Understanding Postcolonialism 1844651606, 9781844651603

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms
3. Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective
4. Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism
5. Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics
6. Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place
7. Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe
8. Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline
Questions for discussion and revision
Guide to further reading
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

understanding postcolonialism

Understanding Movements in Modern Thought Series Editor: Jack Reynolds This series provides short, accessible and lively introductions to the major schools, movements and traditions in philosophy and the history of ideas since the beginning of the Enlightenment. All books in the series are written for undergraduates meeting the subject for the first time.

Published Understanding Empiricism Robert G. Meyers

Understanding Postcolonialism Jane Hiddleston

Understanding Existentialism Jack Reynolds

Understanding Poststructuralism James Williams

Understanding German Idealism Understanding Psychoanalysis Matthew Sharpe & Joanne Faulkner Will Dudley Understanding Hegelianism Robert Sinnerbrink

Understanding Rationalism Charlie Heunemann

Understanding Hermeneutics Lawrence Schmidt

Understanding Utilitarianism Tim Mulgan

Understanding Naturalism Jack Ritchie

Understanding Virtue Ethics Stan van Hooft

Understanding Phenomenology David R. Cerbone

Forthcoming titles include Understanding Pragmatism Understanding Feminism Peta Bowden & Jane Mummery Axel Mueller Understanding Environmental Philosophy Andrew Brennan & Y. S. Lo

understanding postcolonialism Jane Hiddleston

acumen

© Jane Hiddleston, 2009 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by Acumen Acumen Publishing Limited Stocksfield Hall Stocksfield NE43 7TN www.acumenpublishing.co.uk ISBN: 978-1-84465-160-3 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-84465-161-0

(paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in Minion Pro. Printed and bound in the UK by Athenaeum Press Limited.

Contents

Acknowledgements

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1 Introduction

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2 Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms

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3 Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective

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4 Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism

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5 Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics

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6 Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place

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7 Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe

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8 Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline 178 Questions for discussion and revision Guide to further reading Bibliography Index

186 189 193 199

contents

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford, and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford for granting me a sabbatical during which to complete this project. Chapter 1 contains extracts from my article “Dialectic or Dissemination? Anti-colonial Critique in Sartre and Derrida” (Sartre Studies International 12[1] [2006]), and Chapter 4 reuses some material from my essay “Jacques Derrida” (in Postcolonial Thought in the Francophone World, C. Forsdick & D. Murphy [eds] [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009]). I am grateful to the editors of both for allowing me to reprint this material. I would like to thank the series editor, Jack Reynolds, for suggesting this project in the first place, and Tristan Palmer at Acumen for his work in bringing the book to fruition. The anonymous readers also offered invaluable advice and comments, and I am grateful to them for helping me to sharpen the final version. Kate Williams has also been a scrupulous editor and has helped to produce a more polished text. Discussion of aspects of the book came up in seminars and meetings with a number of graduate students at Oxford, and I benefited greatly from trying out my ideas with them. Finally, I am immensely grateful for the help and support of friends and colleagues, and above all, to Colin, for everything. Jane Hiddleston Oxford

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understanding postcolonialism

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Introduction

Postcolonialism is a broad and constantly changing movement that has aroused a good deal of both interest and controversy. Inaugurated in earnest during and after the fight for independence in the remaining British and French colonies around the 1950s and 1960s, it has developed rapidly to become today a major area of intellectual innovation and debate. While the term first became popular in North American university campuses, and in particular in literary departments, it is now widely used both inside and outside Western academic institutions and attracts ever-growing numbers of commentators as well as students. The term “postcolonialism” can generally be understood as the multiple political, economic, cultural and philosophical responses to colonialism from its inauguration to the present day, and is somewhat broad and sprawling in scope. While “anti-colonialism” names specific movements of resistance to colonialism, postcolonialism refers to the wider, multifaceted effects and implications of colonial rule. Postcolonialism frequently offers a challenge to colonialism, but does not constitute a single programme of resistance; indeed, it is considered consequently by some to be rather vague and panoptic in its ever more ambitious field of enquiry. This book will focus on the philosophical dimensions of postcolonialism, and will demonstrate the diversity of conceptual models and strategies used by postcolonial philosophers rather than by political thinkers or literary writers. Postcolonial philosophy will be shown to feed into these, but detailed discussion of the politics, economics and literature of postcolonialism is beyond the scope of this study. introduction

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The term “postcolonialism” is a highly ambiguous one. In order to understand its meanings and implications it is first necessary to define the colonialism to which it evidently refers. Colonialism should be conceived as the conquest and subsequent control of another country, and involves both the subjugation of that country’s native peoples and the administration of its government, economy and produce. The act of colonization is a concrete process of invasion and a practical seizing of control, although it is important for postcolonial studies that this material, empirical manifestation of colonization is at the same time backed up by a colonial ideology that stresses cultural supremacy. Colonialism is from this point of view both a specified political and economic project, and a larger discourse of hegemony and superiority that is enlisted to drive and support that concrete political act. The colonial project involves the literal process of entering into a foreign territory and assuming control of its society and industry, and, on a more conceptual level, the post facto promulgation of a cultural ideology that justifies the colonizer’s presence on the basis of his superior knowledge and “civilization”. “Colonialism” is close in meaning to “imperialism”, although at the same time slightly different. If colonialism involves a concrete act of conquest, imperialism names a broader form of authority or dominance. Colonialism is in this way one active manifestation of imperialist ideology, but imperialism can also be understood as a larger structure of economic or political hegemony that does not have to include the direct rule and conquest of another country. Imperialism could, then, continue after the end of colonial rule, and indeed, many critics have described the United States’s current dominance of global markets as a new form of imperialist rule. This conception of imperialism shows that the term is wide-ranging, but it certainly helps to conceptualize both past and present forms of economic and cultural dominance. Imperialism is also now associated with capitalism, and with the attempt by Western states to impose their capitalist system on the rest of the world. Colonial conquest and settlement was one way in which those states accomplished the spread of their capitalist ideology, but even after decolonization this ideology continues to exert its pressure on the ex-colonies and the “Third World” (and the use of this term itself stresses the subordinate status of the countries to which it refers). If these are the distinctions between colonialism and imperialism, then what do we understand specifically by the term “postcolonialism”? We might assume that postcolonialism designates the aftermath of any form of colonial rule. This means it could presumably refer not only to 2

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the effects of British rule in India, for example, or of the French presence in Algeria, but also to the wake of the Roman Empire, or to the traces of the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America. Indeed, some critics believe that the model for current conceptions of postcolonialism precisely emerges out of the earlier experiences of independence and neo-imperialism in Latin America, and certainly, some thinking around the concepts of liberation and transculturation can be traced back to this region. So the term could be seen to name a series of historical contexts and geographical locations that is bewildering in scope. In fact, however, perhaps as a result of the new understanding of imperialism as associated with capitalism mentioned above, postcolonialism is more frequently conceived to describe what has resulted from the decline of British and French colonialism in the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, many critics continue to reflect on the “postcolonial” heritage of Latin America, or, indeed, use the term to discuss the impact of foreign power on Canada or Australia. It has even been suggested that the United States is postcolonial in the sense that it was once a British colony, although it is clear that the conditions of this colonial project were different from those that were being questioned specifically in British and French colonies around the 1950s. Nevertheless, most critics who identify themselves with postcolonialism focus on the particular form of colonial ideology that was also tied to capitalism, and that brought about not just the conquest of peoples and the use of their resources, but also industrialization and the wholesale restructuring of their economies. Postcolonial critique of British and French colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also focuses very much on the ruthlessness of their methods of exploitation and on the inequality and impoverishment brought about by this particular form of oppression. So postcolonial thought is potentially geographically and historically wide-ranging, but has been narrowed slightly by some of the major critics, who tend to concentrate on British and French capitalist forms of colonialism. The question of the precise dating of the postcolonial, however, remains to be resolved. On this matter, thinkers have distinguished the “post-colonial” from the “postcolonial”, arguing that the removal of the hyphen designates a shift in meaning. It is widely agreed that “post-colonial” names a distinct historical period following the end of direct colonial rule. Post-colonial Algeria, for example, describes the nation’s trajectory after 1962, once decolonization was agreed after eight years of bloody conflict. Post-colonialism is in this way narrow in scope and names a specific, identifiable moment. Postcolonialism, with no introduction

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hyphen, is larger and more problematic. For a start, it tends to refer not to all that happened after the end of colonialism, but to the events that succeeded its beginning. So postcolonialism also names the period of colonial rule, together with its gradual weakening and demise. For this reason, in his book Islands and Exiles (1998), Chris Bongie suggests writing the term in the form post/colonialism, since this stresses the presence of the colonial within postcolonial critique. Far from celebrating the definitive conclusion to colonialism, then, postcolonialism analyses its effects both in its heyday and during the period that followed the end of the literal, concrete colonial presence. The movement is associated with the examination and critique of colonial power both before and after decolonization. This expansion of the historical period to which the term postcolonialism refers means that it has come to be associated with a range of situations and events. Furthermore, postcolonialism names the analysis of the mechanics of colonial power, the economic exploitation it brought with it, and a form of both cultural and ethical critique or questioning. It is both a political and a broader ethical philosophy, and indeed, it will be the contention of this book that latterly the field has become split, often artificially, between these two distinct strands. Overall, it can be agreed that postcolonialism names a set of political, philosophical or conceptual questions engendered by the colonial project and its aftermath. But the approach taken by critics towards these questions varies significantly, with one school of thought tending to lean towards a denunciation of colonial politics and economics, and to call for practical revolution or reform, and another stressing colonialism’s ethical blindness and the cultural regeneration required in the wake of that oppression. Postcolonialism does not propose one answer to such questions – although many critics have objected that it tries to – but offers a framework for their expansion, exploration and clarification. So although commentators point out the risks associated with conceiving the term as a homogeneous label, unifying distinct experiences of oppression, it can be understood to describe a multifaceted and open process of interrogation and critique. It is not a single structure or a straightforward answer, but, as Ato Quayson helpfully puts it, it is a process, a way of thinking through critical strategies. Quayson goes so far as to propose not a “postcolonialist” analysis, but a “process of postcolonializing”, or an intellectual engagement with the evolving links between the colonial period and current or modern-day inequalities. Postcolonialism is additionally, in this sense, different from postcoloniality. If postcolonialism involves some form of critique and resist4

understanding postcolonialism

ance, despite its proponents’ awareness of capitalism’s neo-imperial effects, postcoloniality is a looser term for a current moment or epoch. Postcoloniality is at the same time a condition rather than an intellectual engagement or standpoint, and this term also contains the negative connotations of a generation still, perhaps unthinkingly, bound up in the politics of the hegemony of “the West” over its (former) overseas territories. Moreover, postcoloniality has been described by Graham Huggan as a particular condition in the market, whereby certain texts, artefacts or cultural practices are celebrated precisely as a result of their apparent “marginality” in relation to the Western canon. The irony of this process of exoticization is that only certain authors or works are championed, and those who achieve this status do so largely because they fulfil Western expectations of the nature of the other culture, and of the form of a good work of art. Some critics have argued that postcolonialism is also guilty of this fetishization of certain aspects of “Third World” culture, but we might argue in response that postcolonialism is the movement that interrogates this cynical process, whereas postcoloniality is the broader epoch and set of conditions in which such exoticization has come to thrive. Postcoloniality is from this point of view intermingled with neocolonialism: that is, with lingering ideologies of cultural patronage of the sort that originally backed up and fuelled actual colonial powers. To return more specifically to postcolonialism, this book will stress that this is a movement of questioning that seeks not, as critics have at times objected, to propose a single model or understanding for the colonial project and its aftershocks, but to analyse the nuances and implications of its multiple, varying manifestations. Postcolonialism is equally not a coherent strategy for resistance, but it names the at times self-contradictory or internally conflictual movement in thought that examines, unpicks and compares multiple strategies and potential modes of critique. This book will analyse some of these varying strategies as they were conceived by some of the major philosophers and thinkers of the twentieth century, and will explore the distinct approaches that have been reified by certain critics into a strict, and ultimately rather problematic, division. While for some readers postcolonialism is an overtly political movement, concerned above all with the empirical, material effects of colonialism and its aftermath, for others this field of enquiry heralds an ethical reflection concerning, rather more broadly, relations between self and other. Postcolonial thought is, on the one hand, seen to interrogate the underlying political structures of colonialism, and the mechanics of its promulgation and subsequent dismantling. Postcolonial introduction

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critique goes on to enquire after the structure and efficacy of particular forms of nationalism as they emerged at the time when colonial ideology faltered and declined. On the other hand, however, an apparently alternative strand to this movement in modern thought forces us to rethink our understanding of the deeper relations between peoples, cultures or communities, and the ethical encounter interrupted by colonialism but crucial to its denunciation. A major part of postcolonial critique concentrates on the militant condemnation of a pernicious political ideology, but another aspect uses that condemnation to challenge and extend our understanding of how to contemplate the other. The two strands of postcolonialism draw, respectively, on Marxism and Levinasian ethics. These influences are evidently combined with others and used in different ways, but some understanding of Marxist politics and Levinasian ethics offers insight into two of the dominant currents in postcolonial philosophy. Marx commented explicitly on colonial ideology in a number of essays, although it is above all his critique of capitalist exploitation and his call for revolt that inspired later postcolonial thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas does not engage openly with the question of colonial power, but his reinvention of the ethical relation in the wake of National Socialism is undeniably at the heart of many later discussions of postcolonial alterity. The rest of this introduction will sketch the relevant parts of Marx and Levinas, and establish the philosophical bases on which much subsequent postcolonial thought is constructed. Nevertheless, in noting that many secondary postcolonial critics appear to choose between politics and ethics in their reflections on the works of the major philosophers, much of this book will consider the fragility of the frontier between these apparently distinct poles. Levinas himself offers an equivocal response to Marx, arguing both that the latter’s materialist confrontation of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat casts aside the possibility of absolute freedom, and that he nevertheless did universalize French revolutionary ideals by championing freedom of consciousness. Much more broadly, moreover, postcolonial thinkers of each camp at times borrow from the other, and leading critics such as Gayatri Spivak constantly and deliberately dart between them in the effort to stress their reciprocal uses. Materialist commentators such as Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry may battle against the “textualist” approach of a critic such as Robert Young, but most of the leading philosophers address both the politics of colonial oppression and its underlying, unethical representational structures. Certainly, the overt goals of political and ethical postcolonialism will be found to be quite clearly distinct from one another, yet a genuine 6

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understanding of the postcolonial arena will necessitate an engagement with both levels.

Marxism and ideology Marx refers directly to colonialism somewhat sporadically throughout his work, and many of his comments on this subject appear rather ambivalent. There can be no doubt, however, that he condemns the subjugation and economic exploitation of the underclass that the colonial system demands. Marx’s most developed observations concerning colonialism are focused on India and on the inequality enforced by British colonial rule in that context. He notes in numerous journalistic essays, and in parts of Capital, the misery and poverty suffered by the natives, the cruelty of their exploitation and the destructive effects of the British restructuring of the economy. Marx notes that the British effectively broke down the founding framework of Indian society by taking control of the means of production and imposing British capitalist principles. As a result of the British presence, Indian agriculture deteriorated as it struggled to conform to these principles of free competition, laissezfaire and laissez-aller. Furthermore, British forms of industry destroyed local technologies – the handloom and the spinning wheel, for example – in order to impose a larger-scale manufacturing industry, with the result that the colonial system entirely recreated the means of the production of cotton in the “mother country of cottons”. Smaller farms, local businesses and family communities were dissolved because they were based on a domestic form of industry – on hand weaving and tilling, for example – and the natives as a result no longer ran or managed their own resources. Not only was economic control passed over to the British, but local communities were dissolved and fragmented by the installation of this foreign form of industry. In addition, the higher employees of the British East India Company instituted a monopoly on the tea trade, fixing prices and taking profits away from local workers. In analysing such instances of restructuring and exploitation, Marx and Engels both denounce the economic drive conceived as the major basis for colonial power: “colonialism proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity” (Marx & Engels 1960: 261). Despite these condemnations of the inequality and exploitation brought about by the British in India, Marx’s position on colonialism nevertheless at times seems contradictory. First, in arguing that the British colonizers did make an economic profit out of the colonial introduction

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project, he succeeds in both condemning the exploitation associated with this profit and stressing the success of an economic venture that anti-colonialists at the time wanted to deny. As Young points out in Postcolonialism (2001), Marx goes on to contradict himself on this question of profit, as he mentions how the East India Company was stretching British finances to the point of potential ruin, but for the most part he underlines the impact of colonialism in the capitalist drive for financial gain. Furthermore, if Marx denounces the moral failings of British colonialism, and laments the suffering of the native population, he does also note that the British succeeded in imposing some unity on a people that had been disastrously fractured up until that point. He recalls that India had previously relied on hereditary divisions of labour, solidified by the caste system, and these impeded the progress and development of Indian power and industry. The modern industrial system imposed by the British, together with the construction of a railway system, in fact to a certain extent helped to transcend existing petty hierarchies. So Marx is virulently against colonial exploitation, but does not condemn every aspect of the colonial project. Marx is also above all interested less in independence than in the revolt of the working classes against the bourgeoisie. In order for the Indian working class to achieve such a revolt, and then to reap the benefits of British industrialization, Marx argues that the British bourgeoisie would first need to be supplanted by a strong industrial proletariat capable of undermining the bourgeois control of the means of production. The first revolution had to happen back home, then, and the colonized might be able to follow suit if the British working class had created a model for them to follow. The Indian proletariat needed to learn from the British proletariat before achieving the conditions necessary for their emancipation. At the same time, the colonial and imperialist projects were preventing the socialist revolution in Britain from taking place, so the danger was that the combined force of colonialism and capitalism mutually strengthened each system, disabling revolt both at home and abroad. Colonialism is an ideology thrown into question in Marx’s work, then, but anti-colonial critique is by no means his first priority. He continues to believe that Indian society might have something to learn from Britain, and indeed, that an anti-colonial revolt should not take place at any cost, and without a properly constructed political framework to support it. In The Communist Manifesto (1967), Marx and Engels again at once denounce the capitalist exploitation of colonized countries and remain hazy on the nature, and appropriate moment, for something as specific 8

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as a nationalist revolution. They vilify the scope of capitalist ambition, its spread beyond Western nations and drive to rule the economies of the world. It is a holistic ideology that demands not only the reign of surplus-value making in Europe, but at the same time the derivation of further surplus-value using the resources of other countries, of colonies. Capitalism for Marx and Engels is also pernicious because it is propped up by a rhetoric of civilization, and claims to bring moral as well as economic benefits to foreign territories. They angrily denounce the way in which capitalism: compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (1967: 84) Nevertheless, if capitalism also brings with it this drive towards colonization and the imposition of what it conceives to be its mission civilisatrice, its overthrow in the colonies should not necessarily be nationalist. Marx and Engels propose, in the wake of the weakening of distinctions between nations as a result of the development of the bourgeoisie, that revolution will be achieved through the unification of the working classes beyond national differences. They argue that working men have to seize hold of their own nation, they have to position themselves as the leading class of the nation in order to achieve political supremacy, but once this supremacy has been instated, Marx and Engels look forward to a utopian world where divisions and conflicts between nations fade. Marx’s views on nationalism and anti-colonial revolt alter later in his career, however, and it is difficult to pin down and reify his attitudes to these phenomena. Again, as Young points out, Marx goes on to schematize the relationship between colonizing and oppressed nations according to the same model used for the bourgeoisie and the control of the proletariat, and this suggests that the colonized nation should now pull together and unify its forces in order to achieve its emancipation. Taking into account Marx’s vacillation on nationalism, however, it remains clear that his broader thoughts on the structures of economic exploitation and on the nature of a workers’ revolt can tell us something about the capitalist drive behind colonialism. Ambivalent about colonialism’s potential benefits, Marx also does not offer a straightforward anti-colonial critique, and focuses more on the effects of the introduction

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bourgeois control of the means of production than on colonial violence. His identification of capitalism’s broad sweep and underlying colonial drive provides, however, a significant context for any understanding of the mechanics of colonial economic control. In addition to the practical discussion of economic exploitation, Marx’s work at the same time offers a foundation for a conception of ideology that is crucial for the spread and institutionalization of colonial power. In The German Ideology (1964), Marx and Engels distinguish the material activity of men and their empirical political and social relations from the larger ideological superstructure. Marx’s discussion of ideology opens with the observation that the functioning of the capitalist system starts with actual individuals, who are productively active in a definite way, entering into a series of definite political and social relations. These relations are then seen to direct the production of ideas, of conceptions and of a broader consciousness that remains tightly interwoven with material and empirical conditions and actions. Nevertheless, Marx’s theory of the division of labour and the control of the means of production by the bourgeoisie means that the worker comes to find himself alienated from the ideas that drive and shape his existence. Obliged to work for the broader community or the state, the worker directs his energies into this larger communal life, which is at odds with his own self-interest. The proletariat work in the service of the ruling class, who produce the ruling ideas, and these are in turn divorced from the worker’s perception of his personal needs and aims. For Marx, the class that retains control of the means of production also controls the community’s mental production: “the ruling class presents its interest as a common interest to all members of society” (Marx & Engels 1964: 60). This common interest can be seen as a dominant ideology that has become detached from the individual’s view of his material conditions; it is an illusion or chimera that nevertheless props up the capitalist system. Building on Marx, Engels goes so far as to conceive ideology as false consciousness; it is the illusory gamut of ideas and dogmas that support and justify the structure of economic exploitation and inequality. As Terry Eagleton writes in Ideology (1991), however, Marx’s later reworkings of this notion of ideology move away from the notion of a false ideology and towards a conception of the duplicity of actual lived relations. Marx’s theory of ideology can be used to reveal the illusions and suppositions promulgated in favour of colonial imposition and domination. It is not, however, without its inconsistencies. Eagleton’s discussion of the evolution of ideology in Marx’s work points out that there is 10

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some contradiction in his use of notions of truth and falsity, because the “falsity” of ideas paradoxically comes to describe the “truth” of the social order. Ideology also seems integral to social life and at the same time dissociated from it. Furthermore, it has been observed that the assumed association between the ruling class and ruling ideology suggests a tight system of control, when ideology could be seen to function in a broader, more free-floating manner. Similarly, critics have noticed that Marx’s theory of ideology implies that ideology is somewhat homogeneous, although thinkers such as Stuart Hall have stressed that Marx does in fact allow for ideology to vary in form. Market relations can indeed be conceived in more multifarious ways than perhaps at first appears. At the same time, further dissenters have noted that in Marx’s theory, those who are swayed by the ruling ideology are conceived unfairly as blind to its falsity and distortion. Once again, however, we might respond that Marx’s members of the proletariat are not necessarily passive and ignorant, but rather that his understanding of ideology implies that parts of the capitalist process either escape their understanding, or make little sense to them as individuals. What this notion of a dominant consciousness and a ruling set of ideas suggests, moreover, is that the capitalist system imposes itself both practically and insidiously, by propagating ideas that justify that initial practical structure. Concomitantly, the workers’ struggle against capitalism requires a form of ideological transformation: a change in leading values as well as a seizing of economic control. If Marx’s theory of ideology has been criticized for its rigidity, then Antonio Gramsci is one thinker who helps to add nuance to his understanding of the mechanics of class domination. Gramsci troubles the temptation in reading Marx to conceive the ideological superstructure as tightly knitted to the economic substructure, and stresses instead the complexity of social formations. Gramsci’s approach is not exclusively economic, and his writing analyses together economic conditions and the knotted structure of political and ideological relations that serve to form the social fabric. Furthermore, Gramsci uses the concept of hegemony to think through structures of domination, rather than sticking to the notion of a fixed correlation between one ruling class and the ruling ideology. A hegemonic formation is not necessarily a permanent fixture, but names the different strategies employed by any ruling class to win its position of dominance. Hegemony is distinct from coercion, since it relies on a changeable form of moral and cultural leadership or authority that comes to determine the structure of a given society, rather than on the use of force. Hegemony names the ways in which the governing introduction

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power wins the consent of those it governs. Like Marx’s concept of ideology, then, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes the spread of a sort of cultural and political status quo that props up the leadership of the ruling class and the bourgeois mentality that goes with it. For Gramsci, however, unlike for Marx, the relation between base economic structures and the hegemonic class is wide-ranging and diffuse, and is bound up with culture and the spread of values as well as with exploitation. Hegemony also names lived social relations rather than just false ideas or illusions. Finally, hegemony is for Gramsci necessarily a site of struggle, as plural subjects under the sway of hegemony nevertheless assert their multifarious and contradictory forms of social consciousness. This form of struggle is more important for Gramsci than simply a straightforward, economistic seizing of control of the means of production. In addition to opening out Marx’s theory of ideology to stress the role of culture and morality in the subjugated subject’s strategy for revolt, Gramsci’s political writing more specifically on the peasantry offers a model of contestation that could also be usefully anti-colonial. Interspersed with his comments on the subjugation of the Italian peasantry are observations on the injustice of colonial exploitation and the necessity for the exploited class to come together, united by shared ideas. Like Marx, Gramsci condemns the capitalist drive behind colonialism, but then goes on to emphasize the importance of the education of working men, since a better understanding of their situation would help them to organize a coherent position of revolt. Resistance would be achieved through the creation of a powerful and fully realized self-consciousness. This conception of the role of culture both in the propagation of hegemony and in the service of its overthrow is additionally pertinent in the colonial context, since the colonial project of course relies not only on the institution of a capitalist form of exploitation, but also on the spread of a belief in white racial supremacy. Furthermore, Hall points out that the discussion of the culturally specific quality of hegemonic formations enables us to think through the particular determinants of colonial dominance and allows a flexible understanding of the ways in which class and race feed into one another. Most famously, Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern – which names a subjugated social category not restricted to the notion of class – has been used by Marxist Indian theorists such as Ranajit Guha and, more loosely, Spivak to examine the insurgency of the Indian peasantry, as well as its oppression. The significance of this thinking lies above all in its conception of a decisive political agency claiming a voice of its own. The subaltern is a resistant being rather than merely a passive object of oppression and exploitation. 12

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The final theorist of ideology worth introducing here is Louis Althusser, who refines and expands on both Marx and Gramsci. Althusser develops Marx’s understanding of the relation between base and superstructure by specifying the actual mechanics of ideological domination. He reads Marx’s work in detail, but points out the theoretical gap in Marx’s analysis of the question of how the ideological superstructure works itself into actual economic relations and conditions. In order to address this lack in Marx, Althusser does not use Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and cultural supremacy, since he conceives the latter’s desire to amalgamate economic infrastructure, exploitation, class struggle, the law and the state under the unifying umbrella of “hegemony” as astonishingly idealistic. Rather, Althusser looks at the State as a “machine” with a set of apparatuses ensuring the continued domination of the ruling, bourgeois class. The State is made up of the repressive apparatuses, such as the army and the police, by which it exerts its force, and these are combined with political apparatuses, including the head of state, the government, and the body of the administration. Most famously, Althusser asserts that the ideology of the ruling class is promulgated via a plurality of ideological apparatuses, such as the education system. These ideological state apparatuses are the most insidious, and include major institutions such as schools and colleges, the church, the legal system, communications, and smaller sites of diffusion such as the family and the cultural expectations accompanying it. The role of these apparatuses is to ensure the reproduction of the labour power, so that workers continue to submit to the ruling ideology and the agents of exploitation and repression continue to manipulate that ideology. The ideology produced by these apparatuses denies the existence of economic exploitation and struggle, and recommends the virtues of public service. It is also, importantly, a distortion that acts to reshape individuals’ perception of their relation to the means of production. It is not bound up with falsity, as in Marx and Engels, and does not imply that certain conditions are illusory, but describes rather the imaginary relation of individuals to their actual conditions of existence. Most importantly, Althusser’s analysis is innovative in that it pinpoints the material manifestation of this ideology, since this is no longer conceived merely as a series of ideas or a ruling consciousness but as a concrete set of mechanics. Ideology, as well as exploitation, gains force and credence by means of particular institutions or apparatuses, all of which serve and concretize the bourgeois aims of the State. Althusser’s notion of ideology also alters our understanding of the construction of the subject. It is ideology that makes us subjects; it introduction

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“interpellates” individuals, which means it addresses them, and constructs them as subjects of the State. We are always born into the ideological system, then, and know ourselves only as formed by that system. Althusser draws on Jacques Lacan here, and suggests that the subject recognizes itself by means of an imaginary or deluded vision that is promulgated by ideology. Most importantly, though, Althusser’s thinking is useful here in that it uncovers the vast ideological mirage that the individual is born into, and that forms each individual as a social subject. Ideology actually serves in the construction of subjectivity, rather than acting only on a ready-formed consciousness. Once again, this conception of the constitution of the subject by ideology could be seen to inform notions of the colonized as actively formed by colonialism: by notions of white supremacy that serve to govern the entire social system, and that are promulgated by the State and its attendant institutions. Postcolonial critic E. San Juan Jr notes that Althusser’s conception of the determined, interpellated subject risks ruling out autonomous agency, but nevertheless stresses the importance of Althusser’s theory of ideology for an understanding of capitalist colonialism. Althusser’s use of the notion of a Lacanian alienated subjectivity will later be taken up by Homi Bhabha in his specific discussion of the splitting of the colonized in the face of what will by this time be called colonial discourse. If Marx himself comments sporadically and even erratically on colonialism, this book will show how his relevance to current postcolonial debates also exceeds the scope, and indeed the ambivalence, of these direct references. His critique not only of colonialism, but of economic exploitation, informs many more recent denunciations of colonialism and capitalism. Major revolutionary thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre derive their understanding of revolt from Marx’s call to the proletariat to stand together and seize control of the means of production. Anti-colonial critique is not concerned in such contexts just with the relation between colonizer and colonized, but with the oppression of the masses by the bourgeoisie, and this must be overturned by the destruction of both political and economic subjugation. In addition, theories of decolonization and nationalism in India use a Marxist understanding of the domination of the peasantry by the bourgeoisie, while also offering a critique of nationalist unity in the preparation of that struggle. More broadly, the concept of ideology as developed by Marx, Gramsci and Althusser feeds into postcolonial denunciations of colonial power as propped up by a system of false images and mirages. Michel Foucault’s exploration of discourse, although rejecting the term “ideology”, draws on Marxism in stressing the interweaving of power 14

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with knowledge, and Edward Said in turn builds on Foucault to show how colonial power is propped up by the production and diffusion of certain images of the Orient. Critics and commentators on all these theorists, such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik, go on to use their readings self-consciously and assertively to inscribe Marxism at the centre of postcolonial theory. San Juan summarizes his discussion of postcolonialism with the proposition that “capitalism as a world system has developed unevenly, with the operations of the ‘free market’ being determined by the unplanned but (after analysis) ‘lawful’ tendencies of the accumulation of surplus value” (1998: 5). And Lazarus goes so far as to argue that the Marxist understanding of capitalism is “the foundational category for any credible theory of modern society” (1999: 16). In this way, many of the more politically oriented postcolonial thinkers can be seen to rely on concepts that can be traced back to the philosophy of Marx.

