A Postcolonial Perspective(Work in progress by Terry DeHay)

 

 Postcolonialism, like other post-isms, does not signal a closing off of that which it contains (colonialism), or even a rejection (which would not be possible in any case), but rather an opening of a field of inquiry and understanding following a period of relative closure. Colonialism is an event which can be identified, given an historical definition, through its effects and characteristics as they reveal themselves in a given nation, among different cultural and social groupings. Partha Chaterjee, in The Nation and its Fragments, characterizes the colonial project as "...the normalizing rule of colonial difference, namely, the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group" (10). Later in the text, he clarifies this difference: "representing the "other" as inferior and radically different, and hence incorrigibly inferior" (33). Colonialism can further be defined as "a way of maintaining an unequal international relation of economic and political power" (Williams 4), employing social, cultural, and religious means of control, as well as economic and political ones, or following Althusser's categories, both institutional and repressive state apparatus.

Indeed it is possible to see colonialism as a totalizing event which desires closure, to see the world as always already defined in terms of the relationship of the colonized to the colonizer, the margin to the center, etc. As Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism, the Imperialist powers needed to create an Other, an Orient, in order to define themselves as center. And the policies of colonialism, although they varied from one "center" to the next, systematically programmed colonized people to understand themselves as other, as marginalized, in relationship to this center. Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his theory and fiction has demonstrated effectively that colonization was not just a political and economic subjugation of continents, but rather required a on-going program of cultural colonization to support and maintain the hegemony of the colonizers. In "The Cultural Factor in the Neo-colonial Era," he states:

...economic and political control inevitably leads to cultural dominance and this in turn deepens that control. The maintenance, management, manipulation, and mobilization of the entire system of education, language and language use, literature, religion, the media, have always ensured for the oppressor nation power over the transmission of a certain ideology, set of values, outlook, attitudes, feelings, etc, and hence power over the whole area of consciousness. This in turn leads to the control of the individual and collective self-image of the dominated nation and classes as well as their image of the dominated nations and classes.

* * *

By thus controlling the cultural and psychological domain, the oppressor nation and classes try to ensure the situation of a slave who takes it that to be a slave is the normal human condition. (Moving, 51)

This program of cultural colonization clearly continues in terms of on-going neo-colonial relationships, establishing and maintaining the comprador class which in turn maintains the economic interests of the former colonists.

The intervention of the colonial educational system and language on cultural production becomes a necessary and inevitable element in any discussion of postcolonial literature. In the article "What is Post(-)colonialism?" Mishra and Hodges suggest accepting that postcolonial literature is based on the equation of "a European epic narrative mediated through the European bourgeois novel" plus "those very precise, historically and culturally specific distinctions that mark off post-colonial difference without constructing, in turn, a post-colonial homogeneity that cancels out its own opposition and fractures" (CDPT 280-281). In his study of the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah, Resistance in Postcolonial Literature, Neil Lazarus argues for a type of "periodization" of African postcolonial literature, which moves from the disillusionment of independence in the 1960s, when writers saw that independence had failed to bring about any real change in the structures of government or the situation of the masses, to the call for change and collective resistance in literature since 1970s. These later texts very often boldly posits the possibility, the inevitability of change and of a movement forward, always with a gaze backward to pre-colonial Africa. Referring to Wole Soyinka's identification of the "projective capacity" in African fiction, Lazarus describes the dialectic of a dual focus in the text: "the narrative focus falls unremittingly upon the existing social order, the inner gaze of the text seems...to be directed beneath and beyond the surface" (47). This "inner gaze" then potentially "subverts the bleak surface" of the text. This description effectively references the "affirmative deconstruction" identified by Spivak. The often dark, realistic surface, presenting things "as they are," contrasts with another level of the text, which suggests alternative or suggestive readings. These readings often are opened up through the use of textual devices such as irony and shifting narrative voices, which challenge one mode of perception and allow the postcolonial text to deconstruct the colonial discourse from within.

The definition of postcolonialism that I am most comfortable with is as follows: the social, political, economic, and cultural practices which arise in response and resistance to colonialism. This corresponds to Mishra and Hodges' definition of postcolonial literature as, "an always present tendency in any literature of subjugation marked by a systematic process of cultural domination through the imposition of imperial structures of power," which as they point out implies that postcolonialism is "already implicit in the discourses of colonialism" (284). As I think will become clear, these categories will reverse, with colonialism being subsumed into postcolonialism. Always important, as well, is the incorporation of an understanding of material condition in any analysis of postcolonial cultural production. Postcolonial texts will incorporate culturally specific details, often not offering translations or explanations of non-European practices, decentering the European-based reading. In addition, the texts very often decenter the

white characters, who become faceless, nameless representatives of a dominating power, shifting the power relationships within the text. Finally, it is perhaps most important to stress the ever changing nature of postcolonialism as a defining term, as it responds to the material conditions under which people live in colonial and neo-colonial situations. Although postcolonialism comes out of colonialism, in opposition to colonialism, in its development, it has literally become a critical perspective through which to view colonialism. By problematizing the Western humanistic metanarratives on the basis of which colonialism was justified, colonization itself becomes a motivated political, historical effect. In effect, "colonialism" no longer exists outside some critical framework; hence it always exist from within the postcolonial context.

