Naive Definition
The literal meaning—as with
all such terms—will be helpful only as a starting point, which we must
inevitably leave. The historical,
cultural and intellectual currents associated with the term oblige us to use it
as a key to understanding very specific critical attitudes, trends and
problems. The literal meaning, then,
from post- (after) and colonialism (the conditions of and the
situations describing the occupation of colonized lands by Imperial powers)
means the conditions of and situations describing colonized lands and peoples
after the colonizers no longer hold them as their property. So the situations we might name postcolonial
are very wide ranging and include states and countries of the following:
Modernity
Modernity
must be grasped in terms of two distinguishing and distinguished historical
processes: those of modernization and of modernism.
With
the swift rise in Europe and America of powerful tendencies manifesting
advances in technology and science, as well as the development of nation
states, democratic political systems and the expansion of capitalist modes of
production, the word modernization comes to describe them. Associated with modernization, of course, are
not only the values of humanism and enlightenment, but also those of
colonialism and European Imperialism as the modernization of the west spreads
around the world.
The
word modernism however is used to describe certain trends in art,
writing, criticism and philosophy that have had a powerful
influence on the development and experience of the 20th century. Conventionally we can date these trends from
the last decade of the 19th century (1890) to about the beginning of the 2nd
world war in 1939. So we can
provisionally accept that the phenomena of modernism were produced within a
fifty-year period. Modernism is not, of
course, a period in itself (other kinds of art and writing occurred during this
time) but it does describe a wide range of textual phenomena that exerted a
profound influence on the way we all think and experience our world today.
Modernity, then describes both the tendencies associated with
modernization (science, technology, rationality) and the self-critical attitude
of artists, writers and philosophers who, within modernity, have profoundly
questioned its powerful limits. We can
thus, provisionally at least, identify a point of confluence between postmodernism
and postcolonialism. In fact postcolonialism
names a specific mode of intellectual and artistic production and has a
historical provenance within the field of critical theory. In this narrower and more powerful
determination we can see that the issues of postmodernism are very close to
those of postcolonialism.
The following points are
designed to show how the term postmodernism can be linked to the term
postmodernism. My feeling is that, if we
are to accept either of the two terms as being of any use at all, then we must
take both into consideration (each point provides a hyperlink to the
corresponding point on the “Postmodernism” page).
Our distinction between “modern” and “postmodern” can be
broadly mapped back over the distinction between colonial and postcolonial if
we take “modern” to denote the condition of modernity and “postmodern” to
distinguish, as before, between intentional and unintentional
postmodernism. Postcolonialism would
thus be—both the active theorizing of the postcolonial condition and the
condition itself. So, on the one hand,
postcolonial theory, with the combined resources of poststructuralist criticism
and postmodernist philosophy, addresses these issues critically, i.e., by drawing
attention to the specific and ineluctable historical grounds in the
colonialism and ethnocentrism that has always accompanied western history and
thought. In this sense the problematizing of frontiers that we identified with
postmodernism can be resituated in terms of the frontiers between western
powers and colonized countries, between European subjects and their colonial
others, always grounded in the conditions according to which one identity is
related to an other (the abstract “relation to the other” without which there’d
be no relations whatsoever). So having
argued that “defining a difference is the same as drawing a boundary and
defending a frontier,” we have concrete historical examples in a broad field where
boundaries and frontiers have been asserted, policed and legislated in terms of
colonization. The failures and paradoxes
of colonialism are revealed to be those that are determined by any attempt to
legislate a frontier without taking account of its ground (the relation to the
other). The logic of colonialism assumes
two contradictory things: 1) the colonized subject is now “one of us” (belongs
to the colonizer’s “we”) and 2) the colonized subject is not one of us
and can thus either only repeat in an inauthentic way what (the European) we
must always be or threaten (the European) us, as irrecoverably other
from behind the veil of otherness. The
threat of confusion that appears to come from outside a designated limit (them
as opposed to us) turns up, from a postcolonial point of view, as being at the
same time the possibility of identity itself, so any attempt to push an other
to the outside returns as a kind of distorted mirror image to mock the sense of
“we”. This would be the first instance
of the relation between postmodern and postcolonial—two similar forms of
troubling the notion of identity at its root.