Levinasian ethics Levinas never directly confronts the question of colonialism and its aftermath, but his work is at every point an expression of his revulsion for National Socialism, its totalitarianism and imperialism over the marginalized, the oppressed, the other. Colonialism constitutes a quite different form of totalitarianism from that enforced by Nazi Germany and its violence and exploitation are conceived to different ends, but it is significant that, increasingly, thinkers such as Aimé Césaire have drawn parallels between them. And indeed, colonialism’s failure to conceive otherness ethically is related conceptually to the violence that Levinas condemns throughout his philosophical career. Otherwise than Being, first published in 1974, is dedicated to the six million victims of the death camps, and references to Hitlerism, both overt and implied, recur across the corpus. The early essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” explores the association between monotheism and absolute freedom, together with the link between paganism and fate, and Levinas condemns the society that cannot accept the freedom of man and that falls back on a dangerous and reductive biological determinism. This is a society where: man no longer finds himself confronted with a world of ideas in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sovereign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to introduction

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a certain number of these ideas, just as he is linked by birth to all those who are of his blood. (Levinas 1990b: 70) Levinas also argues here that the danger of this philosophy is that it has to be universal, since if it were freely chosen it would contradict the determinism it upholds, the belief that individuals are necessarily rooted in and circumscribed by their communities. It is from this insistence on the universal applicability of a form of ethnic determinism that National Socialism derives its at once colonial and exterminatory logic. More generally, however, Levinas’s work can be seen to be pertinent for postcolonial philosophy because he writes against any conception of subjectivity as totalized, masterful and dominant over the other. Levinas’s major works seek to condemn not so much the vocabulary of race as the related notions of the “totality”, “sovereignty” and “imperialism” of the self. Totality and Infinity opens with a reference to “the permanent possibility of war”, and goes on to assert that “the visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy” (Levinas 1969: 21). War is the inevitable result of the attempt to conceive the self as entirely whole, self-contained and self-sufficient, since such a conception inevitably leads to oppression or exclusion. The notion of “totality” alludes both to the totalitarianism of National Socialism or of any imperialism, and to Western knowledge itself, according to which the individual conceives himself as a totality and subordinates everything that is exterior to himself. The startling opening of Totality and Infinity, and its stark opposition between war and morality, develops into an extended critique of Western metaphysics and ontology, in particular its suppression and occlusion of the other. Levinas’s critique of ontology will also throughout be subtended by his desire to ward off the threat of totalitarianism or the subjugation or expulsion of alterity that might also be described as colonial. Levinas’s main objective in the initial chapters of the work consists in criticizing the ways in which Western thought has conceived the self, or Being, as totalized and self-same: it either excludes or assimilates otherness. A series of terms, including Totality, Being, the Same, the subject, are all undermined by Levinas as a result of their tendency to subordinate what lies beyond their totalized confines. In denouncing Heidegger, via Socrates and Berkeley, for example, Levinas laments that in ontology the freedom of Being is prioritized before the relation with the other; indeed, freedom means “the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other” (Levinas 1969: 45). The “I” accomplishes a 16

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relation with the other by means of a third term, but this is incorporated into the self rather than maintained as distinct and external. As a result, and even worse, the conceptualization of Being suppresses or possesses the other and privileges the “I can”, the autocracy of the “I”. In a series of rapid moves, Levinas then connects the philosophy of ontology with the philosophy of power, which in turn feeds into the tyranny of the State. In Heidegger, Levinas again traces this back to a belief in rootedness in the soil, to paganism and a devotion to the “master”. This philosophy also places the freedom of the self before justice towards the other, and fails to call into question injustice. Astonishingly swiftly, Levinas has moved from a critique of ontology to a denunciation of tyranny and of the association between state politics and war. The error of Western metaphysics is its reliance on ontology, and war and injustice are presented as direct consequences of this concentration on the freedom of Being to the detriment of an ethical relation with the other. What ontology obscures, according to Levinas, is not an other that can be incorporated into the self, but the absolute Other. This Other has no communality with the I, but is a Stranger and is wholly external to Totality or to the Same. Against Totality, this Other inaugurates the idea of Infinity, an excess that is wholly resistant to knowledge or assimilation and that needs to be respected for its impenetrability. The infinite cannot be an object or thing; it is an unending exteriority that can never be known, encompassed or circumscribed. Here again, Levinas creates a conglomeration of terms (Infinity, the Other, exteriority, transcendence, alterity) that offset and undermine the mastery and imperialism of totality. Furthermore, the way in which the Infinity of the Other presents itself to the self is by means of the face, an ambiguous term in Levinas’s writing that designates both the expressiveness of the human face and something that cannot be seen: the face “at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea” (Levinas 1969: 51). The face both names the features of another individual, and serves as a figure for the Other that the self cannot assimilate, know and understand. An awareness or acceptance of this overflow or excess at the moment of encounter is, for Levinas, the definition of ethics: it does not tell us how to be or act, but describes the fundamentally ethical nature of human encounter. The ethical conversation with the Other means not assimilating its expression but receiving it in the knowledge that it exceeds and surpasses the idea that the self creates of it. Importantly, in this ethical relation with the Other, the freedom of the self is not the first priority but is overtaken and surpassed by the demands of introduction

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the relation. Subjectivity is secondary to the encounter with the infinite, which itself occurs in the immediacy of the face-to-face meeting. Importantly, however, even though Levinas’s work at times appears to rest on a rather schematic pairing, Infinity is in reality not the opposite of Totality, and is not entirely separated from it. Totality and Infinity are not conceived as a binary opposition, but a pairing to be thought alongside one another. As Howard Caygill writes, “what is ‘otherwise’ than totality is understood more often in terms of what is immanent to it, what qualifies, checks, displaces or otherwise postpones its operations” (2002: 95). Absolute Totality does not exist, but finds itself supplemented, invaded and permeated by that which it seeks to exclude and master. Understanding this permeation and interpenetration is the ethical demand made by the encounter with the Other’s face. Having stressed the intractability, which means the difficulty, of mastering or controlling the expression of the Other in conversation, Levinas develops in the rest of Totality and Infinity, and in Otherwise than Being, his understanding of the role of language in establishing the ethical relation. Discourse, for Levinas, is the site of relationality; it is not the direct representation and communication of a thought or intuition, but “an original relation with exterior being” (1969: 66). In speaking to the Other, the “I” cannot know this Other or put him in a category, but must apprehend him in all his heterogeneity. This is not to say that all discourse succeeds in establishing this relation, since rhetoric for Levinas is a form of language that denies freedom in seeking to persuade. In its expressive function, however, language precisely both maintains and allows the revelation of the Other. It does not represent something already constituted and known, but creates sharing without assuming sameness. It is a sort of interface exposing singular, intractable and potentially infinite beings to one another without forcing resemblance or complete communion. Language institutes a relationality without relationality, and does not require the establishment of communality. In Levinas’s words: “language presupposes interlocutors, a plurality. Their commerce is not a representation of the one by the other, nor a participation in universality, on the common plane of language. The commerce … is ethical” (ibid.: 73). Language reveals the nudity of the face before it has been interpreted or illuminated, and exposes its intractability. It is vital to the creation of community, not because it creates identity, but rather precisely because it exposes the self to the Other. It is not the ground of totality but the space in which the Other faces the self in all its possible forms, “hostile, my friend, my master, my student” (ibid.: 81). 18

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In Otherwise than Being, Levinas develops this analysis using another set of terms. Discourse is divided between two coexisting facets, the Saying and the Said. The Saying designates what in language overspills the confines of Being and signals the simultaneous proximity and intractability of alterity. The Saying is the excess of language, its openness and resistance to a single and restricted set of meanings. The Said, on the other hand, is the expression of an essence, a theme or content; it names the movement of language towards the identification and containment of its referent. Levinas argues that Western philosophy has traditionally been preoccupied with the Said, since it produces arguments, hypotheses and propositions that aspire to a status of certainty and truth. In privileging the Said, however, philosophy has chosen to ignore the omnipresent excess of the Saying. Once again, these are not opposites or alternatives to one another, but the Saying constantly expands the potentially reductive and oppressive boundaries of the Said: “the Saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the Said” (Levinas 1981: 44). The Saying moves towards the Said, but in becoming absorbed into it strains against its limits and opens it to otherness and the beyond. The Said creates essence and truth, but the Saying exposes that essence to alterity and establishes language as the interface of the ethical relation. The relation between the two terms in Levinas’s writing is constantly unsettling and at times apparently paradoxical. The one exceeds the other, but the Saying also relies on the Said and is only manifested through its apparently secure statements. As in Totality and Infinity, the opposition is less a distinct dichotomy than a coupling, whereby the ethical insistence on Infinity, or the Saying, is conceived alongside the apparent security of Totality or the Said. In both formulations, openness to excess is the start of an ethical relation. In addition to expanding the limits of both Being and language, Levinasian ethics proposes a set of requirements pertinent for postcolonial criticism. Justice towards the other, for example, is discussed early on in Totality and Infinity and takes precedence over the freedom of the self. Being cannot pursue its own ends in the name of spontaneity if in the process it exerts power over, or tyrannizes, the other. The obligation to welcome and do justice to the other restricts the freedom of the self, although this is not in the sense that the other can oppress the self, but in the sense that it “calls in question the naive right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being” (Levinas 1969: 84). Even more, the welcoming of the other necessitates in the self a feeling of shame towards his own injustice and pursuit of freedom. Levinas then goes so far as to define the relation to the other as the demand for justice introduction

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over freedom, again criticizing Heidegger for privileging the latter over the former. Any assumption of the self ’s power, the subject’s ability to pursue his own chosen ends, is undermined by the requirement that attention to the other comes first. Furthermore, in Otherwise than Being, justice requires an admission of the otherness of the self, a realization of the limited mastery of the ego. Levinas here writes less of a confrontation between Same and Other, than of proximity, of justice as a result of contact without absorption or assimilation. In his famous “Violence and Metaphysics”, Jacques Derrida pointed out that Levinas’s terminology in Totality and Infinity risked falling into a schematism reminiscent of the ontology he was criticizing, and in response Otherwise than Being associates justice and the ethical relation with the brushing of subjects against one another rather than with an encounter between two dichotomous subjects. In both texts, the concept of justice can clearly be related to postcolonial critiques of cultural domination, sovereignty and mastery, and could also be used to denounce the colonizer’s pursuit of his own “free” ends at the expense of the other. The colonial relation erroneously places the power of the master before the justice owed to the victim. This resonance in Levinas’s work is amplified by the use of the term “imperialism” to designate the sovereignty of the self and the subsequent subjugation of the other: the colonized or the slave. Justice is at the same time for Levinas associated with responsibility and, in Otherwise than Being, hospitality. These terms are somewhat blurred together, since it is the just relation with the other for which the self finds himself responsible. The ethical relation is also the responsible relation, in which the subject attends to the difference and demands of the other. Responsibility is also hospitality, moreover, and requires the welcoming of the other into one’s dwelling. Dwelling is not an object of possession; it is the place of shelter, of the constitution of subjectivity, but it does not root Being securely in the ground. It is not a conduit to the soil or owned by right, but, pre-existing Being, is merely the space in which the subject establishes intimacy in the face of the elements. At the same time, in order not to be constricted by possession, “I must be able to give what I possess”, and “the Other – the absolutely Other – paralyzes possession, which he contests by his epiphany in the face” (Levinas 1969: 171). Thus for Levinas habitation offers security to the self, but must also be conceived as another space of encounter that puts into question the possibility of possession. In addition, beyond the dwelling of the intimate self Levinas throws into question the territory of the State, since although this concept appears to prioritize proximity, it too rests on a belief in Being that excludes what lies beyond it. Derrida 20

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explores this exigency in Levinas in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, where he describes Totality and Infinity as “an immense treatise of hospitality” (1999: 21), and uses his work to explore a concept of hospitality that works against the tyranny of the State. This would be an “infinite hospitality” without condition, incommensurate with political regulations and laws but necessarily conceived alongside these. More practically, Mireille Rosello uses Levinas in her Postcolonial Hospitality (2001) to explore the paradoxes of cities of refuge, where the refugee is both welcomed and reminded of his otherness. Levinas helps to point out the ethical limitations of such a condition. One of the difficulties of Levinas’s work in this area, however, is the distinction between ethics and politics that in turn troubles and unsettles the postcolonial field. Derrida’s reading in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas stresses the necessary but impossible conjunction between “the law of hospitality”, the requirement that the host accept any other, and “the laws of hospitality”, the conditions that necessarily regulate that acceptance within the confines of existing states. Derrida argues that both forms of hospitality are indispensable, but have to be conceived as an irresolute aporia within which one necessarily conflicts with the other. For Levinas himself, the political, again necessarily, intervenes in the ethical relation between self and other in that it introduces a third party, or other human subjects, perhaps in the form of society or community. It is the need for negotiation with this third party that upsets the ethical encounter by adding the obligation to consider external factors. This very “third term”, however, although establishing the demands of the political, troubles or throws into question the purity of Levinasian ethics and the direct, unmediated encounter with the face. At the same time, it is this third party that disrupts the potential asymmetry of the encounter (I can put myself in the place of the other, but cannot myself be replaced); it forces the self to be other differently, or other to another other. Nevertheless, when asked about the relation between ethics and politics, Levinas still subordinates the latter to the former, arguing for an engagement with both while also admitting that there remains a contradiction between them. The example of Israel leads him to suggest that “there might be an ethical limit to this ethically necessary political existence” (1989: 293), but he falls silent on what this would mean for the Jewish people of that state. There is not space here to consider the intricacies of Levinas’s writing on Israel, but certainly it is here that the contradiction between ethics and politics starts to make the debate disturbingly hazy. As Caygill explores with great subtlety, Levinas seems confused in Difficult Freedom (1990a) introduction

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about whether the Jewish people should be conceived as a “fraternity” or whether they represent universal ethical concerns. Levinas struggles to reconcile the political demands of the State of Israel and the unconditional ethics that he affirms Judaism provides. He suggests a return to notions of sacrifice, but for Caygill, “this seems dangerously close to sacrificing to an idol – the most powerful, fascinating and irresistible of modern idols – the nation-state” (2002: 165). When he goes on to propose a looser form of state identity to accommodate the Diaspora, he risks this time falsely unifying Jewish identity. Even more disconcertingly, Caygill points out that Levinas is unclear about whether he conceives Islam to play a part in holy history and even describes the Asiatic world as a stranger to Europe. He also evades the question of the place of the Palestinians and subsumes their plight into a broader reflection on universal responsibility. His call for peace at the end of Totality and Infinity seems ill equipped to deal with the particular tensions of Israel and Palestine. If Levinas’s thought is flawed in many ways, however, his ethics, if not his politics, is crucial for postcolonial reflection on alterity. His work in itself signals some of the problems explored in the current book, in that his belief in the ethical relation at times fails to tackle the political requirements of a situation of conflict, in this case one as troubling as that in the State of Israel. And indeed, his non-engagement with Islam itself oddly comes close to a colonial drive towards the marginalization of the other’s culture. It is nevertheless precisely that overwhelmingly significant strand of his work devoted to ethics and alterity that will prove a foundation for later conceptions of a postcolonial openness to difference. Derrida’s criticisms of Levinas’s work have already been noted, but in fact much more important is Derrida’s debt to Levinasian ethics, which underpins his entire deconstruction of Western metaphysics and ethnocentrism. Explicitly engaging with Levinas repeatedly, Derrida also uses the ethical encounter to inform his conception of the blindness of the Western epistēmē or system of knowledge (via readings of Saussure, Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss), as well as his reading of colonialism and sovereignty in The Monolingualism of the Other (1998). In addition, Bhabha’s postcolonial philosophy scarcely mentions Levinas but, as we shall see, his exploration of the flickering presence of ambivalence and alterity within colonial discourse is highly reminiscent of Levinas’s permeation of Totality with Infinity, or the Said with the Saying. Abdelkébir Khatibi’s foregrounding of otherness and bilingualism can also be seen to emerge from a Levinasian understanding of excess and the intractable, and, finally, Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of 22

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Relation” learns at least implicitly from Levinas’s concept of an encounter without sameness or consensus. Levinas remains alone in his prioritization of ethics over freedom, and postcolonial thinkers for the most part conceive their ethics rather as a recognition of the freedom of the other rather than as a relation preceding the affirmation of freedom. Many subsequent notions of mastery, totalitarianism and irreducible alterity nevertheless inherit these notions, either overtly or implicitly, from Levinas’s groundbreaking formulation of twentieth-century ethics. Poststructuralist currents in postcolonialism, analysed for the most part in the second half of this book, are deeply indebted to Levinas even if he is often now not explicitly acknowledged. As major influences for postcolonial thinkers, Marxism and Levinasian ethics raise quite distinct questions concerning the errors of colonialism and the strategies or modes of thinking crucial to its overthrow. Many later critics have chosen to foreground the strands in postcolonial critique related to one of these schools, and certainly political and ethical thinkers express their goals in quite different, even contrasting, ways. Parry comments explicitly on this disjunction between Marxism and poststructuralist ethics, and, advocating a Marxist-oriented frame of analysis, points out that “the rejection by poststructuralism of the Marxist notions underpinning left anti-colonial thinkers – capitalist system, structural divisions, nationalism, an emancipatory narrative, universalism – suggests that the discrepancy between the informing premises is not readily negotiated” (2004: 7). This study will explore the differences between these approaches within postcolonialism, while also revealing the potential overlap between them, the overlap that critics such as Parry believe is under-analysed. Controversy has arisen in the confrontation between political and ethical thinkers, but closer inspection reveals that the two approaches are not directly opposed, but can be conceived as related, if not identical in their aims. Moreover, while it may seem reasonably clear that a militant such as Fanon requires a different framework and vocabulary from a philosopher as ethically minded, and indeed as “textualist”, as Derrida, thinkers such as Spivak and Mudimbe oscillate constantly between ethics and politics as if to stress their necessary contiguity. These latter theorists also include criticisms of both Marxism and deconstructive ethics in their work, and use strands of each to reveal the shortcomings associated with the unequivocal embrace of either school. A genuine understanding of the multiple levels and layers of postcolonial critique will require a reflection of each field as it alternately interweaves with and diverges from the other. introduction

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Key points • Postcolonialism consists of the multiple political, economic, cultural and philosophical responses to colonialism. It is a broad term that is used to refer to effects following the beginning of colonial rule, and, although it covers all regions, is most commonly now associated with the aftermath of British and French colonialism. • The field of postcolonial studies has often been divided between those who concentrate on political critique and those interested in postcolonial ethics. This split is somewhat artificial, but the two currents can be understood in terms of the influences of Marxism and Levinasian ethics on postcolonialism. • Marx was ambivalent about the colonial project. He criticized the economic exploitation it brought with it but also saw the benefits of wiping out the hierarchies of the caste system in India. His writings on capitalism, on ideology and on revolution have been enormously influential to postcolonial thinkers. • Levinasian thought can be seen to be at the root of postcolonial ethics. Levinas denounced the concepts of Totality and mastery that underpin all forms of totalitarianism, and recommended openness and respect towards the other as other. His notions of justice, responsibility and hospitality are also useful in conceiving a postcolonial ethical critique.

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two

Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms

Frantz Fanon is undoubtedly one of the most significant and influential of anti-colonial revolutionary thinkers. Born in Fort-de-France, Martinique in 1925 to a middle-class family, he grew up thinking of himself as French. He was educated in a French school and, before finishing his education, fought for France in the Second World War. Even when serving his country, however, Fanon experienced racism from his French allies, and he criticizes the caste system within the army, whereby whites were positioned at the top, with the Senegalese, the first to be sent into battle, at the bottom. After the end of the war, Fanon went to study psychiatry in Lyon, and published Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. Disillusioned with metropolitan culture, he denounces the Manichaean divisions of the colonial system and rails against the rigid classification of the “negro” as inferior and “other”. After finishing medical school, Fanon took a position at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algiers, where he began to investigate culturally sensitive approaches to madness. A year after he arrived, however, the Algerian War of Independence began, and Fanon quickly found himself caught up in the revolutionary struggle. Treating torture victims and those with psychological illnesses related to the violence, he witnessed at first hand the mental scarring caused by the conflict and began to speak out against its horrors. When the increasing intensity of the violence made practising psychiatry difficult, he resigned his position, left Algeria and worked for the National Liberation Front openly from his exiled position in Tunis. Some of his most influential writing stems from this period. The Wretched of the Earth (1967) analyses the process fanon and sartre

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of decolonization in Algeria in order to evolve a universal revolutionary politics, advocating violence and national cohesion. The essays collected in A Dying Colonialism (1980) discuss the changes the Algerian revolution wrought on social relations and everyday life. Fanon is clearly a highly militant thinker and, indeed, The Wretched of the Earth has been seen as no less than a “handbook” for revolutionary action. The decolonization of Algeria was its immediate focus, but the Marxist struggle for liberation proposed by the text has also been interpreted to be applicable more broadly. The book was used by leaders in contexts as different as that of Malcolm X in the African-American Black Power movement of the 1960s and Steve Biko in the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa during the same period. If Fanon is often seen as one of the most militant and incendiary critics of colonial politics, however, his writing is not uniformly directed towards practical revolution. The Wretched of the Earth advocates decolonization with more urgency and immediacy than Black Skin, White Masks; it is here that he denounces the physical violence of colonialism and advocates that this must be countered with direct violence against the colonizer. The mission is the absolute overthrow of the colonial system, by force if necessary. In Black Skin, White Masks, however, although Fanon is certainly highly critical of colonial politics, and although he gives vent to his anger towards the colonizer’s sense of superiority and towards the stark reductions of the stereotypes that continue to circulate around notions of “black identity”, he perceives the violence of colonialism as a cultural situation: part of a system of significations and associations that weave themselves insidiously into the consciousness of both colonizer and colonized. The colonized is the victim above all of the pernicious image of his identity propagated by colonial ideology, rather than of brute force. To summarize, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon examines less the myths of colonized identity than the politics or modes of thinking necessary for their overthrow. In the earlier work, his overt focus remains rather on identity, desire and the psychoanalytic structures of alienation. Many have noted, reinforced or condemned this division in Fanon’s philosophy between concrete political engagement and a more psychoanalytically oriented investigation of identity and alienation. David Macey, Fanon’s biographer, comments on his two apparently distinct guises, the post-colonial or early Fanon, and the militant, “Third Worldist” revolutionary Fanon: the “post-colonial” Fanon is in many ways an inverted image of the “revolutionary Fanon” of the 1960s. “Third Worldist” read26

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ings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs; post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that text and studiously avoid the question of violence. (Macey 2000: 28) Celia Britton explores the rather less neutral reactions of a range of critics towards his leap from psychoanalysis to politics and society, noting both Diana Fuss’s assumption of their successful amalgamation and objections levied by thinkers such as Henry Louis Gates Jr and Françoise Vergès that the exploration of alienation does not take into account social factors. Britton’s own reading concentrates more specifically on Fanon’s adaptation of Freudianism to suit the context of the Caribbean, namely his rejection of the Oedipus complex in favour of an exploration of social alienation. Certainly, however, unlike Britton herself, many readers of Fanon have chosen to foreground either one side of his vision or the other, as if his deeper reflections on the configuration of self and other in the psyche were not part of his call for concrete liberation. Most strikingly, perhaps, Homi Bhabha, having noted Fanon’s eclecticism, goes on to explore the obscure and ambivalent function of desire in the colonial vision: the white man’s fantasized answer to the question “What does the black man want?” independent of context. Bhabha stresses the Lacanian resonances of Fanon’s Other, the continually displaced subject that slides beneath the signifier and that disables the rigid binary opposition between Manichaean essences. Lazarus, on the other hand, reads Fanon’s new form of nationalism for its questioning of the future of capitalism. Although Lazarus expresses reservations concerning Fanon’s ability fully to understand the consciousness of the colonized, he nevertheless stresses the significance of Fanon’s Marxist call to transform the prevailing social order. My argument here is that these distinct strands in Fanon’s work are not contradictory, and are not separated between the two major works as starkly as it appears. Both Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are at once devoted to specific political contexts – the former that of Martinique, and the latter that of Algeria – and reach far beyond the confines of that original historical and geographical location. Both denounce the colonial system, albeit from different points of view, while proposing a far broader, quasi-humanist “dialectic of experience” and a belief in self-invention. Fanon is at once, and in both texts, a political activist and a philosopher of what it means to be human and, even more, this revised, anti-Eurocentric form of humanism touches, at least implicitly, on an ethical commitment to otherness and to the new. Although fanon and sartre

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he is conceived most often either as a militant or as a psychoanalytic thinker, Fanon is in fact not only both of these but, in fusing these two approaches, finishes by proposing a vast and far-reaching renewal of the very concept of the human, of endless self-creation as opposed to reification and stasis. He advocates at the same time respect for the other’s dynamism and denounces the ontological categorization of the other as well as the practical mechanics of domination. Freedom is at the heart of Fanon’s call, unlike that of Levinas, for whom the ethical encounter precedes freedom, but nevertheless in Fanon the embrace of freedom originates in the overthrow of the masterful imposition of an ontological category on the subjugated other. Fanon may also appear to contradict himself in championing both the self-affirmation specifically of the black man and a re-evaluation of the human, but his work is ingenious precisely because it marries a dynamic reclaiming of “negro” identity politics with an urge to question “identity”, and a belief in spontaneous and ongoing mutation. This dynamic conception of self-creation is also, despite their differences, one of the points on which Fanon is united with Sartre. Another militant calling for the decolonization of Algeria, Sartre was closely allied with Fanon and wrote the passionately polemical preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon repeatedly refers to Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks, comparing the alienation of the black man with Sartre’s discussion of Jewish identity in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948a). Although critical of Sartre’s conception of negritude as a stage in a dialectic, however, Fanon continued to share the former’s understanding of the importance of a new form of humanist creativity that would transcend the ossified images promulgated by the colonizer and that would posit the black man as spontaneously self-inventing as well as specifically “negro”. The intricacies of Fanon and Sartre’s relation will be discussed later in this chapter, but it is nevertheless worth stressing for now that both are at once deeply engaged in a political anti-colonial movement and involved in a larger, philosophical and at times ethical struggle upholding a protean form of humanity free from political totalitarianism and from an imperialist ontology that over-determines and hypostatizes the other.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Black Skin, White Masks was written while Fanon was at medical school in Lyon, and much of what he explores in this text stems from the way in which he was treated, having arrived in France believing that he was 28

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French. Fanon argues above all that colonialism entailed not integration but separation: the radical division of society along crude racial lines. French society failed to welcome him but made him feel both foreign and inferior or subordinate. Concomitantly, Fanon describes the relation between black and white engendered by colonialism as a stark binary opposition, and although, crucially, Fanon himself is not Manichaean in his thinking in the way that some critics believe, the object of his criticism is precisely the rigid binary divisions of the colonial vision. Black and white are rigidly polarized, and there is no communication or blurring between them: “the white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness” (Fanon 1968: 9). Colonial racism involves this process of reification or objectification, as the white man creates a fixed, phantasmal image of the black man’s essence. Racism denies the identity of the other; it over-determines that identity from the outside and prevents the colonized from inventing himself in his own way. As a result, “what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact” (ibid.: 12). Black identity is understood by means of a set of fixed and reductive stereotypes. One of the most famous, and most arresting, passages in the text is the anecdote that opens the chapter “The Fact of Blackness” describing the alienation of the black man in France. It is here that Fanon’s language is the most startlingly visceral and immediate, and the reference to the everyday at the same time reinforces his demand for attention to actual lived experience. Expecting to be treated in France as a citizen and compatriot, Fanon’s autobiographical persona tells of his shock when he observes a young boy pointing to him and crying, “Mama, see the Negro, I’m frightened” (ibid.: 79). The little boy associates Fanon’s black skin with a whole gamut of stereotypes, including illiteracy, physical strength and rhythmic sense: “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘sho good eatin’” (ibid.), the latter phrase translating the image of a black colonial infantryman eating from a billycan and pronouncing “C’est bon, Banania” in a Creole dialect. Reacting to this over-determination, Fanon describes the trauma of being forced to look at himself from the outside and failing to recognize the image with which he is presented. Fixed and objectified by the white man’s gaze, the black man fails to identify with the image projected onto him and is disjointed and ruptured from himself. In Fanon’s words, he experiences “an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood” (ibid.). It is as if his body has been torn open and covered in black blood, connoting at once the destruction of the self and the fanon and sartre

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reinforcement of his black identity. The upshot is that in North and South America, West Africa and the Caribbean, black people have been divorced from the rest of society and treated as beasts. Robbed of his identity, the black man is told what he is by the white man, who believes incontrovertibly in his own superiority. Fanon explains that this alienation and failure of identification entails a particular type of splitting. Comparing his understanding of racism to Sartre’s description of anti-Semitism, Fanon argues that in both cases the victim is over-determined from without. Sartre’s formulation is that “the anti-Semite creates the Jew” (1948a). In the case of the Jew, however, the stereotype evolves from the idea that the anti-Semite retains of Jewish identity, not from the latter’s physical characteristics. The Jew is therefore not alienated from his own body, according to Fanon. In the case of the black man, however, it is his very skin that is over-determined, and the black subject is alienated not only by the other’s erroneous imagination, but also from himself, from his own appearance. It is from this internal splitting that Fanon derives the image of the “black skin, white masks”. This sense of a double or split identity also stems from the colonized subject’s use of the French language. This has extraordinarily complex implications, since Fanon’s own writing in French precisely brought him the recognition he deserved and made his work accessible to a far broader audience than the use of Creole would have allowed. Nevertheless, French remains the colonial language and its usage signals in some sense a participation in the culture of the colonizer. According to Fanon, the black man’s use of French compromises his sense of identity, and constitutes the very white mask of which his title speaks. In using French, the black man becomes whitened; he is masked by the screen of colonial culture and divorces himself further from any sense of a “native” identity, of his original roots. Fanon’s analysis of this phenomenon is further complicated by his scorn for “negro” dialects that patronize the black man and enclose him in a narrow and limited world. He argues, “speaking in pidgin-nigger closes off the black man; it perpetuates a state of conflict in which the white man injects the black with extremely dangerous foreign bodies” (1968: 27). The black man is as a result caught up in a double bind. In speaking local dialects, he perpetuates his subordinate position and allows the white man to retain his preconceptions of the black man’s linguistic incompetence. In speaking French, he reinforces the hegemony of the colonial language and supports the culture that necessarily accompanies it. 30

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The psychoanalytic dimension of Fanon’s work will already be perceptible in this summary, but it is important that in this investigation he also reads and adapts the work of other analysts. In his discussion of the inferiority complex, Fanon draws on Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956), and indeed, he expresses his gratitude to Mannoni for producing such a detailed study of colonial structures in Madagascar. Nevertheless, Fanon sets about unpicking Mannoni’s hidden Eurocentric assumptions and, most significantly, criticizes the latter’s belief that the complex pre-dates colonization. He also objects to Mannoni’s assertion that the black man was colonized because he was dependent on the European, and reverses the logic so as to stress how the European precisely made the black man dependent through the imposition of the colonial system. According to Fanon, Mannoni forgets that the Malagasys he took as the object of his analysis exist in the way they do precisely because of the European presence: they were created by the colonizer. Furthermore, Mannoni goes on to analyse the Malagasy’s unconscious, the web of impulses and neuroses that contribute to his desire to become white, but Fanon suggests again that this desire is the result of the colonial presence. It is therefore not strictly an unconscious desire, but the result of an internalized image of himself created by the presence of the colonizer. It is in this sense that Fanon also departs from Freud, since he argues that the very notion of the unconscious is too generalized and universal to account for the specific historical and cultural conditions shaping the black man’s psyche. Fanon’s use and recreation of psychoanalytic models continues in the chapter on psychopathology. Here colonialism specifically in the Caribbean is analysed for its psychic effects on the colonized. Fanon argues that the black man does not suffer from the Oedipus complex because his neurosis originates instead in his cultural situation. If for the European the relation with the family becomes a model for social interaction, in the case of the Antillean the subject is forced to choose between family and society. Using Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious, Fanon asserts that the Antillean is forced to internalize a white unconscious, imposed by society and not by the authority of the family. He does not, then, enter society as a result of his separation from the mother and adherence to the law of the father, but continues to experience family authority and societal authority as conflictual. In addition, Fanon discusses the sexual associations of racism towards the black man, together with their effects on the black man’s psyche. The white man’s fabricated image of the black man stresses the latter’s sexual prowess, and this fantasy of the virile black man makes him an object of both fear and fanon and sartre

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desire. “The Negro symbolizes the biological” (Fanon 1968: 118), and it is in this curious conjunction of fascination and disgust that readers such as Bhabha have uncovered the ambivalence in Fanon’s notion of the colonial psyche. Conscious that his analysis appears to veer away from “the real”, Fanon nevertheless stresses that this fantasized imago precisely structures the actual colonial project, and it is the white man who occludes the cultural specificity of the Antillean behind his reified vision of the “negro” more broadly. This culturally created set of images is what forms for Fanon the Jungian collective unconscious: this is the ideological burden that is imposed on the black man and that divorces him from himself. The sexualized imagery surrounding the black man is further explored by Fanon in the chapters on gender relations between the black woman and the white man, and the black man and the white woman. Fanon criticizes Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948) for exposing the black woman’s desire for the white man, and her fantasy of cleansing and becoming white. He also explores Réné Maran’s Un Homme pareil aux autres (1947), and the central character Jean Veneuse’s self-doubt and self-loathing, his inability to believe that a white woman loves him, as an indication of how the black man internalizes the white man’s myth. Fanon’s final chapter develops this conception of the white mask through readings of Alfred Adler and G. W. F. Hegel. Fanon uses Adler, for example, to argue that “the Negro is comparison” (1968: 149); the Antillean has no value of his own but is seen only as a sign of the other. His analysis differs from Adler’s model, however, in that it applies not to individuals but to a whole society. The black man in general becomes dependent on the white; he has no being-for-itself, no Sartrean reflexive consciousness other than the image constructed for him by the white man. In his reading of Hegel, Fanon then argues that the relation between the black man and the white man resembles Hegel’s dialectic between the master and the slave, except that in Hegel’s schema the relation is based on reciprocal recognition. In Fanon’s configuration of the white man and the black man, however, there is no recognition: “the Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master” (ibid.: 156). There is therefore no meeting of consciousnesses where one subsequently takes control over the other. The white man has already determined and trapped the black man as slave by claiming to have granted him freedom and preventing him from acquiring it for himself. If this summary offers a certain coherence to Fanon’s philosophy in Black Skin, White Masks, however, this does not mean that the work is without apparent inconsistencies. In developing his vision of the black 32

