Postcolonialism a short introduction

 

The term Postcolonialism refers to a historical period after European colonialism and the sum total of all the social political cultural and economical changes brought about by the impact of colonial rule.

In the recent decades, postcolonialism has been increasingly described as a critical theory analysing the socio-political, cultural, economic and historical aspects of colonial rule and imperialism.  Postcolonialism is both a reaction or departure from and a survey of colonialism. It is important to remember that postcolonialism does not invalidate or reject the existence of colonialism. On the contrary it critiques colonialism and its myriad facets. Postcolonialism is a relatively new school of theory which made its appearance in the last decades of 20 century along with some other new disciplines like queer theory, cultural studies and gender studies. In a historical inquiry, postcolonialism addresses several types and phases of imperialism and the long process of decolonisation. In the cultural front, it explores the ways in which the colonisers created the colonialist discourses about the mission of regeneration of the colonized people. Colonisers justified the process of colonisation as a civilising mission rather than an attempt of exploitation.


Understanding the historical processes of colonialism and decolonization is the central aspect of postcolonialism. Elleke Boehmer defines colonialism as the settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenuous inhabitants of occupied lands".

 

The twentieth century is called the century of decolonization since the second and third waves of decolonization occurred in this century. The first wave began when America declared independence. The second phase saw the birth of dominions ruled mostly by the white inhabitants of colonised lands. During the third wave, the colonised people of Asia and Africa declared their independence.

 

Eurocentrism & Orientalism

Postcolonial studies critically explores how imperialist discourses are created and distributed to perpetuate and legitimise colonialism. it encounters the claims of western cultural supremacy as illustrated by Joseph-Earnest Renan, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Rudyard Kipling and others.

"Oh East is East and west is west,

And never the twain shall meet"

- the ballad of east and west , Rudyard Kipling.

"A single shelf of  a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arebia" - Minutes upon Indian education T.B Macaulay.

Postcolonialism, as a critical theory, was developed by the scholars like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bill Ashcroft, Homi K Bhabha and Aijaz Ahmad. Their works expose the ideological positions of colonisers who convince the colonised that they are ruled by a superior race / people for their own good.

The colonisers are actually burdening themselves with the task of civilising the uncivilised and ruling the undisciplined. The publication of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961, Eng. trans 1967) was a highly significant attempt in postcolonial studies. An activist and revolutionary himself, Fanon develops his observations of French racism to a study of French colonialism. He puts forward two important concepts in his essays: the manipulation of collective identity of the colonised by the coloniser and the need to form a national identity against colonialism. He posits that under colonialism the human subject is deprived of that position and treated as an object. This negative value constitutes the identity of the colonised. In fact the colonial subject's identity is shaped as a collective identity based not on the life and experience of the colonised subject, but on what the coloniser's depiction of it. He elaborates this and its consequences in his earlier book, Black Skin and White Masks (1952, Trans 1986). In the fourth chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, he discusses the formation of a national culture against the coloniser and the colonised intellect of the native intellectuals. 

 

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) presents the idea of Orientalism. Said defines Orientalism as the west's representation of the orient or the colonised countries of Asian and Africa. According to him Orientalism is best defined by its oppositeness to the west. Orientalism is the 'inferior other' of the West/Occident. The west is cultured, educated and progressive. It is the seat of all knowledge, as Macaulay declared. Orient is then seen as mysterious, barbarous and the abode of poverty and ignorance. Said states that orientalism is a construction of the west to legitimise colonial rule. Orientalism comprises the west's view of the orient and not reality at all. Said also categorises Orientalism into two: latent and manifest. Latent orientalism resides in the imagination of the west. This collective imagination is rather constant. Manifest Orientalism on the other hand is the depiction of the orient in western texts and colonial discourses. The manner and method of the representation may change according to different periods in history. But the underlying patterns and motives may be the same. Both the varieties of Orientalism create stereotypes to perpetuate and to legitimise the western racial and gender supremacy.

