Reading Postcolonial Theory Key Texts in Conte

Reading Postcolonial Theory
This book is an essential introduction to significant texts in postcolo-

nial theory. It looks at seminal works in the ‘moments of their making’
and delineates the different threads that bind postcolonial studies.
Each chapter presents a comprehensive discussion of a major text and
contextualizes it in the wake of contemporary themes and debates.
The volume:
• studies major texts by foremost scholars – Edward W. Said,

Chinua Achebe, Albert Memmi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Paul Carter, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Robert
J. C. Young, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Sara Suleri;
• shifts focus from colonial experience to underlying principles of
critical engagement;
• uses accessible, jargon-free language.
Focused, engaging and critically insightful, this book will be indis-

pensable to students and scholars of literary and cultural studies,
comparative literature and postcolonial studies.
Bibhash Choudhury teaches English in Gauhati University, Guwahati,

Assam, India. He is the author of English Social and Cultural History
(2005), Beyond Cartography: The Contemporary South Asian Novel
in English (2011) and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (2013). He has also
edited a number of books, including Edward Said and the Politics of
Culture (2008), Amitav Ghosh: Critical Essays (2009) and Western
Mythology: Accounts, Versions, Tales (2014).
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Reading Postcolonial
Theory
Key texts in context
Bibhash Choudhury
First published 2016
by Routledge
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© 2016 Bibhash Choudhury
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Contents
Preface vi
Introduction 1
1 Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized 8
2 Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth 29
3 Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind 53
4 Edward W. Said: Orientalism 73
5 Chinua Achebe: Home and Exile 96
6 Paul Carter: The Road to Botany Bay 117
7 Ashis Nandy: The Intimate Enemy 138
8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Worlds 159
9 Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture 181
10 Robert J. C. Young: White Mythologies 202
11 Sara Suleri: The Rhetoric of English India 224
Bibliography 245
Index 251
Preface
This is a book of readings. What we today recognize as ‘postcolonial

theory’ has a rich historical and cultural lineage. The impact of colo-
nial experience has been approached, studied, critiqued and engaged
with from a variety of reading positions. Over the several decades
of the twentieth century when decolonization affected the contours
of international politics, the emergence of new nation states from
the shadow of colonial rule facilitated newer ways of reading that
experience. It would be naive to say that postcolonialism surfaced
only with the decolonization, for questions regarding the nature and
objective of colonial regimes go back to a much remoter past. But
it is now acknowledged that the discipline of postcolonialism owes
much to the cultivation and circulation of critical discourses which
asked questions in sustained form in different locations over a con-
siderable period of time. Texts which have shaped and contributed to
the development of postcolonial studies, especially those which have
facilitated the traffic of the discipline into newer frontiers, are taken
up for analysis here. Each text is read closely, and its most striking
features are placed in context. It is from such an imperative that
this book derives its title: Reading Postcolonial Theory: Key Texts
in Context.
My plan in the book is to keep the chapters independent of each
other. My reason for that is twofold: first, some of the texts, such as
Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized or Fanon’s The Wretched
of the Earth, for instance, present positions that have been seen to
generate extensive debates on both sides, and to refer to the critical
receptions of these texts would expand the discussion beyond the text
itself. For instance, in Robert Young’s White Mythologies there are
three chapters on Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak, and these three texts form part of what I have in my
schedule as well. I had the option of cross-referring these thinkers
Preface vii
when I read them, but I felt that doing so would take away from the
argument what all these four texts focus on individually. My plan,
therefore, is to locate each text in the context of its own argument,
so that the reader would be able to see it as a response to how they
emerged and what they deal with. I have tried to keep my discus-
sion footnote-free so that the arguments of the texts under discussion
stand clear for the reader to access. This is a position that is fraught
with insistent difficulties, for one could argue that texts cannot just
stand by themselves; while I am not pushing the New Critical argu-
ment of the text being autotelic or contextually disengaged from the
circumstances of its production, my aim is to present an uncluttered
analysis that responds to each of these seminal texts in the contexts of
their situation as texts in the history of postcolonial theory. Readings
of postcolonial theory often presume that the reader has sufficient
knowledge of the texts, based on which the critical roadmap in a
given book is framed. I am here trying to present the texts within their
specific contexts, and in locating these texts as crucial witnesses to the
development of postcolonial theory, my readings of these books would
open up the lines of thought that have come from multiple directions,
in different ways, and have foregrounded issues that have converged,
but are not necessarily the same. A reader would, then, I believe, be
able to see how an Ashis Nandy or a Paul Carter has argued from
positions of great difference but has still responded to the experi-
ence and impact of colonialism. A survey of the different texts would
then facilitate a critical frame through which these seminal texts in
the history of postcolonial studies can be approached or responded
to. The second reason for this arrangement is to propose a mode of
reading a text that draws on the advantage of ‘close reading’, but
one that would certainly not be closed in terms of how a text can be
approached and read even today when ‘theory’ seems to have pushed
the limits and appears to be inhabiting spaces that are not directly
related to one another. At the same time, this is not an argument
for a kind of back-to-the-text theory, or a context-free analysis. One
of my objectives here is to demystify perceptions about these texts,
many of which are held on the basis of certain circulating free-floats,
consolidated through usage and repetition, one instance of it being
the highlighting of Said’s thesis in Orientalism as a one-off argument
against the West and what it has done historically. What I try to do in
my reading of Said’s book is to see his analysis of Orientalist discourse
not as a given that he makes use of to frame his argument but as one
that is also based on his crucial reading of the philological inheritance
of imperialism as well as the role played by forms of travel narratives
viii Preface
in such formations. The overarching postcolonial imperative and the
many directions its theoretical articulation has taken over the past
several decades would thus emerge as the texts are read for what they
proposed within their specific argumentative frames. I believe such an
addressing of the critical circumstances of each of these texts would
provide the reader a perspective on how they have come to form what
we now recognize as and call postcolonial theory.
The reasons for inclusion of the texts for discussion, and the exclu-
sion of others, are primarily, one, the importance and impact of the
chosen book for the discourse of postcolonial theory and, two, the
different insight it has brought into the discipline. In effect, what is
key in my arrangement of things may not be for another reader. But,
at the same time, there is considerable agreement that the texts anal-
ysed here are those that have come to occupy place of importance in
the history of the discipline. All the books, as will be evident during
the course of discussion, are not the same, nor do they follow uniform
critical priorities. That is only to be expected for a discipline that
has grown and expanded with the accumulation of newer insights
not only in the field but also in other areas. I place each book in the
contexts of its production and then look at the ways in which the posi-
tions each book has taken have impacted our reading over time. The
book will facilitate critical engagements which further the impera-
tives of postcolonialism in ways that emerge from the texts taken up
for study, that is the objective of Reading Postcolonial Theory, and
a move in that direction will then be the reward for an exercise such
as this.
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Ranjit Kumar
Dev Goswami, with whom I have had long conversations on diverse
subjects, benefiting every time with insights that have lit up my path;
I thank Nandana Dutta, with whom I have shared my thoughts dur-
ing the writing of this book, and have been amply rewarded by her
generous comments and astute critical sense which enabled me to
look at new vistas with fresh vigour and interest; I owe so much to
Paul Carter, whose generosity and support go much beyond the books
that he sent me, and of course, I cannot thank Robert Young enough
for his time and patience with me, for his words of encouragement
and for his close reading of my writing. I thank Shashank Sinha, with
whom my discussions for this project saw it come into being. I thank
all of them in words, but I owe them much much more. Much of this
book was done during the study leave I got from Gauhati University,
my place of work, and I am really thankful to my employer for facili-
tating it.
Preface ix
My wife and children, whom I have always taken for granted, and
who have given me time, space and, most important, loving care
throughout, it is to their impregnable belief in my project that I owe
the most.
Bibhash Choudhury
Guwahati, Assam
11 March 2015
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Introduction
The demand for critical frameworks to engage with questions of his-

torical understanding and its articulation through different cultural
markers has resulted in the emergence of fascinating reading prac-
tices, of which perhaps postcolonialism is among the most eclectic in
terms of range and variation. What we designate today as postcolonial
studies accommodates a wide rubric of intellectual conditions, includ-
ing interrogations and interventions that have surfaced from the early
forays that subsequently consolidated to chart the operative lines of
the discipline. It is interesting to see how a mere historical overview
cannot quite arrest the strands of critical enquiry that continue to
enhance and expand the frontiers of postcolonial studies. The move-
ment of a discipline’s frontiers not just signals shifts in orientation
but also serves to present conditions for its argumentative reach. The
nature of the expansion of the intellectual frontiers of postcolonial
studies has seen a variety of responses that reflect upon the process of
enquiry itself – from an examination of the founding terms of the colo-
nizer and the colonized to a questioning of the objectives of the very
enterprise – there is, in each critically informed framework, the nucleus
of an argument which cannot be dissociated from its context of pro-
duction. There is, thus, a multi-pronged channelling of critical energies
that cannot be accommodated within sweeps that seek to bracket and
showcase postcolonialism within set parameters through a prioritiza-
tion of one set of values over another.
The convention of situating postcolonialism through the 1978 pub-
lication of Edward Said’s Orientalism has been substantially enhanced
over the years, but coexisting with such an evaluative logic are pointers
that argue for a mapping that engages with issues that Said’s path-
breaking book did not deal with. Such a counter-initiative, aimed at
a retrospective historicization of the crucial moments in the history
of postcolonialism has seen figures such as Albert Memmi and Frantz
2 Introduction
Fanon occupy spaces that accompany a host of other thinkers on the
subject. The dangers of mapping the history of an idea or an argu-
mentative frame are quite evident when the significant texts related
to postcolonialism are placed together, or in a line. A chronological
imperative does serve to enable a comprehensive look at the subject for
reasons that extend beyond conceptual frameworks in which the argu-
ments are placed. It is convenient to do a start-up with Orientalism
because of the nature of the ‘sweep’ that invigorates the book’s argu-
mentative logic, but the fact that Said’s reading tactics are governed
by conditions that he sought to prioritize at the expense of others is
also not lost on the reader. What the faultlines within this ‘convenient’
trajectory bring to the surface is connected to the larger question of the
discipline’s situation in contemporary intellectual history.
For a narrative of postcolonialism to be sustained along the lines
that see Said as one of the pivots, there is also the need to carry for-
ward an accommodative logic that locates the other views of colonial
experience and the politics of reading within a similar format. Yet,
as is evident in the many positions that have come to be garnered for
this narrative, there are positions that emerge in forms which appear
different, if not always contestatory. The passage of time from a his-
torical hinge such as India’s independence (which, ironically, does not
figure within the central thesis of Said’s book) or the decolonization
process associated with the struggle for Suez, for instance, would not
be enough to forward the many tropes of the postcolonial imperative
for reasons that are not merely political. At one level, postcolonialism
does not bracket the political within the realpolitik exclusively, but
rather engages with situations that look at issues which are associated
with disciplines as widely varied as psychoanalysis and material geog-
raphy. As a quest for openings that offer reading opportunities of not
just histories and texts that make historical narratives, the many struc-
tures within which postcolonialism is formatted show a fascination for
the eclectic, marshalled through a refusal to submit to the straitjacket
of the colonizer/colonized variety. This recognition of nuances that
lie at the spaces of critical enquiry, however, draws from the fulcrum
of that binary where the idea of a set historical narrative is sought to
be opened up for scrutiny and critical excavation. That is why it is
incumbent upon the historian of postcolonialism to locate both the
situational imperatives from which the discipline emerged and also
see the value of departures that look at the politics of reading as insis-
tent conditions impinging the very process of revisiting the colonial
experience and its aftermath. When Robert Young examined the triad
of Said, Spivak and Bhabha in White Mythologies, he set out to both
Introduction 3
map and critique the discipline with critical tools that demonstrated
the merit of a contextual reading strategy. Such a move was not part
of the early texts which we today place within the discipline’s emerging
contours such as Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized
and The Wretched of the Earth. It is necessary to situate this difference
in approach, but more than that the movement of the discipline from
its early binary emphasis on the conflictual relation between the colo-
nizer and the colonized to the complexities within relations of power
within both the colonial and the postcolonial worlds requires under-
standing. It may appear to some, from a more critically informed and
theoretically engaging position today, that the arguments proposed by
Memmi and Fanon, to cite two early examples, are simpler than the
subjects they aspired to address, or that such positions are passé, but
the link between the sophistication associated with a Spivak reading
and another by Fanon cannot be broken up or isolated. What the
extent and spread of the theoretical apparatus of postcolonialism has
done is to make it possible to relate the diverse positions of a Said and
a Memmi (one oriented through the Middle East and the other con-
cerning the French colonial experience in Africa) to offer possibilities
of looking at forms of reading that are valid in the contexts in which
they are made to operate.
Materiality, along with other contesting registers, came to occupy
the mind of the postcolonial thinker, but nowhere were questions of
the spatial dimensions of the colonial worldview brought to the criti-
cal firmament of the discipline more acutely than in Paul Carter’s The
Road to Botany Bay. Yet, in major surveys of postcolonialism, there
is often an eliding over issues that Carter brings to the critical table,
so much so that they either seem marginal to the ‘settled’ main cur-
rent of the discipline or are configured as a form of departure from
the thrust areas identified and consolidated over the years. When Paul
Carter looks at the politics and spatial conditions of naming through
the logistical apparatus of James Cook in the newly emerging world of
Australia, there is a process of reading at work which not only is new
to the discipline but considerably invigorating in the way the historic-
ity of a colonial event is played out and placed within the material
dimensions of the space covered and named. Carter’s example brings
to the surface issues of accommodation within surveys which aspire to
chronicle the discipline’s historical contours. For, to accommodate the
critical track of a Carter or a Nandy, the expansion of the binary would
require newer modes of engagement with the subject of colonial expe-
rience and its reception. What Carter and Nandy further exemplify,
each in his own distinctive way, is more than an interesting corollary
4 Introduction
to the possibilities of the discipline. They inaugurate, and bring into
offing, conditions of colonial reality and its making that are not only
much more complex than a seemingly straight analysis would suggest,
but, more important, such explorative forays show how any engage-
ment of a critical nature in the context of postcolonial studies cannot
just rest on a set of parameters to justify the operations of power and
narrative in the colonial world. Nandy’s reading of subject positions
through the example of Kipling, for instance, invites us to consider the
arresting possibility of an open-ended track which calls for a psycho-
logical engagement that stems from, but does not rest in, Freud. The
sociological arithmetic, as Nandy’s examination shows, does not sub-
mit to neatly packaged parallels but challenges the colonizer’s bracket
with ambiguities which are not as easily addressed as they are made
out to be in some postcolonial surveys. The renewed interest in Gandhi
as an iconoclast and a pivot in postcolonial studies extends the modes
of reading beyond the positions that a Fanon or a Said posited in the
early traffic with the idea of the colonial subject.
If postcolonialism today recognizes the complex nature of the sub-
ject and what the specifics of its theoretical engagement entails for the
discipline, there is a simultaneous tug-and-pull that seeks to revisit the
initial probes which brought the politics of colonialism into focus in
the first place. Sweeps of a general nature tend to subsume the details
that constitute identities and ideologies within the framework adopted
for the purpose, and while certain conditions can be located through
a common register under a rubric which can accommodate the vari-
ous registers, there are insistent challenges to such practices that call
for more nuanced readings. When a Memmi or a Fanon invites us to
look at the experience of colonialism through their invoked registers of
power and control, they draw upon situations that validate their argu-
mentative frames. It is rewarding to see the frames within which the
arguments found space for articulation, and also to see them address
historical circumstances that do not have the same texture elsewhere.
But imperatives are drawn from the specifics, the idea of violence from
Fanon, or that of colonial discourse from Said, that are then expended
upon other critical spaces to argue for a more expansive logic to sub-
stantiate what we now call postcolonial studies. Said was aware of
this constituent effect of his Orientalism thesis when he acknowledged
that his critical engagement left out major areas under Western domi-
nation, even though he posited his argument as one that would be
effective enough to offer a perspective on the name and nature of Ori-
entalism. When Bhabha approaches the question of colonial discourse
Introduction 5
in The Location of Culture he invokes the condition of ambivalence,
a key through which he seeks to unknot the seemingly neat structure
that he saw Said rely upon. The movement from Said’s (1978) Orien-
talism thesis to Bhabha’s insertion of ambivalence as one of the keys
within the discursive frames of postcolonial studies offers an interest-
ing example of the trajectory that one can follow as the subject of
colonial experience faces more and more searching questers. At the
same time, however, such a line cannot be used to thread positions
such as those proposed by thinkers like Sara Suleri or Paul Carter. Sul-
eri’s examination of the influence and play of rhetoric in the colonial
world, on the one hand, and Carter’s engagement with the politics of
spatial undertaking in the Australian context do not emerge straight
from the Said or Fanon frames that are referred to consistently in
the reading of the discipline. In spite of the fact that both Said and
Fanon have located their arguments within frames that rely on specific
historical contexts, there has been a growing appropriation of their
critical keys for purposes that seek to read issues postcolonially. The
same cannot be said of Carter, Nandy or Suleri. The reasons for the
widening of the Saidian or Fanonist frame are not difficult to find.
One is the extensive possibilities that the theses of Orientalism and
Nationalism bring to the critical toolkit; the other is related to the
manner of their approach, which offered to later postcolonial critics
the formulaic equivalent for readings directed at examining other sit-
uations. Carter’s reading of Australia’s spatial world following James
Cook’s naming considered the politics that does not quite offer the
same format for appropriation, not in the way that Said’s structure in
Orientalism does. Carter and Said both expose the faultlines in the
colonial world, but while Said looks at the time and its conditioning
of the Western mind through a series of instances which he goes on
to place in a pattern, Carter’s method does not exemplify the same
critical route. Carter looks at the meaning of space and its relevance
in the colonial world, examining minute and specific instances that
alert us to the politics that spatial imagination played in the colonial
world.
The placing of the pivotal moments in the history of postcolonial
studies thus calls for both the recognition of the forms of reading that
contributed to its emergence and consolidation, and of the fact that
brackets which are pressed into service for analysis need not neces-
sarily be the formulaic equivalent in other situations. What such a
recognition further entails is related to the reading apparatus through
which the circumstances of colonial experience are opened up for
6 Introduction
critique and evaluation. As we can see from the cue suggested by Paul
Carter, not all imperial exercises yield to the timeline through which
events are stacked up; there are locational and cultural imperatives
that are unique to a given space, and this demands that each impor-
tant moment in the theoretical forward movement in the history of the
discipline be examined within the contexts in which they operated.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, although Africans, engage
with colonialism in distinctive ways that highlight more than their
immediate circumstances, and for us to acknowledge the subtle but
insistent alterations, mere bracketing under the postcolonial would
not suffice. While surveys and chronicles that provide overarching nar-
ratives aimed at holding the discipline within the logic of colonialism
have clarified the contours of the area of study, there is the need to
situate the key postcolonial texts within the specific contexts from
which they emerged. What such an exercise can highlight relates to
the individual text as well as the evolving nature of postcolonial stud-
ies. This will enable the placement of the texts within frames that may
not suffice for readings in other situations. The reading method used
by Sara Suleri in her analysis of the Hastings trial would not address
the issues that Ngugi writes of in Decolonising the Mind. At the same
time, as moments in the history of postcolonial studies there can be no
denying how both Ngugi’s and Suleri’s tools of reading have greatly
enhanced the discipline.
The chapters that make up this book look at some of the major
moments in the making of postcolonial studies, locating these moments
through specific texts which have either shaped or enhanced the dimen-
sions of the discipline in distinctive ways. Postcolonialism today has a
global spread. The reading of these texts in the shaping of the theoretical
dimensions of the subject can be an enabling exercise. The examination
of nuances relating to a particular idea is not a closed process; rather,
it is one which looks at the way critical openings can provide further
avenues for analysis. The threading of the chain that can provide us
insights into the making of postcolonialism through books which have
come to occupy positions of importance in the discipline is an exercise
in both reading and critical placement. The possibilities afforded by
the reading of the thought frames in these texts are, thus, situated to
engage with some of the telling ideas in postcolonial studies. As the
subsequent chapters will show, each book, and the marks they make,
follows routes that are specifically chosen to facilitate the arguments
pursued therein. Collectively, these ideas showcase the emergence and
consolidation of a discipline that has come to not just shape but also
remarkably impact the nature of critical undertaking in contemporary
Introduction 7
thought. Postcolonialism, as an area of study and as a form of critical
engagement, is a process in the making, and the texts discussed here
constitute, to a considerable measure, important moments in its time,
even as it addresses the contingencies of space and the circumstances
in which they came into being.
1 Albert Memmi: The Colonizer
and the Colonized
Albert Memmi and Francophone
critical theory
Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized is one of the major
landmarks in Francophone postcolonial theory. It is significant not
only because of its situation as a text which scrutinizes the nature of
colonial relationship but also because of the attention it gives to the
psychological orientation which lies behind such experiences. While
there is no denying that Memmi foregrounds some of the recogniz-
able tropes of Freudian psychoanalysis in the course of his argument,
to see his reading strategy simply within such a framework would be
an exercise in reduction. The presence of such terms as ‘substitution’,
‘impotence’, ‘complex’, ‘perversion’, ‘guilt’, ‘self-denial’ and ‘drive’
alerts us to the influence of the psychoanalytical apparatus on this
work. At the same time, however, it is also evident that this is a read-
ing that is indebted to the Francophone intellectual heritage. Apart
from these two obvious frames of critical examination circumscribing
Memmi’s argument regarding the issue of colonialism, we can also
see it as a response that draws on the legacy of African thought and
culture. As Memmi argues in the course of the book, the appropria-
tion of ‘civilization’ by the European mind as a condition and subject
to which its response is the only one that matters bespeaks of a ten-
dency that finds it difficult to accommodate alternative positions on it.
The difference between the responses to the experience of colonization
emanating from the French intellectual tradition on the one hand and
the Anglo-American on the other, for instance, shows that interesting
markers that reflect the contours of cultural orientation as well as the
their seminal minds have approached such a subject. It is commonplace
to situate Frantz Fanon at the centre of the Francophone intellectual
ambit, with its radius incorporating people such as Albert Memmi
and Jean-Paul Sartre. There is considerable substance to such a lay-
out, but the question remains potent still: has Fanon been overplayed
as the intellectual motif governing the Francophone mind in respect
Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized 9
of colonialism? Before considering the question of Fanon’s impact on
Memmi, we could perhaps look at the latter’s approach to the Alge-
rian thinker’s mode and means of dealing with such a subject. In a
fascinating essay titled ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, Memmi
looks at the complicated situation of Fanon’s identity, caught up as it
was in the intertwining matrices of Caribbean, French and Algerian
cultures. For a long time, Fanon’s subscription to the French social
and cultural worldview channelled his thought, especially in his early
years, when he was responding to his Caribbean past. Drawn into this
melting pot where the question of identity clashed with the priorities of
nationalist duty, Fanon found it difficult to separate his loyalties to the
three sources that contributed to his cultural make-up. Memmi reads
this dilemma as an instance of that process where clear distinctions
between the French, Caribbean and African traces are difficult to nego-
tiate. Fanon’s life thus serves for Memmi as an interesting case through
which the actuality of experience offers a challenge to the dominant
narratives of nationalism and power. Analysing the interdependence of
these experiential traces in Fanon’s life, Memmi comments:
Why did Fanon end by refusing to commit himself to his own

people, who were irritated and resentful of his attitude, though in
the end, the younger generation rediscovered him by the round-
about way of Africa and revolution? His propensity for repeating
ceaselessly: ‘I am an Algerian . . . we Algerian patriots’, which
so irritated the West Indians, can be traced back to the fact that,
whether he was aware of it or not, he had no expectation of find-
ing the solution to his problem in his own people.
Fanon therefore broke with France, the French people and
Europe; but he could not be content with a verbal rupture; he
could not have settled down in Normandy, for example, in order
to engage, with several other exiles, in a vague opposition on prin-
ciple. He had to tear himself loose to the last fibre and eradicate
what had constituted his life up to that point. . . . In a certain man-
ner of speaking it was the West Indies that betrayed Fanon, it was
his country which revealed itself incapable of furnishing him with
the psychological and historical remedy to his tragic situation.
(19–20)
This exposition on the dilemma of being Fanon offers an insight on

not just the difficulties that plagued Fanon; it in fact opens up the com-
plicated situation of the Francophone intellectual scene. Like Fanon,
Memmi’s case also was problematic. A Jew in Arab-dominated Tunisia,
10 Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized
Memmi has occupied the margins of an African world invigorated by
the French philosophical tradition; yet it is from this in-between space
that he has come to present a perspective on the subject of colonialism.
Though Fanon and Memmi appear to occupy spaces of marginality in
the cultures they represent and respond to, they bear their distinctive
personalities upon their arguments to such an extent that the trajec-
tories branch out in separate directions. It is perhaps a testament to
the elasticity of the Francophone cultural scene which enables the
coexistence of such diverse voices within formats that display signs
of commonality on the outside. In this constant pressure of social and
cultural energies that draw out the similarities and the contradictions
onto the same playing field, thinkers like Memmi and Fanon find their
distinct spaces to place their own cases. In the passage on Fanon’s
situation, Memmi foregrounds the identity question in a way that
implicates both Fanon and the climate he comes from and responds
to; while Fanon’s individual condition is unique, it carries marks of
a process of cultural engagement that confronts almost all Franco-
phone thinkers. It calls for both acknowledgement of and negotiation
between structures of knowledge that derive from diverse roots. For
Fanon, it is the Caribbean and French inheritance that he must account
for, while for Memmi, his Jewish identity alongside the Arabic world-
view circumscribes his response to the issue of colonial experience.
Memmi’s French inheritance is unmistakably visible in his writ-
ings. Yet his somewhat unique situation – a French-speaking Jew in an
Arab-dominated African environment – and his critical engagement
with the subjects of identity and domination make it problematic to
pigeonhole him in a straightforward category. It is this ambivalence
perhaps that make assessments of his intellectual position difficult.
On the one hand, there are readings of his situation as a critic whose
dependence on the French intellectual apparatus comes in handy in
the critique that he mounts on that very heritage; then there are other
assessments that locate in his marginality a proviso which he suppos-
edly uses to undercut the narratives of ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’.
We could consider the following two positions on Memmi and his
Francophone heritage as representations that foreground particular
tropes in his writing; the first is by Dominic Thomas and the other by
Patrick Williams:
Memmi fastens on the constitutive dimension of these relations,

and this gesture is necessary in order to comprehend the ways in
which French civilizationist discourse operated.
(Thomas 2007: 48)
Memmi . . . says that, rather than being surprised at violent anti-
colonial revolts, we should be surprised that they are not more
numerous and more violent.
(Williams 2003: 188)
In the first instance, the emphasis on the significance of the French con-
nection is driven home through a focus on Memmi’s reading method,
with the suggestion that it reflects upon as well as argues the sub-
ject within a preset matrix. The second telescopes Memmi’s analysis
of revolution as a means of colonial overthrow, where he is placed
alongside Fanon as one of the espousers of violence as an agency of
release. There is no doubt that such assessments engage with Memmi’s
reason, especially in terms of what he proposes in The Colonizer and
the Colonized, but it is equally evident that readings such as these
keep other aspects of Memmi’s worldview under erasure. Although
this has something to do with the analytical priorities of the critics,
the difficulty of encapsulation is also a consequence of the ambiguities
present in the Francophone intellectual environment. What we could
do perhaps in the context of such multiple strands demanding atten-
tion is to consider Memmi’s own logic, his selection of tropes, and
then try to place his writings in perspective. In an interview with Gary
Wilder (1996), Memmi succinctly sums up his priorities as a thinker:
‘Throughout my work I’ve examined domination always in tandem
with dependence. To understand the situation you must always look
at both of the partners, at what I call the “duo”: parents and children,
men and women, colonizer and colonized’ (166). This is an interesting
key. Across the spectrum of his writings, does this theme of domina-
tion reverberate, does it present a consistent engagement with issues
of identity, racism, marginality, occupation and revolution? In many
ways, it does. At the same time, such a key is accompanied by the two
markers: relationship and dependence. While Memmi’s assessment of
his own method provides us an opportunity to consider the strategies
at work, there remains the danger, a potent one at that, of such an
exercise being a form of reduction. This has been one of the primary
issues in assessments of Memmi’s work: if the recurrence of the themes
of dependence and domination and the relationships they entail forms
the crux of his dialogue with colonial experience, do they leave room
for other possibilities? The debate is far from settled. Critics argu-
ing against Memmi’s thesis in The Colonizer and the Colonized, for
instance, question the effectiveness of his partnership model in dealing
with complexities of actual experience. Readings, however relativist
in orientation, must adopt an argumentative frame for its articulation.
What makes Memmi’s reading method so effective, in spite of the jury
being out on the subject, is his insistent focus on the subject, apart
from the consistency with which he manages the critical tropes that
serve him in the course of his argument.
Postcolonial futures: the afterlife of the colonized

How would the ‘colonized’ negotiate the aftermath of decolonization?
This is the pivotal issue in Albert Memmi’s follow-up to The Colonizer
and the Colonized, published almost half a century later, Decoloniza-
tion and the Decolonized. One of the questions occupying Memmi at
the end of The Colonizer and the Colonized was that of the possible
response of the colonized to the postcolonial situation. If decoloniza-
tion was achieved through the agency of revolution, the ouster of the
ruling class was not actually the end of the matter; rather, it inaugu-
rated a series of issues, which the erstwhile-dependent subject would
have to address. It would also involve the realization of certain myths
that he had projected during the revolutionary phase as being part of
his constitution. Is the transition so simple? The Colonizer and the
Colonized takes issue with the experience of colonialism and offers
a reading of the constituents involved in it, analysing their responses
and circumstances in which their worldviews are made and played
out. The book also looks forward to the issue of a postcolonial under-
standing of the world following decolonization. The issue, however,
finds its appropriate platform in Decolonization and the Decolonized,
where the arguments relating to identity, governance and migrancy
are elaborated at length. As Memmi points out, the former colonized
is transformed into a ‘citizen’, an altogether new category, one whose
habit he must put on and make do, assume responsibilities that were
not part of the equation during the period of his subjection. The status
of the citizen, his worldview and the circumstances of his existence,
however, cannot be seen in isolation. Other categories insist that they
be counted – those of nationalism, exile and corporation, to name a
few – and it is in this enmeshing of conflicting trajectories that the
decolonized subject faces a new world order. But it is necessary to
consider the ideal, the model which fuelled the imagination of the
colonized as he found himself on the throes of his much-anticipated
freedom. The opening paragraph of Decolonization and the Decolo-
nized sums up the picture with remarkable clarity and precision:
The end of colonization should have brought with it freedom and

prosperity. The colonized would give birth to the citizen, master
of his political, economic, and cultural destiny. After decades of
imposed ignorance, his country, now free, would affirm its sover-
eignty. Opulent or indigent, it would reap the rewards of its labour,
of its soil and subsoil. Once its native genius was given free rein, the
use of its recovered language would allow native culture to flourish.
(3)
This ideal, however, is far removed from the experiences that charac-
terize life and practice in the decolonized countries. The postcolonial
future is embroiled in ‘poverty’, ‘corruption’, ‘diversions, excuses and
myths’, ‘conflicts’ and ‘sickness’ – all of these are Memmi’s terms – and
it is a real challenge to put up a semblance of order in such a world,
fraught as it is with problems that only intensify in an increasingly
competitive global environment. It is interesting that Memmi exposes
the ideal behind the hypothetical narratives that contributed to the
futuristic imagination of the colonized in his analysis of decoloniza-
tion. For it is a narrative gone wrong, not just in its material form, but
it has in fact given rise to circumstances and issues that weren’t part
of the colonial world. How should one approach this yawning gap
between ‘fiction and reality’? Exemplifying the problems associated
with the new world, Memmi takes the cases of the intellectual and the
writer in decolonized societies. The intellectual’s inability to propose a
cogent framework for the negotiation of the crises at hand is actually
a reflection of a lack that is not easy to fill. This is the lack of a tradi-
tion which would serve the former colonized intellectual to tackle the
circumstances of his new life; the case is no different for the writer.
What should be the language of the writer? If he decides to write in
the acquired language of the colonizer, he would be doing so without
compulsion; his cultural inheritance, on the other hand, makes it clear
that there is a disconnect between the subject and the medium in which
it is represented. Analysing this dilemma in Decolonization and the
Decolonized, Memmi observes:
Paradoxically, it’s harder to be a writer in the postcolonial period

than during colonization. Before, the decolonized wrote in the lan-
guage of the colonizer, the only language he knew well, even when
directed against the colonizer. . . . But now, not having learned
any other, the writer should use this same language to examine
his own society. Continuing to ply his craft, he should depict the
incompetence, the egotism, the profitable complicity of the ruling
classes, the pressures from his own government.
(36–37)
The colonial aftermath presents a bleak picture; beset by conflicts
and contradictions, wants and corruption, decolonized societies are
trapped in the cusp of change. The pressures of globalization and the
continuous political brinkmanship that shape the contours of develop-
ment in a fast-changing international world order demand immediate
responses from the newly freed countries. Memmi suggests that this
would require a reorientation of existing categories where the former
colonized peoples cannot afford to thwart the wheel of contemporary
existence. It would entail a negotiation between the cherished ideals of
the colonized and those that invigorate the priorities of the developing
world. This is a struggle that shows no sign of relenting.
The nature of colonial relationship

In spite of the fact that Albert Memmi’s analysis of colonial experience
draws sustenance from his understanding of the situation in Tunisia,
the overarching predicament through which he frames his argument
extends beyond the immediate historical or spatial circumstances.
This is one of the important principles in the book. While there is an
underlying narrative that thrives on the conditions of life experience
in Tunisia under colonial occupation, the imperatives through which
Memmi builds his thesis have had their appeal elsewhere as well. This
does not imply, however, that the primary argument of the book is a
kind of a floating signifier, ready for adoption in societies that have
similar structures. General frames can serve as effective tools in the
business of categorization, but the specific nature of the conditions
must be accounted for sufficiently in the analysis. The enduring appeal
of Memmi’s thesis (and also the criticism it has consistently invited)
lies in his enhancement of the duality that places the colonizer and the
colonized at opposing extremes, the one pitted against the other.
We now look at The Colonizer and the Colonized for Memmi’s
insights on the subject. In Memmi’s argument this association is char-
acterized by the condition of ‘dependence’. Commenting on this, he
writes in the preface: ‘The colonial relationship which I had tried to
define chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable
dependence, moulded their respective characters and dictated their con-
duct’ (ix). This characteristic, however, does not operate in a vacuum,
or in a space given to neutrality. It is the political arrangement where
the conduct of both parties is marked by the tug-and-pull of economic
understanding, among others. No wonder, Memmi is convinced, such
an operative scheme is designed to bring to fruition a structure of privi-
leges. The processes through which the colonial relationship brackets
life in the occupied world are governed by the logic of control. The
arrangement is such that the patterns evident in civic or political life
manifest a lopsided view of things. On the one hand, the dynamics of
social conduct in a colony penetrate the personality traits across the
divide, and on the other, there is a design in place which functions to
perpetuate the colonial relationship. The myths of colonization con-
stitute one of the engines of this apparatus: it fabricates dimensions of
the self and contributes to the veneer of inevitability, the brush with
which relationships in the colonial situation are coated and varnished.
Appreciating the importance of The Colonizer and the Colonized as
a study of effects that determine the nature of life in a colonial set-up,
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to the book, observes: ‘Colonialist
practice has engraved the colonialist idea into things themselves; it is
the movement of things that designates colonizer and colonized alike’
(xxvi). The trappings of colonization, then, move beyond specific
events, individuals and institutions, even though these particulars may
engineer and sometimes serve as registers articulating the experience in
colonial society. For Memmi, the nature of the relationship is such that
reconciliation of terms within the parameters of existence, which situ-
ate the two parties at two extremes, is unimaginable. According to this
thesis, possibilities of assimilation are ruled out; the colonial relation-
ship functions, in this view, by reference to a philosophy of inequality,
justified, legitimized and perpetuated through the very apparatus that
structures the divide. It is inevitable that Memmi’s argument here,
which admits no possibility of transformation or alteration in either
of the two sides, would invite criticism from different quarters. Ashis
Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy, and Homi K. Bhabha, in The Location
of Culture, to name two postcolonial thinkers, have amply demon-
strated the presence of faultlines that arguments such as Memmi’s often
so conveniently elide over. In the face of such readings that cut through
the duality of the players in this face-off, it would not be surprising
if the clarity of the division is approached as a sign of naivete. For one,
the multiple branches of postcolonial theory that now interpenetrate
the limits of other disciplines show how, irrespective of positions that
appear to cancel out others, the foundations of critical paradigm rest
on an understanding of seemingly contradictory responses to coloni-
zation. If Memmi’s reading exposes the underlying infrastructure of
the colonial edifice through a reference to an association built on the
principle of difference, such analytical reason deserves assessments in
terms of the parameters set for the purpose. The argumentative design
of Memmi’s thesis makes it clear that the issue in question is one that
impacts both sides in the relationship: the colonizer and the colonized.
The division of the book into the portrait-driven arrangement, each
conditioning the character of the two givens, brings home the taxo-
nomic logic informing it. While the book’s primary thrust, that of the
colonizer and the colonized occupying positions of opposition, can
be critiqued in the context of the movement of the attached mark-
ers across set limits, the importance of the values and their relation
to each of these categories (even for questioning) cannot be under-
estimated. Second, there is also the arresting pressure of the binary
opposition which Memmi banks upon, in counter-discourses that prise
open its porous limits. The negotiations which open up the dialogic
process between the two opposing fixities are, at one level, reliant on
the condition of these positions functioning as givens. When Memmi
highlights the distinctive operative features of both of these situations
that bind them together in a relationship, he is drawing our attention
to the properties of each which do not move across to the other side
all that easily. He in fact goes on to account for the possibilities of the
evolutionary process in a very different way, arguing that the disen-
gagement of the two can be brought about only by the radical step of
the ‘revolt’. He examines this possibility towards the very end of the
book, an issue we shall have occasion to address a little further ahead
in the discussion. But it is significant that Memmi does not confine
himself to the ‘colonizer’ and the ‘colonized’ as categories in a state of
stasis. His analysis approaches the implications of the colonial relation
in terms of the conditioning to which both parties are subjected, and
it is the acquisition of properties that is not natural to either, which he
seeks to investigate. There is a definitely political imperative behind
the logic furthered by the colonizer, but for Memmi, it is also aided
by the co-option of this machinery either through the internalization of
the official rhetoric or by a submission to a sense of inferiority by the
subject. As such, the character of the relationship is far from a simple
one-on-one engagement. We could only misread the analytical design
of Memmi if we overemphasize the twin aspects of the association as
straight, divisible issues. There is no doubt that he relies on the logic
of difference for his argument to arrest the various dimensions of the
experience that pits the ruler and the subject in inimical poles; yet his
reading aims to funnel deep there in where the threads of the actual
bind reside.
In showing how the relationship functions to orient the political
apparatus in a colonial situation, Memmi locates the subject through
the registry of a comparative scale. The nature of this scale is deter-
mined and regulated by the colonizer. Once positioned at the apex of
the structure which draws sustenance from its hierarchical inviolability,
the colonizer works out the procedures that grant it its legitimacy.
The impact of such a worldview on the colonized society is such that
the relationship registers itself in the material circumstances circum-
scribing the conduct of both the ruler and his subjects. In effect, the
colonizer’s life in that society cannot but be defined through the scale
of extremes:
Suddenly these men were no longer a simple component of geo-

graphical or historical décor. They assumed a place in his life.
He cannot even resolve to avoid them. He must constantly live
in relation to them, for it is this very alliance which enables him to
lead the life which he decided to look for in the colonies; it is this
relationship which is lucrative, which creates privilege. He finds
himself on one side of a scale, the other side of which bears the
colonized man.
(7–8)
Within the colonial world, the circumstances of actual lived experience

submit to both ideological and institutional frames that are specific
orientations. The correspondence between the real and the ideological
may not necessarily be evident to the subjugated man. Memmi reads
such gaps within the fixities of the colonial relationship as forms of
inadequacy, and insofar as these limits set margins to the argument,
he is alert to the possibilities of another kind. The issue of ‘privilege’
is a pointer to Memmi’s analytical method. Seizing upon the double-
edged trappings of the word and the hierarchical arrangement its use
drives home, Memmi demonstrates that its feasibility rests on it being
accorded recognition by both sides, albeit with their own conditions.
Such an emphasis invites us to attend to the possibilities of a key ele-
ment in the relationship – in this case it is privilege – wherein erasure
of the term’s opposing facet becomes necessary for its validity. For the
colonizer to make capital of this condition, it is necessary that he coat
it with the texture of inevitability, reducing the subject to a mere instru-
ment perpetuating the scheme. Since the governmental machinery is
engaged in defining the process as inevitable, the subject also succumbs
to the same design, whereby his insignificance comes to function as
a given he has learned to accept. For a concept such as privilege to
acquire operative legitimacy in the colonial world, it is imperative that
both sides acknowledge its importance within that realm. In his analy-
sis of the contours of the concept, Memmi engages with it as an agency,
one whose effectiveness is evident not just in its internalization but
equally seen in the way it penetrates institutions in the colonial world.
As an agency, privilege powers the various dimensions of colonial life.
It organizes not just the political arithmetic between the subject and
the ruler; it percolates down to other extensions that include wider
demographic ‘others’ whose status remain unfixed.
The colonizer partakes of an elevated world from which he auto-

matically reaps the privileges.
It is also their concrete economic and psychological position
within the colonial society in relation to the colonized on the one
hand, and to the colonizers on the other hand, which accounts
for the traits of the other human groups − those who are neither
colonizers nor colonized. Among these are the nationals of other
powers (Italians, Maltese of Tunisia), candidates for assimilation
(the majority of Jews), the recently assimilated (Corsicans in Tuni-
sia, Spaniards in Algeria). To these can be added the colonized
themselves.
(13)
This is an interesting diagnosis. While the effect of the law of political

relations marks out the colonized in terms of the norms of a rigid hier-
archy, the mobility of the others does not enable them to avail of the
privileges that are denied to the colonial subject. As such, the grip of
the hierarchical arrangement impacts the fringe-players, not necessar-
ily by the same logic of control that applies to the colonized but by way
of fortification. In other words, the nature of the colonial relationship
does not permit dilution of the colonizer’s privileges, irrespective of the
constitution of the rest of the society.
Portrait gallery (case 1): the colonizer and

his worldview
Memmi’s opening portrait in the book is that of the colonizer. His
examination is spread across three subdivisions, each organized to
address different aspects of the colonizer. The first concerns the issue
of the colonizer’s existence, while the second and the third relate to the
matters of his rejection and acceptance in colonial society. Memmi’s
analysis begins with the appearance of the colonizer in what eventually
comes to function as a colonial society. At an early stage, the colonial
is an outsider; for him this is just a stopover, a temporary, transitory
sojourn and residence for a longer time is not part of his plans. But soon
things change. Not only does he feel at home here, a society whose cir-
cumstances are not akin to the one he had left behind, but interestingly,
this principle of difference is what drives him in the consolidation of
the legitimacy motif once his power-mechanics take hold of the native
imagination. In many ways, Memmi argues, such acquired values and
their accompanying pressures on the subject population work to keep
the colonized wrapped in this rhetoric of difference. But how does the
colonizer come to acquire such power and under what circumstances?
For an outsider coming to an unknown world, he does not have much
to go by, except for the narratives that have come to his knowledge
preceding his actual arrival. These narratives suddenly gain tangibility
through a merger with his actual experience in the colony. What was a
mere metaphor of geographical and cultural alterity suddenly becomes
a part of his existence. This is a crucial development in the making of
the colonizer. He is enriched by the realization that living in the colony
is living with privileges. As an option, this is too tempting not to give
in to, and in Memmi’s argument, the colonial mind is so conducive
to the philosophy of dominance that the only hierarchy which makes
sense here is one where the colonized is a passive recipient without
authority. Painted thus, the colonizer appears remarkably demonic, a
usurper whose only logic for existence in the colony is the exercise of
power and the benefits that follow such a process.
At one level, Memmi’s argumentative thrust in such a portrait seems
overtly simplified; the examination of colonial situations and the the-
oretical frameworks underlying them has shown how complex and
varied conditions in the colony can be or have been. It can also be
argued that there are many sides to the colonizer, and to project him
only as a usurper (however evident that may be) is not just a case
of reductionism but also one that erases trajectories of the colonial
encounter which do not quite subscribe to such straight reasoning. If
simplicity is what Memmi is most guilty of, is it a reflection of some
lack in his analytical reasoning, or some kind of tactical blindness?
I do not think the ascription of ‘simplistic’ as a label could address
the ramifications of the subject he is trying to make a case for. Let us
try to approach Memmi’s method from a different front. A careful
reading of The Colonizer and the Colonized will show that Memmi
does not suggest that his is the only way of looking at the subject.
What is striking in the book is the deliberate eschewing of alternative
frames of setting up the argument. In other words, his is an analytical
paradigm that locates the issue in the colonial relationship. When he
looks at the colonizer as a category, Memmi considers the relational
bond that defines functions between the ruling class and the subjects
to be of great importance. Memmi’s reading thus insists upon the pri-
mary significance of the relation, and he proceeds to build his case
to demonstrate how it contributes to the political and the psycho-
logical infrastructure in colonial society. Many particulars of colonial
existence, ambivalences and contradictions, that hover on the surface
ease out to the greater dynamics which Memmi places within the rela-
tional matrix. As such, the portraits of the colonizer and the colonized
are imbued with the logic of interdependence, each fraught with and
conditioned by the other. Once placed within such a frame, Memmi’s
examination engages with the making of the two minds that constitute
the colonial world.
Is such erasure of multiple possibilities in a complex, evolving world
an exercise in reduction? It depends on what we are looking for. For
one, Memmi’s focus on the colonizer’s priorities and the philosophy
that fuels his imagination validates his selection of examples. Second,
his classification of the different dimensions of the colonizer draws
out those insistent markers that contribute to the idea of the colo-
nizer. What appears reductionist in the context of cultural relativism
becomes in Memmi’s logic a necessity. If he reduces, it is for the purpose
of making the ‘portrait’ definitive. Whether such a narrative possibility
can or does not correspond to other imaginations where the colonizer
appears in a different formation is another issue. Let us examine some
more features of the colonizer’s portrait in order to see whether the
logic of relation holds forth throughout the narrative. Once the colo-
nizer is firmly situated in the colony, there is an attempt to imbue the
existential circumstance with the logic of reason. It hardly matters,
Memmi argues, whether individuals within the system are disturbed
by the existing hierarchy, for the overarching ambit of the structure
presses home the dominance motif across the spectrum. The following
passage, where Memmi traces the genealogy of the colonizer’s status,
takes in both the spatial and the temporal indices within its sweep.
A foreigner, having come to a land by the accidents of history, he

has succeeded not merely in creating a place for himself but also
in taking away that of the inhabitant, granting himself astounding
privileges to the detriment of those rightfully entitled to them. And
this not by virtue of local laws, which in certain way legitimize this
inequality by tradition, but by upsetting the established rules and
substituting his own. He thus appears doubly unjust. He is a privi-
leged being and illegitimately privileged one; that is, a usurper.
Furthermore, this is so, not only in the eyes of the colonized, but
in his own as well. . . . He knows also that the most favoured colo-
nized will never be anything but colonized people, in other words,
that certain rights will forever be refused them, and that certain
advantages are reserved strictly for him. In short, he knows, in his
own eyes as well as those of his victim, that he is a usurper. He
must adjust to both being regarded as such, and to this situation.
(9)
It is a condition which no individual can overthrow, for he is bracketed

within a category he is unable to disclaim. If usurpation and legitimacy
serve as keywords in this passage, they foreground the strong lines
of division which place both the colonizer and the colonized across
it. The colonizer’s acknowledgement of the benefits that accrue his
situation in the colony thus moves beyond the economic and political
control he exercises with authority; it marks him as well as the colo-
nized with the same brush, and what grants him power is the same
that transforms his subject into a victim. Memmi is also drawing our
attention here to the fact that there may be an in-built hierarchy in
place within the colonized population, but it is confined to its own
space. This spatialization of the colonial world into two territories
that follow a new cultural orientation is the consequence of the colo-
nizer’s arrival. The prehistory of colonization may have been distinctly
different from what the colonial world passes through, but it is the
colonizer’s overwhelming rhetoric of legitimacy that overruns all nar-
ratives. It is a process that makes the articulation of alternative voices a
challenge the colonized is not quite ready to mount upon his oppressor.
The privileges of the colonizer extend beyond particular occupants and
is transferred as a right down the family tree. In this context, Memmi
observes: ‘From the time of his birth, he possesses a qualification inde-
pendent of his personal merits or his actual class. He is part of the
group of colonizers whose values are sovereign’ (12). The legitimacy
of the colonizer to occupy the position of privilege thus moves across
a network of values and cuts through the generational divide. This
network of values results in the placement of an infrastructure that
makes the imposition of holidays, festivals, rituals and practices – all
imported from his own land – valid and necessary. Not only does the
colonizer make the colonial society his own place, but also he does so
by bringing his entire cultural apparatus, and he also sees to it that it
is institutionally sanctified.
Are all colonizers of the same make? Memmi argues that the over-
whelming influence of the colonial apparatus makes it extremely
difficult for resistant voices to find their space. At the same time, not
everyone approaches the situation with the same mind, and howsoever
may the colonizer impose his writ on the population, these anachro-
nistic traces remain. For someone having problems with the colonial
apparatus, the challenge is twofold: first, he must de-condition him-
self by foregrounding a critical perspective on the matter and, second,
make sense of the contradiction through which he has to define his
existence. Memmi points out that these tasks call for more than self-
criticism, for what is at risk is his identity in the colony: ‘It is not easy
to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology
while continuing to live with its actual relationships. From now on,
he lives his life under the sign of a contradiction which looms at every
step, depriving him of all coherence and all tranquillity’ (20). It is obvi-
ous that this resistant constituent of the colonizing class is steam-rolled
by the apparatus; whatever he may make of the ‘contradiction’ of his
own situation, he is bound to occupy the space which designates him
as a colonizer. It is interesting that the systemic takeover spares none; it
incorporates colonizers of all minds, equally branding the resistant and
the conformist with the same mark. Irrespective of how he positions
himself individually in connection to the system, the person recognized
as the colonizer cannot escape its pressure:
To tell the truth, the style of colonization does not depend upon
one or a few generous or clear-thinking individuals. Colonial rela-
tions do not stem from individual good will or actions; they exist
before his arrival or his birth, and whether he accepts or rejects
them matters little. It is they, on the contrary which, like any insti-
tution, determine a priori his place and that of the colonized and,
in the final analysis, their true relationship.
(38–39)
‘The colonizer who accepts’ is the one whose ideology, imagination

and conduct fuels the colonial engine. Once he submits to the condi-
tion of being the colonizer, he works to transform a world to his own
understanding. For this, numerous strategies and systemic conditions
are put in place. The first is the principle of justification: ‘No matter
what happens he justifies everything – the system and the officials in
it’ (46). Such a colonizer, so intent upon tapping the advantages that
come his way, is, in Memmi’s perception, the colonialist. The colo-
nialist is one whose identity is configured by the logic of dominance
over the colonized. How is this achieved? Memmi argues that one of
the ways in which this is done is through the operation of the Nero
Complex. The colonialist has to constantly justify his occupation of
the land and its people, the control and takeover of its institutions and
practices by negating the usurpation that made all this possible in the
first place. The dilemma for him, even in his moment of achievement,
is to negotiate the actual circumstances of his arrival with the logic
of legitimacy. The colonizer’s awareness that his authority derives
from the act of usurpation is the source of the Nero Complex. The
moment of triumph is simultaneously the time when the illegitimacy
of his involvement becomes unavoidable. In order to erase traces of
the Complex finding its way beyond his private, psychic space, the
colonizer works towards the formation of a new narrative:
This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he

admits that what triumphs in him is an image which condemns.
His true victory will therefore never be upon him: now he need
only to record it in the laws and morals. For this he would have
to convince the others, if not himself. In other words, to possess
victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the con-
ditions under which it was attained. This explains his strenuous
insistence, strange for a victor, on apparently futile matters. He
endeavours to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extin-
guish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpa-
tion into legitimacy.
(52)
In many ways, this passage drives home the orientation behind Memmi’s
argument in The Colonizer and the Colonized. The major challenge
for the colonizer is to co-opt not just the colonized into the narrative of
legitimacy which he so systematically foists on the population; it also
involves a process of self-engagement wherein his own action is coated
with the fabric of political necessity. This results in the overthrow of
the texts of history which he had encountered on arrival, but now they
are subjected to a carefully orchestrated process of erasure: he makes
laws, restructures institutions and legitimizes his actions in order to
fabricate historical circumstances. Apart from the external validation
of the justness of his situation as a ruler in this colonial land, this
strategy is also designed to set at rest the queries that stem from his
psychic realm, one that requires answering. In time, Memmi argues,
the colonizer works out a conducive logic to tame the unrest within
as well as the difficulties in the colonial world. If this logic sustains
the legitimacy motif in colonial society, there are other dimensions to
it which deserve our attention. An interesting point made by Memmi
here concerns the prevalence of mediocrity. Those who stay back at
the colony and determine the plan for governance are usually those
whose identities are under threat, or marginalized in their own lands.
Therefore, the mediocrity cult forces the wizened among the colonial
elite either to quit these shores or to submit to this rhetoric of domina-
tion. Once the infrastructure finds a firm footing, the colonizer further
enhances the stratification by fortifying the difference between himself
and his subject. This is done through the perpetuation of separation
which is now consolidated: ‘The distance which colonization places
between him and the colonized must be accounted for and, to justify
himself he increases this further by placing the two figures irretrievably
in opposition; his glorious position and the despicable one of the colo-
nized’ (54–55). The hypocrisy which is characteristic of the colonizer’s
conduct in the colony, in fact, is evident in other dimensions as well.
By projecting himself as the face of his mother country, that too as
an ardent nationalist, the colonizer promotes his acquisition of false
morals in the name of patriotism. The image of the homeland that he
sells in the colony is one of superiority, beside which none can ever
come close. This is quite crafty. On the one hand, he enjoys his unchal-
lenged status in the colonial world, and on the other, he articulates an
imagination that does not quite correspond to the rhetoric that carries
it forward. To his homeland, he is presenting an illusion of persever-
ance and toil, and to his subjects, he is marketing a culture that has no
competition. In this way, he hides his inadequacy and makes capital
out of a situation he happens to take advantage of. The following
observation puts the matter in perspective:
Over the years he has sculptured, in opposition to the colony, such

a monument of his homeland that the colony necessarily appears
coarse and vulgar to the novitiate. It is remarkable that even for
colonizers born in the colony, that is, reconciled to the sun, the
heat and the dry earth, the other scenery looks misty, humid and
green. As though their homeland were an essential component of
the collective superego of colonizers, its material features become
quasi-ethical qualities. . . . The mother country thus combines only
positive values, good climate, harmonious landscape, social disci-
pline and exquisite liberty, beauty, morality and logic.
(60)
This exposure of deceit, what Memmi has called ‘a double illegitimacy’

(9) early on in the book, is a facade which acquires validity through
practice and promotion in colonial society. The colonizer holds on to
this structure, enhancing the distance between him and his subject, and
it is only when the inevitable upsurge dismantles the edifice of colonial-
ism that he ceases to be. The road to such a situation is not easily trod,
nor is it a straightforward engagement between well-defined opposites.
As Memmi shows in his discussion on the colonized, the psychological
parameters interpenetrate the mental realms, and that too so decisively
that a return to the previous innocence is impossible. The colonizer’s
exit is thus marked by much more than a physical giving up of the
occupied terrain; it involves a scrutiny of his own make-up as an indi-
vidual, and how far the erasure of identifiable traces arrests the turmoil
within remains inaccessible.
Portrait gallery (case 2): the colonized in his world

In the second part of the book Memmi examines the situation of the
colonized subject. How is his identity formed? Unlike the colonizer,
whose arrival in this new social environment involves the politics of
hierarchy consolidation, for the colonized, it is adjustment of another
order. Once situated in relation to the colonizer, he is compelled to
address the ramifications of the narrative designs that define his status
in society. Memmi shows how myth-making and orchestrated narra-
tivization create the image of the colonized as a depraved, inferior,
weak and insignificant individual; this process is at work at various
levels of the colonial machinery, and it is not surprising that the colo-
nized comes to recognize such an estimate as valid and inevitable. But
more than this myth-making exercise threatening the existing condi-
tions behind self-formation, it contributes to the systematic erasure
of his past, which in turn is replaced by a narrative where his current
abject situation emerges as the natural consequence of that history.
Memmi argues that this is a mode of political and ideological engage-
ment that the colonized finds it extremely difficult to counter:
The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed

from history and from the community. . . . He is in no way a sub-
ject of history any more. Of course, he carries its burden, often
more cruelly than others, but always as an object. He has forgot-
ten how to participate actively in history and no longer even asks
to do so. No matter how briefly colonization may have lasted, all
memory of freedom seems distant; he forgets what it costs or else
he no longer dares to pay the price for it.
(91–93)
The erasure from history is just one of the problems that the colo-
nized is compelled to confront in his encounter with his new ruler,
for questions of identity and responsibility emerge with great force
and marginalize him in his own land. Memmi argues that the process
through which he is excluded from the past and present of his own
tradition takes firm root in his consciousness. He loses his conviction
and is trapped in a time warp where his sense of self is determined and
controlled by the governmental apparatus and its rhetorical machin-
ery. This reduction of the colonized to the margins of his society is
actually patterned to situate him in such a way that any engagement
with the issue of dominance becomes extremely difficult. On the one
hand, there is the first stage of overwhelming the culture of depen-
dence which circumscribes his imagination, and on the other, any
critical response to the situation would involve the cultivation of self-
awareness. This is a very taxing task. Not because of the nature of
the effort that is called for, but for another reason: the colonized is
transformed into an abject individual in such a way that he loses all
confidence and he has no option but to comply. How is such a circum-
stance brought about? Memmi suggests that one of the most powerful
tools aiding the consolidation of this narrative is that of myth. Once
these myths take hold of the popular imagination, they are perpetu-
ated by different agencies. It has been argued that Memmi’s thesis
presents the possibility of placing it beside the psychoanalytical frame
adopted by Freud and Jung, for rather than dealing with the physical
or material effects of that experience, he contextualizes the issue by
addressing it as conditioning of the mind. Lawrence Alschuler (1996),
for instance, sees in Memmi’s foregrounding of myths a strategic
design as it enables us to look at such aspects of colonial experience
that have more to do with the psychological orientation of the colo-
nized than specifically identifiable material evidence.
Memmi gives us a psychological perspective on the conscious side

of the personality. The role of political myths and ideologies, of
self-images, of attitudes toward oppressors and oppressed, are all
more or less conscious manifestations of the ego. Jungian psychol-
ogy contributes further insights into the psychodynamics of the
unconscious processes that accompany these political expressions
of ego consciousness. Memmi brings us closer to an understanding
of the unconscious because he deals so much with the emotions,
which Jungian psychology considers rooted in the unconscious.
(498)
Such a reading of Memmi’s approach to the subject underlines the

importance of drawing out the deep-seated cultural traces that inhabit
the colonial relationship. But Memmi goes further. He argues that the
reduction of the colonized into a mere function involves the construc-
tion of a false sense of security in the subject; what this does is to fix
the colonized in a frame where no manoeuvre works. Memmi points
out that such designs are more than political traps; they affect not just
an individual’s identity; such narratives scar the colonized by making
‘traditions’ functional in these societies. It is not a living tradition in
a free country.
It is designed to legitimize the rhetoric of the colonizer through the
narratives of leisure. Memmi’s view is that there is a percolation from
one generation to another through the family: ‘The colonial super-
structure has real value as a refuge. It saves the colonized from the
despair of total defeat and, in return, it finds confirmation in a con-
stant inflow of new blood’ (99). It is evident that Memmi’s exposure
of the process through which the colonizer takes over the mind of the
subject is actually part of the build-up that eventually leads to the fea-
sibility of the solution he proposes: revolution. The colonized’s only
way of challenging the impasse is through the revolt. It is tempting to
dismiss such an insistence as romantic or even simplistic, but we could
perhaps consider the situation in terms of the categories with which
Memmi chooses to argue his case. For instance, he sees the relation
between the colonizer and the colonized as one where no interpenetra-
tion is considered possible; therefore, without the feasibility of dilution
to the extent where the essence is under threat, these categories con-
tinue to occupy opposite camps. As we have already seen, the status
of each depends on the nature of the relation that exists between the
two. Informing the relation is the consistent attempt of the colonizer to
fixate the subject in a time warp so that no movement beyond the given
limits is possible. Under such circumstances, Memmi argues, the colo-
nized has no option but to contest the authority by violating the terms
of the colonial relation. Once the revolution is under way, the life of
the colonized takes on a different character; his action in the present
is closely aligned to the ideals of national culture and freedom, where
untrammelled by the exigencies of dependence, he launches forth with-
out accounting for its final shape and situation. This is because the
colonial world relies on the relation of dependence, and the distur-
bance to its fabric would not only bring such a structure to the point
of collapse, but it would simultaneously tear asunder the categories of
the colonizer and the colonized: ‘For the colonized just as for the colo-
nizer, there is no way out other than a complete end to colonization.
The refusal of the colonized cannot be anything but absolute, that is,
not only revolt, but a revolution’ (150).
Works cited
Alschuler, Lawrence R. ‘Oppression, Liberation, and Narcissism: A Jung-
ian Psychopolitical Analysis of the Ideas of Albert Memmi’, Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1996, pp. 497–523.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld,
Intro. Jean-Paul Sartre, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967.
_______. ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, trans. Thomas Cassirer and
G. Michael Tworney, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1973,
pp. 9–39.
_______. Decolonization and the Decolonized, trans. Robert Bononno, Min-
neapolis, MN, and London, UK: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Thomas, Dominic. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, Transnational-
ism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Wilder, Gary. ‘Irreconcilable Differences: A Conversation with Albert Memmi’,
Transition, No. 71, 1996, pp. 158–177.
Williams, Patrick. ‘ “Faire peau neuve”–Césaire, Fanon, Memmi, Sartre
and Senghor’ in Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, eds. Francophone
Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, London, UK: Arnold, 2003,
pp. 181–191.
2 Frantz Fanon: The Wretched
of the Earth
Fanon: registers, impact and the
question of theory
The arguments for the overthrow of colonialism, found in Frantz