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man’s splitting, Fanon appears first to imply nevertheless that there is a specificity to the category “negro” and later to abandon the category altogether. On the one hand, Fanon confidently affirms “I am Negro”, and he seems to want to reinforce his sense of belonging to a distinct and particular race. On the other hand, the text also sets out to affirm the liberation of the individual self and champions a form of existential freedom, the ability to reinvent oneself. Despite his continued use of the specified term “negro”, much of the text rejects its unifying and homogenizing implications, and the curious statement in the conclusion that “the Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (ibid.: 165) displays his mistrust for any inherent black being-in-itself. The oddly disjointed sentences, severed with an abrupt full stop, cut the reader short and force us to confront our presumptions regarding black identity and existence. Fanon also vacillates in his evaluation of the negritude movement. Negritude was important in West Africa during the struggle for independence in countries such as Cameroon and Senegal, and certainly the Senegalese poet and political leader Léopold Sédar Senghor promoted the cause from both a cultural and a political standpoint. Senghor’s poetry reclaims black identity by returning to a vision of traditional African life, championing values such as emotion, spontaneity, physicality, rhythm and dance. Negritude was at the same time a political ideology for Senghor, which, together with a form of modernization learned from the French, ironically, would serve to redefine the African nation on its own terms. Senghor’s negritude was also humanist; it conceived as human “this trading between the heart and the mind” and promoted a “‘confrontation’, ‘participation’, ‘communion’ of subject and object” (Senghor 1954: 9). The Martinican writer and politician Césaire similarly used the term to describe the revolutionary power of black poetry and, indeed, Fanon often quotes Césaire’s vision of negritude as a dynamic movement of reinvention and creativity. Césaire writes of a “return” to the native land, although this is once again less a backwards movement towards origin and essence than a dynamic process of recreation. On some level, then, in parts of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon does seem to be upholding a similar notion of black specificity and asserting that this alternative identity category can act in contradistinction to the myths imposed by the colonial gaze. A return to some sort of “authenticity” (albeit fictitious, in particular in the Caribbean) can help the black man to restore a sense of self and to repair the psychological damage of colonial deculturation. But it is nevertheless important for Fanon that there can be no single set of “black values”, since black identity is fanon and sartre

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inevitably mobile and changeable, and the notion of any kind of black specificity entails a determinism that reduces and glosses that variability. Negritude culture uncannily reproduces some of the stereotypes produced by the colonizer, since it calls for a return to African soil and a reinstatement of black virility and strength. Fanon’s rousing conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks for this reason reaches far beyond the concerns of identity politics and celebrates instead the extraordinary richness and mobility of the human. “History” no longer has the capacity to over-determine the human; rather, the subject rises out of its confines and posits itself beyond its conditioning. Fanon’s now universal persona affirms “I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny” and resolves “in the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself ” (1968: 163). Drifting away from notions of both the negro and the Antillean, Fanon’s writing subject speaks for humanity and urges that each individual shapes his own path while recreating himself as he moves forwards. Driven now less by identity politics than a form of existentialism, he advocates continual self-renewal and singularization regardless of the determinations of context. This transcendence is, importantly, the outcome of Fanon’s dialectic, which moves through an embrace of History and an understanding of Manichaeism in order precisely to emerge afterwards in this realm of endless reinvention. It does not liquidate difference, as some critics have suggested, but acknowledges difference while refusing to allow it to be confined to a static category. Fanon’s dialectic is also one rooted in lived experience, but he uses that engagement with the concrete and the everyday to create an altered and renewed form of self-consciousness. While Parry has argued that Fanon never actually resolves this contradiction in his engagement with negritude and identity politics, I would stress that Fanon’s majestic conclusion precisely shows how the black man, condemned by colonialism to an over-determined and over-specified place in History, must adapt his consciousness of himself so as to look beyond this. This entails not a denial of his Manichaean context but a dynamic engagement with it, as a result of which he would succeed in imagining himself anew. If Fanon is most ostensibly a defiant political thinker, he also heralds in this conclusion the seeds of a phenomenological and even ethical reconfiguration of self and other. If the white man’s tyranny lay in his imposition of a reified image onto the black man and in the black man’s subsequent splitting and disavowal, then the overthrow of that tyranny demands the liberation of the other from the controlling gaze of the self. Fanon’s belief in reinvention and mobility proposes an alternative 34

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ontology that refuses to allow Being to attain the mastery and stasis of Totality. Self and other coexist in the world and, in meeting, perceive one another’s inassimilable difference. Political liberation requires at the same time this alternative perception of Being that stresses its continual processes of recreation, and Fanon’s demand for attention to this notion of Being does implicitly belong to the realm of what humanity “ought” to do. Freedom is of course not secondary here, as it is for Levinas, but the affirmation of the freedom of the self also requires the recognition of the other’s ability to recreate himself freely. Fanon’s return to the notion of the human also proposes a broad terminology obliging each subject to recognize and accept the individuality of the other. This humanism is no longer that of the universalization of European values, but a more open demand for a liberated form of individual self-creation, as well as a specific symbol of resistance rather than a new transcendentalism. Recognition of the other’s humanity entails an understanding of his or her singular form of self-invention. Lastly, Fanon finishes Black Skin, White Masks with a call for a form of encounter with the other that allows the self to touch, feel, experience his otherness: “why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself ” (1968: 165). This is not quite the relation without relation of the Levinasian encounter, but an embodied, affective ethics of contact, acceptance and recognition, operating viscerally at the level of the skin.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth The Wretched of the Earth is without doubt from the outset a more overtly committed and militant text than Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon opens quite starkly with a clear call to arms: “national liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, Commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent process” (1967: 27). One of the central tenets of the collection will therefore be that the overthrow of colonial violence must itself be a violent process. Given the intransigence of colonial force, decolonization can occur only when that force is met with equal antagonism. The colonized should not wait to try to subvert the system from within (Bhabha’s invocations of colonial ambivalence, of representational uncertainties on both sides, have little resonance here). Rather, the colonized can only mimic the techniques of the colonizer, who from 1830 onwards subjugated native Algerians with the use of force. Furthermore, Fanon’s description of the underlying fanon and sartre

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structure of colonial thinking is equally stark. Colonizer and colonized are pitted against one another in the form of a rigid binary opposition, and there is no possible communication or mediation between them. The colonial society of Algiers in particular is also “in compartments”; it is segregated and divided along racial lines in such a way as to fix and stultify the colonized. Algiers is divided between designated areas for colonizer and colonized, and that segregation is accompanied by social inequality. The frontiers between these areas are guarded by police or military officers. The only go-between is the soldier, and the transgression of the border is vigilantly supervised, in turn reinforcing the racial divide. So colonialism in Algeria relies on this stark segregation of one society from another, and the termination of that system demands the dramatic and violent rejection of the hegemonic community by those who have been expropriated and subordinated. Fanon again argues that the native is the product of colonialism, that he is formed and created by colonial ideology. The creation of the native by the colonizer requires that he channel his aggression inwards rather than outwards, so that it does not affect the colonial structure itself. His energy becomes directed towards himself, a phenomenon that for Fanon characterizes the real anguish of his colonized position. Revolution occurs, then, when the native succeeds in turning that aggression back against the colonizer. Liberation is characterized precisely by this moment of realization and by the violent rejection of colonial society using the very terms the latter had used in its enterprise of subjugation. Decolonization is in turn an absolute process and entails the total destruction of one society and its replacement with an entirely different social structure. It is a fundamental change, and can involve no negotiation or mediation because it necessitates the end of an entire regime, and the substitution of existing rulers for different men. Colonialism itself is not an ideology that is open to questioning but a total system, whose effects can be attenuated only by the destruction of the system itself. Non-violence is for Fanon acquiescence, the acceptance of the colonial vision, and resistance must be expressed by the use of force: “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence” (1967: 48). Fanon’s evidently controversial paean to violence is nevertheless not simply a means to condone the shed of revolutionary blood, but also a call for creativity and spontaneity. The new revolution gives rise to the creation of new men, to new forms of consciousness that can sweep away the injustices and prejudices of the old: 36

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This people that has lost its birthright, that is used to living in the narrow circle of feuds and rivalries, will now proceed in an atmosphere of solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of the nation as it appears in the various localities. In a veritable collective ecstasy, families which have always been traditional enemies decide to rub out old scores and to forgive and forget. There are numerous reconciliations. Long-buried but unforgettable hatreds are brought to light once more, so that they may be more surely rooted out. The taking on of nationhood involves a growth of awareness. (Ibid.: 105) In addition to this new unity, Fanon champions spontaneity as opposed to the affirmation of a rigid form of black specificity. Throwing aside the constraints of colonial society, he predicts the advent of a liberated upsurge in creative energy, promising unregulated innovation. He also observes the proliferation of cults and superstitions under colonialism, spread as a result of the fear of the colonized and the inward channelling of his energy. Decolonization will herald the end of superstition in favour of a more free-thinking and uninhibited community. Since colonial ideology manifests itself both practically, through social segregation, and linguistically, in its propagation of skewed, stereotypical narratives, the attempt to challenge its tenets requires engagement with all sides. The colonized cannot simply question the details of the colonial vision, but need to eradicate its entire discourse before installing a regime that is utterly new. It is owing to this that Fanon makes a distinction between the strategies of the colonized intellectual and those of the indigenous masses. Fanon argues that the colonized intellectual perceives liberation within the terms of the colonial system. Inheriting many of its insights, the colonized intellectual tries to free himself through assimilation to the ruling system, rather than seeking to overturn that system itself. In this sense, the intellectual risks finding himself part of “a kind of class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free” (ibid.: 47). By achieving a distinguished position within the colonial structure, the intellectual succeeds not in total liberation but in a sort of compromised, privileged acquiescence. The masses or the people, however, demand the absolute refutation of all aspects of colonial logic. They do not want to achieve the same status as the colonizer, but precisely seek to replace him and to eliminate his power in favour of the new regime. Revolution requires the actual replacement of colonizer with colonized. It demands this systematic eradication, and not a partial engagement with the entrenched, hegemonic terms: “for fanon and sartre

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them, there is no question of entering into competition with the settler. They want to take his place” (ibid.). It is the magnitude of this overthrow that demands the use of violence, as well as the unification of the people against the former power. This relationship between the intellectual, or indeed the political leader, and the masses is a constant preoccupation in The Wretched of the Earth. Although the revolution requires organization and direction, Fanon is at pains to stress that leaders and thinkers frequently have different concerns from those of the people and risk detaching themselves from the urgency of their requirements. Those in charge of organizing the revolt tend to mire themselves in detail and in local strategy rather than keeping in mind the greater goal of regime change. For the revolution to be truly effective, however, Fanon asserts that the voice of the masses needs to be heard. While the leaders and intellectuals lose track of the unity of the movement, Fanon argues: the people, on the other hand, take their stand from the start on the broad and inclusive positions of bread and the land: how can we obtain the land, and bread to eat? And this obstinate point of view of the masses, which may seem shrunken and limited, is in the end the most worthwhile and the most efficient mode of procedure. (Ibid.: 39) In a self-consciously Marxist tone, Fanon affirms that the revolution is in the hands of the people, who retain its goal as an absolute in itself. Fanon tacitly criticizes the obscure political machinations of those who attempt to take control. He is suspicious of the colonized bourgeoisie, and his text speaks in favour of the simple demands of the underprivileged and disenfranchised proletariat. Fanon’s relationship with Marxism is a complicated one, however, and demands further reflection. Certainly, Fanon places the concerns of the people above all else, and his revolutionary polemics are often couched in the language of class revolt. Fanon also mistrusts bourgeois thinking, and he is concerned that the decolonization of Algeria should result in the return of power to the hands of the people, rather than to a narrow privileged elite. Indeed, Sartre’s reading of Fanon contains the straightforward assertion that “the national revolution will be socialist” (Sartre 2001: 139). Fanon’s engagement with Marxism is highly specific, however, and although he uses its structures, he is also at pains to stress the particularity of anti-colonial revolution as opposed to class struggle. While he advocates the overthrow of the ruling order by the 38

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disenfranchised and exploited people, he emphasizes that the nature of this struggle in the colonial context is different from that in any other, since the ruling class is not merely wealthy but also foreign. Colonial power is pernicious because it is other, it is imposed from the outside and its managers are therefore even more divorced from the people over whom they wield their influence: it is neither the act of owning factories, not estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes the governing classes. The governing face is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, “the others”. (Fanon 1967: 31) In the chapter “Spontaneity: Strength and Weakness”, Fanon develops his argument in favour of the agency of the masses, yet this time he stresses the danger not only of the dissociation between the intellectual and the people but also of a lack of communication between rural and urban areas. First, this is presented as a time lag or difference of rhythm between the leaders of the independence party and the people. This disjunction is exacerbated in the colonies, where the nationalist organization is copied from the colonial system and seeks its constituents in urban areas. The risk is that the concerns of the rural people are ignored or forgotten by the preoccupations of the town and, indeed, stereotypes circulate that associate the peasantry with inertia and backwardness. Secondly, however, with the development of a new relationship between urban militants and the rural masses, as well as the evolution of a new type of revolutionary organization, Fanon’s concept of the time lag finds a new expression. The immediacy of mass spontaneous action against the colonial system requires the formation of a group of militant leaders who are able productively to oversee the different facets of the struggle and to help to formulate a broader national strategy. If there is a history of little contact between the urban leaders and politicians and the rural masses, then the eventual encounter between the militant from the town and a peasant revolutionary force marks an important moment in the creation of a new decolonized order. One difficulty identified by Fanon in the existing status quo is that the rural masses can tend to equate the urban colonized with the colonial order itself. When urban militants and thinkers arrive in the rural areas expecting to be treated as leaders, this attitude of resistance and mistrust can be aggravated, creating tension rather than leading to new unity. Furthermore, Fanon observes that the leaders themselves can persist in fanon and sartre

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conceiving of the peasantry in terms informed by colonial ideology. They associate rural culture with a backward return to tradition rather than as an alternative set of practices to those imposed by the colonizer. Against this tendency, Fanon recommends perceiving the peasant’s regard for tradition as evidence of his intransigence against colonial influence. Denouncing the persistence of stereotypes regarding the peasantry, Fanon sets out to explore the ways in which urban and rural modes of resistance could come to inform one another. Fanon’s vision consists of a universal revolution, where the intellectual returns to his roots while the peasant’s traditions are enlisted as a positive and progressive form of critique. Most importantly, he wants to end the intellectual’s estrangement from the people and hopes for a wider force of solidarity. At the centre of Fanon’s call for solidarity between peasants and intellectuals, between rural and urban areas, is a politics of nationalism. Using an argument that would now be controversial, at the time of the anti-colonial movement Fanon claims that nationalism forms a crucial locus of critique. Most importantly, the creation of a national culture would not be governed and restricted by a limited bourgeoisie. In the chapter “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, Fanon warns against the risk that posts filled by colonial officials become filled with native bourgeois leaders who maintain the entrenched deficiencies of the colonial system and who fail to unify the citizens of the new independent nation. He wants to guard against the possibility that the new ruling class would appropriate the national identity and mould it to suit its own, narrow economic concerns. What Fanon does argue in favour of, however, is the evolution of a specific, unified and identifiable national culture, created by the community of the former colony’s native inhabitants, which would function as a concrete alternative to that imposed by the colonizer. Like the renowned leader of the independence movement in Guinea-Bissau, Amílcar Cabral, Fanon recommends the creation of a cultural community that would link the colonized in solidarity against the oppressor. National culture acts in contradistinction to the colonial culture and proves that the colonized have an identity other than that imposed on them by the invading power. It also paves the way towards the future, burying the inequalities and prejudices of the past with a celebration of new practices and creative forms of expression. So what constitutes this national culture? It is not necessarily a return to tradition, since the culture of the nation progresses and moves forwards as decolonization is achieved. Once a people has engaged in revolutionary struggle, the signification of its practices and art forms changes. During a period of such intense change, long-standing traditions come 40

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into question and can be replaced by alternative practices. Artists who seek to return to their origins by depicting the original rituals and customs of African peoples risk obscuring the fact that the very people to whom they refer have undergone a massive upheaval. The most important element in the creation of a national art form is precisely that it engages with the contemporaneity of its subject. Fanon champions, for example, the poetry of revolt, rather than the poetry of an original return, and he reinforces the particular dynamism of the present. Indeed, the evolution of a national culture occurs at the very heart of the resistance movement and cannot be separated from its unfolding. “The national Algerian culture is taking on form and content as the battles are being fought out, in prisons, under the guillotine, and in every French outpost which is captured and destroyed” (Fanon 1967: 187). Rather than looking back to the past, national culture lives out its present and reaches forwards into the future, towards the creation of an improved order freed from the influence of the colonial other. National culture is in this sense intricately bound up with the particular history of the nation’s development, and since processes of decolonization in Algeria and Morocco, for example, were dramatically different, any shared postcolonial culture will inevitably become a vague abstraction. Finally, the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth forms a powerful statement of Fanon’s revolutionary vision and brings together some of the fundamental precepts of his thought. Most important is his unconditional demand for change. Fanon rejects every aspect of the present colonial order and summons the colonized people to action. His tone is apocalyptic, advocating the participation of all citizens in the anticolonial struggle. Using the metaphor of awakening, he jolts the people into a realization of their acquiescence and calls for the overthrow of entrenched ideology and familiar patterns of behaviour: “we must leave our dreams and abandon our beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry” (ibid.: 251). This opposition between old and new is coupled with further recollection of the contrast between Europe and the (ex-)colony. Again using black-and-white rhetoric, Fanon categorically associates Europe with the systematic enslavement of its Third World other. European culture also connotes a demand for stasis, immobility and resistance to change. Europeans freeze and atrophy the cultural dynamism of their colonized peoples, and they resist the free invention of new structures. Even more, European thinking maims and kills the people it wants to govern and denies colonized men their humanity. It sweeps away individual creativity in favour of the relentless working fanon and sartre

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of the colonial power machine. In response to this destruction, Fanon advocates a return to the body, and the release of physical power and movement within those who have become divorced from themselves: “let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try and create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth” (ibid.: 252). Reintegrating mind and body, Fanon wants to restore man in his totality and to reconnect the colonized with those parts of himself that have been denied freedom of expression. One particularly striking rhetorical feature of Fanon’s conclusion is the repetition of the term “we”. On the one hand, this focuses the polemic, since it addresses the colonized people directly and calls them immediately to action. The inclusive implications of “we” also stress again the importance of community and solidarity between natives who might initially have felt alienated and dispersed. The “we” is in this sense performative: actively bringing together the people it addresses in order to confirm their unity in the face of colonial oppression. It reminds the colonized that they are not isolated in their alienation and emphasizes the strength derived from sharing and collaboration with others. One of the difficulties of this generalized call, however, is that since much of the preceding chapter on national culture was nonetheless focused on Algeria, the conclusion can appear to be an addendum, divorced from history and lost in the rhythms of its own rhetoric. If Fanon has been criticized for this gesture of universalization, however, it must be remembered that the immediate goal of the writing is to move and persuade, to call his readers to action. Fanon also successfully restores the notion of the human as an ethical category so as to advocate creativity independently of the determinations of context, even if it remains clear that this is a specific response to colonialism. Alternating the old with the new, metaphors of atrophy with inspiring evocations of an alternative world, the primary referent of the conclusion is the language of change, the call for a more just foundation to society, and no longer the specific requirements and conditions of the colonized Algerian’s move to freedom. While many of the other sections of the text are certainly more grounded and more specified than the rousing rhetorical flourishes of the conclusion, this self-conscious use of conceptual language is something that remains at the forefront of Fanon’s work. The lack of historicity, of specific reference, in The Wretched of the Earth places the text in the realm of hypothesis, of philosophical experimentation rather than of truth. Fanon also repeats himself frequently, circulat42

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ing around notions of Manichaeism, community, national culture and innovation rather than dealing with the details of each concept in turn. He progressively investigates the nuances of these revolutionary ideas by endlessly re-describing their mechanisms rather than by exploring the specific workings of each as they manifest themselves in Algeria. It is this exploration of the language and conceptual foundations of colonialism, as much as its empirical manifestations, that connects Fanon’s startlingly politicized philosophy with a vision larger than itself, and larger than its nevertheless crucial historical context. Fanon is as concerned with ontology, humanity, relationality and creativity as he is with the mechanics of the decolonization movement and, indeed, conceives such concerns as interdependent. The objective of Black Skin, White Masks was a call for black self-affirmation and mobility, while in The Wretched of the Earth, the conclusion repeatedly refers to a demand for the new. In both cases, the practical overthrow of colonialism involves a vast, universal and inescapably ethical liberation from the mastery of self over other.

Jean-Paul Sartre One of the most celebrated philosophers of twentieth-century France, Sartre is also one of the most politically engaged. Having vilified the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War, he champions both political and ontological freedom throughout this work, and, during the 1950s and 1960s, writes frequently and fervently in favour of the decolonization of Algeria. While Albert Camus, the “existentialist” with whom Sartre is frequently associated, was born in Algeria and retained a highly ambivalent attitude towards the French presence in what he perceived (rightly) to be his homeland, Sartre was resolutely anti-colonialist. Sartre’s thinking on colonialism critique is nevertheless diverse, protean and frequently self-contradictory, and has generated a good deal of controversy. His celebrated and notorious “Orphée noir”, or “Black Orpheus” (1948b), written as the preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of new Negro and Malagasy poetry in French), has been read as both veneration and critique of the negritude movement, and he has been named both spokesman and traitor of anti-colonial resistance in Africa. Explicating the dynamics of an assertion of black identity in contradistinction to colonial influence, he introduced revolutionary black poetry to the European audience it was directed against. fanon and sartre

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Nonetheless he was soon condemned by some of the other negritude thinkers as Eurocentric and blinded by his own position as a metropolitan, and therefore colonial, intellectual. The version of negritude promoted in the essay was criticized by such thinkers for being too rigid and essentialist, and yet, conversely, Fanon objected that Sartre’s stress on the movement as transitory and provisional was insufficiently immersed in “authentic black experience”. In addition, Sartre’s journalistic writing calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the French presence in Algeria aptly served to draw attention to dissension about the Algerian question within French society, but the Marxist approach underpinning these pieces has been seen as universalizing. Sartre’s emphasis on the structures of political and economic oppression was condemned by Claude Lévi-Strauss as obfuscatory of the particular dynamics of colonial and racial exploitation, and the philosophical expansion of such analyses in the Critique of Dialectical Reason has also been seen to generalize European experiences of capitalism. Sartre’s multifarious works on colonialism no doubt merited some of the responses they provoked, but in many ways the variety and passion of the comments generated by the corpus testify to its richness. Closer attention to texts such as “Black Orpheus” uncovers the seeds of a highly sophisticated, self-conscious mode of thinking that reveals the necessarily multiple layers of postcolonial critique, and that also turns out to be closer to Fanon’s vision than it might at first have appeared. Sartre’s provocative and multidimensional analysis of negritude manages to combine a call for political assertion with a philosophically sophisticated critique of identity politics. His stress on negritude as a stage in an anti-colonial dialectic, and his description of the colonizer’s own alienation, also dissolves the work’s apparent essentialism and communitarianism without attenuating its political impact. Sartre’s valorization of active self-invention provides the seeds of a political strategy, but his anti-colonial critique is again, like Fanon’s, at least partly ethical in its far-reaching call for self-invention and for the subject’s recognition of this endless self-invention in the other. One of the central premises of “Black Orpheus” is the reclaiming of black identity through poetry, and the revolutionary potential of this re-appropriation. Sartre asserts that colonialism oppressed the black man as black, and although the structure of the colonized’s oppression is similar to that imposed on the worker by capitalist society in Europe, the colonizer in Africa uses race to justify and prop up the economic and political hierarchy. Just as in Sartre’s analysis the anti-Semite creates the Jew and over-determines him from the outside, so the colonizer 44

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over-determines black identity and then positions the black man as subordinate, although, as Fanon pointed out, in this case it is the black man’s very skin that he does not recognize according to the white man’s racialist system. It is for this reason that anti-colonial resistance must, for Sartre, involve the reclaiming of black identity in terms invented and controlled by the black man himself: The black man is the victim, as a black man, as a colonized native or as a deported African. And since he is oppressed in his race and because of it, he must first seize consciousness of his race. Those who, for centuries, have vainly tried to reduce him to the status of a beast because he is a negro, he must force to recognize him as a man. (Sartre 1948b: xiii–xiv; my translation throughout) It is only by showing black identity to be other than that which the colonizer supposed that the colonized African can overthrow those stereotypes and rediscover his humanity. The goal of the negritude poets is to display the black soul, to represent collective black identity in new terms, to recreate it and display its otherness to the colonizer. This assertion of black authenticity has a direct political purpose, since it overthrows the colonizer’s stereotypes and returns to the black man control over his self-image. It is important, however, that this assertion of black identity is not a straightforward return, and is not dictated by a soul that is already constituted. Sartre himself affirms quite explicitly that the black soul was not already there, not itself at the time of the colonizer’s invasion. The over-determination of black identity by the colonizer also influences the black’s self-perception and alienates him from himself; he does not know or recognize himself: “he is split, he no longer coincides with himself ” (ibid.: xvi). This separation from the self, again as in Fanon, also takes place on the level of language, since, educated in the French system, the negritude poets use the French language to voice their dissent but that language also only dissociates them further from themselves. The poetry they write cannot therefore convey any identical, original self, since it still reshapes their self-expression and glosses over an otherness that can never be captured or formulated. As a result, rather than reading into negritude poetry a comfortable recovery of a black being at harmony with itself, “we should rather speak of the slight and constant discrepancy that separates what he says from what he would like to say, when he speaks of himself ” (ibid.: xix). So although Sartre does spend fanon and sartre

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time in the essay exploring the imagery of negritude, its reclaiming of the natural environment, its use of African rhythms as opposed to European, and its insertion of terms from indigenous languages, these are not conceived as pure and originary. Negritude constructs a self that it then claims as “authentic”, but it does not propose a straightforward return to a mythical, pre-colonial, essential state. Negritude’s “authenticity” is an invention that serves as a riposte to colonial constructions of black identity but that cannot represent an origin or an essence. Negritude is also not essentialist in Sartre’s view because it is in no sense a state, or a “disposition”; it is a challenge to political alienation, but not a denial of its effects. It is also not a set of values but the black man’s “being-in-the-world”, his multiple and changing ways of reacting to the world and transforming it. Sartre equally stresses that it can never be a completed product or an end in itself. Instead, it is the negative response to the colonizer, but its gesture of negation will lead to a new social structure. It is part of a dialectic and not a totalized position, and it works as a redressing of an unequal balance, rather than as a goal of its own. Having spent much of his essay praising the affirmation and innovation of revolutionary negritude poetry, then, Sartre’s conclusion nevertheless stresses its provisionality: “Negritude must destroy itself, it is a transition and not an endpoint” (ibid.: xli). Negritude in this sense contains the seeds of its own destruction: it must turn against itself in order paradoxically to attain its real end. It is a crucial strategy, but its values must also be questioned and ultimately rejected. The use of the term “negritude” is, on the one hand, supposed to lead to a new stage, a new society that does not need such classifications. But the term is also questioned because its label opens up a chain of meanings that reach beyond its classificatory grasp, so that it must also abolish itself. Sartre uses the concept of negritude, reveals its essentialist foundations, reworks it and turns it against itself. This reading of Sartre’s essay crucially contests Fanon’s response as expressed in Black Skin, White Masks. As already signalled, Fanon and Sartre were closely engaged in one another’s work on colonialism, perhaps most explicitly and enthusiastically during the campaign for the decolonization of Algeria. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectic Reason was a major influence in Fanon’s writing of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon asked Sartre to write the preface, and both thinkers’ reflections on violence appear to learn and borrow from one another. Fanon’s reaction to “Black Orpheus” was, however, problematic, and he focused on Sartre’s dismissal of black identity in contrast to his own celebration of the latter’s potential. If Sartre conceived negritude as a process, a stage in 46

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the transition to a higher synthesis, Fanon argued that this diminished its significance and robbed it of its revolutionary force. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon rails against the European scorn for the black man’s strategies of self-affirmation: I wanted to be typically Negro, – it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white, – that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic. (1968: 94) Sartre’s conception of negritude as just a stage in the dialectic was for Fanon too schematic, too reductive, and reduced the potential of black self-reinvention. Even worse, Nigel Gibson observes that “because Black consciousness merely contributed to an inevitable and pre-existing goal, Fanon felt that Sartre was curtailing possible futures” (Gibson 2003: 74). Gibson goes on to explain that Fanon believed that colonial imposition impeded the black man’s creation of his subjectivity, so that his resistance had to reach back to a moment before the beginning of the dialectic. The creation of black subjectivity would then be an open-ended and ongoing process, rather than a passing phase before the arrival of the “society without race”. Fanon’s critique of Sartre was in many ways a justified one, and the dialectic is clearly a problematic structure in several respects. Not only does it apparently curtail negritude, but it also denies its “substantive absoluteness”: a term borrowed from Hegel, and which Fanon uses to convey its irreducibility, its immediacy, its roots in lived experience. Fanon’s reservations about “Black Orpheus” also stem from the objection that it does not provide a sense of the real experience and actuality of the black man, the materiality and affect of his everyday life. Fanon is in many ways correct in his reading of Sartre, and it is no doubt true that Sartre’s position has to remain constrained by his position within a clearly European philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, it is also possible to read the conclusions to “Black Orpheus” not as a rejection of the open-ended potentiality of negritude, but precisely as a warning that the movement must not at any stage become closed, completed or, indeed, too clearly defined. Its perpetuation would only increase the risk that its dynamism might slow and that its label might stabilize and become entrenched. A reading of “Black Orpheus” that takes account of Sartrean concepts of the disordered freedom and contingency of being-for-itself would stress that he is attempting to prevent negritude from slipping fanon and sartre

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into bad faith, into a category that would betray the very creativity and invention it promotes. The disagreement between Fanon and Sartre from this point of view is less that the former conceives black identity as endlessly self-inventing whereas the latter reduces it to stereotypes; rather, the dispute centres on the term negritude itself, which Fanon believes can remain open-ended, while Sartre insists it has to negate itself to remain faithful to its own principle. It is “an explosive fixity, an expression of pride that renounces itself, an absolute that knows itself to be transitory” (Sartre 1948b: xliii). Later, however, Fanon went on to revise his criticisms of Sartre and came round to the idea that there were dangers associated with negritude’s totalizing discourse. Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth goes some way to reconciling the two thinkers’ versions of anti-colonial critique. First, it is important that Sartre’s reading of Fanon’s work adds to its incendiary quality and reiterates its dynamic call to arms. Sartre stresses also the necessary unity of the revolutionary people, referring in a Marxist tone to the role of the peasantry as the radical class but calling at the same time for the collapsing of boundaries between intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and the masses. This is less the movement of a specific community than a rising up of forces claiming human freedom. Concomitantly, Sartre argues that what colonialism denies is the humanity of the colonized: “no effort will be spared to liquidate their traditions, substitute our languages for theirs, destroy their culture without giving them ours; they will be rendered stupid by exploitation” (Sartre 2001: 142–3). As in Fanon’s work, Sartre upholds a concept of an underlying humanity, the respect for which requires also an understanding of the other’s difference, the customs and cultures of the colonized people. This is not the hypocritical humanism of European civilization, or the obfuscatory rhetoric of “liberty, equality, fraternity” that props up the myth of the French Republic while subjugating its oppressed other, but a demand for the recognition of otherness. Above all, the preface demands again the overthrow of colonialism by means of violence, and addresses this call to violence to the Europeans against whom it is directed. Sartre asserts that Fanon’s text was an appeal to the colonized, but his own role is to show how this revolutionary call will impact on the colonizer, how it will tear him apart in just the same way as he severed the black man from himself: “the colon within each of us is being removed in a bloody operation” (ibid.: 150). Sartre’s critique also builds on Fanon, however, and can even be seen to foreshadow subsequent forms of postcolonial theory indebted to poststructuralism. Sartre, like Fanon, argues more than once that colonialism is self-defeating in its very structure: it is necessarily bent 48

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on its own destruction. Again in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre notes that the colonizer wants to kill the colonized, and yet he also wants to exploit him. Colonialism in reality therefore urges the elimination of the subjugated other, only this would necessarily end the project of exploitation and subjugation. Sartre’s essay on Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized expands this structure of codependence, noting once again that the colonizer hates the colonized he oppresses but, brought to its logical conclusion, this hatred means that he wants either to eradicate the colonized, or to collapse the division he relies on by creating an assimilated society. The system as a result requires the colonizer to keep the colonized in a sort of limit position, capable of work but paid the lowest possible wages, and this system inevitably generates rebellion and brings the colonizer’s violence back on to himself. Critique of Dialectical Reason similarly tells us that the rebellion provoked by the colonizer’s oppression mimics the violence that he himself imposed on the native, so that the structure necessarily becomes reciprocal. Reworking the Hegelian dialectic between master and slave, Sartre shows that colonialism is not a masterful structure, but one that leads necessarily to its own destruction, and one that cannot maintain itself in the form on which it paradoxically relies. Once again, the colonizer is not assured in his position of power, but becomes potentially the victim of his drive to maintain that power. Sartre concomitantly, and controversially, insists that colonial alienation is an experience that belongs to both sides, to both colonizer and colonized. In the essay “Colonialism is a System” reprinted in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, for example, Sartre provides a quick history of political and economic expropriation in Algeria, and concludes by stressing that this is indeed a system in which both colonizer and colonized are cogs. It is not an abstract mechanism; it is one that is created by human beings, but the point is that individuals on both sides are trapped and determined by the system, even as they perpetuate it. As a result, “the colonist is fabricated like the native; he is made by his function and his interests” (Sartre 2001: 44). Even as early as “Black Orpheus”, the colonized is not oppressed by a master who knows himself and possesses his own language. Sartre’s discussion of colonial relations reminds the colonizer that he too is alienated, that he possesses nothing, that he is impure and non-essential. “Black Orpheus” opens with the startling reminder that while the white man believed that his gaze was pure, that his belief systems were correct and true, the black man now throws that gaze back on him and shows him to be both powerless and other to himself. Just as the white man’s gaze over-determined and alienated fanon and sartre

