialism, . then what do we understand specifically by the term "postcolomalism"? We might assume that postcolonialism designates the aftermath of any form of colonial rule. This means it could presumably refer not only to 2
understanding postcolonial ism
the effects of British rule in India, for example, or of the French presence in Algeria, but also to the wake of the Roman Empire, or to the traces of the Spanish and portuguese colonization of Latin America. Indeed, some critics believe that the model for current conceptions of postcolonialism precisely emerges out of the earlier experiences ofindependence and neo-imperialism in Latin America, and cert~y, some thinking around the concepts of liberation and transculturation can ~e traced back to this region. So the term could be seen to name a senes of historical contexts and geographical locations that is bewildering in . scope. In fact, however, perhaps as a result of the new understanding of imperialism as associated with capitalism mentioned above, postcolonialism is more frequently conceived to describe what has resulted from the decline of British and French colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, many critics continue to reflect on the "postcolOnial" heritage of Latin America, or, indeed, use ~e term to discuss the impact of foreign power on Canada or Australia. It has even been suggested that the United States is postcolonial in the sense that it was once a British colony, although it is clear that the conditions of this colonial project were different from those that were being questioned specifically in British and French colonies around the ~9~Os. Nevertheless, most critics who identify-themselves with postcolomalism focus on the particular form of colonial ideology that was also tied to capitalism, and that brought about not just the conquest of peoples and the use of their resources, but also industrialization and the wholesale restructuring of their economies. Postcolonial critique of British and French colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also focuses very much on the ruthlessness of their methods of e:xploit~ tion and on the inequality and impoverishment brought about by this particular form of oppression. . . So postcolonial thought is potentially geographically and ~ston~~y wide-ranging, but has been narrowed slightly by some ofthe major cntics, who tend to concentrate on British and French capitalist forms of colonialism. The question of the precise dating of the postcolonial, however, remains to be resolved. On this matter, thinkers have distinguished the "post-colonial" from the "postcolonial': arguing that the removal of the hyphen designates a shift in meaning. It is widely agreed that "post-colonial" names a distinct historical period following th~ end of direct colonial rule. Post-colonial Algeria, for example, descnbes the nation's trajectory after 1962, once decolonization was agreed ~er eight years of bloody conflict. Post-colonialism is in this way ~ru:row ill.scope and names a specific, identifiable moment. postcolomalism, WIth no introduction
3
hyphen, is larger and more problematic. For a start, it tends to refer not to all that happened after the end of colonialism, but to the events that suc~eeded its beginning. So postcolonialism also names the period of colomal rule, together with its gradual weakening and demise. For this rea~o~, in his boo~ Islands and Exiles (1998), Chris Bongie suggests wnting the term m the form post/colonialism, since this stresses the presence of the colonial within postcolonial critique. Far from celebrating the definitive conclusion to colonialism, then, postcolonialism analyses its effects both in its heyday and during the period that followed the end of the literal, concrete colonial presence. The movement is associated with the eXamination and critique of colonial power both before and after decolonization. This expansion of the historical period to which the term postcolonialism refers means that it has come to be associated with a range of Situations and events. Furthermore, postcolonialism names ~e ~alysis ofthe mechanics of colonial power, the economic exploitation It b~ou~t wi~ it, and a form of both cultural and ethical critique or q~estio~g. ~t IS both a political and a broader ethical philosophy; and mdeed, It will be the contention of this book that latterly the field has become split, often artificially; between these two distinct strands. Over~, it car: be agreed that postcolonialism names a set of political, philosophical or conceptual questions engendered by the colOnial project and its aftermath. But the approach taken by critics towards these questions varies Significantly; with one school of thought tending to lean towards a denunciation of colonial politics and economics, and to. c~ for ~racti~al revolution or reform, and another stressing colonialisms ethical blindness and the cultural regeneration required in the wake of that oppression. Postcolonialism does not propose one answer to such questions - although many critics have objected that it tries to - but offers a framework for their expansion, exploration and clarification. So although commentators point out the risks associated with conceiving the t~rm.as a homogeneous label, unifying distinct experiences ofoppreSSIOn, It can be understood to describe a multifaceted and open process of interrogation and critique. It is not a single structure or a straightforward answer, but, as Ato Quayson helpfully puts it, it is a process, a way of thinking through critical strategies. Quayson goes so far as t.o ~~op?,se not. a ''postcolonialist'' analysis, but a "process of postcolomalizmg, or an mtellectual engagement with the evolving links between the colonial period and current or modern-day inequalities. Po~tc.olOnialism is additionally, in this sense, different from postcolomality. Ifpostcolonialism involves some form of critique and resist4
ance, despite its proponents' awareness of capitalism's neo-imperial effects, postcoloniality is a looser term for a current moment o~ epoch. Postcoloniality is at the same time a condition rather u:an an mtell~c tual engagement or standpoint, and this term also contams the negati~e connotations of a generation still, perhaps unthinkingly, bound up III the politics of the hegemony of "the West" over its (~ormer) overseas territories. Moreover, postcoloniality has been descnbed by Graham Hugganas a particular condition in the market, .whereby certaintext~, artefacts or cultural practices are celebrated preCIsely as a result of theIr apparent "marginality" in relation to the Western canon. The irony of this process of exoticization is that only certain authors or works are championed, and those who achieve this status do so largely because they fulfil Western expectations of the nature of the other culture, and of the form of a good work of art. Some critics hav~ argued tha~ po.stcolonialism is also guilty of this fetishization of certam aspects of .n:rrd World" culture, but we might argue in response that postcolomalism is the movement that interrogates this cynical process, whereas postcoloniality is the broader epoch and set of conditions in v.:-hich. such exoticization has come to thrive. Postcoloniality is from this pOIllt of view internIingled with neocolonialism: that is, with lingering ideologies of cultural patronage of the sort that originally backed up and fuelled actual colonial powers. . To return more specifically to postcolonialism, this book will stress that this is a movement of questioning that seeks not, as critics have at times objected, to propose a single model or understanding for the colonial project and its aftershocks, but to analyse the nu~ce~ an~ implications of its multiple, varying manifestations. Postcolomalis:n IS equally not a coherent strategy for resistance, but it n~es the at times self-contradictory or internally conflictual movement m thought that exanIines, unpicks and compares multiple strategies and 'potential u:odes of critique. This book will analyse some of these varyrng stra:egres as they were conceived by some of the major philosophers and thinkers of the twentieth century; and will explore the distinct approaches that have been reified by certain critics into a strict, and ultimately rather problematic, division. While for some readers postcolonialism is an ove~y political movement, concerned above all with the e~pirical, mater.Ial effects of colonialism and its aftermath, for others this field of enqUIrY heralds an ethical reflection concerning, rather more broadly, relations between self and other. Postcolonial thought is, on the one hand, seen to interrogate the underlying political structure~ of colo.nialism, and ~e mechanics of its promulgation an,d subsequent dismantling. Postcolomal
understanding Postcolonialism introduction
5
critique goes on to enquire after the structure and efficacy of particular forms of nationalism as they emerged at the time when colonial ideology falt~red and declined. On the other hand, however, an apparentlyalternative strand to this movement in modem thought forces us to rethink our understanding of the deeper relations between peoples, cultures or communities, and the ethical encounter interrupted by colonialism but crucial to its denunciation. A major part ofpostcolonial critique concentrates on the militant condemnation of a pernicious political ideology, but another aspect uses that condemnation to challenge and extend our understanding of how to contemplate the other. The two strands of postcolonialism draw, respectively, on Marxism and Levinasian ethics. These influences are evidently combined with oth~~s and used in different ways, but some understanding of Marxist politics and Levinasian ethics offers insight into two of the dominant currents in postcolonial philosophy. Marx commented explicitly on colonial ideology in a number of essays, although it is above all his critique of capitalist e:xploitation and his call for revolt that inspired later postcolo~al thinker~. Emmanuel Levinas does not engage openlywith the question of colomal power, but his reinvention ofthe ethical relation in the ~ake ?f National Socialism is undeniably at the heart of many later discussIOns of postcolonial alterity. The rest of this introduction will sketch the relevant parts of Marx and Levinas, and establish the philosophical bases on which much subsequent postcolonial thought is co?structed. Nevertheless, in noting that many secondary postcolonial cntics appear to choose between politics and ethics in their reflections on the works of the major philosophers, much of this book will conside:- the ~agility of the frontier between these apparently distinct poles. Levmas ~self o.ff~rs an equivocal response to Marx, arguing both that the. latter s m~tenalist confrontation of the bourgeoisie and the proletanat casts aSIde the possibility of absolute freedom, and that he nevertheless did universalize French revolutionary ideals by championing fr~edom of consciousness. Much more broadly, moreover, postcolonial th~ers of each c~p a~ times borrow from the other, and leading cntics. such as Gayatri SpIvak. constantly and deliberately dart between them m the effort to stress their reciprocal uses. Materialist commentat~rs such :s Aijaz.~ad, Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry may battle agamst the textualist' approach of a critic such as Robert Young, but most of the leading philosophers address both the politics of colonial . oppression and its underlying, unethical representational structures. Certainly, the overt goals of political and ethical postcolonialism will be found to be quite clearly distinct from one another, yet a genuine
understanding of the postcolonial arena will necessitate an engagement with both levels.
Marxism and ideology
I
I. I.'
6
understanding postc%nialism
,':
\
L
Marx refers directly to colonialism somewhat sporadically throughout his work, and many of his comments on this subject appear rather ambivalent. There can be no doubt, however, that he condemns the subjugation and economic exploitation of the under~lass that the .colonial system demands. Marx's most developed observations concemmg c.o~o nialism are focused on India and on the inequality enforced by Bntish colonial rule in that context. He notes in numerous journalistic essays, and in parts of Capital, the misery and poverty suffered by the na~v.es, the cruelty of the:ir exploitation and the destructive effects of the Bntish restructuring of the economy. Marx notes that the British. effectively broke down the founding framework ofIndian society by taking control of the means of production and imposing British capitalis~ principle~. As a result of the British presence, Indian agriculture deterIorated as It struggled to conform to these principles of free co~petition, laissezfaire and laisse:z-aller. Furthermore, British forms of mdustry destroyed local technologies - the handloom and the spinning wheel, for example _ in order to impose a larger-scale manufacturing industry, with the result that the colonial system entirely recreated the means of the production of cotton in the "mother country of cottons". Smaller farms, local businesses and family communities were dissolved because they were based on a domestic form of industry - on hand weaving and tilling, for example - and the natives as a result no longer ran or managed their own resources. Not only was economic control passed over to the British, but local communities were dissolved and fragmented by the installation of this foreign form of industry. In addition, the higher employees of the British East India Company instituted a monopoly on the tea trade, fixing prices and taking profits away from local workers. In analysing such instances of restructuring and exploitation, ~arx an~ Engels both denounce the economic drive conceived as the maJo~ baSIS for colonial power: "colonialism proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity" (Marx & Engels 1960: 261). Despite these condemnations of the inequality and exploita~on brought about by the British in India, Marx's position on c?lomalism nevertheless at times seems contradictory. First, in argumg that the British colonizers did make an economic profit out of the colonial introduction
7
project, he succeeds in both condemning the exploitation associated with this profit and stressing the success of an economic venture that anti-colonialists at the time wanted to deny. As Young points out in Postcolonialism (2001), Marx goes on to contradict himself on this question of F~ofit, as he mentions how the East India Company was stretching Bntish finances to the point of potential ruin, but for the most part he underlines the impact of colonialism in the capitalist drive for financial g~. Furthermore, if Marx denounces the moral failings of British colomalism, and laments the suffering of the native population, he does also note that the British succeeded in imposing some unity on a people that had been disastrously fractured up until that point. He recalls that India had previously relied on hereditary divisions of labour, solidified by the caste system, and these impeded the progress and development of Indian power and industry. The modern industrial system imposed by the British, together with the construction of a railway system, in fact to a certain extent helped to transcend eXisting petty hierarchies. So Marx is virulently against colonial exploitation, but does not condemn every aspect of the colonial project. Marx is also above all interested less in independence than in the revolt of the working classes against the bourgeoisie. In order for the Indian working class to achieve such a revolt, and then to reap the benefits of British industrialization, Marx argues that the Britishbourge~isie would first need to be supplanted by a strong industrial proletanat capable of undermining the bourgeois control of the means of production. The first revolution had to happen back home, then, and the colonized might be able to follow suit if the British working class had created a model for them to follow. The Indian proletariat needed to learn from the British proletariat before achieving the conditions necessary for their emancipation. At the same time, the colonial and imperialist projects were preventing the socialist revolution in Britain from taking place, so the danger was that the combined force of colonialism and capitalism mutually strengthened each system, disabling revolt both at home and abroad. Colonialism is an ideology thrown into q~estion ~arx's work, then, but anti-colonial critique is by no means his first .pnonty. He continues to believe that Indian society might have something to learn from Britain, and indeed, that an anti-colonial revolt should not take place at any cost, and without a properly constructed political framework to support it. In The Communist Manifesto (1967), Marx and Engels again at once denounce the capitalist exploitation of colonized countries and remain hazy on the nature, and appropriate moment, for something as specific
n:
as a nationalist revolution. They vilify the scope of capitalist ambition, its spread beyond Western nations and drive to rule the econo~es of the world. It is a holistic ideology that demands not only the reIgn of surplus-value making in Europe, but at the same time the ~erivation of further surplus-value using the resources of other countries, of ~o~ onies. Capitalism for Marx and Engels is also pernicious because It IS propped up by a rhetoric of civilization, and claims to b~ng moral as well as economic benefits to foreign territories. They angrily denounce the way in which capitalism: compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce wh~t it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeOIS themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own (1967: 84) image. Nevertheless, if capitalism also brings with it this drive towards colonization and the imposition of what it conceives to be its mission civilisatrice, its overthrow in the colonies should not necessarily be nationalist. Marx and Engels propose, in the wake of the weakening of distinctions between nations as a result of the development of the bourgeoisie, that revolution will be achieved through the unification of the working classes beyond national differences. They argue that 0 :-k ing men have to seize hold of their own nation, they have ~o pOSIti.O~ themselves as the leading class of the nation in order to achieve political supremacy, but once this supremacy has been instated, Marx ~d Engels look forward to a utopian world where divisions and conflicts
w.
between nations fade. Marx's views on nationalism and anti-colonial revolt alter later in his career, however, and it is difficult to pin down and reify his attitudes to these phenomena. Again, as Young points out, Marx goes o?- to schematize the relationship between colonizing and oppressed nations according to the same model used for the bourgeoisie and the control of the proletariat, and this suggests that the colonized nation should now pull together and unify its forces in order to achie~e its emancip~ tion. Taking into account Marx's vacillation on nationalism, however, ~t remains clear that his broader thoughts on the structures of econOmIC exploitation and on the nature of a workers' revolt can tell us something about the capitalist drive behind colonialism. Ambivalent about colonialism's potential benefits, Marx also does not offer a straightforward anti-colonial critique, and focuses more on the effects of the introduction
8
understanding postcolonialism
9
bourgeois control of the means ofproduction than on colonial violence. s iden~cation of capitalisnls broad sweep and underlying colonial drive proVl~es, howeve~, a significant context for any understanding of the mechanics of colomal economic control.
m.
In, addition to the practical discussion of economic exploitation,
~arxs work ~t the ~ame time offers a foundation for a conception of Ideology that IS cruCIal for the spread and institutionalization of colonial power. In .The G:er:n an Ideology (1964), Marx and Engels distinguish the matenal activity of men and their empirical political and social relations from the larger ideological superstructure. Marx's discussio~ o~ ideology opens with the observation that the functioning of the ca~It~st syste~ starts with actual individuals, who are productively a~e m a .definite way, entering into a series of definite political and so~al relations. The.se relations are then seen to direct the production of ldeas, of conceptions and of a broader consciousness that remains tightly interwoven with material and empirical conditions and actions. Nevertheless, Marx's theory of the diviSion of labour and the control of the means of production by the bourgeoisie means that the worker co~es to find ~self alienated from the ideas that drive and shape his eXIstence: Obliged to work for the broader community or the state, the worker directs his energies into this larger communal life, which is at odds with his own self-interest. The proletariat work in the service of the ruling class, who produce the ruling ideas, and these are in turn divorced from the worker's perception of his personal needs and aims. For Marx, the class that retains control of the means ofproduction also ~o~trols the community's mental production: "the ruling class presents its mterest as a common interest to all members of society" (Marx & Engels 1964: 60). This common interest can be seen as a dOminant ideology that has become detached from the individual's view ofhis material co~di~ons; it is an illusion or chimera that nevertheless props up the capItalist system. Building on Marx, Engels goes so far as to conceive ideology as false consciousness; it is the illusory gamut of ideas and do~s tha~ support and justify the structure of economic exploitation and mequality. As Terry Eagleton writes in Ideology (1991), however, Ma:x's later rew~rkings of this notion of ideology move away from the notion of a false Ideology and towards a conception of the duplicity of actual lived relations. Marx's theory of ideology can be used to reveal the illusions and suppositions promulgated in favour of colOnial imposition and dOmination. It is not, however, without its inconsistencies. Eagleton's discussion of the evolution of ideology in Marx's work points out that there is 10
some contradiction in his use of notions of truth and falsity, because the "falSity" ofideas paradoxically comes to describe the "truth" of the s~cial order. Ideology also seems integral to social life and at the same tlille dissociated from it. Furthermore, it has been observed that the assumed association between the ruling class and ruling ideology suggests a tight system of control, when ideology could be seen to fun~on in a broade:, more free-floating manner. Similarly, critics have noticed that Marx s theory of ideology implies that ideology is somewhat homogeneo~s, although thinkers such as Stuart Hall have stressed .that Mru:x does m fact allow for ideology to vary in fonn. Market relations can mdeed be conceived in more multifarious ways than perhaps at :first appears. At the same time, further dissenters have noted that in Marx's theory, those who are swayed by the ruling ideology are conceived unfairly as blind to its falsity and distortion. Once again, however, we r:rnght r~spond that Marx's members of the proletariat are not necessarily paSSIve and ignorant, but rather that his understanding of ideology impli~ that parts of the capitalist process either escape the~ un~erstanding, ~r make little sense to them as individuals. What this notion of a dOmInant consciousness and a ruling set of ideas suggests, moreover, is that the capitalist system imposes itself both practically and insidiously, ~y propagating ideas that justify that initi~ pr.actical s~cture. Conc.omItantly, the workers' struggle against capItalism requrres a fo~ of ~d~o logical transformation: a change in leading values as well as a selZ1llg of economic control. If Marx's theory of ideology has been criticized for its rigidity, then Antonio Gramsci is one thinker who helps to add nuance to his understanding of the mechanics of class domina~on. Gr~sci troubles the temptation in reading Marx to conceive the IdeolOgIcal sup~rstructure as tightly knitted to the economic substru~e, and s~esses mstea~ the complexity of social formations. GramSCIS approach IS not exclUSIvely economic, and his writing analyses together economic conditio~s and the knotted structure of political and ideological relations that serve to form the social fabric. Furthermore, Gramsci uses the conc5!pt ofl;legemony to think through structures of domination, .rather than stickin~ to the notion of a fixed correlation between one ruling class and the ruling ideology. A hegemOnic formation is not necessarily a pe~anent ~e, but names the different strategies employed by any ruling class to WIll its position of dominance. Hegemony is distinct from coer.cion, since it relies on a changeable form of moral and cultural leadership or authority that comes to determine the structure of a given society, rather n:an on the use of force. Hegemony names the ways in which the governmg
understanding Postcolonialism
l
introduction
11
power wins the consent ofthose it governs. Like Marx's concept ofideology, then, Gramsci's concept ofhegemony describes the spread of a sort of ~ultural and political status quo that props up the leadership of the ruling class and the bourgeois mentality that goes with it. For Gramsci, however, unlike for Marx, the relation between base economic structures and the hegemonic class is wide-ranging and diffuse, and is bound up with culture and the spread of values as well as with exploitation. Hegemony also names lived social relations rather than just false ideas or illusions. Finally, hegemony is for Gramsci necessarily a site of struggle, as plural subjects under the sway of hegemony nevertheless assert their multifarious and contradictory forms of social consciousness. This form of struggle is more important for Gramsci than simply a straightforward, economistic seizing of control of the means of production. In addition to opening out Marx's theory ofideology to stress the role of culture and morality in the subjugated subject's strategy for revolt, Gramsd's political writing more specifically on the peasantry offers a model of contestation that could also be usefully anti-colonial. Interspersed wi~ his comments on the subjugation of the Italian peasantry are observations on the injustice of colonial exploitation and the necessity for the explOited class to come together, united by shared ideas. Like Marx, Gramsci condemns the capitalist drive behind colonialism, but then g~es on to emphasize the importance of the education of working men, smce a better understanding of their situation would help them to organize a coherent position of revolt. Resistance would be achieved through the creation of a powerful and fully realized self-consciousness. This conception of the role of culture both in the propagation of hegemony and in the service of its overthrow is additionally pertinent in the coloni~ co.nte~ since the colonial project of course relies not only on the mstitution of a capitalist form of exploitation, but also on the spread of a belief in white racial supremacy. Furthermore, Hall points out th~t the discussion of the culturally specific quality of hegemonic formations enables us to think through the particular determinants of col~nial dominance and allows a flexible understanding of the ways in which class and race feed into one another. Most famously, Gramsd's concept of the subaltern - which names a subjugated social category not restricted to the notion of class - has been used by Marxist Indian theorists such as Ranajit Guha and, more loosely, Spivak to examine the insurgency of the Indian peasantry, as well as its oppression. The significance of this thinking lies above all in its conception of a decisive political agency claiming a voice ofits own. The subaltern is a resistant being rather than merely a passive object of oppression and exploitation. 12
understanding postcolonialism
The final theorist of ideology worth introducing here is Louis Althusser, who refines and expands on both Marx and Gramsci. Althusser develops Marx's understanding of the relation between base and superstructure by specifying the actual mechanics of ideological domination. He reads Marx's work in detail, but points out the theoretical gap in Marx's analysis of the question of how the ideological superstructure works itself into actual economic relations and conditions. In order to address this lack in Marx, Althusser does not use Gramsci's theory of hegemony and cultural supremacy, since he conceives the latter's desire to amalgamate economic infrastructure, exploitation, class struggle, the law and the state under the unifying umbrella of "hegemony" as astonishingly idealistic. Rather, Althusser looks at the State as a "machine" with a set of apparatuses ensuring the continued domination of the ruling, bourgeois class. The State is made up of the repressive apparatuses, such as the army and the police, by which it exerts its force, and these are combined with political apparatuses, including the head of state, the government, and the body of the administration. Most famously, Althusser asserts that the ideology of the ruling class is pro.mulgated via a plurality of ideological apparatuses, such as .th~ e~ucation system. These ideolOgical state apparatuses are the most mSIdious, and include major institutions such as schools and colleges, the church, the legal system, communications, and smaller sites of diffusion such as the family and the cultural expectations accompanying it. The role of these apparatuses is to ensure the reproduction of the labour power, so that workers continue to submit to the ruling ideology and the agents of exploitation and repression continue to manipulate that ideology. The ideology produced by these apparatuses denies the existence of economic exploitation and struggle, and recommends the virtues of public service. It is also, importantly, a distortion that acts to re.shape individuals' perception of their relation to the means of produc~on. It is not bound up with falsity, as in Marx and Engels, and does not lillply that certain conditions are illusory, but describes rather the im~oinary relation of individuals to their actual conditions of existence. Most importantly, Althusser's analysiS is innovative in that it pinpoints. the material manifestation of this ideology, since this is no longer conceIved merely as a series of ideas or a ruling consciousness but as a concrete set of mechanics. Ideology, as well as exploitation, gains force and credence by means of particular institutions or apparatuses, all of which serve and concretize the bourgeois aims of the State. Althusser's notion of ideology also alters our understanding of the construction of the subject. It is ideology that makes us subjects; it introduction
13
"interpellates" individuals, which means it addresses them, and constructs them as subjects of the State. We are always born into the ideological system, then,and know oUrselves only as formed by that system. Althus~er ~aws on Jacques Lacan here, and suggests that the subject recogruzes itself by means of an imaginary or deluded vision that is promulgated by ideology. Most importantly, though, Althusser's think~g .is .use~ here in that it uncovers the vast ideological mirage that the mdiVldualls born into, and that forms each individual as a social subject. Ide~logy actually serves in the construction of subjectivity, rather than acting only on a ready-formed consciousness. Once again, this conception of the constitution of the subject by ideology could be seen to ~orm no~ons of the colonized as actively formed by colonialism: by notions ofwhite supremacy that serve to govern the entire social system, and that are promulgated by the State and its attendant institutions. Postcolonial critic E. San Juan Jr notes that Althusser's conception of the determined, interpellated subject risks ruling out autonomous agency, but nevertheless stresses the importance of Althusser's theory of ideology for an understanding of capitalist colonialism. Althusser's use of the n?tion of a. La~ian alienated subjectivity will later be taken up by ~OIDl Bhabha ill his specific discussion of the splitting of the colonized ill the face of what will by this time be called colonial discourse. . ~Marx ~self comments sporadically and even erratically on colonIalism, this book will show how his relevance to current postcolonial debates also exceeds the scope, and indeed the aniliivalence, of these direct references. His critique not only of colonialism, but of econOlnic explOitation, informs many more recent denunciations of colonialism and capitalism. Major revolutionary thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre derive their understanding of revolt from Marx's call to the ~roletariat to stand together and seize control of the means of prod~ction. An~-colonial critique is not concerned in such contexts just ~th the relation between colonizer and colonized, but with the oppresSIon of the masses by the bourgeoisie, and this must be overturned by the destruction of both political and economic subjugation. In addition, theories of decolonization and nationalism in India use a Marxist un~erstanding of the domination of the peasantry by the bourgeoisie, while also offering a critique of nationalist unity in the preparation of that struggle. ~ore broadly, the concept of ideology as developed by Marx, GramsCl and Althusser feeds into postcolonial denunciations of colonial power as propped up by a system of false images and mirages. ~chel F~~cault's exploration of discourse, although rejecting the term Ideology, draws on Marxism in stressing the interweaving of power
with knowledge, and Edward Said in turn builds on Foucault to show how colonial power is propped up by the production and diffusion of certain images of the Orient. Critics and commentators on ~ these theorists, such as Aijaz Ahmad and ArifDirlik, go on to use theIr readings self-consciously and assertively to inscribe ~~sm ~t the centre of postcolonial theory. San Juan summarizes his disCUSSiOn of postcolonialism with the proposition that "capitalism as a world system has developed unevenly, with the operations of the 'free market' being determined by the unplanned but (after analysis) 1awful' tendencies of the accumulation of surplus value" (1998: 5). And Lazarus goes so far as to argue that the Marxist understanding of capitalism is "the foundational category for any credible theory of modern society" .(199~: 16). In this way, many of the more politically oriented postcolOnIal ~ers can be seen to rely on concepts thatcan be traced back to the philo sophyofMarx.