Fanon’s bracketing of liberation and nationalism, are notions that situ-
ated the West as a confirmed antagonist, but this process also involved
an act of self-definition, one through which the new nation would dis-
tinguish itself. In the context of the decolonization wave that changed
the international dynamics in the twentieth century, Fanon’s framing
of political imperatives for the new country was perceived, and also
taken to be, relevant to the task at hand. Not everyone bought the
argument that he proposed, but that he was able to bring to focus
the issues that a new nation faced was something on which there was
wider agreement. It may appear that Fanon’s emphasis on violence
as a vital agency in the road to freedom is a literal call to arms, but
if such an impression has accompanied more engaged readings of his
political philosophy, then it sidetracks the question of culture that he
holds so close to his worldview. In articulating the need for differ-
ence Fanon turns the Western rhetoric on its head where savagery is
situated as part of the exercise which fuelled colonialism in the first
place. Given the circumstances in which he presented his argument,
what he demonstrates as a historiographic strategy in The Wretched
of the Earth – that the Western nations colonized other peoples only
to elevate them from the morass of savagery – this conditioning of the
imperialist power structure in A Dying Colonialism is a reversal of
terms:
In a war of liberation, the colonial people must win, but they

must do so clearly, without ‘barbarity’. The European nation that
practices torture is a blighted nation, unfaithful to its history. The
underdeveloped nation that practices torture thereby confirms
its nature, plays the role of an underdeveloped people. If it does
not wish to be morally condemned by the ‘Western nations’, an
30 Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth
underdeveloped nation is obliged to practice fair play, even while
its adversary ventures, with a clear conscience, into the unlimited
exploration of the new means of terror.
(24)
This passage from A Dying Colonialism opens the West/colonized

space wide, but it is interesting to see how Fanon construes a politically
driven ethics in distinguishing the underdeveloped countries from its
advanced counterparts. Often, Fanon has been located and impressed
upon the theoretical scene of postcolonial space as a champion of vio-
lence, especially in the light of his somewhat belligerent call for the
exercise of power by the colonized people in the fight against imperi-
alism. There are reasons behind such a placement, but any reduction
that reads into his argumentative design only the narrative of violence
would miss out on seminal questions that Fanon has brought to bear
on the contemporary critical practice. Fanon’s occupation of an ascen-
dant position in postcolonial discourse owes, to a great extent, to his
earmarking of parameters that any engagement with the experience of
colonialism would require. In the first place, what Fanon does more
emphatically, and without ambiguity, is to open up the critical distance
that exists between the colonizer and the colonized. Whereas this dis-
tinction is placed in the context of the political space in The Wretched
of the Earth, he explores the psychological circumstances in which the
black/white dichotomies are played out in the public space in Black
Skin, White Masks. Is it the pressure of performance that conditions
the world of the black man in an environment where the worldview
of the white exerts itself in various ways? This is one of the questions
that Fanon persistently asks in his writings that aim to unravel the
psychological contours of phenomenon that is not so easily realized
or understood. When he sees the function of language as a dominant
determinant, one whose pressure occupies the mind of the margin-
alized individual, Fanon’s reading of ‘inferiority complex’ brings
together the social and the personal onto the same plane, whereby he
is able to reposition the black as one who is threatened by the call of
assimilation. This is a response that the black man is under immense
pressure to give in to, for when one who has had the experience of hav-
ing been in an urban location, he permeates the sense of this very world
to his fellow people back home, for the ‘black man who has been to
the métropole is a demigod’ (3). The pressure to display this experience
and distinguish himself from his own environment and, at the same
time, contest the gnawing sense of inferiority in a white world exerts
great demands on the black man to perform in ways that show his
Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth 31
ability to adjust himself. Fanon draws out these nuances with remark-
able insight, positioning the complexities of the individual caught in
the pull of social and psychological pressures within the context of
colonial experience. This act of situating of the black individual within
the twin ambits of colonialism and performative expectation is of great
importance to Fanon’s reading of that mind which is compelled to
address questions of value beyond the world of his own making. He
puts the issue quite clearly at the opening of Black Skin, White Masks:
All colonized people – in other words, people in whom an inferi-

ority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has
been committed to the grave – position themselves in relation to
the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the
colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the
more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his black-
ness and the bush, the whiter he will become.
(2–3)
Yet Fanon’s importance as a psychologist reading the other in terms

of the black man’s placement in the West-controlled world has seen
responses that situate him in different ways. David Macey, for instance,
looks at the difficulty of categorizing Fanon within the critical space
where his insights are referred to for both analysis and critique. This is
because Fanon does not hold the black/white divide as stark a frame as
often it is made out to be; rather, as we can see in his reading of Jacques
Lacan’s analogy of the human subject in psychoanalytic discourse, the
shift from the cultural to the personal draws up a trajectory which
does not follow the conventions associated with its framing. Macey’s
projection of this difficulty of situating Fanon within an easily acces-
sible disciplinary structure also sheds light on the complicated nature
of the world that he took as his subject, for Fanon also revisited the
spaces of those disciplines whose threads he brought to bear on his
reading of colonialism. Discussing the problematic nature of Fanon’s
situation as an analyst in terms of the bracketing to which he has been
subsequently subjected, Macey (2010) writes of the embarrassment he
has become:
Embarrassing to psychiatrists because he uncovers their science’s

contribution to one of the more unsavoury episodes in its history,
embarrassing to at least some Martinicans because he is perceived
as a traitor, and embarrassing to France in that he is a stubborn
reminder of un passe qui ne passe pas, the Fanon of Peau noire,
masques blancs is also embarrassing to cultural historians and
critics in that he is so difficult to categorize. He fits uncomfortably
into the category of ‘progressive psychiatrist’, though he certainly
was one, but is almost as difficult to include in any history of the
black ‘French minority’ and its cultural-intellectual history.
(38)
The claims that are designed to question Fanon’s method, for instance,
cut through the imperialist legacy of many of the disciplines that
Macey lists here as part of the discourses his writings engaged with,
and more than his own situation as reader of the colonial situation, it
is the exposure of the faultlines in Western knowledge production pro-
cedures that has made it so difficult to locate Fanon as a theorist within
the conventions he drew upon. There can, of course, be other brackets
one may have recourse to in placing Fanon, but that he can be situated
as a political commentator, or psychiatrist, and more significantly as a
postcolonial thinker, attests to the continuing relevance of his writings
for a world mired in antagonisms whose essential paradigm of hostility
and distrust has not shown much change in an increasingly globalized
environment.
The colonial world, violence and political

responsiveness
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth opens with a hyperbolic
expression: ‘decolonization is always a violent phenomenon’ (27). The
context in which Fanon projects violence as the essential condition
informing the process of colonial departure is something that unfolds
in the course of the argument, but this engagement acquires signifi-
cance for another reason: that, based on pronouncements like this,
Fanon and, the theoretical spin-off, Fanonism are associated with a
form of aggressive response that seems to operate by leveraging itself
on this being not merely necessary, but almost an inevitability. How far
is such an impression grounded on the examination of Fanon’s analysis
of colonialism? Or rather, we could ask, why does he invest so much
upon the thesis of violence and its agency for the process of freedom
from colonial authority? Both these questions are related, though they
point towards, first, the reading of Fanon’s theory of violence and,
second, his mode of reading colonial experience. For a book structured
into five sections followed by a brief conclusion, the considerably long
first part called ‘Concerning Violence’ is designed not merely to initi-
ate the terms of the discussion; it is also meant to serve as the index
of critical engagement, the matrix through which Fanon examines and
situates questions of resistance and freedom in the context of colonial
rule. It is fascinating to see how the process of decolonization, for
Fanon, involves a complete overhauling of the system that the colo-
nial rulers had put in place, for in the acceptance of traces lies a form
of agreement with all that the new nation will be fighting against.
Fanon’s position, at one level, shows a strong anti-colonial current,
but it would not be fair to leave it at that, for behind such an under-
standing we have the legacy of colonial pressure that reduced lives and
cultures to conditions of abjection. At another level, however, Fanon’s
emphasis on the rejection of the colonial apparatus entirely emerges
as a mode of political knowledge, a condition with which governance
in the new nation is to be done. There is thus a two-way move behind
Fanon’s reading of violence in the first section of The Wretched of the
Earth: it is a violent wringing away from the chains of colonialism, a
movement by force and will that would make this history ineffective
in the shaping of the nation’s present, and moreover, it is a strategy for
the future, one where the norms and rules of the colonial state will be
rendered ineffective.
The change that Fanon sees or, rather, argues for in the postcolonial
state derives from a logic of opposition, and it is this countering of the
colonial machinery that requires a complete reassessment of values. It
is necessary to recognize the thrust of Fanon, his argumentative focus
and his insistence on the function of ‘violence’ in the nation that comes
into being through the process of decolonization. In the very first sen-
tence of the book, Fanon draws on the cognates of the word ‘nation’
thrice and emphasizes that irrespective of the nature of the designa-
tion, no new state can afford to cling on to the culture of colonialism.
What he is arguing for is not merely separation from the colonial
power that controlled it but an overhauling that would result in the
‘whole structure being changed from the bottom up’ (27). He recog-
nizes that the ‘change’ being referred to cannot be a one-way process:
it would impact the colonizers as well. It would alter the dynamics of
international politics and relations in ways that cannot quite be placed
into a formulaic straitjacket. At the centre of Fanon’s proposition that
violence is an inevitable corollary to the new nation’s emergence in the
world lies the acknowledgement of the oppositional paradigm, and it
is only through a face-off of the opposed forces that decolonization
can take place. It is interesting to see how Fanon locates decoloniza-
tion as a practice that displays mutual recognition of the oppositional
engagement, and one that operates not in one fell moment, but over
time. In spite of the fact that the moment of freedom from colonial
rule in its realized form is fixed in time, it owes much to a historical
process: ‘Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences
individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms specta-
tors crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the
grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them’ (28). How does this
opposition work? And to what extent can the colonized people chal-
lenge this pressure of the colonial order? Fanon’s argument is that the
process of release from domination involves, among other things, the
understanding that there is a problem with the mode of governance,
with the way the world is seen. This ‘problem’ is the one that comes
from the colonial worldview, and when he argues for violence being
inevitable in this experience of decolonization, he is also referring to
the rejection of the vision that colonialism imposed upon the natives.
In other words, the new nation must challenge the political grammar
of the colonial world, and for this, the native who looks forward to a
postcolonial experience must be ready for a counter-response. Fanon’s
examination of the colonial world shows an engagement with the
forms and agencies through which authority and power are exerted.
This exploration of the colonial order and its structural character is
aimed at demonstrating the ground where the oppositional framework
between the colonizer and the native was evident in practice. And it is
this analysis which marks the reasons behind the argument that sees
violence as an inevitable condition of the decolonizing process.
What is the nature of the world under colonial rule? Fanon begins
his examination by considering the role played by the instruments of
the power elite and fixes his attention on two institutionally sanctioned
agents: the policeman and the soldier. In states where governance is
aimed at furthering the development of its citizens, the policeman and
the soldier serve as agents of peace; they contribute to the maintenance
of law and order. When it comes to the colonial world, these very per-
sonnel become symbols of fear and they are seen as figures employed
for the purpose of domination. What Fanon is trying to emphasize
here relates to the mode of governance in the colony where the norms
undergo a complete reversal. That is why he states, quite unambigu-
ously: ‘In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the
official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his
rule of oppression’ (29). As agents of the power elite, the policeman
and the soldier serve to maintain the divide between the ‘settler’ and
the native – it is interesting to see how Fanon makes use of the terms of
the colonizer and the settler depending on the scope of the example
or the nature of emphasis – but they are not mere symbols; they practice
a much deeply set structure that spreads across the colonial world. And
it is this world that sees the native and the settler occupying positions
that are starkly opposed to one another. This opposition is not one
of political hierarchy alone; it is, Fanon believes, a design that runs
through the very fabric of that world and impacts the various layers of
existence. In arguing that these are two different worlds – that of the
settler, prosperous and comfortable, and of the native, rundown and
impoverished – Fanon is actually pointing towards a distinctive dif-
ference in orientation. One of the early examples that he gives in this
context relates to the associations of space, the metaphor being that of
the ‘town’, different because of its inhabitants and also because of the
way things are perceived and seen. At a consistent level, then, Fanon’s
argument is directed towards a psychological inculcation that emerges
out of the practice of colonialism, and it acknowledges the force of
the apparatus that makes this philosophy of domination effective. The
town of the settler ‘is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is
always full of good things’ (30). Its opposite, the town of the native, on
the other hand, is ‘peopled by men of evil repute’ (30). As the opposites
pile up in a contrasting series of have and have-not terms, it clear that
Fanon is pushing the argument to an extreme structural condition, one
which follows the ‘principle of reciprocal exclusivity’ (30). In the con-
text of the proposition that violence is an inevitable consequence of the
native’s response to colonial experience, this grounding of oppositional
values is of considerable significance. Not only does such a reading
situate the settler as part of a privileged category, but it also locates the
native as one whose actions are compelled to be reactionary. Why is
the native always on the edge? Fanon argues that the reason for such
a position owes to the settler’s customization of the colonial space in a
particular format, and that is where the structure of ‘values’ operates
in a different way. For the settler, the native cannot be conditioned into
the format that is brought into the colonial world because values do
not apply. What the settler does is to demarcate the colonial space in
terms of both the political and the cultural matrices, each informing
the other: ‘All values, in fact, are irrevocably poisoned and diseased
as soon as they are allowed in contact with the colonized race. The
customs of the colonized people, their traditions, their myths – above
all, their myths – are the very sign of that poverty of spirit and of their
constitutional depravity’ (32). The focus on the distinction between
the two spaces, in terms of both the imagination that guides the rul-
ing elite and the perception that is projected as actual, is crucial to
Fanon’s thesis. For at the centre of the argument lies the philosophy
that it is the Western model of knowledge production that is valid, and
that even after decolonization has taken place, the correct method of
assessing the state of progress is through the one practiced in the set-
tler’s own country. Violence, for Fanon, does not merely involve the
exertion of force. In the ways in which the West imposes its cultural
vision upon the colonial space, that is where violence can be seen to
leave its mark: ‘The violence with which the supremacy of white values
is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of
these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean
that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are
mentioned in front of him’ (33).
Unlike the system of values imported from the settler’s own land,
the colonial world does not offer the native much of a choice when
it comes to morality. This is because the colonized people start from
a situation where they can only react to what is firmly in place: the
colonial apparatus that has organized everything into neat, formulaic
compartments. Everything that the native had believed in or sub-
scribed to was overwhelmed by the institutional logic of colonialism.
In effect, the native has only one moral goal to pursue: the ouster of the
colonizer. Fanon’s pursuit of the oppositional frame where he places
the settler and the native in situations of contest and confrontation
does not permit the overlapping of priorities. One can ask questions of
such an emphasis on this extreme structural arrangement whereby the
roles can only be adversarial in nature, but Fanon’s argument does not
quite look at the issue as an engagement or a contest for its own sake.
His focus is on the fact that the colonizer has no right or authority to
impinge upon that space which is not his own. As such, any structural
intervention of a political nature is a violation; it is a form of violence
upon a people whose world is altered because of such movement into
their space. Essentially, then – and this is Fanon’s contention – the
violation of that space, which is designated as ‘colonial’ because of
the ‘foreigner’ (31) coming in, is an act of violence. It is not merely a
contest between points of view, nor a matter of debate between par-
ties arguing from different perspectives. The entry of the colonizer is a
life-changing event. It affects the world of the native, resituates him in
a new involuntarily cast relation with an ‘other’ and compels him to
respond to a programme that he was doing well without. For Fanon,
this form of entry into the ‘colony’ is an event that can only be with-
stood and overcome by the application of the same measure. In the
context of mid-twentieth-century politics and international dynamics,
the call for such a resistance model was not without identifiable refer-
ence markers on the ground, but the fast-evolving global situation in
subsequent decades has invited critical responses to the framework
proposed by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. The topical aspects
of Fanon’s argument, like any other contextually cushioned idea, refer
to conditions that have not remained the same, but the significance of
his reading of colonial practice has not diminished over time. What
he is arguing for, then, if we broaden the scope of his subject, is the
recognition of worlds for what they are, and irrespective of how domi-
nant and exciting a cultural or political paradigm may be, it does not
sanction its imposition upon another. Once a framework is imposed
from the outside, the affected people have no alternative but to resist.
Resistance or, rather, its organization into a sustained and effec-
tive process is not an easy one. The first problem that surfaces comes
through in the form of the ‘colonialist bourgeoisie’, a group that draws
on the mode of knowledge production of the colonizer, and strives
to inject the same into the native population. The situation is aggra-
vated because the state of the people across the colonial world is not
the same. There are pockets where the native’s naivete is exploited
by this group, and an internal contest of ideas is evident, where the
cause of the individual is pitted against the larger good of the commu-
nity. Culturally trained to carry forward the colonizer’s perspectives
on knowledge and civilization, this group infiltrates into the social
vacuum in the colonial world and engineers a process of seeing that
is alien to this land. Fanon sees this as a self-defeating exercise: ‘The
colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the
members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds
of the colonial intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in
spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the
West, of course’ (36). The emergence of the native intellectual at the
forefront on the new thought paradigm in the decolonization process
is a cause for concern. For in spite of his neat rhetorical packaging
of cultural resources, he does not see things outside the frame of the
colonial bourgeoisie. His siding with the colonized people does not
alert him to the fundamental question, that of colonialism, and his
response to the immediate situation misses that which is most relevant
to the issue at hand, and, in Fanon’s words, he forgets ‘that the defeat
of colonialism is the real object of the struggle’ (38). It is evident,
argues Fanon, that the native intellectual, for all his insight and acu-
men, is not equipped to address the problem. The crux of the problem,
then, is the identification of ‘truth’ with the idea of nationalism. It is
interesting to see how Fanon draws up the map of his argument by
referring to conditions of knowledge that enables him to situate the
ouster of the colonizer as an unquestionable fact. In his argument,
what needs addressing is the mechanism through which the people can
recognize the truth of colonial rule, not because this is what they have
been tutored to feel but because this is a matter that cannot be hidden,
and it is this attachment of truth as value that must be brought home
to the native population. In this context, Fanon writes: ‘Truth is that
which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which
promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives,
and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful
behaviour: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for “them” ’.
This process of associating truth with the nationalist upsurge is aimed
at suggesting that only the recognition of such a condition unsettles the
logic of the value system that is based on the Western model of knowl-
edge. In the eyes of the colonizer, truth is related to his understanding
of the world, and this, as Fanon has already argued, is a partial reading
of the situation at hand. Does the erstwhile colonial world change with
the removal of the occupier? Decolonization involves the engagement
of a much wider paradigmatic shift, where the residual energies of the
colonial apparatus must be dealt with. The matter is not simply con-
fined to the physical departure of the colonizer from the occupied land.
What about the mind of the native, how far has the colonizer’s pro-
gramme infiltrated and shaped his outlook on things? There are two
simultaneous movements as the process of decolonization gets under
way. The first is the contest within the colonial world between the
native intellectual and those members of the population who question
the validity of such thinking, and the second is the nationalist upsurge
which drives the native towards the overthrow of the colonizer. While
the intellectual energies are directed towards the validation of the
thought regime of colonialism, the institutional machinery serves to
propel the native in his quest for freedom. The exertion of the colonial
machine thus works to remind the native of his oppressed status, and
this is a reminder that strikes him in his face every day. ‘The native’,
writes Fanon, ‘is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to
become the persecutor. The symbols of social order – the police, the
bugle-calls in the barracks, military parades and the waving flags – are
at one and the same time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not
convey the message “Don’t dare to budge”; rather, they cry out “Get
ready to attack” ’ (41).
The colonizer preys on the cultural matrices of the native population
by engaging their ‘emotional sensibility’ (44), and it is through a projec-
tion of practices that have a rich heritage that the distinction between
the native and the settler is enhanced further. What Fanon argues for
is also a call for awareness, for the native cannot just remain confined
to the world whose roots lie in the community’s cultural past; this is
because the reality of colonialism is too stark to be addressed through
processes that originated to function differently. For the native, this
is a kind of discovery: ‘The native discovers reality and transforms it
into his plan for freedom’ (45). The priority for the native population
is to direct this energy in such a way that it corners the colonizer to
withdraw. At the same time, Fanon argues that there is problem with
uniformity in these matters, as all do not agree on the nature of the
operation. This is due to two reasons: first, the peasantry is primarily
isolated from these moves, and second, the elite that is in control of
the resistance would employ rhetoric no doubt, but when it comes to
action, there is a gap. The problem arises because the political par-
ties and the intellectual elite fail to justify their aggressive vocabulary
in practice. This disconnect between the precept and its realization
does not quite settle down the nationalist impulse that runs through
the population in the lead up to the actual decolonization. In effect,
there emerges groups that are at cross-purposes: the national par-
ties, for instances, are driven by its urban-centric philosophy, and the
peasantry, not so well organized, contests the usurpation of the land
through more aggressive means. How is reconciliation to be achieved
under these circumstances? Fanon cites the example of Algeria to mark
out the following principle, and without it being properly acknowl-
edged, no freedom can be achieved: ‘colonialism is not a thinking
machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence
in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater
violence’ (48). The note here is both prescriptive and cautionary: in
other words, without challenging colonialism for what it really is, ‘vio-
lence in its natural state’, no release is possible. Fanon makes violence
a synonym for the colonial state, and questions have been asked as
to its sustainability as an argument, more so than its viability as an
option. It would be appropriate to see his views on non-violence in this
context, how he situates it and what his reasons are for abandoning
it; it goes without saying that he is interested in the change of order in
the colonial world but believes that freedom must be wrested, and it
can only be done by violence. ‘Non-violence is an attempt to settle the
colonial problem’, writes Fanon, ‘around a green baize table, before
any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made,
before any blood has been shed’ (48). This positioning of non-violence
as a mode of engagement prior to the advent of colonialism cancels
its force as an agency of resistance. Such a framing of non-violence
has resulted in Fanon being seen in antithetical terms to Gandhi, in
whose hand the potency of this method was fully realized in India’s
fight for freedom. Fanon places non-violence in the prehistory of colo-
nialism and does not envisage any possibility of its practice having
impact on the process of decolonization. The contexts are different, no
doubt, because he is referring to the African experience, and Gandhi’s
example was effective in India, but that is no reason for such a blanket
assessment that places the logic of non-violence only in a situation of
innocence. It is clear that Fanon’s reading of the colonial experience
is directed towards an acknowledgement of the essential difference
between the two sides and that the relation is one of opposition. There
is a logic behind the argument that in the settler and the native we have
two irreconcilable categories, because with the takeover of land by
the colonizer, the adversarial dimension starts operating and affecting
the relationship. The experiences of decolonization have not always
followed the straight oppositional frame in twentieth-century history,
with each situation reflecting the complicated inter-political dynam-
ics involved in these cases, and Fanon has come under considerable
questioning for his overarching framing of the nationalism issue. Neil
Lazarus, for instance, highlights the problems associated with Fanon’s
take on the subject, given that he is looking at a frame conditioned
by the experience of immediate history, but leading through it to a
process of understanding that would respond to questions beyond the
given context. In an essay (titled ‘Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon,
Nationalism, and the Question of Representation in Postcolonial
Theory’) meant to address the nationalism question and its combative
character in the Fanon argument, Lazarus observes: ‘Some contem-
porary theorists of “postcoloniality” have attempted to build upon
Fanon’s denunciation of bourgeois nationalism. Yet Fanon’s actual
standpoint poses insuperable problems for them. One fundamental
difficulty derives from the fact that far from representing an abstract
repudiation of nationalism as such, Fanon’s critique of bourgeois
nationalist ideology is itself delivered from an alternative national-
ist standpoint’ (162). The accommodation of Fanon in the space of
postcolonial theory has remained an exciting subject ever since the
discipline emerged as a potent theoretical paradigm. This issue of see-
ing Fanon and his ideas as part of a chronology he did not invent nor
anticipate is one that has seen considerable exchange of fire, and some
of it has to do with the programmatic reading of Fanon within a prede-
termined bracket. If Fanon offers a position on the subject of colonial
practice, its merit derives from a logic that sustains itself. This is evi-
dent in the way Fanon takes the condition of violence, for instance, as
an inevitable agency of change. Often, this emphasis has been read as
a call alone, but behind such an insistence lies the recognition that the
colonial state cannot be overwhelmed by rhetoric or narrative projec-
tion of alternative governance structures. It is in this context that he
lambasts the native intellectual for his inability to position himself
adequately in a situation where fence-sitting cannot engineer the colo-
nial regime’s downfall.
Why is a colonial population so restive during the initiation of the
decolonization process, why is it that the people see violence as the
only mode of conduct? Fanon lists two reasons for this: ‘The upris-
ing of the new nation and the breaking down of colonial structures
are the result of two causes: either of a violent struggle of the people
in their own right, or of action on the part of surrounding colonized
peoples which acts as a brake on the colonial regime in question’ (55).
It is interesting to see how Fanon situates the condition of violence
as a process that can surface from both internal and external factors.
While the resistance movements in other colonial regimes can be a
source of inspiration, and egg on the natives to aspire towards that
which has been achieved elsewhere, it is the volatile situation within
that makes resistance inevitable. It does not quite matter that the set-
tler understands the native, for in the existing scheme of things, Fanon
argues, only the overthrow of the regime will restore equilibrium. The
colonial state, then, so long as the settler is in control, remains in a
situation of consistent tension. The regime co-opts members from the
native population to fragment and dissipate the upsurge, but, rather
than assuage the resistance, such designs only enhance the resolve,
and the outpouring is evident in the violent response. Somewhere along
the line in his argument, Fanon seems to lose the plot in this discourse
on decolonization, for in comes the analysis of Russia and Cuba as
influences – ‘Finally there is the well-known myth of liberating move-
ments directed from Moscow’ (58) – and the capitalism/socialism axis
rears out to inject another dimension to the debate. Such reasoning
does not take away from Fanon’s insights into the essential opposi-
tional framing of the colonizer and the colonized, but as he looks at
the state of the new independent country, international politics and its
structuring of governance policy forms a part of the way he charts the
lines of history. Khrushchev and Castro are now key players; Fanon is
at his sarcastic best when he magnifies the Russian leader: ‘For what
Mr Khrushchev shows the colonized countries which are looking on is
that he, the moijuk, who moreover is the possessor of space-rockets,
treats these miserable capitalists in the way they deserve’ (61). The
options for the new state, or the one on the way to independence,
are limited, as from the struggle within to what the international pic-
ture presents, it is something that cannot be settled easily. It is here that
the new nation must gear up to find ways to express itself unambigu-
ously. Expected to sit on the sidelines of unfolding history, the newly
decolonized state has the choice of adopting the principle of ‘neutral-
ism’ (65), a position of non-commitment that surprise the social and
capitalist blocs. But, as the evolving political picture from the mid-
twentieth century has shown, the situation is much more complicated
than a question of choices before the new state.
While the situation internationally is complicated enough, there are
issues within that demand the response of the native. Towards the
end of the first section of The Wretched of the Earth titled ‘Concern-
ing Violence’, Fanon presents a series of characteristics of violence,
including an incisive reading of the subject in the international context.
The ‘international’ mapping primarily covers the Eurocentric imagi-
nation and the play of wealth in the making of culture in places that
have not had the experience of colonialism. Building upon the con-
trast between the social imperative and the capitalist engagement of
resources through exploitation, Fanon highlights the instrumentality
of wealth and the violence through which it buoyed the Western econ-
omy. The capitalist pressure on the economic and social structuring of
‘culture’ thus owes to a history of deception, the measure of which is
yet to be fully addressed: ‘Colonialism and imperialism have not paid
their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from
our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the under-
developed world like nothing more than war criminals’ (80). Once the
colonial regime makes way for the new nation, the challenge does not
end; the task of the nationalist involves, among other things, questions
of identity, responsibility and political maturity.
The marks of the nation: principles and reality

When the colonial machinery makes way for the local government to
take over the land and its resources, the first question that requires
addressing is that of political order. How is the political structure of
the new nation going to be like? What would the people’s perspective
be on the subject of governance? These, and many other related issues,
emerge alongside the nation. As Fanon points out, it is convenient to
adopt a frame which has been in place, but it can end up enhancing
the divide further: ‘The great mistake, the inherent defect in the major-
ity of political parties in under-developed regions has been, following
traditional lines, to approach in the first place those elements which
are the most politically conscious: the working class in the towns, the
skilled workers and the civil servants – that is to say, a tiny portion of
the population, which hardly represents more than one per cent’ (86).
The divide that runs across the nation follows parameters that do not
match – the rural space rundown by the townsfolk, for instance – and
as the contest for power gets more intense, there are measures foisted
that do not face the situation on the ground. Instead of considering the
state of the new nation, the political parties are led by visions that are
not concerned with reality:
The political parties do not manage to organize the country

districts. Instead of using existing structures and giving them a
nationalist or progressive character, they mean to try and destroy
living tradition in the colonial framework. They believe it lies in
their power to give the initial impulse to the nation, whereas in
reality the chains forged by the colonial system still weigh it down
heavily. They do not go out to find the mass of the people. They
do not put their theoretical knowledge to the service of the people;
they only try to erect a framework around the people which fol-
lows an a priori schedule. . . . Even after the struggle for national
freedom has succeeded, the same mistakes are made and such mis-
takes make for the maintenance of decentralizing and autonomist
tendencies. Tribalism in the colonial phase gives way to regional-
ism in the national phase, and finds its expression as far as institu-
tions are concerned in federalism.
(90)
Fanon sees in the power tactics of the government of the new nation
traces of the colonial mode, features which do not display the respon-
sibility that the people expect. He argues that there seems to be an
agreement, not a literal one, but one evident in the adoption of gov-
ernance principles that marginalize those who present alternative
views on the subject of progress. He cites the example of the trade
union culture that permeates the nation’s space in the new indepen-
dent state, with the antagonist now emerging from within. Using the
term ‘lumpen proletariat’ to designate that group of people who go
against the regime, Fanon sees in this formation a resistance that does
not follow the rationale of accepted or recognized behaviour. And it
is this development that hits at the very edifice of the structure of gov-
ernance: ‘The constitution of a lumpen proletariat is a phenomenon
which obeys its own logic, and neither the brimming activity of the
missionaries nor the decrees of the central government can check its
growth. This lumpen proletariat is like a horde of rats; you may kick
them and throw stones at them, but despite your efforts they’ll go
gnawing at the roots of the tree’ (103). Fanon has another name for
such emergences; he calls it the ‘strategy of immediacy’ (105). There
is a lot of cross-referencing and to-and-fro movements in the argu-
ment that Fanon develops in The Wretched of the Earth. Discussion
of the nation and its imperatives is replete with insertions that look
at the ways in which the colonial regime functions and the strategies
that are put in place to offset the native resistance. One of the key
points to emerge in the course of the second section of the book titled
‘Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Weaknesses’ relates to the elaboration
of the processes of liberation, alongside which run views on the nature
and problems of the nation. Consider the following passage, where he
looks at both, the question of freedom and that phase of domination
that is now in the past: ‘The struggle for national liberation does not
consist in spanning the gap at one stride; the drama has to be played
out in all its difficulty every day, and the sufferings engendered far
outmeasure any endured during the colonial period’ (112). What is
required, in the struggle to forge the people’s identity and cultural con-
sciousness, is a movement from ‘total, undiscriminating nationalism to
social and economic awareness’ (115) but the task is not an easy one.
Mature intellectual leadership must address the issues that plague the
people, wrest itself from the pressure of the colonial worldview and
anticipate the conditions that demand attention. Fanon believes that
there are lessons to be learned from the experience of colonialism, and
that is the lesson which calls for execution of the ideal, the consumma-
tion of the dream in actionable terms. He ends the second section by
emphasizing the need to draw upon the knowledge of the struggle to
reframe the forward march of the new nation, where the key word is
‘violence’, but here it is transformed into an example for action: ‘Vio-
lence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and
educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand
social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without
that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-
dress parade and the blare of trumpets’ (118). It is clear that the focus
of these lines is on what the struggle against colonialism can impart to
a nation coming into being.
In the making of the nation, there are bound to be ‘tragic mishaps’
(119), and it is for such eventualities that the people must prepare
themselves. National consciousness is accompanied with its inher-
ent faults, not because the ideal is improper but for reasons that are
related to inequality, disharmony and lack of adequate understand-
ing. Highlighting the enormity of the problem that the new nation
confronts, Fanon writes: ‘National consciousness, instead of being
the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole
people, mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty
shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been’ (119).
All responsibility for the lack of political acumen does not lie with the
colonial regime or its legacy. Fanon is unsparing in his attack on the
new nation’s middle class, which is steeped in a kind of ‘wilful narcis-
sism’ (120). What appalls Fanon is that a segment of the power class
behaves in the fashion of middlemen, and coupled with a lack of aware-
ness of the country’s resources, policies are designed to serve interests
that do not address the genuine needs of nation building. Ironic, and
biting in his criticism of what he calls the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, Fanon
sees in these actions the replication of the Western model, the very
structure that decolonization was supposed to dismantle. The training
of governance, thus, derived as it is from the West, only complicates
the need of the new nation: ‘In the colonial countries, the spirit of
indulgence is dominant at the core of bourgeoisie; and this is because
the national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the Western bourgeoi-
sie, from which it has learnt its lessons’ (123). In the shaping of the
nation, the management of the country’s resources and capital leads
to an increase in the class divide within different parts of the popula-
tion: Fanon delineates some of the pockets where the consolidation of
human agency is centred, identifying the divide that is brought about
by the adoption of strategies that are detrimental to nation building,
and as the formations position themselves on different sides, there is
the structuring of the landed, the national and the native along lines
of opposition. In spite of the generalized tenor of Fanon’s reading of
the experience of colonialism, there is no doubt that his argument is
drawn from the situation of the African continent, and The Wretched
of the Earth must be approached with that in mind. As the new nation
attempts to come to grips with the unfolding situation, the complicated
ground situation surfaces as a great challenge. Prior to decolonization,
the energy of colonized peoples was directed towards the overthrow
of the foreign regime, but once freedom frees the nation, questions
of governance and important policy matters demand mature leader-
ship, vision and immense responsibility. In the context of how things
appeared to him in the mid-twentieth century, Fanon did not see things
moving towards the ideal with ease; rather, it was fraught with great
difficulty: ‘African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men
and women of Africa were passionately attached, and whose operative
value served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism, African
unity takes off the mask, and crumbles into regionalism inside the hol-
low shell of nationalism itself’ (128). What was a source of strength
during the resistance to colonialism also holds its inconsistencies, and
potential frames that can arrest the process of national consolidation
involve religion and racism. And to make matters worse, the Western
intellectual machinery foments the fires of unrest by capitalizing on the
ineptitude of the leadership. The picture is pretty bleak. The widening
divide between the people and the power elite, the distancing of the
rulers from the ground and the recourse to rhetoric against the colo-
nial past further aggravate the situation: ‘There no longer exists the
fruitful give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to
the bottom which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite
on the contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the
masses and the leaders’ (136–137). This disconnect is both symptom
and cause of the malaise that affects the nation’s functioning; there is
protectionism, use of institutional force in the name of governance,
flight of capital, monopolization of wealth in the hands of the few and
stagnation of the economy. The few sincere and capable ones within
the ruling regime find themselves marginalized in a race for individual
growth and power.
Fanon looks at the condition of the new nation through an African
lens as he sees the failure of the party structure and the impending col-
lapse of the state machinery. Instead of the party operating to bridge
the distance between the government and the people, it comes to serve
more as an ‘information service’ (146), and as such, when any party
member is present in public, rather than inspiring confidence, there is a
sense of fear and attrition. Much of the angst that the people harbour
is muted, and it is not surprising that some resort to praise to ward off
any danger that the party member may inflict on them: ‘The political
party in many parts of Africa which are today independent is puffed
up in a most dangerous way. In the presence of a member of the party,
the people are silent, behave like a flock of sheep and publish panegy-
rics in praise of the government of the leader’ (147). This is a turn of
events that was not anticipated during the struggle against the colonial
regime. For the nation to leave its mark upon history, the ‘pitfalls’ must
be overcome and the onus is on the leader as well as the party, the
former demonstrating by example and the party serving as the guide
for the people to ‘express their will’ (149). Fanon sees the party taking
on a more proactive role in facilitating the mind of the people, and in
this pattern that he envisages, a decentralized ethos would educate the
people of their rights so as to make their participation in the condition
of nation making a completely interactive and involved process:
To educate the masses does not mean making a political speech.

What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the
masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is
their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too,
that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous
man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the
demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally
only the hands of the people.
(159)
The pressure on the leader and its implications for governance in

the new nation have continued to engage the critical mind so many
years on across the political spectrum. Connections have been made
between the Fanon take-on leadership and a Marxist legacy that he
is supposed to have drawn on, and it is on the basis of such pointers
that his responses to authority and administration have created the
space for critical debate. Vikki Bell (2010), for instance, looking at the
book after half a century, sees the scope for situating Fanon thus: ‘The
Wretched as a whole sees Fanon employ what some have regarded as
a racialized Marxism, in which he considered himself, at least in parts,
to be “stretching” Marxism to fit the colonial context in which racial
division rather than class structures all, so that it is the sustained expe-
rience of racism that will explode in violent revolution’ (9). More than
revolution or a radical revamp of the political world in Africa is not
a ready-to-hand affair, and Fanon realized that very well. In consider-
ing the pitfalls of nationalism, he was also examining the dynamics
of social progress, and in his attempts to situate the political in the
context of the many worlds within Africa along with the different
states of social movement within the continent, he draws out the prob-
lematic nature of the task at hand. That national identity and social
equilibrium were not always parallel and equal conditions in a newly
decolonized land was obvious to Fanon; what he also highlighted was
driven by his insights into the fissures that characterized the diverse
spaces of the African world. Irrespective of the traces of socialism that
have been brought to light by Fanon scholars in the decades subsequent
to the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, the correspondence
is not a straight one. There is no denying that Fanon was critical of
the capitalist imperative that fashioned the Western response to both
governance and economic empowerment, but at the same time, he did
not buy the socialist argument in the inherited form. What he sought
to envision was more related to an understanding within the new state,
an understanding that would bear out the nuanced but important con-
ditions that affected a particular people. For Fanon, the onus is on
the leadership and the potential of the population to respond to the
demands of the national culture. It is not about an absence of thought
or volition, but rather related to the question of harmonizing the mul-
tiple but cross-directed political and social trajectories for an adequate
response to the situations in Africa:
The African people and indeed all under-developed peoples, con-

trary to common belief, very quickly build up a social and politi-
cal consciousness. What can be dangerous is when they reach the
stage of social consciousness before the stage of nationalism. If this
happens, we find in under-developed countries fierce demands for
social justice which paradoxically are allied with often primitive
tribalism.
(164)
The priority of a country’s leadership is to take the people forward in a

collective thrust so that the ‘nation’ identity is shaped in a representa-
tive way. For this to happen, things must fall into place in ways that
accommodate and address issues that are not confined to particular
situations alone. This is a form of answerability to history in which the
entire country must participate: ‘The living expression of the nation is
the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coher-
ent, enlightened action of men and women. The collective building
up of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical
scale’ (165).
National culture and roadmap to realization

For a nation to come into being, mere rhetoric cannot bring about
the desired change. Fanon calls for a discarding of passivity, but more
than that, he argues in Section IV of The Wretched of the Earth that
it is participation of the people of Africa that will bring about actual
change. ‘On National Culture’, as the fourth section of The Wretched
of the Earth is titled, is, in other words, a stock taking of sorts. It is a
revaluation of the situation in the African context where, though the
traces of colonialism are evident in institutions and different modes
of social practice, the nation cannot keep that same tune going. For
‘revolution’ to take place, Fanon believes, there is a great need for
cognizance of the realities that confront the people. When the colonial
regime is operational, the objective is to propose a kind of history that
sees the culture of the native as both inferior and inconsequential.
The problem is not merely one of challenging versions of the past.
It is about the method of locating a culture in history and what such
an engagement entails for the people of a country trying to realize
its potential. What now seems commonplace – that the narrative of
the West superimposed the rhetoric of a ‘legitimate’ culture upon an
unsuspecting native population – serves as one of Fanon’s take-off
points here, but he is simultaneously conscious of the dangers that a
completely nativist foregrounding of culture can inaugurate, and that
is why we see a kind of balancing of priorities as he chalks them here.
Arguing for a need to affirm the unity of a kind that would project the
African mind above its individual constituencies, Fanon says that
the responsibility for such an exercise is on those who are contesting
the colonial worldview: ‘For colonialism, this vast continent was the
haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism,
destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God, a country
of cannibals – in short, the Negro’s country. Colonialism’s condemna-
tion is continental in scope’ (170).
When he pits the African continent as a consolidated space, Fanon
is conscious of the fact that the diversity of the different groups and
the ethnicities which constitute it is being demonstrated by the Euro-
pean mind as its weakness. This has to with a form of historiography
that is imposed on the people, a charting of the past which places the
colonizer as the initiator of ‘real’ history. The matters are not merely
about the narratives that are foisted upon the African people by the
West; it has also to do with a logic that is aimed at cancelling out the
structures of knowledge transmission that have deep roots in the con-
tinent’s traditions. He cautions people against the dangers involved in
the rhetoric that comes with the history-making process of the colonial
project, and commenting on the similarity between the Arab space and
the African one, he observes: ‘Colonialism has made the same effort in
these regions to plant deep in the minds of the native population the
idea that before the advent of colonialism their history was one which
was dominated by barbarism’ (171). In the formation of national cul-
ture, the challenge before the native population is immense. On the one
hand, there is the native intellectual who is constantly under the threat
of a culturally driven framework which is steeped in the knowledge
production apparatus of the West, and on the other, there is a need to
cultivate a vision that responds to the changing times and at the same
time connects to the past from where the people draw the vital ener-
gies of their culture. Fanon outlines a three-phase development in the
native intellectual’s engagement with literary discourse, showing how
the ideological pressure of the West makes it extremely difficult to
wriggle out of its grip. In the first phase, the native intellectual draws
inspiration from the colonial sources, and this is a period of assimila-
tion. But soon he realizes that mere aping of a cultural past which is
not his own is fraught with difficulties, and he looks inward into his
own heritage, his personal and the collective memories, which ‘will be
reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed aestheticism’ (179). The third
phase, where the native intellectual shoulders the task of awakening
the conscience of the nation, is characterized by the literature of revo-
lution, and this, in Fanon’s view, is the national literature. Yet the task
is not an easy one, nor is the native intellectual the pioneer he situates
himself as in this revolutionary phase. What he ends up doing becomes
an ostensible show of inwardness, for he is unable to unshackle the
training of colonialism, and in effect, he has the formatted templates
ready through which he tries to appropriate the country’s culture. Such
attempts not only simplify the constantly evolving contours of the cul-
ture of a country, but they also seek to fix and organize issues that
resist such encapsulation. It is interesting to see how Fanon dissociates
culture from the pressures of rituals and practices, for he situates the
pulse of the people as a dynamic movement that does not remain con-
fined to unalterable parameters:
Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all sim-

plification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is
always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to
tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only
mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s
own people. When a people undertakes an armed struggle or even
a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance
of tradition changes.
(180)
The intellectual’s attempts to respond to the country’s cultural cur-

rent are thus often in danger of ‘being out of date’ (181). The onus
is on the intellectual, however, to carve out a mode of access through
which he may justify his involvement in the nation’s upsurge, and one
that addresses the complexities of the exercise and not merely suffice
as an outward display of cultural affiliation. The native artist, on the
other hand, shows another form of disconnect, not by accommodating
advances in technique but by attempting to revisit forms that can-
not be seen in static or fixed terms. This is an important distinction
between the artist and the intellectual, both key players in the national
scene, yet, in their responses to the demands of the time, they operate
in ways that complicate matters in the nationalist upsurge. Looking at
the artist’s backward gaze, Fanon writes: ‘The artist who has decided to
illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically towards the past
and away from actual events. What he ultimately intends to embrace
are in fact the cast-offs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge
which has been stabilized once and for all’ (181). In case of the native
poet, Fanon argues for a foregrounding of the mind of the people,
for it is the purpose of literature to see that the subjects and percep-
tions are ‘transfused with light’ (183). Distanced from the frame of the
immediate revolutionary context where Fanon’s call for literary and
artistic production of a given kind was grounded, such a design could
very well be targeted for being propagandist. Is literature or the arts of
a particular variety, or written with a given purpose, the only worthy
representative of a culture? Such a view is untenable. Yet Fanon’s read-
ing, in the context of the priorities that he outlines for a nation coming
into being, shows the relevance of streamlining the cultural trajectories
in ways that contribute to the evolving national culture. It is necessary
to situate his idea of national culture in the context of freedom from
the manacles of colonialism. In other words, for Fanon, the shaping of
national culture is one of the keys in the ‘fight’ against colonial oppres-
sion: ‘To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for
the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the
building of a culture possible’ (187).
By the concluding stage of his chapter ‘On National Culture’,
Fanon converges the cultural imperatives of the people with the con-
dition of freedom. And as he focusses on the situation in Africa,
Fanon distinguishes between separate national conditions but argues
that the nature of colonialism that they have to combat is similar. He
gives the example of different African nations in this context: ‘There
is no common destiny to be shared between the national cultures
of Senegal and Guinea; but there is a common destiny between the
Senegalese and the Guinean nations which are both dominated by
the same French colonialism’ (188). The debate on national culture,
then, is conditioned by the people’s assessment of contextual param-
eters which again are determined on the basis of a collective vision,
and it is the dialogue between the heritage that the country draws
its cultural resources from and the future it envisions that holds the
key. Too much harping on a past that is distanced from the realities
of governance and political dynamics cannot be in sync with the
times; the objective of any exercise that aspires to represent the peo-
ple’s vision must be directed towards an understanding of situational
truths. In such a context, the flow of intellectual movement, political
tact, social understanding and collective wisdom must harmonize to
achieve the ideal of a realizable national culture. It is in asserting this
worldview that Fanon writes:
We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a

people in order to find coherent elements which will counteract
colonialism’s attempts to falsify and harm. We must work and
fight with the same rhythm as the people to construct the future
and to prepare the ground where vigorous shoots are already
springing up. A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract
populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature.
(188)
The process of nation building, he goes on to argue at the concluding

passage of this chapter, involves ‘the discovery and encouragement
of universalizing values’ (199). For it to take off, the focus cannot be
confined to the insular logic of a country’s own immediate context, but
must be extended to accommodate and respond to the wider ‘stage of
history’ (199).
With a case-study-based short section interspersing the debate on
national culture and the short but succinct ‘Conclusion’, The Wretched
of the Earth returns at the end to the need to de-Europeanize the Afri-
can mind, to seek out alternatives to the Western models of history and
knowledge-making processes, and the urgency with which he calls for
such a departure in an intellectual envisioning of a postcolonial future
is couched in the frame of an involved political response no African
would have shied away from at the time when the appeal was made.
Works cited
Bell, Vikki. ‘Introduction: Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth 50 Years On’,
Theory Culture Society, Vol. 27, No. 7–8, 2010, pp. 7–15.
Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier, New York,
NY: Grove Press, 1967.
_______. The Wretched of the Earth, [1965] trans. Constance Farrington,
London, UK: Penguin 1990.
_______. Black Skin, White Masks, [1952] trans. Richard Philcox, New York,
Lazarus, Neil. ‘Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the
Question of Representation in Postcolonial Theory’ in Anthony C. Ales-
sandrini, ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, London, UK: Routledge,
1999, pp. 161–194.
Macey, David. ‘ “I Am My Own Foundation”: Frantz Fanon as a Source of
Continued Political Embarrassment’, Theory Culture Society, Vol. 27, No.
7–8, 2010, pp. 33–51.
3 Ngugi wa Thiong’o:
Decolonising the Mind
Ngugi and the language question
in African literature
The idea of an African literature – involving the nature of its contours,

legacy and priorities – has occupied the imagination of the writers
of the continent for quite some time. Often, critical narratives that
weigh the impact of colonialism in terms of opposing arguments find
reasons to question the imperatives with which a rival’s case is made.
The most visible and engaging dialogue on this subject has two of
Africa’s great literary pioneers taking their stands at opposite ends:
Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Thiong’o’s career as a creative
writer – he began writing in English and then switched to Gikuyu after
his novel Petals of Blood (1977) – and his engagement with contempo-
rary cultural and political life in Kenya is also a carefully orchestrated
overture, one designed to present the argument for Africa, one which
he considers the most potent and relevant. While it would be grossly
unfair to read Ngugi’s graph as one of political posturing, it is undeni-
able that he has often presented his argument for a politically relevant
aesthetics within parameters that draw in the volatile circumstances
of his writing. It may appear that Ngugi’s rhetoric is another version
of the nativist argument mounted against the oppressive ideological
structures in most anti-colonial situations; it is also likely that his array
of powerful and loaded illustrations against the intellectual apparatus
is an open-and-shut case for a form of revenge historiography. The
issue, especially in Ngugi’s case, extends beyond these frames of either/
or arrangements in terms of an isolated ahistorical sense, for, more
than anything else, it is evident that his writing has to be accounted
for in the context of the various stages of cultural and social condi-
tions that impinged upon modern Kenyan history. In his ‘childhood
memoir’ Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi, for instance, recollects
the early influence of the national behemoth, Jomo Kenyatta, and his
hold on the Kenyan imagination. The intermingling of the nationalist
priority with the recognition that the imperialist machine worked in
54 Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind
subtle, subterranean ways thus found in the figure of Kenyatta and
the idea of linguistic conditioning a circumstance Ngugi considered fit
for analysis. In his formative years, these two issues – nationalism and
the agency of the English language – operated within the cultural and
intellectual milieu and cut deep into the recesses of the Kenyan mind.
In his novel A Grain of Wheat (1967) Ngugi dealt with the pressures
exerted by the complex of political and cultural forces, impacting and
influencing the young minds of Kenya at a time when the hold of
the colonial apparatus was seriously threatened by nationalist ideas.
Given such a focus, especially during the 1960s and the 1970s, Ngugi’s
priorities as a writer oscillated between his attempts to consolidate his
creative energies through the registers of the nationalist narratives that
were at play on the one hand, and the desire to formulate a vision that
articulated an alternative poetics that could be identified as African.
By the time Decolonising the Mind was published his ideas had been
entrenched in the rhetorical formats that placed the national question
and that of cultural imperialism within clearly determined brackets.
It is perhaps the presence of such an insistently emphatic nationalist
tenor that found its way into Ngugi’s narrative, but, more important,
the implications for an argument against linguistic imperialism were
so heavily factored in that the book moves beyond the mere either/
or rhetoric to engage the complex dynamics of Kenyan culture and
society. We could perhaps see how the personal becomes the political
in a climate of national uncertainty, and more than the negotiation
between choices, the inscription of culture is writ so large on the
face of the narrative that Ngugi constructs; it becomes impossible to
access the question of language in isolation. The threads of this nar-
rative lie within the memories of a culture that begins much earlier
than its formulation in Decolonising the Mind. Well inscribed into
the fabric of Ngugi’s childhood, such a memory is a kind of trapping
through which the register of nationalist pride finds a new avatar; it
becomes a process of reading that questions the formative structures of
a Kenyan childhood and the genealogy of colonial oppression within
those very roots. Presented as a personal response to the time of his
own childhood, Dreams in a Time of War is simultaneously a cultural
document, a chronicle that sets for itself the agenda of a reorienta-
tion of history. It is interesting that Ngugi locates in the structures of
contemporary knowledge production the circumstances of the nation’s
predicament, for in this intermingling of the personal, the social and
the national, the paradigms of a material culture emerge with insistent
force. In spite of the fact that the markers of Kenyan culture and the
educational apparatus that served to indoctrinate the imperialist ethos
Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind 55
upon the impressionistic minds of unsuspecting new learners faced no
resistance, it is fascinating to see how Ngugi reframes the matrix of
language to argue his case. While the articulation of the situation in the
memoir and the insistent political rhetoric in Decolonising the Mind
are placed in generic frames that are not necessarily aligned, the point
that he seeks to drive home is the same in both the texts. Consider
the following passage from his memoir where he revisits the language
question and the education apparatus in which he was a participant:
In the new Manguo school, English was still emphasized as the

key to modernity, but, whereas in the Karing’a Manguo, Eng-
lish and Gikuyu coexisted, now Gikuyu was frowned upon. The
witch hunt for those speaking African languages in the school
compound began, the consequence rising to bodily punishment in
some cases. A teacher would give a piece of metal to the first stu-
dent he caught speaking an African language. The culprit would
pass it to the next person who repeated the infraction. This would
go on the whole day, and whoever was the last to have the metal
in his possession would be beaten. Sometimes the metal would be
inscribed with demeaning words or phrases like ‘Call me stupid’.
I saw teachers draw blood from students. Despite this we were
proud of our English proficiency and eager to practice the new
language outside the school compound.
(2011: 177)
The desire to exhibit excellence to a public that would recognize their

expertise as English speakers not only projects the internalization of
the colonial rhetoric of cultural sophistication; more important, it
reduces nation/language debate to kind of comic theatricality. As a
narration of a process of learning, this episode brings the institutional-
ized apparatus to notice, but seated within his admission of the desire
for public performance is the threat that Ngugi articulates so forcibly
in Decolonising the Mind.
It is necessary to situate Ngugi’s argument for linguistic emanci-
pation within the broader context of the colonial imaginary and its
impact beyond the revisionist debate that seems to characterize most
readings of the African interrogation of the English language in the
continent. At the same time, this question has not occupied the African
intellectual space in some kind of stasis, but has changed its contours
as the decades following decolonization in the continent have shown,
and significantly, Ngugi himself has tried to accommodate the elastic
nature of the phenomenon by making space for the new politically
and critically charged aesthetics that cannot quite be addressed by the
nativist logic that seemed to have framed the anti-colonial discourses
in the middle of the twentieth century. It is another matter that Decolo-
nising the Mind argued for the need for a socially cultivated response
to the question of linguistic oppression, and while the topical empha-
sis of the text may have subsided a little in the cosmopolitan traffic
that has moved into the fabric of contemporary Africa, the persis-
tence of the psychic impact has acquired a more insistent character.
In this sense, the argument forwarded in Decolonising the Mind has
established itself beyond the circumstances of its formulation, notwith-
standing the topical pressures that impacted it at the time of writing.
In spite of the colonial takeover of the African mind ostensibly moving
to the background of contemporary politics and society, the question
of orientation and articulation remains as pertinent as ever. This is
remarkable because the modes of cultural orientation today can hardly
be kept distant from the process of transmission that impacts the Afri-
can world. Ngugi is alert to this dynamism and acknowledges as much,
but at the same time his understanding of the contemporary situation
is informed by a sense of the danger that indigenous languages face,
more so when speakers are dwindling and the practices are threatened
by institutions more powerful and attractive in what they promise and
facilitate. In an interview with Angela Rodrigues taken more than two
decades after the publication of Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi not
only displays his alertness to the changing circumstances in a world
that is more inclusive and interpenetrative than it was ever before but
also shows how the nuances of an increasingly fluid global culture
have not been able to blunt the language issue out of contention.
It is important that we create a model through which people might

be able to improve and develop their actions. There is nothing
wrong with European languages and of course there is nothing
wrong with African languages either. I don’t see that cultures must
live in isolation. Every culture should borrow whatever is best and
progressive in other cultures, including European ones. Progress
comes through contact. The problem in the past was the advent of
colonialism, since some cultures were dominated by others, which
is not a fair exchange: domination and subjugation induced psy-
chic submission from the part of the dominated.
(163)
The language question in Africa, thus, occupies more than the politi-
cal imagination or the dangers that accompany its institutionalization
through the educational apparatus; in fact it is closely allied to the
issue of ‘psychic domination’ Ngugi refers to earlier, an insidious mode
through which the registers of a non-native culture make its way into
the consciousness of the people.
At the same time, the question of language would perhaps be better
approached if it is not confined to an instrumentalist perception of
knowledge production. The failure of the Western imagination to per-
ceive the feasibility of structures other than the Enlightenment-induced
reason-centric progress model is what African thinkers like Ngugi are
trying to interrogate. At the heart of this contention lies the argument
of Chinua Achebe, often projected as being in opposition to Ngugi’s,
that more than language, it is the overhauling of the storytelling tradi-
tion, among other things, that is under serious threat from the colonial
exercise. This is a fascinating engagement where two of Africa’s most
perceptive minds approach the subject of colonial influence in their
own distinctive ways. It may appear, as it often does, when we place
these thinkers’ arguments on the subject of language side by side, that
there is a serious difference that shows evidence of potential reconcilia-
tion. At one level, the arguments are irreconcilable, for while Achebe’s
proposal for the effectiveness of the English language (or any non-
African language, for that matter) as the medium of cultural transfer
has found assertion in a variety of quarters, Ngugi has also pursued
the need for an aesthetics that fosters the African imagination through
its own linguistic structures with remarkable conviction and intensity.
Yet these twin positions have a greater, larger objective ahead, and it
is that concern for all things African – the mind, culture, traditions,
practices and ways of living – that lies behind these thinkers’ concern
for the ethos of the continent they come from.
Reading Decolonising the Mind: the argument for an

