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9 April 2018
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 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies

• Early variants, e.g. W.E.B. Du Bois’ pan-Africanism and black elitism

vs. Booker T. Washington’s assimilation idea, Harlem renaissance
(WWI and 1920s)

• Négritude (blackness): a francophone movement comprising Aimé

Césaire, Léopold Senghor, etc. (1940s-50s), focused on solidarity of
shared black identity in the rejection of French colonial racism.
• Anti-colonialist criticism inspired by Marxism (CLR James),
psychoanalysis (Frantz Fanon), Africa (Chinua Achebe, Anta Diop),
Indian historiography (Ranajit Guha & Subaltern Studies Group or
Collective)
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 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies (cont.)
• Subaltern Studies Group: focused on “history from below”, or non-elite
history of India and South Asia. Argues Indian historiography has had a
pronounced elitist bias that can be corrected by focusing on the
underdogs of society.
• SSG inspired by Antonio Gramsci, later by Jacques Derrida; the shift
from Postcolonial Studies to Postcolonial Theory. Key figures: Ranajit
Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak.

• SSG’s hard distinction of elite vs. subaltern: failure to differentiate

nuances and hierarchies within the category of subaltern. No
appreciation of class distinctions and social mobility therein. Also implied
no possibility that subalterns could ever threaten the elite political
structure. 3
 Edward W. Said’s Orientalism

• As an academic classification: Oriental

studies or area studies
• As an ontological distinction from
‘Occident’
• As a corporate institution (from late 18thC)
for dealing with the Orient through making
statements about it, authorizing views of
it, describing/ teaching/settling/ruling over
it – a Western style for dominating,
restructuring and ruling over the Orient.
Involves constant exchange between
academic and popular.
• Privileges Europe through treating the
Orient as a surrogate/underground
version of Europe? 4
Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (cont.)
• Orient “not Europe’s interlocutor, but its
silent Other”: all power lies with colonizer?
– Jean-Paul Sartre’s “master/slave” based on
reciprocity: master needs slave to overcome
auto-alienation, in order for mutual recognition
and political accommodation to take place.
– Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: the
white man’s conception or imagination of the
black man has no corporeal/material reality as
the real black man stands outside of self/other
binary inscribed by the former.
• Is “true” knowledge – or even non-
coercive and non-reductive representation
of the Other – ever possible?

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 Criticism of Orientalism
“Orientalism taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity – ‘
were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, we would be
great once more’ – encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of
the 1980s, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even
stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their
findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being
labeled ‘Orientalist’. The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have
called ‘intellectual terrorism’, since it seeks to convince not by arguments
or historical analysis, but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism,
and Eurocentrism from a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with
Said has insult heaped upon him. The moral high ground is an essential
element in Said’s tactics. Since he believes his position is morally
impeachable, Said obviously thinks he is justified in using any means
possible to defend it, including the distortion of the views of eminent
scholars, interpreting intellectual and political history in a highly
tendentious way – in short, twisting the truth. But in any case, he does
not believe in the ‘truth’.”
–Ibn Warraq, “Edward Said and the Saidists”, Defending the West
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 G.C. Spivak’s Subaltern
• SSG: Colonial socio-political hierarchies are
reproduced in the postcolonial era. Subaltern subjects
have no genuine non-distorting representation or self-
expressed voice. SSG seeks to recover the “real”
subaltern voice.
• In contrast, Spivak argues: the marginalized subaltern
subject is always defined via her difference from the
elites. Since the subaltern subject is heterogeneous,
examining the mechanisms of the “recovery” of their
voice reveals an ongoing displacement and
effacement. Female subalterns in India who undergo
sati are doubly displaced, gendered by both Indian
patriarchal norms and British colonial law.
• Although postcolonial theory could lead to an
essentialist displacement of Third World women, yet it
is still necessary to continue with the analysis of
colonial oppression of the subaltern.
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 Homi Bhabha’s Mimicry & Hybridity
• Mimicry: Emulation by “been-to’s” of language, dress,
politics, or cultural attitude of colonizer, and corresponding
suppression of one’s own cultural identity. Viewed as
shameful and opportunistic behavior. Via Derrida, Bhabha
sees mimicry as a kind of (unintentionally subversive)
performance that exposes the artificiality of all symbolic
expressions of power. For Chatterjee, Third World
nationalism is a derivative discourse of or copy of western
nationalism. (Note: the act of “going native” constitutes
reverse mimicry.)
• Hybridity: cultural mixing or mingling between East and
West, which for Bhabha can be a subversive tool whereby
colonized people might challenge various forms of
oppression. Hybridity can also generate third spaces, i.e.,
the interstices between colliding cultures, a liminal and “in-
between” space which gives rise something new and
unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and
representation, where new cultural identities are formed,
reformed, and constantly in a state of becoming. It’s a place
that simultaneously is and is not one’s home. 8
 Postcolonial Criticism vs. Postcolonial Theory
• Growing divide between Postcolonial Criticism (PC) and
Postcolonial Theory (PT)
• PC involves broader varied forms of applied criticism that
engage the perceived connections between culture and
imperialism. It is partly rooted in older traditions of anti-
colonialism, often Marxist-inspired. It attacks colonialist-
inspired “false consciousness”, rediscovers racial identity and
agency (as opposed to abject colonial subjects)