Levinasian ethics
Levinas never directly confronts the question of colonialism and its aftermath, but his work is at every point an expression of his revulsion for National Socialism, its totalitarianism and imperialism over the marginalized, the oppressed, the other. Colonialism consti~tes a quite different form of totalitarianism from that enforced by NaZI Germany and its violence and exploitation are conceived to different ends, but it is significant that, increasingly, thinkers such a~ ~~ Ce.saire have dra~ parallels between them. And indeed, colonIalism~ failure to conc~Ive otherness ethically is related conceptually to the Vlolence that Levmas condemns throughout his philosophical career. Otherwise than Being, first published in 1974, is dedicated to the six million ~~s of the death camps, and references to Hitlerism, both overt and Iffiplied, recur across the corpus. The early essay "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" explores the association between monotheism and abso~ute freedom, together with the link between paganism and fate, and Levmas condemns the society that cannot accept the freedom of man and that falls back on a dangerous and reductive biological determinism. This is a society where: man no longer finds himself confronted with a world of ideas in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sovereign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to introduction
14
understanding postcolonialism
15
a certain number of these ideas, just as he is linked by birth to all those who are of his blood. (Levinas 1990b: 70) Levinas also argues here that the danger of this philosophy is that it has to be universal, since if it were freely chosen it would contradict the determinism it upholds, the belief that individuals are necessarily rooted in and circumscribed by their communities. It is from this insistence on the universal applicability of a form of ethnic determinism that National Socialism derives its at once colonial and exterminatory logic. More generally, however, Levinas's work can be seen to be pertinent for postcolonial philosophy because he writes against any conception of subjectivity as totalized, masterful and dominant over the other. Levinas's major works seek to condemn not so much the vocabulary of race as the related notions of the "totality': "sovereignty" and "imperialism" of the self Totality and Infinity opens with a reference to "the permanent possibility of war~ and goes on to assert that "the visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy" (Levinas 1969: 21). War is the inevitable result of the attempt to conceive the self as entirely whole, self-contained and self-sufficient, since such a conception inevitably leads to oppression or exclusion. The notion of "totality" alludes both to the totalitarianism of National Socialism or of any imperialism, and to Western knowledge itself, according to which the individual conceives himself as a totality and subordinates everything that is exterior to himself The startling opening of Totality and Infinity, and its stark opposition between war and morality, develops into an extended critique of Western metaphysics and ontology, in particular its suppression and occlusion of the other. Levinas's critique of ontology will also throughout be subtended by his desire to ward off the threat of totalitarianism or the subjugation or expulsion of alterity that might also be described as colonial. Levinas's main objective in the initial chapters of the work consists in criticizing the ways in which Western thought has conceived the self, or Being, as totalized and self-same: it either excludes or assimilates otherness. A series of terms, including Totality, Being, the Same, the subject, are all undermined by Levinas as a result of their tendency to subordinate what lies beyond their totalized confines. In denounCing Heidegger, via Socrates and Berkeley, for example, Levinas laments that in ontology the freedom of Being is priOritized before the relation with the other; indeed, freedom means "the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other" (Levinas 1969: 45). The "1" accomplishes a 16
understanding postcolonialism
relation with the other by means of a third term, but this is incorporated into the self rather than maintained as distinct and external. As a result, and even worse, the conceptualization of Being suppresses or possesses the other and privileges the "I can': the autocracy of the "I". In a series of rapid moves, Levinas then connects the philosophy of ontology with the philosophy of power, which in turn feeds into the tyranny of the State. In Heidegger, Levinas again traces this back to a belief in rootedness in the soil, to paganism and a devotion to the "master': This philosophy also places the freedom of the selfbefore justice towards the other, and fails to call into question injustice. Astonishingly swiftly, Levinas has moved from a critique of ontology to a denunciation of tyranny and of the association between state politics and war. The error of Western metaphysics is its reliance on ontology, and war and injustice are presented as direct consequences of this concentration on the freedom of Being to the detriment of an ethical relation with the other. What ontology obscures, according to Levinas, is not an other that can be incorporated into the self, but the absolute Other. This Other has no communality with the I, but is a Stranger and is wholly external to Totality or to the Same. Against Totality, this Other inaugurates the idea of Infinity, an excess that is wholly resistant to knowledge or assimilation and that needs to be respected for its impenetrability. The infinite cannot be an object or thing; it is an unending exteriority that can never be known, encompassed or circumscribed. Here again, Levinas creates a conglomeration of terms (Infinity, the Other, exteriority, transcendence' alterity) that offset and undermine the mastery and imperialism of totality. Furthermore, the way in which the Infinity of the Other presents itself to the self is by means of the face, an ambiguous term in Levinas's writing that designates both the expressiveness of the human face and something that cannot be seen: the face "at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum - the adequate idea" (Levinas 1969: 51). The face both names the features of another individual, and serves as a figure for the Other that the self cannot assimilate, know and understand. An awareness or acceptance of this overflow or excess at the moment of encounter is, for Levinas, the definition of ethics: it does not tell us how to be or act, but describes the fundamentally ethical nature of human encounter. The ethical conversation with the Other means not assimilating its expression but receiving it in the knowledge that it exceeds and surpasses the idea that the self creates of it. Importantly, in this ethical relation with the Other, the freedom of the self is not the first priority but is overtaken and surpassed by the demands of introduction
17
the relation. Subjectivity is secondary to the encounter with the infinite, which itself occurs in the immediacy of the face-to-face meeting. Importantly, however, even though Levinas's work at times appears to rest on a rather schematic pairing, Infinity is in reality not the opposite of Totality, and is not entirely separated from it. Totality and Infinity are not conceived as a binary opposition, but a pairing to be thought alongside one another. As Howard Caygill writes, "what is 'otherwise' than totality is understood more often in terms of what is immanent to it, what qualifies, checks, displaces or otherwise postpones its operations" (2002: 95). Absolute Totality does not exist, but finds itself supplemented, invaded and permeated by that which it seeks to exclude and master. Understanding this permeation and interpenetration is the ethical demand made by the encounter with the Other's face. Having stressed the intractability, which means the difficulty, of mastering or controlling the expression of the Other in conversation, Levinas develops in the rest of Totality and Infinity, and in Otherwise than Being, his understanding of the role of language in establishing the ethical relation. Discourse, for Levinas, is the site of relationality; it is not the direct representation and communication of a thought or int"uition, but "an original relation with exterior being" (1969: 66). In speaking to the Other, the "I" cannot know this Other or put him in a category, but must apprehend him in all his heterogeneity. This is not to say that all discourse succeeds in establishing this relation, since rhetoric for Levinas is a form oflanguage that denies freedom in seeking to persuade. In its expressive function, however, language precisely both maintains and allows the revelation of the Other. It does not represent something already constituted and known, but creates sharing ~thout assuming sameness. It is a sort of interface exposing singular, Intractable and potentially infinite beings to one another without forcing resemblance or complete communion. Language institutes a relationality without relationality, and ~ges not require the establishment ' 1 of communality. In Levinas's words: "language presupposes interlocu~. tors, a plurality. Their commerce is not a representation of the one by the other, nor a participation in universality, on the common plane of language. The commerce ... is ethical" (ibid.: 73). Language reveals the nudity of the face before it has been interpreted or illuminated, and exposes its intractability. It is vital to the creation of community; not because it creates identity; but rather precisely because it exposes the self to the Other. It is not the ground of totality but the space in which the Other faces the self in all its possible forms, "hostile, my friend, my master, my student" (ibid.: 81). 18
understanding postcolonialism
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas develops this analysis using another set of terms. Discourse is divided between two coexisting facets, the Saying and the Said. The Saying deSignates what in language overspills the confines of Being and signals the simultaneous proximity and intractability of alterity. The Saying is the excess oflanguage, its openness and resistance to a single and restricted set of meanings. The Said, on the other hand, is the expression of an essence, a theme or content; it names the movement oflanguage towards the identification and containment of its referent. Levinas argues that Western philosophy has traditionally been preoccupied with the Said, since it produces arguments, hypotheses and propositions that aspire to a status of certainty and truth. In privileging the Said, however, philosophy has chosen to ignore the omnipresent excess of the Saying. Once again, these are not opposites or alternatives to one another, but the Saying constantly expands the potentially reductive and oppressive boundaries of the Said: "the Saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the Said" (Levinas 1981: 44). The Saying moves towards the Said, but in becoming absorbed into it strains against its limits and opens it to otherness and the beyond.. The Said creates essence and truth, but the Saying exposes that essence to alterity and establishes language as the interface of the ethical relation. The relation between the two terms in Levinas's writing is constantly unsettling and at times apparently paradoxical The one exceeds the other, but the Saying also relies-on the Said and is only manifested through its apparently secure statements. As in Totality and Infinity, the opposition is less a distinct dichotomy than a coupling, whereby the ethical insistence on Infinity; or the Saying, is conceived alongside the apparent security ofTotality or the Said.. In both formulations, openness to excess is the start of an ethical relation. In .addition to expanding the limits of both Being and language, Levinasian ethics proposes a set of requirements pertinent for postcolonial criticism. Justice towards the other, for example, is discussed early on in Totality and Infinity and takes precedence over the freedom ·.of the self Being cannot pursue its own .ends in the name of spontaneity if in the process it exerts power over, or tyrannizes, the other. The obligation to welcome and do justice to the other restricts the freedom of the self, although this is not in the sense that the other can oppress the s.elf, but in the sense that it ''calls in question the naive right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being" (Levinas 1969: 84). Even more, the welcoming of the other necessitates in the self a feeling ofshame towards his own injustice and pursuit offreedom. Levinas then goes so far as to define the relation to the other as the demand for justice introduction
19
over freedom, again criticizing Heidegger for privileging the latter over the former. Any assumption of the self's power, the subject's ability to pursue his own chosen ends, is undermined by the requirement that attention to the other comes first. Furthermore, in Otherwise than Being, justice requires an admission of the otherness of the self; a realization of the limited mastery of the ego. Levinas here writes less of a confrontation between Same and Other, than of proximity, of justice as a result of contact without absorption or assimilation. In his famous "Violence and Metaphysics': Jacques Derrida pointed out that Levinas's terminology in Totality and Infinity risked falling into a schematism reminiscent of the ontology he was criticizing, and in response Otherwise than Being associates justice and the ethical relation with the brushing of subjects against one another rather than with an encounter between two dichotomous subjects. In both texts, the concept of justice can clearly be related to postcolonial critiques of cultural dOmination, sovereignty and mastery, and could also be used to denounce the colonizer's pursuit of his own "free' ends at the expense of the other. The colonial relation erroneously places the power of the master before the justice owed to the victim. This resonance in Levinas's work is amplified by the use of the term "imperialism" to designate the sovereignty of the self and the subsequent subjugation of the other: the colonized or the slave. Justice is at the same time for Levinas associated with responsibility and, in Otherwise than Being, hospitality. These terms are somewhat blurred together, since it is the just relation with the other for which the selffinds himself responsible. The ethical relation is also the responSible relation, in which the subject attends to the difference and demands of the other. Responsibility is also hospitality, moreover, and requires the welcoming of the other into one's dwelling. Dwelling is not an object of possession; it is the place of shelter, of the constitution of subjectivity, but it does not root Being securely in the ground. It is not a conduit to the soil or owned by right, but, pre-existing Being, is merely the space in which the subject establishes intimacy in the face of the elements. At the same time, in order not to be constricted by possession, "I must be able to give what I possess': and "the Other - the absolutely Other - paralyzes possession, which he contests by his epiphany in the face" (Levinas 1969: 171). Thus for Levinas habitation offers security to the self; but must also be conceived as another space of encounter that puts into question the possibility ofpossession. In addition, beyond the dwelling of the intimate selfLevinas throws into question the territory of the State, since although this concept appears to priOritize proximity; it too rests on a belief in Being that excludes what lies beyond it. Derrida 20
understanding postcolonialism
explores this exigency in Levinas in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, where he describes Totality and Infinity as "an immense treatise of hospitality" (1999: 21), and uses his work to explore a concept of hospitality that works against the tyranny of the State. This would be an "infinite hospitality" without condition, incommensurate with political regulations and laws but necessarily conceived alongside these. More practically, Mireille Rosello uses Levinas in her Postcolonial Hospitality (2001) to explore the paradoxes of cities of refuge, where the refugee is both welcomed and reminded of his otherness. Levinas helps to point out the ethical limitations of such a condition. One of the difficulties of Levinas's work in this area, however, is the distinction between ethics and politics that in turn troubles and unsettles the postcolonial field. Derrida's reading in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas stresses the necessary but impossible conjunction between "the law of hospitality': the requirement that the host accept any other, and "the laws of hospitality': the conditions that necessarily regulate that acceptance within the confines of existing states. Derrida argues that both forms of hospitality are indispensable, but have to be conceived as an irresolute aporia within which one necessarily conflicts with the other. For Levinas himself; the political, again necessarily, intervenes in the ethical relation between self and other in that it introduces a third party; or other human subjects, perhaps in the form of society or community: It is the need for negotiation with this third party that upsets the ethical encounter by adding the obligation to consider external factors. This very "third term': however, although establishing the demands of the political, troubles or throws into question the purity of Levinasian ethics and the direct, unmediated encounter with the face. At the same time, it is this third party that disrupts the potential asymmetry of the encounter (I can put myself in the place of the other, but cannot myself be replaced); it forces the self to be other differently, or other to another other. Nevertheless, when asked about the relation between ethics and politics, Levinas still subordinates the latter to the former, arguing for an engagement with both while also admitting that there remains a contradiction between them. The example ofIsraelleads him to suggest that "there might be an ethical limit to this ethically necessary political existence" (1989: 293), but he falls silent on what this would mean for the Jewish people of that state. There is not space here to consider the intricacies of Levinas's writing on Israel, but certainly it is here that the contradiction between ethics and politics starts to make the debate disturbingly hazy. As Caygill explores with great subtlety; Levinas seems confused in Difficult Freedom (1990a) introduction
21
about whether the Jewish people should be conceived as a "fraternity" or whether they represent universal ethical concerns. Levinas struggles to reconcile the political demands of the State ofIsrael and the unconditional ethics that he affirms Judaism prOvides. He suggests a return to notions of sacrifice, but for Caygill, "this seems dangerously close to sacrificing to an idol - the most powerful, faScinating and irresistible of modem idols - the nation-state" (2002: 165). When he goes on to pro~ose a ~oo~er form of state identity to accommodate the Diaspora, he nsks this time falsely unifying Jewish identity. Even more disconcertingly, Caygill points out that Levinas is unclear about whether he conceives Islam to playa part in holy history and even describes the Asiatic world as a stranger to Europe. He also evades the question of the place of the Palestinians and subsumes their plight into a broader reflection on universal responSibility. His call for peace at the end of Totality and Infinity seems ill equipped to deal with the particular tensions of Israel and Palestine. IfLevinas's thought is flawed in many ways, however; his ethics, ifnot ~ ~~ politi~s, is crucial for postcolonial reflection on alterity. His work ,t ill Itself SIgnalS some of the problems explored in the current book, in that his belief in the ethical relation at times fails to tackle the political req~ements of a situation of conflict, in this case one as troubling as ~at ill the State ofIsrael And indee~, his non-engagement with Islam itself oddly comes close to a:. colonial drive towards the marginalization ~f e other's culture. It is nevertheless precisely that overwhelmingly SIgnificant strand of his work devoted to ethics and alterity that will prove a foundation for later conceptions of a postcolonial openness to difference. Derrida's criticisms of Levinas's work have already been noted, but in fact much more important is Derrida's debt to Levinasian ethics, which underpins his entire deconstruction of Western metaphysics ~d ethnocentrism. Explicitly engaging with Levinas repeatedly, De::nda also uses the ethical encounter to inform his conception of ~e blindness of the Western episteme or system of knowledge (via readings of Saussure, Rousseau and Levi-Strauss), as well as his reading of colonialism and sovereignty in The Monolingualism of the Other (19~8). In addition, Bhabha's postcolonial philosophy scarcely mentions Le~as but, as we shall see, his exploration of the flickering presence of ambIvalence and alteritywithin colonial discourse is highly reminiscent of Levinas's permeation of Totality with Infinity, or the Said with the ~aying. Abdelkebir Khatibi's foregrounding of otherness and bilingualIsm can also be seen to emerge from a Levinasian understanding of excess and the intractable, and,finally, Edouard Glissant's ''poetics of
u:
22
understanding postcolonialism
Relation" learns at least implicitly from Levinas's concept of an encounter without sameness or consensus. Levinas remains alone in his prioritization of ethics over freedom, and postcolonial thinkers for the most part conceive their ethics rather as a recognition of the freedom of the other rather than as a relation preceding the affirmation of freedom. Many subsequent notions of mastery, totalitarianism and irreducible alterity nevertheless inherit these notions, either overtly or implicitly, from Levinas's groundbreaking formulation of twentieth-century ethics. Poststructuralist currents in postcolonialism, analysed for the most part in the second half of this book, are deeply indebted to Levinas even if he is often now not explicitly acknowledged. As major influences for postcolonial thinkers, Marxism and Levinasian ethics raise quite distinct questions concerning the errors of colonialism and the strategies or modes of thinking crucial to its overthrow. Many later critics have chosen to foreground the strands in postcolonial critique related to one of these schools, and certainly political and ethical thinkers express their goals in quite different, even contrasting, ways. Parry comments explicitly on this disjunction between Marxism and poststructuralist ethics, and, advocating a Marxist-oriented frame of analysis, points out that "the rejection by poststructuralism of the Marxist notions underpinning left anti-colonial thinkers - capitalist . system, structural divisions, nationalism, an emancipatory narrative, universalism - suggests that the discrepancy between the infomIing premises is not readily negotiated" (2004: 7). This study will explore the differences between these approaches within postcolonialism, while also revealing the potential overlap between them, the overlap that critics such as Parry believe is under-analysed. Controversy has arisen in the confrontation between political and ethical thinkers, but closer inspection reveals that the two approaches are not directly opposed, but can be conceived as related, if not identical in their aims. Moreover, while it may seem reasonably clear that a militant such as Fanon requires a different framework and vocabulary from a philosopher as ethically minded, and indeed as "textualist': as Derrida, thinkers such as Spivak and Mudimbe oscillate constantly between ethics and politics as if to stress their necessary contiguity. These latter theorists also include criticisms of both Marxism and deconstructive ethics in their work, and use strands of each to reveal the shortcomings associated with the unequivocal embrace of either school A genuine understanding of the multiple levels and layers of postcolonial critique will require a reflection of each field as it alternately interweaves with and diverges from the other. introduction
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Key points
• Postcolonialism consists of the multiple political, economic, cultural and philosophical responses to colonialism. It is a broad term that is used to refer to effects following the beginning of colonial rule, and, although it covers all regions, is most commonly now associated with the aftermath of British and French colonialism. • The field of postcolOnial studies has often been divided between those who concentrate on political critique and those interested in postcolOnial ethics. This split is somewhat artificial, but the two currents can be understood in terms of the influences of Marxism and Levinasianethics on postcolonialism. • Marx was ambivalent about the colonial project. He criticized the economic exploitation it brought with it but also saw the benefits of wiping out the hierarchies of the caste system in India. His writings on capitalism, on ideology and on revolution have been enormously influential to postcolonial thinkers. • Levinasian thought can be seen to be at the root of postcolonial ethics. Levinas denounced the concepts of Totality and mastery that underpin all forms of totalitarianism, and recommended openness and respect towards the other as other. His notions of justice, responsibility and hospitality are also useful in conceiving a postcolOnial ethical critique.