As we have seen above, Orientalism is defined by the western world view. This perspective can be summarily termed Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism puts Europe and its ways of life at the centre of all discourse. it divides history, culture and all known areas of human thought and activity into European and non-European. Europe or specifically western Europe sees the rest of the world in terms of a series of binary. These binaries go like this: west is progressive, active, democratic, masculine and dynamic whereas the orient is stagnant, passive, despotic, feminine and lazy . But eurocentrism is not just a series of binaries or a geographical concept. It is also an ideological perspective that specifies that Europe is the seat of all learning and civilization. It is where all branches of knowledge originated. As a system of knowledge it exemplifies how Europe is portrayed as the originator of all developments (democracy, sovereignty, human rights).

This binary is one of the fundamental analytical concepts of postcolonial studies. Europeans held themselves a superior race. They thought it was their duty to rule, subjugate, control and regulate the barbarians who have no culture, civilization or desire for refinement. They believed that colonial rule was for the betterment of the colonised and justified the economic exploitation as remuneration for their toil in the process of colonisation and extension of civilization to the remote areas.

 

Alterity (State of being the 'Other')

The colonial discourse is keen to create the narrative of the supremacy of the west neglecting the non-west other as what the west is not. This cultural and material otherness is designated as alterity in postcolonial studies.

 
In postcolonial studies, alterity was used in the sense that the colonised is perceived as different from the coloniser. In the postcolonial context, alterity can be defined as the outcome of the west's (the the dominant self) formulation of an imagined other by projecting a constructed difference between themselves and the non Europeans. Otherness is based on prejudices, fears and imagination of the dominant self. Frantz Fanon in his psychological studies of the colonial subjects, introduced the idea of alterity in colonial context. The other lacks identity and representation. Like other critical theorists, postcolonial thinkers also oppose the notion of the 'other' as they see it as a logic of marginalisation. The process of making others is termed 'othering. Othering is made possible by devaluing and marginalising the binary opposition. Identity is the chief criterion of alterity.

Homi Bhaha posits that the colonial discourse is neither powerful nor supreme as it is generally estimated as. The colonial discourse originally aimed to legitimise and validate the colonial rule. Orientalism's stereotyping is also cast with the same aim. But Bhabha departs from Said's contention that orientalism and other colonial discourses perpetuated colonial rule and supremacy.

Diaspora and Hybridity

 
Diaspora is a significant concept associated with postcolonialism. Diasporas can be tentatively described as "a group of people who scattered from their native country to other countries"

Differences of generations, gender, race and class make diaspora communities always dynamic and also problematic. These internal conflicts as well as the problems of assimilation and acceptance in the present country and alienation  have been the constant and often defining themes of the diasporic literature in continuation of his observations on mimicry and ambivalence, Bhabha considers the issues of migration and diaspora which led to his ideation of hybridity. By this Bhabha means the interdependence and intertwining of the identities of the coloniser and the colonised. The dominant culture and its discourses are contaminated by the entry of the colonised subjects into the fabric of colonial discourse. This generates hybridity. Bhabha describes  hybridity as " neither the One nor the Other but something else besides "

Subaltern Studies

Subaltern studies is a distinct and autonomous school of postcolonial critical theory led by scholars like Ranajit Guha, Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K.Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee. Influenced by Marx, Gramsci and Foucault among others, their preoccupations include the treatment of the subaltern by the colonised elite in the anticolonial movements and their representation in colonial texts of India. Subaltern is an important theoretical formulation of Gramsci. Ranajit Guha exemplifies that the 'unhistorical' historiography of the Indian elite deliberately left out the politics of the people from its narrative on the formation of Indian nationalism. He posits that parallel to the elite national movement, there existed" another domain of Indian politics in which the dominant actors were the subaltern classes[...] mass of the labouring population[...] . The subaltern, according to Guha, includes workers, peasants, non-industrial urban poor and lower sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Spivak developed the scope of subaltern studies to include the engaging issues of the representation of human subjectivity. Spivak rejects the position of Foucault and Gilles Delueze that the subaltern is an autonomous subjects .  In her famous essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," she postulates the idea that women as subaltern is not an autonomous subject.