Postcolonialism

Post-Colonialism/Postcolonialism
• 2 meanings:
- a) Post-colonial states & societies – those which
experienced (and liberated themselves from)
Western colonial rule, mainly after World War
II.
- b) Postcolonial/’postcolonialist’ thought – a
body of critical reflection on the colonial
experience of most societies on the planet, and
the long-term effects of colonial rule.
 Postcolonialism: an expansive category
• Postcolonial thought does not study the period after colonialism. In fact,
‘postcolonial’ histories largely concerned with the study of colonialism and
its effects.
• Postcolonial thought not confined to colonized societies – it can be equally
vital for understanding former imperial powers, like Britain and France.
• Not a rigidly defined ‘school’ of thought: often intermixed with Marxism,
feminism, post-modernism/post-structuralism.
• Certain characteristic themes:
- European/Western domination of ‘the East’ or the colonized world.
- Modes of domination: not just economic, political, but also cultural.
- Focus on forms of European knowledge about the rest of the world, and
how this knowledge is itself a form of power: theory of ‘colonia discourse’.
Before postcolonialism: Economic critiques of
imperialism
• Early 20th century: European colonialism reaches its peak and its
terminal crisis: 2 world wars; end of empire. However, global
inequalities continue.
• Early critiques of imperialism: 2 examples
1. Late 19th century: Indian nationalists critiquing colonialism as a
form of economic exploitation. Eg. Dadabhai Naoroji.
2. Revolutionary Marxism: imperialism analysed as a logical
consequence of capitalist production and competition on a global
scale. Lenin one of the major proponents of this analysis.
3. After decolonization in 1950s and 1960s: ‘dependency theory’,
‘world-systems theory’: left-wing analyses of the continuing
economic imperialism of the ‘First World’.
 Before postcolonialism: the ‘psychological’
critique of colonialism
• During decolonization period, several writers and activists write about
colonialism as not just an economic and political, but also a psychological
mechanism
• Frantz Fanon, Martinican psychiatrist, involved with Algerian war of
independence in late 1950s. 2 major insights:
a) The colonized person becomes an ‘object’ for the colonizer; loses his/her
own autonomy. “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a
meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source
of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other
objects”.
b) The colonized and colonizer are locked in a mutually destructive cycle of
violence where they define each other, in a way which threatens the
humanity of both. The only way out is the decisive defeat of colonial rule.
 Edward Said: Orientalism (1978)
• Traced the way in which European colonizers treated the
history, customs, literature, languages of ‘the East’ as
‘proofs’ of the superiority of the West
• “Orientalism” defined as ‘a distribution of geopolitical
awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological,
historical and philological texts’.
• Orientalism is also defined as a style of domination: ‘dealing
with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of
it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it […]’.
• ‘East’ and ‘West’ defined as permanent, binary opposites of
each other.
 “Subaltern Studies” and the advance of
postcolonialism since the 1980s
• Other than Said’s work, this is the most influential variant of
‘postcolonial’ thought.
• A historians’ project, originally trying to analyse colonial Indian history,
and the history of anticolonial nationalism, ‘from below’ – from the
perspective of peasants, workers, tribals. Influenced by critical varieties
of Marxism.
• Mid-1980s onwards: Subaltern Studies comes into contact with Said
and critique of Orientalism. New focus: critique of colonial
‘constructions’ of India and ‘the East’.
• Partha Chatterjee: anticolonial nationalism itself unable to fully break
free from the colonialism it confronts. Imprisoned by its categories,
forms of thought.
• Ashis Nandy: colonialism as ‘cultural violence’.