24
understanding postcolonialism
two
Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms
Frantz Fanon is undoubtedly one of the most significant and influential of anti-colonial revolutionary thinkers. Born in Fort-de-France, Martinique in 1925 to a middle-class family, he grew up thinking of himself as French. He was educated in a French school and, before finishing his education, fought for France in the Second World War. Even when serving his country, however, Fanon experienced racism from his French allies, and he criticizes the caste system within the army, whereby whites were positioned at the top, with the Senegalese, the first to be sent into battle, at the bottom. After the end of the war, Fanon went to study psychiatry in Lyon, and published Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. Disillusioned with metropolitan culture, he denounces the Manichaean divisions of the colonial system and rails against the rigid classification of the "negro" as inferior and "other: After finishing medical school, Fanon took a position at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algiers, where he began to investigate culturally sensitive approaches to madness. A year after he arrived, however, the Algerian War of Independence began, and Fanon quickly found himself caught up in the revolutionary struggle. Treating torture victims and those with psychological illnesses related to the violence, he witnessed at first hand the mental scarring caused by the conflict and began to speak out against its horrors. When the increasing intensity of the violence made practising psychiatry difficult, he resigned his position, left Algeria and worked for the National Liberation Front openly from his exiled position in Tunis. Some of his most influential writing stems from this period. The Wretched ofthe Earth (1967) analyses the process fanon and sartre
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of decolonization in Algeria in order to evolve a universal revolutionary politics, advocating violence and national cohesion. The essays collected in A Dying Colonialism (1980) discuss the changes the Algerian revolution wrought on sodal relations and everyday life. Fanon is clearly a highly militant thinker and, indeed, The Wretched ofthe Earth has been seen as no less than a "handbook" for revolutionary action. The decolonization of Algeria was its immediate focus, but the Marxist struggle for liberation proposed by the text has also been interpreted to be applicable more broadly. The book was used by leaders in contexts as different as that of Malcolm X in the African-American Black Power movement of the 1960s and Steve Biko in the Black Consdousness movement in South Africa during the same period. IfFanon is often seen as one ofthe most militant and incendiary critics of colonial politics, however, his writing is not uniformly directed towards practical revolution. The Wretched ofthe Earth advocates decolonization with more urgency and immediacy than Black Skin, White Masks; it is here that he denounces the physical violence of colonialism and advocates that this must be countered with direct violence against the colonizer. The mission is the absolute overthrow of the colonial system, by force if necessary. In Black Skin, White Masks, however, although Fanon is certainly highly critical of colonial politics, and although he gives vent to his anger towards the colonizer's sense of superiority and towards the stark reductions of the stereotypes that continue to circulate around notions of "black identity': he perceives the violence ofcolonialism as a cultural situation: part of a system of significations and assodations that weave themselves insidiously into the consdousness ofboth colonizer and colonized. The colonized is the victim above all ofthe pernidous image ofhis identity propagated by colonial ideology; rather than of brute force. To summarize, in The Wretched ofthe Earth, Fanon examines less the myths ofcolonized identity than the politics or modes ofthinking necessary for their overthrow. In the earlier work, his overt focus remains rather on identity; desire and the psychoanalytic structures of alienation. Many have noted, reinforced or condemned this division in Fanon's philosophy between concrete political engagement and a more psychoanalytically oriented investigation ofidentity and alienation. David Macey, Fanon's biographer, comments on his two apparently distinct guises, the post-colonial or early Fanon, and the militant, "Third Worldisi' revolutionary Fanon: the ''post-colonia[' Fanon is in many ways an inverted :image of the '"revolutionary Fanon" ofthe 196Os. "Third Worldist" read26
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ings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs; post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that text and studiously avoid the question of violence. (Macey 2000: 28) Celia Britton explores the rather less neutral reactions of a range of critics towards his leap from psychoanalysis to politics and sodety, noting both Diana Fuss's assumption of their successful amalgamation . and objections levied by thinkers such as Henry Louis Gates Jr and Fran:.' of the author's first name is already a mistranslation of a sound that only exists in Arabic, and which, in a form of archaic calligraphy, figures also the "eye': The result of this mistranslation is that the work is introduced by this effect of effacement: it ''opens with an absent eye, with blindness, with the invisible and the unreadable" khatibi and glissant
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(Khatibi 1983: 182). Writing in French, for the Arab author, in this way at the same time evacuates the mother tongue. Nevertheless, Khatibi goes on to argue that Meddeb's text constantly uses the preposition"i/' ("to" or "at"), as if the accent on the "a' could transliterate the original Arabic sound excluded from the title page, and to make up for this absence. The work contains the trace of the author's name, but this trace constantly undergoes a process of transformation: "it falls under the sway of a double genealogy, a double signature, which are as much the literary effects of a lost gift, of a giving that is split in its origin" (ibid.: 186). In this process of translation, Khatibi suggests that the two languages signal to each other but at the same time exclude one another, and this simultaneous interaction and withdrawal defines the narrative that "speaks in languages': There is a bilingualism within Meddeb's French, which operates both a movement of transformation and a splitting or division. The narrative forms an example of a language existing in relation to other languages, which by turns interrupt its rhythms and lie dormant beneath its surface. This bilingual writing is a source of both alienation and enjoyment. Khatibi locates in Meddeb's text a certain hermeticism, in that the language becomes a sort of formal edifice that hides the memories that the author nevertheless seeks to translate. Memories and traces of the maternallanguage, conceived also in psychoanalytic terms as the language of fusion with the mother, are traumatically repressed and occluded even as they scatter themselves beneath the artifice of the French. These traces figure the Lacanian "fragmented body" of the narrator, the disintegration of an irrevocably lost totality. In Khatibi's own novel of bilingualism, Love in Two Languages (1990), however, this alienation and loss are constantly juxtaposed with jubilation and creativity. Love across languages results in a confrontation with the incommunicable, but it is also a trigger for desire and a quest for fusion. Bilingualism is a form of separation, but the form also engenders a plural, relational form of writing for Khatibi, in which languages jostle against one another and provocatively permeate one another with fragments of alterity. The bilingual text contains silence, and yet, by the end of the text, it gives rise to a "folie de la langue': the chaotic accumulation of phonemes and signi:fi.ers in the creation of a new, plural mode of expression. This dual attitude equally characterizes Khatibi's study of the stranger in French writing (Figures de letranger dans la litterature fran~aise; 1987), a text in which analyses of writers such as Segalen, Jean Genet and Roland Barthes are capped with a champiOning of 'literary internationality': The figure of the stranger implies untranslatability, but in the works 132
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examined this can also become an invigorating and enriching encounter with alterity. Khatibi's tentative move towards a celebration of bilingual relationality is at the same time an aesthetic and an ethical call. In an essay on Derrida and borders, for example, Khatibi concludes by enquiring after the effects of an awareness of foreignness within languages: "in what way is this impropriety, this hybridization and this troubling of identity favourable to idiomatic and stylistic inventions?" (Khatibi 1994: 449; my translation). An awareness of otherness in language is also a way to seek new forms of writing, new styles and new sources of creativity. Khatibi's celebration of bilingual writing can also be seen as Levinasian, in that it calls for attention to the intractable and the untranslatable, and makes of that attention an ethical condition of the use of any language. All language, for Khatibi, contains traces of other languages, and, like Levinas's discourse, it is a site for encounter across differences, although its proper understanding does not allow the reduction of difference to the same. Khatibi's "pensee en langues" and Levinas's discourse are both forums for an ethical encounter with an other that resists essentialism, knowledge and metaphysics. In this way, Khatibi adds to Levinasian ethics a further dimension in his exploration of bilingualism, and gives that ethics particular resonance in the context of intercultural communication between France and Morocco. There is nevertheless in this exploration of French and Arabic bilingualism in the aftermath of colonialism a universal conception of relationality and ethical exchange within and between all languages. Moving away from engagement with the context of colonialism and postcolonialism in the Maghreb, Khatibi also writes about calligraphy and Islamic art. His analyses have resonance here, however, because again they provide a means of imagining the open-ended process of signification in language in a way that subverts the colonial urge to mastery and knowledge. In the commentary on Meddeb, Khatibi notes that Arabic calligraphy, in its untranslatability, is the lost source language of the text. Yet in La Blessure du nom propre (The wound of the proper name) (1974), Khatibi explores the richness of calligraphic art, as the calligraphic letters hover between emptiness and plenitude. Calligraphy confers dynamism on the sign, since calligraphic letters fluctuate between phonetics, semantics and geometric design. The calligraphic sign functions musically, pictorially and semantically, and its potential suggestiveness is heightened and multiplied by the operation of these different levels of sense. Equally, Khatibi's LArt calligraphique arabe (Arabic calligraphic art) explores the origins of Arabic calligraphy khatibi and glissant
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in the Koran and its link with the belief that the language of the Koran is sacred or "uncreated': The writing of the Koran is the direct word of God, passed down to Mohammed and transcribed, and must be treasured not only for its meaning but also for its form. In both works, moreover, calligraphy is conceived of as a way of writing that opens up the space between the referent and the realization of the work of art in its appeal to multiple forms of sense. This exploration of calligraphy serves to develop Khatibi's portrayal of the complexity of Arab culture and the perhaps often forgotten belief in polysemy. A final aspect ofKhatibi's writing worth mentioning here is his study Le Corps oriental (The Oriental body) (2002), which, similarly, uncovers the plurality of meanings associated with the body in Arab and Islamic-culture. Khatibi notes in his commentary on this stunning collection of paintings and photographs that the Orientalist gaze of the European nineteenth-century painter seeks to unveil and denude the Oriental body, but also to tie it to its past. Indeed, Khatibi notes that for Delacroix, 'l\ntiquity is no longer in Rome but in the East': and depictions of Oriental bodies during this period return repeatedly to stock figures of the odalisque, the harem, the slaves at Constantinople and various biblical memories (2002: 175; my translation). The section on Orientalism is fairly brief, however, since Khatibi's principal endeavour is to explore how the body is used, interpreted, decorated and regulated in diverse ways through the history of Arab and Islamic culture. Indeed, there are not one but three words for the body in Arabic: jism is the concept of the body, badane designates the bodily constitution and jassad signifies sensuality and the flesh. Furthermore, Khatibi explores the art of reading the body by means of the "sensorium" or the flesh: geometric or physiological forms, gestures and whispers have suggestive connotations that need to be translated. The body is, moreover, central to Islamic faith. Mohammed is respected and remembered also for his corporeal presence, and the prophet's body and acceptance of his mortality serve as a model for Muslims to follow in understanding their own physical strengths and weaknesses. The body is also a focus for endless rituals and rites: the posture of the body during prayer bears meaning, cleanliness is a spiritual value and circumcision is a further way of marking the body with the trace of society and culture. Again, Khatibi has moved far beyond postcolonialism in this work, but his intricate study is relevant here for its insistence on plurality and polysemy in a culture often reduced and misunderstood by the 'Vest, by the former colonizer. While Khatibi has not yet received the attention he deserves in anglophone postcolonial circles, his work is becoming increasingly celebrated 134
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in France, as well as in Morocco. Barthes famously produced a brief eulogy, "Ce que je dois a Khatibi" ("What I owe Khatibi"), to be used as the preface for La Memoire tatouee, in which he celebrates Khatibi's invention of a "heterologicallanguage" and suggests that French thought should learn from this decentring of the Western subject. It has been objected, however, that Barthes's own response to Khatibi is Orientalist, in that it omits to consider the specific implications of colonialism in Morocco in favour of a somewhat vague and formless celebration of Eastern culture. More recently, Derrida dedicated The Monolingualism of the Other to both Khatibi and Glissant, although Derrida's comment that he himself is more "franco-Maghrebin" than Khatibi because he experiences alienation or disjunction within the French language, rather than as a result of the confrontation between French and Arabic, can seem a little tendentious. Nevertheless, the support of figures such as Barthes and Derrida is just one sign ofKhatibi's growing importance in francophone thought, and his engagement with Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Hassoun, among others, in his collection of essays on bilingualism further testifies to his inSightful participation in francophone debate. As I have suggested, however, Khatibi's thought is provocative because it succeeds in combining a highly focused study of Morocco, and ofIslamic and Arabic culture, with a critique of colonial and ethnocentric thought. Knowledge of the supple traditions ignored by the West is also coupled with an ethical call for attention to the presence of alterity in any language, and this is both a form of Levinasian intractability and the trace of another culture or linguistic idiom. This broader ethical call never becomes universalized in such a way as to occlude the specific experiences of Moroccan bilingual subjects but lingers rather as a force that contests the pernicious determinism of colonial discourse. Finally, this ethics offers a particular vision of poetic enrichment and literary creativity that transcends borders and categories, and that promises a mode of thinking freed from the constraints of both colonialism and metaphysics.
Edouard Glissant and Caribbean Discourse
While Khatibi bases his vision of postcolonial ethics on bilingualism and plurality in Moroccan culture, Glissant conceives Caribbean identity and the poetics of "creolization" as the catalyst for what can almost be read as a global cultural revolution. Writing about his native Martinique, which remains a French colony having been accorded the status of a khatibi and glissant
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"departement doutre mer" in 1946, Glissant tracks the oppression and silencing of the Martinican colonized subaltern, but proceeds as a result to propose not only the embrace of bilingualism but the celebration of a vast, open-ended network of cultural interactions operating across the globe and resisting the determinist forms of thinking propagated by colonial regimes. Like Khatibi, Glissant too responds to the political injustices of colonialism by advocating an alternative ethical and cultural model of relationality; although the focus on place in Glissant crucially involves the denunciation specifically of the rupture brought about by the slave trade in the Caribbean. Rather than remaining aware at once of the distinction and the complicity between politics and ethics, however, Glissant clearly moves through his career from an emphasis on the former to an embrace ofthe latter, and ofits expression through aesthetic production. Indeed, the political motivations of his early novels are still perceptible in Caribbean Discourse (1989), but by the time of Traite du tout-monde (1997d) and La Cohee du Lamentin (2005), politics is all but dismissed for its conventional reliance on a territorialism and a determinism that are anathema to Glissant's cultural ethics. While Khatibi and, above all, Derrida theorize and maintain the tension between ethics and politics in postcolonial criticism, Glissant slips perhaps rather more glibly from one to the other, giving rise to a certain unease among his readers concerning the limited efficacy or practicality of the later work and its contradictions with the earlier militancy. Where Glissant can be seen to be unrivalled, however, is in the dynamism and expansiveness of his poetics and in his conception of the value of that poetics independently of the political requirements of the (post)colony. Glissant's thought is quiteclearlya development and extension of that of the poet and politician Cesaire, whose Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1995), an extraordinary and powerful landmark in postcolonial literature, constitutes an incendiary reclaiming of Antillean territory from the colonizer's warped vision. The "return" performed by Cesaire's poem at once affirms the cultural values of negritude and the traditions of a black African heritage, and eschews French exoticism to confront the sickness and disease of Martinique at the hands of French politicians and slave-owners. The work ends with an image of the slaves rising up and taking control of the slave ship in a compelling gesture of defiance (Cesaire 1995: 131). Far from redefining Martinique by means of a new set of categorizations, however, Cesaire's return is crucially at the same time an opening out: it is an exposition of the dynamism ~d mobility of black Caribbean culture and experience. Similarly, Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism (2000) is another virulent denunciation of 136
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the colonial project, in which the author explicitly compares the dehumanization engendered by colonialism to the horrors of Nazism. Most famously, Cesaire now asserts that colonization is "thingification": colonialism deprives the colonized of their humanity, dispossesses them of their land and resources, and saps the spirit and energy of the societies under its grasp. Another revolutionary inspiration for Glissantwas C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938), which charts the revolt of the slaves of San Domingo, inaugurated by Toussaint Louverture in 1791, followed by the creation of an independent Haiti in 1804. First published in 1938, James's work narrates an allegory ofliberation and emancipation and has served as an inspiration for many subsequent anti -colonial thinkers in the Caribbean. Both James and Cesaire are major influences in Glissant's rejection ofthe dehumanizing force ofcolonialism and in his exploration of the expansiveness of Caribbean identity and culture. Glissant's early novels tend to be seen as the most militant of his works in their search to depict some form of subaltern agency. It is in Caribbean Discourse, however, that Glissant articulates his critique of colonialism in quasi-philosophical form, and it is also in this expansive tome that he starts to envisage the link between the political denunciation of slavery and exploitation on the one hand, and an emergent "poetics of Relation" on the other. The full French text of Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) is a weighty; even cumbersome, volume, structured by multiple sections, subsections and subdivisions as if in a parody of French structuralist criticism and its claim to scientism. Its underlying political foundations are perhaps clearest, however, in the section on the relation between "History" and "histories': and in which official History with a capital H is denounced as a phantasm of the West that specifically occludes plural local histories. Moreover, Glissant argues that "the French Caribbean is the site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade" (1989: 61). Caribbean history is brutally severed from its origins as a result of the transportation of slaves from Africa, and this discontinuity has prevented the people from forming a national solidarity; as the African nations did, against the colonial power. Official History relies on a hierarchy that privileges Europe at the expense of Africans or Americans, but it is also structured by a linearity that fails to account for the disjunctions and losses of Caribbean "non-history': If the historian can create a continuity out of the History of Martinique, setting out a schema starting with the slave trade, passing through the plantations system and the appearance of the elite, to assimilation and more recently to what Glissant terms "oblivion': then even this continuity is structured khatibi and glissant
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by changes brought about by the French: they are a function of someone else's history. The non-history of Martinique turns out to be the basis for Glissant's economic analysis earlier in the book. Colonialism and slavery bring about the "dispossession" not only of local history but also of the land and resources, but Glissant also argues that the colonizer in Martinique and Guadeloupe lacks control of the market, and runs an economy of bartering: "he exploits on a day to day basis" (ibid.: 38). This means that the Martinican economy is tightly integrated into the French economy, making it difficult for the colonized to rebel. Glissant equally asserts that this structure engenders a lack of collective responsibility, and the consequences of this include in turn an absence of global investment, no accumulation of capital and a tendency towards under-productivity. This exposition of the lack of local agency mirrors at the same time the portrait of lethargy, passivity and stagnation found in Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. The forms of resistance that have occurred in Martinique are also, according to Glissant, of the sort that cannot lead to the national overthrow of the colonial regime. The "economy of survival" means that the worker is able to carve out a terrain that assures the upkeep of the family, but this does not lead to any form of collective progress. A more violent mode of resistance is that of the maroons - escaped slaves who started their own plantations on new plots ofland - but again, the isolation of the maroons meant that it was difficult for their rebellion to take on a collective force and meaning. Intellectual maroons, a class made up of "mulattos" and sons of agricultural workers who benefited at least from primary education, were then compromised by their reliance on that French education; indeed, "they quickly become the vehicle of official thought" (Glissant 1997e: 119; my translation). What the Martinicans lack, then, is a distinct and active nationalist project that would assure the repossession of their territory. Glissant proposes as a new form of contestation the notion of "Antillanite: an alternative vision of Caribbean collective identity that will define history and culture in terms that are not structured by Western myths and ideology. This is admittedly unlikely in the end to provide the basis for a national revolution, but Glissant uses it as a starting-point for the invention of an innovative form of historical thinking designed to rescue local people from consignment to "non-history" and to fight the stagnation and passivity diagnosed also by Cesaire. Right up until departmentalization in 1946, Glissant argues that "French Caribbean people are thus encouraged to deny themselves as a collectivity, in order 138
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to achieve an illusory individual quality" (1989: 7) and he sets out to re-imagine that collective identity in terms that resist the sweeping universalization of European thought. In sketching this new concept of Antillanite, however, Glissant at the same time rejects Cesaire's use of the notion of a "retour" or "reversion", since he identifies within that term a reliance on a centred, determinist identity complicit once again with colonial thinking. Cesaire's return no doubt refused this rigid identitarianism in its celebration of the expansiveness of black identity and in its exploration of the active relation between the archipelago and the rest of the world, topographically, politically and culturally, but Glissant's argument is nevertheless that the concept of return assumes the stability of the returning self Indeed, "Reversion is the obsession with a single origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being" (ibid.: 16). Conversely, then, Glissant recommends the invention ofAntillanite through "detour" or "diversion": the recourse of the culture that is not directly pitted against an enemy but that needs to conceive its resistance surreptitiously. The detour cannot rely on the construction of a coherent ,_ alternative identity, but takes the form rather of "an interweaving of negative forces that go unchallenged" (ibid.: 19). It is also a strategy or moment that should lead to its own "depassemenf' or development; its success determines that it ultimately transcends its own confines. Glissant's prime example of this strategy of detour is the use of the Creole language. In using Creole, the slave or worker embraces the simplified language imposed on him by the master, and he twists and appropriates it so that it symbolizes his difference and his resistance. In Glissant's terms, "you wish to reduce me to childish babble, I will make this babble systematic, we shall see if you can make sense of it" (ibid.: 20). Creole becomes a ruse used by the slave to alienate the slave-owner and to reclaim the idiom as his own. While for later thinkers and writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant "creolite'" names a culture to be affirmed and maintained, however, Glissant's conception of the use of Creole as a strategy of detour requires that it in turn be surpassed, that it lead somewhere new. Fanon's revolutionary fervour and Cesaire's poetic language brought concrete change: they used a strategy of detour in order to envisage the world differently and, indeed, according to Glissant they also understood that the detour must on some level be mingled with another return - not to an origin, but "to the point of entanglement" (ibid.: 26). Clinging on to Creole would cause Martinican culture to stagnate, and Glissant fears that this "pidgi.'l" is not a language in which Martinicans can express their creativity. Glissant has been criticized for failing to see the rich potentiality of the Creole khatibi and glissant
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culture and language, but it is nevertheless the argument of Caribbean Discourse that it is not creolite but the exploration of a broader point of entanglement that will serve as a focus for Antillanite. This also means that Glissant recommends the continuous and unpredictable process of creolization, through the embrace of interaction and exchange, rather than the establishment of a specifically Creole identity. This search for a "point of entanglement» at the heart of Antillanite leads next to the elaboration of a "poetics of Relation": an exploration of Caribbean identity that celebrates its juxtaposition and intermingling of diverse cultural influences and practices. This is not just "metissagl: the simple mixture of black and white, but a more complex interaction or creolization that produces the unpredictable and the unexpected. This dynamic relationality recalls the transculturation celebrated by the Cuban thinker Fernando Ortiz, which, rather than describing the adoption of a new culture implied by "acculturation: stresses "the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here" (Ortiz 1995: 97). Similarly, Glissanfs poetics of Relation promotes "Diversity" over "Sameness" , and this conception of Diversity brings no i new fusion, but "means the human spirit's striving for a cross-cultllTal relationship, without universalist transcendence" (Glissant 1989: 98). While Sameness privileges Being, Diversity inaugurates relationality, and whereas Sameness fuels the European expansionist project, Diversity emerges in the resistance of the people. In terms reminiscent of Levinas's work, Glissant offers an ethical critique here of the totalitarianism underpinning European universalism and argues that even the French discourse of human rights is born from this "saturation of Sameness" and blocks the requirements of Diversity. It is in literature or poetics that Glissant suggests that the ethics of Diversity survives and, as we shall see, it is this investment in literariness and aesthetics that will come to dominate Glissanfs later thinking. Glissanfs beliefin the power ofliterature nevertheless does not entail a privileging of the written word. Indeed, the relational culture he seeks to reinvigorate is one that celebrates oral story-telling, and the oral form for Glissant performs the mutability and dynamism encapsulated by the Diverse. Glissant goes so far as to attest that "the written is the universalizing influence of Sameness, whereas the oral would be the organized manifestation of Diversity" (ibid.: 100). Printed forms, although potentially protean in meaning, are nevertheless :fixed on the page, whereas the oral form allows the speaker to adapt or revise what he narrates; orality leaves room for digression, omission and recreation. Glissantiail. !
