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New Literary History, Volume 43, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 371-390 (Article)
I
n the following, we dialogue with the Robert Young and Dipesh
Chakrabarty essays, while also grafting them onto our own concerns.*
We will address two broad issues broached by both essays, that is,
the “whence”—where does postcolonial theory come from?—and the
“whither”—where is it going? Throughout, we argue for a decentered,
multidirectional narrative for the circulation of ideas in order to better
chart the past itineraries and future possibilities of the postcolonial.
Robert Young deftly refutes the postcolonial-theory-has-lost-its-groove
argument by shifting focus from its prematurely celebrated demise to an
anatomy of the desire for its death. In the face of this unseemly dance
macabre around a putative corpse, Young points to the Lazarus-like res-
urrection of the cadaver. As long as colonialism “remains” in the form
of vestigial practices and habits of thought rooted in colonial power
structures, Young argues, postcolonial critique will contest that legacy:
not as an orthodox catechism of answers, but rather as an ever-shifting
constellation of questions.
Young’s own essay demonstrates postcolonial theory’s jiujitsu-like
capacity to transform critique into renewal. From the early “internal”
interrogations by Anne McClintock and Ella Shohat to the later “external”
criticisms of Aijaz Ahmad or Arif Dirlik, the criticisms have triggered both
rebuttals and course corrections. To name just a few of the critiques,
they include censure for: (1) the elision of class (sometimes linked ad
hominem to the elite status of the theorists themselves); (2) a tendency to
subjectivize political struggles by reducing them to intrapsychic tensions,
a critique addressed to Bhabha’s poststructuralist recasting of Fanon;
(3) an avoidance, noted by Marxists, of political economy in a global-
ized age where neoliberal economics drives many of the cultural shifts
registered by the theory; (4) an obsessive antibinarism that ignores the
intractable binarism of colonialism itself (a critique made by phenom-
enologically oriented Fanonians); (5) a haughty superciliousness (noted
by Ann du Cille) toward fields such as “ethnic studies,” which shared
many axioms with postcolonial critique and helped open up institutional
space for postcolonial studies, yet which were dismissed as essentialist;
(6) a tendency to focus on faded European empires while ignoring the
actually existing U.S. neoimperialism that surged into the vacuum left by
the receding empires; (7) a Commonwealth-centrism which, while valid
in its own terms, sometimes quietly assumes the British-Indian relation
as paradigmatic, while neglecting vast regions such as Latin America,
Africa, the Middle East, and the indigenous “fourth world” (including
that within India itself); (8) a lack of historical precision (noted by his-
torians such as Frederick Cooper), linked to a vertiginous rhetoric of
slippage that allowed little concrete sense of time or place except when
the theoretical helicopter “landed” on a random historical example; (9)
the inordinate privileging of themes of hybridity, diaspora, and elite
cosmopolitanism, to the detriment of refugees and displaced persons
and the racialized division of international labor; and (10) a failure to
articulate postcolonial theory in relation to ecology and climate change.
Some of these criticisms are patently unfair when applied to a mul-
tifaceted intellectual formation, some apply only to particular versions
of postcolonial theory, and some betray a hostility to theory per se. In
terms of alleged lacunae, Young and Chakrabarty foreground some of
the very issues presumed elided. Young evokes the human remains of
colonialism embodied in an “invisible tricontinental diaspora,” while
Chakrabarty addresses ecology, climate change, and some horrific indices
of social oppression—a billion people without proper drinking water,
European detention centers for “illegal immigrants,” and so forth. The
“outside” Marxist critique of postcolonial theory, meanwhile, forgets
that Marxism is also “inside” postcolonial theory, in Young’s work (for
example, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction) and in the work of
Gayatri Spivak and the subaltern studies group generally, to take only
two obvious examples. Many of the criticisms are premised on the chi-
merical demand that every writer-scholar address all the issues within
one fell textual swoop. In any case, the criticisms themselves arguably
form part of the postcolonial field as the site of what Young calls “the
necessary mode of perpetual autocritique” (22).