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the black man, the negritude poets’ returning gaze in turn alters and defamiliarizes the former’s self-perception: “our whiteness appears to us as a strange, pale veneer that stops our skin from breathing” (Sartre 1948b: ix). In addition, the negritude poets’ use of the French language twists and deforms it until the white man is alienated by it, and forced to recognize that he cannot possess, contain and control it. Both the white man and the black man experience a sense of non-belonging in language, a lack of self-identity, so that “there is a secret blackness to the white, and a secret whiteness to the black, a fixed flickering of being and non-being” (ibid.: xxii). Neither colonizer nor colonized is secure in his being, but both are confronted with traces of otherness, of their own contingency, in their use of a language that can never be entirely their own. Surprisingly, then, one of the outcomes of Sartre’s revolutionary writing is its revelation that the master, or colonizer, may claim possession of his identity, but this is a gesture of denial, or bad faith. The experience of alienation in language is a universal one: language separates all speakers from themselves, and what the colonial system did was doubly to alienate the colonized people by forcing a foreign language on them, a language that the colonizer could then claim as his own. The colonized are forced to live in a society governed in a language that is not theirs, so their alienation operates on two levels, and also becomes entrenched by political inequality and oppression. On this point, Sartre comes close to anticipating Derrida’s discussion of colonialism in the much later The Monolingualism of the Other (1998), first published in French in 1996. In The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida’s initial reflection on the specific experience of Algerian Jews dissolves into a discussion of our universal alienation in language, together with an exploration of the author’s own pursuit of a process of self-singularization. This means that both colonizer and colonized are alienated, but the colonizer denies his alienation and claims to possess his culture and language while enforcing it on the other so as to concretize the other’s dispossession. As in Sartre, then, the crux of this is again that both colonizer and colonized are in exile, and neither is able to control and possess his language, to fix both his own being and that of the subordinate other. Sartre stressed in “Black Orpheus” that the negritude poets forced the colonizer to experience the sense of separation from himself that colonialism forced on the colonized. Derrida’s work dwells on this universal and reciprocal alienation at length, and argues that if we speak of the dispossession of the colonized, we must also remember that the colonizer, the master, is no more in possession of his language than the colonized he oppresses and tries 50

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to assimilate. The disjunction between self and language is universal, and far from dissolving the specifics of the colonized’s oppression, this universal, ethical theorization provides the basis for its concretization and politicization in the colonial context: “the master is nothing. And he does not have exclusive possession of anything” (Derrida 1998: 23). Although Sartre’s comments on the colonizer in “Black Orpheus” are less extensive than those of Derrida in The Monolingualism of the Other, the argument that both sides are alienated is offered in the earlier work, and certainly ties in with the generalized contingency of being-for-itself in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1989). Although Sartre does predict a totalized “society without race”, then, his awareness of the constantly self-inventing being-for-itself stresses the infinite singularization of all beings, their disjunction from the language they are constrained to use. Sartre’s ideal society, conceived as the ultimate aim of the dialectic, crucially remains deferred, and although he wants to imagine a complete, totalized and synthetic resolution, its very deferral means that his thinking finishes by positing an ongoing process of invention in the search for that higher goal. At the end of “Black Orpheus” Sartre is in any case hesitant in his elucidation of the third phase of the dialectic, and although he is adamant that negritude remains a transitory stage, his idea of synthesis remains tentative. It is reminiscent of the Marxist vision of a “classless society”, but is not fleshed out as a goal of its own. Reading the essay, one is left with the sense that the dialectic is not a step towards totalized harmony, but rather a process that must keep moving, but that may remain indefinitely unfinished. Sartre’s dialectic is not the rapid dismissal of negritude poetry, nor the promise of a naive harmony, but the argument that no stage in the resistance process, no self-affirmation, should be allowed to freeze into a static position and should retain a sense of its movement beyond itself. His dialectic names an evolution and not an endpoint; it privileges continual reinvention rather than a finite achievement or stasis. Sartre succeeds in setting out a clear purpose to this process of continual invention, but the deferral of its endpoint, and his questioning of the use of any label because of the proliferation of its significations, means that his strategy stretches beyond the concerns of immediate liberation and into a deconstructive and ethical interrogation of language, identity and mastery. Sartre succeeds in offering a distinct anti-colonial standpoint and proposal, and voices this with an urgency to rival that of Fanon. At the same time, however, he manages to collapse colonialism as a sustainable conceptual structure, to expose its delusions and myths, and in so doing fanon and sartre

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he sows the seeds of a broader, deconstructive and ethical critique of its philosophy of language and culture. He demands the immediate overthrow of colonialism, but also considers the weakness within the system itself, its self-defeating nature and its deluded collusion with a certain metaphysics of identity and linguistic possession. Closer attention to “Black Orpheus” and the other essays brings out the multiple layers of Sartre’s writing on colonialism: his ability to take a political stand and to make positive proposals while criticizing the simplicity of any “identity politics”. His tone is contestatory and revolutionary, but it also contains the seeds of a complex, meticulous deconstruction of the very language of the colonial system, its self-defeating contortions, and the implications of that deconstruction for the elucidation of anti-colonial critique. From this point of view the work is an amalgam of negritude and Hegelianism, it anticipates deconstruction, and problematizes both the construction and maintenance of colonial power and the fraught process of its undermining. Like that of Fanon, it offers an astonishing combination of the most militant political polemic with a philosophical and ethical enquiry reaching far beyond the requirements of the moment of independence.

Key points • Fanon’s work has both psychoanalytic and political dimensions. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explores the psychic alienation of the black man, his sense of splitting from himself. In response, on the one hand Fanon affirms the black man’s “negro” identity, and on the other hand he champions the black man’s belonging to a universal humanity. • In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s political denunciation of colonialism in Algeria rests on a critique of its Manichaean structure. This divisive structure must be overthrown by means of violence, and should give way to a completely new society. Fanon draws on Marxism in his sketch of an anti-colonial revolution, although he also points out the limits of Marxist thinking in this context. Fanon affirms the importance of national culture while elucidating the risks of its dominance by the bourgeoisie. • Sartre celebrates black poetry as a space of resistance and selfreinvention, but he too remains ambivalent towards the affirmation of black identity recommended by the negritude movement. He stresses that negritude is only a stage in a dialectic and should 52

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lead to the transcendence of any racial category. Fanon conceives Sartre’s reading as an unfair dismissal of negritude. • Sartre’s analysis of colonialism in Algeria emphasizes that both colonizer and colonized are victims of the colonial system. He calls for the immediate dismantling of this oppressive system. Moreover, Sartre’s thinking anticipates Derrida’s form of postcolonial critique, in that he undermines the mastery of colonial discourse.

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three

Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective

If Fanon and Sartre’s writing on colonial Manichaeism, emergent nationalism and the new humanism is clearly directed against French colonialism in Algeria, Africa and the Caribbean, then the undoing of British colonialism required, at least for the major Indian anti-colonial thinkers, a rather different form of critique. French colonialism, in particular in Algeria, promoted the assimilation of the foreign territory to French control and to French culture, whereas British colonialism tended to privilege a form of paternalism or indirect rule. Moreover, the conquest and control of Algeria had been from beginning to end a bloody process and, despite the French policy of assimilation, resulted in repeated violent clashes and ongoing segregation. The French “mission civilisatrice” also produced, according to Fanon and Sartre, a disturbing form of racism that utterly severed and destroyed the colonized’s very self-image. In exploring British colonialism in India, thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee stress less strikingly the Manichaeism of the colonial vision and focus instead on its administrative structures, its association with capitalism and economic and social inequality. Fanon and Sartre were also clearly virulently anticapitalist in their writings on colonialism but, unlike these thinkers, in their writing on India Gandhi and the others do not conceive the shortcomings of the European economic and political system as related to such a distinct binary opposition between colonizer and native. Indeed, one of Gandhi’s persistent preoccupations was why the British had colonized India or, more precisely, why the Indians had apparently surrendered the control of their territory to them. Gandhi lamented the 54

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weakness of his compatriots in succumbing to the British and colluding in their imposed administrative system, although in fact, rather ironically, early on he himself supported some aspects of the British presence, again suggesting a certain ambivalence in relations between colonizer and colonized. Furthermore, Chatterjee notes that postcolonial India did not transform the basic institutional arrangements of colonial law and administration, and although nationalism and a specific national identity were at the time a significant part of anti-colonial discourse, competing versions of these already complicated any notion of a stark binary between British and Indians, or between East and West. The movement to overthrow British colonialism was a deeply fractured and ambivalent process, and leading thinkers and commentators on the movement waver in their configuration of the relation between cultural and ethnic groups (British, Hindu and Muslim) in the struggle for power. Gandhi was one of the most influential figures in India’s emergent anti-colonial movement, however, and it is to him and his critics and followers that this chapter turns. His work has two striking features worthy of particular attention that set it apart from that of the thinkers already discussed. First, he is not a nationalist philosopher and his call for resistance at no point hinges on a concept of national identity. Fanon, writing of course after Gandhi and at the moment where the anti-colonial movement in Algeria was at its most desperate, upholds national culture even as he denounces the narrow vision of the bourgeoisie who risk over-determining that culture. Gandhi, however, nowhere recommends Indian nationalism, and this is both one of his unique strengths and, for some, as we shall see, one of the possible limitations of his vision. Anxious to avoid homogenizing Indians and creating a false unity, Gandhi perceives home rule or “Swaraj” as a return to an independent Indian civilization, a rich conglomeration that is necessarily both variegated and unified. Hindus and Muslims from this point of view live alongside one another without assuming a national identity but sharing nevertheless a common spirit tied to their Indian past. Concomitantly, Gandhi believed that the real conflict lay not between two nations, nor between East and West, but between modernity and tradition. His anticolonialism is a reclaiming not of a national culture but of an intricate web of customs and beliefs opposed to the individualist, competitive spirit of modern civilization and capitalism. Secondly, while Fanon specifically advocates violence, Gandhi’s strategy is that of non-violence. Fanon argues that the overthrow of a colonial system predicated on violence requires that the same violence be decolonization, community, nationalism

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turned back against the colonizer, but Gandhi will not condone violence of any sort and recommends a form of passive resistance. The use of violence is entirely incompatible with Gandhi’s belief in the traditional Indian spirit, and is necessarily complicit with the mastery, individualism and destructiveness that Swaraj sets out to eradicate. The concept of non-violence, and its practical manifestation in acts of passive resistance or civil disobedience, mutates throughout Gandhi’s career, a mutation that testifies to the thinker’s tentativeness in recommending a clear set of policies in the fight against the inequality imposed by the British. The aim of Gandhi’s evolving philosophy of non-violence nevertheless rests on the firm credence that violence ultimately begets more violence; even if it succeeds in its goals it creates a precedent and encourages the belief that violence can be justified as a means to an end. Conversely, the strategy of non-violence or passive resistance disquiets the onlooker, destabilizes the position of those in power and crystallizes the system’s injustices. It makes it difficult for the oppressor to react, since further violence blatantly appears morally unjustifiable whereas the decision to take no action weakens the oppressor’s image of power. The difficulties of this vision will be discussed later, but certainly it is important to recognize the strength and significance of Gandhi’s strategy of noncooperation as an alternative form of anti-colonial critique to that of the more militant and aggressive Fanon. If Fanon was a revolutionary political philosopher whose work had ethical undertones, Gandhi, with his critique of violence, conceived politics and ethics or morality as inextricably bound together. Once again, if later critics of colonialism in India have become polarized in their privileging of either ethics or politics, Gandhi himself made no such choice and presented his highly political objectives as infused with an awareness of moral obligation. Critical of Marx, Gandhi nevertheless draws on his denunciation of capitalist inequality, and his battles revolved precisely around real economic issues including the laws determining the activities of the peasants, or the excessive salt tax that he marched against in 1930. His call for an independent India was also a direct rejection of the British government’s imposition of a competitive market where the rich lined their own pockets at the expense of the exploited and the poor. Yet at the same time, Gandhi repeatedly used a moralizing vocabulary, designating colonialism as “evil”, as well as “corrupt” and “diseased”, and the fight for Indian civilization was above all in defence of his people’s spirit of integrity and equability. Independence from British rule was also inseparable from personal freedom and the full realization of the human self. It involved a spiritual project, a 56

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search for self-knowledge and internal harmony derived in part, and at times rather problematically, from Hindu tenets and the Bhagavad Gita. It is for this reason that Gandhi’s methods were rigorously ethical, and foreclosed any possibility of domination and mastery over the other. His strategies of non-cooperation and non-violence worked against both the practical policies of the British system and its underlying pitting of self against other, its individualist ends. Chatterjee and the historiographical thinkers of the Subaltern Studies Collective develop and build on the political analysis of decolonization and nationalism, while the celebrated postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, discussed in Chapter 4, retracts from the political in favour of ethics and cultural criticism. Nandy, not unlike Fanon, ignores this dichotomy and discusses colonialism in India, and Gandhi’s work, in terms of politics, psychology and representation. More than anyone, however, it is Gandhi who explicitly refuses to divorce his practical from his spiritual goals and was prepared to face the inconsistencies that this fusion nevertheless brought.

Mahatma Gandhi Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1869 at Porbandar, Gujarat, Gandhi later became known as “Mahatma” or “Great Soul” as a result of his achievements as leader of the independence movement in India. Despite his renown, however, he was himself uncomfortable with the adulation expressed by his followers and with his position as a figure of authority. He also stressed repeatedly that his philosophy did not amount to “Gandhism”, to any specific or fixed agenda, and, indeed, it is clear that his thinking mutates throughout his career in response to the historical changes he witnesses. Furthermore, Gandhi was in no way an abstract thinker but was deeply committed to political action, and his writings often took the form of scattered musings or glosses on his militant activities. He admired simplicity and set out to work closely with the people; he was committed to making his beliefs concrete and meaningful to India’s victims – the exploited, the weak and the poor. It is difficult, then, to systematize his thinking and to create a unified body out of his work. He offers no single anti-colonial philosophy but a series of observations and experimental methods of critique. Gandhi’s militant career began when he was working as a lawyer in South Africa. He himself experienced racial discrimination, and began campaigning against the mistreatment of Indians soon after his arrival in the country in 1894. He founded the Natal Indian Congress, decolonization, community, nationalism

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an organization that set out to fight anti-Indian racial laws. Nevertheless, he assisted the British during the Boer War by working as a stretcher-bearer, and at this stage he supported the colonial power even as he became aware of its injustices. Also during his time in South Africa, Gandhi wrote frequently for the newspaper Indian Opinion and gradually shaped his views on the evils not so much of colonialism but of modern civilization, as well as on the techniques necessary for its undermining. He formally adopted the term “satyagraha”, which designates the power of truth, love and non-violence, and which also involves a variety of concrete acts of resistance and civil disobedience. Frequently imprisoned as a result of his militancy, Gandhi nevertheless lobbied relentlessly for his cause and continued to organize campaigns and marches as a means of expressing protest. He returned to India in 1915 and began his work defending and speaking up for his disadvantaged compatriots. He applied the principles of satyagraha in a series of disputes, settling the grievances of indigo workers in Champaran and the textile workers’ strike in Ahmedabad. He lead a movement of peaceful resistance against the Rowlatt Bills of 1919, which proposed severe measures to deal with terrorism, and even contributed to the panIslamic Khilafat movement in the same year. He also fasted repeatedly, notably in protest against the Indian caste system and the mistreatment of the untouchables. Nevertheless, when in 1922 the non-cooperation movement got out of hand and a number of Indian policemen were massacred as a result of civil disobedience, Gandhi was deeply saddened and revised his understanding of satyagraha in order to stress its necessarily peaceful nature. Another of Gandhi’s significant achievements was the salt satyagraha of 1930: a two-hundred-mile march against the tax that the British Raj had placed on salt. The movement was also, however, a broader statement of protest against the British presence and became a significant moment in the move towards independence. Gandhi went on to launch the Quit India movement in 1942 ahead of Indian independence, and partition, in 1947. This is a highly cursory summary of Gandhi’s activities, but these moments need to be noted for their influence on his evolving philosophy. At the centre of this is his far-reaching critique of modern civilization, expounded above all in Hind Swaraj, a series of comments and reflections written in ten days during his return from England to South Africa in 1909. If there is any seminal text in Gandhi’s corpus it is this one, since it is here that he elaborates most succinctly on the philosophy behind the call for Swaraj, or home rule. It is not Englishmen themselves that he vilifies, but the evil and selfishness promoted by modern civilization. 58

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Modern concepts of civil liberty and equality are certainly admirable for Gandhi, but the greed of rampant capitalism is not, and at the heart of modern civilization lies the flawed premise that “people living in it make bodily welfare the object of life” (Gandhi 1997: 35). This prioritization of material comfort in turn means that men “are enslaved by the temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy” (ibid.: 36). They ignore both morality and spirituality, lack strength and courage, and find themselves isolated from one another. Concomitantly, India suffers because it is “being ground down not under the English heel but under that of modern civilisation” (ibid.: 42). Technological advancements brought on by the British have contributed only to India’s suffering. Railways, for example, served only to spread plague and, furthermore, Gandhi argues that they actually helped to harden India’s internal divisions. Later in the text, Gandhi similarly laments the effects of modern machinery, the dreadful working conditions of factory employees and the destruction of traditional methods of production. Indians can produce their own cloth, their own goods, by means that eschew the cruelty of modern civilization. Ultimately, the British obsession with commercial selfishness is a form of violence and vanity that negates even their own spirit of Christianity. Their colonial project was the worst and final manifestation of this aggressive and exploitative drive. Gandhi’s thought is related to that of Marx in its denunciation of capitalism. Gandhi argues against the capitalist concept of private property, for he believes that there is no inherent reason why one man should claim exclusive ownership of the fruits of his labour. The good functioning of society depends on cooperation and on self-sacrifice, and the capitalist drive towards private ownership undermines this need for sharing. Gandhi also believes that capitalism dehumanizes its workers, requiring them to work in unacceptable conditions and breeding discontent and aggression among them. This emphatically does not, however, make Gandhi a Marxist; indeed, he vilifies communism as much as he does capitalism. Communism is also based on materialism, according to Gandhi; it occludes the people’s spiritual needs and inflates the power of the state. Moreover, while Marx lamented the slow pace of change in India, this link with the past and with tradition is, for Gandhi, his country’s strength. So Gandhi shares with Marx a disgust for the avaricious drive of capitalism and a belief in the necessity of its destruction, but conceives an alternative Indian society in starkly contrasting terms. Gandhi believes that the British came to India only in search of material gain, and a new market for their goods. Indians, however, were decolonization, community, nationalism

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seduced into colluding with the imposition of this modern civilization, and it is in this collusion that they forget their traditions and their past. They ignore the spiritual teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, the path of self-purification and self-sacrifice, and the relinquishment of shortterm, self-serving goals. They forget their communal spirit and the moral necessity that each man look after the other. In a series of stark oppositions, Gandhi opposes this ethical spirit to the greed of modern civilization in order to champion Indian integrity: “the tendency of Indian civilisation is to propagate the moral being, that of the Western civilisation is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God” (ibid.: 71). Moving swiftly and deftly between ethics and politics, moreover, Gandhi takes the spinning wheel as a symbol of India’s traditional spirit, and uses it to represent a refusal of the machinery of Western civilization. The spinning wheel stands for an ethical means of production free from the denigrating and dehumanizing effects of industrialization on a large scale. Gandhi argues that in adopting the spinning wheel, Indians “declare that we have no intention of exploiting any nation, and we also end exploitation of the poor by the rich” (ibid.: 167). The restoration of such traditional modes of production is both a vigorous statement in defiance of capitalism and an ethical promise to end the rule of the guiding values of selfishness and avarice. Perhaps most disturbingly, the imposition of modern civilization divided a country that Gandhi stresses had previously been able to live peacefully. India’s plurality and diversity is part of its richness; it is a vast and protean civilization and not a unified nation, but the differences between, for example, Muslims and Hindus are perceived by Gandhi to be mutually nourishing. Noting in Hind Swaraj that they have long since ceased to fight, Gandhi argues that “religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal?” (ibid.: 53). Gandhi also wrote about the confrontation with British colonialism and the move towards independence as a statement of unity, where Indian civilization was united against the oppressor. He notes: more and more, as they realize that amid differences of creed and caste is one basic nationality, does agitation spread and take the form of definite demands for the fulfilment of the solemn assurance of the British Government that they should be given the ordinary rights of British subjects. (Gandhi 1962: 101) 60

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Gandhi’s call, in his move towards a demand for independence, is in this way directed to all Indians, and part of his endeavour is to abolish caste distinctions and internal inequalities. He also, like Fanon, addresses the masses; he wants to call the attention of the people, and not an elite native bourgeoisie who would risk once again oppressing and speaking in the place of the peasants. Gandhi similarly seeks to reconcile divisions between rural and urban cultures. A return to Indian civilization would entail the handing over of the land to the people and the abandonment of inegalitarian, divisive economic and political structures. Of course, the difficulty with Gandhi’s belief in unity is that it seeks to deny real and painful divisions between Muslims and Hindus, which escalated to reach an apotheosis during the conflicts leading up to partition. By 1946 India was enmeshed in a civil war, inaugurated in earnest by the Great Calcutta Killing in August of that year. Having tried previously to ignore the rupture that was tearing India apart, by 1947 Gandhi was gravely troubled by the growing violence, visited the city and resolved to fast. While Hindu protestors initially saw Gandhi’s attempts to make peace with Muslims as an act of betrayal, in the end his powers of persuasion worked, and, indeed, on the day India became an independent nation the city remained surprisingly peaceful. The calm was short-lived, but Gandhi continued to believe in reconciliation and in the powers of satyagraha to achieve his aims. If he did succeed in healing some rifts between Muslims and Hindus, however, Gandhi’s philosophy was inevitably rooted in the Hindu religion and culture, and critics have observed that his rhetoric of unity sat uneasily with his highly particularized use of the Bhagavad Gita. At the same time, he was moving further and further away from an engagement with the economic and historical roots of the conflict and glossed over the politics of the rift with a spiritualism ill equipped to deal with its complexity. Gandhi’s conception of a unified and spiritual Indian civilization is complemented by a series of multifaceted and mutating concepts that require further elucidation. The first of these is undoubtedly satyagraha, a term that I have already used a number of times to describe Gandhi’s non-violent methods of resistance. Etymologically, it comes from “satya”, meaning truth, and “agraha”, a form of insistence without obstinacy. Initially it is related to passive resistance, although Gandhi rejects this term quite quickly, first because he argues that it was associated with a dangerous and potentially destructive form of contestation, with a “preparation” for violence, and secondly because for him it actually implies weakness. It is nevertheless noteworthy that passive resistance is a concept used by Levinas, in a very different context, to decolonization, community, nationalism

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describe the encounter with the face and the resistance of the other to the self ’s desired power and mastery. Gandhi’s thought is much more politically oriented than that of Levinas, but his notion of resistance does contain this vision of an ultimately moral confrontation between a being that believes itself to be masterful and the raw and naked suffering of the other. The concept of satyagraha, if it is not quite passive resistance in Gandhi’s view, is, moreover, at once an affirmation of strength and a deeply ethical embrace of the virtues of love and charity. Satyagraha is an active form of opposition, committed to non-violence, but bold and affirmative in its claims for what is right. The satyagrahi is not afraid, but promotes “self-help, self-sacrifice and faith in God” in his pursuit of justice and freedom (Gandhi 1962: 80). He is prepared to suffer and to use his suffering as a tool to achieve the ends to which he remains committed, and, in turn, it is his suffering that shames the oppressor and reminds him of the evil of which he is the cause. The power of satyagraha comes from strength of will, which is always far superior to the power exerted by brute force. Satyagraha as a form of truth is also complemented by “ahimsa”, the rule of non-violence as an agent of change, and this concretizes the demands made by the former term. Ahimsa is again both a personal notion, bound up with self-will and self-sacrifice, and a political tool, manifested by fasting and marching, or in practical movements of civil disobedience. This disobedience must remain peaceful, however, and disturbed by the violence that did emerge in 1922, Gandhi was increasingly at pains to stress the necessity for its careful planning. Satyagraha is conceived as the key method in the pursuit of Swaraj, or home rule. Although Gandhi applied it to his protests against the caste system and the violence between Muslims and Hindus, it was conceived around the time of Hind Swaraj as part of the necessary return to Indian (Hindu?) values and traditions. In campaigning for Swaraj, for example, Gandhi stresses “my Swaraj will not be a bloody usurpation of rights, but the acquisition of power will be a beautiful and natural fruit of duty well and truly performed” (ibid.: 171). This Swaraj is, moreover, an equally complex concept comprising multiple layers. First, it is the direct and urgent call for the withdrawal of the British from India. Yet this withdrawal is not just a political demand for decolonization but an aspiration to reclaim Indian civilization and to return it to its traditional values and customs. Secondly, then, Swaraj names not only political home rule but “self-rule”: it connotes the freedom of the individual to create himself according to his own principles while sacrificing himself to others. Gandhi argues that home-rule is self-rule or self-control: it 62

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is the establishment of an Indian spirituality that combines affirmation against the British with a belief in sharing, community and the sacrifice of the self before the other. Swaraj is at the same time inconceivable without “swadeshi”, or community: “the principle of relying on the products of India rather than foreign goods” (quoted in Dalton 1993: 249). Swadeshi names the attachment to the land and to the environment that Gandhi champions in his call for the restoration of Indian civilization, and it implies not only political autonomy but also cultural and moral independence and cohesion. The call for independence in this way has profound spiritual and moral consequences, drawn from this deeprooted adherence to community, integrity and truth. Gandhi’s philosophy is deeply politicized in its direct engagement with the masses, with specific injustices and with the Indian National Congress and its movement towards independence. Yet the depth and complexity of his core concepts implies a thinking that stretches beyond the practical and the immediate, and that speaks not just to Indians but to humanity more broadly. Like Fanon and Sartre, Gandhi retains a strong concept of a common humanity, distinct from any Eurocentric humanism and unrelated to the obfuscatory notion of “human nature”, but important as an ethical category. Again like Fanon and other anticolonial thinkers such as Memmi, Gandhi rails against colonialism, or its imposition of modern civilization, because of its dehumanizing tendencies, and he uses the term “human” to advocate the crucial recognition of the other. For Gandhi humanity is unified and indivisible, and a proper understanding of the human requires respect for and attention to other humans, and the refusal of exploitation and degradation. This unity is not the same as similarity, and does not obstruct Gandhi’s pluralism, but establishes a common foundation on which individuals construct mutual respect. As a result, the call for freedom applies not only to India but to all peoples: “the spirit of political and international liberty is universal and, it may even be said, instinctive. No race appreciates a condition of servitude or subjection to a conquering or alien race” (Gandhi 1962: 102). Gandhi’s aim is at the same time greater than independence, as he seeks “to deliver the so-called weaker races of the earth from the crushing heels of Western civilisation” (ibid.: 164). This universalist strand certainly creates difficulties for Gandhi’s readers, as the sweeping rhetoric moves a long way from the more pressing political goals of his work, and the breadth of his references, from Plato and Socrates to Tolstoy and Ruskin, obscures his immediate objectives. Indeed, the resistance to Western civilization is couched in terms that are still unavoidably inflected with Hinduism decolonization, community, nationalism

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and with India’s specific past in ways that are clearly objectionable to Muslims. This combination of the specific with the universal lacks the elegance with which Fanon elaborates his dialectic between negritude and the new humanism, partly because Gandhi’s very language is bound up in a spiritual tradition that it claims to be able to transcend. It is this ethical ambition, however, that lifts his work into the realm of philosophy and that continues to influence postcolonial thought many decades after his assassination 1948. Gandhi’s thought was nonetheless mired in other problems that he struggled to resolve. In her essay “Concerning Violence”, Leela Gandhi asserts that Gandhi’s ethics, unlike that of Levinas, is totalizing, and does not leave space for contingency. The Levinasian encounter cannot be subsumed into totality and is conceived only in terms of the immediacy of the face-to-face encounter, but Gandhi’s demand for universal love actually deflects the other’s appeal for proximity (L. Gandhi 1997: 109). Commentators such as Bhikhu Parekh also, while sympathetically explicating Gandhi’s philosophy, express concern about his uncompromising embrace of suffering, since its precise effects are difficult to trace and it borders at times on a form of ritualism. Equally, Young has commented on the potential hypocrisy of Gandhi’s self-image, which was highly mediatized and broadly disseminated, despite his critique of modern technology. Leela Gandhi and others have also criticized Gandhi’s vision of female agency, since, while helping women to contribute to satyagraha and Swaraj, these concepts allow them to do so only within their traditional role in the family. Perhaps most troublingly, Gandhi’s latter withdrawal from the political makes his vision of postcolonial India highly questionable. Adhering to principles of satyagraha and Swaraj, Gandhi refuses to contemplate the formation of a modern Indian state, even if this was what his nation urgently required. His inspirational capacity derives much more from the ethics embedded in his strategy for resistance than from his model of postcoloniality.

Ashis Nandy Nandy is a leading Indian intellectual, a follower and critic of Gandhi, who develops the work of his forerunner precisely by conceiving of anti-colonialism and postcoloniality together. A self-proclaimed Marxist, Nandy’s distinction, however, is that his reading of colonialism and postcolonialism is not historicist but psychological. A constant dissenter, Nandy is also difficult to pigeonhole; unlike many Indian 64

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postcolonial intellectuals he was not educated outside India, and also does not hold a post in a university department. He has for a long time been associated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, but his work does not sit comfortably within the boundaries of a single academic discipline. His writing style is elliptical, punchy but at times allusive, and although he has been hugely influential within India, his work has tended to be somewhat under-explored in Western postcolonial circles. Although he has spoken out on a diversity of issues, ranging from nationalism in India to the use of psychoanalysis in South Asia, it is his thinking on colonialism and its aftermath that is most celebrated and that will form the focus of this section. His approach to these questions is provocative and unique, his militant style contrasting with his refusal of empiricism and his innovative use of psychoanalysis. His language is nevertheless not abstract and theoretical but dedicated, like that of Gandhi, to local culture and folkloric tradition, and it is through this eclecticism that he creates a new and distinct form of hybridization between postcolonial politics and ethics. Nandy’s best-known work, The Intimate Enemy, opens with the bold claim that modern colonialism “colonizes minds in addition to bodies” (1983: xi). Although the statement contains echoes of the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind published in 1986, it announces more particularly a psychoanalytic understanding of colonialism as damaging in its effects on both the colonizer and the colonized’s selfperception, and on their understanding of the relation between India and the West. Indeed, Nandy notes at the outset that even Fanon, from whose psychological approach he draws many insights, writes his critique in a style inherited from Sartre, with the result that “the West has not merely produced modern colonialism, it informs most interpretations of colonialism” (1983: xii). Colonialism infiltrates the ways in which both colonizer and colonized express themselves and corrupts even the process of forming a strategy for resistance. Nandy goes on to argue that the ideology of colonialism was in operation well before the full institution of the Raj, as well as after its demise, and that this ideology propagates itself in two ways: via codes that shape the cultural practices of both sides, and via a series of insidious strategies for managing and controlling dissent (for example the system’s failure to recognize the violence it inflicts on the colonized). The psychology of colonialism is also expressed through the ideology’s fusion of sexual and political dominance, an effect that developed through the nineteenth century. Indians were conceived according to the British idea of the martial races: “the hyper-masculine, manifestly courageous, superbly loyal Indian castes and subcultures mirroring the decolonization, community, nationalism

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British middle-class sexual stereotypes” (ibid.: 7). This image of masculinity served both to prop up colonial prejudice and to encourage colonized subjects to act as “counterplayers of the rulers according to the established rules” (ibid.: 11). This sexualization of the native clearly recalls Fanon’s discussion of the stereotypical virility of the black man, although Nandy will go on to explore counter-examples in thinkers such as Gandhi in a way that Fanon does not. A second stereotype informing the psychology of colonialism for Nandy is that of the childlike quality of the native. This critique leads Nandy to denounce Marx’s vision of progress as complicit with colonial ideology, since Marx goes so far as to claim that “whatever may have been the crime of England she was the unconscious tool of history” (quoted in Nandy 1983: 13). European intellectuals were able in this way to describe colonialism as an evil, but a necessary one, since it worked to the benefit of the uncivilized and barbarian natives who could learn from the knowledge of their superior Western counterparts. This ideology seeps into primitivist images of the noble savage in need of management and reform. Oddly, however, this myth was at the same time countered by that of India as aged, clinging to a heroic past but degraded and past its peak. Nandy recalls that in the view of the colonizer, “like a sinful man Indian culture was living through a particularly debilitating senility” (ibid.: 18). Another of Nandy’s innovations in The Intimate Enemy is his argument that the colonizer too is damaged by colonialism. While Sartre had already stressed that both colonizer and colonized were cogs in the system, in Nandy’s work this observation is developed by an exploration of the system’s perverse psychic effects on the colonizing mind. Nandy observes, for example, that during the colonial period intellection and introspection were conceived as feminine traits secondary in importance to the dominant social values of competition and productivity. At the same time, colonialism made British people believe in a false cultural homogeneity among their own people, since those who did not conform were packed off to the colonies. Next Nandy asserts that colonialism brought the “isolation of cognition from affect – which often is the trigger for the ‘banal’ violence of our times – and … a new pathological fit between ideas and feelings” (ibid.: 34). Colonialism was in this sense not merely a political theory but a vast ethical, quasi-religious belief, reinforced in turn by technology. Finally, colonialism had the pernicious effect of deluding colonizers into believing that they were omnipotent: the British would be able not only to conquer foreign territories but to found new forms of self-consciousness. These 66

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pathologies find a response in the work of Rudyard Kipling, who equates the savage with childishness, and, conversely, in George Orwell, whose critiques of totalitarianism reveal the entrapment of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Another type of response included that of Oscar Wilde, whose transgressive sexuality functioned as a way to threaten the basic premises of the British colonial attitude. It is on Gandhi that Nandy dwells at greatest length, however, and it is in his reading of Gandhi’s response to colonialism that Nandy envisages the troubled emergence of another culture, another India. Part of Gandhi’s subversive quality stems, for Nandy, from his use of Western, indeed Christian, references. Gandhi also set out to liberate both the British and the Indians from colonialism, and he achieved this by troubling the Western belief in the superiority of masculinity: first by positing the transcendence of both femininity and masculinity at the top of the hierarchy, and secondly by privileging femininity. In this way “activism and courage could be liberated from aggressiveness and recognized as perfectly compatible with womanhood, particularly maternity” (ibid.: 54). In response to the colonial belief in progress, and the figuration of the native as childlike, Gandhi again reversed the hierarchical structure and conceived myth as superior to history. History was also not an official, sanctioned and monologic discourse but made up of the subjective recollections of the people: “public consciousness was not seen as a causal product of history but as related to history non-causally through memories and anti-memories” (ibid.: 57). Nandy goes on to argue that Gandhi reversed the progressivist schema of the development from child to adult by using a language of continuity with the past, together with a language of self-understanding, which would come before the attempt to understand the other. Both approaches are antithetical to modern colonial thinking and reverse its destructive effects. The difficulty, as we have seen, is that Gandhi lays himself open to charges of ahistoricism, but his achievement, according to Nandy, is nonetheless that his languages “gave societies the option of choosing their futures here and now” (ibid.: 62). Nandy’s emergent argument is that India must conceive itself in different terms from those imposed by the colonizer: that the goal must be the achievement of another India. This India would not have to choose between East and West, and it would be neither modern nor anti-modern, but defined by its own composite terms. India cannot reject the West, for in doing so it rejects some of its own traditions, but must work its European influences into its own traditions to create a new pluralist yet self-conscious identity. In Nandy’s terms, Gandhi’s ethnic decolonization, community, nationalism

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universalism “takes into account the colonial experience, including the immense suffering colonialism brought, and builds out of it a maturer, more contemporary, more self-critical version of Indian traditions” (ibid.: 75). Furthermore, ingeniously blending Fanon with Gandhi, Nandy describes India’s split self-image: the psychological disjunction between the colonizer’s imposed image and the native’s perception of his or her culture’s traditions. Less divorced from the political in his psychoanalytic reflections than Fanon, Nandy uncovers the emergence of that split image through celebrated writers and thinkers, and links it with Gandhi’s deployment of notions of traditional Indian civilization in his very methods of resistance. As a culmination of this analysis, Nancy then criticizes myths of a wholly authentic India as either martial or spiritual, and argues for a vision of a “non-heroic”, trans-cultural, transgendered conglomeration of influences. A precursor to Bhabha in this vision of hybridity, Nandy’s proposal is also more rigorously constructed through his readings of colonial and anti-colonial psychological affects and tropes, and it is out of these interweaving readings that he advocates his particular experimental, cultural blend. This affirmation, moreover, deftly knits together political, psychoanalytical and ethical critique, as Nandy concludes by observing, “knowledge without ethics is not so much bad ethics as inferior knowledge” (ibid.: 113).