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poetics recommends as a result the insertion of the oral into the written form, and the inscription of the dynamism of the spoken language into the literary. Once again, Glissanfs celebration of oral culture does not lead to the privileging of creolite or indeed folklore here, however, and if Glissant conceives a role for folk culture this will be as a strategic affirmation leading to its own necessary transcendence. The poetics of Relation upholds the dynamic and changing interaction of the oral and the written, and not just the retention and affirmation of an existing tradition of story-telling. Furthermore, the Diverse is expressed not only in the use of the Creole language or in oral culture, but through multilingualiSm. If Khatibls conception of bilingualism served to foreground linguistic relationality and dynamism, Glissant goes even further than Khatibi and exalts the interpenetration of any given language with multiple changing idioms. Glissant rewrites Saussure's distinction between "language': meaning the language system, and "speech': denoting particular instances of the usage of the language, in order to criticize the assumed hermeticism of the former and to emphasize the multifarious creativity performed by the latter. Noting that multilingualism through history has frequently fallen back on a belief in the separation and hierarchy between languages, Glissant suggests instead that the very concept of language or "langue" can be opened out by examination of the creative inventions of particular languages or "langages': For Glissant, "language [la langue] creates the relation, particular instances oflanguage [Ie langage] creates difference, both of which are equally precious" (Glissant 1997e: 552). It is through the inflexion of his written French with the rhythms and idioms of his spoken Creole, for example, that Glissant creates his own symbiotic language, and it is with these very sorts of singular but multivalent langages that the universalism and standardization associated with French, and instituted through colonialism, can be undermined. Caribbean Discourse suggests that this contestatory dynamism can be created through the mixing of French and Creole, or of the oral and the written. The later sections of the French text additionally introduce the notion of "verbal delirium" as a means of describing "deviant manifestations .,. which limit themselves to the practice of particular languages (written or spoken)" (ibid.: 625), although these by their very nature should not be taken as exemplary. Nevertheless, Glissant schematizes some of the forms of this "verbal delirium" with a certain self-conscious irony, noting for example the use of repetition, formulae, evidence, structures that proceed by proliferation rather than sequence, and the khatibi and glissant
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vision of the self as determined by the transcendent vision of the other. For the most part, however, this deviance is a dysfunction that may subvert the norms of the French language, but that will eventually be surpassed by a more expansive and creative relationality. Glissant next explores the theatre as a means for the seizing of consciousness, which may pass through a phase of folklore, but whose dynamism should also seek t? reach beyond folklore. Crucially, however, these strategies are conceIved as forms of contestation that might lead to national liberation and, ~esp~t~ its privileging of poetics, the text retains something of a MarxIst VISIon of repossession. At the end of the study Glissant returns to the "poetics of Relation" as the form that will explore both the complexrealityofMartinican culture and the diversity and dynamism ofall cultures of the world, but the final pages nevertheless defiantly call for the independence of Martinique via this revolution in cultural mentality. Creolization, conceived alongSide Glissant's more acerbic sections on political and economic inequality, is championed here as a strategic tool leading to national liberation.
Glissant's poetics In addition to Caribbean Discourse and the novels, Glissant produced
a series of essays or reflections, now published by GallinIard as a series entitled Poetique and numbered sequentially. There is a large degree of r~petition and rewriting across the series and, indeed, The Poetics ofRelatlOn (1997c) is also explicitly "a reconstituted echo or spiral retelling" of ~aribbe~n. Discourse (Glissant 1997b: 16), as well as of EIntention poetlque (ongmallypublished in 1969 but repackaged as Poitique II; 1997b). This spiral structure is evidently itself conceived as an alternative to D.1.e linearity of official or European history; indeed, the individual volumes are themselves a subversively hybrid mixture of literary, philosophical and intermittently political language, structured not by linear argument but by overlapping fragments. The later texts of the Poetique series are also markedly different from Caribbean Discourse, however, both in their privileging of aesthetics in place of politics and in their own highly literary form. The Poetics ofRelation tells us that Relation not only "binds" and "relays': but it also "recounts': suggesting it comes about through the creation and transfer of narratives. The creolization championed in Caribbean Discourse is now the product of an open-ended form of story-telling, where sections of narrative are «relayed" from one narrator to the next. It is also striking that the opening of The Poetics of 142
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Relation expands on the philosophical discussion of the slave trade as the inauguration of a non-history, this time through an intensely poetic evocation of the abyss across which the slave ships sailed on their journeyto the Caribbean. The description of this originary exile nevertheless here gives rise to a new concept, that of"errance" or "errantry': suggesting not so much loss but wandering and discovery. The initial image of the transportation of the slaves in this way leads not to alienation but to the creation and narration of "shared knowledge': Furthermore, the poetics of that relationality is conceived using a new set of images, derived from Deleuze and Felix Guattarfs A Thousand Plateaus (1988), opposing the root structure with that of the rhizome and building in tum on Derrida's rejection of origins as far back as OfGrammatology. Glissant moves away from a vocabulary of political strategy and ruse in favour of a wholehearted embrace of "rhizomatic thinking": a model of cultural identity and exchange based on plural connections rather than on the positing of a single, monologic origin. Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant denounces root structures as reductive, even totalitarian, while celebrating the entangled web of stems and roots that constitute the rhizome structure: the root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. (Glissant 1997c: 11)
If the root structure describes an identity firmly planted in the soil, related to an identifiable and inlmutable origin, the rhizome, a term originally used to name those types of plants whose roots form a complex network, evokes a plural and interactive mode of individuation or self~creation. It also inaugurates a conception of being not as finished product, but as process or, indeed, as singular "trace': Any specific identity is necessarily now tempered and opened out by its connections with other parts of the rhizome structure. Despite the biolOgical origins of the concept of the rhizome, however, Glissant's use of it is above all as a creative metaphor, as a poetic descriptor of Caribbean relationality or "nomadic thought". The rhizome becomes a figure of resistance to colonial thinking and its privileging of monolingualism, territoriality and cultural determinism. It is perhaps not surprising, after this poetic opening, that Glissant's The Poetics of Relation proceeds by exploring literary examples of khatibi and glissant
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rltizomatic thought Glissant notes that the very foundational texts of community, the iliad, the Odyssey, the chansons de geste and African epics, are frequently texts of exile or even erranCE. These are works in which the possession of territory is questioned, and in which collective consciousness is created through the open-ended exploration of travel and migration rather than through the establishment of borders. In addition, Glissant cites the poetry of Baudelaire, and argues that, in exploring the poet's inner consciousness, Baudelaire reveals that inner self as vast and expansive. The poetic persona discovers, according to Glissant, that "the alleged stability of knowledge led nowhere" (ibid.: 24). If Baudelaire's poetry remains within the confines of the French language, however, Rimbaud's famous pronouncement that "I is an other" becomes for Glissant the archetypal statement of the poetics of Relation. Rimbaud seeks not merely to deepen his knowledge of himself, but to transform that self, to transcend and disrupt tradition and heritage. Segalen's work is then cited as a further example of an aesthetic that embraces the Diverse and, like Khatibi, Glissant recognizes the importance of Segalen's conception of a moral or ethical relation with the other. Conversely, Glissant cites Saint-Jean Perse's work since it operates the reverse movement of returning from the periphery (from his native land Guadeloupe) to the centre. Most importantly; the poetics of Relation can be located across the history of both French and world literature, and at the same time, takes different forms when sketched by different poets. The poetics of Relation is precisely not a specific mode of writing that can be pinned down and determined, but names rather more broadly a straining against boundaries, against territorialism, and against monadic forms of identity. Indeed Perse, one of the writers on whom Glissant dwells at most length, is explored not because he privileges the Caribbean over Europe, but because his writing invests in and desires both worlds. Rather more problematically; Glissant also cites Fanon's migration from Martinique to France to Algeria as an example of Relation, although of course this overlooks Fanon's own privileging of national identity in the service of the decolonization of Algeria. A further example of this movement towards the poetics of Relation can be found in Baroque art. For Glissant, "baroque art was a reaction against the rationalist pretense ofpenetrating the mysteries of the known with one uniform and conclusive move" (ibid.: 77). Baroque art enjoys the proliferation and expansion of aesthetic forms: it turns away from demands for uniformity and eschews transparency. Glissant's celebration of the metissage of Baroque art recalls the work of the Cuban writer 144
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and thinker Alejo Carpentier, who evokes the richness of "marvellous realism" and the Baroque in Latin America. For Carpentier, Baroque is indeed "art in motion, pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders" (Carpentier 1995: 93). This is also a form of art that arises specifically from the rapid meeting of cultures, such as in Latin America as a result of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Postcolonial metissage, for Carpentier, leads to dynamiC forms of artistic transformation. Moreover, Baroque art, and the poetics of Relation more generally, refuses to propose unequivocal and monologic forms of meaning, but affirms the value of opacity. Glissant recommends forms of art that do not offer back to the West its own transparent mirror image, but that give voice to the unfamiliar and the unknown. An adherence to modes of writing that remain anchored within the standardized form of French, and that do not explore the contact between French and other languages, will prevent the culture from developing and enhancing in new and enriching ways. As a result, Glissant goes on to argue that the promotion ofJrancophonie as a means of protecting the language and imposing a standard form of French on the rest of the world repeats the colonial gesture of silencing other voices. Francophonie for Glissant must on the contrary be concerned with the evolution of the language and its ability to convey the idioms of diverse cultures and peoples. Furthermore, French has since the eighteenth century been associated with myths of clarity and logic; it has been conceived as a potentially universal tool for expression able to lend rationality to all speakers. In opposition to this, Glissant recommends not so much the right of the colonized to speak their own language, but rather a principle of communication and interaction between languages. Opacity, then, is not "enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singu1arity,,; it names not the affirmation of a self-enclosed idiom, but the retention of singular but linguistically complex or relational forms of expression (Glissant 1997c: 190). It is a sign of confluence and interchange rather than of isolation. One of the most striking developments of The Poetics oj Relation, and indeed of the later volumes of the Poetique series, is the increased emphasis on this relationality as a new form of totality. Glissant repeatedly criticizes the old Eurocentric universalism that imposes its own restrictive values and cultural identity on the colonies. This universalism is deceptive: it masks its own particularity beneath the myth of assimilation. Totality, on the other hand, is the vast, inclusive network of relations and interactions performed in Glissant's poetics; it is not khatibi and glissant
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a monolithic generalization, but names the whole that is formed by a diverse and pulsating web of connections. Glissant's thought retains a latent Hegelianism in this championing of a: dia:Iectic that would embrace, or even (inadvertently) subsume, the shocks and juxtapositions it recommends. The dia:Iectic is not totalitarian, it is not absolute, but nevertheless names a globa:I force of movement and intermingling. Already in The Poetics of Relation, Glissant a:Iso conceives the totality of Relation as the "chaos-monde': not a fusion or confusion, but the chaotic and unpredictable combination of movements and interactions taking place all over the world. Drawing at times a little spuriously on the science of chaos theory, Glissant uses the model of chaos to describe the contingency and entropic energy of the poetics of Relation, and to emphasize its potentially extensive but unpredictable effects. I suggested at the beginning that Glissant's thought moves further and further away from a focus on the specificity of the Caribbean, and certainly the concept of the chaos-monde can be seen to trigger this relinquishment of a specified poetics grounded in location. The Poetics of Relation is the third volume in Gallimard's repackaged series, and the fourth and fifth volumes, Traite du tout-monde and La Cohee du Lamentin, clearly develop this embrace of totality at the expense of the earlier adherence to place. In Traite du tout-monde, Glissant further elaborates and even systematizes the thought of the chaos-monde or the "tout-monde" as the meeting, the mutua:I interference, the harmony or disharmony between cultures, and this new process is characterized by speed, by unpredictability, by self-consciousness and by the cultures' mutua:I va:Iorization. In La Cohee du Lamentin, the vocabulary of tota:Iity is coupled with that of "mondialite'" or "globality': distinct from the neo-imperialism of ''globalization': and deployed to evoke diversity and relationality across the planet: this globa:Iity projects into the unprecedented adventure that is given to all of us to live through today, and into a world, which, for the first time, so truly and in such an immediate, sudden way, conceives itself as both multiple and One, and inextricable. (Glissant 2005: 15) In addition, Glissant describes the totality of relations as a trembling; this evokes both the trembling of peoples in the face of disaster, and the bUZZing movement produced by migration, travel and cu1tura:I interchange. Glissant's concept of trembling privileges the agitation of forms 146
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of artistic production over fixed systems, over tradition and determinism, and adds to the former discussions of relationality the implication of an infinite if at times imperceptible mobility. Glissant's title La Cohee du Lamentin refers to his birthplace in Martinique, and yet any specific reference to Martinique or the Caribbean in this work is soon subsumed in the whirlwind of this trembling, so that the archipelago is nothing more than a privileged figure for globa:I movement and relationality. Glissant specifically notes that the danger of evoking the Caribbean as a unique site of metissage is preCisely the potentia:I occlusion of forms of interaction taking place all over the world. It is this effective dissolution of Caribbean specificity, however, that has troubled some of Glissant's critics. Peter Hallward argues that the investment in the specificity of Martinique and the construction of suba:Itern agency in Glissant's earlier work is thoroughly surpassed in the later texts by a reflection on singular self-differentiation. Beings are continually evolving, totality is constant and interactions between particular groups are dissolved in this all-encompassing whole. The detour, opacity and the focus on place turn out to function only in the service of their own extinction by the totalizing force of the chaos-monde or globality. Indeed, any assertion of opacity takes place in dia:Iogue with other cultures, and the specificity that might have been represented by opacity is diluted and transformed through that dia:Iogue. Any conception of nationa:I agency lingering in Caribbean Discourse is now disabled by the larger, singular force of totalization, and if fleeting references to specificity can still be found in The Poetics ofRelation, this "has little to do with relations-with and-between particularities as such" (Hallward 2001: 123). Hallward notes in particular that the change in Glissant's reaction to Perse from Caribbean Discourse to The Poetics of Relation performs this problematic shift, in that in the earlier work Perse was condemned for not offering a sufficiently specific vision of the Caribbean, whereas in The Poetics of Relation he is lauded for his performance of relationality. Ultimately, for Hallward, the upshot of this shift is a disastrous rejection of the very concepts that founded the politica:I bases of Caribbean Discourse: "there can be no nationa:I repossession, for dispossession is now the condition (and opportunity) of Creative reality itself" (ibid.: 124-5). Hallward may well be correct in his diagnosis of Glissant's startling disengagement from politics; indeed, the defence of Glissant's politica:I efficacy offered by more positive critics such as Michael Dash can seem a little weak. The call for the liberation of Martinique, still pressing in Caribbean Discourse, was nevertheless clearly even then bound khatibi and glissant
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up with ruses and strategies that were conceived only in the interests of their eventual surpassing, and the seeds of "globality" lie in that early investment in "depassement" or development. Furthermore, if politics and poetics do to some extent diverge in Glissant's work, then this may serve the purpose precisely of creating a space for forms of cultural production unconstrained by militancy. In The Poetics ofRelation, Glissant argues for a liberatory aesthetics, and although this is clearly related to the denunciation of colonial thinking, the poetic forms recommended by Glissant do not have to function in the service of a specified anti -colonial movement. Like Hallward, Bongie articulates the difficulties of Glissant's political disengagement in his essay "Edouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality" (2008), and yet it is perhaps useful that Bongie nevertheless concludes by conceding that: the work of the late Glissant provides a valuable reminder of the distance between culture and politics, even if its serene composure cannot help but create a nostalgia for the "rough futures" that a resistant politics, an anti-colonial politics capable not merely of dissenting from but of combating the imperial aspirations of the thuggish proponents of Empire, cannot help but continue to envision. (Bongie 2009) From this point of view, it might be argued that Glissant is unusually bold among postcolonial thinkers in that he does not promote a banal "cultural politics" but conceives a role for aesthetics as a site of experimentation not necessarily linked to the concrete demand for political independence. The poetics of Relation insists on the liberation of the imaginary before the overthrow of political oppression. Finally, the division in Glissant's work can be seen to recall the schism ofDerrida's reflections on politics and ethics, although there is no doubt that Derrida for the most part retains a self-awareness and rigour at times lacking in Glissant's cultural utopianism. Despite separating the demands of ethics and politics, moreover, Derrida nevertheless argues for the necessity of thinking each alongside the other, however uncomfortable or uneasy a process this might be. Glissant's celebration ofpoetics is also largely ethical, and is reminiscent of Derridean thought in its rejection of origins, territorialism and borders, and in its exploration of singular self-differentiation and being as a "trace". Nevertheless, if Glissant's work recalls that ofDerrida, he also invests much more in the role not only of ethics but of poetics or aesthetics, and it is perhaps in the text's creative and evocative whirlwind that it loses touch with the 148
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political altogether. Glissant's championing of opacity is also reminiscent ofBhabha's later affirmation of the rights of minority cultures, especially when conceived by a critic such as Britton as "an ethical value and a political right" (1999: 25). When conceived merely as part of the infinite trembling of the poetics of Relation, however, opacity loses its political force and becomes more of a focus of energizing, but ungrounded, cultural experimentation. Indeed, in the recent musings on aesthetics gathered in the volume Une nouvelle region du monde (2006), Glissant explicitly champions the role of aesthetics before ethics and politics, and the dynamism of relation is associated with aesthetic beauty. Clearly, then, Glissant moves from the at once ethically and politically impassioned treatise of Caribbean Discourse to a much more literary and aesthetic vision of infinite cultural relationality, and the latter's ambitious sweep undoubtedly undermines its political resonance in the place from which it was engendered. Yet that latter stage remains provocative and enriching perhaps precisely because it imagines an aesthetic and cultural ethics that liberates artistic production from the requirements of immediate political engagement, and suggests that poetics has a role that is distinct from that of concrete independence movements. Glissant in this way advocates a form of literary and linguistic experimentation that responds to postcoloniality and sets out to liberate thought from imperialist metaphysics, but that is not subservient to the goal of regime change. Caribbean Discourse offers a vision of ethical and political criticism rooted in the experiences of Martinique. The Poetics ofRelation and the later works, however, are provocative above all as a result of their defiant search for an unprecedented postcolonial aesthetics.
Key points
Khatibi allies decolonization with deconstruction, and recommends (with Derrida) the affirmation of a "pensee autre" ("other thought") that would attend to cultural differences. He also evolves a theory of bilingualism that explores both the alienating effects, and the creative potential, of writing across two languages. Khatibi's general postcolonial theory of bilingualism is coupled with detailed exploration of Moroccan, Arab and Islamic cultures. He criticizes Berque for conceiving Arab culture in generalized terms, and investigates calligraphic art as a form of representation that opens up the relation between sign and referent in challenging, and ethical, ways. khatibi and glissant
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•
Glissant's Caribbean Discourse calls for the liberation of Martinique as well as for a celebration of cultural relationality not unrelated to Khatibi's ''pensee autre: Glissant presents Caribbean culture or "Antillanite'" as multiple and diverse, and affirms the creative potential of "detour' or "diversion" rather than the straightforward return to roots. Glissant's later work is less political than Caribbean Discourse, and concentrates on the cultural and aesthetic productivity of "Antillanite'" as a site of relationality. Glissant also incorporates the Caribbean into the "chaos-monde: a bUZZing, trembling global network of multiple connections capable of bringing cultural innovation and change. This later divorce between culture and politics is a useful sign of the distinct roles played by each in postcolonial criticism.
seven
Ethics with politics? Spivak/ Mudimbe/ Mbembe
The work of many of the postcolonial thinkers discussed in this book has both ethical and political implications, yet most tend to privilege one approach over the other. Fanon and Sartre's militancy is underpinned by an ethical call for freedom and subjective self-invention, but theIr first objective is the decolonization of Algeria, whereas for thinkers such as Derrida and Bhabha it is the ethical awareness of the other's intractability that initially provides the basis for political liberation. Moreover, one can detect in Glissant's evolving trajectory, and in Said's movement between Palestinian politics or Islam and literary criticism, a distinction between writing that is first and foremost political, and that which insists above all on an ethical or cultural agenda. It is Spivak, Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, however, who engage most explicitly throughout their work both with Marxist political theory and with a form of ethical thinking derived from deconstruction. Particularly in the work of Spivak, this duality can lead to contradiction, since at times she calls for a renewed understanding of subaltern political agency while at others the subaltern is a more intractable figure signifying the resistance of the other to concrete forms of representation. Such contradictions are never fully resolved in Spivak's work, although she comes up with the notion of "strategic essentialism" in an effort to argue that specific claims for agency might rest on the assertion of an identity, but that identity does not necessarily acquire permanence or "truth': Nevertheless, the eclecticism of Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe finally suggests that, while politics and ethics do indeed require different modes of thinking, these different modes are both necessary for an 150
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understanding of postcolonialism and, indeed, the challenge is to keep both in play without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with the programmatic use of either. These three thinkers are treated together here, then, because despite the differences in their focus - Mudimbe and Mbembe write specifically about colonial and postcolonial Africa - they all draw at once on Marxism and on poststructuralist ethics, and in so doing demonstrate the inevitable multivalency of postcolonial philosophical reflection.
