Foucault’s work has failed to address empire and coloniality satisfactorily.

However, his
scholarship (and its critiques) has deeply informed the work of decolonial and postcolonial
scholars. In this essay, I explicate a few shortcomings and decolonial/postcolonial
applications and re-workings of Foucault’s work on sexuality, discourse, power/knowledge,
biopower, and discipline.

1.Foucault’s shortcomings

Cosquer (2019:3) critiques the discrepancy between Foucault’s focus on the temporal
dimensions of social life and his neglect of its geopolitical dimensions, specifically his failure
to consider how French and European imperial projects impacted the French and European
historical discourses, structures, and events that he studies. Further, Foucault is not reflexive
about how his positionality and location within imperial France influenced his writing and
replicated colonial discourses and global power relations.

For example, Homi Bhabha writes that Foucault’s work is complicit with the (colonial) logic
of the “‘contemporaneous’ within Western modernity” because, in conceptualizing race (and
“symbolics of blood” more generally) as “historical retroversions” and arguing that the
deployment of sexuality must be conceptualized “on the basis of the techniques of power that
are contemporary with it” Foucault fails to consider the modern relevance of the question of
race for his theories on sexuality and disciplinary power (2012:247-248). Similarly, although
Foucault mentions instances of sovereign racism, his theorization of modernity as having
involved a transition from sovereign to disciplinary power leads him to neglect the relevance
of (colonizing countries’) sovereign power in the colonies (at the time of his writing) and the
role that sovereignty played in the genesis of racism and in colonialism (Cosquer, 2019:12).

One additional example of how Foucault’s location within a European imperial power
influenced his work is his conceptualization of “ars erotica” (“a practice, in which ‘truth is
drawn from pleasure itself’”) as associated with non-Western peoples and of “scientia
sexualis” (“procedures for telling the truth of sex… opposed to the art of initiations and the
masterful secret” (Foucault, 1978:57-58)) as associated with Western nations, which
replicates Edward Said’s account of Western romanticization and exoticization of “Oriental”
sexuality (Cosquer, 2019:16). A final example of the limitations which his location within the
French empire imposed on his thinking is that Foucault did not consider the influence that
events, peoples, and knowledge in colonized countries had in colonial metropoles, as
becomes clear when he discusses examples of racism in Nazi Germany that do not
acknowledge “colonial societies which were the proving grounds for Social Darwinist
administrative discourses” (Bhabha, 2012:247-248).

The absence of race from some of Foucault’s work also diminishes the explanatory power of
his theorizations. For example, his discussions of class differences in Europe neglects the
racialized, subaltern bodies and their domestic, nurturing services that the bourgeoisie “relies
upon to assert itself as a class” (Stoler, 1995:111). That said, some of Foucault’s scholarship
includes discussions of race but Cosquer questions Foucault’s ability to produce meaningful
insights about race without studying its entanglements with empire and coloniality (2019:2).

The absence of empire from Foucault’s work has led Cosquer to argue that some Foucauldian
conclusions need to be radically re-read. For example, she argues for a re-reading of
Foucault’s theorizing that liberalism moved from conceptualizations of the family as a model
to conceptualizations of the family as a unit of intervention, because this analysis does not
consider that colonial powers’ paternalistic discourses and practices towards colonized places
and peoples could be interpreted as a shift in the familial model that is constitutive of
liberalism (2019:12-13).

2.Foucault and decolonial/postcolonial scholarship

Foucault’s work on discourse, discipline, biopower, and governmentality have, nonetheless,

productively informed the work of decolonial and postcolonial scholars; even its
shortcomings have inspired insightful decolonial/postcolonial critiques and analyses.

2.1.Discourse, Power/Knowledge

Postcolonial scholar Edward Said has used Foucauldian genealogy and discourse, and
theorizing of power/knowledge (particularly the notion that power produces, disseminates,
and legitimizes knowledge about groups which it aims to control (Foucault, 1978)) to argue
in Orientalism (2003) that the coloniality of power is expressed in colonizing nations’
institutionalization of a Eurocentric discourse of the “Oriental Other” that represented
colonizers as rational disseminators of knowledge, modernity, science, and discipline and the
colonized as pre-rational and superstitious passive receptors of civilizing knowledge.

Since Said wishes “to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting
itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate self” (2003:3), his work deviates from
Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge by partly reconceptualizing European colonial power
as legitimizing authority and by linking knowledge to the concept of identity
(Occidental/Oriental identities), which Foucault did not discuss in his work. Said also
deviates from Foucauldian work on discourse by sometimes conceptualizing the gaze as
shaping discourses about the “Orient” (2003:127) and by pointing to a reality outside of
discourse, when portraying Orientalist discourses as misrepresentations of reality (Clifford,
1988:260; Young, 1990:130).

Postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha (1984, 2001) more closely follows Foucault’s
conceptualization of discourse (as more than misrepresentation of reality) but also expands it
by portraying discourse as unstable (against the stability which Foucault (2013) describes in
The Archaeology of Knowledge) and by discussing the possibility of resistance to hegemonic
discourses, which is absent from Foucault’s work. Indeed, Bhabha’s work highlights the
instability of discourse by adding to it the concepts of intersubjectivity (the notion that the
enunciation of certain discourses about the colonial Other always depend on that Other to
acknowledge it (2001)) and mimicry (the insight that, in repeating a colonial discourse, the
Other can resist and transform it (1984)).

Less conventionally, I argue that decolonial scholars Lugones (2010), Oyěwùmí (1997), and
Amadiume (2015) implicitly engage with Foucault’s work on power/knowledge. Specifically,
in conceptualizing the epistemicide of precolonial conceptualizations of gender and sexuality
and the imposition of Eurocentric gender frameworks as constitutive/productive of the
coloniality of gender, Lugones (2010:734) draws a nexus between power and knowledge
similar to Foucault’s theorization of power/knowledge. Lugones could thus be read as a
decolonial intervention to Foucault’s Eurocentric account of power/knowledge, her focus on
the destruction of precolonial knowledges expanding Foucault’s conceptualization of
power/knowledge as productive (of new discourses/knowledges). Similarly, I read Oyěwùmí
and Amadiume’s discussions of white feminists’ impulse to interpret non-Western gender
systems through Eurocentric gender frameworks as echoing Said’s work on the
projection/imposition of Eurocentric knowledges onto colonized Others, which, in turn,
echoes Foucauldian power/knowledge.

2.2.Biopower

Achille Mbembe’s (2008) Necropolitics (“the generalized instrumentalization of human

existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (2008:14)) draws on
Foucault’s theorizations of biopower (1978) while shifting biopower’s focus away from
power’s investment in the management and sustainment of life and towards the political
distribution of death. Mbembe’s work can thus be read as a decolonizing intervention that
explores the colony as a location of necropolitics, destabilizing Foucault’s Eurocentrism and
adding to his work an acknowledgement of the violence of the biopolitical management of
life without reducing biopolitics to death. Mbembe also deviates from Foucault’s (1995)
conceptualization of sovereign right to kill as concentrated in a monarch when theorizing it as
mobile and dispersed across “urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private
security firms, and state armies” (2008:32).

Mbembe follows other Foucauldian frameworks closely, however, for example when
conceptualizing the goal of necropolitics as “management of the multitudes” (2008:34) after
Foucault’s theorization of biopower’s goal as population control. Mbembe also applies
Foucault’s general focus on the technologies of power to his analysis, arguing that “each
stage of imperialism also involved certain key technologies (the gunboat, quinine...)”
(2008:25). Finally, Mbembe applies Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power (1995) to his
theorization of necropolitical regimes as marked by permanent surveillance (2008:28).

2.3.Discipline

Scholars Martha Kaplan (1995) and Timothy Mitchell (2000) have dislodged Foucault’s
(1975) work on discipline from a Eurocentric context, applying it to the study of former
colonies in Asia and the Middle East respectively. In so doing, Mitchell has advanced the
concept of multiple modernities, which decenters the hegemony of Eurocentric notions of
modernity in Foucault’s work, arguing that: “developments and forces external to any
possible definition of the essence of capitalist modernity continually redirect, divert, mutate,
and multiply the modernity they help constitute, depriving it of any essential principle,
unique dynamic, or singular history” (2000:12). Mitchell thus also moves beyond binaries
that permeate Foucault’s work - sovereignty and discipline, modernity and tradition - and
adds to it the possibility of resistance differently than Bhabha, locating it in the continual
reproduction of modernity.

Finally, my reading of David Eng and Shinhee Han’s (2000) discussion of Asian immigrants’
contradictory desires to conform to white American behavioral norms and preserve their non-
white cultural background (which entails different behavioral norms) and this tension’s
production of “racial melancholia” also sees it as implicitly reflecting Foucault’s work,
particularly his conceptualization of disciplinary power as operating through individuals’
self-regulation/self-disciplining to comply with particular behavioral norms (1975). I thus
believe Eng and Han (2000) can be read as a decolonial intervention to Foucault’s
disciplinary power that adds to it a psychological dimension by suggesting that racialized
immigrants in a settler colonial state self-discipline to conform to competing (cultural)
behavioral norms, which results in a psychic state of “racial melancholia.”
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