The closest and perhaps most relevant comparison to postcolonialism is postmodernism in that postmodernism has somewhat the same relationship to modernism as postcolonialism does to colonialism. The connection or even complicity between modernism and colonialism makes this comparison especially interesting and relevant: both are challenges to the Enlightenment narratives. "Modernism" was a period of unprecedented searching and yearning for what Lyotard has called "metanarratives" to replace the dethroned god of Western humanist thought. In some analyses, with the rise of capitalism and the increasing imperialism of the European powers, this yearning translated into the "modernist totalizing ideal of progress" (Hutcheon, PP 25). This ideal of progress comes as well out of the Enlightenment project, which privileged reason and rationality: mind and reason conquer superstition, control nature. There is an increasing rift between res cogitans and res extensa, leading to "gulf between inside and outside, between logical form and substantive content, inner existence and outer reality." In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno state, "The creative god and the systematic spirit are alike as rulers of nature. Man's1 likeness to God consists in the sovereignty over the world, in the countenance of the lord and master, and in command." This defines man's relationship to that over which he exercises power as one of alienation, of distance between subject and object: "He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them"(9). This then leads to a master and slave relationship and a system of domination which "lends increased consistency and force to the social whole in which it establishes itself" (21). What Horkheimer and Adorno refer to as the "culture industry" is put into the service of the self-preservation of the center, producing accessible cultural products that represent imperialist domination as universal, natural.

Although Horkheimer and Adorno do not apply their analysis to external colonialization in this work, it is useful in understanding the relationship of the Enlightenment to imperialism as a justification for the West's domination of entire populations of native people in the name of progress. Many colonial narratives (Conrad, Kipling, Dinesen) associate native populations with images of nature. These narratives in turn reflect the creation of a more extensive political, even anthropological characterization of the "native" as natural, ie uncivilized. This opens up the whole system of binary opposition coming out of the separation of man and nature: culture/ nature, civilized/ primitive, rational/ irrational, light/ dark, good/ evil, providing further rationalization for colonialization (at times effacing political and economic motivations). Western rationalism would actually "liberate" the dark, chaotic "natural" worlds. In this sense, as a

way of reading, differance becomes important for the postcolonial reader in deconstructing the opposition: as Derrida states in "Differance":

one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse live, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the differance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same,

going on to cite the example of "culture as nature different and deferred" (17). The opposition between nature and culture can then be reinscribed as a function of language and history rather that as a universal condition, undoing the domination of one term over another. As Tapalde Mohanty states "In other words, it is only in so far as 'Woman/Women' and 'the East" are defined as Others, or as peripheral that (western) Man/ Humanism can represent him/itself as the centre. It is not the centre that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the centre" (CDPT 215).

Postmodernism does not reject modernism per se, but rather, as Hutcheon points out, through a "rhetoric of rupture," reads the past as "textualized remains" (PP 20), and "teaches that social reality is structured by discourses"(PP 7). She also identifies postmodernism's relationship to the metanarratives of modernism in terms of "a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society," and "the site of struggle of the emergence of something new" (PP 4). Similarly, postcolonialism cannot eliminate or undo the historical stuff of colonialism. However, as an essential part of the process of decolonization, postcolonialism uses many of the tropes and tools identified with postmodernism to interrogate the social theory and practices coming out of the Enlightenment as a way of re-reading colonialisms' narratives of domination. As Chatterjee asserts, the development of nationalism during the periods of initial decolonization was complicated because the project of "cultural 'normalization'" had "to choose its site of autonomy from a position of subordination to a colonial regime that had on its side the most universalist justificatory resources produced by post-enlightenment social thought" (11). This was then a critical moment in the development of postcolonial theory, forcing the recognition that independence was not simply a matter of renaming political and economic dependency. It also became clear that colonial policies and discourses could be perpetuated by the formally colonized as well. For this reason, the suspicion of "liberal-humanist rhetoric of progress and of universalizing master narratives" clearly links postcolonial and postmodern projects.