Gayatri Spivak
Spivak grew up in Calcutta, where she took her undergraduate degree in English, and she went on to complete her graduate work at Cornell while also teaching at Iowa in the United States. She now teaches at Columbia University in New York, and although earlier in her career she was perhaps best known as the translator ofDerrida's OJ Grammatology, her prolific writings on postcolonialism have more recently led her to become one of the field's most cited thinkers. Spivak's work broadly sets out to rescue the "subaltern" both from the structures of imperialist and neo-imperialist oppression, and from the voracious grasp of Western academics whose discourse newly occludes and silences the subjugated non-Western other. In this way her thinking is clearly aligned with that of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and she regularly contributed articles to the journal, although she is treated separately here because her work reaches beyond their remit in a number of ways. First, Spivak draws not only on Marx's theories of economic exploitation and on Foucault's analyses of the complicity between power and knowledge, but also on Derrida's explorations of the inaccessible and singular other alienated in language. Secondly, Spivak's work is distinctive for its focus on gender: when she writes about the oppression of the subaltern, she examines specifically the double subjugation ofwomen by imperialism and by patriarchy. It has been objected more than once that a significant failure in postcolonial studies is the lack of attention particularly to female oppression offered by its major representatives, and it is perhaps true that Spivak is one of the few renowned voices in the field consistently to analyse the suffering of subaltern women. While Bhabha scarcely mentions gender anywhere in his work, Spivak conceives her postcolonial critique as necessarily always feminist. Thirdly, Spivak's work is unusual in its constant, even excessive, self-consciousness, and confessions of perpetual anxiety about her own work repeatedly serve to 152
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warn the reader of the loopholes and obstacles obstructing the process of forming a postcolonial critique. For many critics this recurrent selfdoubt borders on a crippling narcissism that gets in the way of Spivak's attending to the real mechanics of colonial oppression, and certainly at times her work seems as much concerned with the self, and with the work of "Theory': as with the other. Spivak's self-consciousness is nonetheless highly provocative since, like that of Derrida, it forces us to ask the fundamental question ofwhat postcolonial philosoph~ is and does. The implications of Spivak's anxiety will be discussed at the end of this section. One of the major strands of Spivak's work, then, is her championing of the work of Marx, which she argues is unique and provocative as a result ofits revolutionary exegesis of global capitalism. She reads Marx for his generalized political and economic understanding of capital as it functions across the globe, and goes on to use some of his concepts to explore the mechanics of postcolonial or neo-imperialist oppression. Unusually, moreover, Spivak at the same time focuses on the intricacies of Marx's texts and strains against readings that conceive his thought as deterministic and reductive. One of her most famous essays on Marx, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" (1996b), for example, explores the slippery construction of the notion of value in Marx, and also expands Marx's critique of the bourgeois ruling class so as to question the inequalities subtending the very academic activity in which she herself is engaged. Spivak starts by raising the question of how to conceive the subject in terms that are neither wholly "materialist" nor entirely "idealist". In order to answer this, she goes on to identify the potential flexibility and openness in Marx's writing on value and to stress the "textuality" of his materialist writing. Spivak then shows that value is conceived in Marx as a representation, and even more, as a differential: "what is represented or represents itself in the commodity differential is Value" (Spivak 1996b: 114). Yet having established this, she next demonstrates that in linking labour to value and money via representation, Marx's thinking masks several discontinuities, such as the fact that money is "separated from its own being as commodity': or that money is a sort of "vanishing moment facilitating the exchange between two commodities" (ibid.: 115). As a result, Spivak argues of Marx's schema on the relation between value, money and capital that "at each step of the dialectic something seems to lead off into the ,open-endedness of textuality: indifference, inadequation, rupture" (ibid.: 116). The process of representation inherent in Marx's model masks this ambivalence or slippage. Spivak also pinpoints the ambiguity of the notion of use-value, ethics with politiCS?
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suggesting that it is both inside and outside the system of value detertninations, because it is not part of the circuit of exchange, and yet the notion of exchange-value nevertheless relies on the notion of use. This reading of Marx is "textualist': in that it explores the hidden confusions of Marx's writing even as it celebrates their pertinence. Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" problematizes Marx's notion of value in order to reject accusations that his thougpt is deterministic, but she also goes on to use it to show that the literary academy too supports the international division oflabour. Developments in telecommunications further entrench this division, as well as the oppression of women, and Spivak argues that any theory of .value needs to take into account the exploitation carried out in the name of the production of technologies on which we rely. In addition, Spivak stresses that Marx's materialist notion ofvalue should be used to understand processes of canon formation, and she suggests it would be fruitful "to pursue the evaluation of the pervasive and tacit gesture that accepts the history of style-formations in Western European canonical literature as the evaluation of style as such" (ibid.: 129). Not only is Marxist thinking more complex in its textual formulation than has previously been recognized, but its resonance is also more far-reaching than expected, as is testified by Spivak's application of notions ofvalue and the division oflabour to the sphere of academic and literary study. If Spivak finds a suppleness or ambivalence in Marx's writing, and uses his understanding of the international division of labour with an awareness of the slipperiness of his founding concepts, she nevertheless criticizes Derrida's reading of Marx for its excessive confusion surrounding the notion of value. In "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value': Spivak notes that Derrida conceives capital as "interest-bearing commercial capital" rather than industrial capital, and the result is that surplus-value for him becomes "the super-adequation of capital rather than a 'materialist' predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself' (ibid.: 119). Derrida's reading in this way posits the subject as "idealist': as consciousness, and as insufficiently materialist. Furthermore, in the essay "Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida" (1993), Spivak concedes that there are valuable political lessons to be learned from Derrida, but she nevertheless suggests that Derrida's reading in The Other Heading of the polysemy in Paul Valery's use ofthe term "capital" displays an inadequate grasp of Marx's concept. Once again, Derrida also misunderstands the notion of surplus-value as an abstract signifier of an infinite excess of value, rather than as the specific difference between labour-value and exchange-value. Finally, in "Ghostwriting" 154
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(1995), Spivak's careful engagement with Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994), Spivak continues to acknowledge her debt to Derrida and to endorse his ethics, while developing previous observations that he fails to attend to women's suffering as a result of the international division oflabour. Spivak also complains that when he pinpoints the ten plagues of the modern world, he blurs distinct types of value and fails to comprehend "the connection between industrial capitalism, colonialism, so-called postindustrial capitalism, neo-colonialism, electronified capitalism, and the current financialization of the globe, with the attendant phenomena of migrancy and ecolOgical disaster" (Spivak 1995: 68). Most disturbingly, the upshot of Derrida's reading of Marx, according to Spivak, is that the subaltern has no place in it. The innovation of Spivak's readings of Marx is her emphasis on textual indeterminacies, and it is perhaps ironic that she uses a deconstructive strategy while criticizing Derrida's own use of Marx. Her writing on Marx testifies to an extraordinary amalgamation of support for his highly materialist, economic analyses, together with exploration of the linguistic indeterminacy that nevertheless characterizes those analyses. Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is arguably her most often cited piece of writing, and it is also here that she displays most overtly her simultaneous affiliation with both Marx and Derrida. On one level, Spivak again draws on Marx, this time in order to explore the difference, and the problematic confiation, of two forms of representation. The German "Darstellen" designates "rhetoric-as-trope': or the process of representation in the sense of a depiction, whereas "Vertreten" names "rhetoric-aspersuasion': or a more political form ofrepresentation. Vertreten involves substitution or "speaking for". Spivak quotes Marx's comment in The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte that "the small peasant proprietors 'cannot represent themselves; they must be represented'" (1988: 276-7), and notes that while Marx specifically uses the term Vertreten, he exposes the ways in which this form of political representation is elided with representation as depiction. While the peasants described have no political voice, at the same time they are .also occluded by the forms of depiction or understanding imposed on them from outside. The purpose of this further "textualisr' reading of Marx is to demonstrate how French philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari are unwittingly guilty of this same slippage. Spivak shows, for example, that in stating that there is no place for representation, only for action, Deleuze too finishes by blurring Darstellen and Vertreten, and leaves the subaltern subject with no voice. She chides these otherwise highly self-conscious philosophers for failing to think through the two senses ethics with politiCS?
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of representation, and asserts: "they must note how the staging of the world in representation - its scene of writing, its Darstellung - dissimulates the choice of and need for (heroes: paternal proxies, agents of power - Vertretung' (ibid.: 279). Marxist politics is here inscribed into the heart of French intellectual work, as Spivak complains that once again academe itself supports and entrenches the international division of labour in its very ignoring of the economic underpinnings of the philosophical statements it produces. Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and indeed the Subaltern Studies Collective, need to reflect on their own practice, and ask "Can the subaltern speak?': or does their work too deprive the oppressed subject of a voice? This lapsus is all the more astonishing in the work of thinkers who nevertheless touch on Third World issues, and indeed, Spivak reads Foucault's omission of the narrative of imperialism from his discussions of institutions of power as a further example of this silencing. Developing the political strand to the essay, Spivak next uses the example of the Hindu practice ofsati, or the self-immolation of widows, to demonstrate the practical effects of this elision in the process of representation. On the one hand, colonial officials seeking to abolish the practice of sati can be read as a case of "white men saving brown women from brown men': while on the other hand, the Indian nativist riposte was that "the women actually wanted to die" (ibid.: 297). The two positions serve to legitimize one another, but both exclude the women's voice and agency. Police reports included in the records of the East India Company are, according to Spivak, both ignorant and fragmented, and the imperialist attitude towards the practice suggests that the woman is conceived as an "object of protection from her own kind" (ibid.: 299). Moreover, the Hindu law on sati as it is formulated in the Dharmasastra and the Rg- Veda is in fact modelled on suicide laws created for men. According to the DharmaSastra, suicide is usually reprehensible, but there are two types of suicide that are permissible. The first is when it arises out of "the knowledge of truth': when "the knowing subject comprehends the insubstantiality or mere phenomenality (which may be the same thing as nonphenomenality) of its identity" (ibid.). The second form of suicide that is permitted is when it is accomplished in a particular place of pilgrimage. Women are permitted to kill themselves, then, if they mimic these laws that were originally destined for men. This means that the woman can "act out" her husband's insubstantiality, or can immolate herself in the specific place of her husband's funeral pyre. Part of Spivak's endeavour in this analYSis is to trace the women's absence of political representation in both colonial and native 156
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discussions of sati. However, it is Significant that Spivak's argument in fact rests on her understanding of subtle slips in the process of representation akin to the sorts of ethical awareness subtending Derrida's work. Spivak shows that the two forms of sanctioned suicide for widows both blur imitation with intention, and it is in this blurring that the women's voices lie hidden. First, in immolating herself on the husband's funeral pyre, the widow performs a sort of displaced suicide: she kills herself by taking her husband's place. Secondly, when conceived in relation to the sanctioned suicide of the subject who knows his insubstantiality, the widow's suicide can be seen as a secondary act of mimicry. Spivak notes that the DharmaSastra makes an exception here both in its permission of women's suicide, and in its attribution of agency to widows (who were relegated permanently to a passive, premarital status), in order to justify self-immolation. Yet for Spivak, this agency is fragile, given that it manifests itself, as she shows, on this secondary level both in the woman's acting out of her husband's phenomenality and in her taking his place on the funeral pyre. Intention here becomes blurred with imitation, with mimetic performance, and is as a result in itself unidentifiable and unlocatable. The widows' intention is only a model or a copy, in which it is ultimately impossible to locate any individual's authentic intention. Agency is a lost potential here, the glimmer of a possibility, but it is also dissolved because the supposed free choice is just an imitation of a code created for men, to be used in other contexts. Spivak's identification ofthe blurring between intention and imitation here dearly recalls D errida's understanding of iterability, expounded in the essay "Signature, Event, Context" in Margins of Philosophy, as the possibility that a statement, when repeated, can mean something different from originally intended. Spivak's attention to this potential but hidden shift of meaning in the women's mimetic act of self-immolation is also close to Derrida's ethical call for an awareness of singularities that exceed both the sovereignty of all language and the colonizer's drive for deterministic knowledge. Furthermore, earlier in the same essay Spivak had already established the usefulness of Derrida's work for this sort of postcolonial reflection. Reading Of Grammatology, Spivak shows how Derrida's text uncovers the European subject's "tendency to constitute the Other as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that as the problem with all logo centric and therefore also all grammatological endeavors" (ibid.: 293). As in the colonial discourses on sati, the subaltern's voice slips outside the European conceptual framework. Even more, Spivak uses Derrida to conceive the Other here not so much to denote a specific and identifiable non-European subject, but as "that inaccessible ethics with politics?
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blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text" (ibid.: 294). Derrida does not as a result invoke '1etting the other speak for himself': but appeals to the "tout autre" or "quite other': a singular, intractable presence close in conceptual terms to Levinas's Infinity. An ethical conception of the subaltern as this "inaccessible blankness" rather than as a specific subject position prevents the postcolonial philosopher from over-determining her or speaking in her place, and this prevention is privileged over the achievement of political agency. If, then, on the one hand Spivak uses Marxism to criticize the politics of the representation of the specific subaltern subject, she also in the same essay cites Derrida in order to emphasize our ethical obligation towards the subalterns singular intractability. Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" was later rewritten and published again in her monumental A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason (1999), however, and it is perhaps significant that the later version is even more self-conscious about the ethics of the theorist's own writing. She omits a number of sections in the later version, such as her comments near the beginning of the discussion of the sati stressing the relationship between information retrieval in anthropology, political science, history and SOciology on the one hand, and her own challenge to the construction of a subject position that underpins such work on the other. The paragraph containing this assertion is absent from the version printed in A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason, suggesting that she no longer wants to make such bold claims for her strategy. This later version is clearly more doubtful about its broader resonance and impact than the earlier text. Furthermore, the revised version is less trenchant, and contains more discussion, and more ambivalence, about its own practice. Here, Spivak precedes her analysis of the DharmaSiistra with the observation that the colonial subject normalizes the notion of "woman' in this context and avoids the question of psycho biography, and she goes on to as~ "what is it to ask the question of psychobiography?" (1999: 291). The question remains unanswered, but indicates the impossibility of telling the subaltern womans biographical story, and introduces a further level of methodolOgical unease absent from the earlier version. In addition, in the later version Spivak inserts a further section developing the resonance ofJean-Frans;ois Lyotard's concept of the differend as a signifier of the impasse or block between two incompatible positions, and the expansion of this analysis indicates a less dogmatic attitude to the subalterns silencing. Spivak describes the aporia between the patriarchal admiration of the womens free will and the rhetoric of colonial benevolence by quoting Lyotard at length, and stresses that these 158
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are two perspectives between which there is no common ground, no terms in which to negotiate. For Spiv~ however, the widow's response lies in the space between these poles, the space left open by the differend. Spivak goes on to underline the impossibility for the woman to overcome this differend, but indicates that her analysis will end with a reflection on "an idiomatic moment in the scripting of the female body': which will remain in the space of the differend, but which is nevertheless not the same as total effacement or silence. Even if this space is one of impossible negotiation, the terminology of space connotes a chink that can be analysed, rather than outright effacement or ignorance. This potential field of analysis then relates to Spivak's discussion of the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, a young girl who hanged herself at the age of sixteen or seventeen because she was involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence, but did not want to commit an assassination. She killed herself while menstruating, however, so that it was clear that it was not because she was pregnant as a result of an illicit affair, and Spivak shows how reports and accounts of the story again gloss over her actual motivations. In the earlier version, Spivak concludes the discussion with the stark statement: "the subaltern cannot speak': In the revised version, however, she admits that this was an inadvisable remark since, of course, in its certainty it silenced the very other whose voice she was trying to rescue. The aim was not so much to reinforce the effacement of the subalterns voice, as to problematize the endeavour to respond in her place. In the later version of the essay, then, Spivak attempts not to stress the foreclosure ofBhaduri's speech, but to leave the text open enough to reveal the ambivalence of her gesture, to allow the uncertainty of the act to emerge through the lines of her own reading rather than to speak in the other's place. In this way, by the time of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak emerges as a careful reader ofherself and also of others, and although she still shifts erratically between affiliation with Marx and Derrida, much of the work consists in attentive readings of both political and ethical injustice. The revised version of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is printed in a section on "History': and hinges, as I suggested, on careful engagement with archives on the sati with the aim both of unearthing past forms of political oppression and the collusion of these with unethical silencing. In addition to the "History" section, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason also includes a chapter on "Philosophy" comprising subtle readings of particular details in Kant, Hegel and Marx. Spivak tracks the troubled position of the "native informant': and again, she moves from a more ethical critique of Kant and Hegel's blindness to the Third World Other ethics with politics?
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to a regeneration of Marx, although this will again be based on the latent "textualism" of his writing. First, Spivak analyses Kant's treatment of the concept of "man" in the three critiques, and notes that, in a passing gesture of dismissal, Kant suggests that "the New Hollander or the man from Tierra del Fuego cannot be the subject of speech or judgment in the world of the Critique" (Spivak 1999: 26). This failure to conceive the other or the "native informant" as human is exemplary of the very forms of postcolonial exclusion against which Spivak's work tirelessly rails. Equally, Hegel's aesthetics contains comments on the Bhagavad Gita but, although Hegel's remarks are benevolent, "they still finally point at the mindless gift for making shapes [verstandlose Gestaltungsgabe] and an absence of the push into history" (ibid.: 44). Spivak then goes on to show that in fact the representation of time in the Bhagavad Gita does follow a Hegelian model: "'Hegel' and the 'Gita' can be read as two rather different versions of the manipulation of the question of history in a political interest, for the apparent disclosure of the Law" (ibid.: 58). Finally, Spivak returns to Marx and notes that despite the apparent stasis and generalization of the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, it does function as a useful, non-empirical figure for difference in Marx. 'The rest of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason continues to track the troubled representation of the "native informant" and stresses in particular the occlusion of the female subaltern. A section on "literature': made up largely of previously published essays, explores the double subjugation of the Third World woman and, again, the textual emphasis of the section suggests a call for ethical attention to the violence of imperialist forms of representation and silencing. Spivak begins by discussing Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, in which the figure of Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, is described in terms that blur the border between human and animal; indeed, Jane refers from time to time to her desire to free women of the Third World from their ignorance and servitude. Spivak also discusses a passage in which Mr Rochester recounts the return to Europe from the West Indies as a divine injunction, and the site of the imperialist conquest is conceived as Hen. In Jean Rhys's rewriting of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, however, Bertha Mason's humanity is left intact, and Spivak also draws out Rhys's use of metaphors of mirroring to argue that the text depicts the colonial subject confronted with the image of itself as other. She notes in addition that the colonized other of the text is less Bertha!Antoinette than the black plantation slave Christophine, a deliberately marginalized figure, and yet the only one capable of judging and analysing Rochester. Spivak's next example is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a text not explicitly concerned 160
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with imperialism, but nevertheless one where "the master alone has a history" (ibid.: 140). Finally, Mahasweta Devi's story "Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Suhay" shifts the discussion to the postcolonial context. Spivak argues that the work deliberately constructs the colonized as subaltern rather than citizen, and figures the pterodactyl, which "may be the soul of ancestors': as an impossibility whose portrayal is also separated structurally from the frame of the story. This deliberately mimics the marginalization oflocal history by dominant colonial discourses. Spivak's chapter on "literature" also contains readings of three "masculine" texts, including literary texts by Baudelaire, Kipling and a paper laid before the East India Company, in order to offer further evidence of imperialist ideology even within writing that is conceived as oppositional. 'These are then contrasted with exploration of J. M. Coetzee's Foe, in which the "native" is this time also an agent. 'There will not be space here to discuss each of these readings in turn; however, Spivak's strategy is once again to uncover the ways in which the subaltern is not only politically subjugated but also unethically marginalized within literary discourse. 'The final section of A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason revolves slightly more loosely around "culture': and contains a discus.sion of Frederic Jameson's conception of postmodernism and late capitalism. Spivak notes that Jameson's theory at once attempts to obliterate the notion of a secure subject position and continues paradoxically to rely on its presence. This contradiction emerges in part from Jameson's use ofDerrida, since in order to decentre the subject, deconstruction too must retain a notion of the centred subject. Spivak also invokes several examples from the fashion industry, including Barthes's Empire ofSigns (1983), to uncover the repeated assumption of a neutralized European "1" that forecloses the native informant: throughout this book, my point has been that the subjectposition of this I is historically constructed and produced so that it can become transparent at will (even when belonging to the indigenous postcolonial elite turned diasporic like the present writer). (Ibid.: 343) 'The culture of the native informant, however, is "always on the run"; its constant self-singularizing eludes the European discourses that repeatedly but fruitlessly seek to grasp it. The distinctiveness of much of Spivak's work, moreover, stems from her awareness of her own complicity with the discourses she sets out to undermine. Constantly vigilant about her own position, Spivak ethics with politics?