Where did postcolonial theory come from? When did it begin? In the
long view, postcolonial theory must be seen as part of a long anticolonial
dureé. Here we welcome Young’s salute to the primordial importance
of Iberia and the Convivencia. In our view, the various “questions”—the
Jewish, Muslim, “Indian,” Black, and African questions—have been
interwoven for centuries. Their linked trajectories can be traced, as we
argued in Unthinking Eurocentrism, back to the events associated with
whence and whither postcolonial theory? 373
and others ate barely at all and why the starving did not strangle the
well-fed. With a few irreverent queries, the Tupinambá demolished the
prestige of the hereditary monarchy and the class system. In a sense,
they were theorizing prerevolutionary France as much as Montaigne was
theorizing pre- and post-Conquest America.
The idea that the image of the free Indian lifestyle helped spread
revolutionary ideas in Europe and North America was not a fantasy
only of French philosophers. In 1937, the conservative Brazilian jurist/
historian Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco argued in The Brazilian Indian
and the French Revolution that the theory of natural goodness, developed
by the European Enlightenment but inspired by what he saw as false
ideas about the Brazilian Indian, helped foment the French Revolution.11
The Franco-Brazilian-indigenous dialogue has been ongoing for five
hundred years, leaving traces even in what is loosely defined as “French
Theory.” Lévi-Strauss’s work in Brazil in the 1930s, which generated
such concepts as la pensée sauvage and bricolage, was very much inspired
by Jean de Lery’s sympathetic protoethnographic account of life among
the Tupinambá. The Franco-Indigenous philosophical dialogue has been
prolonged by Certeau’s writings about Jean de Léry, by Rene Girard’s use
of Tupinambá cannibalism as the key to the scapegoat rituals informing
all religions, and by Gilles Deleuze, who wrote in What is Philosophy? that
the “philospher becomes Indian, and never stops becoming so—perhaps
‘so that’ the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else and
tears himself away from his own agony.”12
The motif of the Indian as “exemplar of liberty” also pervaded the
discursive atmosphere of the American Revolution and of Brazilian
anticolonial nationalism. The American Founding Fathers were avid
readers of the philo-indigenous French philosophes, but they also “read,”
as it were, the Native Americans themselves. While entirely capable of
exoticism and even exterminationism, the Founding Fathers had a more
direct experience of Native Americans than did the French philosophers.
They had diplomatic exchanges with them, traded with them, learned
their languages, and were influenced by their political thought, even
if—a crucial point—they ultimately massacred and dispossessed them.
Like pro-independence nationalists in Brazil, American revolutionaries
brandished the Indian as an icon of national difference vis-à-vis Europe,
whence the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) symbolism of the eagle’s quiver
of arrows (representing the thirteen states) on the dollar bill and the
Indian statue gracing the Capitol building.13
A recurrent leitmotif in the writings of the Enlightenment philoso-
phers and the Founding Fathers was the idea that Indian societies never
submitted themselves to any laws or coercive power. Marx and Engels
later picked up on this theme in their readings of Lewis Henry Morgan’s
378 new literary history
oppose Spanish conquest, just as natives in North America did not have
to study at the Sorbonne or Oxford to oppose the French or the British.
If, in the long view, the colonial debates go back to the Reconquista
and the Conquista, in the relatively short twentieth-century view, (post)
colonial critique also has multiple beginnings, locations, and trajectories.
In the broad sense, it forms part of what we call the postwar “seismic
shift” in scholarship that led to the (still all too partial) decolonization
of thought. Central twentieth-century events—World War II, the Shoah,
Third World independence movements—all simultaneously delegitimized
the West as axiomatic center of reference and affirmed the rights of
non-European peoples straining against the yoke of colonialism and
neocolonialism. Thus, if Nazism, fascism, and the Holocaust revealed
in all their horror the “internal” sickness of Europe as a site of rac-
ist totalitarianism, the Third World liberation struggles revealed the
“external” revolt against Western domination, provoking a crisis in the
taken-for-granted narrative of European-led Progress. May ’68, in France,
in this sense, was not simply a generational revolt; it was also a belated
aftereffect of colonial insurgencies, much as the 1968 “movement” in
the United States was partially a byproduct of the Civil Rights struggle
and resistance to the colonialist war in Vietnam. If French revolts were
haunted by Dien Bien Phu and the Algerian revolution, the U.S. revolts
were haunted by My Lai, Havana, Selma, and Wounded Knee.
The “seismic shift” refers to the intellectual/discursive fallout of all
these events, seen as catalytic for a broad decolonization of knowledge
and academic culture. Disciplines in which the West was assumed to be
both speaking subject and object of study were submitted to critique.