The attempt to keep a boundary secure between what is valued and what
threatens the valued thing reveals that this strategy of inclusion and exclusion
tends to be built on paradoxical grounds that, in the full logic of the
paradox, must include as part of its own condition the thing that is perceived
as a threat, hence the second phenomenon.
Postcolonialism cannot maintain a distinction between colonizers and
colonized, between center (or metropolis) and
periphery, without falling into paradox.
Just as with postmodernism, the grounds of all colonial exclusions
and inclusions (and the frontiers and boundaries that are drawn between them)
turn out to be paradoxical, so we need to rethink the whole notion of
grounds—along with notions like foundation, origin, beginning, etc. The general disappearances in postmodernism
of notions of origin, source, ground and foundation have equivalents in
postcolonialism. Edward Said (Orientalism) showed that much of what is
comprehended in the West as the Orient turns out to have been an
extraordinarily sophisticated and heterogeneous series of theoretical
fictions—inventions disguised as facts—and constitutes one of the great myths
that have governed western attitudes to the world in general for thousands of
years. Orientalism
is part of a complex narrative (as complex as it is contradictory) concerning
progress, belatedness, otherness and identity, civilization and barbarism etc.,
and is as prone to hyperbolic praise as it is to derogatory scorn. Like the “grand narratives” of western
modernity, Orientalism in Said’s
sense can be identified within a wide range of cultural registers (science,
knowledge, art and culture, as well as bureaucratic administration and trade,
which is what so much of the narrative in fact serves to support and maintain). Instead of ground and origin, as we have
seen, postmodernism begins to see things, including things like historical
processes, in terms of repetition and difference (“just another case of history
repeating”). So the ground of colonialism
would not be a simple narrative involving two origins or sources, one of which
is dominated or even removed by the other (one culture conquered by another)
but must instead by grasped in terms of the “pluridemensionality”
of relations in their difference and repetition, in terms of the play of
forces. In this sense we can begin to
see that colonialism itself doesn’t simply go away. But, since the historical phenomenon was
itself informed by the possibilities of repetition and substitution and
manifests exactly the kind of play of forces that repetition and substitution
imply, a postcolonialism would always in some sense manifest the colonialism of
which it is the post. In this sense we
should look to the great god Capital, which was always anyway the main
beneficiary—as well as the conqueror—of both imperialism (i.e., colonialism)
and critical democracy (i.e., modernity) in the west. So where are we going then?
3. Problematizing Destinations
The problem of
destination (colonialism’s destiny?) is certainly marked in
postcolonialism. The “some time or place
or condition” that a modern would have marked out in advance is of course, in
the ideological fulfillment of the colonial project (the civilizing of the
primitive), the moment of independence.
This teleological (and fictional) narrative has civilization adopting
its less advanced wards and then granting them their independence when good and
ready. The obvious inconsistencies here
do not, however, prevent the paradoxes from emerging in concrete historical
ways. In postcolonialism the destination
is deeply problematic (as is the notion of home). The widespread phenomena of migration,
trans-migration, the figure of the refugee, and diverse waves of global diaspora, have all in different ways problematised
the notions both of origin and destination to such a degree that we can no
longer make coherent sense of the world based on those notions. Here you get the first of our affirmations
repeated in the postcolonial dimension:
The performative is that aspect of a text or institution that can be revealed at the level of its functioning or acting—it is institution in act. “The terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively,” Homi Bhabha writes, in The Location of Culture, “The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition.” In linguistics a performative utterance is one that allows the accomplishment of something through speech itself, e.g., warning or promising, both of which are speech acts that have some effect on the situation and addressee. By comparing these with assertoric or constative sentences, which classically are considered as true or false descriptions of facts, language philosophy is led to consider acts of communication in terms of the total situation produced by the act in the context of its utterance. It thus becomes possible to say that any speaker, in uttering a sentence, has produced a speech act that will have had some effect on its addressees. But one can “perform” a speech act in two senses. In the linguistic sense a performative act brings about some state of affairs by simply being uttered (as with a promise). But such acts can also be performed in the