African point of view
Ngugi’s opening position regarding the purpose of the book – that its
aim is to foreground the debate on Africa’s destiny – is structured to
draw in the politics surrounding the continent’s culture and history
into the ambit of literary production and practice. If the insistence
on the debunking of misconceptions is anything to go by, Ngugi’s
engagement can hardly be seen in impersonal terms; rather, it is in
those spaces where his personality and situation are most vehemently
invoked that his assertion and argumentative logic strike home with
greater force and conviction. In the great imperialist narrative hold-
ing sway over the European imagination, the registers are enhanced
by intellectuals who hail from Africa no doubt, but their allegiance
to a received cultural idiom considerably distances them from their
roots. This is one of the inevitable dilemmas Ngugi has to deal with
throughout the book. The process and consequence of such an exercise
involves the flattening of circumstances by the requirements of preset
Western narratives. In elaborating the argumentative strategy adopted
in this book, Ngugi makes it clear that his study is designed to con-
sider the contest between the imperial mind and that which such an
apparatus aspires to overwhelm: ‘I shall look at the African realities
as they are affected by the great struggle between the two mutually
opposed forces in Africa today: an imperialist tradition on the one
hand, and a resistance on the other’ (2). The adoption of the European
work-ethic and a culture of governmentality decidedly un-African in
character strikes Ngugi as signal modes of domination, the challenge
to which is not only extremely difficult to mount but at most times very
inadequately framed. It is this internalization of a culture which has
acquired local tentacles that presses home its claim over an emerging
intellectual consciousness. As such, such a mind projects the imbibed
set of cultural norms as the best feasible option for a continent coming
into its own. At the other extreme of this orchestrated and designed
move lies the resistance imperative whose character cannot be defined
within the parameters of ‘order’ that the European imagination proj-
ects as essential to any credible intellectual formulation.
For Ngugi the designation of the resistance movement as one body
itself may not be sustainable, yet there is no denying that questions
relating to the imperialist process attest to the presence of a persis-
tent African current that refuses to be cowed down. The problem,
however, does not concern the current of resistance as such, but its
capacity to overwhelm the dominant imperialist mind occupying Afri-
can thought. The severe critical material serving as the bedrock of the
European narratives regarding Africa makes the process of undoing
the misreading all the more difficult. This is because the issue at hand
is no longer one of replacement of one structure by another – it is the
curative potential of imperialism that is so difficult to disengage from
the rhetoric of the continent’s ‘essential’ character. Ngugi goes on to
define the far-reaching impact of imperialism on the human psyche in
the following terms: ‘Imperialism is total: it has economic, political,
military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of
the world today. It could even lead to holocaust’ (2). How does this
process penetrate into the deep recesses of a community’s character?
The question does not have easy answers, but Ngugi suggests that it
could perhaps have something to do with ‘the cultural bomb’. This
concept of the cultural bomb is a telling metaphor aimed at encapsu-
lating the dilemma confronting the African circumstance in the wake
of colonization.
The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in

their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heri-
tage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in
themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-
achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from
that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which
is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other
peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify
with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which
would stop their own springs of life.
(3)
In effect, Ngugi reminds us, a collective inferiority complex takes

over that community or people who submit to the imperialist rhetoric
unquestioningly. The colonial apparatus and its deep impact over a
people’s mind is not easily overturned. This is because the colonial
agency flattens out the multidimensional character of a country’s
culture, engaging instead with a set of features that appear to the colo-
nized as viable and preferable. Such an engagement penetrates into
the psyche of the people and renders their ‘tradition’ redundant. It is
a process that the imperialist condition inevitably brings in its wake.
Ngugi is not quite suggesting the need for an overhauling of the com-
munity’s collective memory; rather, his examination of the people
under the weight of an imperial sky is what presents interesting, fas-
cinating insights into the ways in which cultures are threatened long
after the actual presence is gone. The argument for an African response
to this onslaught is not quite mounted on a platform that matches the
imperialist mode of indoctrination or domination; in fact, a sense of
underachievement marks these structures of doing and learning, for
the competition for cultural ascendancy is not a matter of unsettling
the structures of local knowledge but one of bringing the politics of the
imperial condition to the surface. As Ngugi recognizes, under no cir-
cumstances can an erasure of the imperial machinery or apparatus be
arranged for or considered feasible. His focus, actually, is on the culti-
vation of a cultural ethic that enables his fellow people to understand
the implications of accepting and propagating the line bequeathed
by the colonial order, a line, however locally framed and contextual-
ized, that remains dedicated to its original purpose of imperial culture.
Decolonising the Mind is, in this sense, a search for an argumentative
frame that would not only intellectually assert itself but also showcase
the African cultural mind without having to compete for it.
Doing literature in the African language:

the Afro-European challenge
Ngugi’s examination of the imperialist influence on the cultural and
political ethos of Africa is framed through the register of language.
So crucial is the role of language to the condition of Africa’s destiny
that the argument for an engaged debate on this must first overwhelm
the parameters that have already determined the way the knowledge
question has been raised and addressed intellectually. Is this the mark
of a dominant European rhetoric that refuses to relax its grip on the
African imagination? In framing such a question and shifting the argu-
mentative structure to a Western mode of articulation, Ngugi invites
us to first attend upon the circumstances in which language, knowl-
edge and identity came to be interlinked in the Africa debate from the
nineteenth century onwards. It is not that Ngugi pursues a historical
trajectory alone to orient his language thesis in order to suit his argu-
ment; rather, his exposition bears out the need for the interrogation of
an imperialist design that has come to occupy centre stage in African
politics, culture and, more crucially, policy-making. At the same time,
his appeal for an involved, sustained examination of the structures of
knowledge production is never posited upon a ‘neutral’ axis, not that
there can ever be one, but he makes it quite evident that his is a politi-
cal response, one that he hopes will present the psychological takeover
of the African mind as unambiguously as possible. Such a position
is not only interesting for the possibilities it opens up for Ngugi; it is
simultaneously a strategy through which the colonial politics behind
the language question finds a framework for effective articulation. If
the question were to be confined merely to the rhetorical overlay that
influenced and determined governmentality, the impact on the recog-
nized African aesthetic would perhaps have been considerably less, but
as Ngugi points out, that is hardly the case. The reach of this design
is remarkably wide and deep-set, and more than being confined to an
instrumental or functional ambit, its mark is starkly evident in the
way emerging African writers came to situate themselves in the new,
cultural world where the continent’s tradition was being reframed and
reset for international consumption. The following passage, carrying
as much angst and helplessness as it does, brings to notice this crucial
condition of language choice in terms of the African writer’s priorities
at a time when such decisions made significant difference to the way
the people came to consider themselves.
African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies,

came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the lan-
guages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking or Portu-
guese speaking African countries.
Unfortunately writers who should have been mapping paths
out of that linguistic encirclement of their continent also came to
be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of
imperialist imposition. Even at their most radical and pro-African
position in their sentiments and articulation of problems they still
took it as axiomatic that the renaissance of African cultures lay in
the languages of Europe.
(5)
Is Ngugi too vehement and blunt in his framing of this language issue
in the context of African literary practice? At least, such has been
the argument by many of his fellow practitioners, the most celebrated
of them being Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi’s situation as writer and
his own practice have been consistently submitted to serious scrutiny
on this count. Achebe’s enunciation of the issue, albeit, or seemingly,
tongue-in-cheek, narrows Ngugi’s logic to a kind of an overt dra-
matization of the subject of the colonial process in which language
becomes peripheral to the condition of knowledge. For instance, in an
essay titled ‘Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature’
Achebe begins his thesis by placing it against Ngugi’s argument, not
only suggesting but also emphasizing that his position on the matter –
that European languages are deeply embedded in the cultures of Africa,
and hence articulation through them is inevitable – accommodates the
complexities of the situation much better than Ngugi’s, which is con-
siderably partial. Here is Achebe on Ngugi and the politics of language
in African literature:
Ngugi’s book argues passionately and dramatically that to speak

of African literature in European languages is not only an absur-
dity but also part of a scheme of Western imperialism to hold
Africa in perpetual bondage. He reviews his own position as a
writer in English and decides that he can no longer continue in
the treachery. So he makes public renunciation of English in a
short statement at the beginning of his book. Needless to say,
Ngugi applies the most severe censure to those African writers
who remain accomplices of imperialism, especially Senghor and
Achebe, but particularly Achebe, presumably because Senghor no
longer threatens anybody!
Theatricalities aside, the difference between Ngugi and myself
on the issue of indigenous or European languages for African writ-
ers is that while Ngugi now believes it is either/or, I have always
thought it was both.
(2010: 96–97)
As an indictment of Ngugi’s argument, Achebe’s reading could not

have been more blunt and scathing, yet it is evident that even in his
insistence on the cosmopolitan pressures that occupy the practice of
writing in the contemporary world, including that emerging from
Africa, the logic forwarded by Ngugi retains its value remarkably
well. The frame with which Achebe circumscribes the debate, for
one, does not adequately address the questions raised by Ngugi in
Decolonising the Mind. Second, Achebe’s reading is more designed
to justify his own choice of language and marked by his own logic
of articulating the Africa question. Ngugi’s argument, on the other
hand, addresses a much-wider ambit, interrogating not just the cir-
cumstances in which the European takeover of the African mind was
affected and brought about; it also offers a reading of the possibili-
ties that have been challenged by this process. It would not do, not
at least in the way Achebe does, to dismiss Ngugi’s concern by a
backhand sweep, and read the issue of language choice as involving
both inevitability and discretion for the writer. For Ngugi, the issue
of language choice by an African writer is primarily an illustration of
the embeddedness that is characteristic of the psychic hold of Europe
over the African mind. In other words, he does not settle the debate
with this issue alone. He offers a map of the intellectual dimensions
of a phenomenon whose impact stretches far beyond the writing that
has emerged from the continent; it concerns the impact on cultures
that have struggled to formulate its resistance within parameters that
would make sense in a vocabulary the West is accustomed to. As
such, while the criticism of Ngugi’s tactics and argumentative logic
has considerable bite, there is no denying the significance of his inter-
vention in the language debate in the African context, and more so in
terms of the postcolonial situation, where his reading has registered
an interesting aspect of the psychic politics that governed colonial
experience in the continent.
As a take-off point, the 1962 conference in Kampala, Uganda, tell-
ingly titled ‘A Conference of African Writers of English Expression’ (to
which he takes strong exception) presents Ngugi the perfect opportu-
nity to ground his argument. Certain factual circumstances relating to
his situation, which he elaborates upon at the beginning, are important
here. The early 1960s was seen by many English-educated Africans
(Ngugi himself was one) as the time when new possibilities of writing
and reading were opening up for both reception and participation in
worlds that moved beyond the continent. Ngugi alludes to the wind-
fall that followed the publication of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and
the interest which the conference was generated in both young, aspir-
ing writers like Ngugi and the now-settled ones like Achebe. Under
these circumstances it was only natural that the conference came to be
seen as an event of seminal importance in the African literary environ-
ment. While Ngugi acknowledges the impact of this conference on the
imagination of the writers and participants, he drives home his argu-
ment about the vulnerability of such assemblies as the rhetoric behind
the writing can very often occupy the mainstream, rather than those
issues which deserve much closer attention. For Ngugi, the question
that required addressing was that of language. He contends that the
language question never quite figured in the conference: it was only the
paradox of furthering African life and culture through the medium of
‘borrowed tongues’ (Ngugi 1986: 7) that found favour in the debates.
If such prioritization of peripheral circumstances relating to the subject
of African literature offered Ngugi the opportunity to take on the logic
of the exercise, it also made sense to highlight the fundamental issue
at the centre of the argument: that of language. After all, Ngugi argues
here, how could any discussion on the articulation of culture simply
bypass the centrality of language? In this context, he writes: ‘The ques-
tion was never seriously asked: did what we wrote qualify as African
literature? The whole area of literature and audience, and hence of
language as a determinant of both the national and class audience, did
not really figure: the debate was more about the subject matter and
the racial origins and geographical habitation of the writer’ (6). The
argument that European languages, of which English was the most
potent and pervasive, would enrich the worldview of an emerging
African mind and facilitate correspondence with the world appeared
to Ngugi to be considerably ‘feeble’ (9). The reference to literatures
in non-African situations and the pursuance of a thesis following the
adoption of European languages for the making of literature thus
do stand before Ngugi’s scathing attack on it. As Ngugi’s position is
amplified further, it is evident that his matrix is not confined to the
making of literature alone; it probes deep into the logic and sustenance
of traditions that Africans have come to situate and understand as
their own, and it is these cultural structures, he ardently holds, that are
now under serious threat from the experience of colonialism.
The storytelling tradition and the onslaught of

imperialism
In Section III of the first chapter of Decolonising the Mind, ‘The Lan-
guage of African Literature’, Ngugi elaborates on the process through
which the storytelling tradition impacted everyday life for the different
communities in Africa. Although his register is the one from which
he himself drew sustenance, it is emblematic of the mode of cultural
transfer that prevailed across the continent and embraced the lives
and practices of the people in a variety of ways. Most African writ-
ers, including those writing in English and other European languages,
have drawn on the rich repository of folklore and the oral traditions
to augment and present their narratives to the world. Such exercises
cannot be explained away in terms of technical insertion or narrative
innovation, for they refer to ways of life whose marks are evidenced
in these linguistic representations. The close and often inevitable
interconnections between the folkloric resources and the narratives
that have come to constitute what we today recognize as the modern
African literature are thus reflective of deep-rooted cultural practices,
whose forms are indigenous to the continent. In these structures of
knowing and transferring, the role played by language was seminal –
for it was not just the instrument of dissemination; it was a mode of
living determining the nature of the values one attached to the condi-
tion of existence. How storytelling left its mark on the responses of the
listeners in African society is borne out by the following passage where
Ngugi highlights the nuanced character of the process:
There were good and bad story-tellers. A good one could tell the
same story over and over again, and it would always be fresh to
us, the listeners. He or she could tell a story told by someone else
and make it more alive and dramatic. The differences really were
in the use of words and images and the inflexion of voices to effect
different tones.
We therefore learnt to value words for their meaning and
nuances. Language was not a mere string of words. It had sug-
gestive power well beyond the immediate lexical meaning. Our
appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was
reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles,
proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but
musically arranged words. So we learnt the music of our language
on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols,
gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty of its own.
(11)
As a pointer to the ingrained cultural mode that storytelling functioned

as in African society, this passage brings to our attention the difficulties
of accommodating this experience within a European linguistic registry.
For Ngugi, the process of cultural engagement was in no way dissoci-
ated from the conditions of living, and acts of listening and weaving
stories came naturally in an environment where modes of knowledge
transaction followed routes that were considerably removed from
those to which the European mind was either accustomed or privy to.
This distance was more than a matter of employing the imaginative
resources in particular ways; it involved forms of understanding and
internalization that no European language could adequately address.
This seems to be at the heart of Ngugi’s contention here. It is with
considerable angst that he places the matter of the English language
in perspective: ‘The language of my education was no longer the lan-
guage of my culture. . . . English became the language of my formal
education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was
the language, and all the others had to bow to it in deference’ (11). In
the course of his argument Ngugi goes on to emphasize the European
model of knowledge acquisition as the inevitable and natural struc-
ture for such exercises. In the changeover from the education scheme,
one in which the African child was accustomed to and had been bred
upon, to a system that valued terms of culture that were imported
from Europe, the colonial child lost much more than his language. The
storytelling tradition to which his forefathers was accustomed to now
was subjected to a deliberate form of undervaluation; its marks could
be felt everywhere, in every field, argues Ngugi in his scathing thesis
against this colonial imposition of an alien tongue that robbed people
of their ability, not just to communicate but more significantly to knit
thoughts in their own language.
The failure of the writers to perceive the politics of this linguistic
invasion and its impact on the African psyche has cost the continent
in a big way, in a way whose dimensions are almost immeasurable.
While Ngugi recognizes that this anglicized literary development has
facilitated the projection of an image of African culture to the rest of
the world, the damage done to its mind by the imperialist rhetoric was
immense. The takeover of the African mind by the European imagina-
tion has, in his view, orchestrated a fiction that is now understood by
many Africans trained in the Continental process, as both valid and
reasonable. One example of this is seen in the clever dissection of Africa
into substructures that are then subjected to close reading in ways
that explored modes of cultural practice within paradigms determined
by Europe. However authentic such narrative designs may appear to
be, Ngugi contends, the distance between the vernacular world and
the European linguistic repository will always remain, and no literary
tradition harnessed on English or other foreign languages can ever
represent the complexities of African experience. Driving home this
point further, Ngugi looks at the English-language literary writing as
pretentious: ‘The literature it produced in European languages was
given the identity of African literature as if there had never been litera-
ture in African languages. Yet by avoiding a real confrontation with
the language issue, it was clearly wearing false robes of identity: it was
a pretender to the throne of the mainstream of African literature’ (22).
The issue at hand, however, is not simply, or literally rather, confined
to the choice of language. What Ngugi insists relates to the determina-
tion of a tradition that would challenge the imperialist trajectory of
knowledge production that has taken such deep root in Africa. The
achievement of such a purpose is not an easy one and involves much
more than the determination of the writer or the facilitation of cultural
transmission. It is crucially linked to the ways of knowing, to the devis-
ing of ways through which the various traditions of African peasantry
are brought to the foreground. The process, Ngugi acknowledges, is
both complex and daunting. It involves the recovery of registers of
culture that bear African modes of living to a modern audience; more
important, it is connected to the development of new paradigms of
writing that would not only argue for and represent the African world-
view and the African mind in all its myriad hues to an audience within
the continent but also take this practice to a much-wider international
reading public.
Theatrical language and the African mind

The case for an alternative mode of reception and critical engage-
ment for the understanding of theatrical practice in Africa is made in
the second section of Decolonising the Mind, ‘The Language of Afri-
can Theatre’. Ngugi charts the complex participatory dynamics that
involves man, community and environment in these performances,
very often making such exercises inevitable conditions for the purpose
of knowledge transmission and education. Under what circumstances
this process operated and affected the African mind constitutes the
subject of his thesis in this section. However, Ngugi is not engaged in
chronicling the historical movement of these indigenous traditions per
se; rather, his objective is to demonstrate the threat faced by such prac-
tices and the need for the African people to work towards a resistance
mechanism to mark its development and sustenance in an increasingly
globalized environment. At one level, Ngugi’s aim is to facilitate a
recovery of that tradition from the morass in which it is currently
placed; at another, his argument cuts deep into the damaging designs
of the colonial regime, reducing it to an artefact, an almost redun-
dant relic of very little contemporary relevance. Although his thesis
is mounted on the experience of dramatic practice in Kenya, much of
what he argues holds true for similar exercises across the continent. It is
interesting to see how he structures the oppositional logic between the
colonial and the native worldviews to showcase the distinctive charac-
ter of indigenous theatre. Such a structure is driven by the imperative
of projecting the dramatic practices in Africa as engagements involv-
ing the fundamental circumstances of life and living, implicating both
individual and society as opposed to the staged form of representation
that characterized theatre in the West. It is evident that Ngugi’s argu-
ment requires him to reduce the rich heritage of European theatrical
traditions to a single trajectory, to one identifiable structure through
which he can other Africa’s rich cultural repository in such simple
terms. In a way, such a logic of reductive enunciation is convenient for
an argument of the kind Ngugi is proposing here, for his objective is
not a comparative analysis of the culturally diverse theatrical practices
in Africa and Europe but to bring to focus the damage wrought by the
imposition of foreign tongues in the field of theatre. Let us consider the
following elaboration of dramatic practice in Kenya and the challenges
it faced from imperialism:
Drama in pre-colonial Kenya was not . . . an isolated event: it was

part and parcel of the rhythm of daily and seasonal life of the com-
munity. It was an activity among other activities, often drawing its
energy from those other activities. It was also entertainment in the
sense of involved enjoyment; it was moral instruction; and it was
also a strict matter of life and death and communal survival. This
drama was not performed in special building set aside for the pur-
pose. It could take place anywhere – wherever there was an ‘empty
space’, to borrow the phrase from Peter Brook. ‘The empty space’,
among the people, was part of that tradition.
It was the British colonialism which destroyed that tradition.
The missionaries in their proselytising zeal saw many of these tra-
ditions as works of the devil.
(37)
The lines of opposition are clearly drawn here. The destruction of the
tradition to which he refers to here, as he goes on to demonstrate in
the course of the chapter, was effected not merely by the missionaries;
it was subjected to both critique and ridicule through the engagement
of the colonial administrative apparatus, on the one hand, and the
supplantation of European models which included Shakespeare, on
the other. Not that the colonial administration had a smooth sail in all
of its designs, hardly so, but it is equally evident that the native modes
were difficult to sustain in the context of the sophisticated and well-
orchestrated onslaught unleashed by the colonial regime. The fight for
the control of the Kenyan National Theatre in the 1950s and 1960s
became a sticking point in the entire debate on the language ques-
tion, and in spite of the rhetorical war that was waged between the
adherents of English and native languages, the matter was much more
complex than what it appears to be. In order to exemplify his point
further, Ngugi draws on his own personal experience of composing
and developing Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) – a
play written in collaboration with Ngugi wa Mirii and dealing with
the ‘proletarisation of the peasantry in a neo-colonial society’ (44) –
to argue that the issue at the centre of all this is language. How does
one communicate the ritualistic patterns of communal life, so deeply
embedded in processes of social engagement through a foreign tongue?
More than a question of vocabulary or the resourcefulness of a given
language, what is at stake here, in his view, is the transfer of cultural
idiom. And this, he contends, cannot be done in a non-native theatrical
environment. Song and dance, two important performative functions
of everyday African life, serve as agencies for Ngugi in this context.
How does the African mind respond to song and dance? Are they
external to the experience of living, or do these forms authenticate the
essential character of an African way of looking at life? These ques-
tions occupy Ngugi as he negotiates the subject of theatrical purpose
in the context of the language problem.
Even daily speech among peasants is interspersed with song. It

can be a line or two, a verse, or a whole song. What’s important is
that song and dance are not just decorations; they are an integral
part of that conversation, that drinking session, that ritual, that
ceremony. In Ngaahika Ndeenda we too tried to incorporate song
and dance, as part of the structure and movement of the actors.
The song arises from what has gone before and it leads to what
follows. The song and the dance become a continuation of the
conversation and of the action.
(45)
The emphasis on an inclusive theatre, a theatre that follows a ‘collec-

tive’ imagination – Ngugi cites Augusto Boal’s concept of ‘the theatre
of the oppressed’ (57) to press his argument home – is not quite about
the communication of a particular content as such. It involves the pro-
cess through which a seamless, unaffected experience of community
life is brought before the audience. And, undoubtedly, this is best done
in a language that the community is at home in, one which makes
representation authentic for the way it enables both identification and
understanding for the audience.
Writing fiction in Africa: problems and possibilities

Fiction has been the most visible, the most impacting and the most
popular of the literary forms to occupy the African aesthetic imagi-
nation in the twentieth century. In the final part of the book, Ngugi
looks at the pressures and problems that have accompanied the con-
temporary novelist in his journey towards the fulfilment of the African
dream. The Marxist trappings of Ngugi’s argumentative logic come
to the fore here when he recommends Lenin’s Imperialism along with
Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as essential reading for anyone
interested in understanding African literature. Such an orientation,
where class position is brought to the centre of colonial policy, is
not just a strategy associated with the reading process; it is closely
aligned to the circumstances in which the novel could be or was being
produced in the continent. In Ngugi’s view, the problem was both his-
torical and cultural. When the novel form arrived in Africa, it was
consolidated and rich, and it had become one of the thriving forms of
literary representation in Europe. It was not possible for any African
writer to either emulate or develop a practice modelled on the example
that Africa offered. Then, there was the further problem of accommo-
dating content within the matrices of the genre, much of which either
demanded a more nuanced approach or called for the development of
an alternative writing paradigm that emerged as distinctively African
and, as yet, international. One of the telling examples of this issue, for
Ngugi, can be seen in the way the African mind responds to nature,
which is not only different from the standard European mode of evalu-
ation, but also in the strategies the African novelist takes recourse to
for the purposes of fiction. Ngugi explains the circumstances which
have become part of every African’s worldview and which no writer
can afford to ignore: ‘[Nature], largely unknowable and largely hos-
tile, could be faced through a collective response and a cohesive social
order; I could be cruel in some of its practices, but also humane in its
personal relations and its awareness of mutual accountability among
its members. This world was reflected in the literature it produced
with its mixture of animal characters, of half-man-half-beast and of
human beings all intermingling and interacting in a coexistence of
mutual suspicion, hostility, and cunning but also occasional moments
of cooperation’ (65). As an account of the genesis of the overwhelming
presence of myths, stories and folk resources in the modern African
novel, the preceding reading is indeed very significant; however, the
objective of such an emphasis is not merely to draw out the distinc-
tive character of the genre in its African avatar but rather to highlight
the crucial role played by language in the development of an African
literary tradition. How would a language unaccustomed to the ways
of living in these circumstances adequately serve as the instrument of
cultural transmission? In seeking to establish the fact that language
and imperialism were closely tied up and had deeply impacted the
nature of African literature, he considers two factors to have been of
damaging influence in the growth of the African novel. The first, he
suggests, was the interconnected pressure exerted by the designs of a
group of missionaries whose foray into the world of the indigenous
imagination was effected by the novel. Early novels that contributed
to the development of the African novelistic tradition followed the
didactic purpose model to its logical conclusion; it thus created a form
of generic blanket across the creative terrain, preparing a roadmap
for subsequent practitioners. The ideological imperatives behind such
a process soon became evident, but the infiltration into the aesthetic
possibilities of the genre kept its hold for a considerably long time. The
second factor was the establishment and growth of universities, more
specifically the emergence of English as the coveted subject and the
syllabus it followed, for herein lay the seeds of a tradition that came to
see the adoption of a non-indigenous tongue as natural. At the heart
of this realization rested a paradox, towards which Ngugi is quick to
draw our attention to. While the novel as a form facilitated the free-
dom with which the new practitioner could go about his business, this
liberating process also turned out to be the most challenging limita-
tion. To overcome the pressures of the didactic model thus constituted
an important task for the young writer; this was because the entire
process of production was closely tied up with the imperialist strategy
of knowledge transmission. Ngugi talks of his own fascination for the
English language in his formative years and the pursuit of a career in
this language, as opposed to the fact that his mother-tongue Gikuyu,
and it was in his own language that he felt most at home. But feeling
at home is one thing and working in a tongue that had its own creative
and critical vocabulary was another. It is in this respect that he writes
about the struggle that confronts all African novelists, he himself being
embroiled in the process. It is a situation that can hardly be accessed
from the outside or even considered from the perspective of the exist-
ing European model. This was because it was not possible to subscribe
to the European structures of knowing and responding to experiences
that carried its own distinctive cultural weight. More than the trans-
mission of content that was technically African, the task of the novelist
involved the development of a vocabulary that would reflect his world-
view yet do so in a form that has strong, inevitable European roots.
For the African writer bursting onto the scene in the 1960s, this was
indeed a challenge of tremendous proportions, and one that has shown
no signs of relenting:
But the biggest problem then, and what I think is still the biggest
problem facing the growth and development of the African novel,
is finding the appropriate ‘fiction language’, that is with fiction
itself taken as a form of language, with which to effectively com-
municate with one’s targeted audience: that is, in my case, the
people I left behind.
There were two inter-related problems of ‘fiction language’ vis-
a-vis a writer’s chosen audience: his relationship to the form, to
the genre itself; and his relationship to his material, that is to the
reality before him. How would he handle the form? How would
he handle the material before him?
(75)
How contemporary writers take up the cause of the African novel

is, however, dependent on conditions that extend beyond the logic of
individual choice. Modes of production, the feasibility of translation,
the success or failure of publishing houses in Africa and the growing
international glare – these are some of the factors that will determine
the shape of the genre in the continent.
As Ngugi brings his argument to a close in Decolonising the Mind,
the unshackling of the imperialist hold on the African mind remains
the most daunting challenge. Subsequent critical attention has veered
away from the kind of direct interrogation of the colonial effect on
the psyche, focussing instead on social issues to engage the complex
dynamics of life experience in contemporary Africa. Yet Ngugi’s argu-
ment has not lost its bite or its relevance, even as there is no denying
that the circumstances in which literature is now being produced con-
cern issues beyond the terms set for Ngugi’s debate in this book.
Works cited
Achebe, Chinua. The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays, New
York, NY: Anchor, 2010.
Rodrigues, Angela Lamas. ‘Beyond Nativism: An Interview with Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2004, pp. 161–
167.
Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature, London, UK: James Currey, 1986.
———. Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir, London, UK: Vin-
tage, 2011.
4 Edward W. Said: Orientalism
The framing of the case: Said’s
‘introduction’ to Orientalism
Edward Said’s Orientalism is an event in twentieth-century intellectual

history, in more ways than one. The point Said makes in the book is
about perceptions that have informed the Western understanding of
the world, and as he looks at the cultural consolidation of ideas and
visions that have come to situate what we identify as the Orient, there
is also a recognition of the fact that for certain structures to operate
there are accompanying conditions that facilitate them. Orientalism
recognizes the presence of these cultural practices, and in the course
of the book Said goes on to examine how minds have been shaped
into engaging with certain operations that have come to occupy us
as givens. The many responses to the argument of Orientalism, the
most critical as well as the commendatory ones, have surfaced through
undertakings that consider the process of historical evaluation Said
engages in, but the consensus is that the point made in the book is one
that cannot be overwhelmed by either sophistry or counter-logic. In an
intellectually invigorating engagement as the one that Said undertook
in Orientalism, there is bound to be sides for people to position them-
selves in, yet no overthrow of his basic argumentative frame has as yet
been attempted. The seminal status of the book stems from the force of
the argument discussing a practice of cultural structuring that not only
is historically substantiated but considered in terms of the multiple
trajectories that have converged to make the idea of the Orient what
it is. The ‘Introduction’ is the site where Said pans out his argument,
elaborating block by block the implications of his thesis and even more
significantly showcasing his exercise in critical method.
In a proposition of immense daring, Edward Said asserts that the
idea of the Orient was a produce of the European mind, a condition
whose character, nature and extent was determined by the Western
world. Such a proposition, by its very sweep, can be interrogated for
what it accommodates within its range, but that is an issue which Said
addresses as he goes forward, and what is important in this process of
intellectual and cultural mapping is the articulation of a situation that
has long been taken for granted, or even considered as a given, and
this is what he brings to the foreground of the Orientalist debate. It
appears now to be a proposition of daring because Said’s contention is
being interrogated on multiple fronts, and also because of the sweep to
which he subjects the exercise of colonialism. Yet postcolonial theory
owes to Said and his monumental thesis presented in Orientalism an
argument which has facilitated the opening up of an intellectual space
for debate. What critical response Said’s book has spawned is arresting
in terms of the impact it has had on the reading of the Western argu-
ment for a particular kind of history. Readers of Orientalism are faced
with the issue of choice: in many ways, this is a gauntlet-throwing
exercise that is meant to unsettle the consolidated assumptions that
have taken root in the Western understanding of the world and its his-
tories. And perhaps such a challenge to what constitutes our reading
of the material and cultural condition of human knowledge is what
brings forth the many interesting dimensions to this articulation of
social history. The most riveting and sustained textualization of cul-
tural history surrounding the idea and experience of the Orient in the
book is argued for in the Introduction. It is a spacing of the intellectual
arena that Said uses as a springboard to span his argument in the sub-
sequent chapters of Orientalism.
Considerations of the Orient as a Western experience, and the read-
ing of its impact on the European imagination, for Said, constitute
parallel expressions of a clearly identifiable design, that which con-
cerns the Other. In order to bring these twin currents into sharp focus,
Said emphasizes the importance of seeing the academic and the imagi-
native connotations as criss-crossing engagements interpenetrating
each other. In the course of the Introduction Edward Said lays down
the plan of examination through which he situates and reads the intel-
lectual and material dimensions of the subject. More than offering an
answer to a prospective question in the manner of ‘what is Oriental-
ism?’, Said’s book is a structured reading of what the phenomenon
involves. This is made quite evident early on in the book when he
points out that Orientalism is better approached as a network instead
of being seen as a situation with fixed parameters. Laying down the
purpose of his study, Said states: ‘It is the whole network of interests
inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any
occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question. How
this happens is what the book tries to demonstrate’ (3). Prior to the
placement of such a priority, he had already distinguished between the
Edward W. Said: Orientalism 75
designatory dimensions of his subject. When he argued that the ‘Ori-
ent is an integral part of European material civilization and culture’
(2), Said opened up the terms of the debate by situating the subject as
a condition associated with the process of self-formation in the West.
The argument, then, is to suggest that for an adequate understand-
ing of the European mind’s response to the question of knowledge,
it is necessary to see how the Other, the Orient in this case, came to
be constructed in culture. Such a focus on a dialectical engagement
where the polarities are clearly defined involves, among other things,
the recognition that cultural historiography has played its part in a
process of intellectual engineering whereby structures of knowledge
acquire validity over time. The different processes through which the
features of Orientalism emerge in critical and popular discourses are
part of an academic label. That is one part of a many-sided story. A
designatory mechanism of this kind involves not just individual inter-
est in the subject but also institutional support and consolidation: ‘The
most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one,
and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions.
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this
applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian,
or philologist – either in its specific or general aspects, is an Oriental-
ist, and what he or she does is Orientalism’ (2). Said is conscious of
the fact that demarcation lines as these are fraught with their own
cultural baggages, and it is with such an understanding of the various
accretions of the subject that he locates the imaginative consolidation
of the idea in history. He argues in the Introduction that Orientalism
as a condition has been approached in three ways, the third being
the legitimization of the idea through a corporate-style set-up where
everything related to it is given authoritative backing by the West-
ern establishment. Thus, along with the academic and the imaginative
aspects of Orientalism, the corporate style of Western knowledge pro-
duction mechanism contributes to its situation in culture. The opening
section of the Introduction touches upon these three modes of cultural
engagement, and the emphasis on the argument that ‘the Orient is not
an inert fact of nature’ (4) with which he begins the next section of this
chapter is actually a reassertion of the critical values that he brings into
his reading of Orientalism.
Indicating the contours of the method Said adopts for his
examination – for he goes on to rely on an eclectic mix of critical
strategies to approach Orientalism in the course of the book – he refers
to the Foucauldian notion of discourse and its effectiveness as a read-
ing mechanism. What does such a design hold for the examination
of the discipline itself? For one, Said does not make Orientalism a
Foucauldian examination per se. In fact, his wide reading and heav-
ily illustrative material weighs upon the narrative in such a way that
alongside the discursive dimension attached to the reading process,
there is an insistent recognition of the importance of the materiality
of culture, which goes beyond the limits of Foucault’s argumentative
scheme. This is an important point in the book, one that Said takes con-
siderable care to hammer in, that Orientalism is an exercise in method,
and that the reading of the Orient requires a sustained reexamination
of the critical values which inform the Western understanding of his-
tory. In Chapter 2, titled ‘Orientalist Structures and Restructures’, it
is this question of historical knowledge that occupies Said, and in his
heavily illustrated and annotated critique of the European project Said
brings to the fore the modes of narrative that have operated to engage
a system that achieved legitimacy through a constantly determined
emphasis on a particular vision of the world. The second chapter of
Orientalism is not merely about the celebrated players – Michelet, Sacy
and Renan, for instance – but the strong current of socially embedded
narrative imagination that facilitated the world appearing the way it
did. And in reading the impact of this historiographic exercise on the
European mind, we do not quite see the Foucauldian imperative in evi-
dence; rather, there is the philologist in Said that surfaces to invite our
attention to the traditions of knowledge making which lie behind the
cultural institutions recognized as inevitable. The reference to Michel
Foucault and the use of his idea of discourse is therefore a proviso that
carries an enabling function. Said’s awareness of the multiple threads
that make up the discourses of Orientalism thus builds upon the Fou-
cauldian strategy of seeing the presence of ideas in culture through
a network, but it moves ahead to address issues and conditions that
require the engagement of other critical structures. This is what makes
Orientalism such a fascinating book.
It is interesting to see how Said tailors his ‘qualifications’ to
accommodate the potential resistances to his argument. The opening
paragraph saw him project the Orient as ‘almost a Western invention’
(1), but he is also aware of the limits of such a programmed view, and
we see in the ‘qualifications’ an exercise in method that brings the
counter-arguments into the foreground. The first qualification is that
any blanket assumption which irons out the condition of materiality
in the emergence of the Orient in the Western imagination would be
incorrect. Said argues that he does not deny the reality of the Ori-
ent being different in nature from the Western world, but includes
a caveat. He makes his position unambiguously clear regarding the
idea of Orientalism that he takes for his subject: ‘[T]he phenomenon
of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a corre-
spondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal
consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as
career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with
a “real” Orient’ (5). The second qualification relates to the necessity
of studying the power relations alongside the examination of ideas,
cultures and histories related to the Orient. This is an important point,
for the contention that the ‘the relationship between Occident and
Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of
a complex hegemony’ (5) constitutes one of the major imperatives in
Said’s thesis here. The third qualification asserts the significance of cul-
tural accumulation over time, a process that is evident in the material
transformations that are effected by colonial interaction. Elaborating
upon this condition that impacts the nature of Orientalist discourse,
Said observes: ‘Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy
about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which,
for many generations, there has been a considerable material invest-
ment’ (6). Drawing on the insights of Antonio Gramsci to make his
argument about the role of cultural hegemony, Said sees it as a decisive
engagement through which the idea of Orientalism is sustained over
time. The key to understanding the relation of the Western imagination
to the Orient, Said suggests, lies in recognizing the superior position
the former is placed. He emphasizes, at the same time, that it is neces-
sary to be aware of the possibilities of distortion and inaccuracy that
may beset evaluations which negotiate the interconnections between
the general and the particular aspects of colonial experience.
The intellectual involvement in this process of consolidation, which
Said addresses with great clarity, is arguably the most telling exposi-
tion of the stakes informing the discourses of Orientalism. In order
to establish the roadmap for the debate on the subject, Said takes up
the major part of the Introduction where he looks at the parameters
through which the Orientalism operates in the imaginative and the
intellectual scenes in Western history. This is a very important exercise.
It not only enables Said to clarify his position as a researcher but also
facilitates the paradigm he adopts for the purpose of examination. As
such, Said’s field-opening scheme is both theorization and practice of
the argument for the purpose of revising the terms of history. What is
that which makes a proposition, an argument or a theoretical stance
a political one? Are there two kinds of knowledges – pure and politi-
cal? This is the first aspect of contemporary reality that Said opens up
for examination. Defining himself as a humanist, Said says that his
training as a student of the humanities does not make it incumbent
upon him to foray into branches of knowledge traditionally associated
with ideological sciences such as economics, politics and sociology,
but that is precisely the question that he asks: is it possible to distin-
guish between knowledges simply on the basis of preset categories?
There is no knowledge that is apolitical or neutral, and although the
thesis regarding objectivity is foundational to Western thought, such
an emphasis marginalizes the relevance of the political circumstances
that inform and influence the production of knowledge. For Said, the
issue of politics is not confined to the economic dimension informing
the knowledge industry, but rather, it involves, among other things,
the agency of power. Taking the scholar of Orientalism as one whose
stakes behind the production of discourse cannot be separated from
the text being made, Said argues that it is not possible to consider the
processing of knowledge within a single-track plot. From this perspec-
tive, Orientalism is a distribution of awareness across a wide space
that involves recognition of the social, economic, historical and philo-
logical currents, and it is consistently informed by a series of interests
that facilitate the distinction between the Orient and the Occident.
The emphasis on the exchange of power across multiple planes and
the exertions of the politics on the production of discourse constitute,
for Said, one of the major issues in the field of Orientalist research.
In this context, Said makes his position quite clear: ‘Indeed my real
argument is that Orientalism is – and does not simply represent – a
considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and
as such has less to do with the Orient that it does with “our” world’
(12). Said argues that the implications for the political dimension of
Orientalist discourse are not negative; rather, it is the cognizance of
the constraints that impact the production of thought which can facili-
tate the questioning of settled ideals. Questions surround the presence
of intellectual or scholarly energies, and those concerning the trans-
mission of imperialist knowledge – it is the objective of Orientalist
research to make sense of such interrogations. Yet, as Said admits,
there can be no ‘hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between
knowledge and politics’ (15).
In an early work Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) Edward
Said projected the importance of ‘beginnings’ and asked whether the
examination of methodological issues relating to the advancement of
knowledge could be placed under a more rigorous plan that addressed
matters of discourse and purpose. Responding to the problems that
beset structuralist theory and critical understanding in the context
of the knowledge question in the twentieth century, Said drew upon
the insights of such widely placed thinkers as Giambattista Vico, Paul
Valery, Erich Auerbach and Michel Foucault to articulate the impor-
tance of seeing the cultural situations in which texts were produced
and conditioned. The book on beginnings was, incidentally, a critical
exercise attending upon the knowledge question in Western intellec-
tual history. Is there a method by which texts, ideas and perceptions
acquire validity in a given culture? What Said does in his Introduction
is to revisit this question of method, but in doing so, he examines the
circumstances in which the archive and documentation engines of the
British, French and the American intellectual industry have outpaced
the other colonial powers. Aware of the implications of excluding
the German scholarly tradition in respect of its impact on Orientalist
research, Said admits as much, but contends at the same time that the
intellectual rigour of the German industry was not as closely connected
to the ground as the others were. In effect, what we can learn from the
German experience is the importance of ‘intellectual authority’ (19),
something that is of great relevance to archival research. How does one
make use of intellectual authority? Said says that his method involves
a two-way process: ‘My principal methodological devices for studying
authority here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way
of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental
material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of
analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups
of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and
referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at
large’ (20). Two points are categorically made here: first, the manner
and style of writing and the emphasis on certain conditions associated
with Orientalism reflect the situation of the one involved in such work,
and, second, the textualization of the Orient is premised upon the
conditions of exteriority. The method, then, involves the examination
of Orientalist discourses in their represented form, and it is not neces-
sary that the correspondence between the textual and the actual be a
direct one. Such a direct correspondence, in fact, cannot be sustained
as a method of research. The way the Orient is configured depends,
to a large extent, on the Western techniques of representation. Said
explores the importance of dominant culture in the shaping of the
idea of the Orient, suggesting that the effectiveness of the brand of
Orientalism we know and recognize is the consequence of a process of
intellectual emphases and consolidation, the roots of which go back a
long way in the history of ideas. Early on in the discussion, Said had
acknowledged his indebtedness to the Foucauldian method of examin-
ing cultural history through the discursive network, but he is quick to
argue that such an inheritance requires a qualification. He argues that
the debate on Orientalism cannot be carried forward without consid-
ering names that figure so insistently in the narrative that he aims to
subject to critical scrutiny: ‘The unity of the large ensemble of texts
I analyze is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each
other: Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors’
(23). The presence of authors whose writings have shaped and contrib-
uted to the consolidation of the idea of Orientalism, thus, figures in
Said’s debate, but it does not quite come as personalities in fiction, or
characters per se, for his ‘goal is to reveal the dialectic between indi-
vidual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his
work is a contribution’ (24).
Regarding the admission that Orientalism is neither a complete his-
tory nor a general account of the phenomenon, Said takes recourse
to ‘the personal dimension’ (25) that informs his narrative, and this
constitutes the third aspect of his research method in the book. Clarify-
ing how his own situation as a subject whose experience reflected the
conditions he explores here, Said writes:
Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my

awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two
British colonies. All my education, in those colonies (Palestine and
Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that
deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of
Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me,
the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so
powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.
(25)
As an admission, the passage is not merely forthright; it is also an

important pointer to the circumstances in which Said found himself
located within the intellectual scene that he sought to examine and
subsequently critique. Concluding the Introduction Said asserts that
his perspective on the stereotypical characteristics associated with
Orientalism has only been confirmed with the enhancement of the
postmodern contextualization of contemporary values. Irrespective
of the fact that Said’s reading of Orientalism is conditioned by his
own experience of Islamic culture under colonial subjugation – ‘for
me the Islamic Orient has had to be the centre of attention’ (25–26) –
Orientalism remains a seminal argument, a pioneering text that opened
up a field of study for analysis in ways that had never been attempted
before. And it is the Introduction, more than any other chapter in the
book (this does not in any way discount the significance of the elabo-
ration of the thesis throughout the text), that has had its impact in
bringing about a change in the way we now consider the idea of Orient
and what it entails for the discipline of postcolonial studies.
The ‘Oriental’ and the knowledge projects of the West

The section immediately following the Introduction in Orientalism is
titled ‘The Scope of Orientalism’. Divided into four subsections, the
emphasis here is on the extent to which the idea of Orientalism went
and how the Western machinery orchestrated its percolation across a
wide spectrum accommodating different layers of colonial space. Cit-
ing Arthur Balfour’s conditioning of ‘knowledge’ through the aegis of
the hegemonic colonial machine, Said shows the skewed vision not only
reflected a patronizing attitude; it went a long way towards creating an
intellectual apparatus for the perpetration of this position. Said points
out that for Balfour, the binary demarcation between Egypt and Brit-
ain is clear: ‘Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from
its origins to its prime to its decline – and of course, it means being able
to do that. Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self,
into the foreign and distant’ (32). The consistency that Balfour finds in
the logic for its domination of Egypt is what Said takes up as an illus-
trative case. Balfour’s argument is pursued in such a manner that offers
no scope for an alternative position. The Balfour speech addressed to
the House of Commons on 13 June 1910 ostensibly dealt with the
‘problem’ of Egypt and the question of governance, but in effect it
was a vindication of Western imperialism. It is fascinating to see how
the terms of the argument are projected as givens, as conditions which
are programmed into the logic of the British enterprise. Said unravels
the consummation of this rhetoric not through Balfour but visits the
textualization of colonial history through another ‘master’ running
Egypt, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer. The Cromer–Balfour narrative is
not arresting for the common spaces they touch upon alone, but also
because in the specificities of the emphases there lay a general prin-
ciple that ran like an inevitable thread marking all colonial peoples.
Such a bracketing of the world they occupied had implications for the
narrative of imperialism, at least the one that people like Balfour and
Cromer projected to their countrymen. And this was the ironed-out
uniform text that brushed colonial people with the same coat, irrespec-
tive of the differences in location, culture or practice. Said catches this
branding design, exemplified here through the Cromer example, and
uses it to show how the process of colonial understanding impacted
the Western imagination: ‘One of the convenient things about Ori-
entals for Cromer was that managing them, although circumstances
might differ slightly here and there, was almost everywhere nearly
the same. This was, of course, because Orientals were almost every-
where nearly the same’ (38). The discursive exercise that Cromer and
Balfour were engaged in suggests the persistence of a rhetoric whose
codes run deep and across the colonial landscape. Said argues that the
manifestation of this process is found in the Cromer–Balfour collec-
tive circumstances for the discourse to operate. Programmed within
a power-structured and socially determined world, these discourses
show how deeply embedded the argument for imperial regulation was
and to what extent it was informed by Orientalism. Explaining this
point, Said writes:
We would be wrong, I think, to underestimate the reservoir of

accredited knowledge, the codes of Orientalist orthodoxy, to
which Cromer and Balfour refer everywhere in their writing and
in their public policy. To simply say that Orientalism was a ratio-
nalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial
rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the
fact. Men have always divided the world up into regions having
either real or imagined distinction from each other. The absolute
demarcation between East and West, which Balfour and Cromer
accept with such complacency, had been years, even centuries, in
the making.
(39)
It is interesting to see the typification of cultural terms is consoli-

dated over time and through the complicitous engagement of different
institutions and structural enhancements. Such a programming of
knowledge is never the handiwork of a single individual, or a group
at a given time, though the contribution of layers of narrative over
socially recognizable formats marks out the space of discourse. Said
argues that it is not always fruitful to situate the thesis of Orientalism
within a generalized matrix, for, then, the specificities of location and
time get lost in the overarching storyline, yet, with regard to a subject
such as this, it is evident that a discipline runs as an undercurrent that
singles out the Orient for some need of corrective, or it is inferior in
terms of the processes of culture which enable us to respond to it. This
argument bears the opposition within the frame that situates the idea
of Orientalism, and although Said’s effort here is to make a case for
the accommodation of particulars that generalizations are likely to
iron out, it is imperative for his thesis that the prejudices that mark
the Orient through the civilizational brand of the West are never lost.
The entire section titled ‘The Scope of Orientalism’ in fact elaborates
upon the discursive processes through which the idea of civilization
is patterned to achieve its impact upon the Western mind as well as
that defined as its Other. The nineteenth-century imperial machinery
enabled the wide circulation and adoption of a vocabulary and rheto-
ric that held sway over the imagination of long generations of people
that included administrators and subjects in the colonial lands. As a
projection of a mind where the intellectual and material investment
reflected a particular possibility for the discourse of civilization, the
thesis of Orientalism took on different forms. Said locates in Napo-
leon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 a signpost through which the historical
turn towards a consciousness of the cultural difference came to be rec-
ognized as necessary for Europe’s self-appraisal. It became important
in the nineteenth century, following this Napoleonic intervention, to
know the Orient. In spite of the academic and scholarly interest in the
‘other’ lands and their cultures, which included an increasing focus on
the languages that the West came to know about, the Saidian conten-
tion is that ‘Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of a reality
whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe,
the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’ (43).
All articulations that draw on the embedded cultural understanding of
the West and the Orient as mutually opposite spaces, however, do not
come through in the same format. No mode or method relating to Ori-
entalism is ‘value-free’ (47), whether it is through the overtly divisive
rhetoric of the Balfour–Cromer type or the subtler one of the Henry
Kissinger variety couched in the foreign policy narratives that occupied
twentieth-century discourses in international politics.
The knowledge question involved in Orientalist space bears both
material and ideological structures with ease. In covering vast and
widely divergent spaces, Orientalism operates through the agency of
locational difference to address the subject of a non-West understand-
ing that draws on the resourceful varieties of colonial states within its
rubric. As such, the extent of Orientalist knowledge, both academic and
cultural, exhibits a strong archival heritage. This is evident from the
canon-making exercises that narratives of the Orient are seen or read
as, and through the coverage such experiences receive in international
policy matters. By the time, the subject of international diplomacy
occupied centre stage in twentieth-century politics, the geography of
the world came to be consolidated into clearly marked-out spaces in
terms of the logic that made the West and its others. It is to emphasize
this fashioning of the world thus that Said observed: ‘Orientalism is
a field with considerable geographical ambition’ (50). Said asks how
this geographical extent was covered, and by what means. How was it
that Orientalism and the mind of the West that contributed to its for-
mulation come to occupy and influence such widely divergent textual
operations? What Said implies by the textualization of the circum-
stances of culture relates to his emphasis that the operations through
which the world came to be so structured were primarily of a narrative
kind: ‘There is no use pretending that all we know about time and
space, or rather history and geography, is more than anything else
imaginative’ (55). Added to this was the condition of the performative
that rendered the Orient the subject of theatre, and its character came
to be defined through the matrix determined and set by Continental
necessity: ‘A field is often an enclosed space. The idea of representation
is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is
confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent
the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to
be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world,
but rather a closed, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe’ (63).
Said’s reading in this section is tailored to address the issue of trans-
mission and the extent such a process reached out to, the institutions
involved in it and the way the worlds that made up the Orient came
to be figured through this epistemological engagement. As he points
out, the matter was much more complex than what any straight nar-
rative can aspire to accommodate or hold, and that is why he draws
on such a rich variety of archival and critical resources to emphasize
the way the make of Orientalism operated across multiple ideologi-
cal and cultural terrains. The roles played by preset rhetorical values,
for instance, cannot be placed and seen on the plane that one uses to
read the paranoia that beset the subject whose psychological situation
demanded a wholly different response. Such operative truths reflect a
form of realism that is also compelled to take cognizance of the ‘crisis’
that confronted Orientalism. Whether it is the collapse of the politi-
cal map where the erstwhile colonial sites were no longer imperial
subjects, or the narratives that orchestrated a given reality through a
process-embedded textualization, there is no doubt that the conditions
for the Orientalist operation were not always the same. What Said asks
us to attend to is more than the issue of variety, or the changes wrought
by locational or cultural variations. He is taking issue with something
that goes deeper than this, with a process whereby the Oriental comes
to be seen as fixed as an idea, the Other of the West, irrespective of
how it came to be constituted in its own space. By the time of the
Bandung Conference of 1955, decolonization had taken off the sheen
and authority of the imperialist powers, and in the new independent
states, politics and power operated through structures that avowedly
made a break from the models that they were under. Yet Orientalism
continued to thrive in the scholarship zones, in the Western imagi-
nation, and the crisis of the real-world order notwithstanding, the
intellectual engagement with the subject demanded a revision of terms.
Said calls for an examination of ‘the methodological problems that
history has brought forward’ (110) for a contemporary understanding
of the scope of Orientalism, without which it could end up being a
series of individual readings of texts and contexts without a theoretical
thread through which to make sense of its operations in history.
Structures and paradigms: Europe and the

shapers of history
The grounding of Orientalism gained from a historiographic exercise
that drew on enhanced patterns emerging from newly acquired knowl-
edge, but to what extent such information was fashioned, and how its
ideological character was shaped, depended on the projection of reali-
ties whose only evidence lay in the incredibility of the narratives where
they were couched. Said sees in these voyager’s accounts the travel
accounts and bring-home texts, the romanticization of the Orient, but
even in such fantastic orientations the signs of Europe as the matrix of
evaluation remained constant. The historian coupled up as the roman-
tic ironist, marking each narrative with a rhetorical gloss that read as
‘real’ in course of the production-consumption process and the Orient,
as well as Europe, came to be formed as text, valid and recognizable
for the oppositions such structuring framed these ‘realities’ in. As the
contours of the discipline evolved, history enlarged its scope to accom-
modate the non-West through paradigms that responded to changing
demands of the time. The shift from the Renaissance on the Orient
as something to be considered with suspicion to its reading for an
enhancement of self-knowledge suggests an adaptive design that has
consistently governed the historiographic agenda of the West. Elabo-
rating this point, Said writes: ‘Whereas Renaissance historians judged
the Orient inflexibly as an enemy, those of the eighteenth century con-
fronted the Orient’s peculiarities with some detachment and with some
attempt at dealing directly with Oriental source material, perhaps
because such a technique helped a European to know himself better’
(117). It is important to recognize the difference between this roman-
ticized text where the Orient had a chameleon-like multidimensional
character accommodating anything from the sublime to the terrifying
and the subject of serious academic intent which situated it through
the twin scholastic registers of philology and anthropology. This was
triumph of another kind, where the power and authority of the scholar
controlled the modes through which the Orient was figured and deter-
mined for textual appropriation.
Modern Orientalism drew on the four elements of ‘expansion, his-
torical confrontation, sympathy, classification’ (120) to develop a
vocabulary and conceptual framework, but in its revised format, it
was firmly backed by the pedagogic infrastructure that contributed to
its cultural codification. For Said, this transformation of intellectual
direction and the reassertion of scholarly values packaged the Western
mind’s capacity for understanding and critique in a new way. Yet this
was no different from the ‘classic’ version of Orientalism, for the gov-
erning principle was that of power and the enhancement of the view
that in any exercise aimed at knowing the Orient – classic or modern –
it was the accumulated cultural heritage that was in operation. This
heritage was European, and it was pressed upon to vindicate a thesis
whose roots preceded its modern archival situation as the subject of
culture. Said takes the Sacy and Renan arguments to elaborate upon
the anthropological and philological structures through which Ori-
entalism came to be coded for the modern world. As a pioneer in the
field of Oriental studies, Silvestre de Sacy shaped and brought to life
an institutional paradigm that facilitated research and scholarship in
this field. Said looks at the impact of Sacy’s framing of the discipline’s
boundaries through an emphasis on method and systematization at a
time when the subject did not quite have the rigorous orientation that
such a vast field demanded. In this context, Said writes: ‘It was not
only because he was the first President of Societe asiatique (founded
in 1822) that Sacy’s name is associated with modern Orientalism; it
is because his work virtually put before the profession an entire sys-
tematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and
an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy’
(124). What Sacy brought to the discipline was an insistent direct
tone imbibing the conditions of utility, trust and the impeccability
of reason. What is imperative for Sacy – the didactic and revisionist
emphases – emerged in the nineteenth century as structural bulwarks
upholding and framing the subject of Orientalism where his situation
as a specialist enabled him to forward generalizations that appeared
credible. Presenting the Oriental scholar as the arbiter responsible for
the transference of knowledge to a Western audience, Sacy emphasized
the necessity of compilations and critical editions, through which new
literary cultures could be brought home to the West. As such, in Sacy’s
scheme of things, the Orientalist is a mediator between cultures, and
it is this commentator’s overlay that made the inaccessible ‘Orient’
available in a systematized, organized form. At one level, this was an
exercise in canon formation, an ordering of worlds whose situations
are removed from those they are brought into, and what is projected
as a pedagogic necessity, is, in effect, a controlled determination of
the terms of evaluation. Commenting on the process through which
Sacy impacted research in Orientalist studies, Said observes: ‘Sacy’s
genealogical originality was to have treated the Orient as something
to be restored not only because of but also despite the modern Orient’s
disorderly and elusive presence’ (129–130).
The groundwork which Sacy prepared served to open up the field
of Oriental studies for a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts.
The appearance of Ernest Renan onto the intellectual scene paved the
way for the philological imperative to enhance the discipline’s intel-
lectual frontiers. Renan and a few others that included Jules Michelet
and Edgar Quinet were the key architects that shaped the intellectual
infrastructure of the European response to history in the nineteenth
century. This was a new generation of history’s mappers who revital-
ized and systematized a subject that now involved both rigour and
critical understanding. Said places Renan’s contribution in the history
of Orientalist scholarship in the following manner: ‘Renan derives
from Orientalism’s second generation: it was his task to solidify the
official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and to
establish its intellectual and worldly institutions’ (130). In Said’s view
it is Renan’s philological inheritance that is so important for Orien-
talist studies. Renan situated and projected philology as the system
that mattered, as that structure whose critical engagement with the
resources emerged as of the cornerstones of modernity. For Renan,
philology marked a departure from the paradigm offered by Christian
historiography, for it included the comparative study of grammar, the
examination of languages in terms of the categories into which they
could be broken up into and, more important, the challenge to the
divine origin theory of language. This was a major shift in the history
of ideas, for now it was the cultural orientation that determined and
shaped human conduct, which included the languages as part of the
same process. Renan was a considerably visible exponent of this new
philological understanding, but as Said points out, there were many
other key players who facilitated the emergence of such an intellec-
tual undertaking, and it was this environment that made the Orient a
space whose many-sided character became the subject of scrutiny and
critique. The encounter with the Orient – India and its languages and
gods serve as a striking instance – became, in the context of the rig-
orous philological apparatus, a dramatic event which showcased the
distant and the strange for the scientifically inclined European mind.
Renan’s work marked a distinctive shift from the dramatized textual-
ization of cultural history practiced by Michelet and Quinet, and it is
his problematization of the subject within a predetermined philologi-
cal space that patterned Orientalism in a specific way. The impact of
Renan’s work could be felt well beyond the field in which he operated.
Commenting on this aspect of his research, Said writes:
His constructs, and the very act of construction is a sign of impe-

rial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a confirmation
of the dominating culture and its ‘naturalization’. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that Renan’s philological laboratory is the actual
locale of his European ethnocentricism; but what needs emphasis
here is that the philological laboratory has no existence outside
the discourse, the writing by which it is constantly produced and
experienced. Thus even the culture he calls organic and alive –
Europe’s – is also a creature being created in the laboratory and
by philology.
(145–146)
The foregrounding of Europe in the mind of the resident scholar, the

historian and the archivist was effected through a variety of structural
formats. At one level, it was the imbibing of the personal with the con-
dition of authenticity that made the branding of Europe an exercise in
cultural consolidation. This was more than a method; it was a form
of social stratification that operated within the narrative formats that
gave the Oriental library its status and reality. With its different features
factored in, the European engagement was, after the systematization
of Oriental discourse, a form of codification. It drew on the experi-
ence of the resident or the visitor which, over a period of time, and
through a process of accumulation, became part of the official narrative
of Orientalism. The nature of the ‘official’ text differed, depending on
how the author sought to visualize and respond to the experience of the
Orient. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Flaubert, Disareli and
Mark Twain projected a particular kind of writing that remained liter-
ary in character, opposed to the academic discourse of science which had
architects such as Sacy and Renan at the helm.
Outside the historically and philologically constructed edifice, the
making of the Orientalist space was going on through other narrative
formats in the nineteenth century. From the Renaissance onwards, the
story of the Orient was brought home to Europe, sedimented to pres-
ent the ‘other’ as a cultural space awaiting discovery. Factored into this
constant motif were certain evolving institutional mechanisms which
further enhanced the worldling of the Orient. The historiographic and
philological imperatives of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centu-
ries consolidated and made effective an oppositional scheme on which
the European imagination thrived. This is the point that Said pur-
sues in his discussion of the structuring process of Orientalism. Of the
multiple contributors, the travellers and pilgrims occupy a very inter-
esting space in this environment of cultural indoctrination. For Said,
then, Orientalism suffices also as a ‘system’ whose operations can be
approached by reference to the variety of threads that made it so effec-
tive: ‘In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less
a place than a topos, a set of references, a congress of characteristics,
that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or
a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous
imagining, or an amalgam of all these’ (177).
Said’s emphasis on the structuring process through which the Ori-
ent came to be configured in the Western imagination is one of the
seminal points in his argument in Orientalism. It is evident that in
his selection of illustrative material there is a design which is directed
towards a particular theoretical formation. It is in the context of
such a threading of critical priorities that Said organizes his thesis,
one where he brings together the multiple but connected aspects of
cultural orientation within a particular theoretical ambit. Orien-
talism is not merely a pioneering text in the field of postcolonial
studies; it is also an exercise in critical method. Said explores the dif-
ferent dimensions of the subject, but there is a definite plan whereby
his selection of material, as well as the mode of evocation, displays
the purpose at hand. In other words, his shifts from one feature to
another suggests a stage-wise argumentative scheme. When he looks
at the nineteenth century, for instance, we see Said covering a variety
of intellectual domains from the archive to travel literature, each
read with the objective of highlighting the effectiveness with which
the worlds of the Orient were opened up for critical and popular
evaluation. The discussion on the myth-making process is part of
the same plan wherein he studies its structural implications for a
Western audience. Of the many tropes that formed part of a bur-
geoning industry in nineteenth-century Europe, the responses to the
Orient surfaced through a myth-making engagement that had its
own champions. Unlike the navigators of the Renaissance, or the
scholarly industry of a Sacy or a Renan, the Orient that emerged in
the travel accounts and speculations was built upon a gradually con-
solidated structure of cultural difference. It is as an illustration of this
process that Said brings in the examples of Nerval and Flaubert. The
French intellectual engagement with the Orient was operating along
multiple fronts in the nineteenth century. Flaubert’s response to the
issue of Orientalist experience, for instance, was an extension of a
broader paradigmatic sweep which also included the worlds outside
Europe within a determined matrix. Said’s objective in Orientalism is
consistently aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of such a pro-
grammed understanding of worlds that Europe fashioned through
the registers of culture. Critics of Said have had strong objections
to make against a thesis that places a perspective on a given plane
only to assume that such an overlay held good across diverse loca-
tions and situations. Subsequent research in postcolonial studies has
amply shown the problems associated with the reading of Orientalist
experience through a bracketed format where the West and its others
are placed in adversarial positions. Said’s work in Orientalism, in this
context, is taken to represent a generic set of assumptions that can be
subjected to serious scrutiny. The enlargement of the discipline – and
this is a point of great importance – does not take away from but
rather builds upon the groundwork of Said’s book.
When Said calls Richard Burton, the translator who brought Ara-
bian Nights to the West, an ‘imperial scribe’ (197), there is an attempt
to locate his work, like that of many others who were engaged in the
process of dissemination of Oriental narratives, within a trajectory
whose markers are imbued with the same recognizable pattern. This
is the pattern where the cultures of modernity are situated within the
matrix of a Eurocentric worldview. Irrespective of the emphasis and
nature of engagement, where the figures referred to in Orientalism
from Balfour to Burton emerge as key players illustrating the various
stages of the same phenomenon, Said’s objective throughout is to
demonstrate the existence of a logic whose character is determined
by the mind of Europe. What also comes through is a diversification
of intellectual and cultural energies that suggest varieties of the Con-
tinental imagination over different time zones and locations. By the
end of the nineteenth century, the Orient as an idea, and as a space,
was well consolidated and part of a reality whose roots ran deep.
The major part of Orientalism is directed towards the exposition
and evaluation of this process through which this ‘reality’ moved
seamlessly from the plane of narrative to the condition of perceived
actuality.
The Orient in the twentieth century: the shift in
cultural politics
The twentieth century saw a change in the figuration of the Orient, in
both mode of registration and co-option of narrative agency, where
the nature of the play was of a different order. The difference, as Said
points out, is not of kind – for the figuration of the Orient operates
through the same structural mode – but rather a different form of
ordering of priorities. Some of this change was occasioned by the shift
in international relations and changes that affected public policy in a
rapidly shifting geopolitical environment. Yet the thread of intellectual
agency that played such a seminal part in the consolidation of the Ori-
entalism in the previous times was still current, albeit in a format that
exhibited changes in orientation. Said identifies two ‘principal meth-
ods’ through which Orientalism came to be seen and accessed in the
twentieth century: ‘One was by means of the disseminative capacities
of modern learning, its diffusive apparatus in the learned profes-
sions, the universities, the professional societies, the explorational and
geographical organizations, the publishing industry. . . . The second
method by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West was the
result of an important convergence’ (221–222). The convergence that
Said is referring to here is ‘the convergence between latent Oriental-
ist doctrine and manifest Orientalist experience’ (223) – functioning
through a process where the special knowledge of the scholar and the
subject under review are situated within the same fold. This is a process
of cultural coming together of the scholarly and the envisaged aspects
of Orientalism which now came to be seen as being parts to the same
thing. The modern response to Orientalism, Said argues, is a refined,
sophisticated assessment of worldly circumstances which came to be
institutionalized and practiced in the early twentieth century.
This institutionalized form is achieved by means of what Said calls
‘an irrefutable collective verity’ (236), the operations of which can find
manifestation in different agencies. Whether it is the Rudyard Kipling
narrative of the White Man, or the William Robertson Smith classifi-
cation of Islamic culture as being definitively inferior, these practices
were based on the assumption of a confirmed understanding of Ori-
ental space as being other than that of West. More than anything else,
the early twentieth century saw the scholarship of the learned being
foisted upon this narrative of ‘general truths’ (237) so that the exertion
of power now had the backing of an intellectual rigour which was pro-
jected as being beyond question. Twentieth-century Orientalism, thus,
sees a cultural shift where the focus is not confined to understanding
alone, but by a projection which is designed to place the Western indi-
vidual as ‘the maker of contemporary history’ (238). Said refers to the
work of T. E. Lawrence to demonstrate how he epitomized the West-
ern tendency to stimulate, shape and personalize the Orient whereby
the rhetorical agency was now replaced by the condition of confirmed
knowledge subjected to definite action. The movement towards a panoptic
pressure upon a subject such as Orientalism reflected ‘an instrumental
attitude’ (246) in the early part of the twentieth century.
The not-so-long road from the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury to the 1970s when Said’s book appeared saw shifts in cultural
and political understanding that did not remain confined to the West
alone. The cross-fertilization of ideas, modes and methods meant that
the percolation of the institutionalized forms of Orientalism, either
through the academia or through means of cultural traffic that had
subtler routes of entry, came to impact the people who had thus far
served as the subject of this process. The final chapter of Orientalism
faces this situation of cultural movement across the divide, as it were,
and asks questions that have had no easy answers even after the pas-
sage of so many decades now. The dominant consumerism to which
the Orient has been subjected to throughout the twentieth century is
just one among many of the potential issues that Said places before
his reader as he concludes his thesis. But how far was the objective
achieved, and is the argument that rested so heavily on a supposed
binary logic of the West and its others relevant for the ground that was
now ready for critical examination, and one that has come to wear the
assured label of ‘postcolonial studies’? Said anticipates such questions
and places his own objective and, more important, his method, on
record. Looking back for Said here is also an exercise in theoretical
anticipation:
Is this book an argument only against something, and not for

something positive? . . . My project has been to describe a par-
ticular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system
with a new one. In addition, I have attempted to raise a whole
set of questions that are relevant in discussing the problems in
human experience: How does one represent other cultures? What
is another culture?
(325)
Binaries exist, and no pretending would gloss them over: this is what
Said contends. And the fundamental binary opposition is that where the
Orient is placed and seen through a process of othering, and however
circumspect one may be, there is no denying that ethics and politics are
the two cornerstones that demand human attention. Said emphasizes
that true scholarship must involve the twin issues of knowledge and
freedom, and even as they can be caught up in ‘seductive degradation’
(328), it is this awareness that the critique of Orientalism can open up
avenues for a sustained examination of human values which makes the
reading of Orientalism such a rewarding experience.
Responding to the book’s reception: the post-texts

bracketing Orientalism
In 2003, Edward Said wrote a preface to Orientalism. He had already
presented a detailed response to the major questions raised by critics
against his argument, method and style in 1995 when he appended
an afterword to the book. These post-texts – not technically part of
the thesis that makes up Orientalism but extremely relevant for the
responses they bear – serve to suggest a cultural map of the ways in
which the book has been read across the spatial and cultural divide
that it has travelled since it was first published in 1978. In the preface
Said asserted what, with the passage of 25 years, had become a condi-
tion on which his argument was based: ‘Neither the term Orient nor
the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made
up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the
Other’ (xi). Said places himself as a man out of place, a title he used in
his memoir in 1999 and situates the West the way he does the Orient, as
a construct. In this parallel drawing of the two terms in the binary that
formed the basis for the argument in Orientalism in 1978, do we see a
shift here? For, towards the end of the book, Said was clearly arguing
that the ways in the Orient are constructed to serve the prerogatives of
the Western imagination; the same cannot be said about the Occident.
Neither in terms of how the Oriental individual came to situate him-
self within this cultural format where he was constantly imagined as
the other, nor within the frame where the Occident was seen as the
opposite of an already existing phenomenon. The reasons for Said’s
parallelism are not easy to find. We could conjecture a variety of alter-
natives, but more than a pursuit ill-directed, such an exercise would
not suffice to achieve much. Not at least for an enhanced reading of
Orientalism. Of the texts that bracket Orientalism in the 1995 and the
2003 editions – the afterword and the preface, respectively – the latter
is an add-on that does not elaborate beyond providing some light on
the historical and contemporary relevance of the book and the recep-
tion it has been accorded over the years. The case of the afterword is
different. Before coming to the key points of this 1995 text, we could
perhaps look at how Said addresses the issue of travel when it comes to
the field of ideas. Said’s engagement with the movement of ideas across
cultures, and time, has been a constant one. However, he specifically
takes up this issue in his essay titled ‘Travelling Theory’ (included in
The World, The Text and the Critic), where he evaluates the implica-
tions of cross-fertilization and how thought trajectories imbibe and
impact people. In this context Said writes: ‘Cultural and intellectual
life are usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of
ideas, and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious
influence, creative borrowing or wholesale appropriation, the move-
ment of ideas and theories from one place to another is both fact of life
and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity’ (226). What
Said, in effect, is responding in the post-texts that bracket Orientalism
is the journey his book has made over time, and across diverse loca-
tions since it first appeared.
Of the striking questions raised about the argumentative mechanism
pursued by Said in Orientalism, a point he addresses in the afterword,
the mode of selection of illustrative material is a contentious one.
At the beginning of the book Said had already stated that his focus
is on the ‘limited (but still inordinately large) set of questions to the
Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which
for almost a thousand years together stood for the Orient’ (17). The
range that he covers, critics have suggested, is limited, a point he not
merely anticipated but also accounted for in the Introduction. In the
afterword he reiterates the scheme with which he embarked on this
enterprise, one which is also a response to the questions about the
purpose of the book: ‘I intended my book as part of a pre-existing cur-
rent of thought whose purpose was to liberate intellectuals from the
shackles of systems such as Orientalism: I wanted readers to make use
of my work so that they might then produce new studies of their own
that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs in a generous,
enabling mode’ (340). In other words, Orientalism sought to open up
a subject for critical examination which has had a long history, but one
whose traces are to be found across a wide variety of sources and insti-
tutions. The task, as Said has been repetitively arguing throughout the
book, is not one of comprehensive coverage of the range of the subject
in either history or location but is directed towards a critical response
to its workings in the Western imagination. It is this objective that he
asserts in the afterword, pointing out that his reading of situations
relating to Oriental culture and its structuring for the West is part of a
pre-envisaged design: ‘Each of my analyses varies the picture, increases
the difference and discriminations, separates authors and periods from
each other, even though all pertain to Orientalism’ (337). The passage
of years has not diminished the force of the argument Said presented
in Orientalism. Both the preface and the afterword articulate the rel-
evance of the frame that he adopted for the purpose of reading the
subject. The trapfalls to which the book or the various modes that
he makes use of can be subjected to are not invalid, neither is Said
positing them as such in his comments that appear in these post-texts,
but the very fact that postcolonial studies as a discipline has drawn
consistently on the pioneering foundation that he lay in Orientalism
bears out its continuing relevance for a field whose extent is regularly
addressing newer formations in culture and in history.
Works cited
Said, Edward W. The World, The Text and the Critic [1984], London, UK:
Vintage, 1991.
_______. Beginnings: Intention and Method, Second edition [1975, 1985],
London, UK: Granta, 1997.
_______. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Second edition
[1978, 1995], London, UK: Penguin, 2003.
5 Chinua Achebe: Home
and Exile
Chinua Achebe and modern
African writing
The writings of Chinua Achebe are commonly identified with the

emergence and consolidation of a modern consciousness in twentieth-
century African literature. Achebe’s first novel Things Fall Apart (1958),
which inaugurated a burst of creative activity across the continent, set
the tone for subsequent literary practice in and from Africa. Writing in
the first decade of the twenty-first century, the young Nigerian writer
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie acknowledged the great impact Achebe’s
writings have had for generations of writers who followed him. In a
comment appended to her first novel Purple Hibiscus (2004) Adichie
reflects upon the influence Achebe has had on her: ‘Reading Achebe
gave me permission to write about my world. He transported me to
a past that was both familiar and unfamiliar, a past I imagined my
great grandfather lived. Looking back, I realize that what he did for
me at the time was validate my history, make it seem worthy in some
way’ (3). Adichie’s observation is not a one-off personal eulogy; it
articulates the pulse of an intellectual current whose initial springs can
be located in the way Things Fall Apart was received by the African
reading public. It is not that ‘modern’ African writing was non-existent
in the period preceding Achebe. Far from it. Achebe has himself com-
mented on the debt he owes to the rich storytelling traditions in Africa
on a number of occasions, in a variety of different contexts. In fact,
much of Achebe’s force derives from the embedded strains of creative
practice which present a distinctively African character. His novels
draw on the rich repository of Nigerian oral and folk resources, yet at
the same time, his expertise as a novelist suggests a unique interface
between the creative minds of Europe and Africa. As a genre, the novel
is not native to Africa. Other African writers like Wole Soyinka, Ngugi
wa Thiong’o and Ahmadou Kourouma have opened up new vistas in
contemporary fictional writing by exploring the various dimensions
of the encounter with colonialism. Neither their representations nor
Chinua Achebe: Home and Exile 97
the strategies adopted for narrative enunciation suggest uniformity.
While such variety and elasticity have something to do with the novel
form itself, we can also see how different African writers have orga-
nized their fictions as responses to cultural situations they consider
important. In Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1972), for instance,
we see an idiomatic change that shows how at the hands of a highly
accomplished craftsman both form and language can acquire new, fas-
cinating hues. It would be improper to read these fictional exercises as
departures from an existing tradition, or as attempts at linguistic play
and experiment, for African novelists do not share the same heritage
with Europe in the history of fiction.
The early reception of African fiction epitomized the standardization
of the European cultural ethos, for it was through such standards that
the continent and its narratives came to be judged. The African writer
thus had to contest the presumptive bias of a Eurocentric mind, on the
one hand, and argue for a cultural situation that bore its own specific
character on the other. It is not surprising to see many an African writer
arguing the case of an alternative poetics, one which would adequately
address the complex experiential realms of the continent. By the 1980s,
when Heinemann’s African Writers Series had taken off the ground,
the idea of a modern literature from the continent knocked the doors
of a West that had been either closed or myopic about the creative
genius of the African people. It is not easy to imagine the impact of this
one circumstance of publishing history and Achebe’s engagement with
the process now, especially when global traffic has facilitated conve-
nient access to texts from different parts of the world. The case was not
so in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was also the time when the
wheels of decolonization had begun gaining momentum; the picture
was as yet hazy, and the world not quite ready to encounter alternative
storytelling possibilities on a global scale. The African Writers Series
changed all that. It opened the floodgates, fashioned a platform for the
creative African minds to meet an unsuspecting global audience, even
as it suggested new possibilities that had been considered decidedly
European thus far. James Currey, the British collaborator in this devel-
opment, acknowledged Achebe’s emblematic function in a touching
account more than three decades later:
It was an inspired choice to make Chinua Achebe the Editorial