Critical and even insurgent proposals were expressed in recombinatory
coinages—“revisionist history,” “radical philosophy,” “symmetrical anthro-
pology,” and “radical pedagogy”—that suggested a reconceptualization
of canonical disciplines from the periphery. The thrust was doubly criti-
cal, first of the presence of colonialist and Eurocentric perspectives and
second of the absence of non-European and nonwhite faculty, students,
and cultural thematics. The seismic shift impacted many disciplines,
in different ways and at different times. To cite just two examples, a
decolonizing economics in the form of dependency theory (and later
“systems theory” and “core/periphery theory”), represented by such
figures as Andre Gunder Frank, James Petras, Paulo Singer, Immanuel
Wallerstein, and Samir Amin, rejected the free market-based “develop-
ment” ideologies that conceived a Promethean West as catalyzing an
economic “takeoff” that would recapitulate the historical sequencing of
Western development. The same hierarchical world system controlled
by metropolitan capitalist countries, they argued, generated both First
World wealth and Third World poverty as opposite faces of the same
380 new literary history
Portions of this essay elaborate on arguments made in our book Race in Translation: Culture
Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2012). Other por-
tions elaborate on points made in a 2005 presentation, entitled “Tupi or not Tupi a Tupi
Theorist,” for the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory. Other portions elaborate points
made in a 2009 presentation by Robert Stam, entitled “The Red Atlantic: Tupi Theory
and the Franco-Brazilian-Indigenous Dialogue.” We would like to thank both the School
of Criticism and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for providing enriching opportunities
to work out some of the ideas expressed in this essay.
1 On the hyphen in the “Judeo-Muslim” and the “Arab-Jew,” see Ella Shohat, “Rethinking
Jews and Muslims,” MER 178 (1992): 25–29; and “Taboo Memories and Diasporic Visions:
Columbus, Palestine and Arab-Jews,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer
Fink (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), 131–56.
2 See, for example, Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of
the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press,
1986); Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: Univ.
of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades
Against Muslims and Other Minorities (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009).
3 See Domenico Losurdo, A Linguagem do Império, trans. Jaime A. Clasen (São Paulo:
Boitempo, 2010).
4 See Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1988).
5 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
390 new literary history
6 It should also, ideally, incorporate the Crusades’ demonization of the infidel as part
of the process by which Europe constituted itself as an imaginary “continent” through
opposition to an Islam which had arrived at the very gates of Vienna.
7 For example, in Shohat’s “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992):
99–113 and Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multicultralsim and the Media (New
York: Routledge, 1994).
8 See Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation
of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004):
463–84.
9 Jack D. Forbes argues that native people from the Americas might have traveled to
Europe before Columbus. See Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007).
10 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Univ.
of Texas Press, 1982), 370.
11 Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, O Indio Brasileiro e a Revolucao Francesa: As Origens
Brasileiras de Teoria da Bondade Natural (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2002).
12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 109.
13 See Donald Grinde, Jr. and Bruce Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the
Evolution of Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991).
14 Quoted in Benedito Nunes, Oswald Cannibal (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979), 73.
15 Nunes, Oswald, 34.
16 See the collection of interviews in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ed. Renato Sztutman (Rio
de Janeiro: Azougue, 2008), 79.
17 On Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” see Elizabeth Grosz, “Criticism, Feminism
and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Thesis Eleven, no. 10/11 (1985):
175–89; reprinted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogues (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–17. On what Stuart Hall referred
to as “the fictional necessity of arbitrary closures,” see Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in
Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1987), 45.
18 François Durpaire, France blanche, colère noire (Paris: O. Jacob, 2006), 13.
19 See Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,”
Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 121–56.
20 Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,” 141.
21 Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,”131.
22 Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, “Discovering White People,” in Povos Indigenas No Brasil
1996–2000 (São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiantal, 2000).
23 Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
24 Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads: Between Alternative Modernizations,
Postliberalism, and Postdevelopment,” Lecture at the Center for Latin American and
Caribbean Studies, New York Univ., October 29, 2009.
25 Quoted in Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2008), 246.
26 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Métaphysiques Cannibales: Lignes d’Anthropologie Post-
Structurale (Paris: PUF, 2009), 5.
27 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Etnologia Brasileira,” in O Que Ler na Ciencia Social
Brasileira (1970–1995), ed. Sergio Miceli (São Paulo: Anpocs, 2002), 152.