The Subaltern Studies Collective Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy was produced at around the same time that a group of Indian academics inaugurated another approach, characterized this time by a focus on historiography. The Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of historians similarly focused on colonialism and postcolonialism in India and drawing not infrequently on Gandhi, but committed above all to a critique of how the history of India has been written. Founded by Guha in 1982, Subaltern Studies was an annual publication of historiographical essays, with frequent contributions by intellectuals such as Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose objective, in contrast to Nandy’s psychoanalytic approach, was to rewrite the political history of colonial India from the point of view of the people. The term “subaltern” was taken from Gramsci, and referred to those “of inferior rank”: in this case, the disenfranchised peasantry exploited by the colonists and deprived at the same time of a voice with which to express their response to their condition. The mission of the journal was to point out the ways in which historical texts on colonial and 68

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postcolonial India were constructed either from a colonial perspective, or from the point of view of a native bourgeois elite, and the historians themselves tried to fill in the gaps and expose the peasants’ own views and experiences at the mercy of both the capitalist system and the emerging nation state. It is perhaps with the emergence of the Subaltern Studies Group, moreover, that postcolonial studies began to divide between an emphasis on the political and the economic, and a more self-conscious pursuit of the ethical. Despite their focus on historiography and therefore writing, thinkers such as Guha, Chatterjee and Chakrabarty are highly politicized in their approach. They are steeped in Marx, although critical of his methods, and they also uncover the complicity between power and knowledge, and reveal how economic oppression is directly mirrored by the suppression of the voice. As we shall see in Chapter 4, Bhabha conversely pursues the psychoanalytic approach proposed by Nandy, while Spivak, partly involved with Subaltern Studies, endeavours to bridge the division. The historians of the journal itself, however, precisely condemn the less political aspects of Gandhi’s vision, and they steer postcolonialism away from Nandy’s psychology and ethics back to a militant form of historicism. Guha’s manifesto in the opening issue of Subaltern Studies boldly sketches the journal’s radical objectives. Guha argues that the historiography of Indian nationalism has been dominated by both colonial and bourgeois-nationalist elitism, and that both of these are ideological by-products of British rule in India. The colonial elitist form of history presents Indian nationalism as the sum of activities and ideas by which the Indian hegemonic class responded to the colonial establishment. The bourgeois elitist version defines Indian nationalism as an “idealist venture in which the indigenous elite led the people from subjugation to freedom” (Guha 1982: 2). The problem with these two approaches is that they fail to address how the Indian masses conceived and created their own nationalism. The agency of the peasantry in reassessing and reconfiguring its position in relation to the state was merely perceived as a problem of law and order by the colonialists, and the bourgeois nationalists in turn believed that the peasants only participated in the nationalist movement under the direction of their own narrow and hierarchical structures of leadership. Guha concludes that the role of the journal will be to explore both the conditions of the exploitation of the masses and the workings of the people’s autonomous political agency. Guha’s historiographical critique has three strands, all of which shape the remit of the journal and which come together in the three essays reprinted in his Dominance without Hegemony (1997). The first of these decolonization, community, nationalism

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is the argument against what he conceives as the universalizing tendency of capital (Guha 1997: 4). Guha uses Marx to denounce capitalism’s drive to create a world market and to subjugate every moment of production to the broader system of exchange-value. Reading Marx’s Grundrisse (1973), Guha shows how Marx rails against this univeralizing tendency by exposing the uneven progress of material development across the world, but laments that readers have tended to focus rather blindly on this universalist drive rather than on its limits and insufficiencies. In Guha’s words, “historiography has got itself trapped in an abstract universalism thanks to which it is unable to distinguish between the ideal of capital’s striving towards self-realization and the reality of its failure to do so” (1997: 19). The result of this error is that historiographers assume that capitalism was successfully instituted in India, and that it overcame the obstacles posed by the colonized on the path to colonialism and selfexpansion. They mistake dominance for hegemony, in that they believe that Indians accepted the imposition of capital without resistance, and forget the agency of the masses in contesting the dominant structures imposed on them from above. Chakrabarty articulates a similar objection to the use of Marxist critique in studies of India, and asserts bitterly that in Marx’s own discussion of universalism in Capital, “for ‘capital’ or ‘bourgeois’, I submit, read ‘Europe’” (1992: 4). Marx himself was not a historicist but a conceptual political thinker, and the difficulty of his work, according to Chakrabarty, is that it has lent itself to misappropriation in contexts such as that of colonial dominance in India. Secondly, Guha argues that the bourgeois leaders of the nationalist movement also mistook dominance for hegemony and erroneously stressed their unifying power over the masses mobilized against the colonial regime. The Swadeshi movement set out to unite the people in the drive towards independence, but for Guha this claim was elitist in that it suggested that “mobilization was the handiwork of prophets, patriarchs, and other inspirational leaders alone and [implied that] the mobilized were no more than an inert mass shaped by a superior will” (1997: 103). The rhetoric surrounding this claim was also abstract because it ignored the real tension between force and consent on which the movement relied. This is a dissimulation of which, according to Guha, Gandhi himself was guilty. In the non-cooperation campaign of 1920–22, Gandhi distinguished between social and political boycott, and he argued that sanctions, for example on medical care, were a form of social boycott and were immoral. Gandhi was enraged by these sorts of activities, and frequently described the people engaged in them as “‘unmanageable’, ‘uncontrollable’, ‘undisciplined’” (quoted 70

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in ibid.: 139). Guha goes on to describe this conflict as a further manifestation of the gap between elitist and subaltern politics and asserts: Gandhi’s theory of leadership amounted thus to a formula to dissolve the immediacy of mobilization in the subaltern domain, and open up a space for the nationalist elite to step in with its own will, initiative, and organization in order to pilot the political activity of the masses towards goals set up by the bourgeoisie. (Ibid.: 143) Guha demands in the place of Gandhi’s elitist and bourgeois leadership renewed attention to the masses’ own processes of self-mobilization. The final element in Guha’s critique of Indian historiography is the exposition of the interplay between power and knowledge. We shall see in Chapter 4 how this fusion is theorized at length by Foucault, but Guha’s analysis draws on Foucault to explore from a practical and empirical point of view the colonial state’s mission to prop up its position of mastery by means of the dissemination of knowledge. Guha begins by revealing how in the early, formative phase of the colonial state, officials were perturbed by their lack of understanding of local agriculture. In response the East India Company set out to inform itself about the character and value of landed property, expressly so as to command the natives who worked on it. Early officials set out “to historicize the Indian past” (Guha 1997: 163), but they did so by means of their own European historiographical methods and in order to impose their own administrative system more effectively. Concomitantly, the British went on to extend their power by means of education, which, far from emancipating the natives, “was designed to harness the native mind to the new state apparatus as a cheap but indispensable carrier of its administrative burden” (ibid.: 167). This led also to the spread of the use of English, so that the language became a symbol of power and a source of prestige. The imposition of English on educated Indians cut them off from their own languages and from their own past. The British then in turn learned the native languages so as to harness these too to the construction of the colonial state apparatus. If Guha was the founder of Subaltern Studies, Partha Chatterjee was one of its best-known contributors. Chatterjee’s work is similarly Marxist, and his major contribution to postcolonialism has been his expansion of Guha’s critique of nationalism in India into a sophisticated and far-reaching exposition of nationalism’s paradoxes and shortcomings. Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought in the Postcolonial World (in Chatterjee decolonization, community, nationalism

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1999) is both a philosophical dissection of nationalism and a specific and politicized account of its deficiencies in the Indian context and, once again, in the thought of Gandhi. The first part of the text explores the fundamental paradox of Eastern nationalism: it imitates in its structure a “Western” mode of thinking even though its purpose is to establish a distinction between colonial culture and the specific traditions of the native, colonized community. Chatterjee sifts through the work of a number of historians of nationalism, including the influential thought of Benedict Anderson on the invention of the nation as an ideological construction (executed, for example, by the development of print languages), and uncovers in each case a more or less hidden Eurocentric agenda. Next, he identifies a split between the “thematic” of nationalism, the broader epistemological system, and the “problematic” of nationalism in India, its concrete manifestation as it unfolds in dialogue with the “thematic”. Chatterjee’s argument is that the thematic and the problematic weave together in complex ways: nationalist thought takes some of its precepts (the “thematic”) from Western rational thought but it must also contest the arguments and objectives of colonial knowledge. The problematic of nationalism in India must then open up the framework of knowledge that seeks to dominate it, and create itself differently. It is, in sum, “a different discourse, yet one that is dominated by another” (Chatterjee 1999: 42). The rest of Chatterjee’s text examines three moments in the history of nationalist thought in India: the moments of departure, manoeuvre and arrival. There is no space here to summarize all three, but the moment of manoeuvre comprises a discussion of Gandhi that is worth noting in the context of this chapter. Chatterjee explores Gandhi’s critique of civil society and stresses that this is directed not against the West but against modern civilization. As we know, Gandhi was also not nationalist, and even more, for Chatterjee his thought is barely historical but predominantly moral. Gandhi’s thinking turned out to rely on a disjuncture between politics and morality, even though the concept of “ahimsa” had attempted to bridge that gap, and even though Hind Swaraj had tried to sketch a movement that accomplished a fusion between them. Gandhi’s increasingly utopian use of notions of truth, of morality and the ideal was ultimately antithetical to political thinking: his thought “saved its Truth by escaping from politics” (ibid.: 110). One example of this difficulty in Gandhi was his involvement in the khadi movement: the principle that rural production would be for self-consumption and not for sale. In promoting this movement, however, Gandhi emphasized that the people should follow above all the morality behind the 72

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movement, and he had no theory for its political execution. The upshot was once again that his vision of the nation was distanced from the people on whose participation it nevertheless depended. Chatterjee continues to explore the multiple facets of India’s problematic nationalism, and he locates in Nehru’s attempt to invent a sovereign nation state an ongoing, residual failure to incorporate into that state the life of the nation it governs. Chatterjee’s subsequent work The Nation in Fragments (in Chatterjee 1999) develops the critique of the colonial state, together with that of the bourgeois nationalist vision, and explores the fragmentary narrative also of the nation’s pasts before colonialism. Chatterjee equally significantly identifies the troubled position of women in nationalist narratives. Since British colonialists justified their mission by claiming also to “civilize” the natives in their treatment of women, nationalism became associated in part with a resistance to the “Westernization” of women. Women were perceived to have a specific form of spirituality, distinct from that of men, but that did not necessarily prevent them from participating in social and public life. That the nationalist movement conceived itself to be regulating the question of women’s positions on its own nevertheless meant that it was not a key part of their negotiation with the colonial state. If women’s lives did change dramatically during the period of nationalist agitation, Chatterjee argues that they were nevertheless excluded from the conception of the new nation state. The work of the Subaltern Studies Collective is broad in its range and militant in its call for attention to the ongoing oppression of the people, including women and the peasantry. The group’s highly politicized form of historiography ran up against difficulties, however, perhaps not least of which was their omission of a clearly ethical and self-reflexive critique. Spivak’s controversial essay “Deconstructing Historiography” (1996a), initially printed in Subaltern Studies, volume IV, argues that the group find themselves adhering to a positivist notion of subaltern consciousness as recoverable even as they remind us that the subaltern’s voice is available to us only via the discourse of the elite. In this sense they risk turning against their own premises in their belief that they can access the subaltern’s voice, even though they display its obfuscation by existing colonialist or bourgeois accounts. Spivak writes in support of the enterprise and affiliates herself to it, but argues that this paradox in the endeavours of the Subaltern Studies Collective means that they need to deconstruct the notion of the subject on which they rely, and she renames their focus not subaltern consciousness but “the subaltern subject-effect”. She goes on to define this as “that which seems to operate decolonization, community, nationalism

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as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network (‘text’ in a general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on” (1996a: 213). The group’s notion of an identifiable subject position is strategic, then, and their proposal that the subaltern’s consciousness might be recoverable should be understood only against the background of this poststructuralist awareness of the inevitably textual reconstruction of that consciousness. In addition to Spivak’s nuanced critique, it also quickly emerged that the sources available to the Subaltern Studies historians were in the end highly limited. If they set out to rewrite Indian history from the point of view of the masses, it was ultimately difficult for them to know the complex facets of that occluded and subjugated perspective. In asserting the political motivations of its new form of historiography, and in criticizing Gandhi’s foregrounding of the moral to the detriment of the political, the movement did not fully take on board the ethical difficulties of its own project. The journal Subaltern Studies was influential in its identification of the imbrication of history or narrative with power, and it supplemented Nandy’s psychoanalytic analysis with examination of the occluded position of the people in India’s evolving nationalist discourse, but it never quite resolved the problem, to use Nandy’s terms, of the necessary connection between knowledge and ethics within its own militant lines.

Key points • Gandhi’s critique of British exploitation in India was moral as well as political. He vilified the capitalist system and its mistreatment of native workers, and championed a return to spirituality and tradition. For Gandhi, however, the enemy was less the British than the evils of modern civilization. • Gandhi called for home rule in India by means of “satyagraha” or a form of passive resistance. Unlike Fanon, he disapproved of violence and recommended peaceful forms of protest, together with strength of will. A powerfully influential figure, Gandhi was nevertheless unable to conceive the political organization of a new India. • Nandy draws on both Gandhi and Fanon to explore the psychology of colonialism, and the damaging effects of the stereotypes and myths of the native. He argues that inferior knowledge leads to bad ethics. 74

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• The Subaltern Studies Collective sought to fill the gaps in Indian history by attending to the voice of the masses. They criticized the universalism of Marxism and the dominance of the local, elite bourgeoisie, and also uncovered the co-implication of power and knowledge. Their work lacked a self-conscious reflection on its own ethics.

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four

Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism

The work of Michel Foucault is a useful forerunner to postcolonial philosophy in its groundbreaking dissection of the relation between power and knowledge. The Subaltern Studies historians argue that both colonial and bourgeois elitist power structures are at work within historical writing on colonialism and nationalism in India, since the exclusion of the subaltern from his own history mirrors his economic and political subjugation. It is Foucault, however, who establishes a full-blown theory of the intersection between the production and dissemination of knowledge on the one hand, and the operation and expansion of power structures on the other. Foucault’s philosophy invents a unique mode of analysis, which he terms “archaeology”, and which retains as its goal the exploration of how knowledge operates as a part of a system or network propped up by social and political structures of power. This means that the creation and use of knowledge itself is political, and can serve to propagate and reinforce the social marginalization and oppression of those who do not conform to the norms of the dominant discourse. In exploring the potentially totalitarian, or at least authoritarian, effects of discourse and representation, moreover, Foucault crucially opens the way for thinkers such as Said to uncover the forms and uses of colonial knowledge. In drawing on Foucault, however, Said moves away from both the revolutionary fervour and the empiricism encountered so far, and examines the academic study of the Orient, together with the fantasized images of colonial territories that seep into cultural representation, and the ways in which these feed into the politics of the colonial 76

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mission. Said uses Foucault’s notion of discourse as expounded in The Archaeology of Knowledge (2001b) and Discipline and Punish (1991) to theorize the ways in which the Orient is discursively created as an object of knowledge, and this process of construction and categorization serves to reinforce the colonial project of conquest and subjugation. He argues in the process that there is a direct link between concrete politics and textual representation (via the media and history, as well as literature), and his critique of the political abuse of ideology is inflammatory, although he departs very clearly from the Marxist framework lingering in Fanon and Sartre, or in the work of the Subaltern Studies Group. Furthermore, this inauguration of a thoroughgoing investigation of imagery and representation heralds a new understanding of the fantasized relation between self and other that structures the colonial vision. The Orient for Said is the conglomeration of images and forms that stand for Europe’s other, and the colonialist creates his position of mastery and dominance over that other by claiming to define, categorize and know its difference from the self. Not at all overtly Levinasian, Said’s analysis will nevertheless also turn out to be close to Levinas’s ethical critique in its denunciation of the drive to subsume the other into the familiar framework of the self. This examination of knowledge and representation inaugurates postcolonialism’s ethical awareness of the intractability of the marginalized other, and the movement’s call for openness and responsibility towards the other’s difference.

Michel Foucault Foucault does not engage anywhere directly with the mechanics of colonialism, but his thinking is nevertheless highly influential because he helps us to think through the mechanisms by which power is constructed and disseminated. Rather than using the term “ideology”, however, with its Marxian connotations of falsity as opposed to truth, Foucault writes about the ways in which knowledge is shaped by the production of discourse, and this in turn props up the power structures of any given society. One of Foucault’s most influential works is The Archaeology of Knowledge, and it is here that he examines most explicitly the methodology underpinning the rest of his work. Archaeology in this text names a new approach to history that relies not on continuity, on notions of tradition, direct influence, development or an underlying spirit, but on the identification of ruptures and discontinuities within and between discourses in history. Foucault argues that the foucault and said

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history of ideas has tended to try to suppress contradiction, whereas his approach will “be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption” (2001b: 25). This means that any illusory coherence will be replaced by a vast examination “of the totality of all effective statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events and in the occurrence that is proper to them” (ibid.: 27). The focus of the analysis will be on relations between statements in fields of discourse (such as that of madness, or pathology, or, later, sexuality), and these relations will be explored according to their transformations through time, in terms of their internal ruptures rather than in the service of a coherent history. Foucault’s discursive fields are made up of coexistent, dispersed statements that can either interlock or exclude one another, but that can be examined on a broad scale according to the rules of their formation. Foucault also goes on to analyse objects of discourse (types of behavioural disorder, for example, in the field of psychopathology), which might in turn be highly dispersed, but which can be analysed together if their emergence can be identified by a particular discursive formation. This analysis is juxtaposed with a discussion of modalities (the conditions of production of the discourse), concepts and strategies at work within the discourse. The text then explores the complex production of the statement (the elementary unit of discourse), and the system of the vast, contradictory and discontinuous archive within which the statement functions. One of Foucault’s first examples of a discourse conceived along these lines is that of madness and reason, and here it is clear that the discursive formation structures knowledge in such a way as to prop up relations of power. In Madness and Civilisation (2001a), Foucault sets out to examine the ways in which discourses about madness precisely created the madman as external to reason and to civilization, and he argues that society has required this division in order to conceive a sense of its own consistency and coherence. Subsequently summarizing some of this method in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault affirms that in the nineteenth century, for example, the medical profession, together with the legal system, religious authority and even literature and art, constructed madness as an object: delinquency was conceived in pathological terms. So madness is never a given in Foucault’s science, but is something that is made and shaped by those in a position of authority. The discursive formation of madness as it is explored by Foucault in Madness and Civilisation is, however, once again dispersed and discontinuous. In the late Middle Ages, for example, the madman was a wanderer, adrift on the ship of fools, although this was also as a 78

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result of his social expulsion. Around this period madness was equally potentially frivolous: it was the satirical punishment of ordered science, and it revealed the hidden potential of dreams and illusions. In the fifteenth century, however, madness becomes “moored” and institutionalized, and the hospital served to silence and stultify the voice of unreason. By 1656, the Hôpital Général had achieved an almost judicial power over the madman, requiring sequestration and confinement. Foucault’s analysis works through the various categories and images associated with madness from this moment of institutionalization, uncovering endless shifts and emergent beliefs, but in order above all to show its construction as society’s feared and relegated underside. In each case it is discourse that creates the category of unreason, and marginalizes or excludes from society those who are consigned to that category. This “archaeological” exploration of the interplay between discourse and power continues in Discipline and Punish, in which the focus is not on the institutionalization of madness but on the evolution of systems of punishment and surveillance. Foucault argues here that the gradual disappearance of torture as a public spectacle in the second half of the eighteenth century was accompanied by the formulation of new codes and rules of procedure. This new penal system set out to punish not the crime, the individual act, but the “soul” of the criminal. The question of guilt revolved not only around who committed the crime, but also around the causal processes that surrounded it, with the result that “a whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement” (Foucault 1991: 19). Judgement and punishment are enmeshed in a system of knowledge and understanding, a set of “scientific discourses” determining what is acceptable to society, what is not, and how both are understood. This initial hypothesis then forms the basis for Foucault’s highly influential theory of biopower, since it is now the man, the individual and his body that are the objects of penal intervention, rather than the crime. The penal system is regularized, refined and homogenized at the end of the eighteenth century, and what it acts on now is the individual in contravention of the social contract and not simply the contingent action. In addition, Foucault analyses the development of the prison system, together with the complex operation of “discipline” and social surveillance. There is not space to discuss the intricacy of this evolution here, but in both cases Foucault’s crucial argument is that increasingly the individual is constructed, watched over and regulated by a range of disciplinary systems built on the combination of knowledge and power. This process of foucault and said

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surveillance, the control of behaviour and the drive to categorize those whose behaviour exceeds or transgresses the law will serve Said as a model for the management of the colonized other via morality as well as politics and culture. Both Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish rely on an understanding of the subject as formed, shaped and determined by dominant and regulatory discourses operating on him or her constantly. Foucault went on to express his reservations towards this analysis in particular as it is worked through in Madness and Civilisation. In The Archaeology of Knowledge he regrets that this text came close to proposing a generalized subject of history. Subjects are conceived as entirely formed by the discourses acting on them, and Madness and Civilisation also stresses that the dominant discourse rigorously divides and opposes inside and outside, normal and abnormal. Discipline and Punish does not emphasize and reinforce classificatory categories in this way, but Foucault still conceives the subject here as shaped by the all-pervasive operation of institutions of power. In The History of Sexuality (1978), however, Foucault comes to a more fluid understanding of the subject’s ability at the same time, reciprocally, to shape and “care for” him- or herself. By the time of the later volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault explores not only the workings of power and authority on the individual, in this case via discourses of repression, perversion and transgression, but also the subject’s self-examination and self-creation in relation to these discursive forces. The discourse of repression now also triggers a proliferation of counter-discourses, and these are what incite Guha and the other Subaltern Studies historians to deploy Foucault’s association of power and knowledge to explore the response of the subjugated native. Importantly, however, Foucault’s evolving methodology is concerned not with ideology, with a notion of false consciousness, but with the production of a network of potentially contradictory discourses that exert authority over the very construction of our subjectivity, and our subsequent positioning within, or indeed outside, society. If in Madness and Civilisation unreason is defined by the dominant category of reason, then in The History of Sexuality perversion is created by a discourse of repression, and this isolates, intensifies and consolidates peripheral sexualities (even though there is now a sense of a mutual negotiation between the margin and the centre). In these works, and in Discipline and Punish, Foucault exposes the complex interweaving of discursive formations that create in more or less determinate ways society’s marginalized and subjugated others. 80

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Through discourses such as those of madness, criminality and perversion, and through the authority that such discourses wield over social formations, Foucault’s subjects are shaped and given a position in society. For Foucault, “the individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces” (1980: 73–4). In turn, this power is a vast and net-like organization that traverses and produces forms of knowledge, and is propagated not only by the state but by individuals as they live out and reproduce its effects. No single individual possesses power, but it is channelled and exercised through the web of individuals that make up the social fabric. For Foucault, power operates on a wider level than that implied by Althusser’s state apparatuses: it is not only wielded by the state or by the sovereign subject but is produced in much more intricate localized systems. Furthermore, the notion of discourse replaces ideology as the vehicle of power because it no longer relies on an opposition between truth and falsity, and, equally, it does not occupy a secondary position in relation to a distinct economic base. Foucault’s analyses show how knowledge and power mutually create and structure one another and are diffused across the discursive formation. The individual subject lives within this formation and is always already in dialogue with it: there is no underlying set of lived relations on which discourse would then act from the outside. We shall see in the next section how Said used Foucault’s notions of power and discourse to think more specifically about the mechanics of colonialism. The summary above already indicates, however, that his work lends itself to the analysis of subjugated subjects, and it has also been observed that it was in writing The Archaeology of Knowledge in Tunis that Foucault was better able to critique the authoritarianism and ethnocentrism of French culture. In addition, the notion of bio-power explored in Discipline and Punish and, more comprehensively, in The History of Sexuality could be seen to work on, and marginalize, the racial other and to contribute to the oppressive construction of ethnicity. Ann Laura Stoler has explored the potential resonances of Foucault’s work for a critique of racism, and has argued that the “biopolitical” state creates a notion of sexual degeneracy that also intersects with race (Stoler 1995). Foucault’s work fails overtly to take into account the practical field of empire, nor does he write of the concrete mechanics of citizenship, but his analysis of discourses of normativity and exclusion can be deployed in an examination of the subjugation of the colonized as a result of his or her ethnic difference. foucault and said

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If Foucault is influential in his conceptualization of discourse and power, however, his work has also been highly controversial. Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), for example, analysed in Chapter 6, opens with a discussion of Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s blindness towards their own assumptions of Western cultural hegemony, and this effectively mars their ability to speak about colonized peoples. Spivak notes that in Foucault’s writing the subject is never at odds with itself, the relation between desire and interest is never questioned, and some level of agency is assured. As a result, Spivak holds that Foucault and Deleuze perhaps unwittingly retain a conception of the sovereign subject, and this is effectively the “Subject as Europe” (Spivak 1988: 280). In Foucault’s writing, Spivak determines that the subject can know and speak for itself, it retains a sense of agency, and for her this derives from Foucault’s presumption that the marginalized subject is still European and still has a voice. Furthermore, in analysing society’s excluded others, Foucault apparently forgets to draw attention to the division between his perspective and that of the subaltern worker: “neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor” (ibid.: 275). Everything in Foucault’s work rests on the assumption that the subject analysed is European, and his exegeses are unable to conceptualize the highly complex and elusive workings of power and desire on what she terms “the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe” (ibid.: 280). Even an intellectual exercise that sets out to reflect on structures of marginalization remains anchored in an ethnocentric framework perpetuating European dominance. Foucault’s marginalized others are only ever shadows or reflections of a European self and the colonized other is consequently forgotten and erased in his work. Spivak’s criticisms are undoubtedly somewhat equivocal, and her observations certainly do not mean that Foucault’s influence on postcolonial studies has been abortive. Said drew extensively on Foucault’s work in his Orientalism ([1978] 1995), although he understands discourse in more coherent and more historically grounded terms than those suggested by Foucault’s proliferating networks of power. In addition, Young writes about the resonance of Foucault’s reflections on rupture and discontinuity for an understanding of the limits of Western versions of History. As Young also discusses, however, if Foucault’s work has been instrumental in shaping the evolution of postcolonial critique, some of its schematism might be loosened, and Derrida’s reading of Foucault on madness goes some way to achieve this suppleness. In 82

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“Cogito and the History of Madness” in Writing and Difference (1978), Derrida notes that Foucault separates madness and reason in order to argue precisely that madness is reason’s other. This suggests at the same time that madness is excluded from reason, and that it is outside the selfcontained structure of rationality and civilization. According to Derrida, however, this means that Foucault’s writing gets caught in a trap, since he claims somehow to be analysing madness using a language that is distinct from that of reason, even though he turns out, of course, to be unable to do so. Foucault also writes as if he knows what madness is, as if the signifier can be understood in logical language. Derrida then traces Foucault’s use of Descartes, and shows that Descartes sought to distinguish reason from madness without enquiring into the nature of the language used to execute that distinction. As a result of both readings, Derrida argues that madness must on the contrary be considered as a linguistic supplement at work within reason, that it is the différance, the uncontrolled chain of traces that reason is unable to exclude. To return to the postcolonial, although Derrida does not spell out this implication here, the location of otherness within the language of reason, or within the hegemonic discourse, helps to trouble any reductive opposition between self and other, between those in power and those who are oppressed. In turn, Derrida’s reading might go some way to resolving Spivak’s anxiety about the apparent security and self-presence of Foucault’s analytical, and indeed oppressed, subject. Foucault also revised his work after receiving Derrida’s critique, and certainly his later theories of resistance operating within the power structure seem more consistent with the Derridean perception of otherness within the dominant discourse of the centre. Derrida’s critique may nonetheless turn out still to be pertinent to Said’s clearly postcolonial use of Foucault, and it is to this deployment that this chapter will now turn.