Adviser to the Series. The first four titles included Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart and its sequel No Longer at Ease. First printings were
about 2500. It was a cautious start. Quickly Chinua Achebe’s
name became a magnet for new writing. The photograph of the
98 Chinua Achebe: Home and Exile
author on the back reinforced the idea that Africans might get
published.
By the twentieth anniversary in 1982 Heinemann had sold close
on three million copies of Things Fall Apart; in the next 20 years
sales trebled. There have been translations into many other lan-
guages. Neither Penguin nor Pan, the two major paperback series
in Britain in 1958, bought rights. It now appears in Penguin Mod-
ern Classics. None of that would have happened if it had not been
published in paperback as number 1 in the African Writers Series.
(160)
Let us revisit the situation. Chinua Achebe’s first novel Things Fall
Apart was published in 1958 in hardback. But the effect of a new
creative idiom became apparent when the initial titles of the African
Writers Series – Achebe was a major feature here – began to hit the
market from 1962 onwards. Things Fall Apart was reissued as the first
title in the series when its paperback version inaugurated this venture.
James Currey’s metaphor of the ‘magnet’ drives home the point with
telling precision. Achebe’s association with this publication exercise as
both its creative pivot and its policy flagbearer prepared the ground
for a modern African literary tradition to consolidate itself. But even
as Africa’s literary voice was finding an audience, set structures, both
ideological and racial, were controlling the cultural markers through
which the continent came to be figured and perceived in the outside
world. Achebe’s consistent critique of two tropes – one represented
by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the other by Joyce Cary’s
Mister Johnson – shows how difficult it has been to dismantle cer-
tain presumptions about Africa in the popular imagination. Achebe’s
examination of the processes through which Africa came to be config-
ured in different discourses on the continent is one of the characteristic
features of Home and Exile.
Perspectives on Africa and its literature have followed a variety of
trajectories since the initiation of the African Writers Series in 1962.
As the first decade of the twenty-first century ambles into history, it
is evident that global publication patterns have taken African litera-
ture beyond the span of the Heinemann series. Young writers from
Anglo, Mozambique, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Central African Republic,
Somalia and Senegal (apart from Nigeria and Kenya) have seen their
work adorn the catalogues of both major publishing houses across
the Atlantic and vibrant independent firms such Serpent’s Tail and
Ruminator Books. There is also a noticeable shift in the thematic pre-
occupations of many of these emerging voices, for colonial experience
now has to vie with other subjects in their imaginative frames. Ngugi
wa Thiong’o (2010), in a special address titled ‘Language Is Everything
to Declare’ on the occasion of Wasafiri’s twenty-fifth anniversary in
2009 fixed his eye on the changed circumstances under which African
literary practitioners have begun writing:
In terms of the global literary landscape, much has changed, par-

ticularly in the visibility of writers from Asia, Africa, the Carib-
bean and Latin America, whether they are writing from their
home base or from new homes as bona fide citizens of the Western
world. It is impossible to talk about the global literary scene with-
out bringing those writers into the equation. In terms of Africa,
there has emerged a new generation of writers, the Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie generation, confident under their skin and taking
their citizenship of the globe in their stride. They have no problems
in setting the actions of their work across continents and treating
characters from other cultures as integral to their landscape.
(1)
The expansion of frontiers for the global citizenry of writers is exciting

in what it promises. However, such a prospect and its very feasibility
for the new generation of African writers owe it to foundation set up
by people like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soy-
inka. What remains vibrant and integral to the African writing in the
twenty-first century is the presence of a cultural memory, referred to
by means of a variety of agencies and creative modes. And it is in this
context that Chinua Achebe’s legacy remains central to the African
literary imagination.
African literature and culture: Achebe’s response

As it happens the novel, even in its home of origin, has not behaved
very well; it has always resisted the strait-jacket. What is more,
being a robust art form, it has travelled indefatigably and picked
up all kinds of strange habits!
(54)
So writes Chinua Achebe in the essay titled ‘The Writer and His Com-
munity’. His situation as an African storyteller has often led him to
formulate interesting critical frames for the placement of the genre he
has adopted, the novel. The elasticity of the novel form and its recog-
nized refusal to submit to rigid structures in any age finds reflection
here, but more than that Achebe’s emphasis on the form’s assimilative
potential, he also hints at the way it came to be nativized in Africa.
Achebe’s critical writings often confront the dynamics of this encoun-
ter with Europe: sometimes it is evident in his critiques of Conrad
and Cary, otherwise in his readings of the cultural pressures borne
by narratives in the name of fiction. He is not averse to situating the
writer within the frame of ‘responsibility’ (best argued in his essay ‘The
Novelist as Teacher’), yet a bracket of this kind also involves the ques-
tion of culture. His firm conviction about the circumstances in which
Africa came to figure in the popular imagination is well argued for
in Home and Exile. Weighed by the legacy of a modern value system
gifted by the West, the African writer is caught between possibilities he
can only negotiate but not quite settle through an either/or choice. In a
way, this is a dilemma that colonial experience presents all decolonized
people with: transformed by the imperial encounter, the people can
neither reverse the wheels of history nor accommodate the new in its
received form. Take the two following arguments – each separated by
time and context – where Achebe is seen exploring the contours of a
critical frame through which the colonial experience may be best situ-
ated. The first is cautionary, alerting the African writer to the danger
of being seen as an apologist for a newly fashioned literary tradition, a
point he makes in ‘Colonialist Criticism’: ‘Most African writers write
out of an African experience and of commitment to an African destiny.
For them, that destiny does not include a future European identity
for which the present is but an apprenticeship’ (1989: 74). Then, we
have this reminder about the ineradicability of memory of the colonial
encounter: ‘In my view, it is a gross crime for anyone to impose himself
on another, to seize his land and his history, and then to compound this
by making out that the victim is some kind of ward or minor requiring
protection’ (2010b: 7).
The double-edged pressure of negotiating the past with its atten-
dant responsibility, on the one hand, and of being alert to the changed
circumstances following the colonial experience, on the other, has
placed different demands on Achebe’s writings. His criticism of liter-
ary texts and traditions – from both Africa and elsewhere – has thus
followed a trajectory we do not conventionally associate with main-
stream Anglo-American critics like Coleridge, Henry James, T. S. Eliot
or Ezra Pound. Neither is his argumentative frame akin to the ones we
see in the writings of contemporary European critics such as Milan
Kundera or Umberto Eco. For Achebe the question of culture is also an
inevitably political one. There is a need to situate the process through
which perceptions about critical priorities find their way in the popular
imagination. For instance, the insistence of many African writers like
Achebe and Soyinka that creative writing cannot be dissociated from
the particular circumstances from which they emerge has sometimes
been read as an example of radical politics. Nadine Gordimer locates
the writing of Achebe and Soyinka within such a frame, as the follow-
ing perspective suggests: but not only is such a reduction a misreading,
it is also inadequate as an approach to the writing of these writers.
Gordimer (1988) writes: ‘They became “more than writers” in answer
to their country’s – Nigeria’s – crisis of civil war, but in no sense did the
demand develop their creativity. On the contrary, both sacrificed for
some years the energy of their creativity to the demands of activism,
which included, for Soyinka, imprisonment’ (289–290).
What is required here is a different form of orientation altogether.
Achebe’s engagement with literature has never submitted to the art
for art’s sake structure, and in situations where textual interpretations
are in question, the emphasis is on a reading strategy which places it
within the parameters of African storytelling traditions. In essays such
as ‘Colonialist Criticism’ (where he discusses Amos Tutuola, Camara
Laye and Kofi Awonoor in the contexts of African creative practices)
and ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ (where the writer’s purpose constitutes
the subject), we see Achebe locate literary practice within the broader
circumstance of culture. This reading of culture is informed by a sense
of awareness which is now recognized as ‘African’. One interesting fea-
ture of this process relates to the identification of markers both within
the fields of literary production and outside. How should an African
writer respond to the history and culture from which he derives his
identity? The problem, argues Achebe, lies in the lack of a commonly
recognized matrix that all African writers could subscribe to without
feeling alienated. In the absence of such a historical platform, the idea
of an African mind, primarily the consequence of imperial education
and agency, took root. The first priority of the African writer, argues
Achebe, is to interrogate this situation under which he has to write.
The pressures of recognition and acceptance in contemporary culture
have had a great impact on the way writers see both themselves and
the work they do. In a fascinating essay titled ‘Africa and Her Writers’,
Achebe looked at the issue of ‘anxiety’, examining the circumstances
under which writing from Africa has had to deal with the received
ideas of culture: ‘In talking about the world here we really mean
Europe and the West. But we have all got into the bad habit of regard-
ing that slice of the globe as the whole thing. That an African writer
can so easily slip into this error is a tribute to its hold on the contem-
porary imagination’ (1973: 623). The most striking aspect of Achebe’s
critical argument about African literature is perhaps the consistency
with which he has written on the interpenetrative relation between
art and culture. What appears to be peculiar and novel in the African
literary tradition, thus, also serves as its own specific cultural mark-
ers. To a mind unaccustomed to the process of creative engagement in
Africa this becomes a process of negotiation, but for one reflecting the
continent’s different cultural hues from within, it is the most accessible
thing. This is one of the issues Achebe has regularly addressed in his
commentaries on African literature.
Reading Home and Exile: the African imagination

and its contexts
The writing of space, or for that matter, culture and history, is often
arranged through certain processes of figuration that appear famil-
iar through usage, convention and community acceptance. These
processes follow distinctive hierarchical formats, much of which are
‘naturalized’ and organized through the presence of a series of givens,
which in turn assert their logic onto the argument without compro-
mise. Theoretical writing about and from Africa in the past several
decades has had to contest and challenge the recognized notions of
narrative design – most of which trace their origin to distinctive Euro-
pean roots – but with the alternatives inaccessible to a world audience
fed on a diet of Western creative enterprise, much of the modern liter-
ary culture that we now designate as ‘African’ has been misread and
ordained within self-defining brackets. ‘The modern African mind’ is
such a bracket. It struggles to unify and coalesce where homogeniza-
tion of any sort can only be through the agency of violence – violence
to the multiple linguistic and cultural registers that assert their distinc-
tive presences in unique ways, each bearing specificities that cannot
be addressed with a single argumentative label. Africa’s inaccessibility
is not just confined to a lack of awareness regarding its actual spaces,
its geographies and locations – often accounts morph perceptions into
neat reductive structures that bear the weight of a given rhetoric –
there is also a cultural registry that draws heavily on preset European
models of imagination, and it is this condition that makes the reading
difficult and challenging. Modern African writers have had to counter
these extremely pervasive models of knowledge production, challeng-
ing the dominant markers through which their world is approached
and accessed, and at the same time argue for worldviews that situate
the subject anew. Commenting on the impact of the imperial mind on
the African subject, Chinua Achebe, one of the continent’s most rec-
ognized voices, writes:
Imperial domination required a new language to describe the

world it had created and the people it had subjugated. Not sur-
prisingly, this new language did not celebrate these subject peoples
nor toast them as heroes. Rather, it painted them in the most lurid
colours. Africa, being European imperialism’s prime target, with
a hardly a square foot escaping the fate of imperial occupation,
naturally received the full measure of this adverse attention.
(2010b: 159)
In many of his non-fictional writings, Chinua Achebe has voiced his

argument against this ‘imperial domination’, critiquing both colonial
agency and subject through some carefully chosen illustrative models.
His questioning of Joseph Conrad, primarily in terms of the repre-
sentation of Africa in the modernist ‘classic’ Heart of Darkness, has
drawn attention to the presence of a subversive racial tactic, suggesting
how even ‘acts of generosity’ (2010a: 9) can actually disseminate insid-
ious designs. As a writer, Achebe’s creative and critical output is not as
prolific as that of some of his contemporaries, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and
Wole Soyinka, to name just two. Yet, in his five novels, and a handful
of critical essays, he has voiced his argument for an African world-
view, seeking to distinguish its character from other situations in the
postcolonial world. The argument for an informed perspective on the
question of postcolonial space finds its most articulate voice in Chinua
Achebe’s Home and Exile. By the time the book appeared in 2001,
postcolonialism’s consolidation as an agency of critique was not only
confirmed but also deeply entrenched in academia. What is interest-
ing in Achebe’s reading, however, is a deliberate eschewal of jargonic
overlays, for in inviting us to attend upon the polemics of cultural
difference through the mode of personal experience, he reorganizes
the terms adopted for the purpose of investigation. The two terms
on either side of the ‘and’ that joins them in the book’s title – ‘home’
and ‘exile’ – have had their fair share of accrued value in contempo-
rary postcolonial discourse. If Achebe offers to read his experience of
colonialism through these registers, then they do not emerge in the
form of an alternative to the spins that critics like Edward Said or
Homi Bhabha have given them. Rather, they carry value because of
their inscription in Achebe’s personal world, informed by and draw-
ing sustenance from a history that can best be addressed from within
the world they posit and epitomize. One of the objectives of this book,
Achebe points out pretty early on in the narrative, is to unravel the
accretions of the cultural habit through which everything African has
often been viewed in Europe and elsewhere. Achebe has been arguing
for the necessity of such a reading process for quite some time on dif-
ferent occasions, which we shall be referring to later.
The experience of ‘home’ and the imperial encounter

The opening section of the book titled ‘My Home under Imperial
Fire’ begins with a personal anecdote, a recollection of a homecoming
of sorts, through which Achebe situates and develops the argument
against colonial indoctrination. The deep-seated influence of the ideo-
logical apparatuses of knowledge and cultural engagement to which
he himself was subject actually offers Achebe the occasion to revisit
the historical circumstances in which these imperial designs were
cast. Imbued with the stamp of the personal, this revisitation is also
a crucial examination of the prejudices that held sway over Nigerian
minds. What Achebe investigates, however, moves beyond the immedi-
ate ambit of the individual condition, for his questioning of the logic
of knowledge dissemination carries forth the critique of the agency
itself. In spite of the seemingly anecdotal and personal trajectory of his
narrative, there is an intensely involved reexamination of the terms of
reference through which the Africa question is brought to the surface.
At its most immediately discernible level, Achebe’s narrative in the
book makes his case through autobiographical forays, which, though
selective, are informed by the reasoning of self-experience.
The somewhat dramatic circumstance through which Achebe opens
the narrative actually serves as one of the keys to the argument he
develops in the course of the book. The personal account, presented
here with a remarkably nuanced emphasis on the novelty of the experi-
ence, prepares the ground for the launching of the sustained argument
against the ideological pressures that have come to determine the Afri-
can mind in the twentieth century. The traces of the event, now recalled
for the purpose of narrative enunciation, place Achebe’s childhood in
the context of the changing paradigms of thought in early twentieth-
century Nigeria. The novelist in Achebe pictures for us an image of a
young boy grappling with the reality of a homecoming that is simulta-
neously a negotiation with a new world. The fascinating world, Achebe
recalls, was interesting in what it promised and held, but this was a
Nigeria he did not know. Opening up the vistas of a newly fathomed
experiential vision in the context of his self-examination, Achebe sets
up the case for a more involved enquiry into the ‘knowledge’ question
that extends beyond the circuit of his immediately recognized social
world. The homecoming, at the heart of the argument, serving as the
agency of the critical enquiry into the order of the Nigerian worldview
Achebe contests, is thus both metaphor and event, the sign and its
materiality. The strategy is unique in that it invigorates the argument
with the fabric of authenticity, rendering the experience’s pressure on
the narrative in an altogether fresh view. What, then, is the ‘homecom-
ing’ like, and what is the status of that which it leaves in its wake?
Achebe recounts his experience – one characterized by a sense of
inadequacy – by elaborating his father’s professional situation, which
not just qualifies his lack of knowledge but also locates its character
in the immediate context of the ‘event’. Such a trajectory, through
which he tries to engage the ideological architectonics of the impe-
rial order, brackets a wider experiential realm, of which he is only an
exemplar. There are thus two significant aspects to this recollection:
first, it makes a case for an investigation of the parameters of the
imperial engagement through his own case and, second, it draws in
the structures of colonial design by situating the personal as an exem-
plar. We shall be coming to the question of Achebe’s exemplarity as a
Nigerian caught in the throes of cultural transformation, but here it is
necessary to consider his perspective on the event of his homecoming.
The reason for my frightening journey was that my father, after

thirty years in missionary work, founding a new church here and
tending a fledgling one there, had earned his rest and a pension of
thirty shillings a month and was taking his family to his ancestral
home, to a house he had scraped to build in the final years of his
evangelism. It was a grand house with an iron roof and white-
washed earth walls, a far cry from the thatch-roofed mission house
we had just left.
(2)
For all practical purposes, the event was new in what it offered the
young Achebe. For one, it compelled him to revise the idea of the nation
he had come to subscribe to in school, as now, in this larger arena of
a community where the logic of association followed an altogether
different route, he confronted an interesting problem of definition.
Achebe belongs to the Igbo community, primarily located in the south-
eastern part of Nigeria. How was he going to identify himself in the
context of the social group from where he drew his understanding of
self and community? To accept the terms of the paradigm conveyed by
the Oxford dictionary (one he refers to in this case) not only distorts
his experience and situation also renders inadequate the argument
through which he makes sense of the reality of his society.
Defamiliarizing the terms: locating the Igbo

Achebe’s reading of the linguistic dimensions of the word ‘tribe’ places
the premium on the term’s deficiency in accessing the nuances of the
situation in Nigerian context. The four-point critique of the term
focusses on two interesting aspects: first, it deconstructs the word
‘tribe’ in its Oxford-given orientation and, second, it relocates the Igbo
people in a wider cultural frame that opens us the subject for renego-
tiation. This process, in fact, gives us a key to the mode of engagement
that is consistently present throughout the book. Let us examine the
four-pronged counterpoint through which he places the Igbo people
in perspective:
a. Igbo people are not primitive; if we were I would not be offer-

ing this distinguished lecture, or would I?;
b. Igbo people are not linked by blood ties, although they may
share many cultural traits;
c. Igbo people do not speak one dialect; they speak one language
which has scores of major and minor dialects;
d. and as for having one recognized leader, Igbo people would
regard the absence of such recognized leader as the very defin-
ing principle of their social and political identity.
(4–5)
The firmness with which Achebe undercuts the linguistic strategies is

evident in the exposure of the structural inadequacies of the central
terms of the definition in the Oxford dictionary: primitivism, blood
ties, language and leadership. These characteristics resonate with the
legacy of an imperialist ideological mind that situates subjects within
neat, identifiable parameters. By reducing the connotations of the
‘tribe’, to such set and determined conditions of knowledge it locates
any given people within the limits of its designation. As Achebe goes
on to explore later in the book, the problem of categories shows how
the fissures in our mode of appropriation render ineffective the subject
we often seek to represent. The example of Joyce Cary’s Mister John-
son and its supposed engagement with the African consciousness – an
issue Achebe critiques with his invigorating questioning of perceived
assumptions – presents such a case. The systems of power, more
linguistic and cultural than the overtly political ones, that articulate its
sway over the minds of a colonial people cannot always be read from
the structural contexts from where it emerges, for specific experiential
frames demand more involved and culturally informed readings. This
is where the imposition of Joyce Cary’s novel as the definitive text
representing the African ethos fails, for such pressure on the Nigerian
public readily assumes its mind to be of a particular order. We shall be
examining the circumstances of this text and its impact on the Nige-
rian mind a little ahead, but the machinations that engage parameters
from a non-native context require serious interrogation, and that is
what Achebe considers to be one of his objectives in this book. The
issue with both the words at the beginning of the first chapter – ‘tribe’
and ‘nation’ – displays the same question, that of a culture of knowl-
edge production overlaying another without quite accounting for the
nuances relevant to the latter.
What comes through in his critique brings the argument home almost
immediately. It exposes more than just the term’s range: it shows how
sweeping generalizations best understood in particular contexts cannot
quite accommodate specific nuances of cultures that are at a remove
from its knowledge base. The irony of the whole exercise is further
enhanced when Achebe argues for new engagement with the word
‘nation’. Instead of ‘tribe’, he argues, it is ‘nation’ that carries greater
validity for the Igbo people. What he does, in effect, is to challenge
the structures of knowledge through which these words have acquired
value in culture. But this culture is steeped in the baggage that owes
much to the imperial apparatus Achebe now faces on his homecoming.
How and under what circumstances do we engage with the process of
designation? This is a question that Achebe places in context here: ‘The
subject of naming, especially naming to put down, will come up in a
variety of forms in the course of these deliberations’ (5–6). He is not
quite arguing for a revisionist historiography to overwhelm the knowl-
edge system that Nigeria has been a party to since its interface with
the colonial mind; rather, he is suggesting that the currency of terms
such as ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’ require a more sustained engagement with
native life for them to even appropriate aspects of such experience. In
the absence of a system of signs designed to thwart the pressures of
these culturally loaded words, the correspondence is never achieved.
As a question occupying the Nigerian imagination, tribalism has had
an interesting history in Achebe’s thought. In a forthright and incisive
critique of the governance mechanism in twentieth-century Nigeria,
Achebe had explored the probable causes behind the malaise in an
earlier pamphlet The Trouble with Nigeria (2010a). Locating the word
within the interstices of Nigerian political and cultural history, Achebe
considered the shifts in its usage and reception: ‘Nothing in Nigeria’s
political history captures her problem of national integration more
graphically than the chequered fortune of the tribe in her vocabulary.
Tribe has been accepted at one time as a friend, rejected as an enemy at
another, and finally smuggled in through the back-door as an accom-
plice’ (2010a: 25). It is interesting to see how the word ‘tribe’ within
Nigerian discourse has often served as the site of play, its various elab-
orations either coexisting or being engaged in a contest of priorities.
In attempting to read the circumstances in which Achebe is compelled
to ask questions of his own orientation in Nigeria – something he
revisits in the title piece of his essay anthology The Education of a
British-Protected Child (2010b) – he does not picture the non-white
as the superior Other. This is no game of rhetorical one-upmanship,
and Achebe is not engaged in a making a case that would place the
African within an acknowledged cultural centre. In other words, the
interrogation of the hegemonic strategies through which the colonial
state has often played with the consciousness of gullible people is not
presented for the purpose of upstaging one by another. The exercise
is aimed at exploring the subtle processes through which the African
imagination has been held hostage by the flamboyant English cultural
apparatus. Nowhere does Achebe gloss his country or community’s
inadequacies with a narrative sleight; in fact, he is remarkably blunt
in arguing against practices that have deterred Nigeria’s engagement
with peace. The distinctive difference between the contours of the
word ‘tribe’ in the twin usages referred to here requires qualification.
When Achebe interrogates the inadequacy of the term in terms of its
dictionary meaning in the English language, he is arguing against the
imposition of a culture-specific rhetoric on a situation that does not
submit to it. So, by looking at the situation of the Igbos in Nigeria –
often defined through the convenient bracket of the ‘tribe’ – he finds
that the knowledge apparatus that holds sway over ‘civilized’ in the
Western world cannot account for his situation as an Igbo in Nige-
ria. Such a questioning, however, does not lead him to glamorize his
own people or culture by articulating a picture that is removed from
actual experience.
Striking the balance: the dual inheritance

The balance of the critical and introspective invigorate the text with a
unique character; Achebe’s investment in the personal thus extends to
incorporate the orientations that address specific cultural situations.
The example from his experience with Christianity is a case in point.
When his father returned ‘home’ after his long professional engage-
ment with the mission, the situation offered an interesting variation.
Achebe recounts his father’s confrontation with heathenism, that too
located within the immediate family circuit, of which the following
offers a fascinating picture of the crisis at hand:
My father had a younger half-brother whom he had tried in the

past, and quite in vain, to convert to Christianity. On account of
this failure, perhaps, the relationship between the two tended to be
cool. . . . But as the Christian owner was far away in the mission
field his brother considered it safe to install the heathen shrine of
ikenga and other household divinities in the piazza. . . . My father
was furious and demanded the immediate removal of the shrine
not only from the house but from the compound. . . . Could he
have been thinking of the irony of spending his years converting
strangers in far-flung parts of Olu and Igbo while Satan in the
shape of his half-brother was hard at work in the rear, in the very
front room of his own house at home?
. . . Both my parents were strong and even sometimes uncom-
promising in their Christian beliefs, but they were not fanatical.
Their lives were ruled, I think, as much by reason as by faith;
as much by common sense and compassion as by doctrine. My
father’s half-brother was not the only heathen in our extended
family; if anything, he was among a majority.
(9–11)
It is evident that for Achebe, the matter is not one of West-bashing

without qualification. What Achebe does in the process is to situate
the trajectories of social life where the cross-currents of the domestic
arena is examined as the site of conflicting energies. With Christian-
ity internalized, running deep and interacting with the cultural fabric
of an ethos that drew its resources from a very different orientation,
Achebe’s father epitomized a condition that affected all Nigerians fol-
lowing their encounter with colonialism. The adoption of Christianity
did not quite transform the social dynamics into a rigid either/or binary,
but the state of things was not very smooth either. Negotiating these
structures that challenged the existing Nigerian life-world emerges in
Achebe’s understanding through the agency of individual experience,
one where his father’s situation becomes a test case. Although figura-
tive, this example drives home the complex character of the encounter
Achebe is attempting to narrativize in the book.
Whether the impact of the Christian ethos penetrated deeper than the
already-existing cultural frames in Nigeria cannot always be measured
through encounters such as the one Achebe refers to in the example ear-
lier. The demarcation between such faith options was, to say the least,
never absolutely defined or even ordained by the practitioners them-
selves. Achebe’s uncle’s case was thus wrought up in the cultural politics
of the time, and if the infringement into the church’s domain by a nativist
cultural structure is construed as socially relevant, then the arguments
behind such positions also cannot be accounted for without attend-
ing to the contextual specificities involved in it. The heathen–Christian
encounter thus relates substantially to the Nigerian theological milieu
in a way that reflects the spiritual preoccupations of the people. At the
same time, however, the pressures of a social engagement looking for
an appropriate sounding board make its claim upon the imagination of
the people. Achebe’s reading of the complex situation in which he was
situated as a product of Western education – one whose priorities as a
modern man in post-independence Nigeria demanded fidelity to two
seemingly oppositional domains – gains from his incorporation of per-
sonal history, for it is through such an agency that the layers of cultural
accretion and their impact on society could perhaps be best addressed.
As Achebe begins his discussion by pursuing the thesis of inadequate
representation, in terms of both language and the dominant tropes that
have served to identify the African condition for the Western mind, it
seems only appropriate that he settles on the problem of identity that
he himself confronted. In a fascinating essay titled ‘My Dad and Me’
Achebe revisits the circumstances in which he and his father faced up
to a set of possibilities, new yet different for both of them. He does this
not merely within the father–son matrix but informs his remembrance
by presenting it in terms of a cultural other: which was his father’s
uncle Udoh Osinyi. As Achebe points out in his succinct but telling
account, the matter was much more than a case of indoctrination or
ideological imposition. It cuts across the cultural space Achebe and his
family identified and understood as Nigerian, engaging their priorities
within structures of knowledge they were compelled to ask questions
of. The achievement of Achebe’s writing strikes home for this very rea-
son: it eschews the weight of postcolonial jargon, where the questions
of knowledge, identity, location and cultural practice gain from the
investment in personal history. The following passage from ‘My Dad
and Me’ brings to bear on the narrative of the colonial encounter a
sense that no other rhetorical frame can accommodate:
Those two – my father and his uncle – formulated the dialec-

tic which I inherited. Udoh stood fast in what he knew, but left
room also for his nephew to seek other answers. The answer my
father found in the Christian faith solved many problems, but no
means all.
His great gifts to me were his appreciation for education, and
his recognition that whether we look at one human family or we
look at human society in general, growth can come only incremen-
tally, and every generation must recognise and embrace the task
it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.
From where I stand now, I can see the enormous value of my
great-uncle Udoh Osinyi, and his example of fidelity. I also salute
my father, Isaiah Achebe, for the thirty-five years he served as a
Christian evangelist and for all the benefits his work and the work
of others like him brought to our people. I am the prime benefi-
ciary of the education which the missionaries had made a major
component of their enterprise. My father had a lot of praise for
the missionaries and their message, and so have I. But I have also
learned also a little more scepticism about them than my father
had any need for. Does it matter, I ask myself, that centuries before
these European Christians sailed down to us in ships to deliver the
Gospel and save us from darkness, their ancestors, also sailing in
ships, had delivered our forefathers to the horrendous transatlan-
tic slave trade and unleashed darkness in our world?
(2010b: 37–38)
By the end of this passage, the personal register moves to the widen-
ing circuit of a history that simply cannot be wished away. Achebe is
conscious of the complex nature of his inheritance: it is an awareness
informed by the histories of his own family and country. Rather than
build upon this aspect of his experience as the only form of social
narrative, he looks at a more involved process, one which draws on
the rich repository that does not quite submit to the neat Western
models of knowledge production. The engagement of the social and
the individual within the binding matrix of community life, found in
Igbo’s preference for the orally transmitted version, presents Achebe
with an important tool to interrogate some of the presumptions that
have served the idea of Africa well in the dominant narratives about
the continent. The circumstances in which the Igbo people developed
their worldview were remarkably different from that which the Euro-
peans projected and advocated for both political and cultural reasons.
The argument for evangelicalism, as Achebe saw in his own case, had
already taken deep roots in the African consciousness; his acknowl-
edgement of his own situation as a consequence of such a process
in fact furthers the debate in the opposite direction. Building upon
his life story through the agency of pedagogy and education, Achebe
zeroes in to examine the logic that held sway over the policy-makers’
minds as they sought to bring the post-independence generations to
the doors of civilization. For a people nurtured on the rhetoric of unity
and progress, it is extremely difficult and indeed challenging to come
to terms with the complex dynamics of the Igbo world. In a way, in
this inability to understand the conditions of life and culture of the
Igbos lies the crux of the argument Achebe is pursuing in this book.
Without any previous knowledge of the world where the realities of
existence were not appropriated through the agency of Enlightenment
reason, the European found ‘sympathy’ an inadequate instrument for
realizing the verities of such a life view. In effect, what may have had
the logic of knowledge driving it ended up being a parody of what it
aimed to achieve.
Colonial education and its challenges

Achebe looks at the curriculum, one which many like him in mod-
ern Nigeria were programmed to follow. ‘Education’ bore within its
patented frame resources that trained and imperilled young Nigerian
minds. Europe’s case for authenticity is made by a novel, Mister John-
son by Joyce Cary – a text which took modernity to an unsuspecting
people, simply because it was seen as being closest to those ‘civiliza-
tion’ took upon itself to educate. The final few pages of the opening
section of Achebe’s book present a passionate re-reading of the circum-
stances in which Mister Johnson was foisted upon the young Nigerian
minds beginning to grope their way into a heavily Eurocentric knowl-
edge paradigm. It is another matter to be taught ‘treasures’ such as
Treasure Island, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gulliver’s Travels, Ivanhoe –
texts which made no claim to an African consciousness, but when
something like Mister Johnson is programmed as a ‘Nigerian novel’
(22) the underpinnings of a more sustained political ideology invite
our attention. This is precisely what Achebe calls upon us to do. How
does the ideological paradigm of a benevolent Europe showering its
benefits to a people wallowing in the throes of barbarity achieve its
end? Achebe locates it in the strength of the narrative and in its power
to hold an unsuspecting audience in thrall. He encapsulates this strat-
egy with great force, a force that draws sustenance from the experience
of victimhood:
There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those

who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about
others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt,
totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do
anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever
they need them. In Nigeria it is called renting a crowd. Has Joyce
Cary rented Joseph Conrad’s crowd? Never mind. What matters
is that Cary has a very strong aversion to the people he is present-
ing to us.
(24–25)
This is criticism of the first order. With remarkable astuteness he

telescopes the pedagogic exercise of the University College, Ibadan,
in 1948 onto a larger narrative that runs across the face of Africa
in the European imagination. It is the logic of a cultural imaginary
that attempts to sweep a people’s mind by suggesting that texts like
Mister Johnson authenticate their world unlike any other. In one of
the most insightful passages of Home and Exile, Achebe arrests the
designs of narrative desire and what it could achieve through carefully
programmed fictional frames: ‘What his book Mister Johnson did for
me though was to call into question my childhood assumption of the
innocence of stories. It began to dawn to me that although fiction was
undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth
or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention,
its integrity. Needless to say I did not grasp all of this at one bound but
slowly over time through the experience of life and reading’ (33–34).
We need to revisit the Joyce Cary example again, for Achebe not only
elaborates its impact upon the Nigerian mind of his generation in the
second section of the book but also engages with the larger question
of ‘tradition’ here. What, Achebe hypothetically ponders, prevented
Cary from presenting his subject in a way that would be acceptable
to Nigerians? It is not the fact that he was a European; rather, it is the
submission to the dominant knowledge structure that read Africa in
a particular way, a way that was both prejudiced and grossly biased
towards the necessities of colonial agency.
Writing for culture: new cultures of the African word

If we were to consider the opening section of the book as an examina-
tion of the reading experience, then the second is definitely concerned
with the process of writing, quite aptly called ‘The Empire Fights Back’.
At the centre of the argument for the African narrative finding its way
in the world lay an interesting encounter with the European other,
one through which Achebe arrived, as it were, with a strong current
following in its wake. The incident in question concerns the publica-
tion history of Achebe’s first novel Things Fall Apart. For a reading
public, which also includes the book industry, fed on the diet of texts
produced by Joyce Cary and his ilk, Things Fall Apart was an unprec-
edented phenomenon. The 1960s saw the launching of the ‘African
Writers Series’ by the British publishing firm William Heinemann, of
which the first title was Things Fall Apart. Suddenly, Achebe recalls,
there was a surge of creativity that broke through the barricades of a
tradition that had thus far built its edifice upon a European lineage.
‘The Empire Fights Back’ thus deals with two corollaries that build
upon the thesis of misrecognition argued for in the opening section
of the book: the first of these is the emergence of a body of work that
stood its own, and the other relates to the extension of the stereotype
to the response of Europe to a new writing culture. Achebe’s critique
of the kind of European writing (Joseph Conrad and Elspeth Huxley
are two of his favourite examples) that marked ‘Africa’ as its subject
must be supplemented by his reading of the other type, the text which
emerged from and dealt with his territory. The burst of creative activity
that took the embattled African world to one where writing (unlike the
continent’s orality) forayed into ever-new realms was not quite ready
to accept this fresh entrant as yet. The fascination Dylan Thomas had
for Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Achebe argues, is an
exception. The European mind found these African texts inaccessible.
Why, Achebe asks, should a culture so accustomed to the varying and
rich fare of its own tradition find the African offering uninviting? One
reason, he surmises, could be associated with the pervasiveness of the
stereotype in the European consciousness.
Writers like Elspeth Huxley, competent and with first-hand experi-
ence, actually enhanced the image further. Achebe quotes an interesting
account from Facing Mount Kenya, the book on Gikuyu culture by the
Kenyan revolutionary Jomo Kenyatta. In this fable titled ‘The Gentle-
men of the Jungle’ a man is gradually dispossessed from his home and
land by the animals each time he prepared a fresh space for himself.
What this allegory drives home is more than the power of stories; as
Achebe argues throughout the book, stereotyping is also a form of
story-making. Stories envision realities in ways that subject the truth of
the narrative to specific cultural needs. In locating the necessity of an
orientation that builds upon a culture’s indigenous strengths, Achebe
is aware of the double-edged pressure the very process of storytelling
exerts upon the writer. It is with the call to responsibility that he closes
the argument of the book in the final section titled ‘Today, the Balance
of Stories’. In an earlier essay ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ he had affirmed
his conviction as a writer from Africa. This is an imperative he cannot
afford to let go, for he cannot be dictated to by invitations that would
make his narratives real for others, but not for him. He argues as much
when he observes in ‘The Novelist as Teacher’: ‘I don’t know if Afri-
can writers always have a foreign audience in mind. What I do know
is that they don’t have to. At least I know that I don’t have to’ (1990:
41). The matter is not so easily settled. Towards the end of the book
he refers to an account by Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian writer, whose
desire to find a wider audience leads her to ‘minimise her “Africanness”
’ (81), but such manipulative designs can hardly address the politics of
writing that undercuts modern narratives across the world. Achebe’s
final take on the dangers of manipulative politics locates in V. S. Nai-
paul’s A Bend in the River a possibility that presents another kind of
masquerade. While the rhetoric is Conradian, a remarkable example
of mimeticism in fiction, the story’s claim to authority draws in the
motif of the exile, a claim neither augmented nor sustained in the novel.
The storyteller’s responsibility in a continually expanding community
of writers would involve the condition of the exile more and more as
relations between cultures grow more complex, yet interdependent. The
example of R. K. Narayan’s ‘Malgudi’ or Salman Rushdie’s image of a
writer without a ‘home address’ – extensions of the ‘exile’ with which
Achebe concludes his argument – threads the thesis he has been pursu-
ing throughout the book: the storyteller cannot skirt the question of
location. Whether homed in his own territory, or exiled (by choice or
compulsion), the writer must do the balancing act, weigh the demands
placed on him by his community and culture and act accordingly. It is
this acknowledgement of responsibility, one that continually places the
writer in a process of movement, which makes the exercise worthwhile.
‘I am concerned’, Achebe writes in this context, ‘only with the adver-
tisement of expatriation and exile as intrinsically desirable goals for the
writer or as the answer to the problem of unequal development in the
world’ (96). ‘Home’ and ‘exile’ – the twin spatial tropes that bracket
Chinua Achebe’s reading of cultural imperatives in the African context –
remain one of the most fascinating accounts of the colonial encounter in
the modern world. It invigorates the inter-relationships between space,
history and culture through the African worldview, one which is, more
often than not, marginalized in the discourses of postcolonial theory.
Works cited
Achebe, Chinua. ‘Africa and Her Writers’, The Massachusetts Review, Vol.
14, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 617–629.
_______. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, New York, NY: Anchor,
1989.
_______. Home and Exile, New York, NY: Anchor, 2001.
_______. ‘Africa’s Tarnished Image’ in Francis Abiola Irele, ed. Things Fall
Apart, New York, NY: Norton, 2009, pp. 209–220.
_______. An Image of Africa and the Trouble with Nigeria, London, UK:
Penguin, 2010a.
_______. The Education of a British-Protected Child, New York, NY: Anchor,
2010b.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus, London, UK: Harper Peren-
nial, 2007.
Currey, James. ‘Africa Writes Back: Heinemann African Writers Series – A
Publisher’s Memoir’ in Rober Fraser and Mary Hammond, eds. Books
without Borders Vol. 1, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2008, pp.
159–172.
Gordimer, Nadine. ‘The Essential Gesture’ in Stephen Clingman, ed. The
Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, Places, New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1988, pp. 299–300.
Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, London,
UK: Mercury Books, 1965.
Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters, London, UK: Flamingo, 1972.
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. ‘Language in Everything to Declare’, Wasafiri, Vol. 25,
No. 3, 2010, pp. 1–3.
6 Paul Carter: The Road to
Botany Bay
Land-marked: space, memory,
colonization
The act of colonization involved, primarily and literally, the taking

over of land. It was an act of possession. Extensions of this practice
and its various inducements suggest engagements that address forms
of cultural undertaking which disturb and renegotiate orders and hier-
archies, but imperialism in its most potent dimension deals with the
state of the land. Often, this crucial aspect of the colonial exercise is
taken for granted, the assumption being that the land as such remains
unaffected during the process, the changes taking place at a human
level, which may be political or cultural. Attention to the manifest
human dimension and the power relations that determine the nature
of the colonial encounter pushes the question of land to the margins of
critical discourse. With political rhetoric and the contest of ideologies
offering such a rich repository to work upon, postcolonial theory has
consistently pursued issues that pertain to matters of culture, but much
when it comes to the subject of land. It is this pursuit that Paul Carter
is engaged in, a process of critical enquiry that has opened up worlds
whose limits were not quite appropriated in the benchmarked texts
of the discipline. This is a stellar achievement, not only for Carter’s
pioneering work in the field but because it offers a methodological
intervention which reads as well as accesses conditions of life in terms
of land, space and the colonial response to it. As an intervention that
cuts across the obvious political current where the colonizer and the
colonized are placed in a dialectical bind, Carter’s engagement dem-
onstrates the deep-seated implications for a takeover of land that
may be seemingly innocent of design, but which rather is very much
a reflection of a calculating power structure where along with people
it is space that becomes the site of play. The arrival of the colonizer
runs parallel to the assessment of the physical terrain, and once this
land is brought under colonial control ‘ground clearing’ starts, which
involves the crucial process of transcription through the agency of
118 Paul Carter: The Road to Botany Bay
territory. One could also see it as a process of layering or carpeting
by means of which a new spatial narrative takes over and through
the act of visual repetition asserts the primacy of this new structure
by situating it as the only way the land in question is to be known by.
According to Carter (1996), as he argues in The Lie of the Land, the
presence of the newly fashioned physical image of the land served as
the means through which the rhetoric of colonization made its mark.
This was an act of representation, but one which claimed its legitimacy
by imposing its spatial narrative, covering up the preceding template
to remarkable effect. For Paul Carter, such exercises of ground clear-
ing show the land’s susceptibility to forms of spatial manifestation. It
may seem to be confined to the realm of architecture, but behind each
alteration made by the colonizer lay a concurrent rhetorical imperative
whose shadow hovered over the colonially controlled space. Contex-
tualizing the implications for this form of spatial takeover in The Lie
of the Land of land by the colonizer, Carter writes: ‘The result of
ground-clearing was to institute one system of memorialization at
the expense of another. It was as if the colonists set out to erase the
common ground where communication with “Natives” might have
occurred. To found the colony, to inaugurate linear history and its
puppet-theatre of marching soldiers and treadmills, was to embrace
an environmental amnesia; it was actively to forget what wisdom the
ground, and its people might possess’ (6).
The takeover of land need not necessarily be confined to territo-
rial annexation, the fallout of which is generally assessed in terms of
political understanding. The translation of such exchanges through a
change in operative design, or even a new paradigm in governance,
overlooks the situation of the land. Behind such a reductive response
to land lies a long and rich political inheritance that has been sustained
through registers of culture and forms of rhetoric fed on imaginative
reproduction of hierarchical priorities. Yet the process of colonization
relies on the power narrative to arrange the new land into forms that
the imperially conditioned consciousness can respond to and under-
stand. And for this narrative to succeed, the registers of culture that
combine with the acquired vocabulary of the new space function only
to enhance an already assumed worldview for which correspondences
are sought, appropriated and eventually highlighted. This process can
operate through multiple routes and trajectories, and with the nature
of the one in control, the vocabulary and point of view may likewise
see a positional change. Showing how colonial fantasy implants impe-
rial desire onto the occupied land through the agencies of mimicry and
selective mimesis, Carter explains it through the example of Columbus:
Paul Carter: The Road to Botany Bay 119
Columbus’ discoveries, say, were the offspring of a way of seeing.
As far as possible he allowed nothing to come to him: the surface
of the sea, the screen of the sky, were tirelessly scanned for signs
(birds, spars of wood, shoals of fish) which, when spied, were
construed purely in terms of what they might indicate about what
lay ahead. Fluctuating flights, irregular appearances and relative
motion were turned into further rectilinear projections confirm-
ing Columbus’ own way. Ultimately, everything must prove famil-
iar. So, hearing as he saw, Columbus identified among the singing
birds of the Bahamas only the Spanish nightingale.
(130)
Carter sees in this mode apprehension of the new land a design that
comes from the colonizer’s consciousness of his own territory. Colum-
bus’s familiarity with his own space and his experience of the new is
brought to the texture of a narrative format which is already in place.
It is the European mind which unifies the new territorial space through
a formal arrangement of elements, marked for its conformity to a uni-
fied, recognizable pattern. This is a form of reduction that achieves
its effect by flattening the encountered world and its landscape into
a mimetically accessible format. What is interesting here is that the
import of the European mode of seeing the new land, even as mimicry
of the familiar, is not a replica, and it is in the difference of the land
that the sense of power and colonial mastery lies. For ironing out of
the curvilinear space, new yet ready for subjection, the land must be
arrested through the stamp of the discoverer, one whose roles as wit-
ness and spectator enhance his understanding of the place he now
stands upon. In the case of Columbus, it is striking that occupation
only served to revitalize the vision and situation of the world he left,
but longed to go back to, again. The traveller in Columbus and the
Europe that grounded his understanding of what constituted the world
blinded him to the truths of alternative territories. He just could not
see the land for what it was, for he recognized only that narrative
which was embedded in his consciousness, only that which determined
his vision of reality by which he judged everything else. Commenting
on this, Carter writes: ‘Columbus the sign-reader was blind to the
curvature of space about him. He was intent on looking through, as if
whatever came across could only be an inadequate, therefore deceit-
ful, representation of Cathay. It was as if he could only conceive of
journeys in terms of destinations; as if the curvature of the earth were
nothing to him except a hypothesis of coming back, a residual nostal-
gia for staying at home’ (189).
With the land thus marked through the imperial lens, appropriated
and understood, what is projected is that even difference is tempered
through the logic of the same, with Columbus’s example serving as
an indication of how metaphor takes over space to make real that
which no colonial narrative can adequately address: the lie of the land.
Drawing on an array of illustrative specimens across genres from the
aesthetic response to land to the engagement of the topographic scale
in literary discourse, Carter argues that the spatial dimension has
consistently been subjected to a series of textual markings whose pri-
orities lie outside the land it supposedly holds within its frame. This
seemingly comprehensive narrative imperative is often indulgent in the
ways the land is taken for granted and assumed to bear out features
that reflect the observer’s or, in other cases, the historian’s response to
the subject of occupation. Carter’s reading of this tendency to locate
in the land conditions of culture that lend only to the European tra-
jectories of knowledge production opens up the problems associated
with such a process of visualization. What is significant in this reading
goes beyond the politically engaging native/colonizer debate, focussing
instead on a form of inwardness with the land, which Carter calls the
methektic dimension, and it is this methodological departure that so
invigorates his approach to the subject of land under colonial occupa-
tion. This failure, on the part of the European mind, to recognize the
vitality of land and its crucial conditioning of the people who inhabit
that space, is tragic in terms of the loss incurred as no narrative mea-
sure or archive can justify its character. Considering the silences which
replace the voices beyond hearing in the new narrative foregrounding
the imperial logic of occupation, Carter argues that it is in these exer-
cises of the colonizer’s response to newly acquired knowledge that the
unbridgeable space between the narrative and its subject is located.
Commenting on the implications of this process, Carter writes in The
Lie of the Land: ‘It is a pity – and from the point of view of the peoples
they have terrorized, a tragedy no theatre can house – that European
cultures have so consistently suppressed the methektic dimension of
their historical self-constitution, and have in consequence gone on
as if nothing stood in their path’ (202). For Carter, methexis, or the
methektic dimension, was an important mode of access for people
who did not follow the hierarchical formative design whereby strati-
fication was taken for granted. The understanding of the European
traveller and the imposition of a rhetorical overlay over the land that
was seen from the outside ignored this condition of methexis, and in
this ironing out of the connections between the people’s mind and
the space they occupied lay the logic of the imperial narrative. What
actually is methexis? In The Lie of the Land, Paul Carter explores the
different aspects of this term and its implications for a response to the
experience of occupation. What is significant in his elaboration is that
the methektic mode involved a refusal to submit to a singular narra-
tive impulse: ‘A methektic identification began in a recognition of the
duality of being; it assumed that communication began as an oscilla-
tion, a contract across difference’ (84). The Columbus example serves
to show the dangers of appropriation where the European imaginary
looked at land in terms of the inherited memory of the traveller, rather
than attempting to access the world from the situation of the ground.
While ground access was not easy, the colonial exercise was damaging
in the implications it held for the marking of space for history, and the
overemphasis on the power mechanisms that operated to dominate the
reading of peoples and lands saw locations for the potential they had
for the purpose of control. It meant that land was not understood for
what it was for its people, which was, in effect, a disregard for the role
of the methektic dimension in the marking of space: ‘methexis insisted
on an empathy with that which was palpably present, not necessarily
to the sovereign eye but certainly to the eye and ear in their physical
association with the body’s endless plotting of the ground’ (85).
Under what circumstances memory starts to impact the colonizer’s
vision of the new land is difficult to say. In the case of Columbus, the
land he saw was impacted by the land he came from, perhaps a form
of ‘locative ideology’ (288), a term Carter uses in Ground Truthing:
Explorations in a Creative Region, but that the memorialization of
a land left behind was at work is evident. It is a form of dynamic
interweaving that threads the place under view with the imagination
thriving on the presence of difference. In this same book, Carter sug-
gests that memory of land is a much more complex phenomenon than
a block recollection stuck in its history: ‘Memory is not stratified; its
topology is like a marble cake where streaks from the most ancient
deposits swirl up and expose themselves in the pavement of the most
recent thought; its constitution is like the earth’s – internally revolving,
eddying, rising up and falling back’ (153). The functions of memory
in the marking of land in narrative can take different forms. In terms
of the landscape and its appropriated forms in discourse, the tendency
to roll over spaces under the colonial vision and to bring them under
the rubric of familiarity is not confined to the lack of inwardness with
the land. It also involves the silencing of the sounds that make the land
what it is. When the colonizer’s arrival takes place, there is a process
of ground clearing which also means that order is imposed by means
of an act of silencing. This is the point that Carter makes in The Lie
of the Land when he argues that the memory of the existing sounds
must be erased for the new world to assert itself: ‘The lie of the land is
associated with a noise that must be silenced. To inhabit the country is
to lay to rest its echoes’ (8).
The presence of culture: spatiality as a form of history

That the process of linear history writing can involve such serious
implications for a land under occupation, shaping the mind and the
ethos of a people and its numerous referents, is nowhere more tellingly
highlighted in postcolonial discourse than in Paul Carter’s The Road
to Botany Bay. An architect, sound artist and a thinker on the subject
of space, Paul Carter demonstrates with unparalleled critical insight
and painstaking research how the politics of taking over the space
of Australia is embedded in a much more intensely wrought tradi-
tion of imperialist undertaking, one which is only now being gradually
addressed. In the ‘Introduction’ to The Road to Botany Bay Carter lays
the ground for the examination of the historian’s writing of Australia’s
narrative, the dominant method of this involving the reduction of the
land to the stage of performance. In a brilliant passage on the impact
of this practice not just on Australia but also on the historiographic
imperative that has seen the country through the logic of performance,
Carter comes down heavily on the damaging influence of this process:
This kind of history, which reduces space to a stage, that pays

attention to events unfolding in time alone, might be called impe-
rial history. The governor erects a tent here rather than there;
the soldier blazes a trail in that direction rather than this: but,
rather than focus on the intentional world of historical individu-
als, the world of active, spatial choices, empirical history of this
kind has as its focus facts which, in a sense, come after the event.
The primary object is not to understand or to interpret: it is to
legitimate. This is why this history is associated with imperialism –
for who are more liable to charges of unlawful usurpation and
constitutional illegitimacy than the founders of colonies? Hence,
imperial history’s defensive appeal to the logic of cause and effect:
by its nature, such a logic demonstrates the emergence of order
from chaos.
(xvi)
Carter demonstrates how the reading of the land from the colonizer’s
position renders everything into a cause-and-effect narrative, where
the lines of assumption control the process of history by suggesting
that facts are static events, ready for appropriation. He cites the exam-
ple of the Portuguese sailor Mendonça who had mapped the eastern
coastline of Australia in the sixteenth century, and the recent knowl-
edge of his experience is now taken to be a matter of considerable
historical interest. But, as Carter points out, such knowledge actually
does not contribute to the history of Australia: ‘For, treated only as
a question of priority, what does Mendonça’s voyage tell us about
our history? It serves simply to fill in a gap in Australia’s imaginary
chronology. Australia itself, the geographical object he and the Dutch
helped to bring into being, is taken for granted. And so, by a charac-
teristic paradox, Mendonça is relegated to the rank of a hero coasting
a continent which was already there; as if the coast chose him, and
not he the coast’ (xvii). The problem, as Carter points out, lies with
the mode and method of examination. The Road to Botany Bay is
replete with outstanding insights regarding the way the chronological
imperative has taken over the historiographic patterns that are pressed
to address questions of a country’s past. Particularly, in the opening
chapter, where he looks at the subject of naming and the imperialist
underpinning informing this seemingly unimportant exercise, there is
a dense marshalling of archival resource through which he examines
the correspondence between the land and its mapping. The process is
crucial for the questions Carter asks of the historian’s method, and
the conclusions that are derived from a flattening of the land as a pas-
sive, unoperational factor in the theatre of imperialism. Theatre is a
key term in Carter’s reading of the methodological engagement, for
the keys to the critique of this work of culture come from the high-
lighted faultlines that history seeks to pad out through the agency of
narrative. He gives the example of the narrative of G. Blainey, one
of Australia’s popular contemporary historians, whose mythopoetic
description of a situation in what eventually became the state of Vic-
toria showcases the miniaturization of space by an inventive reading
of ‘fact’. In the passage that Carter quotes from Blainey’s Our Side of
the Country, the imposed sublimity and eloquence show how effective
such a reading can be in shaping a nation’s imagination. Carter calls
this a classic instance of ‘diorama history’, that ‘history where the past
has been settled even more effectively than the country’ (xx). What he
is trying to emphasize here relates to a form of selective erasure of the
conditions of land which is approached as the subject of examination.
What such a dioramic focus did was to erase, or render insignificant,
the context of spatial history. In effect, the understanding of the space
is overwhelmed by the practice of repetitive enunciations, and places
acquire cult status, or dissolves into the margins of nationalist dis-
course. Whereas such a mode shifts the focus to the genre of local
history, it is ironic that ‘explorer biography’ comes to determine the
way the land is configured, the way it is seen as history. This is the
problem with the dioramic model, which Carter points out here: ‘The
diorama model shows us the river on the hill’s far side; it shows us
hills. But it was precisely such features which spatial history had to
constitute. At the centre of the colonists’ minds were not picturesque
places, but what preceded them, horizons, possible tracks, bounding
spaces’ (xxi).
The departure that Carter proposes is not merely the accounting of
the geographical vision. It is an exploration, very much in the mode
of a traveller’s tracking, but here the objective is to understand the
way the spatial dimension came to function and influence the colonial
practice of accessing the land. Its subject is to understand how the
cultural processes come to gain from the materiality of the land and
the interaction that takes place when there is an intervention, espe-
cially of the type that claims to present the taken-over space through
a logic which granted legitimacy in the name of history. Clarifying the
framework adopted for The Road to Botany Bay, Carter writes: ‘This
book’s subject is not a physical object, but a cultural one. It is not the
geographer’s space, although that comes into it. What is evoked here
are the spatial forms and fantasies through which culture declares its
presence. Its spatiality as a form of non-linear writing; as a form of
history’ (xxii). A little further ahead, he emphasizes another important
key in the book: ‘The Road to Botany Bay is not about chronological
priority: it is about historical beginnings’ (xxiv). What is significant
here is the way Carter’s recognition of the interface between culture
and space opens up the discourses of postcolonial theory in a way that
has never been done before. In the course of the book he goes on to
explore the possibilities associated with the contexts where codes of
spatial engagement reflect the mind and understanding of those who
have mapped the history of Australia; starting from the act of naming,
it is a transformation of place into symbol imbued with its own history
that he subjects to critical scrutiny.
The designatory impulse: naming and the

colonial imagination
At the centre of the entire enterprise of naming Australia lies one man,
James Cook, and his expedition to that country. Carter examines how
Cook’s status as founder of Australia and the alternative positions
taken by historians with respect to his role in the country’s emergence
from its undefined past have contributed to a model of nationalist
writing which is at cross-purposes with the circumstances in which he
left his imprint. The marks of Cook’s presence in Australia are not
confined to the institutions of narrative agency alone; they have come
to operate through the historiographic exercises that make use of him
as both metaphor and fact. The marginalization of the naming process,
in which Cook took great care, and behind which lay a lot of tact and
reason, is one instance of narrative neglect of sources, for it is his jour-
nals and cartographic initiatives that have caught the interest of
Australia’s historians. Carter brings this point into sharp focus when
he writes: ‘It is fair to say that little attention has been paid to Cook’s
names, the general assumption being that, in contrast with Cook’s
journal itself and his excellent maps, the names have no particular
relevance to the places, at any rate little or no objective relevance. At
best they are anecdotal; at worst, adulatory’ (3). One reason for this
lack of regard for Cook’s names could be, Carter suggests, the diffi-
culty of taxonomic structuring of the subject in question, for these
names do not submit to ready formats that would agree to the cause-
and-effect demands of linear history. Further, the names that Cook
used to designate the places were not organized in terms of an imperial
rule book, but rather they were determined by the implications of the
journey he and his team made; it was an exercise in knowing the world,
one which simultaneously involved the traveller’s understanding and
also served as spatial pointers. This is a point of crucial importance.
That is why the immediate need for the names to mean is what Carter
highlights here: ‘Cook’s names were neither meaningless nor arbitrary:
they did have a genealogy, but it was a genealogy of particulars, a hori-
zontal disposition to mark things where they occurred locally, rather
than to organize them hierarchically or thematically’ (8). Taking issue
with the methods employed by three major Australian historians,
Carter analyses how the subject of naming draws the detective work
regarding Cook’s motives into the centre of investigation, rather than
the focus on the correspondence between the actual space and the
names that designated it. These three historians, James Bonwick, Fred-
erick Watson and J. C. Beaglehole, writing at different times ‘assume
that the explanation for Botany Bay’s involved history lies in either the
psychological or the political spheres’ (10). The emphasis on the sub-
ject of Botany Bay and its naming process ends up being, for these
writers, an exercise in life-writing. In effect, such personality-driven
engagements, however disinterested seemingly, become part of a flat-
tening process that irons out the individual in the context of colonial
discourse. Examining Beaglehole’s sophisticated and long-drawn
account of Cook’s life, Carter argues that the method underlines the
pressures of imperialism that the subject is under: ‘Beaglehole’s project
also represents a form of historical imperialism. In treating Cook’s
biography as a network of dates, places and facts, Beaglehole assumes
a natural consonance between the man and his age: he effaces the
man’s individuality at the very moment that he asserts it. In this way,
Cook becomes but another heroic variation on history’s universal
theme’ (13). The problem of approaching the name ‘Botany Bay’ is not
confined to the subject of its etymology; it is related to the interpreter’s
assumption that the name itself is neutral and that the most relevant
route to its presence is through some kind of historical or biographical
empiricism. As Carter points out, such assumptions dilute the contexts
of both place and name, so that the importance of the moment of
experience is glossed over for a more politically informed perspective.
This is a crucial diversion that shifts the focus onto the historiographic
model, rather than examining the context as such: ‘The effect is to sup-
press the occasion of discovery, to treat the act of naming as if it
represented nothing more than a postcard home, a personal memento
of a journey completed’ (14). The situation, however, was not a mere
glossing of the space, as Carter argues in the opening chapter of The
Road to Botany Bay, ‘An Outline of Names’. He suggests that the
process of naming involved a much more critical and historically
engaging process, exhibiting not just the experience of travel but more
significantly an inwardness with the place. Yet such an undertaking
was, quite interestingly, connected to Cook’s sense of tradition, and his
choice of name showed his response to an experience that was unique
for him as an explorer. Challenging the notion that Cook’s name was
an arbitrary choice, Carter draws out the connections between those
traces that Cook responded to and how it imbibed his sense of both
place and history. It is in this context that he drives home the thesis that
Cook’s choice was a conscious act and it accommodated the condi-
tions of local space and history in a way which only travellers could
critically evaluate. Botany Bay was not Cook’s first choice. But as he
settled on it to designate the place, he had had the experience of going
through other places that bore signs of human contact, each figured in
such a way that it reflected the particularities of the place all too insis-
tently. What Carter is trying to emphasize here is that the status of
Cook the explorer and his involvement with the place-names are inter-
connected. It was a reflection of the ‘deep rooted empathy between
language and land’ (17), and an examination of this process leads
Carter to believe that without altering our methodological tools it
would not be enough to engage with the relevance of naming in the
context of Australian history. The major difference between Cook and
the others is that he was always interested in specificity, and that ‘was
the difference between botany and geography as they were practiced
in the eighteenth century’ (18). A critical commentator on the subject
cannot ignore this condition that so crucially informs Cook’s mode of
classification and naming. As Carter traces the lines of codification, it
becomes apparent that Cook was not working like a botanist; rather,
there is, in his practice, a design that bespeaks of his insistence on par-
ticularities. This is a point of seminal importance. For, in binding the
location with the experience of it, and then subjecting it to scrutiny in
such a way that addressed its peculiar character, Cook was offering a
model through which the land could be marked. This is the issue that
Carter draws our attention to, when he writes: ‘Cook’s geo-graphy, his
writing of lands, was inseparable from the conditions of the inquiry
itself. The same calculations that enabled him to steer a course also
enabled him to leave the coastlines he sighted where they were. This
was the essence of the maps he made, that they did not mirror the
appearance of natural objects, but preserved the trace of encountering
them’ (23). In Ground Truthing, Carter offers another perspective on
the conversational character of place-names, names behind which lay
both space and history as significant registers and it was through them
that the experience of contact found its narrative: ‘Place names corre-
spond to the terseness of the conversation. Compressing allusions to
places come from or destinations imagined, they knot the passages of
a life into a metaphor, a figure for bridging the distance between men-
tal places. They say that places are made after their stories but the
stories are broken or incomplete’ (134).
In other words, this was a dialogue with a land, a conversation. For
imperial historians, Cook’s refusal to take over land, occupy it and
submit it to political control in the classic colonial sense has remained
a cause of bafflement. Carter looks at the whole issue from another
perspective: that the place-names with which we associate Cook do
not obey the logic of imperial register. The name, Botany Bay, carries
its own sense of irony, and this was something that Cook deliberately
did so that his investment in a name served to present his sense of scep-
ticism about the potential of the place. By connecting the particular to
the exploratory nature of his encounter with the land, Cook was, in
effect, denying knowledge of the place in the absolute sense. Unlike
the classic imperial taxonomist, he did not see everything as part of a
pattern already fixed: ‘Cook’s names obey a different, more oblique
logic, the logic of metaphor. His names do not intend to preserve the
delusion of objectivity, for his standpoint is neither neutral nor static.
Instead, they draw geographical objects into the space of his pas-
sage’ (29). This was a move that worked to demystify the place of its
cultural baggage, which could, and in many cases did, overwhelm the
land by its designation. Emphasizing this point, Carter points out that
‘Cook’s aim was not to fill the world up with objects but, rather, to
erase its surface as far as possible of mythic excrescences’ (28). Cook’s
response to the land must be taken as whimsical or casual imposition,
cautions Carter; rather, the process shows the explorer’s critical aware-
ness of the distinction between nature and culture. It is important to
recognize the value of Cook’s undertaking without being prejudiced
or presumptuous, for it is in the nature of the texts he produced to
leave the ‘trace of passage’ (32) and not a paraphrase of the journey
that he made. How is, then, Cook’s journey and his mode of writing
so relevant to the imagination informing the colonial vision of the
world? People who followed Cook into Australia saw in his open-
ended visualization of this space an effective strategy to engage their
own experiences. He became the man whose style and approach came
to be imitated and followed, and without being imposing, without
quite laying down the principles of colonial occupation, Cook’s was
the attitude that came to be identified with the control of Australia. It
was this imaginative response to the spaces of Australia that came to
be emulated eventually: ‘Cook was a foundational figure: although he
found a country, Cook did not aim to found a colony. Among contem-
porary historians he may not have the central place he once occupied.
But what is needed is replacement, not displacement, a recognition
that, by establishing a tradition of travelling, Cook inaugurated Aus-
tralia’s spatial history’ (33).
The land out there: states and sites of writing