dramatic sense—i.e., one can act out a performative in a performance. Jacques Derrida’s controversial reading of J. L. Austin (Signature, Event, Context) shows that this acting out can be generalized as citationality, or iterability, and he shows that this is the condition for all types of utterance (and probably all acts). This iterability is a kind of force, a kind of stricture that imposes the need for a counter-stricture—the constraints of the law in its attempt to eliminate contingency, for instance. This citationality comes back to the law, to intention or teleology, as an accident, a kind of contingency, the contingency of its own founding in the general iterability of signs. The possibility of disengagement, citational graft, and even empty or mechanical repetition, which demonstrably characterizes all iterable marks, is the very condition of experience and the condition for the intentional statements too. This is not, the argument goes, an irritation or impropriety that accidentally attaches itself to proper usage. Rather, as can easily be shown, without it any future utterance, any future addressee and any future at all, would be impossible. In postcolonialism, then, the performative utterance takes on a specific and crucial significance. Take Bhabha’s own introduction to a collection of essays on Postmodernism and Identity. He writes:
It is
one of the ironic signs of our times that then Introduction to The Real Me? Postmodernism and the Question of
Identity should be written by an Anglicized post-colonial migrant who
happens to be a slightly Frenchified literary critic. For in that hybridity
of histories and cultures you have the spectacle of the simulacral:
the corrosive craft of colonial mimicry exposing the limits and borders of the
sustaining project of Western mimesis (qt in “Lagging Behind” 76)
His
point is actually quite complex. In the
performance of what it means to be an identity of postmodernism (hybrid and
shifting) the repetition of the theory in the “fact” of the postcolonial
repeats the colonial subject’s mimicry with regard to the west in a way that reveals
and demonstrates the originary form of postmodernism
in an inherently postcolonial response to colonialism. Postcolonialism logically precedes
postmodernism the moment a colonizer set foot on other lands. The “logically” here, of course, is the logic
of iterability—the originary
nature of the possibility of citational graft—the
possibility that must come before any identifiable origin as such. In this sense the performative is
revealed as ground (paradoxically but actually) and it is this that makes
postcolonialism effective.
5.
Self-Reflexivity (or Auto-Referentiality).
In the last quotation from Bhabha
we witness, too, the self-reflexivity of the postmodern in the
postcolonial—this doubling self awareness that brings us to an awareness of
modernity’s own doubling of identity in the empty repetition of cultural
signs—modernity can be broadly characterized as the attempt to disavow,
repress, domesticate or expel the doubling that repetition produces as
condition for identity. In
postcolonialism the hybrid is explicitly focused upon, performed, inscribed in
its performance.
Now we have a
further reason for failing to construct that paradigm of good and bad
postmodernism. The knowing, educated,
sophisticated irony about who and what and where we are would be in danger of
simply repeating the traditional form of colonial superiority unless it could
assume a solidarity with all those other forms of alienated, oppressed,
marginalized community and those radically different modes of relation
as they emerge performatively under the growing
determinations of global capital. Here
postcolonialism must also participate in the general ethical affirmation of
repetition and difference, sampling, citing, quoting and simulating existence
with no origin or with origin already in representation, with no identity but
what emerges out of repetition and difference (history as repetition, origin as
difference). The awkward consequence
here is that something of the colonial past would need to be acknowledged as
condition, as possibility, as remains of the postcolonial (and postmodern)
present, as we face the blindness of a future destination without end. Perhaps it is this blindness to the future
that now and always structures our sense of self, of the present, and that
hinders our understanding, even now, of a past that must also be comprehended
according to the blindness it had then towards its future—not the future that
here and now looks back, but that future that remains yet to come, for all
time. Who knows?
Ashcroft,
Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
Bhabha, Homi. The
Location of Culture.
Phillips,
John. “Lagging Behind: Bhabha, Post-colonial Theory and the Future.” Travel
Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. Ed.
Steve Clark.
Said, Edward. Orientalism.
Links
A page with one
or two instructive links
Postcolonialism: an extremely useful and well-organized page of links
A
Creative and Provocative “Reader” in Postcolonial Theory
Garbage Culture: a page from the last site—is there any culture that
could not be described in this way?
A great
many links are
here.