Edward Said, Orientalism Said was a Palestinian born in Jerusalem in 1935, and was educated in Cairo before continuing his studies and developing his career in America. His work is distinctive in the sense that, in his role as “public intellectual”, he combines literary criticism with politics and cultural philosophy, and accomplishes the unusual achievement of moving seamlessly between these discrete levels of analysis and in addressing as a result a broad audience of both specialized academics and the general public. Critics have tended to focus either on his academic and literary foucault and said

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critical writing or on his interventions on Palestine, but Said himself perceived these endeavours very much as part of the same project of unsettling the West’s vision of the Orient, the colony and Islam. It is also one of the principal arguments of Orientalism that one can identify the link between culture and politics by analysing colonial discourse alongside the mechanics of conquest and economic exploitation. Although he has been criticized for dehistoricizing the discourses he analyses, Said nevertheless argues that literary as well as historical or popular texts absorb and disseminate contemporary forms of knowledge that can serve to support the colonial power structure operating at the time. The difficulties associated with this move in Said’s work will be discussed later in this section, and there are certainly shortcomings in his cursory treatment of literary works, as well as in his vast, wide-ranging and perhaps generalized theory of Orientalist discourse. Beneath the critique of Orientalism is nevertheless the ardent belief that all human beings engage with a “contrapuntal” meeting of cultural influences, and forms of knowledge that do not address this connectivity misunderstand the specificity of “human experience”. Said’s argument is in this sense universal, and although problematic in its broad sweep, rests once again on an ethical understanding of both the diversity and the commonality of human experience. It is perhaps surprising that the term “human” crops up so frequently in the work of the postcolonial thinkers analysed so far, since Fanon and Sartre, as well as Said, vilify a Eurocentric form of humanism even as they uphold the importance of a new notion of the human necessitating an understanding of the freedom and the alterity of the other. Said also departs from Foucault in retaining the notion of the human rather than deconstructing with the latter the very notion of the subject by displaying consistently its formation in discourse. A number of critics have objected to Said’s humanism, both because it contradicts his engagement with poststructuralists such as Foucault, and because it can appear somewhat under-theorized. This difficulty will be dealt with further later in the chapter, but it is worth noting for now that Said is both distinctive and controversial because, like Fanon and Sartre, he finishes by combining a historical and political critique of colonial oppression with a conception of the unity as well as the diversity of the human as a symbol of resistance. Orientalism sets out to define the notion of Orientalist discourse and to criticize its delusions, which perniciously feed into the diffusion of colonial power. The term Orientalism covers three interrelated meanings. First, Said argues that it names the academic study of the 84

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Orient, in the multiple disciplines of anthropology, sociology, history or philology. Secondly, however, Orientalism is “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’” (Said 1995: 2). In this way Orientalism tends to rely on a binary opposition between East and West, and this dichotomy is both misleading and destructive, since the Orient comes to stand for all that is “other” to the West and therefore threatening. Thirdly, Orientalism can be seen as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (ibid.: 3). Orientalism is from this point of view a discourse in Foucault’s sense: it is a wide-ranging network of texts, images and preconceptions, all of which serve to designate the Eastern other as “a sort of surrogate and even underground self ” (ibid.). It is a way of representing the Orient, a discourse that reconstitutes the East using a number of preconceptions and assumptions, and this discourse helps to reinforce the position of the West as the site of power. Said uses Foucault here because the notion of discourse enables him to move between text and world, and to support his affirmation of the dialogue between culture and politics. He develops Foucault, however, by drawing attention to the spatial or geographic functioning of discourse, together with its infiltration into cultural performance. Said’s definition of Orientalism relies on the argument that the ideas about the Orient propagated by Orientalists have concrete and empirical foundations and effects. If Gustave Flaubert’s depiction of the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem never allows her to speak for herself, for example, then this mirrors the broader pattern whereby the West seeks to govern the East: to represent it in familiar terms the better to enforce its own position of strength. Said asserts that “Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment” (ibid.: 6). Said also draws on Gramsci here to theorize the ways in which certain ideas predominate over others and achieve a form of cultural hegemony, and this hegemony is assured also by the consent of society. Orientalist views of the Orient acquire hegemony and serve to prop up myths of European superiority that are largely accepted by the society in which they are propagated. The link between Orientalist ideas and concrete power structures is not, according to Said, direct and unidirectional, and yet these ideas clearly participate in a sort of uneven exchange with various sites of power, whether these be intellectual, cultural, moral or political, and closely related to the colonial or imperial establishment. In examining this foucault and said

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“exchange”, Said at the same time criticizes the rigidity of the Marxist division between superstructure and base, and stresses that his goal is precisely to explore the interpenetration of these two levels, to show how “political imperialism governs an entire field of study” (ibid.: 14). The analyses he carries out with this aim will also focus more on individual influences than Foucault’s archaeological probings, but will nevertheless demonstrate how these come together in their creation of a certain cultural hegemony. Orientalism is unified as a discourse, but it is important for Said that it can be analysed by means of a series of individual texts. The main body of Said’s work sifts through a multitude of examples of Orientalist discourse in political and historical texts, literature and, more recently, the media. Said begins, for example, by referring to Balfour’s lecture, addressed to the House of Commons on 13 June 1910, on the subject of Britain’s hold on Egypt and the difficulties in keeping that hold secure. Said notes that Balfour’s speech appears to refuse an attitude of British superiority over Egypt, but nevertheless the argument revolves around the premise that the British know the civilization of Egypt. This apparently thorough knowledge of Egypt, according to Said, equates here to Egypt itself, it is Egypt, and the assurance of this knowledge also gives Britain authority over the Oriental country. At no point does Balfour address the perceptions of the Egyptians themselves – any Egyptian who spoke out would merely be conceived as an agitator – and Balfour insists that British occupation is clearly good for the native population. He speaks as a result on behalf of Britain or, indeed, the civilized world, at the same time as he speaks for the Egyptians. Similarly, Said goes on to trace overlapping preconceptions in Lord Cromer’s discourse on Egypt, even if this is based not on abstract knowledge but on the day-to-day experience of managing the colony. Cromer too insists on Britain’s supposedly superior knowledge of the country and of what is right for its inhabitants. This assumption is backed up by a gamut of stereotypes of Orientals or Arabs as gullible as well as cunning, and lethargic as well as dishonest. Political discussions of the role of Britain overseas are in this way underpinned by a reservoir of knowledge, and Said also argues that this justified in advance the colonial project (although it is perhaps noteworthy that in the introduction he affirmed rather that it served to prop up the mission once it was in place). In any case, the colonial presence is shown to be intricately bound up with a history of contacts, of voyages of discovery and the preconceptions that emerge from these, all achieved against the background of a belief that Europe was necessarily in a position of strength. 86

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If Orientalism is conceived as a drive for knowledge of the other, that knowledge is structured by a set of images that serve to encapsulate and classify its object. Islam, for example, is a focal point for the Orientalist, and comes to symbolize barbarism, fanaticism and terrorism. The Orientalist seizes on preconceptions such as these and uses them to define the entire religion and the culture that accompanies it, so that the Orientalizing gesture is at the same time one of reduction. Even with the development of the understanding of Islam in the West, the Orientalist still strives to manage and domesticate the image of the Islamic other. Said argues as a result that the Orientalist “will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or simply to be, reality” (Said 1995: 72). Napoleon’s desired conquest of Egypt, for example, was bound up with a claim both to know and understand the Muslims, together with the belief that a colonial mission could teach them the evidently superior ways of the French. Furthermore, Said argues that from this point on, Orientalist discourse developed to the extent that it lost its descriptive realism and hinged itself on the wholesale creation of the Oriental other: “the Orient as reconstructed, reassembled, crafted, in short, born out of the Orientalists’ efforts” (ibid.: 87). Subsequent writers such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine and Flaubert all learn from these creations, these stylized simulacra, as indeed did more scientific projects such as Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Suez Canal in its endeavour to bring together East and West. Said’s analysis of the vast scope of Orientalism is juxtaposed with an examination of its representational structures in the work of a series of writers and thinkers. During the eighteenth century, four elements linked the structure of Orientalist discourse, all of which will later be parodied in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1999). These four elements include the expansion of the territory to which the term “Orient” referred, the contribution of historians as well as travellers to Orientalist representation, the sympathetic perception of a coherent spirit within the Orient and, finally, the drive towards classification. These structures at the same time contributed to the secularization of Orientalism, so that it was no longer simply a question of Islam versus Christianity, even if old religious patterns continued to enter into the Orientalist vision. Said also now associates the Orientalist drive with the “mission civilisatrice” and with a move towards modernization: “the modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished” (ibid.: 121). Said’s most controversial example of such a modernist belief in the West foucault and said

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as the harbinger of progress can be found in his discussion of Marx, in which he locates a contradiction between repugnance towards the treatment of the exploited natives and the persistent belief in the historical necessity of Britain’s transformation of Indian society. Ahmad criticizes Said’s reading of Marx, arguing that the former paints a dismissive and reductive portrait of Marx’s complex writing on India. Nevertheless, the example allows Said to reveal the creeping of Orientalist beliefs even into non-Orientalist, secular modern discourse. The exoticism of nineteenth-century discourses on the Orient is conjured most colourfully in Said’s readings of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Gérard de Nerval and Flaubert. For Chateaubriand, for example, again the Oriental’s voice and experience are of little importance, and “what matters about the Orient is what it lets happen to Chateaubriand, what it allows his spirit to do, what it permits him to reveal about himself, his ideas, his expectations” (ibid.: 173). Texts such as René and Atala, as well as the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, testify, even more, to the author’s desire to absorb and consume what he sees. Lamartine surveys the Orient from a similar position of assumed knowledge and portrays Oriental territory as “‘waiting anxiously for the shelter’ of European occupation” (ibid.: 179). For Nerval and Flaubert, on the other hand, the Orient was “not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility” (ibid.: 181). In this sense Nerval and Flaubert depart from orthodox Orientalism because they are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge, but experience these limits as a source of seduction and allure. For Nerval, the Orient is a place of sexual intrigue, the locus of a mysterious and desirable femininity, although the female sexual object always nevertheless exceeds his grasp. Flaubert’s writing on the Orient is so rich and complex as to be difficult to summarize, but Said nevertheless finds within it the repeated confrontation between the search for an exotic spectacle and the actual discovery of “decrepitude and senescence” (ibid.: 185). If the notebooks betray disappointment, works such as Salammbô set about reconstructing the image of Oriental glory. At the same time, like Nerval, Flaubert and his characters Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau associate the Orient with sexual desire, erotic energy and discovery. Said notes Flaubert’s self-consciousness and complexity, however, but tends to underplay the irony that pervades his writing: his knowing depiction of the Orientalist vision as both seductive and reductive. In the final section of Orientalism, Said moves away from literary criticism into a discussion of the prevalence of Orientalist discourse in the more recent cultural context, within both academe and the media. 88

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Orientalism is now conceived not just as a discourse prevalent at the particular historical moment of colonial expansion, but as a tradition and a doctrine affirming the superiority of the West that continues to hold sway. Said notes that the Orientalist study of Islam lags behind the rest of the human sciences in its retention of retrograde assumptions and cursory methodology. Even more, since the Second World War and in the wake of the Arab–Israeli wars, the Arab is increasingly and repeatedly stereotyped. Arabs are blamed for oil shortages, and it is seen as a sign of injustice that many countries with oil reserves should be populated by Arabs. The Arab is also “the disrupter of Israel and the West’s existence”, an obstruction in the creation of Israel in 1948 and “a shadow that dogs the Jew” (ibid.: 286). Equally, Orientalist images now are not only the preserve of popular culture, but continue according to Said to be propagated by academics. Even The Cambridge History of Islam published in 1970 is vague and methodologically flawed, and contains a multitude of misconceptions about the religion as well as its history. Said’s at times virulent attack on contemporary Western representations of Islam is also developed just a few years later in Covering Islam (1981), a rather more journalistic text railing against the reductive and ignorant perception of Islam as propagated by the media. Here again, Said criticizes the use of clichés and labels, the construction of Islam as a monolithic entity and the association of that entity with hostility and fear. This ignorance about Islam is particularly pernicious in the United States, where the religion is connected for many Americans solely with issues such as oil, the wars in Afghanistan and Iran, and terrorism. Said in this way traces the development of Orientalist discourse all the way from Aeschylus to modern journalism, and this identification of continuity creates a powerful polemic against the destructive effects of what Nandy might have dubbed “inferior knowledge”. One of the frequent criticisms levelled against Said, however, is precisely that his concept of Orientalist discourse is vast and generalized, and that the discussion glosses over differences between distinct types of Orientalist discourse. Said does trace shifts and variations as he works through his series of examples, but his argument is precisely that Orientalism is a superficial appropriation of multiple and distinct others into the broad schema of the superior West pitted against the inferior East. It is nonetheless true that the overarching framework of Orientalism encourages a synthetic view of how various types of Orientalist discourses operate. The critique of Flaubert, for example, distinguishes him from Chateaubriand and Lamartine, but underlines the exoticism of his vision of the Orient and fails to draw attention to his subversive irony. foucault and said

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The text of Orientalism tends to subsume its intricate examples into an all-consuming, homogenizing framework at the expense of potential subtleties and dislocations within individual instances of Orientalist discourse. In this sense Said’s Orientalism differs from the forms of discourse theorized by Foucault, since Foucault’s point was precisely to analyse discontinuities and ruptures within the larger system. For Said, conversely, although Orientalist discourse does mutate and develop, what is far more striking is the persistence of outworn structures and approaches in modern forms of Orientalism, and it is the broad, continuous sweep of the Orientalist vision that prevails. It is for this reason that Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, and its tendency to homogenize and separate discourses of reason from examples of unreason, might equally be applied to Said. Just as reason cannot exclude the irrational other, the discourse of Orientalism is permeated with ambivalence, with internal dissent. Bhabha denounces this false unity and smoothness in Said’s portrayal of Orientalism, and theorizes on the contrary the dislocations within Western culture. This criticism of Orientalism’s false unity can also be linked to the objection levelled by more materialist critics that Said’s analysis is insufficiently historical and empirical, and risks occluding specific contextual differences in the discourses examined. A further difficulty with Said’s analysis in Orientalism is that it does not accord space to the natives’ response. The Subaltern Studies historians drew our attention to the risk that academic discourse can speak in the place of the colonized other, but Said himself criticizes Orientalist discourse without discussing how those misrepresented by that discourse might have answered back. Moreover, Said does not only silence the voices of the exploited and subjugated, but also those of the colonized country’s elite. Ahmad denounces this omission from Said’s work, and argues that Orientalism “examines the history of Western textualities about the non-West quite in isolation from how these textualities might have been received, accepted, modified, challenged or overthrown by the intelligentsias of the colonized countries” (1992: 172). Furthermore, in his position of exile Said appears to set himself up as a privileged observer, and he reminds us at the beginning of Orientalism that it was his experience of racism in America that fuelled the writing of the book. Nevertheless, Said is clearly extremely well educated and attained a comfortable, accepted position within the Western academy, and his identification with the marginalized and the disenfranchised can be seen to have become a little tenuous. As a result, it is not clear that Said can distinguish himself from the producers of coercive discourse 90

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that he describes and, indeed, his analysis might be accused of the same drive towards occlusion as those he takes as the object of his critique. Finally, however, there remains an underlying ambiguity in Orientalism concerning the notion of the “Orient” at its heart, and this ambiguity troubles his concept of an anti-colonial response. Young points out that Said at times suggests that Orientalist discourse misrepresents the Orient, that it deforms and distorts a place and a people that actually exist. At others, however, Said implies that there is no “real” Orient, since the signifier applies only to a fantasy, an idea with no foundation outside its own construction. “Orientalist” at once occludes some real or authentic feature of the Orient, and fabricates an image of a locus that does not really exist. This difficulty in turn problematizes the question of whether or not there could be an alternative to the forms of representation that Said denounces. If Orientalism misconceives a real Orient, then some reference to an alternative, corrected version might have been helpful. However, if the Orient is only ever a product of discourse, then any suggested alternative would also be a construction and, although it would be significant and informative if this were produced by a native rather than by the colonizer, this construction could not be taken necessarily as an accurate representation of the real. Both Orientalists and their dissenters propose structures and modes of writing rather than mimetic representative forms that can encapsulate the Orient as a single, identifiable culture or place. By the time of Culture and Imperialism, however, Said addresses these questions, includes a whole chapter on narratives of resistance and proposes a subtle and informative understanding of “contrapuntal” textuality. By now no work can be seen to be representative of one thing, “East” and “West” are not configured into a stark binary opposition, and resistance is figured as a process of discursive negotiation and exchange.

Culture and Imperialism Culture and Imperialism was published a number of years after Orientalism, in 1993, and sets out at once to expand and develop its scope, and to fill its gaps. First, this later work no longer focuses exclusively on the Middle East, as Orientalism did, but examines a larger pattern in discourses and representations of Europe’s overseas territories. The study includes writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia and the Caribbean, and traces persistent tendencies to conceive these lands as the other of the metropolitan centre. Secondly, Said notes that foucault and said

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he omitted to address the question of resistance in Orientalism, and affirms now that “there was always some form of active resistance and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out” (Said 1993: xii). Said again departs from Foucault in this renewed attention to movements of resistance, and argues in The World, the Text, the Critic (1984) that one of the deficiencies of Foucault’s thinking is that the system of power it proposes is so all-encompassing. This awareness of widespread resistance means that in this work Said both spends time reading the colonized’s responses to colonialism, and becomes more attentive to the uncertainties and ambivalences operating in metropolitan representations of the colonies. While in Orientalism the implication was that a writer or thinker was either Orientalist or was not, in Culture and Imperialism key figures such as Joseph Conrad are revealed to be at once critical of and complicit with colonial discourse. Said at the same time develops his argument from Orientalism concerning the link between culture and politics, and in this instance argues specifically for the political inflections of narrative. While culture on one level retains relative autonomy from economics, politics and social issues, on another level Said asserts that narrative nevertheless shapes and reflects back ideas on material conditions and empirical events. For Said: the main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future – these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. (Ibid.: xiii) Cultural narratives are in this sense not entirely divorced from the context in which they are produced, culture should not be “antiseptically quarantined from its worldly affiliations”, and the novels that Said takes as his focus are shown quite manifestly to absorb, reproduce and reshape the imperial process of which they are necessarily a part (ibid.: xv). Furthermore, the mechanics of empire depend on the idea of empire as it is constructed in metropolitan society, and it is by means of culture and narrative that that idea is developed and disseminated. The range of texts examined by Said in Culture and Imperialism is once again vast, but a few arresting examples will be worth noting for their demonstration of a certain ambivalence towards the colonial project. Conrad, for example, is significant for Said because his work is 92

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at once progressive and reactionary. His vision does not have the smooth certainty Said found in Orientalist discourse, but turns out to be at war with itself. In depicting Marlow’s African journey in Heart of Darkness, Conrad emphasizes not only his adventures but also his telling of the story to British listeners, and the contingency of the narrative suggests that despite the impression given of the power of colonialism, that power is limited to the specific situation and moment of the telling. Said argues that there are two possible postcolonial responses to Heart of Darkness: one would perceive in it a depiction of sovereign imperialism at its height, whereas the other would stress that its historical specificity also implies that it will at some point come to an end. In Said’s words: since Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo), he permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be. (1993: 28) In addition, Said shows that Conrad’s narrators are self-conscious: they worry about colonialism rather than buying into it without question, and this anxiety hints at the unconscious presence of creeping doubts. Conrad offers Said a particularly subversive example of a simultaneous complicity with and undermining of colonialism, but many of Said’s less provocative readings in Culture and Imperialism also do not set out to blame those authors who reproduce aspects of colonial discourse in their texts. Written at the quasi-official period of empire in India but also at the moment when its demise was becoming apparent, Kipling’s Kim expresses great affection for the native Indians but supports the colonial mission unquestioningly. Kipling genuinely considers the British presence in India to function in the interests of the Indians themselves, and although his work appears to be riven with contradictions in its affiliation with both Indians and British, colonialism was the dominant ideology at the time of Kipling’s upbringing, and he had inevitably absorbed it as part of the status quo. The text cannot help but reproduce this ideology, even though its author was at the same time committed to living alongside the natives, and treating them with the utmost benevolence. Similarly, in his discussion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park Said argues that structures of domestic authority mirror the colonial relation between Britain and Antigua, but this is at the same time a testimony to how imperialism functioned in British society at the foucault and said

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time. Austen’s depiction may contain irony, and yet “Austen reveals herself to be assuming (just as Fanny assumes, in both senses of the word) the importance of an empire to the situation at home” (Said 1993: 106). Said’s reading of Camus equally shows how, born in Algeria, Camus inherited uncritically beliefs that the French belong in North Africa, even though history was beginning to overtake him. Camus clings to Algeria because it is his homeland, and perhaps, like Kipling or even Austen, he grew up believing that the colonial presence was simply a given, part of the natural order of things, even though he lived at the tail end of the colonial epoch. This complicity becomes highly fraught with the start of the Algerian War of Independence, and yet Camus continued to believe passionately in harmony and communion with the Arabs. He was for Said “a moral man in an immoral situation”, utterly defined by France’s mission in Algeria and lost when the validity of that mission was thrown into question (ibid.: 210). One of the distinctions of Culture and Imperialism is nevertheless that it theorizes the production of narratives of resistance, and Said explores not only testimonies of local anti-colonialism but signs of dissent within metropolitan texts. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India portrays Indian animosity towards the colonial presence, even though the novel tries at the same time to underplay signs of a deeper conflict between colonizer and colonized. Other forms of ambivalence are found in texts by indigenous authors, since ostensibly anti-colonial writers at times model their works on colonial and metropolitan texts. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North mirrors Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Césaire’s Une Tempête is evidently a rewriting of the Shakespeare play. Writers such as these subversively rework the original in order to represent the perspective of the colonized and the oppressed, but the works are necessarily “contrapuntal” in their engagements with both sides. More militantly, Fanon is heralded as a thinker who calls for the destruction of the binary opposition between colonizer and colonized and the establishment of a new form of history that would bridge the gap between black and white. Said notes Fanon’s ambivalence towards nationalism, and also refers in this context to Chatterjee’s observation that even as it set out to specify the difference of the colonized, nationalism borrowed its ethic from the influence of the power it set out to overthrow. This argument serves not to undermine the gesture of resistance but to support Said’s overriding belief in ongoing cultural interaction, and in the necessity of understanding the porosity of cultural frontiers in the wake of colonialism. Said does not examine how the subaltern might come to achieve a position of agency, and he does note the paradoxical role of intellectuals such 94

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as Guha, and surely himself, who simultaneously want to attend to the subaltern while their work is conditioned by their upbringing within an elite. Despite these difficulties, Said’s aim is to outline a broad notion of resistance as working both within and against imperialist modes of representation, and in this sense his work learns from poststructuralism (perhaps, again, from Derrida’s critique of Foucault). Said’s endeavour in this work is to demonstrate precisely that “no one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind” (Said 1993: 407). Said’s embrace of cultural mixing is rooted in his ethical resistance to an ontology of mastery, whereby the dominant self defines the other by means of the hegemonic discourse and uses that definition to tyrannize the other and restrict his or her freedom. Controversially, however, Said then distances himself from any passing deconstructive influence even as he draws on some of its methods. He formulates the ethical requirement that we remain open to the other’s difference and, indeed, to the other as internally multiple and hybridized, in terms of a belief in a common humanity. At the end of Orientalism, Said states that “in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed to see it as human experience” (Said [1978] 1995: 328). The conclusion of Culture and Imperialism similarly suggests that “human life” is not about separation and distinctiveness (1993: 408), and in Covering Islam Said laments that it is specifically the “human dimension” of Islam that is constantly overlooked (1981: 135). Even the more militant analysis in The Question of Palestine (1979) retains as one of its goals the call for attention to the human experience of Palestinians. Finally, the posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism argues that it is possible to criticize humanism in the name of humanism, and conceives a new form of humanism based on openness to other cultures: “humanism … must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind of testimony that doesn’t make it onto the reports” (2004: 81). This return to the notion of the human clearly has an ethical function here, since in recognizing the humanity of the other, the self no longer conceives that other as an object but as self-creating and endlessly developing. The term is a problematic one, however: it suggests the restoration of an undeconstructed subject position, and its universalism has been perceived as somewhat empty and banal. The humanist perspective is also denounced for its evident androcentrism: it is a category that tends to be equated foucault and said

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with “man” and excludes “woman”. The human is a notion that has been criticized for its dissimulation of feminine experience beneath the mask of a discourse that refers ostensibly to men. Despite the risk of androcentrism in Said’s use of the notion of the human, it is worth noting in passing that his work has in fact had a considerable influence on gender studies within postcolonialism. Orientalist discourse involved not only the reductive drive to “know” the Oriental other, but also the exoticist fantasy of the Oriental woman’s mysterious sexual allure. Although philosophers such as Fanon and Nandy emphasized the colonizer’s image of the sexually potent black man or the virile Indian native, Said’s concept of Orientalism allowed subsequent thinkers to develop their understanding of the particular oppression of women by the colonial gaze. Said does not dwell on this at length himself, and it has been observed that his readings of female writers such as Austen do not take into account sufficiently the ways in which women writers related differently to the dominant discourse of imperialism, but it is clear that his work has provided a theoretical backdrop against which the representation of colonized women can be assessed. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1987), for example, is a collection of colonial postcards of North African women, and Alloula’s analysis explores the colonizer’s overt obsession with the Oriental harem. The postcards of veiled women, and later of unveiled women in erotic poses often displaying their breasts for the pleasure of the viewer, testify to the male colonizer’s desire for sexual as well as territorial possession. The role of sexuality in the colonial project, the drive to penetrate the colony via its seductive and alluring females, is hinted at in Said’s work and further explored by Alloula. In addition, anti-colonial writers such as Assia Djebar set out to recreate the image of the colonized woman as a result at once of this sexual violence and of this fetishized mode of representation. Finally then, despite the risk of a latent androcentrism lingering in Said’s retention of the notion of the human, his work paves the way for a more developed examination of the position of women in colonial discourse and postcolonial theory. Circumspection is undoubtedly necessary in regenerating the concept of humanity as an ethical category, but in Said’s use of this concept there is also, nevertheless, an urgent call for recognition of a shared freedom and a shared communality in defiance of colonial structures of power and knowledge. A deeply flawed concept, the human still serves Said as a basis on which to construct his demand for universal emancipation together with his celebration of “contrapuntal” mixing, and the advantages of the term are indeed that it 96

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necessitates an understanding of the other in ethical terms. This humanism remains oddly unheeding of deconstructive conceptions of the subject constructed and disseminated in language, but retains a curious merit here in its desperate call for an ethical response. Said’s notion of a common humanity demands an awareness of the basic requirements of freedom and of the ability to create oneself independent of imposed structures of mastery and imperialist knowledge. The conception of the other as human functions as an antidote to Orientalist objectification and reification, and implies an understanding of the residue or the excess that lies beyond the scope of those gestures of oppression and tyranny. Said’s humanism lacks the militancy of that of Fanon or Sartre, and he perhaps never solves the problem that his perspective on the human is necessarily inseparable from his comfortable position within Western academic discourse. Said’s ongoing privileging of the intellectual equally accords the latter a special status that could be seen to be at odds with his claimed emancipatory universalism. There is nevertheless in his persistent and daring tenacity with regard to the concept of the human a crucial and influential alternative to the “bad ethics” implicit in colonialism’s “inferior knowledge”.

Key points • Foucault explores the relation between power and knowledge, and uses the examples of madness, the prison system and sexuality to show how discourse can serve to prop up relations of subjugation. He has been criticized for not himself examining colonial discourse, but his methodology is highly relevant to postcolonialism. • Said draws explicitly on Foucault in his exposition of Orientalist discourse. For Said, Orientalism is the academic study of the Orient, but it is also a set of images or a way of thinking about the Orient that supports the West’s dominance over the East. • Culture and Imperialism expands on Orientalism by examining a broader range of colonial territories and, crucially, by including exploration of the native’s resistance. The analysis is also distinctive because it draws out the ambivalence towards the colonial project of writers such as Conrad, Kipling and Camus. • Said recommends constant attention to the “contrapuntal” meeting of cultures, but his thinking is also deeply humanist. His postcolonial humanism calls for an ethical awareness of the other’s difference. foucault and said

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five

Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics

The postcolonial thinkers discussed so far have all articulated a clear set of political goals and have tended to tie their writing to some form of direct political activism. Fanon and Gandhi were major revolutionary figures, Sartre and Said both combined academic work with political journalism, and Foucault and the Subaltern Studies Collective gave historiography a militant political agenda. Yet within the series of thinkers outlined so far it is nevertheless possible to discern an increasing interest in culture, language and the “politics” of representation, and it is to this more “textualist” postcolonialism that this chapter will turn via an exploration of Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha. These latter philosophers do not overlook the political, although the controversy surrounding their degree of political efficacy will be examined later, but it is nonetheless indisputable that their postcolonial critique is directed not so much against individual regimes as against the ethnocentrism of Western metaphysics. Derrida and Bhabha target not the mechanics of colonial exploitation in Algeria or India but the structure of the Western epistēmē, which positions the European subject at the centre and subordinates other cultures. This analysis of the Western philosophical tradition and its configuration of self and other may have a political dimension but, unlike the work of militants such as Fanon and Sartre, the objective is not political liberation (Derrida and Bhabha in any case write after the decolonization of many overseas territories in the 1950s and 1960s), but the creation of a postcolonial ethics. Derrida and Bhabha invite their readers to question assumptions of European hegemony, to rethink the relation between self and other and to 98

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conceptualize differently the creation of that relation through language. They deconstruct the mastery of the subject and the assimilation or rejection of the other by the dominant discourse, and they insist on an ethical relation of openness to mobile and potentially intractable forms of difference. In this sense they help to think through the shift identified by David Scott in Refashioning Futures (1999) between the moment of decolonization and postcolonial ethics. Derridean philosophy is deeply indebted to Levinasian ethics, and although Bhabha engages only fleetingly with Levinas, his thought learns from the latter’s conceptions of Infinity and alterity in turn via Derrida. Both philosophers, like Levinas, respond to violence by undermining the totalitarianism of a certain type of metaphysics and by conceiving the relation between beings as the necessary confrontation with, and acceptance of, plurality or the unknowable. In moving away from militant or activist postcolonialism, moreover, the achievement of these thinkers is not only the application of Levinasian ethics to postcolonial debate but a deeper questioning of the nature of postcolonial philosophy. Derrida and Bhabha do not analyse the specifics of any given regime; they interrogate the structure of thinking behind colonialism in general, and in this sense their work is more properly philosophical than that of those who investigate historically the exploitation of particular regimes. At the same time, however, Derrida raises the question of whether such a universalizing analysis can account both for the specific experiences of Algerians, indeed of Algerian Jews, and for the infinitely singular responses of distinct subjects. Philosophy conventionally involves abstraction from the concrete and the construction of universals that transcend the specific, but postcolonial critique must be both historically grounded on some level and, crucially, engaged with the singular marginalized subjects that colonial thinking precisely set out to oppress. Indeed, the very ethnocentric gesture that Derrida denounces is one that subsumes the other into an apparently universalized framework, and the colonial mission also in practical terms rests on the belief that colonial culture can assimilate native practices. Derrida encourages us to ask how postcolonial philosophy might both accomplish the philosophical gesture of abstraction or universalization, and attend to the singularities that were occluded precisely by that gesture of assimilation in the colonial context. Bhabha also sketches a new conception of “theory”, and suggests that marginalized subjectivities precisely exceed the boundaries of established discourses: those of colonialism, nationalism and, potentially, the philosopher himself. This means that “theory” itself must be a force of questioning, a heterogeneous process derrida and bhabha

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of ethical and potentially political contestation, rather than a claim for secure knowledge.