The writing through which land emerged in narratives was, in the case
of these early responses to the Australian experience, primarily perme-
ated through the agency of the journal. The way the journals activated
the worldviews of the travellers followed a pattern that attempted
to establish a connection between the imagined space and the place
encountered, yet, many a time, the gaps in narrative and peculiarities
in topography were glossed over to draw pictures that entrenched the
stories of the recordists within recognizable formats. Commenting on
the significance of the journal as the site and agency in the recording
of the Australian landscape, Carter writes:
The fact that journals described the places of the journey, rather
than any external ‘natural’ place, explains why they flourished on
board ship – and why perhaps the greatest bulk of primary mate-
rial relating to Australia’s spatial history is probably contained
in relatively obscure and unpretentious journals kept during the
‘voyage out’. Ships were houses on the move. They had something
of the convenience of home with the advantage of enforced leisure.
They enabled one to write the letters one would have never writ-
ten otherwise. Despite the salt spray, the heaving deck, the stench
and the poor rations, they offered marginally superior conditions
in which to record one’s experience than a campsite in the bush. It
was not that life on board ship was more ‘interesting’, that there
was more incident to record: quite the contrary, it was the very
monotony of sea travel that made it a pre-eminent site of journal
writing. For what the emigrants wrote about was the experience
of travelling and nowhere was that experience brought home to
them more clearly than in an environment devoid of external dis-
tractions.
(141)
How far were these exercises effective in mapping the world it sought
to transfer to another world? The problem with such a mode of writ-
ing and the method of elaboration adopted for the purpose is that
the word is so crucially informed by the perspective of the recordist
that disentanglement of subject from situation of writing is not fea-
sible. The matter, however, does not end there. It is never a single,
unidirectional act. The chronicler responds to the world through dif-
ferent modes, one of the most important of these being the other that
he retrieves from memory: the place where he is in and the way he
imagines his subject are deeply implicated in this process. Emphasiz-
ing this very point in Ground Truthing, Carter writes: ‘I am saying, it
is the imagination of other places that needs to be acknowledged. To
imagine other places that are sustainable, we need to know what our
imagination is like, how it thinks, in what scales and according to what
associative logics. Otherwise we cannot see through its blindspots
and we remain televisually hypnotised by images of the remote over
which we can take no control’ (290). It is also relevant to consider
geography’s myth, something which Carter discusses in Dark Writing:
Geography, Performance, Design, a perception that allowed for the
‘putting together’ (33) of elements into the narratives whereby ‘every
rhetorical and picturesque device [was] employed to persuade readers
that the passage had indeed fulfilled expectations and reached a deci-
sive destination was intended to show that they had advanced step by
step’ (33). The influence of such a process of linearization in presenting
Australia to the world and to history was far reaching. It was train of
images and narratives that made the sites of Australia into the imagi-
nation of both travellers and visitors who either sought to depart from
the text that was being made or enhanced it by locating themselves
within its structure. This was a structure continuously in the making,
and irrespective of the nature of the journal and what was pencilled
in, the consolidation of the image was such that it accommodated
departures and contestations with the same emphasis. If the myths
associated with this form of writing and the sites that they sought
to hold within their texts are probed further, one which deconstructs
itself is that of continuity of the narratives. In his discussion on the
way journals impacted the understanding of Australia as a place in The
Road to Botany Bay, Carter draws our attention to this perception
when he points out that no writing in this context could get away from
its constructed character: ‘The seamlessness of the journals is a liter-
ary illusion. Unfortunately, though, it has too often been taken at face
value, with the result that the reflective attitude the explorer and settler
literature embodies has been overlooked’ (173). There is no denying
the linearization of order which made space subject to an already-read
text, the narrative which hovers over the explorer as he charts the road
traversed by his predecessors. The journey is an act of differentiation.
It enabled the travellers to make the history they wanted to be asso-
ciated with, and it is this awareness of difference that helped frame
experience they recorded. In other words, the journal was a mode of
enunciation through which the writer situated himself and re-imagined
himself and the land he now was having a dialogue with. Never was
such an exercise, such an experience, a neutral act. The identity of the
traveller is ‘consciously constructed through travelling’ (100). Carter’s
argument is that the dissociation between the explorer and the spatial
experience cannot be done. It was so deeply drawn together that the
journals where the narratives sought to bring the space to life were
actually sites that also functioned as platforms for the writing of life.
It was not merely a question of locating the self within the matrix of
the immediate experience, for the line of thought where the explorer
placed himself also demanded that it be figured as a response to the
future. The writing of the journal or the other forms as well, where the
land and the individual were entwined in a distinctive bind, was thus
an anticipatory exercise that projected the imagined future onto the
narrative scheme.
The nature of the picturesque: travelling and the
imagining of Australia
People who came to Australia post-1788 were actually responding to
what Cook had achieved as an explorer. And it is this point that Cook’s
exercises present so well, which Carter analyses thus: ‘Space itself was
a text that had to be written before it could be interpreted. This was
the significance of Cook – that he provided such a text, something that
could be interpreted, something with which a dialogue could be car-
ried on, something against which places could come into being’ (41).
Why is 1788 such an important figure in Australian history? The year
1788 saw the arrival of the First Fleet into Australia, which by itself
was a moment of historical significance, but more so in the context of
the way Botany Bay came to be seen and understood by this new group
of visitors, and because of the way this event stamped the condition
of ‘beginning’ onto the land. Carter cites passages from First Fleet
officer and chronicler Watkin Tench to argue that Cook’s presence as
the foundational figure becomes, from this event onwards, invisible.
As Carter puts it, ‘Botany Bay is the cause that surfaces only as the
effect’ (35). This transformation of Botany Bay into a place completely
removed from the ‘reality’ of Cook’s narrative consolidates the new
historical imperative with which Australia is subsequently imagined
and seen. Watkin Tench’s rhetorical thrust against Cook’s engagement
with the land thus represented two extremes: ‘Tench’s aim is clear: it is
to dethrone Cook and substitute his own experience as authoritative.
Yet he does not achieve this aim empirically, but rhetorically. Thus,
he quotes Cook only to mock him; thus, too he quotes himself’ (38).
This shift in the visualization of the land and its appropriation in nar-
rative, however, does not minimize or erase Cook’s significance; rather,
Cook becomes the frame of reference, even for the sake of opposi-
tion. Carter’s analysis opens up an important, but hitherto neglected,
dimension of colonial experience: that it was Cook who served to pres-
ent the space of Botany Bay, and Australia, for understanding and
critical response. What such a distinction brings into focus is the fact
that we cannot draw conclusions by clubbing travellers or explorers
within the same paradigm even though externals may offer the scope
for it. With a dense marshalling of the critical resources reflecting both
vision of the explorer and the archive that accompanied it, Carter
draws out the subtle distinctions that operated in the early decades
of Australia’s emergence as a land with a character of its own, for, as
he demonstrates so well, class names and associational properties that
the designatory terms carried with it cannot address the imagining of
the country adequately. Unlike names serving as mere signposts in the
chain of time, Carter argues that ‘it was the names themselves that
brought history into being, that invented the spatial and conceptual
co-ordinates within which history could occur’ (46).
It is interesting to see how terms of distinction were ‘invented’ so
as to enable the early traveller to narrativize land in such a way that
showed both – their ingenuity and the uniqueness of the experience.
In effect, the land named, designated or described during the initial
expeditions served to textualize what the travellers encountered, but it
was not necessary that the name or the term stood for the exact space
it apparently described. Many of the names, not following the logic
of association, do not offer much in terms of correspondence: ‘Mount
Introspection’, ‘Mount Misery’, ‘The King’s Tableland’ and ‘River
Lett’ are just a few examples. Carter further goes on to analyse the
way rivers, hills, mountains and specific locational situations came to
be imbued with characteristics that suggest the travellers’ response to
space. Rivers, for instance, were signifiers of mobility and afforded the
traveller the scope to follow the route, functioning in more ways than
one, as anticipatory lines guiding their movements. Yet, behind the
exploration, there lay the objective of mastery. And this is the point
that Carter emphasizes when he comments on the way the actual
journeys were rendered invisible by the narratives that the travellers’
designed and presented:
Explorers were not despatched to traverse deserts, but to locate

objects of cultural significance: rivers, mountains, meadows,
plains of promise. They had a social responsibility to make the
most of what they saw, to dignify even hints of the habitable with
significant class names. They were expected to arrest the country,
to concentrate it into reversible roads which would summarize its
content; they were expected to translate its extension into objects
of commerce. They were, by a curious irony, meant to inaugurate
a form of possession that would render the dynamic of their own
journeys invisible.
(56)
There were problems, however, with the way the land was approached
for narrative appropriation. Unlike the river in Europe, the Australian
river, for instance, did not submit to a sense of order that the traveller
had come to expect. There is an interesting connection between the
rhetorical dimension of language and the experience of the traveller so
that language become both tool and agency through which the land
came to be understood. At the same time, it was also evident that
when the writing of the space took place, there was a cultural and
linguistic takeover of the land, and even when the Aboriginal terms
were appropriated and re-packaged to address the imperial need, pos-
session was understood to be read as a civilizational act. In a sense,
then, Carter argues, the colonization of Australia took place through
rhetorical means, ‘with figures of speech rather than facts’ (65). And
it is the complicitous relation of language to the act of possession that
is so significant here. The Aborigine’s initiation into the English lan-
guage brought him into contact with a discourse that did not suffice
to accommodate his response to the land he inhabited; that is why to
make the Aborigine conversant with the English tongue divested him
of his own cultural roots. Emphasizing the impact of such an exer-
cise, Carter observes that the white man ‘possessed a country of which
the Aborigine was unaware’ (64). Whether such an overwhelming of
Aboriginal culture through a linguistic design was a ploy or an instru-
ment that served the white man well or not, it is clear that unwittingly
the Aborigine colluded with this process of designating the space for
which he had his own terms.
At the centre of the narrative of Australia in this early period lay
the traveller’s vision, for it was he who constructed the world anew,
appropriated it for those who followed him and provided his experi-
ence and the land he came to, a sense of history. And in this process
of articulation and engagement with the land, it was language that
determined the way the text was made. Carter does not lose the travel-
ler and his gaze as he charts the complex patterns of the imperialist
motifs in The Road to Botany Bay; and this constant point of reference
to the traveller’s imperative is what enables us to attend to the ways
language, experience and intent combined to bring to life the world
of the Australian land. Carter drives home this point when he writes:
‘The historical space of the white settlers emerged through the medium
of language. But the language that brought it into cultural circulation
was not the language of the dictionary: on the contrary it was the
language of naming, the language of travelling. What was named was
not something out there; rather it represented a mental occupation, an
intention to travel’ (67). When the travellers arrived in Australia, and
even afterwards, the vision that unfolded was articulated and recorded
differently, but the common pattern across these various exercises was
that the operator’s mode of seeing determined what eventually came to
be consolidated into narrative. And it is the narratives that have held
sway over the imagination. Yet, either through penetration into the
state of things or by means of a deliberate eschewal of context, there
was an imposition that gave the space its character. Home remained
a constant metaphor, a point of reference, one that Carter draws our
attention to in the Columbus example, and it is this prospect of the
familiar that became the measure through which the space to which
the traveller came to be examined. The description of Australian spaces
also suggests how the condition of mobility was embedded in the
modes of knowing, so that something so central to the spatial state of
the country, the picturesque, was seen to be transformed, one the spec-
tatorial vision shifted its gaze. The way the land, and its picturesque,
came to reflect the traveller’s motion through the country was also part
of the same imaginative re-reading process that gave him the senses
of both home and adventure. Commenting on the significance of this
feature of travel writing in Australia, Carter observes:
The picturesque in Australia made the space of travelling visible

to the traveller. It realised for him his own historical destination –
to travel or to settle down. And, just as travelling and settling
were dialectically related, so, also, the two kinds of picturesque,
like landscape gardening and painting, were related to each other,
revealing spatiality in its double aspect of motion and rest, journey
and journal-writing. Implicit in both spatial modalities was always
the sense of symbolic boundaries defined and rendered eloquent.
The screen of vegetation, the trees one would not wish to see cut
down, might, in other contexts, be a bar to physical and imagina-
tive progress. To call them picturesque was to attribute to them
the observer’s own heightened sense of possession, his sensation of
suddenly being at home in the world.
(242)
The function of the picturesque was more than the traveller’s sense
of the world, however. As the world came to be configured through
the visitor’s increasing knowledge of the environment around him, he
responded to it by trying to see the implications beyond his imme-
diate experience. It demanded of him a social awareness, by means
of which he looked at the land, and it is this cultural formatting of
space that is so significant here. The traveller’s vision articulated a
socially informed order, the process of representation thus being both
an agency and a mode of validation of the perspective with which the
subject is seen. Such visions were, at one level, responses that provided
clues about the gaze through which the land came to be recorded, and
at another, these were appropriations that served to give the traveller
the sense that his viewpoint was logical. The world as such came under
his narrative control. This also implied that the mode of apprehension,
the running account of things seen and experienced, was dynamic in
nature, and the spectatorial gaze was of a roving kind. Differences in
the subject – the land, the rivers and the hills, for instance – were thus
subjected to the same process of mobility, the viewer’s understanding
of situations controlled and determined by his status as a traveller. As
such, the imagination brought forth worlds into the narrative scheme
that adhered to his journey, and irrespective of the routes taken and
the haltings where he paused, both the processes of knowing and the
conditions of travel came to be engaged in a dialogue with each other.
Commenting on the interconnection between the traveller’s impera-
tive and the land that emerged through his recording of experiences,
Carter writes: ‘The picturesque was a traveller’s viewpoint, a possible
stopping place, a punctuation mark, an opportunity to reflect on the
future’ (254). It is also necessary to recognize that what Carter is argu-
ing here does not amount to the imposition of the traveller’s fantasy
upon an already existing world. He is, in fact, suggesting that the reali-
ties of land that surface through the representation are the product of
a dialogue where both the individual and the space interact to draw
out a cultural logistics of the future. There is a train of movement
across the temporal and spatial scales which, through the agency of
personal experience and by means of a familiar frame, surfaces to pres-
ent worlds that show the consistent dialogue between the individual
and his environment. This interface, however, is not confined to an
individual’s choice or understanding alone, it is much more than that.
It is the coming together of resources whose roots lie in the histories
from which the individual comes, and in the space that he occupies
or traverses through. This is what can be called spatial history. In a
remarkably insightful passage, Carter draws in the many-sided cir-
cumstances in which the interaction between the individual, the space
he comes to and the tracks of history takes place:
For all this, though, spatial history does not simply restore men
and women to themselves; it does not merely haul them from the
stream of time and ask them to reflect on their own destinies, as
if they were something apart from history. It suggests even our
inviolable ‘personal space’ expresses a community of historical
interests. The viewpoints we take for granted as factual began in
someone else’s fantasy: it is not so much that the travellers and the
settlers belong to our past, but that we belong to their future. But
their fantasies, too, were historical. Just as the travelling writers
did not invent the language they used, so they did not make the
world in their own image. They entered historical space as they
entered life, finding a use for themselves where they lived. It was
their intention to make a place for themselves which links us to
them as much as any marks they succeed in making. And it is by
reflecting on their intentions, by understanding what lies behind
the finished map, the elegant journal, the picturesque view, that we
recover the possibility of another history, our future.
(294–295)
This process that combines the personal with the historical and the
spatial has another important dimension. Places function as the other
in visions that move beyond the immediate contexts in which they are
configured and imagined. In the final chapter of the book, the one from
which it gets its title, Paul Carter examines the way in which Botany
Bay operated at different levels to accommodate the idea of otherness
with the image of something that functioned as both space and event.
When he writes that ‘the road to Botany Bay was a fantasy about the
other place’ (310), Carter is making a case for the place not merely as
place, which is very much there, but he is also drawing attention to
the ways in which Botany Bay circulated as a metaphor, imagined for
it could hold for those who wanted to be there or responded to it as
a realizable space. The road to Botany Bay goes ‘against the imperial
tide of events, towards another beginning, but also by its definition of
historical space as intentional space, it articulates the historical experi-
ence which the Enlightenment apologists of settlement left out’ (310).
It is an event and an experience of momentous importance because
of what it holds in both senses: as a place and in terms of how it has
been imagined, or situated in history. That it has remained fixed in
importance, and shifted in time to accommodate fantasies and imagin-
ings for travellers, imperialists and convicts, that its spatial character
has been approached and accessed variously, all of this show how the
road has functioned as the site showing the ‘spatial revision of his-
tory’ (311). Botany Bay, in the book, is both metaphor and space; it
is event and history; it is that figuration through which Paul Carter
draws out the fascinating dimensions of spatial history and its role in
the conditioning of the imperialist outlook in the contexts of the mak-
ing and imagining of Australia.
Works cited
Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and His-
tory, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
_______. The Lie of the Land, London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1996.
_______. Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design, Honolulu, HI: Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press, 2009.
_______. Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region, Crawley, WA:
UWA Publishing, 2010.
7 Ashis Nandy: The Intimate
Enemy
Ashis Nandy and contemporary
cultural discourse
The placement of Ashis Nandy as a public intellectual in contem-

porary imagination bespeaks a tendency in cultural theory to build
upon a scholar’s body of work to project new and interesting pos-
sibilities in criticism. Whether as an explorer of the possibilities of
hitherto marginalized paradigms of knowledge or as a champion
showcasing the uniqueness of the Indian mind, Nandy’s reading of
the past has often teased out aspects of culture that have otherwise
been under-read. There is thus a fascinating corollary to the image
(of the public intellectual) through which Nandy is best known in
academic circles, which is that critical theory today is accommoda-
tive enough to locate in alternative modernity models (something he
is perceived to have espoused) the feasibility of counter-discourses.
Yet this very accommodation is what Nandy has so vehemently been
arguing against. Spread across his immensely influential and path-
breaking body of work is the thread that aims to reorient thinking
itself, especially that line of thought which relies so heavily on the
Enlightenment, progressive model, for in the space granted to the
dissident, resistant voice lies a strategic design of the Western intel-
lectual apparatus; Nandy’s writings on politics and culture have
represented a critical mode which steers clear of this original/alterna-
tive bind. The challenge before him, the surmounting of the pressures
of a critical vocabulary derived from the West notwithstanding, has
been to establish the objective that his is not a form of revenge his-
toriography. As the various formulations evident in his texts show, it
is easier said than done. Whom, for instance, is Nandy addressing?
While such a question would embed the nativist per se and place
him in competition with the modern European, Nandy’s priority has
been to expose the limitations of such a structure in determining
knowledge-production systems. In works such as The Savage Freud
Ashis Nandy: The Intimate Enemy 139
and The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, to take two representative
examples, he has demonstrated how seemingly competing strands
are bound by cultural pressures that cannot be explained away by
set, already-configured notions. If his readings of figures, institutions
and practices appear either dramatic or unconventional, such impres-
sions have something to do with the way Western modernity has
impacted our thought. That forms of thinking can run counter to
narratives of modernity (Freud is a consistently played-out figure) is
not where Nandy’s priority ends. If the Freudian engagement with
the psyche has found in Indian circumstances situations conducive
to its perpetuation, the effect of such an encounter must be felt both
ways. What clouds the underpinnings of these influences has more to
do with the effectiveness of the dominant narratives in a given situa-
tion than any identifiable difference between set structures. The key
words, then, in Nandy’s writings are history, culture, India, stories,
politics and psychology. Such a drawing of aspects in itemized fash-
ion does not cancel out themes that have occupied him in various
writings, but they do articulate the direction his intellectual interest
is invested in. We may also refer to the recurrence of figures such
as Gandhi and Tagore in his work, but their appearances do not
submit to known patterns of life-writing where a subject’s situation
is isolated for evaluation. Gandhi and Tagore bear traces of India’s
resilience and cultural longevity. Yet their validity as exemplars stems
from the challenge they pose to European modes of knowing, mys-
tifying neat cultural givens and rendering them inadequate. Nandy’s
imperative as a commentator on culture and politics thus has been to
bring rather under-read facets of life and its histories into the critical
mainstream. Commenting on the consistent argumentative thread in
his writings, Nandy encapsulated his situation in Time Warps by sug-
gesting that all his books are ‘a series of explorations in the politics of
awareness. The subjects and contexts have shifted, so have the time
frames. But the main concern has remained the same: the rediscovery
of everyday life and ordinariness as sources of and clues to human
potentialities’ (5).
It is tempting to situate Ashis Nandy as an advocate of alternative
reading practices, and whether a book like The Intimate Enemy is seen
as a political or a postcolonial text, I do not think such a label is accom-
modative enough to account for the critical engagement he brings to
bear upon the subjects he takes up for analysis. Take, for instance, the
following commentary on his contribution to cultural theory, where
his status as a critic is swept with two overarching frames: Nandy
140 Ashis Nandy: The Intimate Enemy
‘dilute’s opposites and bedevils established categories’ and his objec-
tive is to ‘rewrite’ India’s past through an emphasis on an ‘alternative’
paradigm. Farhad Idris (2011), in an entry on Nandy, writes:
The Intimate Enemy (1983), Nandy’s third book on politics

and culture in India, continues to be his most enduring work. It
attempts to rewrite India’s colonial history and reconstruct the
nation’s political consciousness. While the book dilutes opposites
and bedevils established categories – the sahib and the native, the
West and the East, history and myth – Nandy’s purpose is not
deconstructionist. His purpose is to write an alternative account
of colonial and of modern times.
(1186)
Even as an overview, such an approach to his writing can iron out his
engagement with processes of knowing which expose the limitations
of duality-based rhetoric. His attempts to make visible conditions that
have prevailed in societies such as India are only one of his objectives
as a critic; he has constantly argued for such reading procedures that
do not crystallize into set formats, and the enduring relevance of a text
like The Intimate Enemy owes to his pointed analysis of a situation
that has long suffered from it being subjected to critical play.
Nandy’s search for new historiographies

Taking on the influence of modern Western thought on contempo-
rary critical thinking, Ashis Nandy has consistently sought to situate
frames of argument that expose the inadequacies of such a mode in
reading the various dimensions of history, society and culture. It is not
surprising, therefore, to find in many of his essays a concern for those
knowledge-production processes that have failed to gain visibility in
contemporary critical discourses. Such a concern is often manifested in
the way he has taken up the past as a subject for appraisal. Elaborating
upon one of the most common strategies evident in Western histori-
ography, Nandy (2001), in the following passage from An Ambiguous
Journey, shows how the pressures of the European mind have been
regularly imposed on the analytical act itself:
History, as a discipline and form of consciousness, came handy

in this exercise. It flattened the pasts of all societies, so that they
began to look like so many edited versions of European pagan-
ism and/or feudalism. The triumph of the idea of history in the
southern world – over other forms of construction or invocation
of the past – was ultimately a European triumph. This conquest
was not merely over the selves of other societies, but often over
Europe’s own earlier selves that had stealthily survived into the
present, either in Europe or in analogous or parallel forms within
other cultures. Europe truly became Europe as we know it today
only after it foregrounded the experiences of colonialism and a
crypto-Hegelian idea of history within its self-definition. It also
then ensured that these became parts of the self-definitions of all
defeated civilizations.
(2)
The exposure of a cultural dynamics that has fostered and nourished

resistant narratives within its fold is a consistent Nandy theme. At the
same time, however, unlike commentators who rely on the critiques of
Western historiography to propose a completely indigenous model, he
does not posit the experience of non-European cultures in such neat
oppositional terms. Constantly alert to the traffic that cuts across the
givens in a culture’s past, Nandy’s attempt has been to prise open the
underlying yet marginalized trappings of the subject. This has also to
do with how the past is envisioned in the first place. In the Foucauld-
ian scheme of things, for instance, there is constant pressure on the
overarching narrative engagement through which the traces of culture
are taken for analysis. The challenge of postmodern historiography,
led by Hayden White, has been mounted through an insistent focus
on the textualities of the subject and its impact on representation.
Nandy’s approach, however, has moved in another direction. He has
regularly sought to clarify the contradictions of that historiographic
model which aspires to read cultures and locations with a set of hier-
archical assumptions in place. Analysing the structures through which
opposing analogies are pressed into play, he suggests that a critical
mind attuned to the nuances of the subject would require something
different. The running thread of India and its presence in the histori-
cal imagination of the West becomes, for Nandy, a register through
which the inadequacies of the Enlightenment model can be opened up
for critique.
At one level, the propensity of the Western mind to privilege that
material which is more open to textualized formats blinds it to the value
of such cultural paradigms where narrative access is not available in the
same fashion. Nandy looks at the realities of Indian culture where myth-
making is as much of significance as the experience of everyday life.
Along with the mythic dimensions of the Indian consciousness, there is
a cultural heritage that puts a premium on storytelling. Such an expe-
rience, so common to the peoples of locations like India and Africa,
does not necessarily tally with the themes of progress and civilization,
which Western thought insists upon as inevitable. Modes of knowing
and acknowledging reality, thus, in many non-Western situations have
been operative without quite following the development line; viewed
from the perspective of Enlightenment reason, such formats can only be
understood as departures from the norm, for the structures of human
understanding are already in place. It is fascinating to see how Nandy’s
reading of different issues from history and contemporary politics to those
of development and parochialism has focussed on the hegemonic char-
acter of the Western idea of knowledge. In an interview where the theme
of discussion is ‘development’, Nandy locates in the dominant Western
narrative of progress a determination that controls our approach to the
very subject (Kothari 2004). Even the supposedly benevolent nature of
this reason is fraught with the politics of accommodation, and still the
frame remains prescriptive. Arguing against the rhetoric of progress in
the interview, Nandy observes: ‘Even the benevolent element did us little
good in the long run, because it only consolidated the rhetoric of social
evolutionism – that societies were moving through historical stages, that
this kind of urban-industrial vision and its newer edition, development,
were the destiny of all societies’ (9). Whether evident in the resistance
to the mythic structure as a valid way of knowing, or seen in the prop-
osition that development can only be sensible through a materialist,
progressive take on social realities, the Western historiographic model,
for Nandy, is just inadequate as a methodological tool. As he observes
in another context, the processes that function in the Indian worldview
and make real conditions of life do not submit to the neat formulations
that characterize reason in the West. In the absence of an inwardness,
‘listening to Indian stories can be trying, even in these post-modern days.
Most of them lack a proper ending – this is no longer a crime. I am
told – but they are also often not new, which is still an unforgivable sin
in the global culture of knowledge’ (13). Consistently, Nandy has fore-
grounded the pitfalls of adherence to the Western model, arguing for the
cultivation of a critical apparatus that is alert to the hegemonic pressures
of such knowledge-production systems.
Mapping the argument: the ‘preface’ and

the ‘postscript’
The two narratives circumscribing the argumentative chapters of The
Intimate Enemy – the preface and the postscript, each attended by its
own marks of history – serve as fascinating pointers in a reading pro-
cess that takes colonial engagement as its subject. Nandy’s proposal
and a call for a reading apparatus that steers clear of the stereotypical
confines of the oppressor/oppressed binarism realigns the parameters
of discussion. The preface opens with a term-setting emphasis on
the complex character of hierarchies that have long determined the
course of colonial experience. The focus, at this point, is on the ques-
tion of method. Reading patterns, organized to articulate the name
and nature of colonial encounters across the world, have, more often
than not, sought to define these engagements through subject-centric
placements of people and institutions in terms of oppositional giv-
ens such as the colonizer and the colonized. Nandy aims to arrest
the attention of what he calls ‘psychopathic technologies wedded to
new secular hierarchies’ (x) and expose the reductive apparatus that
has transformed the idea of ‘civilization’ into ‘empty rituals’ (x). In
other words, his logic here is designed to unmask the dominant rhe-
torical strategies – political, sociological and ideological – so that the
enmeshing of the concepts of modernity and civilization is opened
up for scrutiny. The combination of modernity and civilization is
often organized to define experiences that take for its centre the para-
digm of the West. How is such a paradigm formed? In the first place,
Nandy suggests, the bracketing of ‘universalism’ with ‘colonialism’
constituted the thrust of the critical method which determined the
nature of the ‘West’. Such an arrangement, while accommodating the
knowledge-production frames within the West’s dominant (as well as
marginalized) narratives, has been limited in the way institutions and
experiences within the colonial realm are marked out for examina-
tion. The awareness of such limiting parameters and its impact on
analytical models is thus played out in the preface: ‘It is now pos-
sible for some to combine fundamental social criticism with a defence
of non-modern cultures and traditions. It is possible to speak of the
plurality of critical traditions and of human rationality. At long last
we seem to have recognised that neither is Descartes the last word on
reason nor is Marx that of the critical spirit’ (x).
At the same time, his examination of nineteenth-century imperialist
historiography and the modernizing mission is contextualized within
the bracket of psychology in the preface. Marking the two trajectories
of the colonial exercise, Nandy pits the first-generation colonial agents
(dismissed as ‘rapacious’) against the groups that amply forwarded
the imperatives of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ (xi). While this strand of
colonial experience has been abundantly commented upon and anal-
ysed, the second trajectory – the colonization of the mind – is placed, in
Nandy’s thesis, at the centre of the argument. The point is made clear
in the following passage in the preface:
This colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it

releases forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural
practices once for all. In the process, it helps generalize the concept
of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a
psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the
West and outside; in structures and in minds.
This is primarily the story of the second colonization and the
resistances to it. That is why these essays are also forays into con-
temporary politics; after all, we are concerned with a colonialism
which survives the demise of empires.
(xi)
In organizing the thesis around the ideas of psychological domina-

tion and resistance to colonialism, Nandy has, however, eschewed the
conventions of the nativist argument, seeking, on the other hand, to
highlight the complicated processes through which the collaborative
registers in both the situations of the colonizer and the colonized wrap
in the intimate enemy. The task is imperilled by the layers of encrusted
imputations which have been regularly passed off as ‘interpretations
of colonialism’ by the West (xii). The problem, in Nandy’s view, relates
to the concepts and categories that have held sway thus far, operating
within the discursive apparatuses in the analyses of colonial expe-
rience. The West, for instance, he argues, has engendered versions,
variations and alternatives in socio-cultural discourses, each carrying
specific markers defining its contours. For the consistency of argument,
however, he states that the logic followed in matters of concepts and
categories is informed by a sense of fidelity. What such an admission
does, in effect, is to clearly indicate the span of the argumentative
frame adopted in the book. ‘Fidelity to one’s inner self, as one trans-
lates, and to one’s inner voice, when one comments, may not mean
adherence to reality in some cultures but in others they do. At least
that is the sole defence I have for my tendency to speak of the West
as a single political entity, of Hinduism as Indianness, or of history
and Christianity as Western. None of them is true but all of them are
realities’ (xiv).
By reflecting on the relevance of the ‘non-players’ and the counter-
players’ role in addressing agencies of dissent, Nandy, in fact, goes on
to ‘declare’ that the book emerges as ‘an alternative mythography of
history’ (xv). But, extending beyond the paradigm of a historian’s take
on colonial experience, the book’s rubric draws in, what he calls, the
‘post-colonial consciousness’ (xvi). The rigours of analysis to which
his thesis is subjected, of course, demand reasons for the reading of
colonial cultures. In his argument, the reasons are framed by struc-
tural devices that one owes much to, and those that he designates
‘the living traditions’ (xviii). Rather than submit to the fixities of the
Indian/Western dialectic, Nandy has sought to demystify conventions,
critiquing even psychological techniques that have held good for such
enterprises. The keywords, in this context, are perhaps ‘continuities’
and ‘demystification’ (xviii–xix) – both engaged in order to invite our
attention to the problems associated with the conventions of revision-
ist historiography. The location of these continuities, marked as it is
by a carefully orchestrated selection process, is invariably what he
designates and situates as Indian. Variations evident in postcolonial
reasoning are not sought to be surmounted by blanket generalizations
but are rather specifically grounded within the cultural and political
ambit of India. The crucial point about his situation as a Bengali intel-
lectual writing in a tongue not native to him, in fact, drives home the
importance of the personal in a narrative aimed at critiquing crystal-
lized conventions and myths. ‘Cultural relativism’, arguably a strategy
that provides its proponent ample scope to wriggle out of difficult
theoretical set-ups, is dismissed by Nandy as ineffective and inade-
quate. Instead, he makes a case for definitive argumentation, one that
is informed by his sense of a nationalist consciousness he identifies as
‘Indian’. In positioning himself within such a self-determined para-
digm, he draws on the intellectual and cultural heritage of a nation,
whose imperatives find articulation through certain figures, Gandhi
and Tagore being two such exemplars.
When Nandy refers to the surprising reception of The Intimate
Enemy in critical discourses in the two and the half decades that fol-
lowed its publication, he is, in fact, revisiting his personal engagement
with the discursive practices of colonial history. As the postscript enun-
ciates with pointed clarity, the passage of The Intimate Enemy in the
contemporary intellectual ambit is also a testament to the triumph of
a reading mode that began by challenging the very conventions associ-
ated with the subject and its history. In a way, then, the argument of
the book, and its reception in contemporary critical thought, attests
to the effectiveness of a strategy that makes headway because it avoids
assumptions that have been firmly grounded in postcolonial histori-
ography. For instance, as he argues, readings of South Asian colonial
society and culture concentrated more on the machinations of exter-
nal circumstances, pushing to the margins the issue of psychological
bearing on the colonial mind: ‘While writing the book, I found, to my
surprise, that there existed no serious study of colonialism in South
Asia that grappled with the inner life of the rulers and the ruled, what
happened to them as persons and cultures in the hot and dusty trop-
ics and in the damp, cold, often-gloomy environs at home’ (115). The
term ‘inner life’ plays upon the contours of both the mental and the
interior (private) enclosures of the people whose existence was often
seen within set structures, resulting, in effect, in the dominance of
reductive categories. The challenge before Nandy, then, was to exam-
ine the possibilities of a fresh orientation, one which not only looked
at Western knowledge patterns but also accounted for the complex
experiences in the colonial situation. It is insightful that the postscript
revisits the circumstances in which the book’s argument came to be
formulated, for it brings the African connection to the fore. Nandy
acknowledges the arresting influence of an interesting generation of
African thinkers, each arguing for specific situations associated with
their own societies, yet all of them concentrating upon the markings
and makings of the colonizer’s mind and the ways in which the impe-
rial apparatus exerted itself. The six Francophone writers referred to
here – Franz Fanon, Octave Mannoni, Aime Cesaire, Albert Memmi,
Amilcar Cabral and Leopold Senghor – attended to the knowledge
question within parameters that exposed the inadequacies of both
the Enlightenment and the Cartesian principles, something which
held sway over the imperial mind in Europe’s grip of its colonies.
Nandy’s two-pronged reading of the conditions regarding the book’s
argument – the marginalization of the colonial mind and the Franco-
phone take on colonial experience – actually opens up the knowledge
question with an insistent emphasis. In his reading, thus, knowledge,
colonialism and historiography emerge as collaborative handmaidens
working towards the same design.
In the twenty-five years since The Intimate Enemy was first pub-
lished it has become more obvious that colonialism is mostly a
game of categories and politics of knowledge. That as long as the
game and the politics survive, colonialism, too will survive, in
some incarnation or other. The first ploy in the game is to use his-
tory to flatten the past into a uniform playing field for a clutch of
nineteenth-century theories of progress and exclude communities
that refuse to historicize the mythopoetic accounts that keep open
their past and serve as components of their self. . . . The second
ploy is to carefully monitor and manage dissent.
(117)
Nandy’s emphasis on the efficacy of colonial structures – evidenced in
the orientations of education, social evolution and historiography – is
part of an exercise that locates contemporary reading strategies and
their interdependence in dealing with issues of politics and power.
But then, in a transformed world, political equations have come
to acquire newer dimensions. How does a concept like the West fare
in this contemporary current of intellectual brinkmanship? Nandy is
alert to the renegotiations to which the term is now subject to in cul-
tural discourse, and even as the markers attending the forces of dissent
and conformity change colour, there is a growing awareness about the
way everyday life has come to demand the interest of contemporary
thought. Often, the trajectories through which life in an erstwhile col-
ony like India finds space in intellectual parleys cannot quite arrest the
character of existence in India. In many ways, Nandy argues, India’s
case is different from the rest. Such a position, consistent as it is with
his argument about the nation and the West as categories, simultane-
ously serves as a self-critical valve through which the condition of life
in the post-colony is opened up for evaluation. India’s characteristic
engagement with movement and stasis – something he discusses at
length in the second half of the book – becomes, for him, a time warp,
holding and accommodating alternatives that have been flattened out
by the cultural sweep of globalization elsewhere. His idea that India
has made unimaginable capital out of the agency of victimhood is
fascinating for the space it grants him as he addresses the idea of the
universal in terms of the country’s response to it. The advertisement
of India’s cultural resourcefulness, however, is not an inextricable
defence-shield, as Nandy concludes his postscript, for accompanying
the nation’s resistance drive is the project of progress, a legacy perhaps
best situated as ‘collateral damage’ (125).
Psychology and the cultural impact of colonial ideology

The opening chapter of The Intimate Enemy titled ‘The Psychology
of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India’ takes within
its discursive span issues which elaborate upon the three terms men-
tioned in the title’s heading, simultaneously examining and critiquing
the dominant structures and investigative modes that have long served
the subject of colonial history. But this critique of structures is fore-
grounded by an insistent reading of the processes through which the
colonial apparatus occupied the mind of the colonized; that the matter
is much more than a design or strategy on the part of the colonizer,
affecting people within the subjugated land and eliciting responses
that were neither anticipated nor adequately accounted for, is one of
Nandy’s priorities here. Instead of playing upon an already burgeon-
ing critical mass which has situated the colonizer/colonized equation
within the frames of ‘economic gain and political power’, Nandy
argues for another front, not only marginalized in postcolonial studies
but, more important, relevant for the insights it provides regarding
the workings of a culture trapped in the colonial imagination. Such
an imperative is evident when Nandy announces his objective at the
beginning of his argument:
This essay argues that the first differentia of colonialism is a state

of mind in the colonizers and the colonized, a colonial conscious-
ness which includes the sometimes unrealizable wish to make eco-
nomic and political profits from the colonies, but other elements
too. . . . The following pages will explore some of these psycho-
logical contours of colonialism in the rulers and the ruled and try
to define colonialism as a shared culture which may not always
begin with the establishment of alien rule in a society and end with
the departure of the alien rulers from the colony.
(1–2)
The measured vocabulary is designed to ward off expectations that

this is another take on the functioning of the colonial apparatus in
terms of the economic and political dimensions in such experiences.
One of the ways in which Nandy traces the ideological pressures is
to identify the shared codes through which the rulers and the ruled
make sense of life functions in colonial society. These codes modify
‘the original cultural priorities on both sides and bring to the centre
of colonial culture subcultures previously recessive or subordinate in
the two confronting cultures’ (2). The ‘sharing’ process is evidently
a condition of governance in colonialist systems by means of which
‘dissent’ is managed in these societies. As such, Nandy argues, there is
an inextricable coming together of the ideological and psychological
constituents in the making of experience in colonial society. So much
so that it is the psychological limits that control and determine anti-
colonial resistance movements.
The contours of the psychological impact of the colonial process are
further evident in the promotion of rhetorical story structures, espe-
cially in relation to the ideas of victimhood and suffering in subjected
societies. The folk view that the subject peoples are the losers in an
economically determined game of exploitation is itself a consequence
of colonialist ideology. Nandy does not posit the matter as an either/
or proposition, for the economic gains of the colonizer were immense,
but equally deep were the psychological inroads that affected both
sides. Probing the effect of this experience on the British conscious-
ness, he isolates four conditions through which the cultural impact of
colonial governance could be subjected to scrutiny. The first was the
institutionalization of social Darwinism, manifested in the concept of
the ‘lower classes’ and the imposition of a set of hierarchies on British
society itself. One example of this was strikingly visible in the plight
of the ‘younger sons, the women, and all “the etceteras and so-forths”
of Britain’ (32). The second feature was the creation of an incorrect
idea of cultural oneness, which was the consequence of the flatten-
ing of social inequalities, and this is what enabled the small elite to
dictate the nature of colonial governance. The third condition related
to the perpetuation of a kind of primitivism, bordering on an articu-
lated religiosity through which imperial actions and conduct came to
be justified. This was another face of the ethical, designed to fore-
ground the logic of domination through another acceptable label. The
fourth point regarding the effect of colonial ideology in British India
related to the structuring of a consciousness which promoted a sense of
supremacy, legitimizing their invincibility in the minds of both the rul-
ers and the ruled. This condition served as an ethical license, providing
the colonizer with the ideological wherewithal to sugar-coat colonial
action in the name of liberalism.
Colonial agency’s takeover of the Western imagination and the jus-
tification of colonization crucially entailed a new cultural orientation.
One example of this tendency can be seen, Nandy observes, in the
creation of ‘an Indian self-image which, in its opposition to the West,
would remain in essence a Western construction’ (72). This ‘Indian’
was built upon the conventional Oriental stereotype but designed to
invoke the feminine, chaotic, primal, devious and cowardly aspects
of the subject, and in its ‘universalized’ form, it brought the vocabu-
lary of defiance within its fold. In this form, the Indian subject was
bound to the imagination of the West, and rather than situate him-
self as a counter-player in a subjected society, he went on with this
image, a response that was not quite anticipated. The inability of the
British to unsettle the Indian consciousness by set structures, stereo-
types and ideological formations was perhaps the greatest challenge
that confronted the imperial apparatus. In the contest of interpreta-
tions, Nandy argues, ‘the British colonial attitude to Indian culture
was always inconsistent’ (80). Irrespective of the mode through which
the Indian mind was approached, or engaged for examination, the
responses were such that no bracket could adequately accommodate
its many aspects. The spiritual/material duality through which Indian
conduct has often been sought to be accessed and the various coun-
ters to which this opposition is subjected can be read as part of the
attempts of the West to make sense of this people and society. Rather
than being placed in strict opposition, conditions of spirituality and
materialism often play upon each other and are enmeshed in such a
fashion that separation of them is almost impossible. In fact, as Nandy
goes on to demonstrate, this very approach of situating a people within
pre-figured frames of reference gets nowhere. As such, it can be argued
that ‘the two Indias which the ideologies project are both products of
Western intrusion and both are attempts to reconstruct Indian cul-
ture according to categories which would seem internally consistent
to the modern Western mind. Both are attempts to convert levels of
living – or aspects of selfhood – into types of ideology’ (82). Whether
the Indian response to the trappings of colonial ideology is viewed
as an antithesis to the Western imagination, or as a kind of peculiar-
ity, it can be accessed only through particularities of configuration,
which will vary in the case of different commentators. Nandy admits
as much when he concludes the argument of the book by clarifying
that his has not been an attempt to ‘reverse the standard stereotypes
to create a neo-romantic ideology of the irrational, the mythic or the
renunciatory’ (113). Rather, his argument has been oriented towards a
recognition of the fact that in situations where the complex discursive
forces are opened up for examination, accepted markers (including
ideological structures) not only lose their relevance but also become
inadequate as tools of critical exposition.
The ‘child’ and the colonial imagination

Concentrating on variations of the child theme and seizing upon its
operative contours in colonial society, Ashis Nandy revisits some of
the circumstances through which it affected the imperial consciousness
in Britain. The link between childhood and colonial situations derives,
for him, initially, through a commonly grounded matrix which builds
upon the theses of innocence and underdevelopment. Nandy draws
on a variety of intellectual resources here, and while the allusions to
Freud and Erikson indicate the way the psychological make-up of the
subject is analysed, the reading of the hierarchies in such a process is
clearly his own. In considering the patterns of knowledge production
in England in the nineteenth century, for instance, he marks the super-
imposition of infantilism upon the condition of colonial subjecthood
in terms of both political expediency and cultural imagination. The
engines of colonialism ran through the subject terrain a series of ideo-
logical channels whose pressures were realized through the different
attempts at legitimization. Rather than being rooted in the thesis, pro-
posed foremost by Philippe Aries, that the concept of childhood was a
consequence of seventeenth-century Enlightenment realization of the
civilizational goals of the West, Nandy argues that colonial agencies
functioned in much more complicated ways to construct a childlike
‘inferior version of the adult’ (14). The effectiveness of the colonial
apparatus in British India built upon the progress module that had
already been reared upon the legitimized political philosophies of the
West. In this context, the following gloss drives home the systematic
structuring of such a routine:
Colonialism dutifully picked up these ideas of growth and develop-

ment and drew a new parallel between primitivism and childhood.
Thus, the theory of social progress was telescoped not merely into
the individual’s life cycle in Europe but also into the area of cul-
tural differences in the colonies. What was childlikeness of the
child and childishness of immature adults now also became the
lovable and unlovable savagery of primitives and the primitivism
of subject societies.
(16)
The visualization and situation of the colonial subject within the pre-
scriptive parameters of childhood was accompanied, observes Nandy,
by the rhetorical narrative of ageing. What such a conjunction of
extremes drawn from the metaphor the human lifespan did was to
isolate features of activity within a predetermined design. The impact
of such isolation on the British consciousness was remarkable; it made
possible categorization of the colonial subject within frames of refer-
ence that functioned as unquestionable givens. Nandy quotes a variety
of sources to argue that far from being a marginal phenomenon, this
form of arrest of colonial subjecthood wheeled in the imperial project
to a condition of validity, the subscription to which was taken for
granted. At the same time, this bundling of the colonial subject with
the rhetoric of naivete and dependence substantially augmented the
modernity thesis that was insistently pressed into service in the genera-
tions that bred on the values of the Enlightenment in Europe. While
the English response was evident in the articulation of two thought
structures that situated the Indian past first as muzeumized and then as
degraded, it found that challenges such as those posed by Madhusudan
Dutt’s Meghnādvadh (1861) could not be tackled within the childhood
motif that had otherwise done so well. Dutt’s valorization of the dis-
senting voice embedded within the recognized moral edifice of the
Ramayana played around the masculinist thesis in a counter-move that
foregrounded the questioning of authority. Bankim Chandra’s represen-
tation of Krishna, in a similar move, sought to disengage the childlike
elements associated with the figure in the pantheon, projecting instead
a subject whose versatility lay in his remarkable adaptive qualities. The
counter-responses to that imperial imagination which aimed at making
capital out of the parallelism of the child and the colonized were not
however, located within Indian narratives alone. Nandy takes up the
case of the errant Oscar Wilde, whose unconventional ways defied the
norms of British culture, a figure whose actions could only be dealt
with through the process of marginalization. Wilde, Nandy believes,
contested the veneer of British respectability by his childlike take on
sexual conduct, something which the Victorian social establishment
worked over time to keep under wraps or, at least, sought to explain
away either as a deviation or as an exception. The unwillingness of the
imperial mind to accommodate alternatives of social behaviour and
the overwhelming blanketing of the child as a figure of lesser capabili-
ties fuelled the development thesis further.
Perhaps the most telling critique of this child motif and its reversal
in relation to the imperial project of civilizational progress comes from
Nandy’s reading of this aspect in Gandhi. Gandhi’s intellectual and ideo-
logical movements not only ran counter to the neat modernity model of
the West but also simultaneously unmasked the idea of linear progress as
grossly inadequate. One of the ways in which he drove home the implau-
sibility of the modernity thesis in a country like India, Nandy argues,
was closely aligned to the dismissal of the European paradigm of adult-
hood. For, in this view, adulthood implied maturity and understanding.
Gandhi, however, through his life, conduct and words, exemplified
something else. Coming from a culture where multiple oppositional
traces coexist in seemingly defiant life patterns, Gandhi offered a form
of dissent that was not reactionary in the conventional sense. This was
because he did not inflate the dualisms of civilized/savage, static/pro-
gressive and the like; rather, he presented a model the British could not
respond to with their existing structures of thought. Nandy locates in
this Gandhian movement a childlike engagement with the experience of
living, thereby suggesting that in Gandhi, the very immaturity argument
that was developed to legitimize colonial governance collapsed.
There was a direct component in Gandhi’s defiance of the ideology

of adulthood, but it was relatively trivial. Not only did every West-
erner and Westernized Indian who came in touch with Gandhi
refer at least once to his child’s smile, his admirers and detractors
dutifully found him childlike and childish respectively. His ‘infan-
tile’ obstinacy and tendency to tease, his ‘immature’ attacks on the
modern world and its props, his ‘juvenile’ food fads and symbols
like the spinning wheel – all were viewed as planks of a political
platform which defied conventional ideas of adulthood.
(56)
In other words, Gandhi presented more than a challenge to the reduc-

tive apparatus that had been designed to explain colonial governance;
he suggested the possibility of another process through which the givens
of knowledge and modernity could be framed differently. Not as alter-
natives to the ones proposed by the European imagination. His was,
at its most discernible level, a questioning of the process of reduction
through which Europe sought to make sense of reality and experience.
Nandy presents the following example of such a practice – involving
Kipling and Aurobindo in opposite extremes – where the child motif
is used to highlight conditions of cultural difference: ‘Kipling was cul-
turally an Indian child who grew up to become an ideologue of the
moral and political superiority of the West. Aurobindo was culturally
a European child who grew up to become a votary of the spiritual lead-
ership of India’ (85). The entanglement of childhood and colonialism
was, then, as structural building block, emboldening the edifice of the
British empire. And even as this combination worked as an undercur-
rent impacting minds in the societies of both the ruler and the ruled,
its fissures were apparent in the cases of a Gandhi or an Aurobindo,
demonstrating both its efficacy and volatility.
Three test cases: Kipling, Aurobindo and Gandhi

As one of the exemplars in Nandy’s examination of the situation of
the ‘self’ in colonial India, Rudyard Kipling occupies the maximum
narrative space in the book. Burdened by a history and an association,
he could neither unsettle nor wholly make his own, Kipling remained
caught between worlds he could not adequately respond to. While
such an analysis of the Kipling state is now commonplace – that of
a white man trapped by the pull and push of the culture of his birth
(India) on the one hand, and the imperatives of the colonizer (England)
on the other – there remain gaps in such a critical assessment. The fol-
lowing passage by Sullivan (1993) captures this commonplace vision
of a man caught between two worlds with telling succinctness:
The contradictory pattern of desire – to be loved and to control –
underlying the familial trope of a world in which mother England
would be caretaker to lesser children of imperial Gods was pro-
duced by the political machinery of empire. But it also fed into a
personal fantasy that charged the longings of a Rudyard who at
the age of six felt he had been expelled from the Edenic bliss of his
first home in India.
(2)
The foregrounding of the tropes of memory and desire in such a gloss

assumes that the colony and its worldview remained posted as a con-
tradiction to the imperial goal. Nandy, however, decided to look at
the cultural dynamics of the Kipling figure, seeking out traces that
were not only enmeshed, but drew and derived from the resources
of both the situations. One of Nandy’s strategies in reading this case
in this book is directed towards a tracking of the conflicting loyalties
that occupied Kipling as its site. Indian in ways that many Britishers
could not imagine or envisage, Kipling remained on the fringes of a
Victorian elite throughout his life. This was a form of marginalization
the either/or dualism of the ruler and the ruled could not accommo-
date. Yet there was something in Kipling that saw him emerge as the
champion of imperialism, one who vehemently aligned the subjuga-
tion of the colonized to the condition of inevitability. This is what
interests Nandy. How was it that a man like Kipling, whose inward-
ness with the ‘Indian’ psyche required no attestation, bore aloft the
flag of empire with such conviction? There are no straight answers
to this. Nandy’s reading of the plight of Kipling in an environment
best defined as hostile, one that did not consider him its own, opens
up the hypocrisy of a society that aspired to capitalize on the rheto-
ric of development. In spite of the hostilities that became part of his
personal destiny, Kipling found in the English tenor towards its impe-
rial subjects a reason to repose his faith. Although such a position
appears strange, Kipling becomes, in Nandy’s analysis, the benchmark
for the psychic undercurrent that impacted and controlled the Eng-
lish mind. Sensing that his own life was caught between structures of
cultural practice he could not adequately reconcile, Kipling shut out
his morality, taking recourse instead in a vision that consolidated the
stereotypes of colonial hegemony. Nandy brilliantly brings the psychic
trappings of Kipling to the surface of his narrative, and by positing his
‘moral blindness’ (69) as a refusal to settle the intersubjective quar-
rel between the same self, he shows how the agencies of colonization
affected even those subjects who swayed between opposing cultural
states. Kipling took the side of the empire. But, Nandy argues, his was
not a personal matter. It was a reflection of the overarching stamp of
imperialist ideology and the success of the machine that presented the
thesis of development as its logic for domination. Kipling was caught
in the self-image of the West, however painful to him in personal life,
and between the India he lived in and knew so well and the England
to which he remained an outsider, he had no option but to adopt the
latter. Nandy sees this as the triumph of the colonial imagination.
In the case of the twin Indian figures of Aurobindo and Gandhi, the
analyses follow different trajectories. In their own ways, Aurobindo
and Gandhi offered challenges to the colonialist design that were nei-
ther envisaged nor anticipated. Aurobindo, shaped and nurtured to
become the exemplary Englishman, followed the reverse path towards
self-realization. Unlike Kipling, however, Aurobindo was not required
to forego his English training to access and build upon the registers of
his own culture. Nandy sees in Aurobindo’s case a telling example of
self-fashioning that drew its sustenance from victimhood where the
processes of identification and cultural internalization facilitated the
unsettling of the colonial grip. From the time his father sent Aurobindo
and his two brothers to England to hone a lifestyle that made them
true Englishmen, there was an undercurrent that derived succour from
oppression. Once the encounter with the idealism of English society
was over, Aurobindo began the long trek towards self-realization. This
was not an easy task. Soon occupied by the public expectation, the
nationalist in him devised a model of liberation that highlighted the
practice of self-negation. It is commonplace to see the two phases of
Aurobindo’s post-English life as separate situations, but his life at the
ashram at Pondicherry and the one preceding that threaded the same
needle, that of pursuing a philosophy of autonomy which challenged
the basic assumptions of the Western ideological framework.
Gandhi, on the other hand, is situated as a very different exemplar
in the book. Unlike many freedom activists associated with India’s
struggle for Independence, Gandhi did not appear antithetical to the
liberal outlook of the West. His was a form of cultural thesis that
explored the other in Western society, teasing out the reflective dimen-
sions of that culture so that what merged in his brand of holism was
something the European imperialist found difficult to target. This was
because many of the stereotypical formations that had been effectively
functioning in the colonial discourse of progress found no counter in
the Gandhian response to play with. Gandhi’s was a kind of pluralistic
vision that did not close a culture’s humanist propensities; neither did
he undervalue the West for the challenge it offered him. For Nandy,
the Gandhian strategy was more than a principled argument built on
moral or humanist ideals. It was a move designed to undercut the
dominance of the Western rhetoric of progress by focussing on a set
of values that the imperialist machinery had marginalized in order to
exaggerate its civilizational mission. In this context Nandy observes:
‘Gandhi’s was not merely an ethical posture but a political one. He had
to involve the dissenting West in his enterprise. To him victimhood was
indivisible and victor’s impunity was only notional’ (119). In Nandy’s
view, Gandhi’s espousal of an accommodative holism engaged the
maternity motif in ways that the West could not adequately counter.
Placed against the hyper-masculinist paradigm of the Western imagi-
nation, this line of argument flattened and rendered ineffective the
metaphor of supremacy which had served the racist model so long.
Nandy argues that Gandhi’s shrewd political and cultural realignments
not only frustrated the imperialist camp but also antagonized those
nationalists who imagined the West in the clear image of the rogue.
The congruence of elements drawn from Hinduism and Christianity,
for instance, made this new structure both impossible to ignore on
the one hand and difficult to reconcile on the other. Nandy sees this
as an instance of creative re-imagination of familiar elements, orga-
nized anew to contest settled hegemonies. Analysing this process, he
observes: ‘In sum, Gandhi was clear in his mind that activism and
courage could be liberated from aggressiveness and recognized as per-
fectly compatible with womanhood, particularly maternity. Whether
this position fully negated the Ksatriya world view or not, it certainly
negated the very basis of the colonial culture’ (54).
Ashis Nandy and postcolonial theory

How does one situate Nandy in the context of contemporary post-
colonial theory? Whether it is his bracketing as a social and political
scientist or his concern for contemporary problems of development
and critical naivete, the claim of social sciences for his appropriation
within its fold goes unquestioned. Obviously, as texts like The Inti-
mate Enemy and The Savage Freud have demonstrated, his writings
have consistently cut through the trappings of Western historiographic
models. Rather than reject the potential of these reading strategies, he
has concentrated on bringing those assumptions to the dock whose
instrumentality is proven to be inadequate in dealing with subjects
such as India. It is no wonder that Nandy mentions his affinities with
contemporary African commentators whose awareness of cultural dif-
ference led to critical formulations of a very different order. The fact
that postcolonial thought has taken for its province the constructions
rendered valid in the modern imagination by the engines of coloniza-
tion makes it inevitable that we take stock of Nandy’s contribution in
this context. The passage that follows, albeit of some length, shows
how Nandy’s preoccupation with method and mode in relation to both
knowledge production and intellectual purpose has great bearing for
investigations carried out in the name of postcolonial studies.
The basic assumption . . . is that the developed world has the

automatic right and unavoidable obligation to set the pace for the
underdeveloped; for what the developed are today, the underde-
veloped will become tomorrow, either through their skills in imita-
tion (euphemistically called diffusion of innovations or transfer of
technology) or through the generosity of the wealthy and powerful
(euphemistically called aid).
The justification for this hierarchy is sought in the analogies
drawn between underdevelopment, insanity, immaturity and
irrationality, within a conceptual grid that crystallized out as a
byproduct of the Enlightenment and was subsequently acknowl-
edged by Western colonialism and ‘science’. The relationships can
be crudely summarised as follows:
development: underdevelopment:
sanity (normality): insanity (abnormality):
maturity (adulthood): immaturity (childhood):
rationality: irrationality
At this plane, development, modern science, colonialism are
not parallel processes, but mutually potentiating forces defining a
common domain of consciousness; there is no difference between
the way development experts look at the objects of social engineer-
ing, professional scientists look at the laity and colonial powers
once laid claim to define the welfare, and, in fact, even the con-
cept of welfare, of their subjects. Together they have thrown up a
new idea of a social elite who, as secular high priests of the vari-
ous theories of progress, have faithfully replicated some aspects of
European Christendom’s passionate fear of the heathens waiting
outside the walls to subvert civilization.
(8)
It is difficult to account for the circumstances that do not always make

Nandy’s placement beside more celebrated postcolonial thinkers such
as Edward Said or Frantz Fanon feasible. Not that such canon-building
is necessary, or that his works require such bracketing. Perhaps it has
to do with Nandy’s focus on the operational dynamics of contempo-
rary society and culture; or maybe it has something to do with the
seeming absence of a theoretical model that would serve as a stand-
in for the West he subjects to critique. While these are red herrings
that are better dismissed unreservedly, there is no doubt that post-
colonial studies today have spanned out to engage questions beyond
the immediate contexts of colonization. A text such as The Intimate
Enemy is pathbreaking because it not only straddles the early moves
of postcolonial review but also offers positions for a political take on
reading strategies that have been outstripped by newer, more challeng-
ing modes of critical imagination.
Works cited
Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans.
Robert Baldick, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
Idris, Farhad. ‘Ashis Nandy’ in Michael Ryan, ed. The Encyclopedia of Liter-
ary and Cultural Theory, 3 vols, Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011,
pp. 1186–1188.
Kothari, Smitu. ‘Revisiting the Violence of Development: An Interview with
Ashis Nandy’, Development, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2004, pp. 8–14.
Nandy, Ashis. ‘Culture, Voice and Development: A Primer for the Unsuspect-
ing’, Thesis Eleven, No. 39, 1994, pp. 1–18.
________. ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 2,
1995, pp. 44–66.
________. An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd
Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination, New Delhi, India: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001.
________. Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts,
Delhi, India: Permanent Black, 2002.
________. Bonfire of Creeds: The Essential Ashis Nandy, New Delhi, India:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
________. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism,
Second edition, New Delhi, India: OUP, 2009.
Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
In Other Worlds
Forms of engagement and cultures
of reading
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak straddles many worlds in critical theory.