There is of course a danger of assimilating postcolonialism under postmodernism--of turning postcolonialism into another imperialist project. Reading postcolonialism in terms of postmodernism, as perhaps a form of postmodernism, makes it seem safe, "reassuringly strange" (CDPT 412), and effaces the political and historical dimensions central to a postcolonial perspective. However, I take very seriously Mishra and Hodges distinction between the two which would inscribe 1) race, 2) a second language, and 3) political struggle into any theory of postcolonialism. For example, if the aim of

postcolonial theory and practice is to dismantle the Enlightenment project that provided the rational for colonialism and created the "colonial subject," the "situating of the subject" and the question of the formation of the subject become essential parts of the postcolonial "project" of decolonization. Many postcolonial writers attempt to show and/or deconstruct the colonial/neocolonial structures of power that "interpellate" the colonial subject, leading to a free "free acceptance" of subjugation. There are immediate, material aims to these deconstructive acts: to reveal the complicity between ecomonic and cultural imperialism and at the same time, to provide models for resistance.

Hutcheon has argued that postmodernism is "fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political" (PP 4). Teresa Ebert has also argued convincingly for a "resistance postmodernism," that would view "the relation between word and world, language and social reality or, in short, 'difference,' not as the result of textuality but as the effect of social struggles. Language acquires its meaning not from its formal system, but from its place in the social struggle over meanings" (887). Clearly, the concept of "resistance postmodern delineates a rapprochement between these two "postisms," locating a site of struggle against oppression within the material practices of language itself. What follows is a very schematic outline of characteristics that postcolonialism shares with postmodernism:

1. Decentering and historicizing of the subject:

situating of subject-recognizes race, class, sexual orientation, gender; emphasis on the constructed nature of the subject: for postmodernism: as defined by humanism; for postcolonialism: as defined by imperialism. contesting of the unified and coherent subject as a general questioning of any

totalizing or homogenizing system. The centre no longer completely holds. And from the decentered perspective, the "marginal and ...the 'ex-centric' take on new significance in light of the implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith...we might have assumed" (Hutcheon, PP 12).

2. Employment of textual strategies to subvert the dominant discourse:

irony: as Linda Hutcheon points out in her essay "Circling the Downspout of Empire," as "a double talking, forktougued mode of address, irony becomes a popular rhetorical strategy for working within existing discourse and contesting them at the same time" (154);

play within text: 1) incorporating models of precolonial texts, both oral and written (storyteller as narrator; use of myth); 2) magic realism (challenging established modes of perception, rationalism); 3) highlighting difference in the system of language itself;

open-ended narratives;

parody: "repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity" (Hutcheon PP 26); implies both change and cultural continuity;

destablizing of narrative perspective.

3. Deconstructive moves within the text:

part of political agenda, used to open and deconstruct master narratives; according to Spivak, we need to look for what is edited out of "characterizations of human experience" by western philosophy, to engage in "affirmative deconstruction" (PC 20);

challenge to/dismantling of "logical" categories of thought and opposition; Derrida, according to Spivak, defines deconstruction as "the deconstitution of the founding concepts of Western historical narrative" (PC 31);

dismantling of master narratives from colonial center; to persuade us "to think through logical categories which may be quite alien to our own" (Mishra and Hodges, 282).

4. Problematizing the relationship with literary traditions and anterior texts:

always working within dominant discourse; "critical revisiting" of literary past.

5. Questioning of historical certainties:

emphasis on the constructed nature of historical narrative (ala H. White); lost master-narrative called forth to help liberate them from colonial narrative

(problematized in women's texts); human history as collective but experienced individually, as opposed to humanist,

universalizing; alternative, revisionary, counterhegemonic histories.

6. Critique of realism:

Questioning of hegemonic representations of reality: "A representation does not re-present an 'original'; rather, it re-presents that which is always already represented" (Niranjana 10).

7. Rejection of universals and essentialism:

questioning of Western-centered discourses; historicizing of basic concepts of wester thought; focus on particular/ localized stuff; recognition of uncertainty and the necessity to change.

  Bibliography & Suggested Readings

Bibliography of Readings on Postcolonialism

Recommended by Terry DeHay, English Dept.

  Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

----------, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.

Beverley, John. Against Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Dallmayr, Fred. Life-World, Modernity and Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

Ebert, Teresa.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. Trans. Donaldo Macedo. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Meuthen, 1987.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectics of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Hutcheon, Linda. "Circling the Downspout of Empire": Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism." Ariel 20, 4 (October 1989), 149-175.

----------. Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988.

Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: The Orion Press, 1965.

Mishra, Vihay, and Hodge, Bob. "What is Post(-)Colonialism?" Textual Practice 5, 3 (1991):399-414.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. Decolonizing the Mind. London: James Curry, 1989.

----------. Moving the Center: the Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Curry, 1993.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: U of California Press.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. London: Cambridge UP, 1976.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 1987.

----------. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

----------. The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.

Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: a Reader. 1994.

http://www.sou.edu/English/IDTC/Issues/postcol/Resources/Terry/dehaybib.htm