• PT influenced by French “high theory” (Foucault, Derrida,

Lacan) aimed at re-conceptualizing relationship between
nation, culture and ethnicity. PT’s “Holy Trinity” (E.W. Said,
Gayatri C. Spivak, Homi Bhabha)
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 Postcolonial Criticism vs. Postcolonial Theory
• PT slow to acknowledge influence of PC; Said’s
The World, Text, and the Critic (1983) contained
just 1 reference to Fanon, but pays tribute to it in
Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• PT says little about colonial cultural domination
(Aijaz Ahmad)
• PC and PT not mutually exclusive: PC isn’t
necessarily non-theoretical, given its Marxist and
other inflections, often implicit. Example of Said’s
“contradictory” scholarship: though he saw Marx as
squarely within the Orientalist formation, his works
rely (though not uncritically) on “culturalist” stands
of Marxism (e.g. Gramsci’s ideas) throughout his
career. Said’s debt to PC? (“Orientalism
Reconsidered”, 1985)
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 Criticisms against the ‘Postcolonial’
• What is “genuinely” postcolonial? Do the voices of prominent
intellectuals in leading Western academic institutions represent the
postcolonial condition? Who’s speaking, and for whom?
• Lack of coherence: a “multiplicity of margins” (HL Gates)
• Postcolonial Theory is shaped by Western “high theory”; Said’s
progressive disillusionment with high theory?

• Postcolonial Studies neither important nor distinct mode of cultural

analysis: a contemporary “culture of gripes and grievances” (Peter
Conrad); “quite entertaining but intellectually insignificant (Ernest
Gellner); whose key adherents (Said, Spivak) were appointed to
Columbia University’s “once distinguished” English department as a
decision based purely on political correctness rather than strength of
scholarship (Hilton Kramer)
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 Criticisms against the ‘Postcolonial’

• Postcolonial Studies “strays” into disciplinary turfs other than

theirs: “As they move out from traditional literature into political
economy, sociology, history, and anthropology, do the postcolonial
theorists master these fields or just poke about? Are they serious
students of colonial history and culture or do they just pepper their
writings with references to Gramsci and hegemony?” (Russell
Jacoby)

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1. Can the subaltern speak? Who is the
subaltern? Are all subalterns necessarily
‘Orientalized Orientals’, i.e., they self-represent
by emulating Orientalist representations?
2. ‘Postcolonial theory and practice comprise a
powerful critique of and revolutionary force
against the established world-capitalist and
state system’. Agree or disagree?
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