Acts of definition, some of which have gained considerable currency in
critical literature over the past several decades, have, it seems, trans-
formed her name into a site that reflects not just the Spivak mind, but
more crucially, these overtures have found moulds which project forms
of critical engagement, each suggesting some of her preoccupations.
Readers of Spivak have acknowledged, irrespective of how they are
positioned as readers, her remarkable versatility, and as each foray
of hers into critical space is prised open for purposes of scrutiny and
critical insight, we see her pointers being drawn into structures that are
sometimes considerably removed from the schemes in which they first
emerged. The difficulty of reading Spivak stems, at one level, from this
pull to which her texts are submitted to by enthusiastic readers; her
wide range, and the outstanding variety of critical space that she cov-
ers through multiple agencies – interviews, translations, commentaries,
essays, theoretical asides, books and critical discourses – this is borne
out by the immense weight of her conceptual creativity and engagement
with forms of reading. We can perhaps take a cue from Spivak herself in
approaching a book like In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, a
repository of writings that is not only genre-challenging in arrangement
but path-breaking in the ways the theoretical pathways are carved and
crafted out of settled conventions. The book is an assortment of essays,
each written in contexts that were separated from each other, but still
threaded through that stamp of creative criticism that we have now
come to associate with her writings. The history of the circumstances of
composition is laid down in the ‘Introduction to the Routledge Classics
Edition’, where she comments on the genesis of the pieces in the book:
‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ and ‘Draupadi’

reflect the beginning, for me, of something that was later called
160 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Worlds
post-colonialism. It was 1981. I had been asked by Yale French
Studies to write on French Feminism and by Critical Inquiry to
write on deconstruction. I had a crisis of conscience and those two
essays were the result. I had gone clear past the culture wars – a
Euro-US phenomenon – which is why I never quite became as
popular as my friend Homi K. Bhabha.
(x)
In 1984 I met Ranajit Guha, the leader of the South Asian histori-
ans’ collective called Subaltern Studies. The last three pieces in the
book come from that turbulent association. I am still on the track
of the subaltern. ‘Subaltern is to popular as gender is to sex, class
to poverty, state to nation’, I wrote a few weeks ago.
(x)
Spivak offers us brief notes on the circumstances in which the other

essays in the anthology were composed, each separate in terms of ori-
gin and concern, yet there is that common line of critical understanding
that is now widely recognized as her own distinctive engagement with
thought. In those essays that deal with the subject of ‘literature’ there
are tropes that invigorate each position, be it those on Dante, Woolf
or Wordsworth, and among those the two that Spivak herself identi-
fies, ‘cultural politics’ and ‘imagination’ are perhaps the most insistent.
What comes through in the way Spivak presents her takes on these
subjects across the narrative terrain of the book is her situation as a
reader, something that she has consistently insisted on as being the
most evident aspect she may be known by. Such a positioning is not
about her priorities in In Other Worlds alone: it is a thread that runs
through the different critical enunciations she has attended to over
the past several decades. Bound with her reading practice is the more
important issue of stance, which she takes irrespective of how the text
under scrutiny may be, from her ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Jacques
Derrida’s Of Grammatology to Death of a Discipline. But this is not
the territory of polemics. Rather, when Spivak teases out the pressures
that affect the moulds of thought behind those critical formations
which are at play in contemporary society, she is also reacting to the
circumstances that facilitate or condition such things. In other words,
not only is Spivak a critical reader of texts in practice, but she is also
one who takes her position with reference to the potential pathways
out of those textual properties which are otherwise ‘ignored’ or kept
at bay. It is this character of her writing that makes her practice and
sets an example as a thinker of such crucial importance in today’s
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Worlds 161
world. A term she uses for this process, which is the title of a critical
response to the possible impact of the journal Interventions, one she
calls ‘The Labour of the Negative’, is a pointer in that direction: ‘I
have never been able to understand the imperative to ignore problems
as impediments to “practice”, whatever that abstraction might mean.
I have always just taught small and large groups how to “read”, texts
of word, thread, power, affect, thought, at both ends of the spectrum.
When I used the word “post-colonial” in the 1980s, it came up in that
connection. In the 1990s it tended to fade away’ (268).
When Spivak refers to ‘imagination’ and ‘cultural politics’ as part
of her preoccupations as a thinker, she is also articulating a line of
thought that she has gone on to pursue in the various ways in which
she has read literature and the arts. The allusion to the tendency of
some to ignore issues that plague us, in fact, is remarkably sugges-
tive of her critical discernment when it comes to positioning herself in
the fields of theory. Theoretical exercises cannot occupy high sites of
academic idealism, eschew conditions that matter in ‘practice’ and still
assume to connect to subjects of the worlds we encounter today – that
Spivak does not pursue such a process of enquiry is abundantly clear.
What she is also trying to highlight is that she is involved in not merely
reading herself but more significantly in inculcating a culture of criti-
cal temperament for generations that she would like to respond to the
multiple realities of contemporary life. This not only is an extremely
difficult task but is also impeded by assumptions that project proce-
dures, which, however critical in their premise, are always fraught
with the danger of following set routes. This is what comes to the fore
when she scrutinizes Julia Kristeva’s analysis of Chinese women, which
we shall discuss later. It is for us to recognize what Spivak organizes as
a series in the earlier citation – ‘word, thread, power, affect, thought’ –
and see how these processes are at work, and at play, determining and
shaping the way we visualize pasts and situate ourselves in specific
locations and ideologies. The reference to imagination as a trope that
she has engaged with over a long period of time gives us a discursive
handle, one through which we may try to see how the critical exercise
is effected across genres and practices. Spivak’s phrases are carefully
chosen, each serving to situate and exemplify her priority and preoccu-
pation as a thinker of our times. In the Introduction to the Routledge
Classics Edition the discussion on imagination provides us some clues
as to how her critical tactics are moulded for purposes of scrutiny and
insight. Commenting on her approach to imagination as a trope in her
study of Coleridge’s take on the issue, ‘Letter as Cutting Edge’, she
goes on to say that that same preoccupation has been part of how she
has worked as thinker. Why is imagination so important to Spivak?
Of the many reasons for this, the one that seems to be the most strik-
ing is the interconnection that she pursues between imagination and
conduct. That is why when she says that ‘this unmanageable thing,
the imagination, has become something like an ethical instrument
for me’ (ix) there is a conscious objective of situating imagination as
agency, one which facilitates possibilities other than those that appear
most likely. She considers it to be part of the training process that she
had; it has enabled her to think outside orthodoxies, beyond patterns
that have consolidated through usage and perception, and to take for-
ward a critical temperament that pursues its own idiom depending on
the critical preferences she has made over time.
This does not imply that Spivak forecloses the advantages that stem
from structures that are already in practice, but the question is not
quite confined to that; it is not a matter of deriving mileage from a
critical framework unless that is something that she finds agreeable,
both as strategy of reading and as an instrument of inquiry. Behind
this lies the culture of interrogation, a culture of critique that she has
cultivated, and when she draws in traces of disciplines as widely placed
as Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism within a common matrix,
she is doing it deliberately and she is setting the agenda for a discur-
sive engagement that would offer perspectives on issues that are not
confined to any one of these formations. Such a straddling of catego-
ries has invited mixed responses from people who have had difficulty
in pigeonholing Spivak or the kind of criticism she does. But that is
actually beside the point. The issue, for Spivak, has never been one of
affiliation to one discipline as against another; that has never been the
guiding mark in her determination to extend the advantages of critical
reading to spaces that remain unattended in academic situations. It is
imperative, therefore, to consider her own take on the play of catego-
ries, and its impact in the generation of critical discourse.
We cannot avoid a kind of historico-political standard that the ‘dis-

interested’ academy dismisses as ‘pathos’. That standard emerges,
mired in overdeterminations, in answer to the kinds of counter-
questions of which the following is an example: What subject-
effects were systematically effaced and trained to efface themselves
so that a canonic norm might emerge? Since, considered from this
perspective, literary canon-formation is seen to work within a
much broader network of successful epistemic violence, questions
of this kind are asked not only by feminist and Marxist critics, but
also by anti-imperialist deconstructivists. Such counter-questions
and declarations are often seen as constituting the new Marxist
(feminist-deconstructivist) point of view on literary value. Since I
share the point of view they subtend, I place them on the threshold
of my essay as I move into my more generalized (more abstract?)
concerns.
(213–214)
This passage from the ‘wild card’ (x) essay in In Other Worlds, ‘Scat-
tered Speculations on the Question of Value’, is important in many
ways. Although the designatory possibilities that are part of what
Spivak herself uses here have been accessed in different contexts, the
issue of overdetermination is one that points towards an interesting
direction in critical discourse. Colin McCabe, for instance, cautions
us against being led too far by the labels that are attached to Spivak
in terms of her pedagogic or critical affiliations in his foreword to In
Other Worlds, and instead of hovering over such quibbles as these
terms – Marxism, feminism, deconstruction – may suggest, it would
be more rewarding to engage with those subjects for another logic.
That is the logic of interrogation that Spivak draws out attention to,
the logic that demands of us positions that we can and should take in
circumstances where the question of ‘value’ is at stake. That Spivak
can see in these formations or schools points of convergence attests
to the ways in which criticism must be wary of the pitfalls of rigid
associations with any given position. One of the values that she brings
into the discourses that she engages with is drawn from the experi-
ence of deconstruction: in this very essay, she makes a telling point:
‘For a deconstructive critic it is a truism that a full undoing of the
canon-apocrypha opposition, like the undoing of any opposition, is
impossible. (“The impossibility of a full undoing” is the curious defini-
tive predicament of deconstruction)’ (213). It is not the overturning of
a thesis, nor its replacement, which, as she argues, is an impossibility,
but this lesson is one that enables us to look at that culture of critical
temperament which gains from the adventure of questioning, some-
thing that constitutes for any inquiry the starting place, irrespective of
whether it is Marxism, feminism or postcolonialism.
Politics, cultural practice and criticism as intervention

‘Politics’ is a crucial term in In Other Worlds. What Spivak attends to
in the course of the book, across the discursive plane of the different
essays, is the question of position-taking; whether it is with reference
to how a poet like Dante may be read or the agency of deconstruction
being a passport to neutrality, there cannot be a situation where one
is outside the scheme of things, where the mode of engagement can be
seen as being unaffected by the process of criticism itself. In locating
this issue in critical history, she draws on her experience of being a
close reader of the Derridean mode of enquiry, one through which she
argues that the processes of understanding cannot let go of something
that runs all through the exercise, ‘responsibility’. What Spivak also
does in the course of her reading of deconstruction as an agency here
is to show how misperceptions regarding it have consigned the ‘self’
to a point of removal from that discursive space where the enquiry
is carried out. But that is far from the case in practice. The self is
always engaged, even its attempts at removal or erasure are present as
traces that condition the position taken; the point she makes here is of
great significance to the process of reading itself, since it concerns how
responsibility and positioning occupy the critical space in any theoreti-
cal exercise. Spivak’s argument is a fascinating example of how ‘theory’
can be engaged in practice, and in demonstrating how deconstruction
does not disavow the self from the subject under scrutiny, she brings
home the issues of politics, responsibility and cultural practice within
the same frame of reference. No reading method, Spivak contends, can
aspire to be, or is, value-neutral. There is a process of internal exami-
nation that not just renders the method effective but also undercuts its
most authoritative premise. This may appear paradoxical, but as Spi-
vak so ably shows from her own experience of reading Derrida’s Glas,
the self is never away from such a complex interweave as this text:
‘I read Glas as an autobiography, “about” Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, Genet et al. Since a faith in the autobiographical self or in the
authority of historical narrative is thoroughly questioned by the decon-
structive morphology, Derrida’s project was there taking the necessary
risk of “demonstrating” how theory is necessarily undermined – as it is
operated – by practice’ (23). Even as she is discussing how a ‘feminist’
position can have its impact on the culture of reading the Dante text,
and how it inscribes its own political traces within its fold, the larger
question of the theoretical framework facilitating it is never away
from practice. ‘Practice’, then, acquires its weighty currency in the
scheme of reading, and when it comes to a cultural engagement with
texts that are submitted to extensive critical pressure, the ‘historical
moment’ asserts itself, thereby dissolving the assumption of neutrality
that deconstruction appears to suggest. Politics and the circumstances
of reading that draw in the issue of culture cannot be sidelined in the
name of theory; in effect, what we have in ‘practice’ is a recognition
of values that are invested in the reading exercise, irrespective of the
theoretical framework adopted for the purpose. In this context, Spivak
explains: ‘The practice of deconstruction, like all practice, and more
so, undermines its theoretical rigour at every turn. Therefore, the trace
of the self struggles to define a historical moment, shoring up a space
of dispersion even as that space gives the struggle the lie, must also go
willy-nilly on record’ (23–24). A little further ahead in the discussion,
she points out that she is ‘not unmindful of the deconstructive cautions
against the feasibility of monolithic analyses’ (25), but such a con-
sciousness also alerts her to the fact that the critical emphases on the
dangers of self-presence in reading exercise have resulted in a form of
consolidation that every reader must be wary of. This is remarkable in
terms of the what Spivak brings into the theoretical plane of contem-
porary thought: she points towards the double-edged implications that
a critical apparatus like deconstruction can have for the experience of
reading: ‘The conservatism that has developed out of these potentially
radical positions – the unexamined use of the argument that great texts
deconstruct themselves, and thus that the canon might be preserved
after all – will also not suffice’ (25).
The politics of reading and the possibilities of critical exchange
that Spivak pursues throughout In Other Worlds reflect a conscious
engagement with such a process of enquiry where the fissures that
are layered in the text are brought up for examination. One could of
course argue that such an imperative is evident in all forms of criti-
cism more or less, but Spivak’s modes of critique moves beyond mere
balancing of textual properties. In her reading of Virginia Woolf’s To
the Lighthouse, for instance, we see this in evidence when she shows
how a text’s design can ‘undermine’ and subject a particular experi-
ence according to preset terms. The politics of reading would entail
recognition of the fact that a text can be positioned effectively within a
given critical bracket where ‘readings’ play a crucial part. It is impera-
tive that this recognition of the role played by critical values in the
making of a text be given the due space in its reading. Spivak, in fact,
deliberately draws our attention to the position she takes in the read-
ing process and what she aims for as she opens up the text to a culture
of critical reasoning:
This modest attempt at understanding criticism not merely as a

theoretical approach to the ‘truth’ of a text, but at the same time
as a practical enterprise that produces a reading is part of a much
larger polemic. I introduce To the Lighthouse into this polemic by
reading it as the story of Mr Ramsay (philosopher-theorist) and
Lily (artist-practitioner) around Mrs Ramsay (text).
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse can be read as a project to
catch the essence of Mrs Ramsay. A certain reading of the book
would show how the project is undermined; another, how it is
articulated. I will suggest that the undermining, although more
philosophically adventurous, is set aside by Woolf’s book; that the
articulation is found to be a more absorbing pursuit.
(41–42)
The issue for Spivak relates to the process through which the under-
mining finds its space there where the entire engagement is with the
exercise of articulation: ‘How does that disarticulation and under-
mining take its place within the articulation of the project to catch the
essence of Mrs Ramsay in an adequate language?’ (43), asks Spivak.
The politics of silence and non-communication cuts through the lan-
guage that narrates, and it is this parallel movement where the spoken
and the silent dimensions of exchange open up the text into the field
of play. While the analysis of To the Lighthouse and the textual traces
of non-communication surface in spite of the pressures of silence in
the novel, the politics at play here demand a response that recognizes
that presence. In fact, as Spivak goes on to argue how the difficulties
of arriving at a consensus regarding ideology have affected the read-
ing process itself in ‘The Politics of Interpretations’, the falling back
to structures of oppositionality defeats the purpose of criticism. It is
not confined to the field of literary studies but concerns the larger
issue of a socially engaged exercise where theory can be effective and
not an instrument to mark out ostensible differences of value. Spivak
cites the example of Stephen Toulmin and the acute difficulty that
besets any enterprise which aspires to address subjects beyond the
plane of oppositional framing, making the process of reading prob-
lematic. This point is one of great importance because the ‘difficulty’
is not because of the text as such but more so because of the question
that Spivak finds inevitable here: how is one to look at the politics
of exclusion in any conceptual framing of norms? There is no escape
from ideology: ‘One cannot of course “choose” to step out of ideol-
ogy’ (165). Given this recognition, how is then the insistent politics
to be taken up in the framing of critical priorities? In ‘The Politics of
Interpretations’ Spivak surveys a vast philosophical terrain, bringing
in the insights of thinkers from both the European and the Ameri-
can scenes, jostling Wayne Booth, Stanley Cavell with Julia Kristeva,
Louis Althusser and the post-1968 French intellectuals, the objective
behind such an assembly being the problem that occupies thought
itself, the problem of critical framing. Irrespective of how the question
is asked or placed, whether the Marx of Sartre or Althusser is pressed
into operation for the purpose of settling the question of ideology or
not, the process involves – and this is the point that insistently recurs
throughout the essay – the response to the nature of othering, and
thinkers find themselves addressing the theme of exclusion in different
ways. There is no escape from such pressures that make it imperative
that we recognize the significance of politics in the shaping of thought,
and its articulation. Interestingly, as the example from To the Light-
house demonstrates, the excluded other – the woman is the example
that Spivak refers to in both the essays – does not disappear, and the
politics behind the tracing of this other, or its erasure, both, come to
impact the way we respond. Spivak, then, is asking a question that
cuts across the Continental and the American spaces, one which looks
at the problem of interpretation by highlighting the inherent politics
of ideology that demands our attention every time we engage in the
process of reading.
French feminism, phases and its

‘international’ markings
‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ is a pathbreaking essay;
an occasion for a theoretical unshackling of settled parameters, this
is where ‘postcolonialism’ arrives as an agency outside its disciplin-
ary frontiers to look at the possibilities of critical exchange in ways
that impact both, the discipline and the wider, more engaging worlds
of feminism and theory. The spreading out of the scene of feminist
thought, primarily that which emanates from and is centred in the
West, does not involve a mere relocation of focus; it calls for a radical
overhauling of the terms of engagement, a reevaluation of the critical
apparatus and the fresh look at the ‘feminist’ who considers it the
business to critique a chosen plane for study. Looking at one of the
assumptions that has held sway in Western feminism, one of cultural
affiliation and stemming from a sense of ease that comes from famil-
iarity, Spivak writes: ‘The point I am trying to make is that, in order
to learn enough about Third World women and to develop a different
readership, the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreci-
ated, and the First World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged
as a woman’ (187). Spivak’s critical examination of the set of norms
that are imported onto the scene of enquiry by French feminists –
Kristeva’s About Chinese Women is a crucial example here – shows
how complicated the configuring process itself is. The field of play is
not engaged through the contest of categories alone (even though the
lines of distinction between the First and the Third Worlds are drawn
well enough); what Spivak’s enquiry demonstrates is that perceptions
and assumptions control the sway of narratives. Kristeva’s program-
ming of Chinese women and their life patterns brings in her own self
as agency, but as Spivak points out, the pressure of her Eurocentric lin-
eage compels her to see things her way. This issue here is not confined
to the making of recognizable roadmaps for assessment of women in
China; it is in the nature of the enterprise Kristeva embarks upon that
Spivak’s attention is drawn to.
The example from Kristeva comes a little later in the essay; when the
essay opens, Spivak takes the term ‘structural functionalism’ to expose
the faultlines in what was in circulation as ‘international feminism’, a
designation that incorporated ‘England, France, West Germany, Italy,
and that part of the Third World most easily accessible to American
interests: Latin America’ (185). The issue, as she goes on to pan out in
the course of the essay, is one that can be framed thus: ‘What is the
constituency of an international feminism?’ (185). And as she does
present through a personal note after stating the preceding question,
the ‘romantic’ inclination to look at women patronizingly from a
‘Third World’ space such as India is what feminists should be wary
about. International feminism cannot clothe its imperatives by assum-
ing the authority for those spaces and issues that are culturally beyond
its range, and then aspire to ‘fix’ them through an engaged theoretical
apparatus. This is what Spivak contests. The personal anecdote where
Spivak’s walk in her grandfather’s estate in 1949, in post-independent
India, brings a contest for rights between two washerwomen – one
claiming that the river belonged to the East India Company – a ‘fact’
that, she argues, is too complexly threaded with traces of history and
effect to be just dismissed or theoretically wished away as insignificant.
When theory encounters such an experience, one that spaces the layers
of history with perception, experience and the realities of everyday life,
how is the assessment to be done? What should the potential approach
towards such a situation, where the women reflect truths through
effects that have acquired validity by usage and social assertion, be?
Spivak issues a note of caution that opens up the debate for feminist
theory and its so-called international priorities: ‘I should not conse-
quently patronize and romanticize these women, nor yet entertain a
nostalgia for being as they are. The academic feminist must learn to
learn from them, to speak to them, to suspect that their access to the
political and sexual scene is not merely to be corrected by our superior
theory and enlightened compassion’ (186). How is this world of
women, whose existence on the fringes of society cannot be accessed
through the frameworks that feminists may engage for understanding
them, to be accessed then? For, as she points out, whenever there is a
First World study of other cultures, the distance between the subject
and the writer is unmistakable. Spivak does not make a plea for a
nativist engagement with the subject of Third World women, but at the
same time, she argues that feminism cannot aspire to read cultures
other than those the West is familiar with unless there is a sense of
understanding that takes the circumstances at play into account. This
cannot be done as a matter of privilege, but through a process of cul-
tivation and realignment of critical values. And as she has shown by
her brilliant reading of Kristeva’s book About Chinese Women, theo-
retical expertise cannot always stand for understanding or appraisal.
What we have, in effect, in About Chinese Women is a series of critical
assumptions that portend to represent the world of the subject, but
that is far from the case. When Spivak says in the course of her criti-
cism of Kristeva’s reading spread over 70 pages in the book ‘speculation
has become historical fact’ (189), such a design can be extended to
encompass the Kristevan project generally as well. Spivak is unsparing
in her questioning of the method that Kristeva uses, but as it becomes
clear in the course of the analysis, the issue is of much deeper concern.
On the one hand, Kristeva uses ‘macrological terms’ (193) to dissect
the state of women in Chinese society and ends up fudging up the scene
and generalizing where specificities are ironed or glossed over, and on
the other, she projects a West onto the others in the Third World with-
out seeing or acknowledging the wide differences that situate different
cultures. Spivak weaves in the Indian worldview and asks: ‘What
about us? The “Indo-European” world whose “monotheism” sup-
ports the argument of the difference between China and the West is not
altogether monotheistic. The splendid, decadent, multiple, oppressive,
and more than millennial polytheistic tradition of India has to be writ-
ten out of the Indo-European picture in order that this difference may
stand’ (193). This is brilliantly argued. Spivak’s analysis draws out the
imperatives of criticism in a global context where the contest of priori-
ties cannot be determined by a set of givens that the First World uses
to structure and shape the other spaces of the world. In fact, there is a
streak of ‘anti-feminism’ (192) in Kristeva’s book which appears to be
complicit with that tendency in the Western worldview which looks at
the Third World askance, and sees such spaces as other, no doubt, but
something that is programmed to fit in with a presumed condition of
cultural difference based on what matters in the so-called First World.
It is in such a context that Spivak cautions against too much reliance
on the insights of ‘French’ feminism for an understanding of the state
of women in other parts of the world: ‘I am suggesting, then, that a
deliberate application of the doctrines of French High “Feminism” to
a different situation of political specificity might misfire’ (194). How
is one to engage with the specificities of French feminism? Spivak rec-
ognizes that the many strands of French feminism cannot quite be
factored in through single matrix, but perhaps the difficulty of dealing
with a question of a ‘what is’ nature is consistent across the discursive
plane: ‘We shall consider the fact that the most accessible strand of
French feminism is governed by a philosophy that argues the impos-
sibility of answering such a question’ (194). In reading French feminism
through the matrix of deconstruction, Spivak sees a form of interroga-
tion that characterizes this intellectual movement, but this is not a
questioning of norms per se; it is the adoption of a method (evident in
Cixous’s adoption of the Derridean strategies of reading in ‘Laugh of
the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’), and in the writings of Kristeva again, there
is the spacing of priorities that does not give in to the exigencies of the
foundationalism in Western thought. Sometimes, the subtleties are
worked out with remarkable expertise and tact, displaying both insight
and an awareness of the state of cultural practice and historical bag-
gage. Commenting on another Kristevan passage, Spivak shows the
‘best of French feminism’ (198) comes through in her reading of the
woman question: ‘Against sexism, where women unite as a biologi-
cally oppressed caste; and for feminism, where human beings train to
prepare for a transformation of consciousness’ (198–199). Yet, as
Spivak points out subsequently, there are insistent dangers in adopting
the Derridean mode without qualification, and this is something that
both Kristeva and Cixous have been aware of. One cannot avoid tak-
ing a position when it comes to the crux, and in spite of the impression
that Derrida’s writings seem to give, that it is free play that destabilizes
the process of structuring in any thought, there are nuances that Der-
rida is attentive to, and these are the points that require recognition.
Writing of Derrida’s method when it comes to the challenge to the
orthodoxies in the Western philosophical tradition, Spivak observes:
‘Much of Derrida’s critique of humanism-phallocentrism is concerned
with a reminder of the limits of deconstructive power as well as with
the impossibility of remaining in the in-between. Unless one is aware
that one cannot avoid taking a stand, unwitting stand get taken’ (202).
French feminist thought, here argued through the writings of Kristeva
and Cixous, cannot therefore be seen in terms of Derridean decon-
struction alone. In the critical examination of the writings of Plato and
Descartes, Luce Irigaray, the other major French feminist, makes use
of the ‘deconstructive themes of indeterminacy, critique of identity,
and the absence of a totalizable analytic foothold, from a feminist
point of view’ (205). When the issue of the ‘international’ dimensions
of French feminism comes, Spivak suggests one needs to be ‘vigilant . . .
against the sort of gallic attitudinizing that has been a trend in Anglo-
American literary criticism since the turn of the century’ (204). What
she is calling for here is a recognition of values that derive from the
insightful imperatives of French feminism, but which are, at the same
time, alert to forms of determinism when it comes to the reading of
other cultures, other women, something that would enable it to avoid
the structural functionalism she referred to at the beginning of the
essay. While the West, through the incisive French avatar, or otherwise,
has opened up ways of seeing the woman question, there are arresting
issues that the international spaces beyond it are looking to be
answered, and how this is to be brought about is the challenge before
feminism, more so, before critical thought itself in a world that is
becoming increasingly aware of the distance between theory and
practice.
Testing waters: Mahasweta Devi, theory and

the ‘Third World’
In Other Worlds is a breakthrough collection in more ways than one.
Its cross-generic arrangement, the incorporation of translations of
Mahasweta Devi, glosses that engage with the issues and discourses
therein and the novel and suggestive modes of critically approaching
the texts in context open up new possibilities of doing theory. In the
two stories by Mahasweta Devi, the trope of the woman subjected to
social normativization controls the narrative centre; yet, as Spivak has
demonstrated elsewhere in the book, these stories seem to aptly exem-
plify the theme with which Spivak began: cultural politics. Politics runs
across the cultural and social space in both of these stories; in ‘Breast-
Giver’ it is the overriding pressures of a patriarchal worldview and a
network where the woman is reduced to a function, and in ‘Draupadi’,
the protagonist is sucked into the vortex of a socially uneven arrange-
ment, one that situates her as part of a difficult world.
In ‘Draupadi’, the players who determine the nature of the politi-
cal contest are under erasure, and only the machinery that does duty
serves as the proxy for one of the parties in the conflict. Dopdi techni-
cally has not been pawned in a game of dice, but the metaphor of the
catch being the object of consumption holds true here too. The matter
is much more intricate here, at least if we confine ourselves to a read-
ing of the disrobing episode, and Senanayak is no Duryodhana. Dopdi
is not the woman in a political game, where the identity of the victim
enhances the intensity of the suffering of the antagonist; she is one of
many who have succumbed to similar pressures in a horrific political
and social environment. This is a major departure from the revenge
structure in the Mahabharata, where this episode sends the narrative
into a fast-spinning spiral, one in which the memory of the event recurs
time and again to invigorate the Pandavas to sustain their passion for
an equally humiliating answer. Instead of the divine agency in the form
of Krishna aiding Draupadi before a hapless public incompetent to
come forward, here Dopdi transforms her body into a mode of attack,
confronting Senanayak with the very instrument that constituted her
weakness. In the story, the ending is the key – it revisits the oppres-
sor with the memory of the event in all its starkness – and forces a
frightened Senanayak into submitting that resistance need not always
be brutal, forceful or physically driven. We do not know how things
turn out for Dopdi eventually, but given the nature of the political
circumstances upon which this episode is situated, there is hardly any
reason to assume that things could be ‘normal’ after its occurrence.
The immediate circumstances of the story is the Naxalite resistance
to India’s state machinery, and Dopdi finds herself caught between
forces that fight it out for purposes that are not directly related to
the way she and her ilk conduct their lives. There is too much at
stake for people like Dopdi in situations of such volatility, and Devi
seems to suggest that even the assumption of some leadership role in
a conflict-ridden zone cannot enable or empower her. The questions
are complicated because it is not simply a matter confined to two par-
ties battling it out for supremacy in an open field, and it is equally
difficult to disengage the threads that bind the local dimensions in a
much wider spectrum of social unrest. The politics of tribal suffering
and its appeal for redress is one of the factors informing the militant
side of the Naxalite uprising, but there are other more layered ideo-
logical and economic issues attached to it that are too complicated to
unravel. Mahasweta Devi’s thematic concern is concentrated on the
figure of Dopdi as an individual, and her reduction to petty objecthood
through the mode of rape pushes the political circumstance into the
background. Thus, questions of police violence and rape engage our
attention immediately. The gangrape of Dopdi is not perpetrated by
miscreants or social outcasts but by the state’s protective apparatus. As
such, an event would go unrecorded, an experience that would find no
reference in public memory or history. This is what Mahasweta Devi
focusses on in the story. How does a victim respond in such a situation
where the machinery’s might overwhelms even its articulation? The
step taken by Dopdi is brutal and stark in a non-violent way: it is a
form of submission that compels the oppressor into backtracking from
an action which had been the source of his pride. We can also see that
the dividing lines are not merely political but quite literally gendered:
Dopdi becomes a commodity because she is a woman. Her resistance,
ironically, is not mounted by a disavowal of her identity as a woman,
but through what is most desired, her body, which she places for fur-
ther consumption to her oppressor, an act that confronts her oppressor
in uncompromising terms. Such an offering is not rhetorically framed,
and in its straight question lies a resistance, which is unprecedented in
the manner of its posing.
Can politics be conditioned through a given frame, already set to
order? In her ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to ‘Draupadi’ Spivak explores
how set norms determine matrices of power not just within societies
where hierarchies are in contest but equally in fields where culture
wars are played out in circumstances of great volatility. In seeing the
villain Senanayak as an archetype, Spivak projects the difficulty of the
First World in coming to terms with the Third – an equation she fur-
thers through a correspondence which locates Senanayak and Dopdi in
these two frames – but as we go on to see in her reading of the story, the
axis of reference is never one of straight association. The story holds
great promise for the complicated situation presented in the story as
an instance of cultural politics in practice, and even as the theatre of
power stirs the field, represented not merely by Senanayak but also by
the apparatus that foists and engineers the assault on Dopdi, there is a
constant tug and pull that shows how set apart each world is. Spivak
focusses on this rupture that marks the contesting spaces in the story
when she writes:
I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the
sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi
(Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation
to the First-World scholar in search of the Third world. . . . The
approximation I notice relates to the author’s careful presentation
of Senanayak as a pluralist aesthete. In theory, Senanayak can
identify with the enemy. But pluralist aesthetes of the First World
are, willy-nilly, participants in the production of an exploitative
society. Hence in practice, Senanayak must destroy the enemy, the
menacing other. He follows the necessities and contingencies of
what he sees as his historical moment. There is a convenient col-
loquial name for that as well: pragmatism.
(245–246)
Spivak admits that her reading is ‘influenced by “deconstructive prac-
tice” ’ (246), especially that dimension of the exercise which enables
her to locate ‘the insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-
subject is herself complicit with the object of her critique’ (246–247).
This direction of critical engagement where Spivak tries to examine
the complex interweaving of priorities and compulsions that control
conduct thus points towards the difficulty of following the binary logic
that seems apparent on the surface. Where loyalties are not static, or
fixed beyond alteration, the thread that connects theory and practice
remains tenuous, taut and arrestingly tense. Calling Dopdi a deroman-
ticized figure, shorn of the gloss that attends upon the Mahabharata
figure whose traces remain inscripted on her body and name, Spivak
shows how this response to contemporary history by Mahasweta Devi
is a critical engagement of the first order.
‘Fiction of this sort relies for its effect on its “effect of the real” ’
(336) – this is one of the ways in which Spivak opens up the textual
engagement with the politics of representation in Mahasweta Devi’s
stories, especially those two included in the book, ‘Draupadi’ and
‘Breast-Giver’. We have already seen how the figure of Dopdi func-
tions as the site of a theoretical engagement, played out over her body
and in the social space, and in the case of Jashoda, another mythical
alignment that reminds us of the imagination which places her in the
submissive bracket, attuned to meet the demands of a structure she
cannot but be a party to in ‘Breast-Giver’. The circumstances where
the conditions of social hierarchy control the channels of conduct and
function find in this story an interesting time-lapse being played out
selectively for the purposes of a specific kind of programming. Jashoda,
a Brahmin woman, married and with three children, is drawn into per-
forming the role of a surrogate mother in a kayastha household, that
of the Haldars, from whose resources she and her family derive their
sustenance. The story can be seen, Spivak argues, as ‘a parable of India
after decolonization’ (337). Spivak does not, in fact, stay on with that
thesis but suggests that such a position can be extended to engage with
the question of class and culture difference in a much more reward-
ing way, which would not only steer clear of a ‘neat reading’ (337)
and foray into that space where one could perhaps see possibilities of
factoring in the subaltern into the scheme. If one were to see ‘Breast-
Giver’ merely from the fabular dimension of nationalism that it can
figuratively offer, the subaltern must be excluded from such a reading.
Erasing this key from the critical arrangement would imply that the
overarching narrative of nationalism can do without these insistent
formations which cannot be formulated or accessed in ways that would
fit such schemes. The argument that Spivak builds upon, she shows,
emanates from Mahasweta Devi herself where subject positions such
as Jashoda’s remain beyond the scope of larger, overarching projects:
‘Mahasweta’s text might show in many ways how the narratives of
nationalism have been and remain irrelevant to the life of the subor-
dinate. The elite culture of nationalism participated and participates
with the colonizer in various ways. In Mahasweta’s story we see the
detritus of that participation’ (338–339). Can the gender condition be
dissociated from the narrative impulse of ‘Breast-Giver’ when the read-
ing of its preoccupations is seen as an allegory for the nation? Spivak
believes that emphasis on the allegorical possibility would reduce the
elasticity of the story considerably. In a telling summation of the story’s
movement through the orthodoxies of Marxist thought, Spivak shows
how the plot submits to questions of power in diverse ways: ‘The pro-
tagonist subaltern Jashoda, her husband crippled by the youngest son
of a wealthy household, becomes a wet-nurse for them. Her repeated
gestation and lactation support her husband and family. By the logic
of the production of value, they are both means of production. By the
logic of sexual reproduction, he is her means of production (though
not owned by her) as the field beast or the beast of burden is the
slave’s’ (341).
The Marxist-feminist placement of the imperatives of ‘Breast-Giver’,
however, cannot encompass a wider, situational issue – that of Third
World literature and its reception in the West, of which this story can
serve as a test case – and this is where Spivak questions both the poli-
tics and the design involved in the approach to the subject itself. What
is a ‘problem’ with the tendency in the West in considering women’s
texts from the Third World through the same lens for Spivak is also an
issue of greater import than merely that of curriculum design; it con-
cerns a lack of inwardness with processes of understanding that beset
the theoretical paradigms we make use of today. A story like ‘Breast-
Giver’, by the very questions it raises, offers the possibility of engaging
with subjects that have hitherto been read through pre-structured, or
assumed, perspectives, the point exemplified by Mahasweta Devi’s
attempts to see the narrative as a figurative take on India after decolo-
nization. How does the Western appropriation of the Third World
text rear problems that cannot quite be discerned from beyond the
contexts of origin? Spivak writes, stating that this is an issue that can-
not be glossed over as easily, which requires a much more sustained
critical engagement and an interrogation of the taken-for-granted
generalizations that have served so far: ‘There is a tendency in the
U.S. towards homogenizing and reactive critical descriptions of Third
World literatures. There is a second tendency, not necessarily related
to the first, to pedagogic and curricular appropriation of Third World
women’s texts in translation by feminist teachers and readers who are
vaguely aware of the race-bias within mainstream feminism’ (349).
Spivak does not see herself outside the frame she is referring to; in fact,
her very act of translation circumscribes her own engagement with the
text of Mahasweta Devi and the ‘benevolent impulse’ (349) that she
recognizes as being problematic. The attempt to engage with Third
World women’s literature is a forward movement in many ways, but
it is not distant from the polemics of social arrangement and reception
that these texts are embedded with. This brings Spivak to the larger
question: can the elite methodology enable the subaltern? This ‘larger
question’ (355), which the story stages and brings to the centre of the
critical enquiry itself, also carries with it the power of resistance, a
narrative energy that resists reductionist encapsulation. The story thus
considers the woman subject as subaltern and thwarts the categories
of feministic summation that may be imposed on it from the different
positions from which it viewed.
Inhabiting the shifting line between parable and representation,

undoing the opposition between tenor and vehicle, Mahasweta’s
Jashoda also expands the thematics of woman’s political body.
Within liberal feminism, the feminist body politic is defined by the
struggle for reproductive rights.
It is of course of central importance to establish women’s right
to practice and withhold reproduction. A text such as ‘Stanaday-
ini’, by posing the double scene of Jashoda as both subaltern (rep-
resentation rather than character) and parabolic sign, reminds us
that the crucial struggle must be situated within a much larger
network where feminism is obliged to the clear race- and class-
specific contours which depend upon an exclusive identification
of woman with reproductive or copulating body.
(355)
The subaltern as trope and as mode of access:

questions for a theoretical framework
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reading of the subaltern as an agency,
and as situational mode in history, has been consolidated in critical dis-
course through her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ even though there
have been other spaces where she has looked at the question time and
again, and in a variety of contexts. In this essay, she revisits her own
situation as Indian, and then threads through it the problem associated
with the process of homogenization, especially when it comes to the
issue of othering:
I was born in India and received my primary, secondary, and uni-

versity education there, including two years of graduate work. My
Indian example could thus be seen as a nostalgic investigation of
the lost roots of my own identity. Yet even as I know that one
cannot freely enter the thickets of ‘motivations’, I would maintain
that my chief project is to point out the positivist-idealist variety of
such nostalgia. I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of
advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and educa-
tion has provided me with a sense of historical canvas, a hold on
some of the pertinent languages that are useful tools for a brico-
leur, especially when armed with the Marxist scepticism of con-
crete experience as the final arbiter and a critique of disciplinary
formations. Yet the Indian case cannot be taken as representative
of all countries, nations, cultures, and the like that may be invoked
as the Other of Europe as Self.
(281)
The theme is consistently present in the writings of Spivak: the theme

of the problem of othering, of reading cultures through apparatuses
that cannot quite address the complicated nature of the experience
emerging from such contexts. In the preceding passage, too, we see
the conscious engagement with this problem, the awareness of the
difficulties associated with swaying one way or the other because of
either inadequacy or its reverse, a sense of supremacy. And further
complicated is the status of the ‘subaltern subject’, one whose inability
to articulate brings forth new advocates, and vocabularies that aspire
to speak on such a subject’s behalf. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ is a
response to the Subaltern Studies Collective led by Ranajit Guha, and
this is one question, Spivak contends, any engagement with the subject
must face, and answer. This essay, therefore, turns the analytical proj-
ect on its head and drawing upon the resources of deconstruction and
Marxism, she invites us to attend to the faultlines that stare at us even
as we consider the possibility of engaging with subaltern experience.
If the subaltern subject is situated on the very margins of the text that
we encounter as history, what about the ‘woman’ subject inscribed
within such a bracket, asks Spivak: ‘Within the effaced itinerary of
the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced’
(287). This then is a matter that must be taken up by the subaltern
historians, and they must take it head on; the problem, however, is of
another kind: with their awareness of such space and what its charac-
ter may entail for the articulation of critical discourse, the postcolonial
thinkers associated with such a project find themselves in a tight spot;
they find this ‘privilege is their loss’ (287). At the end of the essay when
Spivak says with grim finality that the ‘subaltern cannot speak’ (307),
she is, as she points out, taking off from the Derridean caution that
appropriation of the other through assimilation is not only dangerous
but also ineffective. Are postcolonial intellectuals alert to this trap,
where privilege is also a challenge?
Spivak’s argument for a critical vocabulary and a discourse that
could attend to the subaltern as agency and as historical inevitability
was, in fact, dealt with in the 12th essay in In Other Worlds, ‘Subaltern
Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, originally published in 1985.
Here, she looks at two things primarily: first, how has the Subaltern
Studies project emerged and, second, what does it take up for its sub-
ject of enquiry? In order to go beyond the conventional paradigms of
critical arrangement, the imperative of the Subaltern Studies group
must be concerned with a ‘change of terms’ as the existing format of
examination does not suffice. In effect, subaltern historians are look-
ing for a change in the way instrument of the sign functions, but this is
not an easy task, nor one that would easily induce the orthodox ways
of reading into submission. As such, a ‘functional change in a sign-
system is a violent event’ (271). The relation between time and social
frames that are separately situated is sought to be engaged in this form
of reading as a ‘transactional reading’ (272), but the gap between the
theoretical aspiration and the desired-for articulation remains. This
is where Spivak says she would like to intervene. We have already
seen how, in the two stories by Mahasweta Devi included in In Other
Worlds, the effacement of the subaltern is orchestrated by a form of
social design, and while the pressure of the narrative is evident, there is
a constant tug and pull within that opens up the fissures in these repre-
sentations. But the process of enquiry – the politics that comes through
in the choice of events and practices – emerges in the form of a con-
tradiction. The contradiction is that the subaltern historians locate in
the ‘failures’ of their subjects an attendant consciousness ‘as an inter-
pretable construct’ (273). Spivak sees, therefore, such an engagement,
where the consolidation of the elite is posited against the subaltern,
as ‘too simple for the practice of the collective’ (274). In looking at
failures, displacements and other circumstances that have not had their
share of articulation in mainstream accounts, in historical surveys that
cover the field, subaltern historians organize the theses of reading
along played-out lines, ones which presume the elite consciousness
within a foreclosed bracket. This is what Spivak argues against. ‘My
point is, simply, that failures or partial successes in discursive-field
displacement do not necessarily relate, following a progressivist scale,
to the “level of consciousness” of a class’ (273–274), writes Spivak.
The argument, then, is about both: method and objective. How far
can a ‘compartmentalized view’ (275) deliver where there is a form of
reduction at work? In effect, the danger of reading against something
that is devised as a given is always there: ‘By the ordinary standards of
coherence, and in terms of their own methodology, the possibility of
failure cannot be derived from any criterion of success unless the latter
is a theoretical fiction’ (275).
As a strategic design and as a critical imperative, Subaltern Studies
cannot ignore that it is a strategy after all, an exercise directed at the
unravelling of the gaps that history does not conventionally attend
to. If and when the Subaltern Studies objective locates in the subject
of the subaltern as an unambiguous measure, whose articulation is
brought to the surface through a knitting of traces that history has not
accounted for, then problems will crop up. Spivak makes this point
pretty clear when she writes: ‘Since a “reading against the grain” must
forever remain strategic, it can never claim to have established the
authoritative truth of a text, it must forever remain dependent upon
practical exigencies, never legitimately lead to a theoretical orthodoxy.
In the case of the Subaltern Studies group, it would get the group off
the dangerous hook of claiming to truth-knowledge of the subaltern
and his consciousness’ (296). We can also see that Spivak brings in her
critical understanding of deconstruction and the insights it provides
for the very process of reading: ‘You can only read against the grain
if misfits in the text signal the way’ (290). In her ‘Introduction to the
Routledge Classics Edition’ she terms her engagement with the collec-
tive as a ‘turbulent association’ (x). Once we have gone through her
reading of the status of the subaltern, the erasure of such a figure in
historical accounts, and then place the revitalization of the subaltern
as both agency and site by the collective, it is not difficult to see the
reason for Spivak’s use of the word ‘turbulent’ here. One of the most
insightful and original minds of our time, she has transformed many
of the assumptions that have done service in the name of theory; at
the same time, Spivak is not revisionist, nor a radical, but an astute
reasoner – her take on the Subaltern Studies group is a representative
example – and as she has facilitated broader forays into the diverse
fields such as feminism, Marxism and poststructuralist thought, she
has done so with a force and conviction that is truly remarkable.
Works cited
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Lawrence Gross-
berg and Cary Nelson, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
Urbana-Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.
_______. ‘The Labour of the Negative’, Interventions, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1999,
p. 268.
_______. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics [1987], New York, NY:
Routledge, 2006.
9 Homi K. Bhabha: The
Location of Culture
The question of agency: Bhabha’s
postcolonial imperative
By the time Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture appeared in print,

‘postcolonial’ as a term had its fair share of currency in critical dis-
course, articulated either through the historical envisioning of a past
that required revision or in surveys that sought to address the subject
of difference through a more insistent culture-centric lens. In many of
these forays, the givens were quite a few, and as the writings of Frantz
Fanon, Albert Memmi, Octavo Mannoni, for instance, demonstrated,
the focus was primarily on inviting attention to the pressures exerted
on the colonized space by an imperialist apparatus that imposed itself
from multiple quarters. As decolonization facilitated more nuanced,
as well as, critical responses to the experience of colonialism, thinkers
such as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak offered read-
ing positions that sought to attend to circumstances that were not
quite given the attention they were now being subjected to. More than
a settled, unwavering condition, colonialism was not confined to an
either/or frame alone, but questions of method and other theoretical
priorities came to occupy thinkers by the end of the twentieth century.
Why is the method of examination as important as the subject itself?
That we are now considering such an issue, in fact, owes much to the
theoretical intervention of Homi K. Bhabha who, along with Said and
Spivak, called for a radical redrawing of disciplinary boundaries for a
subject that was only just finding its feet.
Homi Bhabha’s placement of characteristics for association with and
identification of ‘postcolonialism’ extends beyond the circumstances
of its function as a political response to the changed world order. This
does not imply that his critical undertaking swerves away from the
political conditions that postcolonialism as an ‘agency’ refers to, but,
rather, it invites us to attend to the necessity of assessing the terms and
what these analytical exercises entail in the very process of question-
ing. Bhabha is often found to be difficult, or even unnecessarily dense,
182 Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture
but such labels fall off the mark when it comes to dealing with the
practice of critical theory that he fashioned to address issues which no
straight binary arrangement can effectively negotiate. The Location of
Culture is a packed book. Heavily wrought in conceptual detail, the
book’s density is not its ornament but is a required structural condi-
tion whereby Bhabha draws in the complicated but connected threads
impinging upon the processes of history making as well as those which
are apparently situated outside the limits of the discipline. Bhabha’s
departure from the settled channels of early postcolonial thought is, at
one level, an indication of the pressures contemporary reading strate-
gies exert upon situations and subjects whereby the seminal importance
of the analytical process itself is taken up for examination and scrutiny.
Bhabha locates postcolonialism as an intervention, as an argumenta-
tive strategy whose potential to unsettle set notions of modernity offers
access to situations and circumstances that other critical practices fail
to sufficiently address. Postcolonialism’s value derives from its abil-
ity to bring to notice conditions of narrative that existing analytical
designs do not consider necessary for the purposes of scrutiny. Is it
then this interventionist dimension of postcolonial theory that Bhabha
situates as its most recognizable characteristic? Certainly, postcolo-
nialism is much more than an instrument of intervention. And spread
across the pages of The Location of Culture are insights, and excitingly
innovative forays that stretch the theoretical possibilities of postcolo-
nial studies outside the already-confirmed space of colonial experience
and its immediate aftermath. Drawing on the recognized trajectories
of critical thought, but departing to forge his own line of argument,
Bhabha envisions a theoretical roadmap for a postcolonial response
to literature and society that not only adjusts to the continually evolv-
ing dynamics in the contemporary world but also engages with other
analytical methods to examine the potential of the critical exercise
itself. A key to Bhabha’s approach emerges in his essay titled ‘The
Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, placed midway in The Location
of Culture, where he situates postcolonialism as a strategic process
through which the circumstances of both contemporary culture and
perceptions of history are brought into the ambit of critical discourse
in order to look at the complexities associated with modernity. For, as
Bhabha goes on to demonstrate, one of the issues at hand is that of
the adopted parameters which govern reading strategies, and with an
awareness of the dangers accompanying any exercise that looks at his-
tory as one of its concerns, it is imperative that the method of enquiry
must also be examined and put to test. This is what Bhabha projects
as an important condition of postcolonial practice:
Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture 183
Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven
forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political
and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial
perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World
countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical
divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in
those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a
hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differ-
ential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communi-
ties, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues
of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination
in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within
the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity.
(245–246)
The passage offers us many of the important keys that recur through
Bhabha’s critical writings on postcolonialism. For instance, the idea
that the lopsided world order is not a given to be taken for granted,
but a structured condition brought about by the functioning ‘geopo-
litical’ divisions, is what he builds upon, following which he places
postcolonial criticism as ‘witness’ to the complicated equation affect-
ing the world. Related to the term ‘witness’ is ‘testimony’, situated
here as site (something from which postcolonial perspectives ‘emerge’),
but it is also a facilitating agency, for it makes it possible for one to
draw from the experience of colonialism threads that enable a critical
look at the state of things. Then, we have the critique of ‘modernity’,
which Bhabha reads as having a hegemonic dimension whose pres-
sure affects the way countries and cultures see themselves as. Seen as a
dominant principle through which the registers of culture are placed for
encapsulation and assessment, modernity normalizes and evens out the
multiple aspects of living modes, and it is for the revision of such a pro-
cess that postcolonialism must play its crucial role in critical pedagogy.
If the history-making enterprise of the West – which has programmed
a particular trajectory of modernity as the benchmark for the purpose
of evaluation of cultural movements across the world – is evidence
enough, Bhabha locates in such a process as being partial in its exami-
nation, for these assumptions acquire normality, and it is this that
calls for both intervention and revision. It is necessary to see through
the facade of this modernity thesis that situates only a particular kind
of movement across the time plane, and when Bhabha lists terms
such as ‘discrimination’ and ‘disadvantaged’ as cornerstones in criti-
cal enquiry, he is highlighting the pressure of the cultural juggernaut
that runs down others in an exercise of power. The critique of such
a dominant narrative framework, then, can emerge from the experi-
ence of colonialism, not only because it has seen the play of ideologies
in an uneven field but also because the systematic organization of
knowledge-production methods has to be seriously interrogated now.
And it is postcolonialism that has the wherewithal and the theoretical
flexibility to lay bare the structures of power that have ‘rationalized’
the modernity thesis through which the cultural situations of the world
have been primarily accessed and determined. The preceding passage
also refers to ‘ambivalence’, another key term in the Bhabha canon,
one whose instrumentality and potential he explores in The Location
of Culture. Perhaps the key that most significantly holds the argu-
mentative focus in ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’ is the term
‘cultural difference’. What Bhabha goes on to argue from this thread of
cultural difference is to call for a ‘radical revision of the social tempo-
rality in which emergent histories may be written’ (246). This process
is not a mere exchange of positions within the existing framework
where culture is already determined, but it is a recognition that cul-
ture is ‘an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often
composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in
the act of social survival’ (247). Once it is acknowledged that culture
cannot be accessed through a fixed set of notions, it becomes possible
to engage with its dynamic, evolving character by considering those
situations which are often run over by ‘national’ narratives, which
constructs the past–present line to articulate its own cultural impera-
tives. Culture cannot be confined to such lines of narrative which claim
‘authentic’ pasts for existing circumstances, and it is here that postco-
lonial intervention can open up these fissures for critical scrutiny. Here,
culture is not a condition alone, it becomes a ‘strategy for survival’
(247). What is it that places the postcolonial in a position of advantage
in this project of reading cultures? In the subsequent discussion in ‘The
Postcolonial and the Postmodern’ Bhabha goes on to suggest the ways
in which postcolonial criticism can offer the apparatus and the method
for the examination of ‘culture’ in today’s society.
Bhabha argues that culture in the contemporary world must be
seen in its ‘transnational’ and ‘translational’ aspects, each foreground-
ing conditions that the postcolonial agency would so vitally address.
This seeming play of terms, however, highlight two important fea-
tures associated with the very nature of the enterprise postcolonialism
seeks to deal with, the first of which is history and the second is the
state of contemporary society. That the history of colonial expansion
and cultural traffic across national spaces engage social, political and
economic exigencies is a well-acknowledged credo in postcolonial
studies. The examination of cultural movements would inevitably
entail both the reading into and reading of traces that would be accom-
modative enough to consider, for instance, the experiences of slavery
on the one hand and the ‘civilizing mission’ on the other. This aspect
of culture Bhabha calls ‘transnational’. The ‘translational’ as a condi-
tion of culture involves the recognition of the processes through which
signals are transmitted across the social terrain where the ‘how’ and
the ‘what’ of culture in a globally interactive and highly technologized
world become an issue of considerable complexity. What these aspects
of culture and the understanding of it show is that it is no longer
possible to work with a set of assumptions and proceed on the path
of enquiry believing that situations can be approached and accessed
through such fixities. That is not the case, not only in terms of how
cultural transactions take place over time and in specific locations, but
the complex nature of the critical exercise too comes to the surface
when such fluid conditions are subjected to analysis.
The distinction between appearance and reality – Bhabha uses the
alternative terms ‘semblance’ and ‘social specificity’ (247) – is an
important one. This is because the traffic across geopolitical spaces
affects both perception and production of meaning, and even such
processes are not determinate or available for direct access. Bhabha’s
choice of words show how critical thought engaged in such debates
must engineer modes of arrangement that do not succumb to the
weight of existing and already-determined reading strategies. The post-
colonial imperative, Bhabha contends, serves as a facilitating agency
as it ‘resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation’ (248).
In other words, postcolonialism cannot be projected or organized as a
corrective to dominant structures of power, because such an initiative
would dull the interrogative focus of postcolonial thought and make it
a catch-up runner. Rather, postcolonialism attends to the conditions of
cultural value that permeate and impact contemporary understanding,
and it recognizes the ‘hybrid’ character of critical discourse in a cli-
mate where totalizing structures remain a constant threat. Bhabha, at
the same time, points out that postcolonial criticism does not actually
replicate the analytical model that critics such as Fredric Jameson have
promoted under the aegis of cultural relativism and pluralism. What
postcolonial thinkers have sought to address goes beyond a critical
reading of cultural practice, for, conditioned by the awareness of his-
torical trajectories that operate as givens in the intellectual space, the
examination opts in those circumstances whose limits are determined
by Europe in the name of tradition. Bhabha alludes to the positions
taken by C. L. R. James and Edward Said to articulate the need for
revision and contestation of critical priorities. There is a reason for
this. Without this postcolonial intervention, cultural criticism moves
between the already-consolidated templates in such practices. As such,
the postcolonial imperative activates the critical impulse which also
informs the postmodern interrogation of modernity, and given the
nature of the uneven, unequal world where migrant populations shift
across borders, it is inevitable that critiques of this order will also ask
questions of ‘a consensual and collusive “liberal” sense of cultural
community’ (251). That is why, Bhabha argues, no discussion of cul-
tural practice today can steer away from the ‘process of alterity’ (251)
that lies embedded in these structures that occupy our critical space.
The accommodative politics that proposes assimilation as one of its
objectives will not suffice to address the difficulties that beset contem-
porary society. More than a setting of terms, Bhabha’s plan of critical
exegesis is a process of questioning, and its subject is culture. Bhabha’s
work chart for the critical enterprise that he envisages is well laid, and
it is here that he outlines how culture could be approached, read and
engaged within the context of the contemporary world order:
Culture becomes as much an uncomfortable, disturbing practice of

survival and supplementarity – between art and politics, past and
present, the public and the private – as its resplendent being is a
moment of pleasure, enlightenment or liberation. It is from such
narrative positions that the postcolonial prerogative seeks to affirm
and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins
of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and
peoples. My use of poststructuralist theory emerges from this post-
colonial contramodernity. I attempt to represent a certain defeat,
or even impossibility, of the ‘West’ in its authorization of the ‘idea’
of colonization. Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of
modernity – rather than by the failures of logocentrism – I have
tried, in some small measure, to revise the known, to rename the
postmodern from the position of the postcolonial.
(251–252)
Bhabha’s attempt, as he himself calls is, is designed not just to introduce

the revisionist impulse into the analytical frames that are pressed into
service in postcolonial studies, but he aims to take it into the amor-
phous space of postmodernism so that this form of critical strategy
opens up the ‘known’ and familiar spaces of contemporary thought.
Such a position, where the margin jostles the recognized stakes, in fact,
can enlarge the limits of the postmodernist engagement with culture
beyond its already-determined limits. The reading of the cultural can
involve, Bhabha proposes, its situation as ‘an enactive, enunciatory
site’ (255) which would then relocate the entire process of cultural
practice outside the locked space of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (255)
where it is conventionally placed. The postmodern response to con-
temporary cultural practice cannot ensure the critical assessment of the
transformations taking place in the world order unless the paradoxes
of the shifting language enunciations are engaged for valuation. What
such an objective does, Bhabha, building upon the theses of Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida, argues here, is to facilitate an outside
space beyond the binary structures within which the knowledge ques-
tion is so often framed (257–259). In effect, such an agency operates
to consider the performative aspect of the cultural rather than a timed
‘capture’ of epistemological assumptions. In his reading of Barthes’s
daydream narrative in Tangiers in The Pleasure of the Text, Bhabha
sees the possibilities of the supplement, which he shows ‘is supple-
mentary, not alternative’ (260). It is the pursuit of such a theoretical
apparatus whose engagement with cultural space would move beyond
the limits but at the same time keep the sense of that which challenges
it in the loop that Bhabha considers relevant to critical discourse.
Is Bhabha then arguing for the accommodation of the postcolonial
agency within the critical space that the postmodern interrogation of
culture has appropriated for itself? He affirms that that is certainly not
the case. Towards the final phase of his essay ‘The Postcolonial and the
Postmodern’ Bhabha looks at the Foucauldian engagement with his-
tory and the situation of the human within the discursive spaces that
open up and facilitate such interventions. Yet Foucault’s brilliance is
directed at a different object of study, for, in the idea of ‘Man’ derives
from a glossing over of the many ‘others’ whose histories have never
found any articulation for them to be dehistoricized, the project that
Foucault embarks upon in many of his writings, most provocatively, in
The Order of Things. The human interface that Bhabha refers to can
only gain from the postcolonial imperative he moulds here, for neither
modernity nor the postmodern focus on cultural relativism can suit-
ably take up the ‘other spaces’ outside the inscribed narrative, or ‘the
peoples without a history’ (282).
The ‘other’ and its implications: stereotypes

and discourses
Bhabha’s reading of the stereotype is closely associated with the role
played by ambivalence in the discourses of colonialism, because it is
through the gaps that inhere in the consolidated logic which makes for
these fixities. This is a crucial point that he draws our attention to at
the beginning of ‘The Other Question’, the chapter where the subject
of discussion is the stereotype and its function in colonial discourse.
If stereotypes were unalterable givens, completely fixed foundational
structures, then ambivalence would have had no role to play in its cir-
culation. Rather, within a circumscribed limit, the stereotype operates
through ambivalent gestures even as it ‘produces the effect of probabilis-
tic truth and predictability’ and fashions possibilities that are ‘in excess
of what can be empirically proved or logically construed’ (95). This is
an important dimension of colonial experience that Bhabha opens up
here, almost in a turn that bears the Derridean examination of play in
‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, from
which the epigraph of this essay is drawn. Bhabha contends that it is
necessary to move out of the recognized parameters of placement (e.g.
negative/positive) and look at ‘the processes of subjectification made
possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse’ (95). The for-
mation of the subject is tied up with the way stereotypical discourses
operate. In seeing the ‘colonial subject’ as the site through which ‘forms
of difference’ (96) find articulation, he is also considering the process
of hierarchy determination in those theoretical strategies which have
marginalized the discussion of others, pushing the question outside the
frame of ‘Western representationalist discourse’ (97). The focus on the
transgressive potential of the other, for instance, even in a seemingly
accommodative reading of the Welles classic A Touch of Evil by Stephen
Heath, Bhabha demonstrates, exposes the limits of the Western response
to this subject. Borders, nation-spaces, gender questions and racism
emerge through different traces in such readings, but in spite of the pur-
suit of a liberal matrix, the tropes of marginality are banked upon, and
they have consistently served to orient critical practice. This is what
Bhabha asks us to attend to. He argues that though the stereotype has
been seen as a closed structural arrangement, it is that vital space which
facilitates the play of contrary conditions on the same plane. Defining
the stereotype, Bhabha says that it ‘is a complex, ambivalent, contradic-
tory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive, and demands
not only that we extend our critical and political objectives but that we
change the object of analysis itself’ (100).
If colonial discourse is seen as a strategy that draws its energy from
power structures which operate through consolidated registers, then
it is also necessary to situate such practice within the ambit of narra-
tive. This emphasis on the production of subjects within a prescribed
space owes not merely to the process of structuring that is invested in
the power apparatus that controls its circulation; it also derives from
a logic that is imposed in the name of truth. Positioning this method
within the operative layers that make up the colonial machinery,
Bhabha writes: ‘It resembles a form of narrative whereby the produc-
tivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed
recognizable totality. It employs a system of representation, a regime
of truth, that is structurally similar to realism’ (101). Carrying forward
Edward Said’s critical exposition of Orientalist discourse, Bhabha goes
on to show how the seeming essentialism is continuously undercut
by operations that contest the structures from within. At the same
time, however, he points out that Said did not further the discussion
on the discourse generating mechanism within the colonial space, but
it is necessary to look at the complicated processes involved in the
making of knowledge and this cannot be left to ‘inadequate attention’
(103). The nature of the stereotype and its function in the situation
of the other must be divested of the essentialisms that formulations
can fall prey to, for which Bhabha calls for a strategic engagement of
critical priorities: ‘The force of colonial and postcolonial discourse as
a theoretical and cultural intervention in our contemporary moment
represents the urgent need to contest singularities of difference and
to articulate diverse “subjects” of differentiation’ (105). More than
the social space where the stereotype operates and creates systems of
effect, it is in its incisive penetration of the psychological space that the
impact is realized. It functions as a normalizing agent, and processes
and conditions perceptions that work as aspired-for realities. Bhabha
uses the term ‘fetish’ to suggest this aspiration towards a set of norms
that serve to control the desires of both the colonizer and the colonized.
Viewed thus, ‘fetish or stereotype gives access to an “identity” which
is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and
defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its rec-
ognition of difference and disavowal of it’ (107). The function of the
stereotype, on the other hand, is evident in that caught-up individual
within spaces which he cannot control or determine, captured to great
effect in the title of Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks. Whether
as an example of mimicry, or as a split between contesting structures
that he is compelled to negotiate, this individual represents the site of
‘fantasy and defence’ (107). Othering here is conditioned by the logic
of difference which makes it possible for such an engagement between
differences to arrive at the same end, and this is no ‘simple’ affair but
a classic manifestation of stereotypical pressures that work to make
identities. In this context, Bhabha writes: ‘The stereotype is not a sim-
plification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a
simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation
that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through
the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the
subject in significations of psychic and social relations’ (107).
The manner in which the stereotype determines both identity and
the Other in discourses of colonialism can also be approached in terms
of a pattern that shows the cohabitation of opposites within the same
plane, neither letting go, and thus in effect we see a tug and pull that
has four strategic moves built with it. Bhabha uses four terms to situ-
ate this effect: ‘metaphor’, ‘narcissism’, ‘metonymy’ and ‘aggressivity’.
The Lacanian inheritance is clear, which he acknowledges and draws
from, but Bhabha’s brilliance lies in his opening up of the subject of
colonial space and the question of identity through the constant play of
desire that is threatened by ‘lack’. Colonial space, in this context, is seen
as that site of conflicting energies which relies on a series of repetitive
functions that constitute the ideas of the self and the other. All the four
terms referred to in Bhabha’s schema operate simultaneously. The other
is always part of the ‘apparatus of power’ (111) and involves not just
the condition of resistance but ‘knowledge value’ (111) as well. The way
this process of play is marked in identity formation exercises, Bhabha
suggests, cannot be stipulated to mean settled notions within a given
format. In other words, the operative ‘truth’ that affects the colonized
individual, for instance, and here he looks at Fanon’s narrative of the
body and the gaze it is subjected to, cannot be pinned to a formulaic
necessity. As such, the stereotype is both a disruption of the narrative
flow that ensures the sustenance of the colonial apparatus and a driv-
ing force that grants the whole system its generative power. Because
this operation is located within that space where ambivalence deter-
mines a constant resistance to recognized fixities, terms such as ‘skin’
or ‘race’ undergo revisions regularly. The other, stereotyped and read-
ied for appraisal, simultaneously demonstrates the fantasy that pulls in
the opposing directions of ‘desire’ and ‘defence’. Bhabha is consistent
in maintaining that no disengagement of ambivalence from the condi-
tion of the stereotype is possible. It goes alongside another contention
where he argues that this process of making subjectivities is not a stamp
imposed from without but is, rather, an interpenetrative design that
contributes so decisively to colonial discourse. Elaborating this, Bhabha
writes: ‘Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes
the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent
text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strate-
gies, displacement, over-determination, guilt, aggressivity; the masking
and splitting of “official” and phantasmatic knowledges to construct the
positionalities and oppositionalities of racist discourse’ (117). Towards
the end of ‘The Other Question’ Bhabha reiterates the significance
of interengagement of terms such as ‘power’, ‘governmentality’ and
‘knowledge’, which operate to grant the racial and colonial discourses
institutional legitimacy through political devices that give them value.
When this is effective, the colonized people are ‘deemed to be both the
cause and effect of the system, imprisoned in the circle of interpretation’
(119). And when this becomes normal and is seen and understood as
such, the processes which this complex web is woven by are subject to
the system of governance.
Identities in stance: self, space, cosmopolitanism