Derrida, ethnocentrism and colonialism Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, near Algiers, into a family of Algerian Jews. He went to school at the local collège and then lycée, although he was traumatically excluded for two years, when the Vichy government deprived Algerian Jews of their French citizenship during the Second World War. Eventually returning to school in 1944, he read French philosophy, and passed his baccalauréat in 1948. He then went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, then on to the École Normale Supérieure, and passed the agrégation in 1956. He visited Harvard University, completed his military service, finished his thesis and went on to publish an introduction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry in 1962. The major works Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference were published in 1967, and Margins of Philosophy followed quickly in 1972. Derrida did not explicitly address the question of colonialism, and indeed his own upbringing in Algeria, until much later in his career, and his most sustained treatment of this subject matter is The Monolingualism of the Other, published as recently as 1996. It is important, however, that despite this initial reticence about Algeria, notions of excentricity and decentring have nevertheless been “central” to Derrida’s thought from the beginning. Derrida’s work has always been concerned with alterity, with the supplementary traces accompanying the main thrust of philosophical discourses, and the decentring of those discourses through attention to “other” allusions within them. This gesture is associated with the dismantling of the hegemony of “Western” philosophy and its self-deluding ethnocentrism, and with a demand for increased attention to the other that “the West” ignores or leaves out. “The West” is, as a result, itself a concept that must be undermined and denounced for its false self-presence and assumed security. Indeed, it can be argued that poststructuralist scepticism towards apparent hierarchies and institutional divisions was already rooted in postcoloniality, in the collapse of colonial ideology as announced by the atrocities of the Algerian war. Deconstruction is not just an unravelling of “philosophical thought” in general, but precisely an overturning of “Western thought”, its denial of its hidden supplements, its conceptual and cultural alterity. Of Grammatology is one of Derrida’s first works to offer a critique that could be conceived as “postcolonial”. Here Derrida explores the 100

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“Western” concept of language as associated with the voice, self-presence and immediacy, and he reveals this as both deluded and ethnocentric. Logocentrism is the affirmation of presence in language: it names the privileging of phonetic writing, in which meaning is apparently unmediated and perfectly captured. This phonetic writing assumes that speech is primary, since it depends on the controlling presence of the speaker, and writing then mimics or follows speech, claiming in turn to signify presence. Derrida locates this privileging of the logos in philosophers from Plato to Hegel, and goes on to trace its development in Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau. His purpose, however, is not only to unravel a certain myth of language as the signifier of presence, but also to show that this is an ideology that both predominates specifically in “the West”, and excludes and denies the cultural others that it cannot contain. For Derrida: phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technological, and economic adventure of the West, is limited in space and time and limits itself even as it is in the process of importing its laws upon the cultural areas that escaped it. (1976: 10) Logocentrism offers an illusion of presence, as if to signify control over meaning, but Derrida argues that this ideology fails to admit its own situatedness, and the intractable, unassimilable meanings that lie beyond its reach. To translate this into the terms of Levinasian ethics, Derrida’s endeavour will be to supplement logocentric philosophy with an ethical call for attention to the Infinity it claims to totalize. Derrida asserts that in Saussure’s work, for example, the spoken language is coupled with phonetic writing, but any traces of the nonphonetic are seen as interruptions, moments of disturbance that unsettle the transparency of the logos, but do not upset his privileging of its rule. These interruptions are unruly traces of an otherness that resides beyond the reach of a clearly “Western” desire for presence, but that Saussure is at pains to relegate to the margins. Derrida’s next example is Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1976), in which he similarly sees a privileging of a specifically “Western” conception of writing. LéviStrauss analyses the “society without writing” (Derrida 1976: 109) of the Nambikwara of Brazil, but Derrida argues that this analysis relies on a separation of speech and writing that is ethnocentric. Lévi-Strauss argues that the tribe’s authentic oral culture is occluded by the colonial presence and its distribution of printed texts but, in spite of itself, this derrida and bhabha

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critique hinges on the very privileging of the logos central to Western thought. Lévi-Strauss refuses to conceive of “drawing lines” as a form of writing, and also conserves the immediacy and self-presence of speech by naively distinguishing it from the supplementary structure of writing. The upshot is a fantasized vision of the Nambikwara’s innocence fuelled by a specifically European privileging of mastery and self-presence in speech. Derrida’s conclusion is that: to recognise writing in speech, that is to say the différance and the absence of speech, is to begin to think the lure. There is no ethics without the presence of the other, and consequently, without absence, dissemination, detour, différance, writing. (1976: 139–40) An adherence to a narrow, restricted conception of speech constitutes a denial of the trace, of the alterity, that structures all writing. This ties in with the “Western” myth of the certainty and hegemony of the logos. Derrida’s other important reading of Lévi-Strauss, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, develops this charge of ethnocentrism and broadens it further to deconstruct the very structures that shape and define “Western” thought. Derrida begins by identifying the persistent “centre” that structures the “Western” epistēmē. This centre serves to give thought a point of presence, a fixed origin, and although it grounds thought it also remains outside the structure it creates. Paradoxically, “the concept of centred structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of play” (Derrida 1978: 279). Up to a point, Lévi-Strauss also relies on this concept of a centre as he persists in seeking to systematize his investigations of other cultures. In the course of his researches, however, Lévi-Strauss later finds that this mythical “centre” is necessarily an illusion, and that his practice as an anthropologist instead resembles “bricolage”: the use of various instruments of analysis without the positing of an originary ground or centre. This process is then itself subject to mythologization, but the analysis allows Derrida to show that anthropology, while devoted to the study of the other, has relied on the “Western” construction of a centre, although this centre is always in tension with the “play” that escapes it. Interpretation as a result can proceed in two ways: it can continue to pursue its own centre, or relinquish that 102

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search entirely in favour of an embrace of the play of signs. Once again, Derrida’s implication here is that anthropology, the very science of the other, has difficulty in remaining open to that other, to its intricacies and singularities, and has repeatedly relied on foundations conceived by the ethnocentric anthropologist and not the object of enquiry. Later, in the “White Mythology” (in Margins of Philosophy), Derrida again undermines the self-created security of the “Western” episteme. Derrida argues that “Western” metaphysics has systematically effaced the ethnocentric origin and myth on which it rests. White mythology claims the originary and centred status of its discourse and, in so doing, denies the self-supporting fabrication of its idiom. The impact of Derrida’s initial deconstruction of ethnocentrism on postcolonialism is significant and wide-ranging, and will emerge explicitly in my discussions of Bhabha, Khatibi and Spivak. Young is one of the first thinkers to explore the links between Derridean deconstruction and postcolonial critique and, indeed, asserts that the inauguration of poststructuralism was not the upheavals of May 1968 but the Algerian War of Independence. From this point of view, texts such as Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference can be read as a new response to the collapse of empire and the effects of that collapse on metaphysics. Derrida’s early intervention into the question of postcolonialism is not, however, without its difficulties, and has been conceived by a number of critics to backfire. In the most general terms, the work is seen to be excessively “textualist”, in the sense that the reflection on language is disengaged from colonial politics and inadequate to the demands of a rigorous political critique. I shall return to this question of Derrida’s politics shortly, but for the moment it is worth noting that Marxist postcolonial thinkers such as Parry have little patience with the convolutions of the links between Derridean philosophy and actual colonial regimes. Furthermore, Azzedine Haddour offers a detailed critique of Derrida’s deconstructive gestures in Of Grammatology and Dissemination (1981), and suggests that the insistence on play obscures specific differences, such as those of the colonized. This erosion of specific differences then prevents the marginalized from forming a distinct community as a symbol of resistance to the imposed culture. Haddour complains that “to reduce difference to a play through which the subject of Western metaphysics is constituted is to deny difference its agency and subjectivity” (2000: 158). Dissemination is even, according to Haddour, akin to the colonial policy of assimilation, and the universalism of Derrida’s thinking at the same time, problematically, makes all forms of oppression appear the same. derrida and bhabha

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Spivak offers a more specific critique of Of Grammatology in her translator’s preface. Spivak notes first that Derrida’s conception of “writing” risks elevating the term to the status of a transcendental signifier, and secondly that Derrida retains a rather facile association between logocentrism and the West. And although he fleetingly discusses Chinese writing in the first part of the text, for the most part he fails to consider the role and position of the East. Rey Chow develops this critique in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), and argues that Of Grammatology oddly insists on maintaining a certain boundary between East and West. Derrida argues that Chinese is not phonetic but ideographic but, according to Chow, this conception of the Chinese language is mythical, and related to popular stereotypes surrounding the “inscrutable Chinese”. Consequently, Derrida retains “a rhetorical essentialism whereby the East is typecast as difference, a difference that, moreover, is seen in the apparently selfcoincident or transparent form of the graphic, the ideogram” (Chow 2002: 63). In short, Derrida is guilty of categorizing and glossing over the other, just as Western metaphysics blindly occludes non-European difference. These observations and criticisms add useful nuance to Derrida’s thinking but, in spite of its shortcomings, the critique of ethnocentrism remains influential to postcolonialism because it suggests that colonialism operates within the very language of philosophy. Moreover, if Of Grammatology contains a persistent blindness towards Eastern cultures, the later exploration of colonialism in The Monolingualism of the Other appears as more acutely self-conscious concerning the difficulties of its own urge towards philosophical universalization. In The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida on one level sets out to deconstruct the ethnocentrism of any “sovereign” language and examines the alienation in language experienced by all speakers, including those who claim hegemony. The universalism of this argument serves to undermine the colonizer’s claim to mastery, since it reminds us that no speaker possesses his language and culture. Language always suppresses without extinguishing alterity, and Derrida denounces the “sovereignty whose essence is always colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressibly, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous” (1998: 39–40). The tyranny of colonial culture brings material violence, but it also reveals in condensed form the oppressiveness of any language and culture. At the same time, however, Derrida’s analysis here is clearly grounded in the specific context of the Algerian Jews and explores the community’s loss of French 104

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citizenship under the Vichy government, despite their monolingualism. Derrida repeats the refrain “I only have one language; it is not mine” to evoke the Algerian Jews’ specific sense of alienation and dispossession when the Vichy government forced them to perceive that their culture and language did not belong to them. Consequently it may never be possible to “inhabit” or “possess” a language and, indeed, as we saw in the discussion of Sartre, Derrida signals that the colonizer too is alienated: “the master is nothing. And he does not have exclusive possession of anything” (ibid.: 23). But the Algerian Jews experienced this dispossession in a traumatic manner when the Vichy government demonstrated in practical terms their non-belonging within the language they had thought was theirs. In this way, Derrida’s text shifts nervously between the universal and the specific, between a conceptual reflection on the relation of all beings to language and a historically grounded discussion of Algerian Jews during the Second World War. In exploring that shift, he asks us to consider the ways in which the colonizer, although fundamentally alienated, used his position to deny his own alienation and to concretize that of the other. In moving between these dimensions of the universal and the particular, however, the text deliberately asks more questions than it answers: is Algeria only an example of a universal difficulty, or is it unique in its brutal institutionalization of a generalized experience? Can the philosopher extrapolate from Algeria to theorize about the relation between language and sovereignty, or is that extrapolation a betrayal of Algeria’s uniqueness? How do Algerian Muslims fit in with Derrida’s discussion of Algerian Jews and colonialism more broadly? Postcolonial philosophy demands both that specific colonial experiences serve as an example of a broader conceptual phenomenon, and that that example announces itself as distinct from the law it nevertheless helps to elucidate. If Derrida discusses the specific experience of Algerian Jews in The Monolingualism of the Other, however, it is at the same time important that Jewishness is at no point conceived as the name for an identifiable and determinate community. Derrida may be drawing attention to the experiences of a particular group of people, but this sharing does not imply sameness, the determination of a resistant cultural collective. The Algerian Jews were at the same time cut off from Jewish culture, contaminated by Christian culture and internally fragmented. In a more recent essay on Jewishness entitled “Abraham, l’autre” (2003), Derrida explains that if he has not frequently mentioned his Judaism in his philosophy, this is because he belongs without belonging to both Jewish derrida and bhabha

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culture and religion. Once again, however, this raises the question of the dynamic interplay between the law and the example, since Derrida argues that Jewishness is defined by a resistance to communitarianism, by diaspora and dispersal. For this reason, he who appears to be the least Jewish is in fact the most Jewish. Jewishness cannot be manifested or claimed in an exemplary way, but this resistance to the claiming of exemplarity is nevertheless an exemplary characteristic of Jewishness. The Jews were the community who were specifically excluded under colonialism in Algeria, then, but their specificity lies in the absence of any claim for specificity. Indeed, the one text in which Derrida does explore his own Judaism, the fragmented musings of “Circonfession” (Circumfession) (in Bennington & Derrida 1993), explores the traumas of the mother’s death and of circumcision while making the identification of a clear subject position impossible. Derrida’s recourse to the specific in his reflection on the situation of Algerian Jews at the same time problematizes and disseminates that specificity. To return to The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida here too problematizes and moves beyond both the universal and the specific with a call for attention to a singular autobiographical subject. Derrida undermines the gesture of philosophical neutralization by incorporating scattered musings on his own singular past, so as to trouble his urge towards universalization. Nevertheless, these musings are not produced by a knowable individual, but express the intermittent anxieties of a fragmented, ghostly “I”, which in turn theorizes its evacuation from the exegesis. The text is haunted by singular traces of the writer’s “self ”, but which the writer can never catch up with and encapsulate. The turn to autobiography is an anxious expression of resistance to the universalization of postcolonial critique, but the text also never fully encapsulates the singular “I” of the enunciation. It is “an account of what will have placed an obstacle in the way of this auto-exposition for me” (Derrida 1998: 70). In a further twist, moreover, the work begins with the confession “I only have one language”, but the first person is already distinguished from any authorial voice because the quotation is set up as a hypothetical statement, analysed and unravelled in turn by a second apparently authorial voice. On one level, this further troubles the notion that the singular “I” of Derrida’s persona can be pinned down in language, but the “I” also, at the same time, acquires a certain philosophical generality, and the statement suggests once more that all speakers fail to possess their language. What might have been read as an autobiographical narrative of Derrida’s own experience of dispossession turns out to fall 106

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back into the universalist structure that the fleeting autobiographical references set out to problematize. The analysis of colonialism requires a resistance to the universal, but Derrida also refuses the identification of an authorial subject position that would over-determine him, so that the text is condemned to a constant and paradoxical movement against each stance it adopts. In its curious and irresolute shifting between the universal, the specific and the singular, The Monolingualism of the Other provocatively questions the practice of postcolonial philosophy and self-consciously signals its traps. Derrida’s postcolonialism undermines the colonizer’s erroneous claim to possess his language and either to assimilate or reject the marginalized but culturally diverse speakers of that language, and reveals instead the master’s hidden contingency and alienation. Having signalled this universal dispossession, however, Derrida pinpoints the particular experience of the Algerian Jews in being dispossessed of their citizenship and of a sense of belonging in language, although he uncovers at the same time the aporia between the need to present that experience as unique and its exemplification and concretization of the broader law. In drawing attention to the alienation brought about at a specific historical moment, moreover, Derrida also refuses to accord the Algerian Jewish community a false determinism that would once again tyrannize and totalize the singular differences of distinct Jews. Although revealing for a reflection on the open-ended community of Judaism, however, Derrida’s analysis somewhat problematically does not include discussion of the French oppression of Algerian Muslims and this raises further questions about the status of the universal. Finally, Derrida subverts both the gesture of philosophical generalization and the examination of a historical specificity further in his pursuit of a form of individuation that refuses positionality or the location of a theoretical norm. The singular “I” of Derrida’s own autobiographical project, and his endeavours at self-exploration, “let all my specters loose” (ibid.: 73). The Monolingualism of the Other displays the tension between “theory” itself and the necessity for a form of writing that does not fall into the same traps of totalization and determinism that colonial discourse set for the colonized. Derrida’s singularity, however, is necessarily depersonalized, with the result that that singularity once again, paradoxically, becomes universal. The text demonstrates in this way the contradictory demands of postcolonialism and the tensions inherent in the philosophical contemplation of the limits of colonial or totalizing thinking.

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Derrida’s ethics and politics It is perhaps already apparent that Derrida’s critique of ethnocentrism and colonialism is undertaken in the name of ethics. Moreover, Derrida has always been committed to exploring and developing Levinasian ethics not only by means of the deconstruction of ethnocentric metaphysics but also in his very reading strategies. Deconstruction is not just an engagement with Levinasian ethics, but performs that ethics in its careful attention to the other’s text and in its teasing out of hidden traces. Derrida’s reading practice is precisely concerned neither simply to repeat the premises of the original (this would not be ethical since it would reduce the text to the rule of the Same), nor to read into the other’s text meanings produced and imposed from the outside. Rather, the reading practice carried out across Derrida’s works consists in an ethical confrontation with the other’s discourse and a rigorous engagement with the potentially infinite meanings that linger beneath the surface of the writing. The text is conceived as a discourse in the Levinasian sense, in that it is not the communication of a specified message but a space of encounter and a forum for the pursuit of multiple allusions. This conception of an encounter with the text’s openness or Infinity, with the chains of associations that proliferate beneath the work’s artifice, can also be seen as an exploration of the Saying behind the statements of the Said. If the Said names the text’s ostensible content, then Derrida works away at the proliferating possibilities of the Saying, the traces of meaning that are not controlled and determined by the grasp of the Said. This reading practice devoted to the aspects of the text that appear to work against its apparent assertions is called clôtural reading, since it perceives the text’s closure at the same time as it ethically searches beyond that apparently enclosed framework of meaning. For Simon Critchley, “a clôtural reading analyses a text in terms of how it is divided against itself in both belonging to logocentric conceptuality and achieving the breakthrough beyond that conceptuality” (Critchley 1992: 30). Derrida’s readings in this way explore both the text’s primary content and the traces that exceed that content. Derrida offers several specific readings of Levinas, beginning most famously with the essay “Violence and Metaphysics” published in Writing and Difference. Importantly, however, this reading itself both explicates Levinas’s position in Totality and Infinity and works against the text’s grain. It is clear that, on one level, Derrida is wholly persuaded by Levinas’s thought, and in an interview in Altérités he affirms: “before a thought like that of Levinas, I never have any objection. I am ready 108

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to subscribe to everything he says” (1986: 74; my translation). Derrida nevertheless goes on to explain that this does not mean that he thinks in exactly the same way as Levinas and, indeed, “Violence and Metaphysics” also explores what might be conceived according to the later notion of the Saying, the traces of meaning that linger behind Levinas’s overt philosophical propositions. First, Derrida explores Levinas’s rejection of the metaphysics of Heideggerian ontology and its neutralization of the other. Having worked through this engagement with Heidegger, however, he proceeds to argue that Levinas in fact himself relies on a certain ontology in his understanding of the relation with the other. The face of the other is also a body and a being. Next, in interrogating Levinas’s relation with Husserl and the former’s insistence on the Infinity of alterity, Derrida discovers that Levinas’s “infinitely other” folds in on itself, since “being other than itself, it is not what it is. Therefore, it is not infinitely other, etc.” (1978: 185). Derrida rejects Levinas’s vocabulary of “scission” or division between the Same and the Other, since if being is divided it must also be at once Same and Other, and the opposition collapses. Levinas’s own language turns against him in forcing a rupture or an opposition at odds with the original thought. Levinas’s own metaphysics turns out to presuppose the transcendental phenomenology that it set out to overturn. Returning to the relation with Heidegger, Derrida then argues that Heidegger’s thought is in reality not so far from that of Levinas, that being is not in Heidegger the anonymous principle perceived by Levinas and that, indeed, ontology commands the respect of the other for what he is. Heideggerian ontology does not imply ethical violence, and Heideggerian being does not have the mastery Levinas perceived. For Derrida, then, ethics in purely Levinasian terms is impossible: Levinas’s attempt to write an ethical philosophy denies the ethical precepts it supports. Nevertheless, Derrida’s own reading is in a sense still faithful to Levinasian ethics, precisely because it troubles any potential systematization and uncovers the Saying beneath the seemingly rational philosophical account. Ethics emerges performatively in this reading encounter rather than by means of philosophical exposition. The Monolingualism of the Other and “Violence and Metaphysics” suggest, then, that an ethically aware philosophy does not set up secure proposals, but either self-consciously questions itself or emerges tentatively via reading. This philosophy attentive to otherness is also not a critique, implying a process of judgement, nor a method or system, but a sort of unfolding that must remain incomplete. If Derrida’s extraordinary gift lies in his meticulous, attentive readings both of himself and of the other, however, this ethical writing remains at one remove derrida and bhabha

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from the practical demands of politics and the creation of an active, political assertion or position. Following Levinas himself, Derrida for this reason separates politics and ethics, even though he insists that they must nevertheless be thought alongside one another. Ethics names the commitment to the form of reading summarized above: it is the patient engagement with infinity in discourse and an open-ended confrontation with alterity. Politics, on the other hand, requires decision-making, the creation of a specified standpoint and argument, and for Derrida works against the openness necessary for ethical thought. Returning to the question of Derrida’s contribution to postcolonialism, we find that he offers an ethical critique of ethnocentrism, and of the colonial, sovereign language, but perceives this as a process entirely distinct from the creation of a practical, anti-colonial resistance strategy. Such a coherent strategy remains beyond the boundaries of his project, and would work against the rigorous undermining of metaphysics and ethnocentrism that he conceives as the foundation for colonial thinking. This absence of a political strategy in Derrida’s thought does not mean that this is unthinkable for him, but that its demands would run counter to the ethics that he retains as his priority. Many of Derrida’s more politically oriented works explicitly theorize this division between ethics and politics and consequently uncover the aporia-fracturing concepts such as hospitality and democracy, which in turn can help to inform our understanding of his postcolonialism. In The Other Heading (1992), for example, Derrida’s analysis of Europe and of the conception of European hegemony ends with a series of dual requirements, a set of paradoxes necessary for a responsible understanding of the European community but severed by the contrasting demands of ethics and politics. Responsibility requires both that we conserve European memory and a sense of communal identity, and that Europe be conceived as open to all that exceeds her borders. A conception of Europe necessitates “this double contradictory imperative” that we open ourselves to all that exceeds reason without allowing politics itself to become irrational (1992: 79). So an ethical notion of Europe is one that explores its permeability and incompletion, but some conception of a shared culture and, indeed, of rationality is indispensable to the political functioning of Europe. More broadly, in The Politics of Friendship Derrida goes on to argue that democracy works as an (ethical) critique of totalitarianism because it privileges the differences between its participants, but it also relies on a political notion of community: “there is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without ‘the community of friends’ (koína 110

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ta philōn), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal” (1997: 22). This duality can be seen to inform Derrida’s postcolonialism, even if he does not theorize the aporia clearly in this context. An ethical anti-colonial critique requires an awareness of the singularities that exceed the colonial law, but a political resistance movement at the same time would rely on the formation of a working community. The Monolingualism of the Other attempts to engage with both levels, but the disjunction between them is one that the analysis struggles to smooth over. Derrida’s later writing on Levinas similarly displays this leap. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Derrida further elucidates Levinas’s concept of hospitality, and notes that for Levinas hospitality is unconditional and absolute. While the concept of hospitality relies on the existence of barriers, it also negates itself in its insistence on absolute openness and the absence of a need for consensus or commensurability. In On Hospitality (2000), moreover, Derrida separates the ethical “law” of hospitality, the unconditional demand that we accept and welcome any stranger, and the “laws” of hospitality, or practical conditions and functioning norms. The law of hospitality allows for the singularity of every visitor, whereas the laws of hospitality are built on workable codes and practical principles. Ethics, then, demands infinite openness, but politics rests on concrete issues arising from immigration law, citizenship and the granting of asylum. In this way Derrida suggests that Levinas’s concept of hospitality contains an aporetic split, but that, far from losing himself in an abstract and impracticable ethics, Levinas obliges us to continue to conceive this unconditional ethics even as we contemplate the political position of the stranger. Ethics and politics are radically distinct, even opposed, modes of reflection, and yet they must be thought alongside one another. Once again, this double bind within the concept of hospitality can serve to theorize also the duality in postcolonialism between an awareness of the singular migrant subject and the potential, necessary integration of that subject within the state. The aporetic structure of Derrida’s thinking on politics and ethics has been the subject of much controversy. According to Morag Patrick (1997), Derrida helps to reinvent the political because he shows that political thinking is not self-same, and that every decision glosses over the singular possibilities excluded by its remit. Geoffrey Bennington (2000) concedes that Derrida is not an activist but insists that his achievement is to inscribe alterity into the heart of political reflection. For Critchley (1992), conversely, Derrida’s work contains an impasse and fails to negotiate the treacherous path between ethics and politics, derrida and bhabha

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and certainly, as I have suggested, the direct translation of ethical philosophy into anti-colonial political critique is not attempted anywhere in Derrida’s work. Nevertheless, Critchley concludes his chapter on Derrida’s politics by returning to Levinas’s movement from the ethical relation to the intervention of the third party, and argues that this movement establishes a transition between the ethical relation and the question of multiple others, leading in turn to the contemplation of justice towards those others. This way of shifting from ethics to politics excludes totalitarian politics (for Levinas, National Socialism, but for our current purposes this could also be colonial sovereignty), and creates the foundation for a politics based on the acceptance of multiplicity and difference. There can be no doubt that Derrida’s contribution to postcolonialism is not as clearly politicized as that of Fanon, Sartre or Gandhi, but it is nevertheless crucial in its careful consideration of the contrasting ethics and politics that might inform postcolonial thought. His separation and juxtaposition of ethics and politics perhaps helps us to think again why Fanon’s militant call for decolonization in Algeria chimes discordantly with his universal humanism, for example, but it also encourages us to attend to both aspects of the work and to try to think them through together. Reading Fanon through Derrida, we can conceive the communitarianism of Fanon’s vision as a practical response that simultaneously includes, on another level, an awareness of Algerian multiplicity and the self-creation of each oppressed singular being. Derrida’s own political thinking is evidently never territorial, as Fanon’s intermittently is, and in apparently prioritizing ethics it does not help to theorize the reclaiming of the land from the hands of the oppressor. Derrida’s innovation is nevertheless his understanding of the simultaneous division and complicity between a conception of something like territorial politics and the ethical critique of totalitarianism. It is not possible, according to Derrida, to address the political and the ethical by the same means, but by tending to them at the same time on different levels we might come closer to an understanding of the complexity and multidimensionality of postcolonialism. The Monolingualism of the Other teaches us that a universalized deconstruction of claims for linguistic mastery reveals colonialism’s ethical transgression, but the discussion of the specific exclusion of Algerian Jews operates on another level, and the relation between these two levels remains uneasy. Derrida shows that postcolonialism cannot be a holistic critique; it must continually shift and negotiate between its divergent ethical and political requirements, but it is this dynamism that prevents the field from becoming programmatic 112

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and stops the critic from falling into complacency when contemplating an evolving and still traumatized field.

Homi Bhabha The work of Bhabha is perhaps best known for its explicit endeavour to combine poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Bhabha’s essays are littered with references to the work of Derrida, and many of his key concepts are taken from the latter’s philosophy. Colonial discourse, for example, is conceived as structured in spite of itself by the movement of the “supplement”, by chains of meaning that it cannot possess, and both colonial and colonized cultures are “deconstructed” by means of attention to their complex and deferred significatory processes. Similarly, Bhabha uses the concept of “dissemiNation” to explore how the construction of a national identity always covers over traces and patches of discrepant cultural meanings produced by that nation’s heterogeneous and plural people. His discussions of colonialism and resistance share with Derrida’s work a resistance to binary oppositions and a meticulous attention to the ambivalence underpinning any apparently fixed and assertive subject position. Bhabha adds to Derrida’s exploration of the overlap between ethnocentrism and logocentrism a further engagement with the mechanics of colonial power and with the ways in which minority voices trouble the hegemonic cultural and national discourses operating on them. Indeed, more than once he criticizes Derrida for remarking on colonialism only in passing, and for not paying sufficient attention to specific and determinate systems of oppression. Nevertheless, Bhabha’s more consistent attention to colonialism scarcely makes his thought more militantly politicized, and his focus remains, like that of Derrida, ethical or at least “ethical political”. Indeed, if much of Bhabha’s work is descriptive of the workings of colonial or migrant culture, he also frequently slips into prescription and stresses the ethical requirement that we “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as others of our selves” (Bhabha 1994: 39). He even, if fleetingly, draws on Levinas and argues that the notion of ethical proximity helps to unsettle notions of territoriality and national belonging. Bhabha was born into the small Parsi community of Bombay in 1949, and he has more than once emphasized that his was a minority culture. Nevertheless, having received his undergraduate degree from the (then) University of Bombay, he went on to do graduate work at Oxford University, taught at Sussex and Chicago, and now occupies the illustrious derrida and bhabha

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position of Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard. Critics have argued that his assimilation into the American academy and membership of the cultural elite, together with the abstraction of his writing style, distance him disastrously from the marginalized and oppressed subjects about whom he writes. Indeed, it is clear that Bhabha’s highly knowing and at times abstruse philosophy is not concerned with the conditions affecting colonized or migrant people’s everyday lives. Like Derrida, however, his achievement is perhaps less to conceive a postcolonial politics than to show how colonialism operates within discourse itself and to draw attention to the delusions of modes of thinking that claim to know and assimilate the other. He uncovers the ambivalence of colonial discourse, the limits of the grasp of the colonial language over its subjects, and undermines colonialism by focusing on its loopholes and blind spots. Bhabha criticizes Said for presenting colonial discourse as fixed and for configuring West and East or colonizer and colonized as reified in a binary opposition. Bhabha’s aim is instead to reveal the anxiety at work in colonial narratives, and he draws on Freud and Lacan in order to analyse the neuroses structuring discourses on self and other, and the “uncanny” that the colonizer sets out to occlude. Anxiety in Freud is a temporally ambivalent state, “at once the ‘recall’ of a situation – its memorial – and its performative anticipation or expectation” (Bhabha 1996: 192), and Bhabha uses this notion of a borderline temporality to argue that culture too can be seen as anxiously hovering between sedimentation in the past and a future reinvention. Colonial and national discourses rely nervously on the notion of a collective past while failing to catch up with the multiple narratives and practices that make up their disjunctive present and future. Bhabha’s psychoanalytic approach here is evidently far removed from empiricism, but its success is nevertheless this inscription of doubt into the production of any discourse of assimilation. And again, as in Derrida, this helps us to rethink or conceive differently the potentially assimilatory drive of theory or philosophy itself: the ambivalence of colonial discourse is “a necessary caution against generalizing the contingencies and contours of local circumstance, at the very moment at which a transnational, ‘migrant’ knowledge of the world is most urgently needed” (Bhabha 1994: 214). The opening chapter of Bhabha’s famous collection of essays The Location of Culture prefaces the ensuing analyses of colonialism and culture with a reflection on “theory” itself. Bhabha notes the frequent criticism that theory is “the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged” (1994: 19) and asserts that he is alert to the dangers of assuming authority by producing knowledge of the other. In defence of the very 114

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notion of a postcolonial philosophy or theory, however, Bhabha goes on to champion the sorts of double movement performed in Derrida’s work, whereby the philosopher deconstructs philosophy from within, or uses the language of logocentrism to undermine logocentrism. Bhabha then adds to Derrida’s approach a more politicized angle, as he recalls John Stuart Mill’s argument that political knowledge has to come about through dialogue, debate and dissension, and suggests that despite Mill’s rationalism, this argument reveals an understanding of the presence of otherness at work in the creation of knowledge. Theoretical discourse, similarly, must attend to alterity in its pursuit of knowledge, and it must resist both logocentrism and essentialism, the drive (falsely) to define and categorize its subjects, even as it inevitably claims a new authority. In reading Mill, Bhabha’s purpose is to confer on Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism and ethnocentrism an emphasis on the resonance of this self-conscious theorizing for political representation. If it is concerned with language and discourse, theory nevertheless offers important insights into political knowledge, because it opens up the space between the political objective and its slippery representation. In Bhabha’s terms, “denying an essentialist logic and a mimetic referent to political representation is a strong, principled argument against political separatism of any colour, and cuts through the moralism that usually accompanies such claims” (ibid.: 27). A theoretical understanding of the slippage between discourse and referent works directly against both colonial assimilation and racist determinism, since both rely on classifying and dividing self and other, inside and outside, black and white. Bhabha then conceptualizes this slippage in language by inventing his own theory of the Third Space. The Third Space is not, as it sounds, an identifiable alternative position to those of colonizer and colonized, or East and West. Rather, it names the gap in enunciation between the subject of a proposition and the subject of the enunciation: that is, between the production of the statement, with all its contextual contingencies, and the other to which the statement refers. It names the interstices between sign and referent, the Derridean movement of traces of meaning along the chain of associations, and Bhabha conceives this as a locus of cultural ambivalence as well as productivity: The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges derrida and bhabha

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our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time. (Ibid.: 37) Theory is necessary according to Bhabha, then, because its attention to language and representation allow us to understand properly the ambivalence of culture, and the violence and delusion of claims to cultural purity, determinism and separatism. It is also perhaps significant that theory itself might contain this sort of anxiety or slippage, but we can use our theoretical knowledge to make ourselves better readers of theory. Bhabha argues later in the work that Foucault, for example, may initially omit to comment on the role of colonialism in Western thought, but the colonizing mission is referred to only subsequently in passing. This movement, however, itself opens up “the space for a new discursive temporality, another place of enunciation that will not allow the argument to expand into an unproblematic generality” (ibid.: 196). The gap in Foucault’s discourse is precisely what allows his theory’s productive expansion. Bhabha also famously reads Fanon in such a way as to highlight the ambivalence of colonial discourse in his work, rather than to elucidate his call for revolutionary action. Bhabha’s Fanon reveals the colonial culture’s fetishization of black identity and locates a force of resistance in the exploration of cultural interstices. Bhabha knows that Fanon ardently desires complete political transformation, but argues that his insight lies in his perception of uncertainty within processes of identification and self-creation. The very disjunction of Fanon’s famous phrase “the Negro is not. Any more than the white man” is conceived to perform the rupture and dispersal of racial identity, and Bhabha’s language stresses this displacement and anxiety and not Fanon’s more militant call for agency. Furthermore, Bhabha explores the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Fanon’s work. His analysis turns on the enigma of Fanon’s Freudian question: what does the black man want? Bhabha examines the fear and desire of the colonizer and the splitting of identity as a result of the meeting of black and white. He applauds in Fanon’s work: the image of post-Enlightenment man tethered to, not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, 116

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that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of his being. (Ibid.: 44) Similarly, the native too is split: he wants both to occupy the place of the colonizer and to maintain his difference from him, as well as his anger towards him. If Lacan teaches that identity is constructed in the gaze of the other, and “bears the mark of the splitting in the Other place from which it comes” (ibid.: 45), then Fanon’s colonizer and colonized also identify themselves on the basis of this doubling of self and other and the alienation that arises from it. Fanon’s apparently Manichaean structure is troubled by this ambivalent doubling and splitting created by the construction of the self through the image of the other. This reading of Fanon deliberately glosses over his humanism, his existentialism and his militancy; indeed, Bhabha openly confesses that his “remembering Fanon” paradoxically requires a certain forgetting, presumably of the moments in his work where he shies away from what Bhabha sees as his most provocative insights. This strategy of reading Fanon selectively, through the lens of Lacanian ambivalence, has perhaps not surprisingly generated much controversy, to which I shall turn later in the chapter. Faithful to his own understanding of “theory”, however, Bhabha’s commentary on Fanon reads between its lines, draws out its anxieties and locates in Fanon’s allusions to psychic alienation and uncertainty the core of his subversive intent. Many of Bhabha’s essays in The Location of Culture propose new definitions of key postcolonial concepts, and it will be worth summarizing the most influential of these here. The first of these is the stereotype, one of the central tropes of colonial discourse, which is for Bhabha not merely a caricature or fixed image, but an idea whose iteration masks its producer’s uncertainty. Colonial discourse desires “fixity”, it seeks to know and define the other, but the repetition of the stereotype betrays the absence of proof and the real precariousness of that fixed image. In commenting on the colonial search for fixity, Bhabha argues that: the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved. (Ibid.: 66) derrida and bhabha