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characterizes her theory not as a source of knowledge but as a form of anxious self-reflexivity, the offering up of a set of propositions and their immediate questioning or withdrawal. She critiques the assumed opposition between positivism or essentialism and Theory, and suggests that this very division makes of Theory an artificially distinct category in which, again, "the position of the investigator remains unquestioned" (ibid.: 283). "Theory': with a capital T signifying a grand narrative or master discourse, is undermined in favour of Spivak's own "implausible and impertinent readings': her "obtuse angling" constantly in dispute with itself. Spivak also peppers her work with autobiographical reflections, partly in order to confess the limitations of her vision, her potential partiality or blindness, although it is significant that even these are usually fleeting and often ironic or self-contradictory. Spivak wants both to emphasize that her discourse is necessarily subjective or incomplete, and to avoid falling into the trap of narcissism by altering or indeed quickly retracting her autobiographical voice before it hardens into an established, identitarian subject position. Equally, her constant revision and rewriting of her work suggests that she does not conceive her arguments to be finite and immutable. Her prose is frequently criticized for its convolutions, but Spivak's difficulty stems from her ability constantly to refine, explore and interrogate her own arguments, and her desire to present her standpoints as part of an evolution, an internal debate. All these features of the writing perform an ethical resistance to mastery and an openness to the alterities that the critic cannot capture. The success of Spivak's writing strategy remains nevertheless a subject of some controversy. In White Mythologies (1990), Young discusses Spivak's interrogation of Western discourses on the Third World and notes her vigilance towards the ways in which her own discourse risks perpetuating the structures she criticizes, but he asserts at the same time that she does retain a classical Marxist position. Conversely, however, Eagleton laments that Spivak spends so much time examining the bad faith of her own writing that she fails properly to address the political mechanics of colonial oppression. In addition, Parry famously objects that Spivak exaggerates the importance of the work of the postcolonial female intellectual, and that her endless critiques of the Western institution still leave no space for the voice of the subaltern. Ultimately, and in spite of herself, "Spivak in her own writings severely restricts (eliminates?) the space in which the colonized can be written back into SOciety" (Parry 2004: 23). Furthermore, with perhaps more nuance, Hallward criticizes Spivak's concept of the subaltern for positing her voice as singular and inaccessible, and for failing to think through 162
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the means by which she might consolidate her identity and voice. For Hallward, "the subaltern, in other words, is the theoretically untouchable, the altogether-beyond-relation: the attempt to 'relate' to the-subaltern defines what Spivak will quite appropriately name an 'impOSSible ethical singularity'" (2001: 30). Against Young, then, these critics imply that Spivak's self-conscious ethics backfires, and that her deconstructive conception of the intractabIe subaltern is politically ineffective. Yet Spivak herself ultimately levels many of the same objections at Derrida's work, and while her appendix to A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason suggests that there are ways in which Derridean thought might turn out to be useful for marginalized cultural groups, "the possibility of these connections remains dubious as long as the 'setting-to-work' mode remains caught within the descriptive and/or formalizing practices of the academic or disciplinary calculus" (Spivak 1999: 429). It would seem that Spivak persists in wanting to combine the use of deconstructive ethics, learned from Derrida, with a more pragmatic, empirical and economic objective. Her fluctuating attitude to the work of Derrida is in turn mirrored by an idiosyncratic engagement with Marx, whereby she by turns applauds the systematic analysis of global praxis and opens up the Marxian text to reveal its hidden slippages, its ambivalences and its resistance to determinism. It is difficult to resolve Spivak's eclectic engagements with Marx and Derrida and to extract from her work an overarching or at least a dominant approach to postcoloniallsm. Where her provocation, or for some her difficulty, lies is in her unusually sensitive writing and reading strategies. Her eclecticism and her self-conscious anxiety do not offer a single model of critique but precisely warn against the adoption of the sort of dogmatic, determinist discourse that occludes the subalternity to which it claims to attend. Postcolonial theory must avoid either assimilating or excluding the others it examines, and it must reveal its situatedness, rather than claiming the transparency and neutrality of the Western discourses that Spivak denounces. As Michael Syrcitinski points out, Spivak's engagement with materialism in Derrida and Marx also seeks to undermine facile oppositions between empirical practice and "textualism': and offers a compelling example of the necessity of a careful "labour of reading" applied to both (Syrotinski 2007: 59). Certainly, Spivak's acuity is most apparent in her readings of other thinkers, writers and critics, and what her work recommends is this form of ethical, attentive reading as a means of understanding all the face;ts of postcolonial oppression, including the political and the economic. Spivak at times seems to privilege politics over ethics, and at others it is ethics with politics?
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ethics that comes before politics, but it is in her readings that it becomes clear how attention to the workings, and blindnesses, of ideological discourse is relevant to an understanding ofparticular instances of political oppression. Her writing does not call for the sorts of immediate political action found in Fanon, Sartre or Gandhi, but it does suggest that attentive reading can offer insight into specific moments of both ethical and political violation.
v. Y. Mudimbe The work of Valentin Yves (Vumbi Yoka) Mudimbe evolves out of a very different context from that of Spivak, since Mudimbe engages specifically with the discipline of African studies and, although well known in this domain, is less frequently associated with postcolonialism. Mubimbe himself was born in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic I of Congo (DRC), although he went to live in a Benedictine monastery in Rwanda at the age of 9, before studying linguistics in Besanyon, France and in Louvain, Belgium. Although he taught in DRC between 1973 and 1982, he subsequently moved to the United States in part to escape the regime ofMobutu, and he is now a professor at Duke University. In many i ways Mudimbe's philosophical work can be seen as related to Said's Orientalism in that his thinking centres on a critique ofthe parallel concepts of'l\fricanism" - the production of knowledge about Africa - and the dangers of allowing that knowledge to be corrupted by forms of ideology that efface the African other. Mudimbe is treated here alongSide Spivak, however, because his work similarly revolves around questions of representation, and combines a critical engagement with Marxism , with an ethical denunciation of "the history of the same'~ informed , this time by Foucault, as well as by Sartre, Rousseau and Levi-Strauss, and, more obliquely, Derrida. His philosophical works shift regularly between discussion of colonial systems, anthropolOgical methods, religious practice and ideology, and philosophy; the critique of Africanism in this sense incorporates both a call for political freedom and a desire to discover ethical forms of African knowledge released from the shackles of "the Same': In his more political moments Mudimbe is nevertheless highly wary of unmediated forms of empiricism, since he conceives these as potentially reductive, while at the same time his call for an ethical awareness of the difficulty of knowing and specifying Africa shies away from excessive textualism and upholds the necessity of seeking real forms of African authenticity. The eclecticism of his work, and the I
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convolutions of his intellectual trajectory, are perhaps best summed up by his own comment at the opening of Parables and Fables: ''here I was, so to speak, the margin of margins: black, Catholic, African, yet agnostic; intellectually Marxist, disposed toward psychoanalysis, yet a specialist in Indo-European philology and philosophy" (1991: x). Mudimbe writes in both English and French, and has published both novels and philosophical works, but his most famous text is perhaps The Invention ofAfrica, published in 1988. Like Mudimbe's subsequent works Parables and Fables and The Idea ofAfrica (1994), The Invention ofAfrica seeks to survey and analyse the practice of African philosophy or "gnosis': a term proposed by the author to refer to "a structured, common, and conventional knowledge, but one strictly under the control of specific procedures for its use as well as transmission" (1988: ix). Like Said, Spivak and the Subaltern Studies Collective, Mudimbe draws on Foucault to theorize the ways in which power structures are subtended by, as well as actively propagating, the conception or indeed the creation of the other by the West, and he also stresses with Foucault that the structures under analysis are diverse and discontinuous. Again like Spivak, Mudimbe asks who is producing knowledge about Africa, and to what extent the discourses shaping that knowledge assimilate the other into a framework governed by Western assumptions and expectations. Unlike Spivak, however, whose "subaltern" remains a singular, intractable figure, Mudimbe holds on to a belief in the possibility of an alternative knowledge, even if, as we shall see, it is not always clear that his writing can access this dreamed authenticity. Mudimbe's fragile vision of African authenticity will nevertheless provide the basis for a new political and ethical philosophy that recognizes as well as criticizes the European currents on which it is founded. The Invention of Africa opens with a systematic and clearly Foucauldian analysis of the political and ethical violence inherent in the project of colonialism. Mudimbe argues that etymolOgically the term colonialism derives from the Latin" colere", meaning to cultivate or design, and that the concept has at its root the notion of organization or arrangement. This process of organization has three facets to it: "the procedures of acquiring, distributing, and exploiting lands in colonies; the policies of domesticating natives; and the manner of managing ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production" (ibid.: 2). In other words, these three facets include the political domination of the territory, the (unethical) direction of the local people's identity and mentality, and the seizing of economic control. Mudimbe goes on to comment on Marxist analyses of the ways in which overseas ethics with politiCS?
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territories are restructured and subjected to the colonizer's economic model, although it will emerge that he conceives the Marxist reading itself as excessively generalized and adrift from the specific experiences of individual African communities. Nevertheless, here Mudimbe maps this conception of the colonizer's economic control onto the ideolOgical creation of a whole gamut of oppositions, such as that between the traditional and the modern, or between the oral and the written, all of which serve to undermine the local culture. Furthermore; it is not only the colonial apparatus itself but a broader set of representations and hypotheses that separate and hypostatize cultures according to a dominant and Western set of values. African tourist art is just one example for Mudimbe of the ways in which, to use distinctly Levinasian terms, "alterity is a negative category of the Same" (ibid.: 12). And even worse, the practice of anthropology is similarly criticized for an "ethnocentrism" linked both to the specific episteme defining the discipline and to various moral or behavioural attitudes exhibited by anthropologists. Mudimbe's next section explores in more detail the methodology of Africanist critique. Here, he develops his engagement with Foucault, and he notes that for the latter, after an epistemological shift at the end of the eighteenth century, three paradigms come to structure the production of knowledge: "function and norm, conflict and rule, signification and system" (ibid.: 26). The movement towards the latter term in each couple brings at the same time both an understanding of the plurality of individual codes, and a new unity over and above these within the human sciences. Analysis conducted on the basis of norm, rule and system privileges the enclosure and internal coherence of the code analysed., and this is used to assume a greater generality. This shift coincides with the invention of the concept of "Man" as a subject who i knows, and the consequence is that "stories about Others, as well as commentaries on their differences, are but elements in the history of the Same and its knowledge" (ibid.: 28). In addition, Mudimbe shows how, rather than charting the "archaeology" of Western knowledge, LeviStrauss explores the "primitives" and "savages" that the West endeavours to caricature, and the upshot of his work is that "the usefulness of a discourse on others goes beyond the gospel of otherness: there is not a normative human culture" (ibid.: 33). Foucault tracks "the history of the Same" while Levi-Strauss rails against its universalizing gestures, but both lament its blindness. According to Mudimbe, however, both Foucault and Levi-Strauss are themselves unable to extract themselves , from the history they denounce. Mudimbe seeks rather a methodology faithful to African epistemology: he seeks to retrieve an African order 166
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of knowledge that doubts the value of schemata such as that of "norm, rule and system': While criticizing Foucault, however, Mudimbe nevertheless uses his concept of "archaeology" to offer a critique in the rest of the work of various epistemological structures that posit the African as inferior or other. The first of these is missionary discourse, which promotes the spiritual transformation of Africans. Mudimbe asserts that missionary discourse served a crucial role in backing up the expropriation and exploitation of conquered lands with its ideology of civilization and spiritual conversion. Africans are depicted according to a variety of models: they are seen as poor and pagan, or as savages, but their culture is always inferior to the great ideals of Christianity. Even Placide F. Tempels, who lived among the Luba Katanga people in Central Africa for more then ten years, doubts myths of African backwardness while nevertheless promoting a Christian policy for the improvement of African natives. Subsequent philosophers such as Alexis Kagame refine Tempels's study of Bantu philosophy and stress that the latter is "an organized and rational construction': and both conceive African culture as "an original alterity>' to be assessed independently (ibid.: 151). Nevertheless, this school of African philosophy, paradoxically for Mudimbe; emerges from a Western epistemological grid. Mudimbe also comments on the negritude movement, and suggests that although it seeks to establish the sorts of African authenticity that he supports, in the end Sartre's argument that negritude must be part of a dialectic and surpass itself makes sense. Similarly, Mudimbe affirms that Senghor's provisional use both of notions of African tradition, and of Marxist revolution, can be defended precisely because he conceives neither as a permanent system that would ossify into the history of the Same. Mudimbe is sensitive to the ambiguities of certain forms of African knowledge, then, and the chapter on the West Indian observer and commentator E. W. Blyden notes the curious intermingling of colonial ideology with African nativist views. However, the history of knowledge about Africa that Mudimbe tracks in The Invention ofAfrica constantly reveals gaps and blanks, biases and hasty assumptions. He finishes by wondering whether "the discourses of African gnosis do not obscure a fundamental reality, their own chose du texte, the primordial African discourse in all its variety and multiplicity>' (ibid.: 186). This obscured "chose du texte" riames the authenticity that lingers elusively behind the textual artifice. Mudimbe's critique of the political exploitation and ethical silencing of the African other rests on a deep-seated anxiety about the concept ethics with politics?
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of the subject, an anxiety that he theorizes explicitly in Parables and Fables. Mudimbe reads Sartre's reworking of Descartes, and shows how Sartre's concept of self-consciousness severs the Cartesian ego's apparent mastery and self-presence. For Sartre, being is a tension between the in-itself, the brute materiality of existence, and the for~itself,or reflexive consciousness. One understands oneself only as an other, or under the gaze of the other. In addition, Mudimbe cites Rousseau's statement in his Confessions that "in truth, I am not 'me' but the weakest most humble of others" (Mudimbe 1991: xiv). Levi-Strauss in turn allows Rousseau's thinking to inform his conception of ethnology as a confrontation with the stranger that puts the ethnolOgist's very self into question. Mudimbe then notes how in his Mythologiques, Levi-Strauss reveals how "the master-meaning is always discreet, invisible, beyond the apparent rationality and the lOgical constructs of the visible surface" (ibid.: xvi). Anthropology or ethnology will always be circling around this hidden, elusive and unconscious meaning that escapes the secure . framework of the anthropologist's knowledge. In this way, although I Sartre presents consciousness as other to itself, Levi-Strauss goes furi ther, according to Mudimbe, in that he theorizes an unconscious claim I to uncover "hidden forms': as well as shOwing how myths perform a I search for "discreet, unconscious, containing structures" (ibid.:. xvii). i Levi-Strauss also throws into question the position of the anthropologist in relation to the other he analyses. Uneasy about the Western frames of reference to which he adheres here, Mudimbe nevertheless uses these thinkers to argue that the contemplation of African cultures requires a fundamental rethinking of the way in which the subject conceives itself in relation to the other. Like The Invention of Africa, Parables and Fables sifts through a number of forms of African knowledge or "gnosis" in order to pick out the difficulties associated with certain philosophical approaches. In . the course of his analyses Mudimbe distinguishes three methodolOgical groups: anthropological philosophy, which also includes linguistic philosophy; speculative and critical philosophy; which comprises also metaphilosophy; and, finally; Marxist projects. There will not be space here to explore all the thinkers analysed by Mudimbe, but it is worth noting nevertheless his ambivalence towards Marxism. Although he identifies himself as a Marxist intellectual in the extract from Parables and Fables cited above, he is also deeply sceptical of its universalizing tendencies and suggests that the generalization of the Marxist model is another example of the "history of the same'~ Mudimbe's politics may be Marxist, but he also perceives in the application of Marxism 168
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to Mrica an unethical lack of attention to specific African cultural differences. Mudimbe examines the use of Marx in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, for example, and suggests that although in Anti-Oedipus they seek to undermine imperialist forms of history; "they make a move toward a possible universal historicization of individualities by distinguishing types of interpretation of socioeconomic disharmonies" (ibid.: 71). In addition, in a chapter on "Anthropology and Marxist Discourse': Mudimbe offers a critique of Peter Rigby's Persistent Pastoralists (1983), the upshot of which is a further critique of the Marxist method. Mudimbe reads in detail Rigby's study of the llparakuyo people of East Africa, but argues that Rigby conceives the future of the llparakuyo precisely according to the dreams of the rational, Marxist social scientist. More broadly, figures such as Senghor and, indeed, Mudimbe himself, promoted the "dubious acculturation of Marxism in Africa': but the problem was that they thought in the 1960s that '~ca was an absolutely virgin terrain on which we could experiment and succeed in organizing socialist societies" (ibid.: 184). Marxists tend to overlook the question of the specific epistemological roots of their own discourse. Mudimbe's The Idea ofAfrica continues this critique of the creation of Africa as a product ofthe West, and includes further comments both on the political successes of Marxism and on its obfuscation of the African other. This volume also includes examination of myths of Africa reaching as far back as Philostratus's story of Hercules among the pygmies of Libya, and Mudimbe exposes here the association between pygmies and backwardness or straightforward stupidity. Equally; Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1989) portrays the "savage" as a faceless victim, while dictionaries of the sixteenth century baldly use the term '1\.ethiops" to name any dark-skinned person. Mudimbe then notes a change around the 1950s, after which the African becomes an empirical fact to be observed and studied by the anthropologist, although again the tendency remains even now to ~pose various totalizing models (such as that of Marxism) on the unfamiliar other. Furthermore, museum collections of "primitivist" art similarly serve to appropriate African cultures to suit the imagination of the West. Ironically, even local discourses on Africa, an extreme example of which might be Mobutuism, turn on "figures and images, analogies and resemblances in figurative constructions that simulate reality rather than signifying or representing it" (Mudimbe 1994: 145). Almost all the forms of knowledge discussed in Mudimbe's text are ultimately fictions that serve only to silence the subjugated Mrican. ethics with politiCS?
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One of the dangers ofMudimbe's form ofcriticism, like that ofSpivak, is that it can be turned back on itself and denounced for its own failure to attend to the subjugated others it seeks to rescue. D. A. Masolo characterizes Mudimbe's work as deconstructive in its stated resistance to philosophical mastery or totalization, but he goes on to object that "although Mudimbe makes an important contribution to the debate on the creation ofknowledge, he lamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance" (Masolo 1994: 179). This means that Mubimbe may successfully offer a multitude of examples of invented or ideological Africanist representation; he does not offer a constructive alternative. His readings, from this point of view, mask an inability to redefine African culture authentically and on its own terms. Certainly it is true that Mudimbe spends rather more time unravelling the loopholes and identifying the blindspots of existing discourses than he does constructing a concrete image ofAfrican identity to replace these deceptive images. Again, like Spivak, his major achievement is perhaps his perceptive engagement with the philosophical archive, and not the creation of a positivist vision of African subjectivity. However, Masolo's critique also rests on a partial misreading of Mudimbe's use of deconstruction, since the latter's deconstructive project still champions a beliefin African authenticity; and in this search for an independent, African order of knowledge he certainly reaches beyond the forms of questioning proposed for example by Derrida. This authenticity is provocative, moreover, precisely because it is not figured in Mudimbe's thought or in his novels as an identifiable essence, but as a horizon towards which the writer aspires even ifhe will remain unable to reach it. Indeed, the Mrica ofMudimbe's novels is a site of conflict as well as of uncertainty; and he never has recourse to reassuring, nostalgic images of an original homeland or tradition. The Rift, for example, is the story of an African intellectual in Paris on a quest for African knowledge who struggles to find himselfbetween competing discourses of African history, and whose disoriented condition borders on schizophrenia. Just as Spivak seeks a form of subaltern agency while underlining the other's necessary Singularity or intractability, Mudimbe upholds a notion of specific African knowledge while persisting in depicting that knowledge as fragmentary, conflictual and elusive. This elusive but specific knowledge is at the same time what both Marxism and deconstructive ethics ignore. Finally, Mudimbe is another thinker who questions not only political and economic conditions associated with colonialism and its aftermath, but also the ethics of reading, writing and theorizing about the other. 170
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This questioning has a particular resonance in the context of African studies since, as Mudimbe shows, the African is conventionally perceived to be incapable of philosophy and consigned to the status of a savage. It is all the more urgent, then, that the philosopher should locate authentically African forms of knowledge, although the impact of colonialism on Africa is such that the native is never free from its intellectual influence even after the termination of its political grasp. Christopher Miller's study Theories ofAfricans (1990) explores how the very practice of theorizing has been conceived as the exclusive domain of the Westerner' who applies his own structures of knowledge to the African "void" or "blank.': Mudimbe's recommendation for a specifically African epistemology in this way directly answers back to a particularly pernicious set of Africanist stereotypes, even if he remains anxious about how to create this authentic knowledge. In addition, it is perhaps also relevant that Miller goes on to explain that ethics, in the sense of an openness towards the intractable other, is (erroneously) seen to be at odds with any more concrete notion of"ethnos", or an African specificity. Western Marxist thinking promotes an ethics of liberation while glossing over ethnic specificity, and deconstructive ethical thinking promotes attention to infinite otherness while excluding particular others. Mudimbe's work both rescues the African from the myth of philosophical ineptitude, then, and goes some way to promoting what Miller conceives as a necessary interplay between ethics and ethnicity in African studies. This precarious combination, as in Spivak's work, is the result of profound self-consciousness and vigilant attention to the conditions and precepts of postcolonial philosophy, and it is not always clear that Mudimbe is able to follow through his celebration of the specific. His awareness of the multiple requirements of postcolonial African philosophy, including political and ethical requirements, and the need to conceive both a specific African ethnos alongSide an understanding of its ineffability; nevertheless offers a challenge to postcolonial thinking and exposes the limits of its habitual Marxist and deconstructive para9igms.
Achille Mbembe
The work of Achille Mbembe clearly emerges out of an engagement with Mudimbe and, once again, can be seen ostenSibly as both a political and an ethical project. Mbembe was born in Cameroon in 1957, studied history at the Sorbonne and, having worked in various institutions in the United States, is now a senior researcher at the Wits ethics with politics?
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Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. His most famous work, On the Postcolony, was published in English in 2001, and is distinctive among the postcolonial studies discussed here for its focus specifically on political regimes in Africa, after independence, as well as under colonialism. 'This text theorizes contemporary forms of oppression and exploitation in Africa and offers insight into the troubling and persistent force of neocolonialism. Like the work of Spivak and Mudimbe, Mbembe's writing is diverse and eclectic as a result of its engagements both with Marxism and with Derridean deconstruction. His thinking is highly innovative, however, because at the same time it reaches beyond both in its vibrant, almost demonic vision of the injustices of the African postcolony. Recalling Mudimbe, Mbembe's study opens with a critique of prevailing images of the African native as sub-human and, in typically colourful style, the author rails against the "invention" of Africa by the imperialist visions of the West. In order to elucidate his critique, however, Mbembe first dismisses "an outdated Marxist tradition" in favour of a psychoanalytic critique of the construction of the African as Other, only then to lament the absence of a framework with which to conceptualize economic exploitation in the African postcolony (Mbembe 2001: 5). Mbembe's approach promises to fluctuate, then, between reflection on processes of representation and exegesis of the structures of economic oppression. Moving away from Mudimbe's call for an African order of knowledge, however, Mbembe's study of the entangled forces of tyranny in postcolonial Africa offers a vision of resistance that operates only within the repetition or simulation of the ritualistic discourse of power. 'There is no authentic African subjectivity in Mbembe's vision, only the suppressed laughter generated by mimicry of a discourse whose oppressiveness is persistent and unrelenting. 'The first section of On the Postcolony analyses structures of "commandemenf' or governance in Africa and explores the development of these structures in the move from a colonial to a postcolonial regime. Mbembe argues that state sovereignty in the colony rested on the inflation of the right to conquest together with the diminution of the right to debate and discussion. Equally, Mbembe uses Derrida's understanding of the violence of the law to argue that colonial sovereignty was self-creating and self-perpetuating. Founded on an initial order ofviolence, the colonial power then executes asecond order, "to give this order meaning, to justify its necessity and universalizing mission - in short, to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority" (ibid.: 25). A third order follows 172
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that assures the maintenance, the spread and the permanence of the colonial regime. Mbembe uses Derrida here to envisage law as circular or self-generating, and its very self-ratifying structure constitutes an act of ethical violence towards the other. Mbembe then takes as a specific example the notion of the indigenat, which refers to the sped:frc administrative system applied to natives in French colonies before 1945 that rested on the creation of a generalized, subordinated category subjected to particular constraints and punishments. 'The practical mechanics of colonial law, for example the exclusion of the African from citizenship, were in this way fuelled by an unethical homogenization and subjugation of native others. This again stems from the empty, self-fulfilling drive to control, direct and exploit. 'This tyrannical form of state sovereignty was, moreover, appropriated by Africans after decolonization. African traders came to occupy positions as middlemen between colonial firms and consumers and, together with a stratum of well-off planters, finished by perpetuating the old hierarchies after independence. In addition, the new states were formed in such a way as to deny individuals rights as citizens, and Mbembe argues that a structural problem was created because "the act of establishing colonial sovereign authority was never a contract since, strictly speaking, it involved no reciprocity oflegally codified obligations between the state, powerholders, society, and individuals" (ibid.: 42). Public affairs quickly became confused with the use of unbridled violence, because the structures of authority were, as in the colonial model described above, conceived as given. Mbembe goes on to explore the chaotic economic structures of the new regimes, and observes that by the 1970s "the bulk of national wealth was, for all practical purposes, part of the 'eminent domain' of a tyrant acting as a mercenary with state funds and the national treasury" (ibid.: 50). One of the consequences of the economic structural points explored by Mbembe is that African nations are unable to fit into the international division of capital. A stratified labour market, and in some cases the dissolution of the public sector, has also led to deepening poverty. This structure of economic hierarchy and inequality stems, once again, from the violence and circularity of state sovereignty learned during the colonial period. Mbembe's next section examines what he terms the structure of entanglement that perpetuates the violence of postcolonial African regimes. This entanglement names not only the coercion exercised on individuals, but also "a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture, and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised and rationalized" (ibid.: 66). At the centre of this cluster is the notion of ethics with pol itics?