The situation of the subject and its markings in history form part of
Bhabha’s discussion in The Location of Culture in a variety of ways.
In spite of the density of his thought, and the closely packed argu-
mentative design, the issue of identity or subjectivity comes home
with remarkable clarity. It is in this context that we can see a thread
running across the theoretical plane that he charts to widely engage
with various circumstances in cultural and literary practice. Given the
immensely involved critical method that Bhabha employs, which not
only draws on an eclectic mix of registers and traces but also recondi-
tions the ways of seeing, it is necessary to locate the key words that
streams through this analytical traffic to articulate the priorities of his
thought. How does one respond to the demand and pressure of move-
ment across the social and cultural planes when self-evaluation is not a
choice but an inevitability? Such a question runs through the narrative
of Adil Jussawala’s Missing Person, a text Bhabha reads to tease out
conditions of identity and cultural difference and place them within
the context of a cosmopolitan and transforming world. In the making
of identities and the forces that operate to forge such formations in
a given situation, the parameters cannot be seen as inflexible; rather,
the field where subjectivities are played out engages with assumptions
that have validity within those very spaces. It is in this playing out of
patterns that the ideas of reception and performance effect both the
subject and the space he occupies. How far is the ‘personal’ imbricated
in all this cross-fertilization that takes place across cultural and social
planes to make demands on a subject’s worldview? How is it spaced
out in time and, more important, locationally? Bhabha wonders what
could have been his take on these issues had he himself not emerged
out of the specific context of his own life in the way he did. In the
‘Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition’, he opens up his own cir-
cumstances for scrutiny:
Growing up in Bombay as a middle-class Parsi – a member of a
small Zoroastrian-Persian minority in a predominantly Hindu and
Muslim context – I never imagined that I would live elsewhere.
Years later, I ask myself what it would be like to live without the
unresolved tensions between cultures and countries that have
become the narrative of my life, and the defining characteristic of
my work.
(x)
I went to Oxford to embellish the antique charms of the armoire;

I ended up realizing how much I desired street food. Why was I
intellectually fascinated but unmoved, when I found myself at the
academic acme of the literary culture that I had chosen to follow?
Fumbling towards an answer to that question brings me closer
to the critical lesson that I was to learn in my early years as an
apprentice academic working in the West. It was this: what one
expects to find at the very centre of life and literature – the sum-
mation of a Great Tradition, a touchstone of Taste – may only
be the dream of the deprived, or the illusion of the powerless.
The canonical ‘centre’ may, indeed, be most interesting for its elu-
siveness, most compelling as an enigma of authority. What was
missing from the traditionalist world of English literary study,
as I encountered it, was a rich and paradoxical engagement with
the pertinence of what lay in an oblique or alien relation to the
forces of centering. Writers who were off-centre; literary texts that
had been passed by; themes and topics that had lain dormant or
unread in great works of literature – these were the angles of vision
and visibility that enchanted me.
(x–xi)
This trail that Bhabha recollects here, a genesis of sorts which he draws
out in order to situate his own interest and priorities as a thinker, con-
tains the imprint of issues that have affected not just literary studies,
but more important, it has also come to impact the way thinking bears,
and is sometimes in dialogue with, the conditions of culture. It is not,
Bhabha points out, a question of categories in contest, for he does
not want to glorify the marginal or the unattended, that would entail
falling into the same rut, but what he is looking at is of much greater
concern to the state of the critical enterprise itself. First, of course, is
the pressure of the canon, here drawn not quite in the Leaviste forma-
tion, but in terms of a currency that runs across the literary spectrum,
one validated by estimation and perception, and its unsettling would
require not merely a revision of the parameters that are drawn for the
purpose but also a recognition of those situations that do not form
part of what constitutes critical priorities in the conventional sense. As
Bhabha points out, the objective is not to glorify or arrest the effects
of the ‘margin’ without qualification but to interrogate the spaces and
the cultural interstices wherein subjectivities are engaged in a variety of
ways. Second, identities are accompanied by the personal, not neces-
sarily always in inscribed form, but through registers that manifest in
unexpected ways and emerge through structures that may be contesta-
tory or accommodative, as the street food memory example in Oxford
exemplifies in the preceding passage. Third, the pressure of existing
paradigms demands responses that compel the subject to address
the issue of identity. In the subsequent elaboration of this theme in
the preface, Bhabha goes on to look at the processes through which the
characters of V. S. Naipaul – a reference he builds upon to articulate
the perspective on identity – operate in societies where they are caught
in the constantly moving cultural traffic. This is what Bhabha writes
of Naipaul’s characters and their position in the worlds they occupy:
‘Naipaul’s people are vernacular cosmopolitans of a kind, moving in-
between cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and
art that do not have a prior existence within the discrete world of
any single culture or language’ (xiii). Cosmopolitanism and globaliza-
tion are terms in wide currency, in Bhabha’s placement; however, they
follow an interesting trajectory whereby the situations in which such
categories are pressed for critical understanding present dimensions
that offer fresh ways of addressing them. When he looks at ‘global-
ization’ as something that is first measured in the local context, he is
also bringing in the circumstances in which traffic takes place within
seemingly defined spaces such as the ‘home’: ‘Globalization, I want to
suggest, must always begin at home. . . . The hegemonies that exist at
“home” provide us with useful perspectives on the predatory effects of
global governance however philanthropic or ameliorative the original
intention might have been’ (xv–xvi). What Bhabha is suggesting here is
that the ‘vernacular cosmopolitan’ is not one to confine himself to the
circumstance of a nation-centric vision of subjecthood, for his sense
of belonging engages more than just a form of identification with a
determined condition; it tries to make sense of ‘political practices and
ethical choices’ as well (xvii). When the voice of the individual in a
global environment is situated as the site of contestations emanating
from multiple directions, the issue of identity cannot be seen through
polarized marking alone: it calls for a more involved awareness of
the circumstances where the modes of exchange and dialogue are
shifting their symbolic layers. It is necessary, Bhabha contends, to place
oneself – he takes the example of Adrienne Rich’s representation of the
self’s negotiation with location – outside the limited space of the ‘local’
to consider it in terms of a wider ‘transnational history’ (xx). Whether
minoritarian or migrant, the individual voice must be accorded the
space to articulate even the sense of ‘unsatisfaction’ (xxi), which is
a stance-taking exercise, as against the bystanding passive witness to
social and political change. This is an important aspect of Bhabha’s
critical examination of identity in The Location of Culture. In a cli-
mate where politics, culture and social energies coalesce and cohabit
spaces that cannot be defined through the registers of polarized bina-
ries, stance-taking is a condition that circumscribes the self.
Bhabha reads Jussawala’s Missing Person to show how totalizing
schemes that build upon structures of social engagement are disrupted
when the confrontation with the other takes place, not as a straight
or unqualified given but as something that facilitates its circula-
tion. This theme of the ‘impossibility of claiming an origin for the
self (or the Other) within a tradition of representation that conceives
of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plenitudinous object of
vision’ (66) recurs throughout The Location of Culture. Articulated
and phrased from different points of reference, Bhabha’s emphasis on
the problems associated with structured identities in both the colo-
nial and the contemporary worlds enables the forging of a theoretical
framework wherein he can explore the situation by drawing a series
of labels: in-between, hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence. Each of
these terms relates to the complex intertwining of cultural matrices
that cannot be accessed in isolation, and so imbricated are they in
different combinations that the points of mergence are not open for
easy or patterned understanding. That is why the notion of hybridity,
or of the in-between space, serves to indicate an important direction
that any theoretical engagement can possibly take. It is also suggestive
that postcolonialism does not quite follow the trajectories that post-
modernist responses to cultural practice appear to foreground, that of
relativism or plurality on a global plane. For Bhabha, globalization
is one of the many reminders of the complicated nature of the rela-
tions that the contemporary world has, to not only deal with but also
situate in terms of specific local circumstances. When he looks at the
status of the individual, whether it is in Toni Morrison’s evocation of
the subjecthood in Beloved, Nadine Gordimer’s exploration of racial
politics in My Son’s Story or the survival tactics of Saladin Chamcha
in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the complications cannot be accessed
through the pattern of set polarities alone. And similar to the subject
facing the current of a globally induced cultural traffic, the individual
in the colonized space also gets caught up in a series of enunciations
that fluctuate continuously and dilute the rigidities that place him in
that society. Colonialism changes the subject in more ways than one. It
creates subjects that emerge from that world and experience to become
something else, different yet connected to structures of power and sub-
jugation that cannot be revisited in their ‘original’ forms. Bhabha uses
the term ‘hybrid’ to present this situation and its evocation in the fol-
lowing manner:
Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its

shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic rever-
sal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the
production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and
the original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of
the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of dis-
criminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation
and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It
unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power
but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that
turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.
For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space
where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its
objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory – or, in my mixed
metaphor, a negative transparency.
(159–160)
In looking at the formation of individuality within specific locations,

Bhabha considers the circumstances and conditions under which the
very question regarding it may be framed, and at the same time, he is
attentive to the modes of knowing that can impact this process. That
is why, consistently, Bhabha relates the situation of the self not merely
to circumstances of production but to ways in which perceptions work
and determine aspirations and desires in a complicated power structure.
Subjectivity, then, cannot be separated from the traces that its cultural
location textures it with, and nor can culture be approached as a body
in itself. Added to this is the difficulty of access that accompanies the
subject of culture, and it is the mode and method of reading that must
be critically examined in this process of critical understanding.
Connected to the question of identity, and impacting it, is the subject
of culture. It is not uncommon to find culture being referred to as a
framework impinging upon the circumstances of living, or as a marker
of social engagement, but Bhabha extends these dimensions to accom-
modate issues such as politics and identity, arguing that culture cannot
be dissociated from the conditions which facilitate perceptions about
it in the first place. Crucial to such a position is the moment of enun-
ciation, that situation where a contestation takes place between the
present (which he calls performative) and the ‘traditional’ ground, one
where cultural difference is most manifest. Throughout The Location
of Culture the play between conditions of power and authority, on the
one hand, and the dynamic, evolving practice of culture, on the other,
functions to configure relations within determined spaces. If culture
and its ‘diversity’ are recognized as presets in its reception across social
spaces, then behind this recognition lies a set of ‘pre-given cultural
contents and customs’ (50) which facilitate the different approaches
to these variations. When he keys in ambivalence as one of the arrest-
ing factors in the processing of cultural authority, Bhabha draws our
attention to the inadequacy of the ‘homogenizing effects of cultural
symbols and icons’ which can also be seen as the interrogation of the
‘sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general’ (52). The situa-
tion of ‘identity’ within the matrices of cultural practice, then, cannot
be taken for granted; it is a process that is dependent on the mark-
ers which impinge both perception and social understanding. And in
recognizing the fluid, transformative dynamics of the traffic across
locations that effect realization and self-evaluation, Bhabha invites us
to attend upon the complex swaying of priorities that shadow the iden-
tity question in contemporary history.
Theoretical takes on the subject: signs and differences

Of the many traces that are invested in the theoretical textures of The
Location of Culture, the imprint of Jacques Derrida is perhaps the most
acutely engaged, something that Bhabha acknowledges abundantly in
the book. At the opening of the chapter called ‘DissemiNation: Time,
Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’ he presents the
trace of the title, but it is equally evident that the matter is not confined
to the accommodation of the name alone; it is a drawing of the intel-
lectual resources that show the impact of the French thinker’s method,
and while this transmission shows the interactive nature of the cor-
respondence of ideas, we also get to see how today trajectories cannot
be articulated in isolated, self-enclosed pathways. Bhabha draws in his
‘person’ to locate his logic of the Derridean association, making his
self-examination a process and a site for the critical reading of the way
ideas traffic in the modern world:
The title of this chapter – DissemiNation – owes something to
the wit and wisdom of Jacques Derrida, but something more to
my own experience of migration. I have lived that moment of the
scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in
the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of
exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’
cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or the
cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign
tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gath-
ering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses,
disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other
worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival;
gathering the present.
(199)
Almost a poetic evocation of the possibilities of gatherings that direct

and determine conduct and response in this cosmopolitan world,
Bhabha centres his own self, his understanding of the process of travel
and migration, to show how migrancy and movement occupy us in
ways that are so inextricably intertwined. The ways in which the ‘dis-
semination’ takes place is not something that is confined to or engaged
with the circumstances of physical experience; it suggests the play of
the sign, negotiation across planes where meaning acquires validity
through the enunciated registers of culture. This could be evident in
different forms and ways. And, more interestingly, although Bhabha
locates his own experience as the text through which he threads the
different possibilities of gathering, he is engaging with something far
more extensive, something remarkably crucial to our understanding
of and response to culture. The sign and its markers that have been in
operation in locations seemingly different from the easily recognized
ones, irrespective of the age, depend on the faultlines of the structuring
paradigm to challenge the keys that enable such formations. Situating
the idea of the ‘outside’ in nineteenth-century culture, Bhabha argues
that one cannot submit to fixities without recognizing how the con-
dition of play is invested therein: ‘I suggest that we understand this
“outside” not in simple spatial terms but as constitutive of meaning
and agency. The “outside event” could also be the unacknowledged
liminality or “margin” of a discourse, the point where it contingently
touches the “other’s” discourse as itself ’ (295). What is this outside
that he is referring to here? These lines are from his chapter on the
Indian Mutiny of 1857 where the chapati became the site, symbol
and sign of culture, a point of reference that drew the opposing sides
into confrontation. What was generated in those crucial moments of
reading of the chapati was more than a nationalist vision; it involved a
play of the sign across counters that were engaged in affixing it to a dis-
tinctively identifiable form. But that was hardly possible, not because
of the mistrust between the warring factions but more so because it
involved the condition of reading the chapati as a sign, and therein
lay the problem of responding to it uniformly. As Bhabha points out,
‘The organizing principle of the sign of the chapati is constituted in
the transmission of fear and anxiety, projection and panic in a form of
circulation in-between the colonizer and the colonized’ (294). Readers
of Derrida will discern the signature of his style, and mode of critical
engagement in Bhabha’s approach, but that is hardly an issue here.
What is important is that Bhabha’s theoretical enterprise is not a direct
approximation of an existing one, but rather, it is in the carving of
a new reading paradigm that his brilliance as a thinker is the most
evident. In many ways, what Bhabha is doing in The Location of Cul-
ture is not a mere exposition of terms within the recognized spaces of
postcolonial theory. He has done much more than that here. In fact,
Bhabha has extended its possibilities as an agency, and as his inci-
sive readings have shown, the conditions of culture are much more
crucially threaded than what the existing postcolonial practices have
concentrated upon. His engagement of the Derridean matrix is thus
part of his interrogation of the limits of a theoretical structure that was
beginning to be recognized as postcolonial when he began writing, just
as his considered revisions of the Saidian enquiry into the practice of
Orientalism are.
Addressing the ‘new’: mobilities and modernities

Homi Bhabha’s method of reading cultural spaces and the insistent
pressures that affect the structuring of knowledge in a cosmopoli-
tan world is consistent throughout the book. His argument with the
limitations of conventional parameters that have served postcolonial
theory is evident in the ways in which he draws out the tracks of this
discipline to take cognizance of the creative modes of enquiry in other
fields. We can see, therefore, critical movements that suggest realign-
ment of the planes of examination wherein it is possible to situate
Conrad within the frame that Fredric Jameson posits for a globally
determined culture, or look at the Eurocentric pulls of critical theory
through the lens of a Bakhtin or an Arendt. It is necessary for us to
value Bhabha’s engagement with theory through the extensions that he
envisages, whereby we would be able to take further the very process
of critical enquiry. The lessons that we learn from Bhabha’s approach
is to recognize the tension that inhabits any formation, more so at this
time when realities and identities are seen for the potential they bear as
‘conditions’ in an increasingly globalized world. Commenting on how
the changing contours of the world today make it imperative for us
to let go of the rigidities of the disciplinary order that are part of any
given theoretical formation, Bhabha argues that the interactive dimen-
sions of critical thought must be made to play a more proactive role in
the approach to contemporary issues and subjects. Analysing Fredric
Jameson’s radical framing of the global with the transformed nature
of critical practice, Bhabha suggests that such a strategy can hold good
as an approach by recognizing the fluidity of cultural reality in today’s
context: ‘My rendition of Jameson, edited with ellipses that create a
Conradian foreboding, reveals the anxiety of enjoining the global and
the local; the dilemma of projecting an international space on the trace
of a decentred, fragmented subject. Cultural globality is figured in the
in-between spaces of double-frames: its historical originality marked
by a cognitive obscurity; its decentred “subject” signified in a nervous
temporality of the transitional, or the emergent provisionality of the
“present” ’ (309).
The Location of Culture, dense and engaging in the questions it
raises and the paths of critical reading that it proposes, remains one
of contemporary theory’s most exciting adventures. There are reasons
for such a situation within the frames of critical theory that Bhabha
has spaced out and opened up through his interventions and creative
reading. It is not easy to chart or enumerate the line of thought that
he pursues, develops and marks for our attention because he does not
submit to the pre-existing structures through which critical advances
in this field have been made. Rather, he follows a brand of eclecticism
that is difficult to pin down. Some of the traces are quite evident, but
one cannot read much into such presences without drawing them in
ways that go against his argumentative designs. This seems to be one of
the reasons behind the perceived inaccessibility of Bhabha’s writings,
and coupled with a vocabulary that reminds us constantly of the com-
plex engagement that language and cultural practices are bound in, he
has cut space within the contemporary theoretical terrain that cannot
be pigeonholed. In fact, the excitement that Bhabha has brought into
‘theory’ is showcased across the pages of the book in the different read-
ing possibilities that he suggests through his examples. Whether it is
the margins of a nineteenth-century event or the decidedly cosmopoli-
tan character of contemporary society, questions relating to ‘migrancy’
or ‘identity’ surface and arrest our attention through multiple critical
registers. Along with the issues that he takes up for analysis, Bhabha’s
critical strategy is a very important exercise in method. His approaches
open up ways of reading that present opportunities for both: the sub-
ject and the way in which it may be attended to. His invocation of the
personal as text, site and exemplar of migrant experience, for instance,
does not occupy the critical space in the form of a self-projection.
While his manner and style of self-engagement draw in the ‘human’
with considerable emphasis, there is never a sense of closure to the
knowledge that we have access to in these enunciations. This, in fact,
is one of the important themes of the book. How is one to make sense
or attempt an understanding of the human? In responding to the pass-
ing away of Edward Said, Bhabha explored another dimension of
the personal, one that perhaps more acutely related to the difficulty
of reducing the human to a formulaic exegesis. Looking at the Said-
ian legacy to the world of letters in the essay titled ‘Adagio’, Bhabha
salutes the humanist impulse that Said imbibed and practiced through
his words: ‘On that day in the fall of 2003 when Edward Said lost his
long struggle against all the odds, I remember thinking that we would
never hear that voice again. His writings were indestructible, his pres-
ence memorable, but the fire and fragility of his voice – the ground
note of the “individual particular” from which all human narration
begins – would be impossible to preserve for another conversation on
literature, music, illness, and common friends’ (371). A little further on
in the essay, Bhabha sees the stamp of the human deeply imprinted in
all Saidian texts. As we can see from the following lines, the two terms
‘location’ and ‘culture’ are crucially embedded in this personal take on
Said: ‘I cannot read a line of Said’s work without being reminded of the
salience he gives to the Palestinian situation; and I do not encounter a
word of his writings without being made aware of his concern for the
human condition’ (374).
Such a gesture presents Bhabha’s prerogative as a thinker, and it is
his understanding of this particular dimension of life and human rela-
tions that is manifested in different ways in The Location of Culture.
Bhabha’s attention to this notion of the particular is what drives many
of his keywords in the book: ambivalence, hybridity, in-betweenness,
identity – each of them draws our attention to the complex web in
which the particular is caught up in narration, and in configurations
that show cultural difference in specific contexts. At different times,
evident even in the edited anthology Nation and Narration, Bhabha
has argued against the dangers of a culture of reductive hypotheses,
and the challenge before theory, now more than ever before, is to be
alert to alternative frames within which to place the circumstances of
culture. This alertness demands that one do not succumb to the cycle
of choice-making – something that Bhabha argues so persuasively
throughout this book – but recognize the limits of critical processes
that follow structures of knowledge production without attending to
their insistent complexities. That Bhabha makes use of so many nego-
tiation terms offers us a window into his critical design, for he projects
a form of inquiry that steers clear of fixed, determined categories. For
all its density and eclectic virtuosity, The Location of Culture does
not privilege a particular style, manner or school of critical theory.
And nowhere does a thinker appear in Bhabha’s writing without such
presence being sufficiently accounted for, and still, he makes the exam-
ple or the representation essential to his argument and point of view.
Whether it is Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Rorty, Jameson, Jussawala or
Walcott, these figures and the references their incorporation points
towards, there is a very compact and sustained procedure in place,
one which makes each framing a part of the critical whole. Combating
reductionist exercises in critical thought is a task of great responsibil-
ity. On the one hand, it calls for reading methods that recognize the
limitations of the critical past which shadows the text in question, and
on the other, the path projected must consistently eschew closure. The
marks of this practice are clearly in evidence in The Location of Cul-
ture. For though the book has been conventionally read as a key text in
postcolonial studies, it breaks through the seams to push the limits of
critical theory itself, and it is, undoubtedly, an exercise in philosophy.
Works cited
Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration, London, UK: Routledge, 1990.
_______. The Location of Culture [1994], Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2004.
_______. ‘Adagio’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, Winter 2005, pp. 371–380.
10 Robert J. C. Young: White
Mythologies
Robert Young and the critical context
of White Mythologies
As a commentator and observer of the scene of postcolonial theory,

Robert Young has brought a critical understanding into the discipline
that draws attention to the conditions of critique informing processes
of evaluation. Drawing on his wide reading of the Western intellectual
tradition, Young has brought to our notice the importance of respond-
ing to ‘other’ cultures, not in the way the ‘West’ has configured them
but by locating the paradigms of thought that contest structures of
knowledge that have been considered valid. Even the interrogation of
the Western knowledge-production mechanism is fraught with fault-
lines that are more often than not glossed over, or taken for granted.
The presence of blanket terms and the critical apparatuses that have
served the Western understanding of history is responsible for this over-
whelming pressure that is exerted on the mode of thought itself. White
Mythologies is, in this sense, a look at the circumstances in which the
intellectual inheritance informing the questioning of terms is carried
out in contemporary thought. Young is unsparing in his insistent gaze
upon the assumptions that Western thinkers have made use of. What
is interesting in his examination is that many of the perceptions asso-
ciated with the postcolonial engagement come undone, which goes a
long way to demonstrate how both question and the mode adopted
for its placement remain areas of contention. White Mythologies is
thus more than an examination of terms. It is an excavation of the
channels of thought that are embedded in the paradigms that are con-
sidered worthy for revaluation. The postcolonial enterprise involves,
among other things, a look at the questions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘his-
tory’ which is accompanied by a consideration of how the other is
placed and looked at. As a historian engaged in the mapping of the
discipline himself, Young has brought to it a critical understanding
that foregrounds the extending nature of postcolonial spaces, and in
doing so, he has enlarged the terms through which colonial experience
Robert J. C. Young: White Mythologies 203
can be opened up for assessment. The magisterial Postcolonialism: An
Historical Introduction (2001) is perhaps the best example of Young’s
insightful and rewarding reading of the vast extent to which the disci-
pline has branched into, and the book remains a towering achievement.
But the ground for it was actually prepared by the densely situated and
vigorously argued White Mythologies, where the subject of inquiry is
the process of thought itself. Its pathbreaking status within the canon
of postcolonial studies is attested by Homi Bhabha in the foreword to
the second edition of the book, where he pays due cognizance to the
importance of Young’s critical stance and the impact it has had for
the discipline: ‘Having made a significant contribution to establishing
the historical genealogy of post-colonial thinking, the book is now
itself a document of historical and contemporary interest. Its strength
of character lies, first, in its steadfast commitment to emphasizing the
place of the colonial and post-colonial experience as central to the
moral, textual and political economies of modernity and postmoder-
nity’ (ix). As Bhabha suggests, the unravelling of the conditions of
history making and the claims of truth that narratives of modernity
propose makes White Mythologies a work of seminal importance. The
relevance of this form of interrogation of terms is not confined to the
field of postcolonial studies alone. The mapper of intellectual history
in Robert Young had already demonstrated his awareness of the need
to cultivate spaces for accommodation of the other in his ‘Introduc-
tion’ to Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (1980) at a time
when poststructuralism was beginning to upstage existing forms of
reading. Here, for instance, is his accommodative understanding of fis-
sures and gaps that form part of what is sometimes mistakenly seen as
one thing: ‘The name “post-structuralism” is useful in so far as it is an
umbrella word, significantly defining itself only in terms of a temporal,
spatial relationship to structuralism. This need not imply the organicist
fiction of a development, for it involves rather, a displacement’ (1). In
other words, Robert Young’s situation as a reader of the history of
ideas has followed a consistent line, one that arrives to forward the
argument for a discerning approach to the questions of history and
knowledge in White Mythologies. In order to frame the argument for
the need to examine the conditions through which the knowledge-
production machinery has been working in the West, and the way it
has engendered responses favouring and also against it, Young takes
recourse to three key terms – history, knowledge and the other.
What matters here is the three keys through which Robert Young
looks at the construction of the cultural edifice of the West which has
impacted not just the way the world is seen and made but also that
204 Robert J. C. Young: White Mythologies
the responses to it have been controlled by its influence. For Young,
responses to the question of the other cannot be pushed to the margin
of discourse; more interestingly, it is necessary to see how postcolonial
understanding has had to negotiate the processes of historical knowl-
edge in order to even unsettle its dominant premises. With the other,
history and knowledge serving as the three most important keys in his
argumentative re-reading of the intellectual inheritance that postcolo-
nialism is compelled to address, Robert Young does not leave out those
whose critiques are aimed at asking questions of the paradigms that
emerge or refer to the West. That is why there is two-plane organiza-
tion of the critical drift in White Mythologies: the first deals with the
idea of history in the West and how the overwhelming Hegelian and
Marxist imperatives have come to impact our responses to the idea of
culture and even condition the departures from it. The second involves
the drawing of the postcolonial positions through the aegis of thinkers
such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. It is Rob-
ert Young himself, in the prefatory chapter titled ‘White Mythologies
Revisited’ who offers the succinct critical overview of the argument
that drove the book’s narrative:
White Mythologies therefore challenges European Marxism’s claim

to a totalizing knowledge through its grounding on a dialectical
theory of history, conceived as external and claimed as objective
but in fact operating within the limits of a fundamentally Euro-
pean perspective. This ‘History’ is contrasted with non-European
accounts in which history is conceived not as a single overarching
narrative, but in terms of networks of discrete, multitudinous his-
tories that are uncontainable within any single Western schema.
Put more simply, the book collides a left historical perspective,
which operated within scrupulously European limits, with ones
that began from the world outside Europe.
(3)
Hegel off-centre? The Marxist imperative and modern

historiography
Facing the question of the arrival of ‘poststructuralism’ onto the world
of critical thought, Robert Young traces its genealogy to, among oth-
ers, the impact of Marxism on modern thinking, and in doing so, he
recognizes how such a focus is unexpected, as much as it constitutes
an interrogation of the frame that Left ideology imprinted on the idea
of history. But the Marxist imperative, as Young points out, does not
appear through an innocent figuration of critical structuring; rather,
it brings to the fore the hovering influence of Hegel and the way the
narrative of world history has come to dominate the modern response
to the subject of knowledge production. The title chapter of White
Mythologies is an examination of this intellectual inheritance, which
is followed up by the subsequent one as well. ‘White Mythologies’,
the chapter that inaugurates the discussion on the Hegelian impact on
the twentieth-century mind, is an interesting take on the conditions
through which the poststructuralist response to history is opened up
for examination. Young acknowledges the problems associated with
determination of such as a trace as the one identified as Hegelian, for
although he takes his initial cue from the Hélène Cixous narrative of
self-education in her book The Newly Born Woman, the story of the
impact can hardly be confined to a particular reading of history. In
fact, it is the significance of the history question that occupies Young
throughout the book, and it is not a mere issue of the critical appa-
ratus chosen for reading of the past; it is also the politics behind the
process itself that arrests his attention. Young extends the range of
the question raised by Cixous beyond its immediate conditioning of
the twentieth-century mind in the West to frame a much larger context,
whose roots go back to, and contribute richly to, a condition that is
taken for granted: ‘Marxism, insofar as it inherits the system of the
Hegelian dialectic, is also implicated in the link between the structures
of knowledge and the forms of oppression of the last two hundred
years: a phenomenon that has become known as Eurocentrism’ (33).
It would be convenient for us to place the keys through which Young
mounts his reading of the conditions of Western history and its char-
acter in terms of their significance. The narrative of world history
and the folding of all its ‘others’ within its conceptual structure, one
of the givens Marxist thought works through, is an important key
in Young’s reading here. And behind this impulse that governs the
Marxist imperative lies the Hegelian structuring of norms. It is this
combined Hegel–Marx founding of the Western intellectual apparatus
that Young takes up for critique and analysis. The impact of this intel-
lectual formation that goes by the label of Hegel, however, is much
more than a naming device; it is a mode of knowledge production, a
way of looking at everything in the world:
The entire Hegelian machinery lays down the operation of a system

already in place, already operating in everyday life. Politics and
knowledge have worked according to the same Hegelian dialectic,
with its ‘phallo-logocentric Aufhebung’ – whether it be Marxism’s
History, Europe’s colonial annexations and accompanying racism
or orientalist scholarship, or, in a typical conflation of patriarchy
and colonialism, Freud’s characterization of femininity as the dark
unexplored continent.
(34)
Even more important than this foundational impact on the ways of

thinking in the West, which the Hegelian structure has undoubtedly
had, is the complicitous understanding between Marxism and the sys-
temic design it positions itself against. In order words, Young is arguing
that the roots of Eurocentrism owe something to this seemingly con-
tradictory arrangement where Marxist thought universalizes all forms
of knowledge within only one other, that of ‘the working class’. The
problem with the Marxist apparatus, then, in Young’s understanding
is that in its framing of history, oppositional formations apart from
the class-elite divide are not accommodated well enough. The chang-
ing contours of world politics, on the other hand, have also brought
about a significant shift in international relations, and the dialectical
dualities that facilitated comprehension earlier appear highly inade-
quate. But the transformations that have taken place in world polity
are not the reasons enough for the falling off of the Marxist method;
the issue involves a much deep-seated conceptual contradiction. The
question, Young seeks here to address, and one that poststructural-
ism has been trying to negotiate, is informed by the rerearing of the
Hegelian structure which renders inevitable the adoption of the dia-
lectical method in any process of critical inquiry. Irrespective of the
approach to the subject – be it Marxism or psychoanalysis – the mode
of structural critique that draws on the dual positioning of alternatives
is difficult to get away from. Young is conscious of the bind in which
critical inquiry gets trapped eventually and suggests that twentieth cen-
tury’s response to a way round this process comes from the lesson of
Althusser. Althusser recognized ‘the impossibility of any attempt sim-
ply to exclude, excise or extirpate Hegel’ (38). This design, couched in
the analytical strategies of Althusser in the form of extensions of the
Marxist model beyond the already configured one, in fact, is a recogni-
tion of the standout influence of Hegel on the modern mind.
Is the revisionist argument, proposed by the Frankfurt School, and
fronted by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic
of Enlightenment, a response worth pursuing? Where does the idea
that in the very seat of reason lies the genesis of irrationality lead?
Young considers this possibility and the implications it can have for the
reading of history’s ignored spaces. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the
centring of the Enlightenment model as the exemplary case showing
the assuredness of historical knowledge calls for serious revision. Rea-
son’s authoritarian streak overwhelms the sources of knowledge that
may have other springs. What this implies for Young is of considerable
significance. The Frankfurt School intervention in the train of Classi-
cal Marxist thought, along with the Althusserian extension, opens up
the critique of the rationalist tracking of history, which thinkers like
Jurgen Habermas have pursued subsequently. All of poststructural-
ism’s reactions to the Marxist model of the universalizing pressure of
history do not chart the same route. While the interrogation of the
Enlightenment as an instrument of knowledge finds elaboration in
the Adorno–Horkheimer thesis, the possibility that we have through
the Foucauldian foregrounding of discourse opens up another front,
and one that holds great relevance for the contemporary responses to
historiography. Michel Foucault’s reading of the Enlightenment, Young
points out, is indicative of the shift in contestatory parameters, as the
questioning of settled assumptions seems inevitable. Yet behind this
seeming inevitability lies the recognition of the fissures that inhabit the
knowledge-production models which take history as a given. Foucault,
like Edward Said after him, built upon the scepticism surrounding the
totalizing patterns that Marxist historiography foists on the narrative
of History. This is the contention that drives the critique of the West-
ern historiographic tradition, argues Young in his analysis of Foucault
and Said, but he is quick to point out that the road out of the Hegelian
dialectical design is not trekked so easily. In the case of Foucault, not
committing himself to the Hegelian thesis of understanding is itself a
considered response, but it is nonetheless an evasion that cannot steer
clear of the problem associated with the accommodation of the other.
Is there a way out of this theoretical paradox? Young feels that, for all
his enterprise and caution, the way beyond Hegel is not substantially
thought out: ‘Said cannot get out of the Hegelian problematic that he
articulates, and indeed tends himself to repeat the very processes that
he criticizes’ (42). The conjectural necessity of assuming the presence
of a condition for its critique – in Fanon’s case it is the idea of the Third
World – is itself indicative of the dialectical structure that the argumen-
tative apparatus comes to rely on. Each of these thinkers – Foucault,
Said and Fanon – considers the knowledge question only to embed
the Hegelian method within the paradigms each proposes, either by
reacting against or by seeking to avoid it, but the problem of accom-
modating, or addressing the other, remains.
Not merely as a framing paradigm but also as a condition for the
process of knowledge production, history has not had an easy truck
with Marxism. Young contends that this problematic relationship has
entailed responses to and within Marxism that seek ways to negotiate
the totalizing tendency that such an engagement brings. If totalization
is a corollary of the Marxist investigative apparatus – whether in the
structure Georg Lukács formats it in his reading of class conscious-
ness or in the ‘interpretive absolutism’ (141) orchestrated by Fredric
Jameson – does such an engagement with the question of knowledge
mark off the many potential others that the reading process cannot
accommodate? Robert Young is clear that postcolonialism is a depar-
ture from the Marxist orientation that informs a major channel of
Western historiography, a view he persists with consistently, and uses
to define the discipline and its parameters. In the opening essay of
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, titled ‘The Politics of
Postcolonial Critique’, Young sets the ground for the discipline thus:
‘Postcolonial theory is distinguished from orthodox European Marx-
ism by combining its critique of objective material conditions with
detailed analysis of their subjective effects. For this reason, it has also
played a significant part in the growing culturalism of contemporary
political, social and historical analysis’ (2001: 7).
Counters to the Marxist paradigm: the shifts in focus

Of the many ways tried out to arrest the Hegelian overwhelming of
the investigative process into the functions of history in the West, the
alternative proposed by Emmanuel Levinas is the one that Robert
Young introduces first. If the constitution of the other (along with the
acknowledgement of its character and situation) is an imperative that
historical investigation cannot remain non-committal about, then the
Marxist overriding of pluralities through the foregrounding of class
must be confronted directly. Once Young’s pursuit of the Hegelian
presence in the investigative process is framed for his argument on the
nature of Western historiography, he moves on to see whether the path
out of the dialectical condition can be approached through other coun-
ters. And the approach adopted by Levinas, contends Young, is one
that directs its attention to ontology itself, rather than proposing an
alternative to the Hegelian master–slave structure. What such a critical
positioning of priorities does is to shift the knowledge question to a
very different frame. Young points out that the Levinasian approach is
a move that refuses to see the problem of either history or knowledge
through the Hegelian lens by not attending to a more fundamental
subject, that of ontology: ‘[A]ccording to Levinas ontology itself is
a problem. Concerned to find a way to allow the other to remain as
other, Levinas therefore rejects not only Hegel but Husserl, Heidegger
and Sartre also, and abjures ontology altogether’ (44). The position
taken by Levinas, as Young places him in the trajectory of modern
thought, is not a one-off event. Rather, the emphasis on the nature
of the other as one with which a dialogue can be arranged is part of
the response associated with poststructuralism. The Levinasian idea of
respect for the other is a facilitation of separation unlike the incorpo-
ration of the world within the self as we seen in the Hegelian scheme.
This is an interesting proposition, given that the West has consistently
seen the other as part of the individual’s attempts to make sense of the
world: ‘In Western philosophy, when knowledge or theory compre-
hends the other, then the alterity of the latter vanishes as it becomes
part of the same’ (45). The task of distancing the knowing self from the
other, the perpetuation of an alterity, is fraught with serious handicaps,
the most telling of which comes from the involvement of language, for
language irons out differences and imposes uniformity, making distinc-
tion difficult. The problem, in Levinas’s vision, lies in the totalizing
impact of history, as the narrative arrangement brings the self and the
other onto the same plane, imposing a context which is actually a form
of violence. The only rewarding mode of distinction through which
the other may be distanced from the self in the Levinasian scheme is
through a call to metaphysics. Preceding ontology, metaphysics for
Levinas combats the overwhelming pressure of totality by referring to
something that is constantly a reminder of a state beyond it, that of
infinity. This idea of transcendence, which breaks free of the totalizing
tendency of history, Young suggests, is very similar to the Derridean
concept of supplement, something that is engendered from within the
same frame of thought but not confined to it. As against the returning
Ulysses and his circularity, Levinas would project Abraham, the one
who ushered forth and branched out, extending the limits of his situa-
tion beyond what circumscribed him.
Robert Young is here offering a map of cultural overhauling that
is remarkably wide in its range and impact. Starting with the Levina-
sian departure from the ontological centre of modern thought, Young
looks at the possibilities inaugurated by deconstruction as he locates
the Derridean example as a process that has brought about radical
changes in the way we look at the knowledge question today. Unlike
conventional approaches to deconstruction, Young sees in the trajec-
tory from Levinas to Derrida an attempt to make sense of the other in
all its alterity, and both in the faultlining of history and in the punctur-
ing of the primacy of the West, the germ for the interrogation of the
European idea of knowledge is evident. Thus, the emerging channels
of revisionist historiography – postcolonialism and postmodernism –
draw on the energy of deconstruction to have a fresh look at the
knowledge question, not with the West at the centre but by envisaging
and accommodating plural locations which contest the very idea of a
centralized thesis on the subject of knowledge formation. Postmod-
ernism, riding on the wings of the agency of deconstruction, Young
argues, has come to serve as an instrument facilitating ‘a certain self-
consciousness about a culture’s own historical relativity’ (51).
Somewhat different from this framing, where the centre-margin
dimensions of Western knowledge is critiqued from another orienta-
tion, lies the Foucauldian response to the idea of history. For Foucault,
the idea of history is not separate from the discursive practices and
forms of knowledge that inform it. Yet, quite interestingly, as Young
observes, Foucault has not been consistent in his reading of history.
His attempts to re-order the conditions through which knowledge
comes to acquire validity in a culture, whether it is related to madness
or discipline, to take two dominant examples, are fraught with its own
complications. Young does not discount the Foucauldian impact on the
study of the social sciences from the 1960s, but there is also a recogni-
tion of the fact that critiques of history can take different forms, and
thinkers like Derrida and Foucault have demonstrated only the fissures
that characterize the Eurocentric understanding of knowledge. What
is more fascinating than the panning out of these counter-responses
to the Western structures of knowledge in White Mythologies is the
deft dissection of the cross-fertilization of the very critiques invested
in the readings of the history question. Young looks at the lines of
thought that emanate from and refer to divergent sources, and in order
to avoid a linear historical mapping of the evolution of this process
of examination, he considers the contesting strands that inform the
intellectual response to the issue of knowledge. In other words, Young
is here looking at the history of ideas, more specifically at the idea
of history in Western thought and how it has been framed for the
purpose of knowledge production in the modern world. That is why
it is interesting to see that Young does not use a blanket formation as
poststructuralism to suggest that the response to the Hegelian master–
slave narrative emerged in a unitary fashion with the adventurism of
the critical temperament of the 1960s. What he does, instead, is to
bring to the foreground the contestatory claims of the thinkers who
came to occupy the same field, and even as they ended up positing
their critiques of history, they also showed, through the different argu-
mentative matrices that they adopted, how even the questioning can
be so differently articulated and placed. On the other hand, Young is
conscious of the lines that thread up to present patterns of thought
which can be placed beside one another, not in terms of readily struc-
tured alignments but as exemplars of a condition of critique that is
part of the interrogative mind characterizing the twentieth-century
response to knowledge.
The critical writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, for
instance, opened up the revisionist frame for a contemporary branding
of Marxism that focussed human subject and its situation within the
formats of history. Sartre, in his dense and invigorating Critique of Dia-
lectical Reason, sought to argue that the actions of people facilitate the
understanding of the past as no other agency can. Moving away from
Merleau-Ponty who had overridden the self’s centrality in the knowl-
edge thesis, Sartre seeks to reconcile the materiality of history with the
subject engaged in its unravelling. The objective Sartre took was to
demonstrate that history functioned through a dialectical process, and
it is not a law, but a produce of human action, of human conflicts, and
it works at the level of individual situations, as much as it facilitates the
understanding of determinate patterns that cover collective concerns
as well. Young sees an interesting turn in Sartre’s movement away
from the classical condition of Marxism which aims to totalize the
world’s events according to the argument for class-centric philosophy
it projects, for in doing so, Sartre engages in a process of perpetual
detotalization. In the Sartrean scheme, this is not a contradiction in
terms. It is a proposal that argues for ‘a structure of sorts – a legacy of
continual aberration’ (73). Conflated with his existentialist argument
regarding the status of the individual, such a take on history envisages
a form of reconciliation between oppositions that orthodox Marx-
ism does not adequately account for. It is, in Young’s view, the logic
of ethnocentricity that Sartre espouses here: ‘Sartre’s ethnocentricity
derives from the whole project of his existentialism and his phenom-
enological definition of man in terms of the experiencing self defined
against an other’ (77). Yet, in spite of his interventions in the imposing
apparatus that defined French colonialisms, Sartre’s insights into the
character of resistance wherein the other was given scope of address,
Young believes, failed to have the impact it could have had, and that is
because of his ‘historicist Marxist framework’ (82).
Louis Althusser’s programme for another brand of Marxist under-
taking, on the other hand, focussed on the necessity to engage in the
process of epistemological self-examination for making sense of his-
tory. Young situates Althusser within the same paradigmatic axis
where Jean Cavailles and Gaston Bachelard had consolidated the argu-
ment for a science-faceted response to history. In reacting against the
Lukacsian postulate for a totalized history, Althusser looked at the
possibility of engaging historicity as a condition that did not have a
subject as such. In this formulation, history is not a narrative in the
classic sense but governed by a series of departures and dysfunctions.
This position did not go down well with those Marxists who sub-
scribed to the order of culture where objectives are well defined and
the goals of knowledge properly marked. But Althusser, in spite of
such a perception, is not anti-historical in his stance. What he does is to
deliberate on the importance of seeing the movement of time as a con-
cept, which enables him to build the thesis that each situation in time
is informed by its own temporality. As Young points out, ‘Althusser’s
significant contribution was to problematize the concept of history by
addressing its presuppositions about temporality’ (97).
History’s new operatives: Foucault, Jameson and Said

Three chapters of White Mythologies are devoted to the arguments to
the question of history proposed by Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson
and Said. What is it that makes them part of a critiquing process, even
though they are bracketed within structures that are removed from
each other? Jameson, of these three, is the advocate of the Marxist
mode; why is he at the centre of a process that revisits the history ques-
tion as much as he reaffirms its importance for knowledge? Robert
Young looks at the conditions surrounding Jameson’s seminal impact
of The Political Unconscious in America, compared to its lukewarm
response in Britain, which itself serves as the signal for the complex
nature of a field in which the knowledge question continues to fig-
ure. An expert assembler of different Marxisms, Jameson’s recipe for
a new brand of total history found a ready American audience that had
grown wary of the French intellectual onslaught on the thought scene
of the country. In looking at the structures through which Jameson
began to impact the argumentative space in the final decades of the
twentieth century, Young sees in the synthesizing project a process that
engages the various strands of Marxist thought, but through a reori-
entation that is made to appear contemporary. How far does Jameson
succeed in producing a new critical idiom? Jameson’s problem rests
with an investment in the seeming assuredness of Marxist historiogra-
phy, and in spite of the fact that he assembles an impressive array of
modern minds which includes Althusser and Sartre for his branding
of history, the targeting of poststructuralism’s emphasis on relativity
comes undone because the desired conflation cannot get out of the con-
tradictory claims he has to negotiate. Commenting on this problem,
Young observes: ‘Jameson’s strategy is to empower Marxism against
poststructuralism by rolling all Marxisms into one, assimilating them
under the grand aegis of history, rather, “History itself”. His problem
is that, while on the one hand he acknowledges the force of recent
arguments that question the status of history, he nevertheless attempts
to retain the traditional truth-claims of historical materialism’ (131).
Building upon the work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst for the argu-
ment that a contemporary revaluation of Marxist historiography can
project a real object of study, Jameson tries to combine the Lacanian
logic of the phenomenon to overcome the narrative dimension of his-
tory. But, as Young points out, such a claim where the interpretative
function of historical knowledge is placed beside a transcendent real
outside the plane of narrative cannot be sustained. Somewhat baffling
is the further claim that Jameson makes on behalf of Marxism, that it
is only the Marxist approach to knowledge which can function as the
mystery unveiler, for by making an appeal to the allegorical condition
of narrative that derives from the biblical tradition, he situates the
truth claim as the bedrock of his argument in The Political Uncon-
scious. Jameson’s subsequent writings, which included his responses to
postmodernism and the capitalist overwhelming of the contemporary
world, have not departed from the claims he made in The Political
Unconscious, but there is an evident attempt to accommodate the
ways through which the knowledge question has been addressed in
the late twentieth century. Young is quick to draw our attention to
another kind of conflation where the postmodern and the poststructur-
alist spaces, in spite their being different in significant ways, are seen as
reflective of the same experience by Jameson. In a later work, published
after Young’s White Mythologies came out, titled Archaeologies of the
Future: A Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Jameson
in fact enhances the idea of a collective response to the question of his-
tory: ‘Utopias seem to be by-products of Western modernity, not even
emerging in every stage of the latter. We need to get some idea of the
specific situations and circumstances under which their composition is
possible, situations which encourage this peculiar vocation or talent at
the same time that they offer suitable materials for its exercise’ (11).
There is a change in vocabulary that shows Jameson’s move from
the Marxist underlays that determined the narrative focus in The
Political Unconscious where the imperative of history is readdressed
by recognizing the loss of that which did service for the totalized
overview that Marxism offered. How far is such a reorganization of
cultural priorities indicative of the problems associated with the ques-
tion of marginal spaces? Robert Young treks the intellectual extent of
Jameson’s response, but nowhere is the proclaimed Marxist’s desire
to carve a new idiom suggestive of a recognition of the other in the
way the unattended spaces and cultures of the world require. At best,
as both Young and Aijaz Ahmed argue, the Jamesonian perspective
on the changing political contours of the contemporary world cannot
hold a brief for the complex and continuously unfolding character of
spaces that the West sees as its other. If Jameson is to be seen as one
who forayed into the project of intellectual mapping of the contem-
porary world order with a model that offered a reoriented Marxism,
keyed to meet the demands of the times, then it does not achieve its
purpose. The Jamesonian raid, a clever yet telling choice in the titling
of the chapter where Young discusses this new Marxist view, falls short
of the very claims it makes. It is in fact as a design foisted on the
intellectual site of modernity which tries to accommodate opposites in
ways that can neither be sustained nor suitably accounted for. Young
locates this coming together of rival energies onto the same plane thus:
Postmodernism, in which the old imperial maps have been lost,

is the condition not just of late capitalism, but also of the loss of
Eurocentrism, the loss of ‘History’ as such. In Jameson’s terms,
postmodernism would then be Orientalism’s dialectical reversal:
a state of dis-orientation. Which would mean that history can no
longer be a single story, even though Western history continues to
conspire with its ‘vast unfinished plot’ of exploitation, and Marx-
ism, as Jameson confesses, continues equally to endorse global
capitalism – on the grounds that it is the necessary preparation for
global socialism. But at the restless margins of the Third World
which, let it be said, is neither Nature nor the Unconscious nor of
course a homogeneous entity at all, Jameson’s totalizing project of
a single narrative also confronts a call that remains always exces-
sive to it.
(156–157)
It is important to see how Robert Young is pitching thinkers engaged

in seemingly different intellectual spaces for the purpose of demon-
strating that at the heart of the postcolonial enterprise lies the direct
confrontation of the question of history. When he looks at Fredric
Jameson and his attempts to make sense of the intellectual current of
modernity through a reoriented form of Marxist historiography, there
is a deliberate focus on the historian in Jameson, and his models for
an appropriate understanding of reality are accessed as such. This does
not disband or render ineffective the insights that Jameson brings into
the reading of modern culture in his writings, but that is another story.
With Said, the issue was not exactly a matter of writing a new history,
but a revisitation which would bring to light the problems associated
with some of the settled positions of Western thought. Young reads
this move on the part of Said to reorient the context of the Western
historical enterprise as an extension of the process which saw think-
ers like Sartre and Foucault realign the limits of critical thinking. This
temperament is not peculiar to Said alone. In fact, much of this critical
engagement with the Western model of knowledge production that has
come to dominate even its critique owes a lot for its foregrounding to
the example of Frantz Fanon who saw Europe, in a cunning reversal of
terms, as the creation of the Third World. Fanon’s questioning of the
humanist ideal by demonstrating the impact of the colonialist rhetoric
embedded in the discourses of the West brings to notice the ways in
which the idealism associated with knowledge aspirations is in fact a
programme of silencing different cultures in history. The dehuman-
ization of the Third World, Fanon contended, was brought about by
the furtherance of the humanist agenda itself, but as Jean-Paul Sartre,
in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, acknowledges,
the objectives of humanism must be visited anew. What emerges in
this process of examination is humanism as a concept, and more so
a desired practice, which is fraught with serious underpinnings that
unsettle the very universalist claims it propels forward. Young is quick
to point out that the interrogation of the effects of humanism is not
a synonym for the rejection of the ethical principle. Rather, this is a
process of enquiry that cuts through the foundations of a method of
understanding that aims to validate the Eurocentric imagination by
suggesting that it can apply to the rest of the world as well. The mode
through which this is brought about is through a narrative logic that
sees the humanist project as a given that is beyond question; and in
this transcendence attributed to the humanist ideal there lies a wide,
unbridgeable gap between the perceptive apparatus and the reality it
seeks to apprehend. When Fanon is seeking answers to the humanist
character of Western universalism, through whose agency the world
and its knowledges are being configured, he is addressing a much more
serious issue. Fanon wants to know what happens to the marginal
others in this broad scheme where erasure of particulars for the larger
objective of a given ideal is taken for granted. In order to even address
the others whose space in the humanist scheme is bracketed by a few
determined givens, a critical temperament is necessary. Fanon worked
towards the cultivation of such a mind, and it is this context that
recognizes as important for those who followed him, including Said:
To criticize humanism in this context therefore does not mean that

you do not like human beings and have no ethics – the gist of cer-
tain attacks on ‘anti-humanism’ – but rather the reverse. It ques-
tions the use of the human as an explanatory category that pur-
ports to provide a rational understanding of ‘man’ – an assumed
universal predicated on the exclusion and marginalization of his
Others, such as ‘woman’ or ‘the native’.
(161)
The negation of historicity and the projection of an anti-humanist

argument, as Young points out, is fraught with its own ‘double logic’
(163), a process which carries serious implications for the process
of critical evaluation. Young refers to the ironic counterpointing in
Roland Barthes’s reading in his essay ‘The Great Family of Man’ where
the categories of understanding are faulted for their overwhelming
pressure on a Eurocentric vision. For the very purpose of negotiating
an anti-humanist discourse, the humanist ideal requires consump-
tion. And therein lies the problem. Invoking Kant, Mill and Sartre as
repositories of this double logic which makes the act of questioning
such a complex exercise, Young asks whether the transference of terms
is method enough to situate the knowledge issue in the context of
colonial experience. In taking the analysis to address the subject at its
foundational premise, Young argues that the in-built paradoxical char-
acter of humanism upstages its idealized face: ‘For humanism is itself
already anti-humanist. That is the problem. It necessarily produces the
non-human in setting up its problematic boundaries’ (165).
The argument founded on the binary of the Orient and the West, in
which Young seizes Edward Said developing Foucault’s logic of knowl-
edge being subject to the discursive fields of its operation, is one where
the knowledge question is brought to the centre with emphatic force.
However, Said’s refusal to commit to any alternative to the system he
attacks has invited critics to ask how far his examination of the sup-
posed perceptions is valid after all. Young sets up the agenda for the
Saidian exercise where the issue of methodology is read not merely for
its instrumentality but also for the manner in which the West came to
configure its other, the Orient. Young explores the difficulties of the
thesis proposed by Said in Orientalism, locating in the representation
process a cultural practice with deep roots in history, and then seeing
in the consolidation of its institutionalist set-up an affirmation of val-
ues which require serious scrutiny.
This problem of closure is in fact fundamental to Orientalism

itself. Said’s hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cul-
tural domination involved in the duality of ‘the Occident’ and ‘the
Orient’ and by doing so perhaps to eliminate it altogether. But
if he shows how Orientalism works by this opposition he does
not so much try to undo it as simply deny it, with the result that
he repeats the inside/outside structures of dualistic thinking him-
self. His analysis of the Orientalists takes the form of a series of
judgements, according to which each writer is identified in turn
as complicit in the process of the intellectual subordination of the
East by the West.
(177)
The theoretical paradox in which Said binds himself, Young argues,

does not settle the history question with which he begins Oriental-
ism. At one level, the critical process employed by Said displays his
recognition of the problems associated with the givens of Western his-
tory, and at the same time, there is a recourse to a different form of
totalization which reflects the fantastic element informing the reality
of the ‘Orient’. Young brings the presence of this condition to our
notice, when he observes: ‘What Said’s analysis neglects, therefore, is
the extent to which Orientalism did not just misrepresent the Orient,
but also articulated an internal dislocation within Western culture, a
culture which consistently fantasizes itself as constituting some kind
of integral totality, at the same time as endlessly deploring its own
impending dissolution. To some extent Said himself remains unself-
consciously within that European cultural heritage’ (180). Young goes
on to implicate Said of relying on some ‘fundamental assumptions’
(180), but such a stretch suggests how complicated the conditions of
critique are when it comes to assessing the nature of colonial experi-
ence. Young’s arresting of the Saidian logic through the faultlines that
characterize the assumptions of historical knowledge is itself reflective
of his insistent focus on the problematic nature of knowledge, but
this analysis does not rob Orientalism of the value it brings to the
discipline of postcolonial studies. What is of greater importance in
this context, however, is that Young asks us to consider the lack of
internal dissension which would have made the Orientalist thesis much
more accommodative than it actually is, and the ironing of culture that
Said accuses the West of engaging in is something he cannot so easily
escape. Given the ambitious scope of White Mythologies, Edward Said
does not find much space within it. The reasons for such marginaliza-
tion of the discipline’s high priest could be many. And we can argue
the case where Robert Young comes out quite well. This is because
Young’s primary focus is on the questions of history and knowledge,
and Said’s situation in the context of what he offers in Orientalism is
examined within the paradigm of a critical engagement whose founda-
tion owes to the European understanding of the world. The Edward
Said we have through Young’s critical lens is not the only one as we
have seen in our discussion on Orientalism. Yet there is no denying
the fact that the Saidian overview of Western perceptions follows the
tracks of a critical method which is deeply embedded in the European
response to knowledge. And, quite important, it is the discursive ori-
entation of Michel Foucault that Edward Said leverages his argument
upon when it comes to the reading of the use of historical knowledge,
which shows the influence of the paradigm both these thinkers are try-
ing to contest and challenge.
When Michel Foucault arrived onto the French and, subsequently,
to the European intellectual scene with his theory of discourse, he
appeared to have organized a system of reading through which the
settled conditions of historical knowledge seemed inadequate. The
matter was not one of upstaging the existing structures of thought with
a new one; rather, it was the imperative of method that drew attention
to the inconclusiveness of the linearities of history that the orthodox
mappings of times and events had projected in narrative form. In its
stead, Foucault proposed that it is discourses that determine the char-
acter of knowledge and the way we construct the world or perceive it
cannot be outside a given discursive frame. The implications for such a
theoretical approach are many. For one, Foucault’s idea that history be
read minus the blanket of continuity has been seen as a parallel forma-
tion to the one proposed by Thomas Kuhn, and more interestingly, as
Young points out, it is not history that is dispensed with but its logic
as an uninterrupted linear movement that is questioned. Foucault is
more interested in reading the transformations across time planes that
may not be placed in a continuum, for to see the past as a series is what
appears to him to be seriously problematic. He looks at another kind of
understanding through which events and experiences can be accessed,
that of locating things through the agency of the episteme, and coupled
with it is the argument that the narrative and interpretative dimensions
of knowledge production determine the contours of that which emerges
in the form of discourses. The mind of Foucault, however, displays
very interesting shifts in orientation, as Young shows in his reading of
the various trajectories that emerge from this seminal French thinker.
The movement from discourse is not quite a radical abandonment of
terms, but a realignment that engages the Nietzschean imperative,
genealogy. The focus in this form of investigation is on the specifics of
the event, a condition which can be enlarged to accommodate others
within its grasp, but the mode is slippery, for there is the pressure of
excess which, Young argues, inflects the Foucauldian logic. In effect,
the tension, in-built in the theses on historical understanding that Fou-
cault engages in, cannot be overcome. This is the tension that stems
from an insistence on the Nietzschean prerogative of interpretations
on the one hand and the proviso that the archaeology of knowledge
cannot submit to subjectivities. The fascinating movement from epis-
teme to discourse, however, has another possibility to accommodate:
that of power. In power, and its agency, lies the germ of a dialectic
that plays out the assertion and the resistance within the same fold.
As such, the genealogical tunnelling of registers in a given historical
situation can incorporate both power and discourse for the appropria-
tion of a cultural text. Young sees in this desire to overhaul the terms
of examination of history through instruments that contest the idea of
totality a two-way consequence, which leads to what we now know
as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. The engagement of the
Foucauldian logic for the analysis of history, by both the schools, is
not pursued entirely: ‘Both groups follow Foucault to the extent that
they neither propose, nor utilize, a general theory of history as such;
but unlike Foucault they simply tend to shelve the whole problem so
as to avoid its theoretical difficulties’ (125).
Accounting the other: Bhabha and Spivak

