Leading Twentieth-Century Postcolonial Thinkers

Postcolonialism : Elleke Boehmer

Introduction:

"Post-colonialism speaks about the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation of native people and their lands."

The past couple of decades have seen the publication of a vast number of cultural critiques of empire and its aftermath designated with the label "Postcolonial".

     Postcolonialism a term addresses itself to the historical, political, cultural and textual remifications of the colonial encounter between the west and the non-west, dating from the sixteenth century to the the present day. It considers how this encounter shaped all those who were party to it: the colonizers as well as the colonized. 

Boehmer's work has been seen as foundational to the field of postcolonial studies in her field of postcolonial studies. In her first book, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Boehmer provides a radically historicising survey of global anglophone literaru production from the 1830s, the period of the so called second empire, to the present, and critically examines key arguments, term, and problems in anti-colonial thought and postcolonial theory. Post colonialisms is thus a name for a critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies, but it also, as importantly, designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of political and cultural authority which extends back across the 20th century, and beyond.

Different traditions of Postcolonial Thinking: 

1) The Theoretical Post-structuralist 2) The Practical Political

are thus linked in so far as some of the key concepts in postcolonialism in its first meaning derive from anti-colonial politics and world wide struggles for rights, as this chapter will in part show.

Leading Twentieth-Century Postcolonial Thinkers

Nationalist developments after 1945, combined with the work of postcolonial nationalist intellectuals, were profoundly important in shaping representations of the postcolonial world: yet it is widely agreed that it was the publication of Edward Said's ground-breaking study. Orientalism(1978), which in institutional terms marked the beginning of postcolonial studies.Critics concerned with anti-colonial political practices and frustrated by the highly textual or discursive content of post- 1968 literary theory. Such critics have included Gayatri Spivak, who applies Derridean concepts of 'difference' to the indian colonial context. and Homi Bhabha, who has reread Lacan in relation to the psychological construction of the native self, as will be seen.

  " Postcolonial Nationalist Represents the Postcolonial World"

Edward Said

" Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

Edward Wadie Said was a professor of Literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies.

Born: 1 November 1935, Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine

Died: 25 September 2003, New York City, United   States  

Era:   20th Century philosophy

Notable Ideas: Orientalism, the other..  

     In Orientalism, and in two contemporaneous publications, The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), Edward Said demonstrated that Foucault's idea that power operates through systems of knowledge applied to the way in which authority was exercised in the colonial world. 'Orientalism', therefore a systematic discipline or discourse about the Orient/ the East/ the Palestine, functioned as a 'Corporate Institution' for understanding and controlling other peoples.

"Orientalism was a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient"

Orientalism inspired the production of a host of spin-off and related studies that developed, refined and expanded aspects of Said's thinking. Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness (1985) has also valuable examined the construction of Africa as against  the Eastern 'Orient', how it was set up within colonial discourse as a third, unspoken other in relation to the dualism of Europe and the East.

Culture and Imperialism (1993), in which he again discuss some of the key cultural productions of the West, opera as well as literature, as subtly expressive, both stylistically and symbolically, of imperial dominance. Yet, if the study is concerned to expose empire as the invisible ideological scaffolding of, say, the European novel, it at the same time confronts the crucial question of into feelings of inferiority and unworthiness, Said argues,

"Postcolonial writers are able to take on or appropriate the forms, style, and symbols in short, the cultural vocabulary of the dominant texts and myths of colonial Europe." 

With Culture and Imperialism Said thus, to an extent , parts company with Foucault, for whom resistance is always represented as equal but opposite to the system of power and therefore as locked into it. Therefore, even if Said is more concerned in Culture and Imperialism than previously to deal with native resistance, for him the construction of the resistance, anti-colonial self is to be accomplished first and foremost by adapting specifically Western configurations of identity. For him contrapuntal writing back involves taking up the techniques and weapons of negation of the west. Such as stereotypes of the lazy native or the noble savage, in order first to remake, and then eventually to transcend them. 

"As writers and critics, therefore, they exercise not only aesthetic but also political agency. They use text as tools that have worldly, anti-colonial effects, that change hearts and minds."

Gayatri Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is University Professor at Columbia University. Where she is founding member of institute for comparative literature and society.

Born: 24 February 1942, Culcutta, British Raj

Era:  Contemprory philosophy  

Notable Ideas: Strategic essentialism,  the subaltern, the other...