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"private indirect government" and the weakening of state structures, of any notion of "public good': Society is run by coercion, hardly any sector is free from venality and corruption, and a crisis in the taxation system means that there is no longer a necessary bond between the ruler and the ruled. If the principle of taxation rests on the notion that both the state and its citizens mutually owe something to one another, Mbembe observes that in certain African contexts poorly defined borders and the use of taxes to fund an apparatus of coercion have interrupted that principle and have led to the dissolution of the crucial founding notion of common good. The most famous part of Mbembe's analysis, however, must be his vision of the "vulgarity': excess and theatricality of power in the postcolony. Mbembe takes Cameroon as an example of a state in which the "commandement" is constantly ratified by its own rituals and institutionalized "as a fetish to which the subject is bound, and in the subject's deployment of a talent for play, of a sense of fun, that makes him homo ludens par excellence" (ibid.: 104). Power is manifested and disseminated through excessive representation, through pomp and fables, as well as through images of sexual potency. This is equally a regime obsessed with bodily functions and orifices, and the body becomes the site on which power is performed and inscribed. The "commandement" fantasizes its power through images of penetration, hence the obsession with orifices, and phantasms of virility serve to mime state dominance over its subjects. At the same time, however, this excessive performance is an empty simulacrum, whose mimicry allows for subtle shifts and hints of subversion. Mbembe uses Bakhtin to think through the splitting of the image of the simulacrum and its potential opening to a logic of resistance' although this resistance will always itselfbe an empty practice, a performance rather than an affirmation of agency and a call for change. Mbembe argues: People whose identities have been partly confiscated have been able, precisely because there was this simulacrum, to glue back together their fragmented identities. By taking over the signs and language of officialdom, they have been able to remythoIogize their conceptual universe while, in the process, turning the commandement into a sort of zombie. (Ibid.: 11)
If the people can enact passing gestures of resistance, in a manner consistent with Bhabha's theory of mimicry as a subversive performance of at once sameness and difference, however, Mbembe stresses that the 174
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regime will remain one governed by vacuous theatricality and carnival. The state can be de-authorized through the repetition of its own symboIs of ratification, but this undermining does not alter the practice of performance and excess on which the regime continues to rely. Mbembe's study goes on to develop this exploration of representation as a mask through an examination of cartoon images of the autocrat. The text pushes the analysis of the tyranny of representation in the postcolony perhaps furthest, however, in the chapter "Out of the World': Here Mbembe examines the function of annihilation and oblivion in modern and contemporary discourse on Africa, offering a vision of terrifying emptiness beneath the simulacra discussed above. In a manner that recalls Spivak's analysis of HegeYs misapprehension of Hindu culture, Mbembe explores the Hegelian image of Africa as "a vast tumultuous world of drives and sensations, so tumultuous and opaque as to be practically impossible to represent, but which words must nevertheless grasp and anchor in pre-set certainty" (ibid.: 176). Hegel explores an African verbal economy in which language is a discordant cacophony adrift from referentiality, a swarm of noise and energy that covers only a void. Mbembe notes also how HegeYs Negro is indolent and untrustworthy, and HegeYs words become the arch example of colonial discourse in their reduction of the African native to a facelessness that borders on inhumanity. Like Fanon, Mbembe also comments on HegeYs dialectic between the master and the slave and the mutual recognition of self-consciousness, and he notes that the Negro in Hegel is in fact deprived of this self-consciousness and consigned to the status of an animal. Even more disturbingly, Mbembe goes on to ask what effects this discourse leaves in the postcolony: "what death does one die 'after the colony'?" (ibid.: 197). If the Negro was annihilated by colonial discourse, in what form does he survive if he is living "when the time to die has passed"? (ibid.: 201). Laughter, for Mbembe, serves as a possible response to this oblivion, but the analysis ends with a disturbing reflection on the dislocation or dismemberment of any stable notion of existence in the postcolony. Mbembe's study concludes by calling for the affirmation of free will, but the book's immersion in the tyranny of language as performance gives little sense of how that freedom might be achieved. It can easily be objected that Mbembe's analysis in On the Postcolony is both somewhat hyperbolic and extraordinarily generalized. The very term "postcolony" is a somewhat abstract notion, and critics have suggested that Mbembe's study would benefit from further attention to the historical specificity of particular regimes. Like Mudimbe, Mbembe can ethics with politics?
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also be accused of feeding off the very Western discourses he contests in his own use of Derrida, Foucault and Bakhtin. Indeed, Mbembe is apparently less openly self-aware than Mudimbe in his espousal of theories and philosophies created in the West. In addition, it is perhaps disturbing that Mbembe does not question whether the slave's capacity for revolt in Hegel might provide the Mrican with a model for selfassertion, and much of the work suggests that there is no clear road to liberation for the dehumanized African. The deconstruction of state power through subversive mimicry is certainly not presented as a coherent strategy for change. If Mbembe deliberately sets out to undermine i conventional and facile oppositions between resistance and passivity, the liberatory tactics he does recommend do not provide an identifiable path to emancipation. While it should be conceded that Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe all hold back from offering the sorts of emancipatory vision to be found in Fanon or Gandhi, however, this is perhaps a necessary testimony to the perpetuation of yet more forms of oppression after decolonization. The most militant and politicized philosophers explored in this book write : in the lead-up to independence, and the more anxious, ambivalent and troubled work of thinkers such as Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe suggests that the end of colonial or neocolonial oppression is neither imminent nor easily conceived. With Spivak and Mudimbe, Mbembe implies that postcolonial criticism requires both the denunciation of political and economic inequality, be it in terms that are clearly Marxist or post-Marxist, and an awareness of the tyrannical forms and structures of representation working on postcolOnial societies in diverse ways. Furthermore, if the international division oflabour, or the newly oppressive regimes apparent in some parts of postcolonial Africa, institute forms of inequality that these thinkers all vilify, the systematic and total overthrow of such structures emerges as difficult to imagine. The ethical critique of the violence of representation is, then, the most significant strategy by which these thinkers construct their postcolonial critique, and if Mbembe moves furthest from any claim to subaltern agency or authenticity, he perhaps comes closest to communicating the horrors of a neocolonial discourse that uses representation or performance to back up its regime of tyran.."'1y and violence. He may merely shake without crumbling the edifice of authority's simulacrum, but he also reminds us all too lUCidly of the power of representation when abused to the extreme in a world still ravaged by postcolOnial oppression.
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Key points
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.•. i
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• Spivak's work draws on both Marxism and poststru~turalist ethics. Her readings of Marx tend to focus on textual slippages and moments of ambivalence, as she explores, for example, the indeterminacy in his notion of value. This form of reading is itself deconstructive, and yet Spivak also criticizes the blindspots of Derrida's engagement with Marx. One ofSpivaKS key concepts is the "subaltern" or native info~ ant. Her works denounce the ways in which subaltern women ill particular have been silenced, and she shows how their voices echo between the lines of Western philosophy and literature. Her work is also distinctive for its self-consciousness, and she constantly reminds readers of her own complicity with the imperialism she sets out to undermine. • Mudimbe's work consists in a political and ethical critique of ''Africanism: Mudimbe vilifies both the mechanics of the colonial project and the forms of knowledge that support it. He ar~es that knowledge about Mricans has often incorporated them mto the "history of the Same': He calls for a more authentic form of African knowledge, while admitting that this authenticity is difficult to attain. • Mbembe criticizes the way in which colonial law homogenizes and subjugates the native, but he also denounces the violence of African regimes in the postcolony. He reveals how these regimes are characterized by excess, vulgarity and theatricality, and how they also disallow resistance. His analysis is testimony to the difficulty of overcoming both colonial and postcolonial violence.
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eight
Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline
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This book has attempted to demonstrate that postcolonialism is a set of at times overlapping and at times distinct strategies aimed at undermining colonialism, as well as wider forms of imperialist subjugation. Postcolonial philosophy is a complex intermingling of political and ethical thinking, and theorists such as Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe show how an understanding of both empirical and discursive struci tures. of op~ression is necessary for the establishment of a critique. If ~e~da pornts out that ethics and politics require the deployment of different sets of concepts (he argues that the former insists on absolute openness while the latter requires the creation of norms and rules), most of the thinkers assessed in this study engage at least to some extent with both levels. Nevertheless, the split among readers of postcolOnial thought remains palpable. "Materialists" such as Parry an~ Lazarus tum away from the "textualism" of Bhabha or Spivak, while mo:-e "deconstructionist" thinkers such as Syrotinski or Philip Leon.ard IIllpl! that the ethical reading strategies recommended by Dernda and hIS followers must be embraced before political liberation can occur. Certainly, Glissant's work indicates that there should be a ~istinct space for cultural and aesthetic postcolonial experimentation, and when the ethics of relationality is explored through literature and art it is clear that it should not have to submit to a clear political agenda. But I hope to have shown that, despite the hostility accompanying debates among postcolonial readers, postcolOnial ethics and . politics remain a more or less anxious coupling detectable from Fanon to Mbembe. 178
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Despite the efforts of philosophers, critics and intellectuals, however, neo-imperialist oppression remains formidable long after many colonies achieved independence. The need for postcolonial questioning did not disappear with the decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, contemporary power structures are perhaps all the more pervasive because they are insidious. Glissant's work on Martinique, for example, demonstrates that although national liberation is becoming less and less viable, the hierarchies and inequalities characteristic of the colonial regime in its heyday are far from extinct in the French Overseas Departments and Regions today. Mbembes horrifying exegesis of the African postcolony, although abstract, suggests that the drive for power originally exhibited by the colonizer is now pushed to excess by local leaders and tyrants in countries such as Cameroon. Moreover, Spivak reminds us that global capitalism and the international division of labour have entrenched the subjugation and exploitation initiated by colonialism and, even more, this neo-imperialist economic oppression is supported by Western academics blind to the experiences of the subaltern others to whom they claim to attend. Western thinkers rely on technologies produced in the Third World and ignore the exploitation on which the production of these technologies rests, while at the same time risking ventriloquizing for the other in their academic work. Lastly, commentators on postcolonial Latin America such as Jose Carlos Mariategui serve to demonstrate to critics of British and French neocolonialism just how long after independence the effects of imperialist domination persist. Mariategui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality explores the ways in which Peru is still, even after emancipation in 1824, corrupted by the sin of conquest, because the bourgeoisie, propped up by foreign investors, remains in control of banks and industry. The Spanish conquistadors destroyed an abundant and progressive Inca society, and Mariategui insists, at least at the time of publication in 1927, that the feudal economy that the colonialists instituted has not been overthrown or replaced. Neocolonialism can be seen to operate in three principal ways that can be sketched briefly in this conclusion. First, the inaugural president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, vilifies the persistence of colonial domination in the immediate aftermath of decolonization. In Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah explains that "the essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside' (1965: ix). African neocolonial states depend on foreign capital, but that capital is conclusion
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· not used for the development oflocal initiatives and instead entrenches the exploitation of the poor. International capital controls. the world market, at the expense of local regeneration. Furthermore, Nkrumah argues that neocolonialism is pernicious because it executes power without assuming responsibility; it is an insidious ideology that seeks · to serve the interests only of developed countries. '~d': for example, · merely increases the debt of 1hird World countries, and specifically , military aid also stalls rather than promotes development since sooner : or later weapons fall into the hands of the opponents of the neocolonial regime and war perpetuates the ex-colony's misery. The only way in •which the African ex-colonies can attempt to resist this powerful and •omnipresent force, however, is to assert African unity. Nkrumah argues ,that: it is only when artificial boundaries are broken down so as to prOvide for viable economic units, and ultimately a single African unit, that Africa will be able to develop industrially for her own sake and ultimately for the sake of a healthy world (Ibid.: 25) economy. However, although Nkrumah's vision of pan-African union, influenced ;by Marxism, was politically ambitious, Young points out that his thiukmg lacked an understanding of the economic unity that might have helped African development in the wake of colonialism. Even more, :Mudimbe notes that once he was in power Nkrumah's rhetoric started to ring hollow and he became something of a dictator; he certainly failed to put his ideals into practice. It is nevertheless significant for ¥1y current purposes that in the wake of independence neocolonial,sm was conceived by Nkrumah as the ongoing dominance of foreign ~conomic power over African regeneration. Moreover, Mbembe's study f economics in the postcolony suggests that this foreign influence still '\Vields power today. i Secondly, it is noteworthy that Nkrumah's, and later Spivak's, concep~on of the power ofinternational capital has been seen by Michael Hardt ~d Antonio Negri to have been transformed more recently into a new, rpagisterial form of "Empire': This "Empire': according to Hardt and J'jJegri, is quite distinct from colonialism as settlement, as well as from C11d forms of imperialism that still rely on a notion of state sovereignty. 'Ibis new system of Empire has emerged with the decline in the power of the nation state and can be seen as an alternative form of sovereignty "composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united
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under a single logic of rule" (Hardt & Negri 2000: xii). Empire from this point of view is decentred and deterritorialized: it manifests itself as a network of power and does not originate in a single source (this is not a name for the diffuse power held over the rest of the world by the United States). The force of Empire transcends the borders between nations, as well as divisions between the First, Second and 1hird Worlds, and also signals the decline of factory labour in favour of "communicative, cooperative, and affective labour" (ibid.: xiii). Moreover, its processes of globalization bring new economic structures but also regulate social life and human nature itself by means of its regime ofbiopower. Although Empire names a new order of global domination, however, it is not a monolith and its multiple branches and processes may also, according to Hardt and Negri, trigger the invention of new democratic forms. Empire presents itself as a broad totality outside history, but the authors of this provocative study nevertheless argue that the movements of "the multitude': the poor and disenfranchised, against this apparently transcendent system of Empire might bring alternative, more liberated structures of organization. For Hardt and Negri, then, the sorts of postcolOnial criticism offered by thinkers such as Bhabha engage with old forms of colonialism ~d imperialism. Bhabha rails against the binary divisions that pit colomzer against colonized, but Hardt and Negri show how the hybridities he champions as an alternative are themselves part of this new structure of Empire. This structure has already moved away from the divisions that Bhabha spends his time challenging, and wields its power in a postmodern, multifaceted but global form through institutions such as those of international law, the United Nations (UN) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank. While old forms of colonialism revolve around a notion of difference, Hardt and Negri stress that Empire is, on the contrary, blind to difference: "all are welcome within its boundaries, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth" (ibid.: 198). Having accomplished this gesture of assimilation, Empire is, in a second movement, capable of recognizing difference, but this must be cultural difference rather than political. This form of difference is accepted because it can nevertheless be controlled, in a third movement, by Empire's all-encompassing embrace: "the triple imperative of Empire is incorporate, differentiate, manage" (ibid.: 201). Furthermore, in this new structure of Empire migration occurs ona massive scale, but while population movements might have the potential to work against conclusion
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the controlling grasp of Empire, often they lead in the end to further disenfranchisement and poverty. It is in this mobility that Hardt and Negri detect a force for the dismantling of Empire, but the manner in which ~e mul~tude might practically organize itself so as to challenge the dommant sItes of power remains elusive in this new, smoothed-out order of global capital. Hardt and Negri's text is an extraordinarily bold endeavour to rewrite Marxist theory for the twenty-first century, and it has been highly influen?c:I. ~owever, it has also been criticized for its abstract jargon and its pnvilegmg of buzzwords such as "deterritorialization" and "hybridity" over concrete economic analYSis. Slavoj ZiZek comments that the notion of "global citizenship" that Hardt and Negri offer as a force of resistance to ~mpire is hopelessly impractical, since it implies literally the eradicatio~ of state ~orders. Certainly, if Hardt and Negri intend to update Ma.na.st analYSIS for the postmodern, post-imperialist era, their writ: ing lac~ elucidation of the sorts of workable revolutionary strategies ~ound ill Marx or Gramsci Although they argue that the new capital:. Ism of Empire is vulnerable to attack from the forces of the multitude they fail to offer a properly political account of how that attack migh~ take place. In addition, in his review of Empire published in the New Left Review in 2000, Gopal Balakrishnan suggests that Hardt and Negri ! underplay the significant role played by the United States in the control : of global capital in their inflation of the postmodern, deterritorializa: ti?n of Empire. More broadly, Hardt and Negri somewhat prematurely i dIagnose the end of old power structures in their argument that the •smooth force field ofEmpire replaces the "striations" of imperialism, its .reliance on hierarchies of sovereignty. As Paul Gilroy (2005) has shown, :the recent. rhetOric of "security" has in fact strengthened again the power [of the nation state. The text of Empire is as a result rather closer to the labstract, postmodern creativity of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand 'flateaus ~an to ~tant Marxism, and dismisses perhaps rather swiftly :the potentially lingering effects of old forms of neo-imperialism. The work deserves mention here, however, because it signals at least the peginnings ofa shift in the workings ofimperialism beyond the confines ~f the nation state. : The third approach to neocolonialism pertinent here refers to the very diSCipline of postcolonial studies. It is perhaps rather strong to denouncepostcolOnialism necessarily as a function of neocolOnialism, but radical Marxists such as AlImad and Dirlik nevertheless lament the c~~licity of postcolOnial academics in the West with capitalism, and vilify the postmodernist celebration of postcolOnial cultures as a 182
commodification of otherness. Ahmad perceives postcolonial theo~ a "marketplace of ideas" adrift from real political and econonnc as questions of inequality and oppression (Ahmad ~992: 70) . For D.lik . IT , postcolomalism is "a discourse that seeks to constitute the world ill ~e self-image of intellectuals who view themselves (or have come to VIew themselves) as postcolonial intellectuals" (1994: 339) and, like Ahmad, Dirlik goes on to argue that the focus on culture obfuscates. sp~ci:fic material conditions. Both commentators believe that postcolomal mtellectuals' lack of attention to global capitalism means that they obfuscate the oppressive structures they set out to critiqu~. Huggan's. more nuanced study The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) emphaSIZes that thIS s~rt of criticism might apply to some, but certainly not all, postcolomal thinkers and, indeed, we have already seen that Spivak is ~ighly a:ware of the potential complicity of academic study with the illternatlOnal division of labour. For Huggan, the danger lies rather in the broader, global commodification of cultural difference. Postcoloniali~ tips over into a sort of neocolonial exoticism, then, not merely when Its proponents draw on culture and theory, but when its consumers fail to read postcolonial texts properly. In Huggan's tenns, this is: when creative writers like Salman Rushdie are seen, despite their cosmopolitan background, as representa~ves of 1hir~ World countries; when literary works like Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1958) are gleaned, despite therr: fictional status, for the anthropological infonnation they proVIde; wh~n academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, de~plte their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashio~ able study of cultural otherness. (2001: vn) An exoticism complicit with neocolonialism occurs precisely through the misinformed and careless treatment of literary texts. These sorts of observations paint a rather pessimistic view of the discipline, and the problems associated with Hardt and Negri's work, together with Huggan's denunciation of .the ph~nomenon ~f cultural commodification, suggest that there remams a failure amon~ m~ellectu als to engage with the structures and mechanics ofpostcolomal mequality as it manifests itself in the present. The process of decolonization produced militants such as Fanon and Gandhi, but more recent calls for liberation and equality lack that precision of focus perhaps beca~se the forces of oppression are now rather more insidious, diffuse ~d ~ifficult to pin down. The aporias ofDerrida's thinking around colomalism and
understanding postcolonialism conclusion
183
ethnocentris~ t~stify to
a.struggle between different forms of critique, and the eclectICIsm of SPIvak or Mudimbe equally betrays a restlessness and an anxiety concerning the tools necessary for emancipation and ch~ge. The return to a form of humanism in many thinkers is compelling, but it also signals a reliance on old categories rather than the ~ve~tion of a n~w idiom. Political science may well be equipped to ?mpomt the workings and effects of globalization, but postcolonial philosophy c~ntinues to struggle to come up with broader conceptual models of reSIstance to postcolonial and neocolonial domination. , Finally, h~wever, ~espite the uneasiness that persists in the discipline ~f postcol~mal studies, what many thinkers writing after decoloniza, tion share IS a commitment to careful reading and writing. Unlike the . c?nsumers to whom Huggan refers, the philosophers explored here are I ngo~ous readers, a~entive to the ways in which colonial power is played , out m the production, diffusion and consumption of texts. It is perhaps : not the role ofpostcolonial philosophers to herald new political regimes, , then, but rather to use their reading strategies to undermine the violent, ~ masterful and ethnocentric modes of thinking that lie at the foundations of imperialist and neo-imperialist ideology. These discourses of postcolonial. violence enact both political and ethical injustice, and although reSIstance to such injustice may be conceived in neo-Marxist, ! deco~struct!ve, Levinasian or even humanist terms, the philosophical Iand di~cursive core of that injustice must be denounced. Said, Bhabha Iand SPIVak, for example, are united in their careful exegeses of the blindinesses and errors of the colonial discourses they read and, although their lap~roaches ~iffer, their critique relies on this attention to the ways in Iwhich colomal knowledge is created in language and disseminated in [texts. In a~~ition, postcolonial philosophy offers new modes of writing [that are VIgilant towards the potential assumptions and biases of the !critic. To a greater or lesser extent, all the postcolonial thinkers explored :here learn from their own subtle reading strategies and engender on !that basis an alternative mode of theorizing that resists temptations of IIDastery and assimilation. From Said and the Subaltern Studies Collecpve ~oug~ ~o Derrida and Spivak, postcolonial philosophers express F the:r wnting a lucidity, and at times an acute anxiety, in relation to their own project that stems from an unprecedented awareness of ~e ethics of theorizing itself. This anxiety may rightly be conceived to lillpede direct political action, and should perhaps be surpassed in the ~ture by a more affirmative mode of discourse, but at the time of writ~g it ne-:ertheless testifies to a new openness in philosophical language 'l-ppropnate to the demands of postcolonialism.