Locating Gayatri Spivak as an interventionist whose shifts are designed
to address the complex nature of the problems she raises, Robert
Young suggests that her work cannot be subsumed within preset labels;
rather, the interrogation of categories offers interesting possibilities for
the study of culture and historical formations that the structured argu-
ments of settled reading practices have not attended to adequately.
Young is of the view that Spivak’s ‘constant attention to the colonial
question’ (200) is seemingly a disruption of the dominant model of
historical enterprise, but even more than that her critical gaze compels
a reorientation of values for both pedagogy and the terms through
which analysis is done. Pursuing her insistent questioning of the histo-
riographic model through which the West has configured knowledge,
Young sees in Spivak’s critical exercise a focus that moves beyond the
immediate sociological or material question. Spivak takes the histo-
rian to task for the narrative blanketing of culture and argues that the
critic’s job is to reorganize how a historical imperative bears the traces
of an imperialist mind even when the subject is not that of colonial
experience as such. Narratives that orient a particular form of social
imagination, and foist it upon a culture, ‘worldling’ it for apprehen-
sion, show how the projection of the other draws in the condition of
the critique within its fold. Young sees merit in this interventionist
undertaking which Spivak makes use of to undercut the imperatives
of historicism, but asks whether she requires to negotiate the struc-
tures of knowledge for their overhauling: ‘To what extent does Spivak
create the very homogenized positions that she wishes to attack? To
what extent does she require a totalization for the production of her
own “epistemic violence”?’ (201). Young’s questions are framed with
a particular objective. Spivak, like Bhabha for instance, reads impe-
rialism as a cultural condition, or practice, whose deeply embedded
fetters affect our responses to the question of knowledge. Young sees
the presence of the Marxism in Spivak’s discourses on cultural theory
as ‘uneasy’ (203) but asks how far the distinction between interpreta-
tion and transformation, which she derives from Marx, can subsume
the complexities of unattended spaces she focusses upon.
Perhaps the agency of the ‘Third Woman’, a textual practice as well
as a referent, which Spivak, along with Chandra Talpade Mohanty
situates as a site for the critical examination of the faultlines that inter-
rogate the assumptions of Western feminism, can be addressed for its
polemical character in the narratives that suggest their postcolonial
character. Young brings into this equation the argument for the subal-
tern subject that Spivak has so persuasively read as an aporia, arguing
thereby that the postcolonial space can no longer be accessed without
referring to the complex theoretical models that are made use of by
critics like Spivak. It the complexity arising out of a reading mecha-
nism that not only challenges the assumptions of the historical project
which Young deconstructs in the early pages of White Mythologies,
but somehow Spivak finds the critical exercise wrought up in the para-
doxes that she has to rely on for her argument for the unattended voice
she champions. What is of significance here is that Young looks at
Spivak not as one who is advocating the articulation of a given voice,
which she incidentally is not, but considers her critical positions to be
rewarding for her ability to recognize how no programmed responses
will serve to address subjects such as the subaltern without enmesh-
ing the discourse in rhetoric. The reading of the woman subject and
the implications introduced by the revision of evaluative scales in her
pathbreaking analyses of texts of such diversity as Wide Sargasso Sea
and the Rani of Sirmur has shown how the imperialist agency embeds
itself in the seemingly politically innocuous texts that have the gen-
der issue at its centre. The ‘Third Woman’ category, not merely as an
agency for the articulation of otherness but also in the form Spivak
herself has come to epitomize it, as a site of embroilment is part of the
intellectual picture she is seen to picture. Robert Young takes this point
home when he shows that the conditions in which Spivak works – her
personal history and the kind of theoretical apparatus that she argues
for – are as much implicated in the enterprise as her response to the
ideas of history in the West. Her thesis of silence and agency in the
context of the subaltern, for instance, Young suggests, is a capitaliza-
tion of the potential of deconstruction, and it is her rich theoretical
and intellectual understanding of alternative scope that makes her
case so interesting. Even as she responds to the transformed charac-
ter of academic discourse within the institutional paradigms where
disciplines are placed and studied, she must address the West as ‘the
West’. How does one position oneself outside the limits of authority
from a location or, rather, an identity, which, while bearing the stamp
of the marginal condition, simultaneously participates in the ‘powers
and economies that enable academic privilege’ (215). Young admits
to focussing extensively on Spivak’s methodological engagement of
deconstruction as a critical apparatus. While her remarkable critical
acumen makes Spivak one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, there
is an interesting corollary to the whole exercise that conditions her
reading method. Commenting on the paradox of Spivak’s situation as
a reader and her investment in the seemingly oppositional theoretical
structures for the purpose of responding to the knowledge question in
our time, Young observes:
Spivak has a particular ability to project the extensive range of

such issues simultaneously with the detailed texture of her histori-
cal, literary, philosophical, theoretical or political analyses. It is
this which constitutes not only her own importance as a critic, but
also demonstrates the extent to which the critique of colonialism
involves a project that is not merely historical nor peripheral but
rather attempts a radical restructuring of the traditional perspec-
tives, norms and assumptions which form the basis of Western
thought. . . . For all the carefully constructed disparateness of her
work, for all the discontinuities which she refuses to reconcile,
Spivak’s Marxism functions as an overall syncretic frame. It works,
in fact, in exactly the same way as Jameson’s – as a transcendental-
izing gesture to produce closure. Spivak’s supplementary history
must itself be supplemented.
(215–216)
Young’s reading is tantalizingly demonstrative of the questions he has

for the Marxist narrative of history, and there is no doubt that the
entire project that he pursues in White Mythologies is designed to
articulate the problematic nature of the historiographic imagination
dominating the question of knowledge. His positioning of Spivak and
Bhabha within that same matrix is thus an extension of the critical lens
through which he examines the theoretical underpinnings that inform
the responses of these two seminal postcolonial thinkers.
Aligned to Spivak, but differing in both emphases and orientation,
the writings of Homi Bhabha have argued for the cultivation of a cul-
tural understanding that accommodates the ambivalence characteristic
of colonial discourse. Young sees the psychoanalytic assumptions that
Bhabha makes use of for the furtherance of his thesis of ambivalence
as an area that requires attention. How far is the employment of the
Freudian structure conducive to the study of cultures that offset the
dominance of the European mind? Interestingly, it is Bhabha’s criticism
of the Saidian imperative of the colonial experience that facilitates the
argument for the slippery character of the worlds that Europe tries to
figure through its own imagination. What Bhabha tries to address in
his reading of Said is the fact that the relations between the colonizer
and the colonized are not straightforward but ambivalent. Such a posi-
tion is not just reliant on the processes of subject-making that Freud
proposed, but it extends to the objectives of history as conditioned
by the hegemonic structures in the West. If colonial discourses are the
consequences of power mechanisms that determine the worlds and the
way they are perceived, then how is one to address these formations?
Within the conditions of history, or through an alternative argument?
Young argues that Bhabha projects ambivalence as a condition which
is integral to any discursive undertaking: ‘Throughout the restless
seriality of Bhabha’s delineation of how historicization is produced
through the different singularities and temporalities of processes that
are never totalized but which do overlap, ambivalence remains a con-
stant reference’ (187). Further implicated in the colonial worldview
is the tendency to follow a given practice of the self, which Bhabha
approaches through the agency of mimicry. In effect, the historical
situations that colonialism refers to end up being transformed, and
cultures and sites can be accessed only by means of the hybrid form
in which they appear. Along with ambivalence, mimicry and hybrid-
ity, there is another concept that is central to Bhabha’s argument on
colonial experience, that of supplementarity. Young is of the view that
Bhabha’s avoidance of the pitfalls that beset Said in his formulation of
the Orient does not enable the logic of ambivalence sustain the poli-
tics of discourse. Eclectic yet rigorous in the critical positioning of the
argument against the total form of history, Bhabha cautions us against
those markers of culture which operate to programme a given form of
narrative. In both the cases of Bhabha and Spivak, Young observes,
there is a cognizance of the limits of the historical imperative espoused
by the Marxist historiographic tradition of the West. What Young does
well is to evidence through his critical reading of these texts the prob-
lems associated with the structures of knowledge that interventionists
like Bhabha and Said empanel for argumentative purposes.
White Mythologies is a pathbreaking commentary on the faultlines
of the project of history and one of most clear and affirmed readings
on the impact of the Marxist model on the way the knowledge ques-
tion has been accessed and approached in the West. His unsparing
examination of the celebrated postcolonial trio of Said, Bhabha and
Spivak is a reminder of the influence of the systematic design that
these thinkers so vehemently argue their cases against. What emerges
in the course of the discussion is a display of erudition and argument,
but more significantly, it is the drawing of the frontiers of a discipline
whose reactionary pressures are as much responses to as much they
are revisions of a process of knowledge-production mechanism that is
of seminal impact.
Works cited
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: A Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions, London, UK: Verso, 2005.
Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, London,
UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2001.
_______. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Second edition,
Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2004.
11 Sara Suleri: The Rhetoric of
English India
Unreadable India: difficulties of
mapping a nation and its culture
Often frames of argument that are brought to bear upon a subject

appear to succumb to the pressures of predictability, a condition that
has also impinged upon the India narrative without achieving the
results such exercises promise. Sara Suleri’s mode of reading the colo-
nial experience argues for the need of a critical apparatus that would
not only address inconsistencies of value but would also accommodate
those registers that thwart convenient analytical strategies. What Sul-
eri is proposing is more than a mere reformulation of terms; it involves
the arresting of those tendencies which have been at the service of
critical theory for long. It is no wonder, then, that Suleri’s call for
a radical reappraisal of the reading process locates in the subject –
India – both circumstance and character which challenge the uncritical
subject position in which the country, along with its culture, is regu-
larly placed. For Suleri, such a revision of terms is more than necessary:
it is a twofold acknowledgement of the situation, the first relating to
the dominant rhetorical impulse at work and the other concerning the
subject under review, India. The argument for a politically induced
narrative process behind the formulation of the colonial Indian mind
and its operative dimensions finds expression in Sara Suleri’s critically
engaging postcolonial thesis The Rhetoric of English India.
What lay beneath the narratives that held sway and determined
the contours of the colonial imagination? In addressing an issue such
as this, Suleri invites us to attend upon the formats through which
these designs found expression in colonial India. The argumentative
thread that runs through The Rhetoric of English India is substan-
tially configured to present an exegesis of the multiple facets of this
critical process through recourse to a selection of narrative discourses
that extend from the colonial past to the contemporary texts fathered
by Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul. Taking her cue from Kipling,
she situates anew the ambivalent circumstances in which colonial
Sara Suleri: The Rhetoric of English India 225
discourses are often enmeshed. We may well ask, why Kipling? As
in the case with Ashis Nandy’s reading of colonial psychology in The
Intimate Enemy, Kipling’s texts emerge in the form of narratives that
address the counter-colonial imperative even as they seemingly align
with the dominant ideology governing cultural formation. In Suleri’s
framing of the issue, the problem is not confined to a contest of facul-
ties, or rather two points of view, but it extends beyond the personal
to engage the variety of discursive structures that spread across the
colonial world. Her argument is marked by an understanding of
critical prerogatives that themselves signal the dangers of simplistic
adoption. Suleri’s method is characterized by an innovative process of
questioning that sets up some of the conventions of postcolonial criti-
cism against practices that are firmly ensconced in colonial experience.
Presenting her approach, situation and critical purpose, she writes:
‘Kipling’s tale functions as a cautionary preamble to my present work,
which both seeks location within the discourse of colonial cultural
studies and attempts to question some of the governing assumptions
of that discursive field’ (1). It is evident that in trying to arrest one of
the most slippery tropes of postcolonial reason – the ‘other’ – Suleri
brings into focus the difficulties of critical investment in a structure
that does not always adequately engage the situations it aspires to
map. In her view, this is brought about by a heavy margin-centre dia-
logic interpenetration which makes ‘cultural decentring’ (1) extremely
complicated to negotiate. If the culture of binary logic is interrogated
further, she argues, it would involve the confrontation of ‘the alle-
gorization of empire’ (2), something that would situate the national
space in terms of a more critically driven environment. Suleri’s opening
remarks, however focussed on the nature of this postcolonial dilemma,
are designed to address that very question of rhetoric which layers the
idea and imagination of India.
The primary issue here, then, concerns the examination of the nature
of ‘English’ India. Suleri’s reading opens up the taken-for-granted
frame, and rather than posit another, she exposes the trappings of that
extension which situates ‘history’ and ‘idea’ within the same argu-
mentative logic. That, she contends, ushers forth a series of critical
inconsistencies which must be analysed in much greater detail than
has been thus far. For such a process to take off, it is imperative that
the limitations of binary understanding be confronted adequately: ‘To
study the rhetoric of the British Raj in both its colonial and postcolo-
nial manifestations is therefore to attempt to break down the incipient
schizophrenia of a critical discourse that seeks to represent domina-
tion and subordination as though the two were mutually exclusive
226 Sara Suleri: The Rhetoric of English India
terms’ (4). In effect, Suleri is contesting not just the convenient division
of the colonizer/colonized opposition, she is also asking questions of
the temperament that aims to appropriate the experience of colonialism
through this dichotomy alone. The stress on the ambiguities accompa-
nying the movements within the texts that constitute the narratives of
colonial history is not without reason. More than an academic tool for
the understanding of colonial experience, the emphasis on the fluidity
of cultural history here emerges as a recognition of the complicated
situation every commentator or historian is compelled to address. And
in the cultivation of such a critical worldview towards the subject of
colonial historiography and reason lies the possibility of unravelling
the intricacies that serve the plots of empire. These plots do not always
engage well-defined structures that bear the name of colonial texts; or,
at least, the existence of such texts does not submit to any coherence
that would withstand the weight of interpretation beyond their points
of reference. What it entails calls for a much wider and even more
flexible paradigmatic design so that the binaries through which this
logic of colonial supremacy is mounted upon a cultural edifice can
account for processes that do not subscribe to the pressures of hierar-
chy. Is it due to the nature of colonial India, at once vast and almost
unmappable, in terms of either culture or territorial diversity, or has
it something to do with the ambivalence that stems from the conjunc-
tive association of difference and fear? Suleri argues that the narrative
thread through which most postcolonial texts articulate the reason
for national form overrides a lack that cannot be ignored. This is the
lack of narrative coherence in colonial historiography. What are read
as ‘facts’ are caught up within the imposed rhetoric of empire. Instead
of becoming the veritable texts of colonial reality, the narratives of
English India are complex examples of circumstances that are caught
up in the twin modes of self-critique and enhancement. Elaborating
this point, she points out:
[T]he narratives of English India are fraught with the idiom of

dubiety, or a mode of cultural tale-telling that is neurotically con-
scious of its own self-censoring apparatus. While such narratives
appear to claim a preeminence of historical facticity over cultural
allegory, they nonetheless illustrate that the functioning of lan-
guage in a colonial universe is preternaturally dependent on the
instability of its own facts. For colonial facts are vertiginous: they
lack a recognizable cultural plot; they frequently fail to cohere
around the master-myth that proclaims static lines of demarcation
between imperial power and disempowered culture, between colo-
nizer and colonized.
(3)
Once the argument for the problematic character of the colonial nar-
rative in English India is proposed with conviction, it is only befitting
that the next step would entail a critical engagement with the nature
of rhetoric. Why is rhetoric so significant a critical module for the
understanding of colonial experience? It is because, Suleri suggests,
of the filter of the imagination that narratives seek to arrest realities
of a world that is at once fragmented and insuperably removed from
familiar experience. What Suleri highlights here is significant for the
possibilities it opens up for subsequent responses to colonial realities.
In this context, she observes:
To state the case at its most naked, the Indian subcontinent is not
merely a geographical space upon which colonial rapacities have
been enacted, but is furthermore that imaginative construction
through which rapaciousness can worship its own misdeeds, thus
making the subcontinent a tropological repository from which
colonial and postcolonial imaginations have drawn – and continue
to draw – their most basic figures for the anxiety of empire.
(4–5)
A more sustained examination of the experience of colonialism in India

furthers the condition, an almost inevitable accompaniment of the
critical process, that India is an unreadable text. Not that the text of
India does not exist, but there is no denying that the apparatus through
which its situations and history are being sought to be read remains
grossly inadequate. Like the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Pas-
sage to India (an example to which Suleri alludes), the combined effect
of mystery and mystique adds to the imaginative mix that configures
an India that refuses to be fixed within the narrative frames through
which it is often accessed. Such inaccessibility functions, she argues,
as a rhetorical instrument, trapping the critique within the norm, so
that what should have emerged as a given also takes the shape of
a resistant metaphor. The advent of colonialism actually opened up
multiple fissures within the territorial breadth and width of the Indian
subcontinent, and though it may appear that English governance and
control facilitated the rise of Indian nationalism, such a logic can-
not be sustained merely through a recourse to the colonial encounter.
Rather, India serves as a sounding board against which a romantic
agency operates to legitimize the representation. The dependence on
another extreme, that of the Subaltern Studies collective, for a justifica-
tion of postcolonial reason is also not free from the lure of bracketing
the other within a convenient frame. The readings proposed by the
Subaltern Studies Collective, or any theoretical attempt for that mat-
ter that aspires to make sense of colonial history through the logic
of alterity, must end up celebrating the instrument for the event, the
device for the experience. As Suleri pursues her case of an unreadable
India, she finds in the overt fascination for the other a desire to foist
the triumph of the analytical spirit upon a narrative whose character
is far from determined. Such a design, such a pattern of reading, neu-
tralizes the effectiveness of postcolonial critique because here, more
than the nuances of the colonial encounter coming to the fore, it is
the insistence of the process of othering that demands our attention.
Suleri’s observation is pertinent here: ‘Contemporary rereadings of
colonial alterity too frequently wrest the rhetoric of otherness into
the postmodern substitute for the very Orientalism that they seek to
dismantle, thereby replicating on an interpretive level the cultural and
critical fallacies that such revisionism is designed to critique’. Alterity,
then, is insufficient both as mode of inquiry and as an approach to the
experience of colonial history. This line of thought, where there is an
insistence on the inadequacy of the binary understanding of the colo-
nial past, is rooted in Suleri’s reading process throughout this book, a
process which she elaborates at the very beginning of the eponymous
first chapter.
If alterity cannot adequately subsume the conditions of colonial
society, the location of a different paradigm must trace its moorings
in the agency of gender difference. In pursuing this thesis Suleri orga-
nizes her understanding of the colonial world through the critique of
gender function in its commonly appropriated forms in both feminist
and postcolonial theory. What is required, and more urgently called
for, in her view, is a radical revision of the terms through which the
woman question is located in contemporary discourse. Such an ori-
entation can be traced back to the knowledge-production practices
in early colonial history when the idea of the ‘Orient’ was being con-
solidated in imperialist narratives. By the time the feminization of the
colony acquired the designation of a given and became a common-
place, this articulation of colonial experience through the register of
the female body embraced a wide range of cultural practices and func-
tions. For long, Suleri contends, the ‘metaphor of rape’ (16) served as
the dominant trope of narrative history relating to colonial life and
culture. If such an understanding sought to arrest the dynamics of
colonial hegemony (Suleri cites Nehru and Rushdie) by referring to
the native space in terms of the female body, such engagements often
succumbed to the arithmetic of desire, where domination and control
were visualized by the logic of erotic symbolism. Such eroticism, once
it was engaged as a conditional in the structuring of a given discourse,
branched out to accommodate the body as site and agency of colonial
experience. In her reading of this process, Suleri critiques and ques-
tions the parameters adopted in such exercises. More than a matter
of critical design, this movement in cultural practice was fraught with
its attendant limitations, and when she exposes the problems inherent
in such gender-centric patterning of colonial history, Suleri aspires to
shift the argument onto an altogether different track. Since the entire
first chapter of the book is devoted to a reading of the rhetorical pro-
cesses through which India came to be imagined and configured in the
narrative consciousness of the West, the critique of the gender template
fits the argumentative frame quite well.
It is interesting that in recognizing the difficulty of adopting the
conventional colonizer/colonized straitjacket, Suleri locates in the very
agency of postcolonial reason the rhetorical imperative, one through
which the meanings of India as culture and nation have been con-
sistently configured. In the course of her analysis of rhetoric and its
impact on the reading of the colonial subject in the opening chapter,
she proposes a few strategies, the most striking of them being the call
to see in the gender-formation process a potential approach to postco-
lonial understanding. What Suleri does is to steer clear of the pressures
of the logic of duality, insisting instead on the need for revision of
the terms through which the intricacies of colonial life and culture
may find a proper agency. How is this agency to be made functional?
Obviously, such schemes as the ways in which critical capital has been
made of the feminist body vis-à-vis the colonial space are what she
contests and exposes for the myopic and skewed vision that they even-
tually project. As such, then, the logic of alterity and the category of
the submissive body, both put to service of the postcolonial criticism
since its inception, find in Suleri’s reading a critical response that opens
up the fissures of these frames for renewed examination. The signifi-
cance of her reading of the ‘rhetoric’ thus stems from this insistence
on the need for a critical inquiry of those terms that have sedimented
deep enough within the matrices of postcolonial thought, which could
well gain from the kind of foundational excavation that she engages
in in this book. In ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolo-
nial Condition’, following an argumentative thread that examines the
conjunctive association of ‘woman’ and ‘postcolonialism’, she exposes
the faultlines that characterize such a combination: ‘The coupling of
postcolonial with woman, however, almost inevitably leads to the sim-
plicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating
the racially female voice into a metaphor for “the good”. Such meta-
phoricity cannot exactly be called essentialist, but it certainly functions
as an impediment to a reading that attempts to look beyond obvious
questions of good and evil’ (758–759).
Sara Suleri goes on to address the complicitous association of the
gender question with the narratives of women travellers in the fourth
chapter, but another agency, that of caste, is taken for discussion in the
opening one. How does caste figure in the making of the imaginative
vision of imperial India? In the configuration of cultural propensities it is
imperative that social formations such as ones determined by caste rela-
tions be approached both contextually and critically, but if the processes
of emplotment are anything to go by, we can see, argues Suleri, how
tale-telling tendencies overlap and condition perceptions about existing
social hierarchies. The shifts in colonial discourse engage the postcolonial
reader’s subject position in a way that makes politics very much a part of
the critical exercise, implicating both the subject and the analyst condi-
tionals that inform and fashion the other. In this sense, it is the dynamism
of the structural process that demands our attention. Commenting on
the retroactive dimensions of postcolonial thought and its pressures on
the nature of the rhetoric holds sway over the discourses of colonial his-
tory, she finds the dialogic insistence of this relation inevitable:
If this rhetoric is to be comprehended as a dynamic and culturally

plangent process, then the reader herself is bound to admit to her
participation in its bewildering production of peripheries, or cul-
tural margins that refer to no historical centre. Much as the colo-
nizer and colonized can no longer be examined as totally autono-
mous entities, so must critical discourse recognize its imbrication
in the fields of its analyses. The postcolonial condition is neither
territorially bound nor more the property of one people than of
the other: instead, its inevitably retroactive narrative allows for
the inclusion both of its colonial past and of the function of criti-
cism at the present time as necessary corollaries to the telling of
its stories.
(22)
The structuring of the critical space of contemporary postcolonial

thought through the threads of the rhetorical network at work, then,
calls for an attention to both the knowledge-production process and
the modes through which the reading is done. In the course of her dis-
cussion on the agency of rhetoric – filtered through the Burkean frame
of reference – Suleri locates in the figuration of India a complicitous
design that simultaneously arrested and thwarted the colonial stereo-
types into narrative submission.
Edmund Burke, Hastings and India: stereotypes and

the trial of a nation
The situation of Edmund Burke in the history of Western aesthetics is
remarkably well cushioned by the image of an aesthete, erudite and
scholar, but it is in an alternative engagement of these attributes that
Suleri locates a political impulse that marks out the idea of India in
British eyes. Two chapters at the heart of The Rhetoric of English
India, one on Burke and the other on the trial of Warren Hastings, bear
down heavily on the processes of nation formation in the imagined
space through which the world and culture of India is subjected to
public gaze. It is as if India, both as a country and as an idea, formatted
for display, assessment and appraisal, found in these two events on the
public stage – Burke’s speech of 1783 and the Warren Hastings trial –
frames for renewed textualization. These two processes of textualizing
India through a rhetorical engagement that had the ear of the British
public offer interesting insights into the functioning of a social imagi-
nary that reposts the nation through narratives of colonial desire. The
first case in point is that of Burke’s address, a display that projected
English benevolence and cultural anxiety through an interrogation of
the modes of economic and material control of India. Instead of fol-
lowing the conventions of colonial reason whereby the mother country
and its culture are rocketed to moral high ground, Burke projects a
mind whose ironic counterpoint to the exploitation thesis highlights
another dimension of imperial agency: sympathy.
The Burkean paradigm of sublimity, appropriated in another con-
text to the nature of the beautiful, is here subsumed to delineate the
circumstance and condition of empire, but in this format what func-
tions, and subsequently acquires momentum, is a theatre where India
is both subject and imagination. Registered within the official norms
of public speaking, Burke’s India narrative builds upon and simulta-
neously fuels the discursive potential of a nation imagined anew for
an eager, responsive audience. The space where such a display is put
up for show is that of theatre. In playing out that dynamic of cultural
reality that is designated and understood in terms of ‘India’, Suleri
argues, it is the theatrical potential of the sublime that opens up the
subject and places it within the matrix of desire. In an incisive, brilliant
and succinct assessment of the politics of the Burkean sublime and the
impact of his intervention on the narrative imagination of a nation
struggling with the experience of modernity, Suleri demonstrates how
Burke’s speech configures the nature of British colonial agency:
When Burke invokes the sublimity of India, therefore, he seeks

less to contain the irrational within a rational structure than to
construct inventories of obscurity through which the potential
empowerment of the sublime is equally on the verge of emptying
into negation. The paradigm that he establishes can be schematized
as follows: India as a historical reality evokes the horror of sublim-
ity, thus suggesting to the colonizing mind the intimate dynamic
it already shares with aesthetic horror; such intimacy provokes
the desire to itemize and to list all the properties of the desired
object; the list’s inherent failure to be anything other than a list
causes the operation of sublimity to open into vacuity, displaying
desire into the greater longevity of disappointment. While Burke’s
speech ostensibly shapes the paradigm into a passionate warning
against the abuse of colonial power, his method of exemplification
clearly reveals that the catalogue itself carries more weight than its
abundant moral.
(29)
Burke’s placement of the sublimity thesis within the rhetoric of the

European imagination configures India in terms of an inventory of
cultural difference. It is not surprising that his strategy finds in the
paradigm of the sublime the logic for mounting the critique of British
imperial policy, for, as Suleri points out, it is through the cushion of
moral reason that the inverse is implicated. The seemingly simple logic
of moral authority is thus a strategic imperative through which Burke
foists his reading of India as a valid narrative of a nation confronting
the imperial machine.
Against the backdrop of an India narrative that throve on mystifi-
cation and the reassertion of consolidated stereotypes, Burke situates
the sublime as a conduit, a medium through which the rhetoric of
empire stood validated. More telling and insistent than the logic of the
familiar stereotypes that buoyed the idea of the Orient, the Burkean
sublime sought to suggest its effect by conflating the modes of repre-
sentation and the imagination that facilitated it. The sublime, Suleri
contends, ‘functions as a conduit between the delusional aspects of
empire-building or breaking and the very solidity of history, which
appears to suggest a continually stable hold on what the proper course
of events may be’ (37). What Suleri is proposing is that the sublime is
attached to the historical narrative minus its autonomy as an aesthetic
value, thereby seeking to legitimize a version of history that gains
through the enhancement of obscurity. The conflation of the sublime
and the historical makes the former unreadable, makes the exotic and
agency and site of play, and in this transfer of beauty to a history that
stands exposed to the anxieties of imperial knowledge, India as text
is not merely inaccessible; it comes to be designated as untouchable.
Suleri sees the Burkean intervention in the Warren Hastings trial as an
‘instrument’ that reflects a ‘discursive collapse’ (45) where this condi-
tion of an unreadable India is clearly evident. The Hastings trial is thus
a material amplification of the India narrative that Burke configured
through the conflation of the three tropes: beauty, sublime and his-
tory. Informed crucially by an aesthetic that built upon the edifice of
the knowledge-production machinery of the West, the Burkean expla-
nation of the narrative of India is designed to offset the crude forms
of Oriental ‘reality’. And it is because of this political underpinning
of national desire that India comes through with a varnish that is at
once theatrical and real. Elaborating the process through which Burke
achieves this effect, Suleri writes:
When Burke turns to the colonization of the Indian subcontinent,

he arrives intellectually equipped with a prior reading of the signif-
icance of difficulty and a foreknowledge of its ability to construct
catalogues or suggest hierarchies that are continually imploding.
In assuming the responsibility of a colonial spectator with both
astonishment and terror, Burke brings to the theatre of Anglo-
Indian history a new dynamic of guilt that comes dangerously
close to articulating the untouchability of the sublime.
(44)
In reading the Burkean intervention in the Hastings trial, Suleri

presents the complexities that underpin the postcolonial critique of
imperial vision. While the straitjacket of the imperial corrective that
had served the legitimacy motif in the narratives of colonization in
India remained embedded in the Western imagination, it is through
the interventions such as the one Burke foisted upon the colonial
worldview that great intellectual capital was garnered and made an
imperative for the understanding of a subject such as India. That
India remained beyond the limits of readability constituted for the
imperial intellectual – and Burke fit the bill to a T – the ready occa-
sion and site for interrogation. As Hastings failed, and succumbed to
the matrix of a malaise that showcased him as both perpetrator and
victim of a situation that called for an extraordinary response, Burke
saw in this exercise the reason to drive home the logic of a colonial
argument that had thus far been confined to the hierarchy of the
imperial structure.
The attention that the trial of Warren Hastings received in the
English imagination was a revelation. It brimmed over the legal
dimensions of an event that was, strictly, an ordinary taking-to-task
exercise by the British governmental machinery. As Suleri points out,
more than the ‘rhetorical exaggeration’ (49) with which Burke sought
to coat his narrative of colonial India, it was the trial that served as
the appropriate matrix through which the imperial space’s unread-
ability acquired insistent force. Burke’s submission to the theatricality
of the entire exercise engaged a far-deeper politico-aesthetic design
than what the exhibitionist streaks of the trial appeared to suggest
to its contemporary audience. Yet such a facade and its imminent
failure to legitimize the objective of the trial foregrounded the rhe-
torical dimensions of a reality that was soon getting caught up in the
contesting agencies of language. Suleri argues that the ironic fallout
of the trial’s incapacity to achieve the status of confirmed knowledge
bears out the significance of the rhetorical mode in enabling the pas-
sage of imperial legitimacy. In the failure of the trial lay the genesis
and the occasion through which Burke’s narrative of India arrested
the country’s idea within the frame of language: ‘In demonstrating
the temporal invalidity of both impeachment and of the urge to locate
colonial responsibility in a single figure, the Hastings trial represents
that theatre upon which the rhetoric of English India loses a body to
gain a language’ (67).
The imperial erotic through Forster’s lens: the case of

A Passage to India
The location of friendship as an insistent topic in Forster’s A Passage to
India becomes for Suleri more than an aesthetic strategy: it is couched
in the space of cultural difference for reasons that extend beyond the
condition of companionship. The politics invested in such an exercise
is imbued with the erotic of desire that draws on the body in its twin
aspects, as a site and as an exemplar of culture. This is a form of tag-
ging designed to explore the gaps: ‘A Passage to India translates the
question of cross-cultural friendship into a more vertiginous study of
how cultures both issue and misread invitations to one another’ (132).
Suleri argues that a consciousness of the limitation circumscribes the
relation between Aziz and Fielding in a way that cannot be overcome.
Does it imply, then, that the knowledge of identity and location is more
important than a cultural label? In effect, do we see the awareness of
difference being transformed into a rhetoric whose character impinges
upon the way relations develop and function? Suleri’s contention is
that it does. The exploration of the implications of this rhetoric brings
to the fore the faultlines that are part of the friendship. Her critical
reading points towards the incorporation of race within the colonial
paradigm as an aesthetic imperative. Understanding of racial iden-
tity does not foreclose the possibilities of friendship: rather, there is a
growing appreciation of the self as a body within the given colonial
space. Suleri situates this tendency as a condition informing the struc-
tures of social bonding, especially when it comes to the figuration of
the male body as a visually recognizable signature of cultural identity.
What is erotic thus becomes a register where the political ramifications
of the colonial encounter are played out: ‘The erotic of race, and its
concomitant cultural complications, is most clearly figured in the nar-
rative’s curious relation to the overdetermination that is Aziz. From
the opening chapters of the novel, it is evident that Aziz is accorded
a certain mobility as a racial body which allows him an exemption
from his role as complete participant in the colonial encounter’ (133).
But Forster’s understanding of racial mobility forms part of a much
broader engagement where the visually identifiable dimensions of
colour and shape constitute the frame through which the imperial eye
operates. The focus on the body, an important part of the identity-
formation process in the colonial reading of cultural difference, thus
emerges as a fertile textual space that both ruptures and reconstructs
the idea of India. In her examination of the way the reality of the
body is brought home to engage the erotic within the circumscribed
colonial space, Suleri reads the graphically striking passage where ‘the
man who pulled the punkah’ draws the attention of Adela Quested.
When Adela sees the man, a function in the great machinery of the
empire, he seems to embody a current of sexually driven energy that
runs against the caste register that defines him in the social space. One
could also argue, Suleri feels, that the fanpuller operates as a sign of
the racially defined Indian male, of which Aziz himself is a more visible
manifestation, the difference between the two being in the apparent
mobility of Aziz, while the stationary nameless servant of the empire
blatantly announces the body as the language of a nation. Adela’s
reading betrays a colonially informed mind that finds in the cultural
structure the repository of a type: the fanpuller’s singularity and his
visual mark as the Indian body remains in the chain of memory. This
is not the case with Aziz. His movement across the textual landscape
of the novel, his ambivalence in the eyes of those he comes into con-
tact with and his being a friend to Fielding complicate matters further.
How far can Aziz be seen as one whose condition may be read as an
indicator of a type? Suleri argues that the failure to typecast Aziz is one
of the keys through which the racial imperative manifests itself. Like
the caves’ mystery that refuse access, Aziz cannot be accessed fully, nei-
ther as an Indian nor as a person with determinable loyalties. He seems
to occupy that space where ambivalence forms part of the colonial
experience: ‘Aziz represents a belittled racial body whose attractions
can never be literalized, and the space upon which Forster can enact
the unavoidable partition that the longing of class creates within the
context of colonial knowledge’ (136). The matter is also connected to
the way distinctions are made use of in the larger context of cultural
difference. The body’s location as site of racial identity in the novel is
paralleled by the way the caves operate in the cultural imagination of
the people who come into contact with them. Just as the caves’ sugges-
tiveness invites interpretation, Aziz too appears accessible but remains
beyond complete cultural understanding. In a different context, in the
essay ‘Multiculturalism and Its Discontents’, Suleri writes how the see-
sawing between difference and understanding facilitates the reading
of something like the caves, which the narrative does not release for
unambiguous appropriation:
In A Passage to India, Forster separates the two sections titled

‘Mosque’ and ‘Temple’ with a central section, crucially titled
‘Caves’. The caves in which nothing happens turn out to be res-
onant spaces where religious and cultural differences are both
quickened and, with some ambiguity, resolved. Perhaps multi-
culturalism can be intellectually effective only if it is prepared to
locate the caves of emptiness that riddle all cultures or the hollow
pockets in which the distinction between mosque and temple can
be temporarily undone.
(17)
What is fascinating in the novel, when it comes to the reading of the

body and its imagined condition, Suleri contends, is the shifts that
take place across the temporal plane. She cites the episode where the
object in view is the image of Aziz’s wife, and it is here that the dis-
play of the photograph before Fielding’s English self is an occasion
for reassertion of cultural values. When Aziz grants Fielding the free-
dom to have a look at his wife’s image, it is an exercise in voyeurism
that comes with limits; this is how Suleri reads the event. But there
is more to it than that. For Fielding, such instances transform Aziz
into a specimen of anthropological interest, and it is the seemingly
liberal outlook that the Indian imagination becomes the subject of
cultural intrusion. Suleri reads the trust that exists between Fielding
and Aziz as an extension of the ordinary into the scheme of a much
larger rhetoric: that of the anti-exotic, through which the passage
into the Indian mind is made feasible. The Marabar Caves and what
they hold for each one – Adela, Aziz and Fielding – become exciting
in the narrative, but it is achieved through the reassertion of the obvi-
ous: ‘The touristic experience of colonialism is deglamourized into
mathematical computations of how literally banal the exotic may
be’ (2005: 145). Towards the closing part of her discussion on For-
ster, Suleri focusses on the role of space, on the way Forster uses the
spatiality of India as an idea for the articulation of the ambivalence
inhabiting the issue of gender and its way it is perceived. A Passage
to India can be read as a novel that capitalizes on the cultural string-
ing of the nation’s character through the metaphor of space. Tied up
with the experience of the mundane, the notion of the exotic is given
an interesting spin where the land and its culture come to be exam-
ined in terms of its situation as a body: ‘Geography thus functions
as a cultural determinant that delimits too promiscuous a traversal
of its inherent boredom, and as a consequence becomes a figure for
the inefficacy of colonial travel, whether it be across acceptable cul-
tural or sexual borders’ (146). It is in this combined form where the
traces of the erotic, the spatial and the mundane emerge through the
register of culture that the rhetoric of India works within the narra-
tive frame. Adela’s desire for an experience of real India and Aziz’s
ambivalence regarding his relation with Fielding are conditions that
add to the embedded logic of a country that is defined by a particular
kind of orientation. Suleri argues that this idea of failure, of incom-
pleteness that characterizes the fragility of the Aziz–Fielding bond,
owes not just to the Marabar Caves disaster but to a much more
deeply enhanced narrative that defines the experience of colonialism.
The danger of falling back upon the defined contours of the stereo-
type where Fielding cannot transcend the frame of the Englishman
is constantly gnawing at the efforts both of them put in. In the end,
when the abortion of the relation becomes the only known reality,
colonial desire reveals itself as a dismal condition that lost its way in
the narrative of determined cultural priorities.
Kipling, Naipaul and Rushdie: postcolonial
bildungsroman?
A key figure in Naipaul’s reading of modernity is Joseph Conrad. The
route through which he comes to Conrad and then threads his way
into his own is itself an exercise in self-fashioning that has invited
many contrary readings. Suleri looks at the Naipaul mystique in the
section titled ‘Naipaul’s Arrival’ and sees in his reading of culture
and its purposes a design that structures a distinctive logic. Naipaul
calls modern that process which facilitated his disengagement with a
language that was weighed down by the discourse of empire. In his
recognition of the Conradian influence and his efforts to craft his own
road, Naipaul looks at his own status as a West Indian, and the strug-
gle he has had to make in order to emerge from the shadow of the
colonial understanding of reality. In effect, Suleri argues that Naipaul
cannot dissociate himself from the narrative he organizes; he cannot
manage the text through something of a Keatsian negative capability.
Instead, he invests in this rhetoric of self-engagement where he is both
subject and site of evaluation, and it is upon such a positioning of the
writer that he situates his credibility as a writer. Examining this con-
dition, Suleri writes: ‘Naipaul’s most significant work has little to do
with definitive statements about postcolonial history, and more with a
perception of the writer’s guilty involvement in the construction of his
own plots’ (151). Naipaul’s is a tricky case, for, as Suleri points out,
his use of the self for the purpose of reading cultural difference as well
as the projection of a particular kind of critical orientation as a mode
of analysis is fraught with its own trappings. While reading Conrad,
there is an underlying engagement with the experience of the colonial
encounter, and whether it is through the lens of the Polish-born mod-
ernist or through the trajectory of his own situation in Trinidad, the
articulation is insistently political. Can one like Naipaul, so given to
the use of the self for the purposes of authenticity and critical sense,
disengage the conditions that inhere in or form part of such experi-
ences? The problem with Naipaul, Suleri argues, runs deeper than
the question of mere identity. It involves the subject of power in a
different way. This is the power that stems from a particularly cul-
tivated and culturally located self. When he writes of the experience
of his landing in England, it is, to quote Rob Nixon, ‘more metaphor
than event’ (161). What is interesting is not confined to the reading
process alone, but it is in the invigorating impulse through which
the condition of colonial understanding is brought to bear upon his
own state that gives the writing its distinctive character. Naipaul has
consistently located his self as a site for the critical understanding of
culture. Take, for instance, one of his versions of his situation in the
West Indies and what it entailed for him to occupy that space: ‘The
adaptation of my own family and the Trinidad Indian community to
colonial Trinidad and, through that, to the twentieth century hadn’t
been easy. It had been painful for us, an Asian people, living instinc-
tive, ritualized lives, to awaken to an idea of our history and to learn
to live with the idea of our political helplessness’ (508). But more than
the programming through which his self is placed in the narrative,
it is his carefully crafted distancing of himself which conditions his
position. Suleri looks at Naipaul’s removal of his self from the sites
which carry preset connotations, which in turn he uses to shape his
argument. In An Area of Darkness Naipaul organizes his narrative to
address the peculiar circumstances that emanate from and relate to
the idea of India. How does he distance himself? According to Suleri,
this is typical of Naipaul. Commenting on how this strategy enables
Naipaul to occupy the position of an uninvolved but informed wit-
ness, Suleri writes: ‘Each time An Area of Darkness approaches an
overt recognition of the bodily and consequently racial quality of its
own narrative, its storytelling quickly veers away into the safety of
some third-person tale, in which the body at issue becomes a represen-
tative of Indian otherness to Naipaul’ (163). The projection is an act
of denial. It is a condition that he makes use of to assert an alternative
which emerges in the form of a critique. Suleri points out how Naipaul
brings the idea of his alienated self into sharp focus by contesting the
idea of replenishment accompanying his return to his roots. Instead
of his coming to India functioning as a homecoming, it becomes an
instance of ‘postcolonial panic’ which the text is at pains to map by
an articulation of absences from the location in question. What Suleri
brings to the fore is of signal importance here, for in Naipaul’s ambiva-
lence is implicated the process of condensation, a process that builds
upon but does not address the object in unambiguous terms:
For Naipaul’s mature writing no longer conceives of the literary as

a recourse from the political, but instead internalizes the imperial
tradition represented by both modes into a dazzling idiom that no
longer needs to indicate the referents of its discourse. As a con-
sequence of this condensation, such a language will never clearly
identify the object of its indictment. Its burden is, of course, to
demonstrate the objectlessness of postcolonial indignation, as that
discourse seeks to establish the parameters of its suffering.
(155)
The point of interest here is the process through which the projection
of the self works in the narrative of India, and the accompanying con-
texts that emerge within discursive frames that is of Naipaul’s making.
It becomes, Suleri argues, a commentary on the nature of the body
that combines the rhetoric of repulsion with the text of anxiety, each
bearing the weight of Naipaul’s personal history. But this is not merely
personal, or confined to it. In the performative dimension of this pro-
cess there lies embedded those cultural codes which look at the bodies
in the Indian cultural context, and imbued with the gloss of pasts that
cannot be undone, there is an insistent restructuring of the colonial
self. An Area of Darkness pursues a revisionist thesis that seems to be
empowered with the condition of the unique, suggesting through the
episodic variety of the Indian world what we can have a glimpse of, a
hysterical response to an undecipherable culture. India’s otherness and
Naipaul’s very peculiarity as a subject endowed with the heritage of a
hybrid cultural past are what complicate the status of his perspective.
This is deliberately done. In a brilliant insight Suleri demonstrates how
his personal situation and response to the ‘world’ function as racial
spectacles where Naipaul is able to orchestrate the familial and histori-
cal circumstances as sites for critical reading. Nothing for Naipaul is
free from its license to critique. Building upon the rhetorical impera-
tive of a hierarchy he inherits, Naipaul realigns his anxiety to pursue a
peculiar kind of erasure which enables him to position his own self as
subject to the experience of imperial control. Interestingly, his cultiva-
tion of the self as vulnerable and inaccessible at the same time becomes
a strategic move which no orthodox binary of the colonizer/colonized
variety can adequately address. In the conflation of predictable catego-
ries, Naipaul’s reading of decay as a condition that must be reflected
upon becomes an investment in the irony of ‘enablement’ (173).
When it comes to the Rushdie case, this process of self-engagement
for the purpose of articulating what Suleri calls ‘postcolonial anxiety’
takes on a wholly different contour. Yet, as in the example of Naipaul,
in Rushdie’s situation too there is an insistent vocabulary that demands
to be heard, to be read for what the contents not just promise but
also examine. This is a strategy of remarkable critical engagement as
both Naipaul and Rushdie draw upon their personal worlds to bring
to life structures in fiction that reflect their philosophical priorities.
While Naipaul sought to project an aesthetic of displacement and self-
critique onto the narratives he built upon the colonially determined
edifices, Rushdie’s narratives took the political potential of the worlds
he made to emerge as possibilities that couched more than the alter-
native frames; they became conditions which demonstrated his desire
to suggest himself as the colonial import striking back at the roots of
Western understanding. What is striking, however, is the imperative
allegory that rides the narratives that Rushdie builds, and in conjunc-
tion with his take on the reality question, the critical dimension gets
enmeshed with the subject of writing itself. For Suleri, the larger ques-
tion in these narratives is the use of the symbolic register to address
conditions of life whose roots run deep, whose indicators invite us to
examine historical postures by making connections that otherwise do
not seem feasible. It is, then, at one level, a mode, a craft-related exer-
cise, but at another, it is a process of critical engagement which refuses
to be bracketed within either the ‘real’ or the ‘allegorical’ registers.
Shame, an example showcasing the conflation of the multiple realist
strains and the figurative that layers it, arrives as a text arguing for a
newly oriented narrative: ‘Its desire to in allegory and magic realism is
emblematic of the alliance between explosiveness and nostalgia, two
imperatives in a postcolonial discourse that maps, with haste and peril,
an aesthetic of novelty’ (175). Is the narrative of Shame complicit in
the process of critique? Is it an enactment of the narratorial expertise
that foists the political from history onto the world of fiction? Suleri
suggests that the narrative orientation of Shame functions not just to
bring the Third World stereotype to the centre of the fictional frame; it
also performs by a process of reversal, what can be called an exercise in
self-examination. The narrator’s understanding is fraught with the con-
dition of irony that reflects more than a rhetorical strategy: it runs as
a political matrix that invests both intellectual and historical baggages
through nostalgia and memory. This is unlike the Naipaul method, for
here we get a withdrawal of sorts, a self-enclosed situation where the
narrator positions himself to bolster his argument about credibility.
That, however, is not achieved. On the contrary, there is a reawaken-
ing of the truth value of what constitutes historical knowledge. This is
worked through the mode of fantasy, but in Rushdie’s version we have
a coexistence of the fantastic beside the recognized, and in effect, the
language is engaged to fashion that which it cannot adequately hold:
The genre of fantasy gestures toward a Western audience, long

since sophisticated at reading the language of the surreal. At the
same time, however, Rushdie cannot help but be seduced by the
facticity of the sorry tale he chooses to tell, by its gossip value to
a more informed audience. As a result, the narrative is forced to
gather power from a commitment to the incredulous, or to a lan-
guage that knows how to retrieve immediately what it has to give.
(179)
The performative character of Shame, however, is most evident in the
potential it exudes for something akin to a televised narrative, one
where the audience and the event are in continuous dialogue, and the
overplayed Western metaphors of value and the insistent rhetoric of
fundamentalism rid the drama of an aesthetic neutrality. In effect, what
we have in the novel is an enactment of culturally motivated language
and ready audiences, each reading alternatives that they recognize and
see as built-in properties of the narrative. Is the text rehearsed and
overdone, as Suleri suggests, or is the Rushdie narrative more than the
act of history’s fictional reproduction? The situation is as tricky as it
is reflective of the demands it makes on our critical understanding and
response to the knowledge of Pakistan’s arrival in history. If the story
is valid for what it brings thorough the process of retelling, then it is
more than the double of history; it does not function as a narrative
agent for ‘reality’, and nor does Rushdie suggest through his creative
exercise an aspiration to condition history into a preconceived for-
mat. What Suleri’s critique of Rushdie brings to the fore is of seminal
importance to postcolonial theory: not that Suleri’s reading compacts
all the imperatives of the postcolonial response to such a layered text
as Shame, but by zeroing in on the narrative entanglement she demon-
strates how history comes to function as a ‘body’, and more than that,
a space limited by the idiom of exile which compels critical attention.
One of the tropes through which Suleri looks at the complicated rela-
tion of the text to the history it seeks to mine is that of violence. This
is violence that transforms the narrative space by its psychic power,
almost willing the reader to succumb to its authority. Yet the process
is not a one-way journey. In fact, it is the narrative autonomy of Shame
that circumscribes the narrator’s freedom and binds him within its
matrix: ‘Rushdie invests a great deal of psychic energy in maintaining
his narrator’s civilization in opposition to the violence of his subject,
but ultimately such strategies of distancing expose the curious bonds
between author and subject. Shame goes to elaborate lengths to repress
its awareness that it is indeed an exercise of authority, that its narra-
tor does not have the luxury of standing outside the parameters of the
story it unfolds’ (188).
Allied to the Indian situation, and to the articulation of the nation
and its culture, is the mode of seeing. While the critical excavation
of the country at the hands of Naipaul shows the diasporic mind,
Kipling’s narrative enunciation of Kim courts another trajectory:
that of journalism. Why is journalism the chosen narrative mode for
Kipling? For one, it enables him to bring the colonial moment into
the centre of the contemporary, to make it valid through a register
that seems justified because it is couched in the vocabulary of the
present. The India that emerges in Kipling’s texts, especially Kim,
is one that is real by its immediacy, brought to life in a way that
suggests its constant reference to the moment of its reading. Argu-
ing the significance of Kipling’s style for a poetics of postcolonial
engagement, Suleri contends that it is through his adoption of the
journalistic mode that the moment of colonial experience comes
to acquire its insistent force in the narrative: ‘To Kipling’s narra-
tives as representations of an atrophic adolescence, therefore, is less
to condemn his imperial ideology than to attempt to comprehend
their brilliant literalization of the colonial moment’ (111). Seeing
the process of the Kiplingesque mode as an extension of the Burkean
strategy of event rendition on the one hand and as a design to offset
the rigours of chronology on the other, Suleri locates it as a resis-
tance to the imperative of cultural anthropology which demands
adequate sequencing among other things, and this is what grants
his narratives the sense of surprise. In this vision, India remains in a
state of continuous figuration, which Suleri calls ‘adolescent energy’
(113). Unlike Naipaul, who made capital of space, Kipling focusses
on imperial time to structure the idiom of the new, new for an audi-
ence that rivets its attention on the textual properties of a culture
that refuses to submit to the straight chronology of past and pres-
ent. Instead, there is an interrogation of the values that disturb the
conditions which make the stereotype work, and in its place comes
the ‘embodiment of peculiarities inherent in colonial dischronology’
(113) which offers a kind of moral evasiveness, because the priorities
of the instant emerge with compelling force. Kipling’s texts do not
avoid the conflict question; rather, they enhance the dialectic that
refuses any bridge across the cultural divide through the process of
non-commitment. This is evident in the way the socializing of values
arrives to suggest a poetics of inwardness so that Kim appears to
operate by evading the either/or duality, and in its place pursues a
reading that is far more problematic. Suleri is pointed in her assertion
that this is a form of reduction that makes use of the loops in cultural
history to foist a structure that builds upon the imperial edifice, how-
ever distanced from the narrative it may appear: ‘Kim is the colonial
voice on the brink of aphasia, so that the abundance of its narrative
is perpetually arrested by the potential dischronology embodied in a
cessation of cultural reading. As such, it incorporates the terrors of
imperialism into the very energy of adventure narratives: something
is on the verge of wiping the lips of Kim’s speech, of which the Great
Game is only the rude literalization’ (117).
The significance of Suleri’s reading of these texts is not confined to
its suggestive potential. What she has done is to offer a critical vocabu-
lary that looks at the conditions of cultural production in which the
idea of India came to operate, and more important, there is a consis-
tent recognition of the critical values that must be brought into the
postcolonialist argument, for in the emphasis on the ambivalences
and the overturns that challenge the set paradigms of the colonial
encounter we can see the difficulties of consolidating the rhetoric of
English India. The chapter on the Anglo-Indian women narratives, for
instance, drives the complex role of the rhetorical pressures that sub-
jected the cultural markers to inhabit settled formations, home. In the
case of Rushdie, Burke or the Hastings question, we can see the thread
of the critical imperative drawing out the motions from their comfort
orbits, and what we have in effect is the brilliant demonstration of a
reading mode that demands a continuous vigil on the part of the reader
approaching such a textured past, whose way into our understanding
is only through the rhetoric that blankets it.
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Index
Achebe, Chinua 96–115 discourse 4; colonial education

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 96 112–13; colonial encounter 19,
adulthood 152–3, 157 100, 110, 115, 117, 227–8, 235,
Africa 3, 9, 45–8, 53, 56–8, 60–2, 238, 244; colonial experience
64, 66–7, 69, 71, 96, 98–103, 2–3, 5, 10–11, 14, 26, 31–2, 35,
111, 113–15, 142; Arab- 40, 98, 100, 143–6, 182, 216–17,
dominated 10; cultures 61, 65; 220, 222–9; colonial history 81,
languages 55–7, 60, 66; literature 145, 147, 226, 228–30; colonial
53, 63, 66, 69–70, 96, 98, 102; ideology 147–50; colonial life
writing fiction in 69–72 18, 228–9; colonial order 34, 59;
African Writers Series (Heinemann) colonial powers 33, 79, 157, 195,
97–8, 114 232; colonial regime 41–2, 45–6,
Afro-European challenge 60–4 48, 67–8; colonial rule 33–4, 37,
Alschuler, Lawrence R. 26 82; colonial society 15, 18, 20–1,
An Area of Darkness (Naipaul) 23–4, 148, 150, 228; colonial
239, 240 space 35–6, 81, 189–90, 229, 235;
Aurobindo 153–6 colonial state 33, 39–41, 83, 108;
Australia 3, 122–5, 128, 130–1, colonial subject 4, 18, 151, 188,
133–4 229; colonial subjecthood 150–1;
colonial world 4–5, 13, 17, 20–1,
Beginnings: Intention and Method 23–4, 27, 32, 34–9, 225, 228;
(Said) 78 experience of 4, 12, 30, 42, 44–5,
Bhabha, Homi K. 2, 15, 160, 64, 103, 141, 181, 184, 226–7, 237
181–201, 203, 219–23 colonization 8, 12–13, 15, 21–2, 25,
27, 59, 117–18, 133, 143, 149,
Carter, Paul 3, 5–6, 117–36 154, 157–8, 186, 233
Cary, Joyce 112–14 The Colonizer and the Colonized
childhood 54, 150–1, 153, 157 (Memmi) 8–28, 30, 41, 117, 143,
Christianity 109, 144, 156 144, 189, 198, 222
civilization 8, 10, 37, 81, 83, 112, Conrad, Joseph 98, 103
142–3 contemporary cultural discourse
colonialism 4, 6, 8–10, 29, 31–9, 138–58
42, 44–5, 48–51, 53, 56, 143–4, cosmopolitan world 197–8
146–8, 151, 153, 221–2; colonial critical space 4, 31, 159, 164,
cultures 145, 156; colonial 186–7, 200, 230
252 Index
critical theory, Francophone 8–28 Fanon, Frantz 9, 29–52, 157,
cultural bomb 59 181, 215
cultural difference 83, 90, 103, 151, feminism 162–3, 167, 169–71, 176,
153, 156, 169, 183–4, 191, 196, 179, 229; international 168
200, 232, 234–6, 238 feminists 162, 167–9, 228
culture 48–51, 56–63, 65–6, Foucault, Michel 76, 79, 187, 207,
75–7, 79–84, 87–8, 99–102, 210, 212, 215, 216, 218–9
107–8, 112–15, 122–4, Foucauldian logic 219
138–41, 161–5, 181–201, Francophone 8–11
222–6, 234–9; affiliation 50, freedom 12, 25, 27, 29, 32–3, 38–9,
167; baggages 75, 128; conditions 44, 51, 70, 93, 237
of 185, 192, 198; contemporary French feminism 160, 167, 169–71
101, 182; engagement 10, 65,
75, 104, 164; heritage 86, 142, Gandhi 153–6
145; history 74, 79, 88, 108, genre 69–71, 96, 99, 120, 124,
226, 243; orientation 8, 21, 56, 161, 241
87, 89, 149; practice 66, 73, geopolitical divisions 183
144, 154, 163–4, 170, 185–7, globalization 14, 147, 193–4
194, 196, 199, 216, 228–9; A Grain of Wheat (Ngugi) 54
pressures 100, 139; subject
of 86, 195; theory 138–9, 220; Hastings, Warren 231, 233–4
transfer 57, 64; transmission Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
66, 70 98, 103
culture wars 160, 173 Hegelian impact 205, 207–8
hierarchies 18–21, 117, 143,
decolonization 6, 12–13, 32–5, 149–50, 157, 173, 226,
38–41, 45, 53–72, 85, 97, 233–4, 240
174–5, 181; experiences of 34, historical baggages 170, 241
40; process of 2, 33, 37–8, 41; historical circumstances 4, 23,
societies 13–14 104, 240
Decolonising the Mind (Ngugi) historical experience 94, 136
53–72 historical space 133, 136
deconstruction 160, 163–5, 170, historicity 3, 212, 216
177, 179, 209–10, 221 historiography 49, 146–7, 207;
designatory impulse 124–8 cultural 75; revenge 53, 138
dissemination 64, 90, 196–7 history: conditions of 203, 222;
double illegitimacy 24 contemporary 92, 174, 196;
dual inheritance 108–12 critiques of 210; cultural-
dynamics, cultural 141, 154 intellectual 32; cultures in 48,
215; of ideas 79, 87, 203, 210;
Earth 3, 29–39, 41–52, 69, 215 linear 118, 122, 125; social 74
edifice, cultural 203, 226 Home and Exile (Achebe) 96–115
education 65–6, 80, 108, 111–12, humanism 215–16
147, 177
The Education of a British-Protected Igbo people 106–9, 111–12
Child (Achebe) 108 imagination: cultural 150, 236;
Europe: structures and paradigms historical 141; historiographic 222
85–90 imperatives, cultural 6, 51, 115, 184
European languages 56, 61, 63–6 imperial history 122
Index 253
imperialism 30, 42, 58, 62, 64, 67, Naipaul, V. S. 238–44
70, 81, 117, 122–3, 126, 154, Nandy, Ashis 138–58
220, 243 national bourgeoisie 45
Imperialism (Lenin) 69 national consciousness 44
In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural national culture 27, 47, 49, 51–2
Politics (Spivak) 159 nation building 45, 52
international feminism 168 Ngaahika Ndeenda (Ngugi) 68–9
The Interpreters (Soyinka) 97 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 53–72
The Intimate Enemy (Nandy) Nigeria 98, 101, 104–5, 107–8,
138–58 110, 113
irrefutable collective verity 91
Islamic culture 80, 91 Occident 77–8, 93
occupation 11, 22, 119–22
Kenyan culture 54 ontology 208–9
Kenyatta, Jomo 53 oppressor 21, 26, 172–3
Kipling, Rudyard 153–6, 238–44 Orientalism 1–2, 4–5, 73–95, 198,
knowledge 37–8, 44, 75–8, 81–2, 216–18, 228; bracket 93–4;
92–3, 104–6, 110, 112, 123, discourses of 76–7
142, 146, 189, 202–13, 217–20, Orientalism (Said) 73–95
234–5; historical 76, 204, 213, Orientalists 87, 217; discourse
217–18, 241 77–9, 189; experience 90; space
83, 88
language 13, 54–5, 57, 59–66, Orientals 80–2, 84, 93, 233
68–71, 87–8, 97–9, 106, 132–3, orientation, psychological 8, 26
135, 166, 197, 234–5, 238–9, 241
languages, of Europe 61 A Passage to India (Forster) 234–7
Levinas 208–9 Petals of Blood (Ngugi wa
The Lie of the Land (Carter) 118, Thiong’o) 53
120–1 picturesque 131, 134–6
literary cultures 87, 192 politics: contemporary 56, 142,
The Location of Culture (Bhabha) 5, 144; cultural 91, 110, 159–61,
15, 181–201 171, 173
postcolonial bildungsroman 238–44
Macey, David 31–2 postcolonial condition 230
marginalization 125, 146, 152, 154, postcolonial criticism 183–5,
216, 218 225, 229
Marxism 204–5, 208, 212–13, 222 postcolonialism 1–4, 6–7, 40,
Memmi, Albert 8–28, 146, 181 162–3, 167, 181–5, 194, 204,
methektic dimensions 120–1 208, 210, 230
mimicry 118–19, 189, 194, 222–3 Postcolonialism: An Historical
missionaries 43, 68, 70, 111 Introduction (Young) 203
Mister Johnson (Cary) 98, 112–13 postcolonial theory 15, 40, 74,
model, historiographic 126, 117, 156–8, 182, 198, 202, 208,
141, 219 228, 242
modern African writing 96–115 poststructuralism 203–4, 206,
modernity 55, 87, 90, 112, 143, 209–10, 213
153, 182–3, 186–7, 198, 203, power elite 34, 46
214, 232, 238 primitivism 106, 149, 151
modern Orientalism 86 Purple Hibiscus (Adichie) 96
254 Index
realities, cultural 199, 231 trajectories, historical 60, 185
relativism, cultural 20, 145, tribe 106–8
185, 187 The Trouble with Nigeria
revisionist historiography 107, 210 (Achebe) 107
The Rhetoric of English India
(Suleri) 224–44 Untying the Text: A Post-
The Road to Botany Bay (Carter) 3, Structuralist Reader (Young) 203
117–36 usurpation 21–3, 39
Rushdie, Salman 238–44
values, critical 75–6, 165, 169, 244
Said, Edward W. 73–95 victimhood 112, 147–8, 155–6
Sartre, Jean-Paul 8, 15, 211, 215 violence 4, 11, 29–30, 32–6,
Soyinka, Wole 97 39, 41–2, 44, 102, 209, 242;
spatial history 123–4, 135–6 condition of 40–1
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
159–79, 219–23 Western culture 217
stereotypical discourses 188 White Mythologies (Young) 2,
storytelling traditions 57, 64–5, 96 202–23
subaltern 160, 174, 176–9 Wilder, Gary 11
subaltern historians 178 Williams, Patrick 10–11
sublimity 123, 231–2 woman 167, 171–3, 176, 216, 230
Suleri, Sara 5–6, 224–44 world history 205
world order, contemporary 186, 214
theatre 67, 69, 84, 120, 123, 173, The Wretched of the Earth
231, 233–4 (Fanon) 69
theatrical language 66–9
Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 96, 98 Young, Robert J. C. 202–23

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Reading Postcolonial Theory

This book is an essential introduction to significant texts in postcolo-

• studies major texts by foremost scholars – Edward W. Said,

Focused, engaging and critically insightful, this book will be indis-

Bibhash Choudhury teaches English in Gauhati University, Guwahati,

1 Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized 8

2 Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth 29

3 Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind 53

4 Edward W. Said: Orientalism 73

5 Chinua Achebe: Home and Exile 96

6 Paul Carter: The Road to Botany Bay 117

7 Ashis Nandy: The Intimate Enemy 138

8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Worlds 159

9 Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture 181

10 Robert J. C. Young: White Mythologies 202

11 Sara Suleri: The Rhetoric of English India 224

This is a book of readings. What we today recognize as ‘postcolonial

The demand for critical frameworks to engage with questions of his-

Why did Fanon end by refusing to commit himself to his own

This exposition on the dilemma of being Fanon offers an insight on

Memmi fastens on the constitutive dimension of these relations,

Postcolonial futures: the afterlife of the colonized

The end of colonization should have brought with it freedom and

Paradoxically, it’s harder to be a writer in the postcolonial period

The nature of colonial relationship

Suddenly these men were no longer a simple component of geo-

Within the colonial world, the circumstances of actual lived experience

The colonizer partakes of an elevated world from which he auto-

This is an interesting diagnosis. While the effect of the law of political

Portrait gallery (case 1): the colonizer and

A foreigner, having come to a land by the accidents of history, he

It is a condition which no individual can overthrow, for he is bracketed

‘The colonizer who accepts’ is the one whose ideology, imagination

This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he

Over the years he has sculptured, in opposition to the colony, such

This exposure of deceit, what Memmi has called ‘a double illegitimacy’

Portrait gallery (case 2): the colonized in his world

The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed

Memmi gives us a psychological perspective on the conscious side

Such a reading of Memmi’s approach to the subject underlines the

The arguments for the overthrow of colonialism, found in Frantz

In a war of liberation, the colonial people must win, but they

This passage from A Dying Colonialism opens the West/colonized

All colonized people – in other words, people in whom an inferi-

Yet Fanon’s importance as a psychologist reading the other in terms

Embarrassing to psychiatrists because he uncovers their science’s

The colonial world, violence and political

The marks of the nation: principles and reality

The political parties do not manage to organize the country

To educate the masses does not mean making a political speech.

The pressure on the leader and its implications for governance in

The African people and indeed all under-developed peoples, con-

The priority of a country’s leadership is to take the people forward in a

National culture and roadmap to realization

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all sim-

The intellectual’s attempts to respond to the country’s cultural cur-

We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a

The process of nation building, he goes on to argue at the concluding

The idea of an African literature – involving the nature of its contours,

In the new Manguo school, English was still emphasized as the

The desire to exhibit excellence to a public that would recognize their

It is important that we create a model through which people might

Reading Decolonising the Mind: the argument for an

The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in