Main Interest: Literary criticism, Feminism, marxism, Postcolonialism.

" Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it can not provide the absolute guarantee of identity." 

     Gayatri Spivak, the Indian-born USA- based critics perhaps most crucial intervention has been, very simply, to argue for the heterogeneity of colonial oppression. Gayatri Spivak's name is associated with some theoretically sophisticated if not recondite writing in the postcolonial field. Beginning her theoretical work in that important decade for postcolonial studies, the 1980s, she has been concerned to point to the differences both pronounced and subtle which separate and divide those called natives or the colonized. She emphasizes that how different forms of othering or diiferent kinds of subject formation under colonialism, even within the category of the oppressed, were not necessarily commensurable the one with the other. 

Subaltern term: Which has an ultimate military etymology, is derived from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used it to designate non-elite social classes and groupings like the proletariat.

      In her contribution to the understanding of Subaltern state under colonialism was to expand its signification to include groups even more downgraded than these, and those who do not figure on the social scale at all: for example, tribals or unscheduled caste, untouchables and within all these groups, women.

Can The Subaltern Speak? (1988)

In her celebrated essay, Spivak exposes the irony that the social-historical analysis which is most intent on retrieving the voices of such politically and historically 'silenced' groups succeeds, by the very practice of that analysis and the development of privileged knowledge, conclusively to silence them. Spivak's focus is, as suggested, rigorously directed to points of contradiction or cognitive failure in a text, where it lays bare the gaps or 'aporia' within its own ideological assumptions. 

     Indeed, for all that her work is highly theoratically informed, and for all that one of the implications rising from her work is that colonialism is effectively a discursive product. She has always insisted in the importance of making practical, negotiated interventions in situations of unjust domination and inequality- hence her emphasis on what she influentially has called strategic essentialism. 

Homi K Bhabha: 

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and language, and the Director of the Humanities center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemprory post colonial studies.

Born: 1949, Mumbai, India

Era:    20th century philosophy

Notable ideas: " Third-space", "Enunciatory Present"

"Words will not speak and the silence freezes into the images of the apartheid."  

  

Homi Bhabha's contribution has been differently if relatedly, to theorize ambivalence as operating within the apparently binary or dichotomous colonial system itself. Two main areas of preoccupation which distinguish the work of this Indian -born theorist. 1)The first are is an interest in the productive instabilities  and ruptures of colonial discourse. 2) The second area, which has developed more recently, is a growing concern with the, to Bhabha, still incomplete manifestation of the 'in-between'. for, Bhabha , a major difficulty with Said's work on Orientalism, Bhabha has instead examined the psychic and cultural fault lines which are generated around, and constantly threaten, any simple 'balck and white' distinction between the two conventional parties to the colonial relationship.

    Bhabha productively adapts Derrida's idea concerning the necessary repetition of meaning. Any meaning that is, in order to do its work, 'to mean' , has constantly or repeated.This then is the role of colonizers, ever anxious to reinforce his authority. But no repetition can ever be equivalent to the original meaning. Transferring Derridean 'repetition' into the colonial context, therefore, Bhabha finds that European attempts to replicate their social structures and cultural values in the colony, as part of the civilizing mission, were inevitably refracted and distorted, in particular in the presence of the colonized.

    Bhabha emphasizes at the same cultural vocabularies and values do not always translate across the linguistic, religious and other boundaries dividing communities. This represent a clear change of definition in his thinking from the earlier concern with imperfect repetition. Indeed, what results from intermixing may equally be entirely new cultural languages. These languages do not therefore facilitate a relaxed cross-cultural interaction between different groups. As he gnomi-cally writes:

"the migrant culture of the 'in-between', the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture's untranslatability ; and in so doing it moves the question of culture's appropriation beyond the assmilationist's dream.....towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of aplitting and difference."

Conclusion:

Against 'the holy trinity' :

The Marxist critic Benita Parry has called the "holy trinity" of Said, Spivak, and Bhabhahas been incalculable for postcolonialism, it must be recognized that their pre-eminence as postcolonial theorist has not benn uncontroversial or undisputed. Their many critics, including the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad and the Turkish-born US academic Arif Dirlik, are especially exercised about the socio-geographic positions occupied by this group. These critics contend that, while ostensibly concerned with Third World oppression and with championing marginalized forms of knowledge, postcolonialism's most powerful theorists are effectively secured their careers through the theorizing of oppression.