Keypornts
• Nkrumah conceived neocolonialism as the ongoing dominance of foreign economic power over African regeneration. • For Hardt and Negri, the old imperialism has been replaced by "Empire": a diffuse network of power operating beyond the borders of the nation state. "Empire" is linked to the economic and political forces of globalization and is propagated through organizations such as the IMP, the World Bank, NATO and the UN. • Critics such as Dirlik suggest that postcolonial studies itself as a discipline is complicit with neocolonialism. Huggan argues more specifically that postcolonial studies have created a new "exotic" that celebrates literatures from the colonies and ex-colonies but that elides their historical specificities. • The future of postcolonial studies remains uncertain, but the anxiety now inherent in the discipline in itself reflects a useful vigilance with regard to processes of representation, to the challenges of reading and writing about cultural difference in the current postcolonial context.
conclusion 184
understanding postcolonialism
185
three Decolonization, community, nationalism: Ga'ndhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective
Questions for discussion and revision
L 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Why does Gandhi vilify modern civilization? How does Gandhi define Indian civilization? What do you understand by the term "satyagraha"? What does Gandhi mean by "Swaraj"? How does Nandy understand the psychology of colonialism? How does Nandy use Gandhi's thought? What were the main objectives of the Subaltern Studies Collective? Why does Chatterjee conceive the Indian nation as ambivalent?
four Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism
one Introduction L 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
What is the difference between colonialism and imperialism? What is the difference between postcolonialism and postcoloniality? In what ways was Marx ambivalent in his attitude to colonialism? How does Marx's theory of ideology inform more recent forms of postcolonial thought? How is Gramscls notion of hegemony distinct from Marx's concept ofideology? Define the Levinasian concepts of Totality and Infinity. What aspects of Levinas's thought can be used to offer a critique of colonialism? How does Levinas conceive the relation between politics and ethics?
L How does Foucault theorize the position of the minorities or marginalized subjects in both Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish? 2. How does Foucault conceive the effect of power on the construction of the individual subject? 3. What criticisms were levelled against Foucault's conceptions of power and subjectivity? 4. How does Said define Orientalism? 5. How was Said's Orientalism criticized? 6. How does Said.'sapproach differ in Culture and Imperialism and in Orientalism? 7. What does Said mean by the term "contrapuntal"? 8. What are the basic tenets of Said's humanism?
five Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics L What examples does Derrida offer ofthe ethnocentrism ofWestern philoso-
two Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms L How does Fanon configure the relation between black and white in Black Skin, White Masks? 2. How does Fanon use and critique psychoanalytic models in his analysis of colonialism? 3. Analyse Fanon's use of the term "negro". 4. In what sense is Fanon's thought ethical? 5. What does it mean if the colonial structure is "Manichaean"? 6. How does Fanon respond to the politics of nationalism? 7. How does Sartre conceive the role of negritude? 8. How does Sartre position the colonizer in relation to the colonized? 186
understanding postcolonialism
phy? 2. How does Derrida conceive the relation between language and colonialism? 3. How does Derrida conceive the relation between the universal, the specific and the singular? 4. What is the relation between politics and ethics in Derrida's thought? 5. How does Bhabha conceive the role of theory? 6. What does Bhabha mean by the "Third Space"? 7. How does Bhabha explore the notion of ambivalence in colonial discourse? 8. In what ways is Bhabha's recent writing on minority rights more politicized than the former work?
questions for discussion and revision
187
six Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
How does Khatibi describe his "pensee autre" of the Maghreb? In what ways does Khatibi draw on both poststructuralism and Marxism? What does Khatibi perceive as the effects ofhilingualism? How is Khatibi's thought at once ethical and political? What is the difference between "history" and "History" in Glissant's thinking?
6. What are the diverse features that make up the notion of"Antillanitr? 7. What does Glissant conceive as the ultimate aim of Caribbean Discourse? 8. Describe the form of cultural production recommended in The Politics of Relation.
Guide to further reading
seven Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe 1. How does Spivak read Marx? 2. How does Spivak criticize existing accounts of the Hindu immolation of widows? 3. In what ways does Spivak draw on Derrida? 4. Examine the importance of gender in Spivak's Critique of Postcolonial Reason. 5. What sorts of African "gnosis" does Mudimbe vilify? 6. What, for Mudimbe, is the best way to offer resistance to the deluded discourses of Africanism? 7. How does Mbembe theorize the operation of power in the postcolony? 8. What, for Mbembe, are the available forms of postcolonial resistance?
eight Conclusion 1. How is neocolonialism defined by Nkrumah, by Hardt and Negri, and by
Huggan? 2. How might postcolonialism divorce itself from neocolonialism? 3. What does postcolonialism tell us about the power of representation? 4. Can postcolOnial ethics and politics be reconciled?
one Introduction There are several introductions to postcolonialism that might complement the present study. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (1993), edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, contains many key essays. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back (1989) is one ofthe first introductions to postcolonial literature, followed by Elleke Boehmer's Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004), edited by Neil Lazarus, updates some of this earlier work. Ania Loombas ColonialismlPostcolonialism (1998) is an introduction to postcolonial culture and thought, and Ato Quayson's Postcolonialism (2000) offers an interesting take on the practice endorsed by the discipline of postcolonial studies. Robert Young's comprehensive Postcolonialism (2001) is a long and highly detailed exploration of colonial history and postcolOnial thought. Young's book includes the best introduction to Marx's views on colonialism, and the slim volume by Marx and Engels On Colonialism (1960) presents a series of extracts in which the philosophers comment on colonialism. A lucid introduction to Levinas in general is Colin Davis's Levinas {1996). Howard Caygill's Levinas and the Political (2002) provides a detailed summary of his engagement with National Socialism and totalitarianism.
two Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms The two important works by Fanon are Black Skin, White Masks (1968) and The Wretched ofthe Earth (1967). The best guide to Fanon's work is Nigel Gibson, Frantz Fanon (2003). David Macey's biography Frantz Fanon (2000) helps to situate his work in the context ofhis career and political activism. Ato Sekyi-Oto's book Fanon's 1;88
understanding postcoioniatism further reading
189
·Dialectic oJExperience (1996) offers a detailed reading of the philosophical under,pinnings of his work, and Lewis Gordon, D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White's edited collection Fanon (1996) includes essays on a variety of aspects of his thought. Sartre's Orphee noir (1948b) presents his views on negritude, and the volume Colonialism and Neocolonialism (2001) offers a useful survey of Sartre's writing on coloinialiSm. Young's White Mythologies (1990) situates Sartre in relation to the broader ihistory of colonialism and postcolonialism in twentieth-century thought.
three Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies Collective
deconstruction in White Mythologies and in the essay "Deconstruction and the Postcolonial" (2000). Michael Syrotinski's Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (2007) contains exposition not only ofDerridas relation with postcolonialism but also that of deconstruction more broadly, as does Philip Leonard's Nationality between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory (2005). Homi Bhabhis key work is the volume The Location oj Culture (1994). An example of his .recent writing on rights is "On Writing Rights" (2003). Criticism of Bhabha is abundant, but good examples are again Young's White Mythologies and Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Theory. Young's Colonial Desire (1995) is an intriguing study of the notion of hybridity, used by Bhabha. David Huddart's Homi K. Bhabha (2005) is a useful summary of Bhabhas thought, also containing discussion of the recent work on minority rights.
IA useful selection of Gandhi's writing can be found in The Essential Gandhi (1962), land his An Autobiography or The Story oj My Experiments with Truth (1982) ~ogether with Hind Swaraj (1997) also clarify his intellectual development and key fdeas. Dennis Dalton's Mahatma Gandhi (1993) explores Gandhi's life and work, Fd ~hikhu Parekh'~ Gandhi~ Politica~ Philosophy (1989) concentrates specifically pn his thought. Ashis Nandys The IntImate Enemy (1983) is the principal text for ptudy used here. Nandy has tended to be under-studied, but Young's Postcolonialism j::ontains some commentary on his work. For more information on the Subaltern ~tudies Group, the best place to start is the journal Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha iJnd Gayatri Spivak's volume Selected Subaltern Studies (1988) provides a useful i:Jverview, and Guhas Dominance without Hegemony (1997) and Chakrabarty's Prorincializing Europe (2000) expand on the journal's mission.
four Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism
six Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place Khatibi's work is not widely translated, but Maghreb pluriel (1983) is the key volume for an understanding of his thinking on postcolonialism. There is also little criticism ofKhatibi in English, but Reda Bensmalas Experimental Nations, or, The Invention oj the Maghreb (2003) contains a chapter on Khatibi and multilingualism. Walter Mignolo champions Khatibi in Local Histories, Global Designs (2000). Glissant's Caribbean Discourse (1989) and The Poetics oj Relation (1997c) are key theoretical texts by Glissant available in English. Celia Britton's Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory (1999) offers a sophisticated reading of his novels as well as his theory, and J. Michael Dash provides an overview in Edouard Glissant (1995). Chris Bongie's Islands and Exiles (1998) situates him in relation to Caribbean and Creole culture more broadly; and Peter Hallward offers a provocative critique of Glissant in Absolutely Postcolonial (2001).
Relevant works by Michel Foucault include Madness and Civilisation (200la), The
~rchaeology oJKnowledge (2001b), Disclipline and Punish (1991) and PowerlKnow~edge (1980). Ann Laura Stoler's Race and the Education oj Desire (1995) is the
?nly full volume devoted to the links between Foucault's thought and questions of folonialism. Edward Said's volumes Orientalism (1995) and Culture and Imperialjsm (1993) are his most frequently cited interventions into postcolonialism. Most mtroductions to postcolonialism contain detailed commentary on Said, but good ~xamples include Young's White Mythologies and Bart Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial theory (1997). There is also a useful collection edited by Michael Sprinker entitled J?dward Said (1992). Bryan Turner's Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism ~1994) develops Said's thinking in the context of globalization.
I
! five Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics Derridas OJGrammatology (1976) outlines his critique of ethnocentrism, while The Monolingualism oj the Other (1998) contains specific commentary on colonialism in Algeria Young has signalled the importance of postcolonialism to Derridean 190
understanding postcoionialism
seven Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe Spivak is a prolific writer, but a lot of her thinking is condensed in the volume A Critique oJPostcolonialReason (1999). The famous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) is also a useful place to start, and The Spivak Reader (1996c) contains many key essays. Young's White Mythologies and Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Theory contain intelligent readings of Spivak, and more critical viewpoints can be found in Benita Parry's Postcolonial Studies (2004) and in Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (1992). Mark Sanders's Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2006) is a clear, synoptic introduction. Key works by Mudimbe include The Invention ojAfrica (1988) and Parables and Fables (1991). The best reading ofMudimbe can be found in Syrotinski's Singular Performances (2002). Mbembe's important text is On the Postcolony (2001), and there is a chapter on Mbeme in Syrotinski's Deconstruction and the PostcoloniaL
further reading
191
eight Conclusion: neocoloniaJism and the future of the discipline The key work by Kwame Nkrumah on neocolonialism is Neo-colonialism (1965). Young's Postcolonialism also contains summary of Nkrumah's career. Hardt and · Negri's provocative volume is Empire (2000), followed up by Multitude (2004). Both : are long, detailed explorations of the authors' controversial theory. ArifDirlik's The · Postcolonial Aura (1997) offers a critique of the neocolonialism ofpostcolonial studies, and Graham Huggan's The Postcolonial Exotic (2D01) explores the marketing • of postcolonial literature. Another provocative article on the commercialization • of postcolonial studies is Chris Bongie's "Exiles on Main Stream" (2003). David Scott's Refashioning Futures (1999) is a more general exploration of the future of postcolonial thought.
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198
understanding postcolonialism
Index
aesthetics 140,142, 148, 149, 160 Africa colonialism in 54, 152 neocolonialism in 180, 185 postcolonial 17l-7,179 representations of 91,164-77 and sexuality 117 and slavery 137 African-American Black Power Movement 26 African identity and heritage 41, 43-7, 93, 136,164-77 Africanism 164,177,188 African rhythm 46 agency female 64, 156, 157 and the masses/the subaltern 39, 69, 70,137,138,147,170,176 native 122-3 political 12, 14,39,116,122,151,158 and the subject 82, 94, 103 ahimsa 62, 72 Ahmad,A. 6,15,88,90,182,183,191 Algeria 3,25-8,35-8,41-55,94,98-100, 103-7,112, l25, 131, 144, 151, 190 Algerian War of Independence 25, 94, 100,103 alienation and the blackman 26-30 and the colonizer 44, 49 and the Jew 105, 107, 125 andlanguage 50,104,128,132, 135 and Orientalism 87
political 46 psychoanalytic 26-7,52,117 Alloula, M. 96 Althusser, 1. 13-14, 81 Anderson,B. 72,116 androcentrism 95-6 anthropology 85,102-3,158,166,168 antillanite 138-40, 150, 188 Arabs 86,89,94,128-35,149 archaeology 76-81,166,190 Austen, J. 93-4, 96 Baroque art 144-5 Barthes, R. 132, 135, 161 Baudelaire, C. 144 Bennington, G. 111 Berber 128 Berque, J. 130-31,149 Bhabha, H. 14,22,27,32,35,57,68-9,90, 98-9,103,113-25,126,149,151,152, 174,178,181,184,190-91 Bhagavad Gita 57,60,61,160 bilingualism 22, 127, 128, 130-35, 136, 141, 149, 188 biopower 79, 181 BoerWar 58 Bongie, C. 4, 148, 191 bourgeoiSie 6,8-10,14,38,40,48,52,55, 61,7l Britton,C. 27,149,191 Bronte, C. 160 Cabral, A. 40 index
199
calligraphy 128, 131, 133-4 Camus, A 43, 94, 97 Capeda, M. 32 capitalism and colonialism 2,3,5,8,9, 10, 14, 15, 24,54,70 European 44 global 153,155,179,182,183 and modern dvilization 55,59,60 and postmodernism 161, 182 struggle against 11, 27, 60 i Caribbean 27,30,31,33,34,91,126,127, 135-50,151,188,191 Caygill, H. 18, 189 Cesaire, A 15, 33, 94, 136-9 Chakrabarty; D. 68-70,190 chaos-monde 146-7,150 I Chateaubriand 87-8 , Chatterjee, P- 54, 55, 57, 68, 69, 7l-3, 94, 187,190 : i Chow,R 104 , Coetzee, J. M. 161 I colonial discourse 14,22,76-97,107, 113-25,135,157,161,175,184,187 ! colonial ideology 24-6, 36-7, 40, 65-6, I 100,101 ! Comad, J- 92-4, 97 creolite 139-41 Critchley; S. 108,111-12 Dash, J. M. 147 : Deleuze, G. 82,143,155,156,169,182 I Derrida, J. 98-113,178,183,184,187, 188,190-91 andBhabha 114,115,119,121,122, 124-5 and Foucault 82-3 and Glissant 135-6,143,148,149 and Khatibi 126-8, 130, 133 and Levinas 20-23 andMbembe 176-7 and Sartre 50-51 and Spivak 151-5,157,159,161-5, I 170,173 i Devi, M. 161 : dialectic 27,28,32, 34,44,46,47,49,51, i 52,64,146,153,167,125 i Diaspora 22, 106 : Djebar, A. 96 ,deconstruction 22, 52, 100, 103, 108, 112, 115,121,127, 130,149,151,161, 170-72, 176, 178, 191 departmentalization 138 Descartes, R 83, 168
200
understanding postcolonial ism
Dirlik, A 15, 182, 183, 185, 192 dispossession 50, 105-7, 138, 147 Eagleton, T. 10,162 East India Company 7,8, 7l, 156, 161 equal rights 123 exotidsm 88-9, 136, 183 exotidzation 5 exploitation 3, 4, 6-15, 24, 44, 48, 49, 60, 63,69,74,84, 98-9, 137, 152, 154, 167,172,179-80 Egypt 85-7 ethnidty 81, 17l ethnocentrism 22,81, 98,100-107,110, 113, 115, 125, 130, 157, 166, 184, 187,190 Fanon,F. 14,23,25-35,77,112,151,164, 183,186,189-90 and Bhabha 116, 118, 121, 123, 124 and Gandhi 54-7,61,63,64,68,74 and Glissant 139,144 and Khatibi 129 andMbembe 175,176,178 and Nandy 65-6 and Said 84, 94, 96, 97, 98 and Sartre 35-53 femininity 67, 88 Flaubert, G. 85,87-9 Forster, E. M. 94,118 Foucault, M. 14-15, 7l, 76-83, 84-6, 89-92, 95, 97, 98, 116,124, 126, 128, 130,152,155,156,164-7,176,187, 190 Fuss,D. 27 Gandhi,L 70 Gandhi, M. 54-64,98,112, 164, 176, 183, 187,190 and Nandy 65-8 and the Subaltern Studies Collective 69-72,74 gender 32,96,122,127,152,181,188 Gilroy, P- 182 Glissant, E. 22,126-7,135-50,151,178, 179,199,191 Gramsci, A 11-14,85,182,186 Guattari, E 143, 155, 156, 169, 182 Guha, R 12, 68-7l, 80, 95, 122, 123, 190 Haddour, A. 103 Hall, S. 11-12 Hallward, P- 147-8,162-3,191
Hardt, M. 180-82 Hassoun, J. 135 Hegel, G. W E 32,47,49,52, 101, 130, 146,159-60,175-6 Heidegger, M. 16,17,20,109 Hinduism 55, 57,60-63, 156, 175, 188, 190 Huggan,G. 5,183-5,188 humanism 27,35,48,54,63-4,84,95,97, 112,117,124,123,131,184,187 human rights 123-4, 140 hybridity 68, 119, 122, 125, 182, 191 ideological state apparatus 13 ideology 2,3,6-15,74-7,80-81,93,138, 161,164,167,180,186 India 3,7-8,12,14,24,54-75,76,88,91, 93-8,119,156,159,161,187 industrialization 3, 8, 60 Islam 22, 58, 84, 87, 89, 95, 128, 129, 130, 133,134,134,149,151 Israel 21, 22, 89 James, c. L R 137 Jews 21,22,28,30,105-7 Judaism 22,105-7 Khatibi, A 22,103,126-35,136,141,144, 149,150,188,191 Rlpling,R. 67,93-4,97,118,161 Koran 127-8,131,134 Lacan,J. 14,27,114,117,119,132 Lamartine, A de 87-8 Latin America 3,119,145,179 Lazarus, N. 6,15,27, 178, 189 Levinas, E. 6,15-23,24,28,35,140,184, 186, 189 and Derrida 99,101,108-13,125,126, 158 and Khatibi 131, 133, 135 and Glissant 140 and Mudimbe 166 and passive resistance 61-2, 64 and Said 77 Levi-Strauss, c. 22,44, 101, 102, 125, 164, 166,168 logocentrism 101,104,113,115,130 Louverture, T. 137 Macey, D. 26-7,189 Maghreb 126-35,188,191 Mannoni, O. 31 Mariategui, J. c. 179
Martinique 25,27,135-50,179 marvellous realism 145 Marx, K 6-15,56,59,66, 69-7l, 88,130, 152-60,163,177,186,188-9 Marxism 6-15,23,24,152,177,180,182 and Fanon 38, 52 and Khatibi 130 andMbembe 172 and Spivak 158 and the Subaltern Studies Collective 75 masculinity 66-7 Masolo, D. A 170 Mbembe, A. 151,152, 17l-7, 178, 179, 180,188,191 Meddeb, A 131-3 Memmi, A 49, 63 metaphysics 16,17,20,22,52,98,99, 103,104,108,110,125,129,130, 131,135,149 metissage 140,144,145,147 migration 144,146,181 Miller, C. 17l mimicry 41,118,119,157,172, 174, 176 mission civilisatrice 9, 54, 87 Moore-Gilbert, B. 122, 190, 191 Morocco 41,127-35 Mudimbe, V. Y. 23,151,152, 164-7l, 172,175-8,180,184,188,191 Naipaul, V. S. 118 Nandy, A 54,57,64-8, 69, 74, 89, 96, 187,190 National Liberation Front 25 National Socialism 6, 15, 16, 112, 189 Negri, A 180-82 negritude 28,33,34, 64, 136, 167, 186, 190 Sartre on 43-52 Nehru,J. 73 Nerval, G. de 88 non-violence 55,56-9,62 North Africa 94,96, 129 ontology 16,17,20,28,35,43,95,109, 131 opacity 145,147,149 Ortiz,E 140 Orwell, G. 67, 118 Palestine 22, 84, 95 Parry; B. 6,23,34,103,121, 162, 178 passive resistance 56, 61, 62, 74 Patrick, M. 111
index
201
paz, O. 119 peasantry 12,14,39,40,48,68-9,73 Perse, S. J. 144 poststructuralism 23,48, 95, 103, 113, 188,191 poetics of relation 137,140,141,142, 144-9 proletariat 6, 8-11, 14, 38
I
Quayson, A. 4, 189 race 12, 16, 33,44-5,47,51,63,65,81, 118,181 Rhys,J. 160 I Rich,A 123 Rimbaud, A. 144 ! Rosello, M. 21 , Rousseau, j. J. 22, 101, 164, 168 Rowlatt Bills 58
I
Said, E. 19,76,77,81,82, 83-97, 98, 1.51, 184,187,190 andBhabha 114,118,124,125 and Mudimbe 164, 165 Salih, T. 94 San Juan Jr, E. 14-15 Sartre, J-P. 14, 25, 28, 43-53, 54, 63,65, 66, 77, 84, 97, 98, 105, 112, 124, 151, 164,186,189-90 and Fanon 30, 32, 38 andMudimbe 167-8
sati 156-9 satyagraha 58, 61, 62, 64, 74, 187 Scott, D. 105 Segalen, V. 128, 132, 144 Senghor, L S. 33,43, 167, 169 sexuality 67,74,78, 80-81, 96, 97 Shelley, M. 160-61
1l l l l l l l l i~iji imiii~
191 and Derrida 103,104 and Foucault 82,83 and the Subaltern Studies Collective 73-4 Stoler, L A. 81 subaltern 12,76,68-75,82, 94-5, 136-7, 147,151,152,155,165,170,177,179 and Spivak 157-63 Subaltern Studies Collective 54, 57, 68_75,76,77,90,98,152,156,184, 187,190 surplus value 7,9, 15, 154 swadeshi 63, 70 Swaraj 55,56,58,60,62-4,71, 187, 190 Syrotinski, M. 163,178,191
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South Africa 26, 58 sovereignty 16-18,20,22, 104, 105, 112, 123,125,157,172,173,179,180,182 Spivak, G. 6,12,23,151-64,165,170, 171, In, 176-80, 183-4, 188, 190,
,~
Taylor, C. 123 Thiong'o, N. W. 65 Todorov, T. 135 totalitarianism 15, 16,23,24,28,67,99, 110,112,140,189 transculturation 3, 140 '~
use value 153 Vichy 100, 105 virility 34,66,174 Young, R 6, 8, 9, 29, 64, 82, 91, 103,121, 162-3,180,189,190,191,192
ZiZek, S. 182
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understanding postcolonialism
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