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The stereotype is used to justify and prop up the colonial project of subjugation, but further analysis of the function of the stereotype reveals it as another indicator of the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The uncertainty of the stereotype is what Bhabha accuses Said of neglecting in his discussion of the correlation between latent and manifest Orientalism, which for Bhabha revolves around an unproblematic intentionality. Said’s writing alludes in passing to the simultaneous recognition and disavowal of cultural difference through the stereotype, but in quoting him Bhabha opens a sequence of questions relating to the projection, fear and desire that subtend the colonizer’s discursive gesture. Furthermore, Bhabha’s stereotype is a fetishization, originally the result of the anxiety of castration and sexual difference, and it functions to smooth over that anxiety by providing an illusory wholeness. The fetish disavows difference and sets out to restore an original presence. If for Freud the fetish plays between the affirmation that “all men have penises” and the anxiety of a potential lack, in the colonial context the fetish vacillates between the assumption that “all men have the same skin/race/culture” and the awareness of what are experienced as disturbing racial and cultural differences (ibid.: 75). This is for Bhabha beautifully demonstrated by Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where the stereotype that disavows difference by means of the “white mask” only splits the image of the subject from itself. Bhabha’s prescriptive ethics emerges here in his concluding recommendation for a recognition of difference that precisely liberates it from the fixation of the stereotype. In addition to this uncovering of the stereotype’s uncertainty, Bhabha also proposes mimicry as a sign of the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The colonial literature of writers as diverse as Kipling, Forster, Orwell and V. S. Naipaul is, according to Bhabha, peopled with “mimic men”: natives by birth who have taken on the tastes, attitudes and beliefs of the colonial culture. Such men are the fruits of the mission, conceived by Thomas Macaulay in 1835, to create a class of “interpreters”’ who would mediate between the colonial authorities and the masses they seek to govern. If, in their mimicking, they appear to reinforce the power of colonial discourse, however, Bhabha points out that mimicry in fact exposes colonialism’s excess and expansion. Mimicry is not sameness, but “a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite” (ibid.: 86), and the act of imitation always includes slippages and traces of alterity. On the one hand, mimicry appears to ensure the control and regulation of the native, but on the other hand, it inserts difference into the dominant discourse of colonial power. The mimic men seem to be “authorized versions of otherness”, but in mimicking the colonizer 118

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only in part, they reveal the limits of the colonizer’s drive to authorize, regulate and control his subjects. Bhabha goes on to use Lacan’s understanding of mimicry as camouflage to stress how it functions in the same way as metonymy: it is “not a harmonization or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying in part, metonymically” (ibid.: 90). It is disturbing precisely because it hides no essence, no clear identity, but inscribes a subtle, partial alterity into a discourse that had conceived itself as self-same. Mimicry lies at the limits of what is acceptable and familiar: it plays by the rules of the colonizer but at the same time works against them. Like the stereotype, it announces the falsity of the colonial discourse of certainty and self-presence, and questions the identity of what might have been taken for the “original”. If for Bhabha mimicry borders on mockery, however, and could function as a powerful force of subversion, it is noteworthy that the Latin American thinker Octavio Paz, with whom Bhabha does not engage, conceives it much more as a sign of emptiness and self-loss; mimicry, dissimulation and irony are “traits of a subjected people who tremble and disguise themselves in the presence of the master” (Paz 1967: 62). Bhabha conceives mimicry as a potential means to deconstruct colonial discourse, whereas in Paz it is a symptom of a hermeticism built out of the fear, mistrust and suspicion still present in Mexico long after the end of the colonial period. Another of Bhabha’s related, much-celebrated concepts is that of hybridity, which again serves to undermine the fixed opposition between colonizer and colonized and to draw attention to movement and play within the colonial discourse. In the chapter “Signs taken for Wonders”, Bhabha discusses the Indian catechist Anund Messeh’s assertion, in 1817, that the Indians should accept the sacrament and help to create “a culturally and linguistically homogeneous India” (Bhabha 1994: 105). Building on the analysis of mimicry, however, Bhabha argues that the English book is not accepted as “a plenitudinous presence” but that it is received in a context so far removed from its production that it is altered by the transfer: As a signifier of authority, the English book acquires its meaning after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be “original” – by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it – nor “identical” – by virtue of the difference that defines it. (Ibid.: 107) derrida and bhabha

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Bhabha again uses Derrida here to explore how the colonial text “does not occupy a simple place” (ibid.: 108, quoting Derrida 1981), although he stresses that his endeavour is not so much to explore the process of interpretation as to question the propagation of power through texts. The upshot of the analysis here, moreover, is to evoke the process of hybridization: the dissemination of the text was supposed to assimilate the natives, but in fact it recreates the colonial culture as hybridized and different from itself. Hybridity “displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (ibid.: 112); it names the expansion of the colonial culture beyond itself and outside its much treasured borders. Hybridity is the effect of the drive towards the cultural assimilation of the colonized, but at the same time it subverts the authority and self-presence of the imposed culture. It is not an alternative identity, but an effect that can in turn be deployed as a ruse against the authority from which it is, in part, derived. The last of Bhabha’s reinvented concepts is that of the nation, which emerges as a plural site of dispersed cultural meanings. Bhabha’s edited collection Nation and Narration (1990) contains essays by a series of major philosophers of nationalism, and tracks an evolving awareness of the nation’s multi-layered construction. Bhabha’s introduction argues that the nation is “Janus-faced” because it is caught between progression and regression, but also because its rhetoric distances it from its people; it is, then, “a figure of prodigious doubling” (1990: 3). Bhabha’s essay “DissemiNation”, printed in Nation and Narration and again in The Location of Culture, argues above all that the narrative of the nation is subject to a time-lag, which means that the imagined unity of the nation can never catch up with the discrepant “shreds and patches of cultural signification” produced by its plural people. Furthermore, the narrative of the nation must be thought of in “double time”: the people are the historical “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the “subjects” of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity. (1994: 145) This means that the narrative of the nation claims to root itself in the past of its people, as if to assure a shared origin, but it must also erase that past if it is to grant its people the ability to narrate their culture in their 120

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own terms. This duality is also conceived by Bhabha as a split between the pedagogical, that is the creation and propagation of a shared past, and the performative, or the self-renewing cultural practices and acts of the people. Again, Bhabha’s thinking is deeply indebted to Derrida here, as he conceives the performative as a “supplementary movement” at work within the writing of the pedagogical. Bhabha’s highly abstract theorizing, and his extensive use of deconstruction, have been much criticized by other postcolonial thinkers. Many have objected to his convoluted writing style and to its lack of engagement with the material effects of colonialism on colonized peoples. One of Bhabha’s most rigorous critics is Parry, who laments that the extensive focus on ambivalence in colonial discourse obscures both the horrific violence of the colonial enterprise and the force of the colonized’s counter-insurgency. The discussion of language effects occludes the real horror of armed struggle, and the focus on anxiety and the uncanny within colonial discourse replaces any understanding of the role of concrete resistance. Bhabha’s reading of Fanon, for example, makes the latter into a “premature poststructuralist” and tempers his revolutionary ethos. Parry also concedes that subjectivity is indeed often “hybridized” or criss-crossed with multiple identifications, but she argues that this does not mean that the colonial situation did not pit communities against one another in an acutely antagonistic struggle. Bhabha may be right to question the division of colonizer and colonized into a binary opposition, but in so doing his thinking also glosses over the real tensions brought about by colonial imposition. The difficulty with Bhabha’s thought, then, is that it “dispenses with the notion of conflict, which certainly does infer antagonism, but contra Bhabha, does not posit a simplistically unitary and closed structure to the adversial forces” (Parry 2004: 56). Furthermore, Parry reads into Bhabha’s ethics a somewhat facile “recommendation of coalition politics and rainbow alliances” that might be conceivable for the “privileged postcolonial” but that means little to the genuinely disenfranchised (ibid.: 71). In addition, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity has been challenged by more than one critic. Young is largely sympathetic to Bhabha, but his Colonial Desire (1995) nevertheless reminds us of the lingering, problematic connotations of the term “hybrid”. Young traces its nineteenthcentury associations with corruption, dilution and degeneration, and explores potentially ongoing anxieties with the loss of racial purity. The study is in no sense a critique of Bhabha, but perhaps a reminder that the term “hybridity” is not necessarily a celebratory figure for cultural enrichment. Rather more acerbically than Young, Antony Easthorpe derrida and bhabha

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argues that the problem with Bhabha’s concept of hybridity is that it is constantly opposed to non-hybridity, and this in itself becomes another unhelpful binary opposition. Bhabha’s writing suggests that it is either possible to have a complete identity, or no identity at all, and even worse, Easthorpe asserts that he treats hybridity as a “transcendental signified” (1998: 345). Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997) notes that, for Bhabha, all cultures are hybrid, but this means that it is not clear how useful the term is in describing specifically postcolonial experience. Bhabha’s writing slips into a universalism that is not necessarily productive for the invention of a specific anti-colonial political strategy. These points are often linked to a general unease with Bhabha’s highly theoretical, frequently psychoanalytic idiom, and to a frustration with his over-inflated belief in the efficacy of the philosopher’s role. Bhabha is accused of overlooking historical contexts, of blurring different experiences of colonialism and, indeed, of failing to consider the particular role of gender in the construction of a postcolonial identity. In each case, the implication is that there is no room in his thought for the specificity or the agency of the colonized: concrete policy and action are occluded by an excessively generalized, even at times universalized, discussion of the workings of discourse. These criticisms are in many ways justified, and it is certainly true that Bhabha has little to say about the mechanics of armed struggle. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that he never claimed that his own style of analysis should replace a more materialist postcolonialism, and one might conceive of the theory of colonial ambivalence as another level of critique but not as a holistic programme. His aim, like that of Derrida, is also to uncover the anxiety underpinning claims for knowledge and mastery, and in the process he implies that he knows his own thought might contain blind spots, moments of uncertainty and incompatible goals. His writing does not use form to explore the same dynamic between universalism, specificity and singularity as Derrida’s does, but Bhabha’s self-consciousness nevertheless testifies to an understanding of the difficulties of any drive for secure and stable knowledge of the other in his own work. Moreover, in his engagement with thinkers such as Guha, Bhabha does raise the question of native agency. His own argument is that agency is created in a context of contingency, which means that although it is grounded in a moment, it is not totalized by that process of grounding. Insurgent agency responds strategically to its moment, but that moment is also one of indeterminacy. Solidarity and collective identity can be invented in the name of emancipation, but this might be with an awareness of the contingency of those constructs. Indeed, Bhabha 122

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notes that Guha’s own concept of agency stresses “the hybridised signs and sites” (1994: 187), for example of the Tebhaga movement in Bengal in 1946 (where peasants demanded to reduce the proportion of their crops taken by landlords). A thinking of agency is compatible with an awareness of ambivalence and hybridization, even if Bhabha’s focus is more on the complexity of its construction than on the mechanics of its deployment. Bhabha’s recent work on minority rights is also more clearly political than the essays of The Location of Culture. In his Oxford Amnesty lecture “On Writing Rights”, Bhabha notes that in his discussion of the recognition of equal rights, political theorist Charles Taylor implies, perhaps unwittingly, that “all cultures deserving of respect are whole societies, their ‘wholeness’ represented by a long, deep, historical continuity”, and even more, Taylor excludes what he calls “partial milieux” (Bhabha 2003: 166). These “partial milieux” are hybridized cultures, minority groups in the interstices between national identities, but Taylor’s implication is that these groups are somehow not worthy of the same rights as those assimilated into the national community. Even more, Bhabha alludes to an amendment to article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights based on a similar exclusion. If, formerly, it had been held that unassimilated minorities presented a challenge to the nation, then the amendment stated that this was not necessarily the case if the group had been in residence for a long period of time. Again, the implication is that interstitial groups are somehow outside the discourse of human rights: rights are only accorded to those who “over a long period of time” have enhanced the life of the nation. Bhabha goes on to read a poem by Adrienne Rich as a call for attention to subjects whose differences are constantly negotiated, rather than accorded any permanent essence and sovereignty. Subjects do not necessarily belong to either one group or another and, indeed, the individual and the group, singularity and solidarity, are no longer pitted against one another. These new minorities are between state and non-state, and create affiliations across various milieux. Once again, Fanon is another example of a thinker who proposes a notion of culture that requires continual questioning, and this affirmation of movement and negotiation continues to have resonance in a society still run by discrimination and hierarchy. Bhabha’s ethical political recommendation here is for the “right to narrate”: the right to affirm one’s cultural reinvention and for that reinvention to be recognized in the discourse of human rights. This “right to narrate” is also integral to Bhabha’s vision of democracy: derrida and bhabha

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[it] assumes that there is a commitment to creating “spaces” of cultural and regional diversity, for it is only by acknowledging such cultural resources as a “common good” that we can ensure that our democracy is based on dialogue and conversation, difficult though it may be, between the uneven and unequal levels of development and privilege that exist in complex societies. (Ibid.: 181) It is clear that Bhabha’s thinking here is very much based on the notions of ambivalence and hybridization sketched in The Location of Culture, but in essays such as this he gives them a clearer political mission, even if this is politics as guided by the ethical rather than by concrete policy. Bhabha strives now to think ethically and politically at the same time: his fundamental principles of respect for difference, and his belief in subjectivity as fractured and evolving, are now expressed in terms of the politics of human rights and the achievement of social equality. It may remain unclear quite how Bhabha proposes to ensure this equality, but his attention to the discourse of minority rights marks the beginning of a transition into the political. Finally, it is intriguing that, like Fanon, Sartre and Said, Bhabha returns to the notion of the “human” in his attempt to unite politics and ethics. Despite his earlier criticisms of Said, in his encomium to Said’s work after his death what Bhabha pauses on is the latter’s careful, thoughtful, ethical humanism. Again, this is not the Eurocentric humanism rejected by Foucault and Derrida, but a more modest call for attention to the multiplicity and diversity of human experience and an awareness of the tensions and conflicts that still govern that experience. Bhabha applauds what he calls Said’s “slow humanist reflection”, which takes into account the constant mediation between part and whole, between the individual and the group, and which “strengthens our resolve to make difficult and deliberate choices relating to knowledge and justice, ‘how and how not?’ in the face of contingency, silence, and mortality” (Bhabha 2005: 376). In addition, in his essays on rights and democracy Bhabha repeatedly invokes the notion of the human to express a “strategic” call for the recognition of all subjects. The term necessitates an understanding of the negotiation between the singular and the collective, rather than an insistence on any reductive and enclosed national framework. For Bhabha, “the ‘human’ is identified not with a given essence, be it natural or supernatural, but with a practice, a task” (Bhabha 2000: 3). The term enables him to think outside the borders of “whole societies” and offers a conception of subjectivity as evolving, and worthy of respect as a result 124

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of that evolution. This retention of the notion of humanity is, then, surprising in a thinker as vehemently poststructuralist as Bhabha but, despite its flaws and risks, the term does function in postcolonialism as a means to think through both ethical and political emancipation. It is ethical in its call for respect for the potentially “infinite” other, and it is political in its demand for the accordance of rights, such as citizenship, on the basis of that respect. It is with this return to the “human”, then, that Bhabha proposes to bridge the gap left open in Derrida’s work and, although the practical implementation of Bhabha’s recommendations remains sketchy, the achievement of this curious return is precisely its tentative articulation of a political ethics and an ethical politics.

Key points • Derrida criticizes the ethnocentrism of Western metaphysics and draws attention to the exclusion of the other in the work of thinkers such as Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. He also explores the violence of the imposition of the colonial language on Algerians in The Monolingualism of the Other. This text is challenging, moreover, because it raises questions about the very nature of postcolonial critique. Derrida shifts here between a universal denunciation of sovereignty in any language, a reflection on the alienation of Algerian Jews, and a personal memoir. • Derrida draws explicitly on Levinas in his elucidation of an ethics. Ethics is also separate from politics, according to Derrida, although they need to be thought alongside one another. • Bhabha’s postcolonial theory is deeply indebted to that of Derrida, as he deconstructs the apparent mastery of colonial discourse and draws attention to the “supplement” of the native’s difference. Bhabha shows how nationalism is always underpinned by cultural hybridity: by multiple fragments of cultural practices that elude any unified postcolonial category. • Bhabha turns to the question of minority rights in his later work, and argues for the attribution of rights to those who live between cultures. Although frequently critical of Said, Bhabha finishes by upholding his humanism as a way of celebrating the dynamism and mobility of cultural identity.

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six

Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place

The Moroccan thinker Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Martinican Edouard Glissant both combine the use of deconstructive philosophy with reflection on the history of the specific postcolonial places within which they write. Highly indebted to the work of figures such as Derrida and Foucault, Khatibi and Glissant explore the cultural plurality and relationality created by colonialism, but recommendations for a generalized ethical awareness of multiple differences are here tied to a specific engagement with the effects of colonialism in the Maghreb or the French Caribbean. This attention to the conditions affecting specific places does not, however, entail a political and empirical study of an individual colonial regime, nor does it lead to a grounded form of activism. Rather, Khatibi and Glissant show how the sorts of universal ethical opening proposed by Derrida and, by extension, Levinas have particular resonance in their own regions of the world as a result of the colonial presence and the region’s patchwork history. Khatibi and Glissant spend less time exploring the disjunction between the universal and the specific than Derrida, but nevertheless root their analyses in the concrete locations of the Maghreb and the Caribbean even as they derive from these analyses a broader ethics of relationality. If, then, Derrida and Bhabha swing away from politics in their universalized reflections on linguistic mastery, différance and cultural ambivalence, Khatibi and Glissant pursue the ethical opening associated with those reflections but re-anchor ethics in the particular context of regions that have been ruptured and fragmented by the colonial presence in distinct ways. Deconstructive ethics is given a more grounded geographical 126

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resonance, even though this resonance is bound up not with militant action but with ways of conceiving local history that serve to promote freedom and to account for multiplicity. Khatibi’s work is diverse and eclectic, but its resonance for postcolonialism stems above all from the conception of a “plural Maghreb” in the wake of decolonization. Khatibi explicitly draws on Derrida by aligning deconstruction with decolonization, and by arguing that any thought of the Maghreb must take into account its plurality and internal differences rather than relying on an essentialized notion of a traditional past. Reflection on the Maghreb requires a “pensée autre” or “other thought”: an alternative conceptual structure privileging also the region’s multiple languages and their mutual interpenetration. Glissant’s work calls for a similar opening out of Caribbean identity, although Glissant goes further than Khatibi in stressing not just bilingualism but a chaotic melting pot of languages and cultures relating the specific place of the Caribbean with the rest of the world. The French Caribbean is the result of a particular combination of cultures, its origin is the rupture and displacement of the slave trade, and its present is at once francophone and a complex, changing, Creole fusion of interlocking cultures and identities. Nevertheless, this specific history engenders a new understanding of global culture as dynamic and relational, and the political conditions of the French Caribbean in the end necessitate a broader ethical call for the embrace of global diversity. In Glissant, this shift constitutes an uneasy movement within the corpus, and the later emphasis on globality appears to contradict earlier references to the specific Caribbean context. Glissant’s writing lacks the self-consciousness of Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other on this matter, and has been criticized for its obfuscation of the political. In his most recent work, however, Glissant apparently relinquishes his goal of political activism, although he continues to use the example of the Caribbean as a figure for globalized ethical, aesthetic and cultural renewal.

Abdelkébir Khatibi Khatibi was born in El-Jadida, Morocco in 1938, and he attended both Koranic and French schools, before studying sociology at the Sorbonne. He completed his thesis on the Moroccan novel in 1969, and went on to publish his autobiography La Mémoire tatouée (Tatooed memory) in 1971. Khatibi was a member of Souffles, the bilingual literary review founded in 1966, until it was banned in 1972, but has continued to khatibi and glissant

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write and teach, and has become one of Morocco’s leading intellectual commentators. The scope of Khatibi’s writing is notably wide-ranging, since he has published both novels and theory, and has treated subjects as diverse as calligraphy and Islamic art, Orientalism and bilingualism, as well as contemporary Moroccan politics. His distinction among postcolonial thinkers is that he analyses not only the effects of colonialism on Maghrebian identity and culture, but also the precolonial past together with the traditions and complexity of modern Arabic and Islamic culture. His reflections on Morocco are as a result not exclusively bound up with the influence of Francophonie, and although one of his best-known works is his exploration of the “plural Maghreb” and its bilingualism after decolonization, his perspective is not narrowly defined by the history of colonialism (Morocco was, after all, a French protectorate only for the short period between 1912 and 1954). If he is a provocative and sophisticated postcolonial thinker, then, he is also an acclaimed authority on Islamic art and on the condition of modern Morocco both in the context of the aftermath of colonialism and in respect of more recent internal developments. His philosophical precursors are Arabic and Islamic scholars such as Suwahardi and Ibn Arabi, as well as French writers such as Victor Segalen and poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault. Despite his academic success in both France and Morocco, Khatibi’s autobiographical narrative La Mémoire tatouée figures its subject as torn between cultures and exiled in the French language in which the text is nevertheless written. Like much of the work on bilingualism, however, this rupture is figured alternately as a source of self-loss and alienation and as a trigger for creativity and invention. Khatibi’s first name, Abdélkebir, bears the mark of a violent severing, since it contains the echo of “Aïd el Kébir”, the festival of the commemoration of the sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac and the day of the author’s birth. La Mémoire tatouée opens with the revelation of this originary destruction, as if the narrative persona carries the wound of the violation of Morocco by the French presence. Next, Khatibi’s autobiographical persona reflects on the disjunction caused by his education in a secular French school, where colonial and republican values are grafted on to, but do not weld with, his Islamic upbringing. The French language is also a “tattoo” or graft whose shapes cover without obliterating both the Arabic learned at the Koranic school and the Berber language spoken at home. Expressions of disorientation and perplexity are nevertheless increasingly juxtaposed with celebrations of intercultural exchange, as the narrator travels jubilantly from Paris to Berlin, London, Stockholm 128

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and Cordoba. The narrative finishes with a theoretical reflection that will go on to inform his thinking in Maghreb pluriel (Plural Maghreb) (1983), and in which Khatibi explores the interpenetration of one language with another within the expression of the bilingual subject. If the persona’s mother tongue retreats when he writes or speaks in French, it nevertheless resurfaces in the form of fleeting traces and fragments that upset the rhythm of the French. This lingering murmur of one idiom within the tones of the other forms the basis for Khatibi’s theory of language as the dynamic and constantly mutating product of its relations with other languages. In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi uses this conception of linguistic relationality and plurality to propose an alternative understanding or “pensée autre” of the Maghreb. Quoting Fanon’s call for the definitive termination of the European society in the Maghreb, Khatibi argues that a claim for difference in that region should not be a straightforward affirmation but a mode of identification that continually calls itself into question. Thinking the Maghreb requires a “double critique”: one that points out the limitations of the region’s Western heritage and another that rejects the return to an archaic patrimony, since this is in turn too rigid, too theological and patriarchal. Khatibi recommends a “plural thought”, a definition of the Maghreb that leaves behind the quest for roots, for origins and an essential identity based on tradition, and that renews itself by exploring the continuously developing and multiple differences that make up North Africa. This call for an alternative thought of the Maghreb consists for Khatibi in the rejection of three unhelpful schools that have hindered its development. First, Khatibi rejects “traditionalism”, in this case the return to a rigid and immutable conception of theological doctrine or, in Khatibi’s words, “metaphysics reduced to theology” (1983: 24; my translation throughout). This hardened theology is not at all a commemoration of the region’s past but its denial or forgetting. Secondly, Khatibi laments the failures of Salafism, a broadly Sunni school of thought upholding the early days of Islam as exemplary, and he qualifies this movement as “metaphysics that has become a doctrine”. Khatibi at the same time condemns the use of that doctrine in the formation of political objectives and social pedagogy: Salafism is unable to cope with the modern Maghreb, since it too insists on a strict division between itself and the other (ibid.: 25). Thirdly, Khatibi reveals the deficiencies of rationalism, “metaphysics that has become technical” (ibid.). Khatibi’s point here is to demonstrate the limitations of the work of the ideological thinker, Abdallah Laroui, whose Idéologie arabe contemporaine (Contemporary Arab ideology) insists on a separation between the khatibi and glissant

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three fields despite their interpenetration in Maghrebian thought, and whose historicism or rationalism results in too neat and too schematic a continuity in the history of that troubled region. The alternative “pensée autre” of the Maghreb would, conversely, take into account disorder and dissymmetry, and would “broaden our freedom of thought” (ibid.: 33). This call for freedom means that thought, or philosophy, is itself brought into the realm of social and political struggle. Khatibi conceives this new thought of the Maghreb with reference to the work of Derrida and Foucault. For Khatibi, “decolonization” necessarily entails the “deconstruction” of logocentrism and ethnocentrism, the undermining of the Western belief in self-presence and selfsufficiency. Khatibi’s deconstruction calls for the philosopher to stand outside his assumed frameworks, to do away with binary oppositions (such as that between reason and unreason) and to subvert the very logic within which he writes. This mode of thinking is at the heart of decolonization, since in Khatibi’s words, “to decolonize would be the other name for this other thought, and decolonization: the silent ending of Western metaphysics” (ibid.: 51). Furthermore, Khatibi points out the difficulties associated with using Marxism to theorize decolonization, since Marx’s thought still rests on the notion that the colonized must adopt a mode of thinking that is Western in origin. Khatibi concedes that Marx was inspirational in helping countries of the Third World to conceive a revolution, but denounces his drive to unify the world by means of his global system. Marx’s thought is, in spite of itself, another form of Hegelian absolute knowledge. Later on in the text, Khatibi also notes the insufficiency of Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production, and argues that in the precolonial Maghreb, for example, politico-military violence was as significant as economic violence. It is the self-critical impulse of Derrida and Foucault, then, that Khatibi champions as a liberatory form of philosophy, and not the revolutionary militancy of Marx. Khatibi also adds to the work of the former thinkers a call for attention to bilingualism as a means of conceptualizing a philosophical language estranged from itself. Arab knowledge, for example, is constantly influenced and interrupted by Western knowledge, but this influence passes through a process of translation. In this way it dramatizes exchange between languages, Khatibi’s “pensée en langues” or thought that takes place in more than one language at once. Maghreb pluriel also contains a chapter on Orientalism, which consists in a somewhat devastating reading of the renowned French thinker and sociologist Jacques Berque’s work on the Islamic world. Khatibi notes that Berque attempts to establish links between an Arab 130

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present and an Arab past, between the Koran and both modern and classical poetry, and between technology, decolonization and multiple examples of Arab culture. In so doing, however, he creates a unified artifice underpinned, according to Khatibi, by Western metaphysics. This means that Berque identifies a determinate being that he calls the Orient; he gives it an ontology. Orientalism of this sort, propagated also by Louis Massignon, confers on the Orient specificities that result in an affirmed essentialism. Furthermore, Orientalism is for Khatibi accompanied by positivism, and also by a form of humanism, which in Berque is derived from Enlightenment thinking. In addition to this reliance on metaphysics, however, Berque goes on to draw on sociology, referring to particular customs and practices, but his descriptions serve only to reify and caricature the Arab people. The son of a colonial official in Algeria, Berque was born there and later lived in Morocco, but his mistake was to use that experience in Morocco to try to speak for the whole of the Arab world. He finishes by fixing the identity of the Arab people, whereas for Khatibi “the other cannot be reduced and brought back to an essence, be it one of paradise, warm and fragrant” (1983: 133). Berque assumes an astonishingly neat continuity between classical and modern Arabs, and encapsulates a diversity of traditions into the framework of a homogeneous identity. Orientalism for Khatibi should be bilingual, in that it should, as Berque also dreams, accomplish an exchange between cultures, but Khatibi reminds us that there will nevertheless always remain the trace of the untranslatable. The error of Berque was to translate the untranslatable into a stilted rhetoric that immobilized and homogenized the other’s difference, rather than retaining a Levinasian sense of the openness and potential inaccessibility of that difference. Khatibi constantly champions through his work an understanding of bilingualism as an open-ended exchange and a movement between languages in which linger, nevertheless, merely hints of the untranslatable. In the essay “Bilingualism and Literature”, printed in Maghreb pluriel, he explores the example of the novel Talismano, by Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, and reads into its French expression both intercultural exchange and the inevitable silencing of the original. The very title page of the novel inaugurates this study of hidden traces. The initial phoneme “A” of the author’s first name is already a mistranslation of a sound that only exists in Arabic, and which, in a form of archaic calligraphy, figures also the “eye”. The result of this mistranslation is that the work is introduced by this effect of effacement: it “opens with an absent eye, with blindness, with the invisible and the unreadable” khatibi and glissant

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(Khatibi 1983: 182). Writing in French, for the Arab author, in this way at the same time evacuates the mother tongue. Nevertheless, Khatibi goes on to argue that Meddeb’s text constantly uses the preposition “à” (“to” or “at”), as if the accent on the “a” could transliterate the original Arabic sound excluded from the title page, and to make up for this absence. The work contains the trace of the author’s name, but this trace constantly undergoes a process of transformation: “it falls under the sway of a double genealogy, a double signature, which are as much the literary effects of a lost gift, of a giving that is split in its origin” (ibid.: 186). In this process of translation, Khatibi suggests that the two languages signal to each other but at the same time exclude one another, and this simultaneous interaction and withdrawal defines the narrative that “speaks in languages”. There is a bilingualism within Meddeb’s French, which operates both a movement of transformation and a splitting or division. The narrative forms an example of a language existing in relation to other languages, which by turns interrupt its rhythms and lie dormant beneath its surface. This bilingual writing is a source of both alienation and enjoyment. Khatibi locates in Meddeb’s text a certain hermeticism, in that the language becomes a sort of formal edifice that hides the memories that the author nevertheless seeks to translate. Memories and traces of the maternal language, conceived also in psychoanalytic terms as the language of fusion with the mother, are traumatically repressed and occluded even as they scatter themselves beneath the artifice of the French. These traces figure the Lacanian “fragmented body” of the narrator, the disintegration of an irrevocably lost totality. In Khatibi’s own novel of bilingualism, Love in Two Languages (1990), however, this alienation and loss are constantly juxtaposed with jubilation and creativity. Love across languages results in a confrontation with the incommunicable, but it is also a trigger for desire and a quest for fusion. Bilingualism is a form of separation, but the form also engenders a plural, relational form of writing for Khatibi, in which languages jostle against one another and provocatively permeate one another with fragments of alterity. The bilingual text contains silence, and yet, by the end of the text, it gives rise to a “folie de la langue”, the chaotic accumulation of phonemes and signifiers in the creation of a new, plural mode of expression. This dual attitude equally characterizes Khatibi’s study of the stranger in French writing (Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française; 1987), a text in which analyses of writers such as Segalen, Jean Genet and Roland Barthes are capped with a championing of “literary internationality”. The figure of the stranger implies untranslatability, but in the works 132

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examined this can also become an invigorating and enriching encounter with alterity. Khatibi’s tentative move towards a celebration of bilingual relationality is at the same time an aesthetic and an ethical call. In an essay on Derrida and borders, for example, Khatibi concludes by enquiring after the effects of an awareness of foreignness within languages: “in what way is this impropriety, this hybridization and this troubling of identity favourable to idiomatic and stylistic inventions?” (Khatibi 1994: 449; my translation). An awareness of otherness in language is also a way to seek new forms of writing, new styles and new sources of creativity. Khatibi’s celebration of bilingual writing can also be seen as Levinasian, in that it calls for attention to the intractable and the untranslatable, and makes of that attention an ethical condition of the use of any language. All language, for Khatibi, contains traces of other languages, and, like Levinas’s discourse, it is a site for encounter across differences, although its proper understanding does not allow the reduction of difference to the same. Khatibi’s “pensée en langues” and Levinas’s discourse are both forums for an ethical encounter with an other that resists essentialism, knowledge and metaphysics. In this way, Khatibi adds to Levinasian ethics a further dimension in his exploration of bilingualism, and gives that ethics particular resonance in the context of intercultural communication between France and Morocco. There is nevertheless in this exploration of French and Arabic bilingualism in the aftermath of colonialism a universal conception of relationality and ethical exchange within and between all languages. Moving away from engagement with the context of colonialism and postcolonialism in the Maghreb, Khatibi also writes about calligraphy and Islamic art. His analyses have resonance here, however, because again they provide a means of imagining the open-ended process of signification in language in a way that subverts the colonial urge to mastery and knowledge. In the commentary on Meddeb, Khatibi notes that Arabic calligraphy, in its untranslatability, is the lost source language of the text. Yet in La Blessure du nom propre (The wound of the proper name) (1974), Khatibi explores the richness of calligraphic art, as the calligraphic letters hover between emptiness and plenitude. Calligraphy confers dynamism on the sign, since calligraphic letters fluctuate between phonetics, semantics and geometric design. The calligraphic sign functions musically, pictorially and semantically, and its potential suggestiveness is heightened and multiplied by the operation of these different levels of sense. Equally, Khatibi’s L’Art calligraphique arabe (Arabic calligraphic art) explores the origins of Arabic calligraphy khatibi and glissant

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in the Koran and its link with the belief that the language of the Koran is sacred or “uncreated”. The writing of the Koran is the direct word of God, passed down to Mohammed and transcribed, and must be treasured not only for its meaning but also for its form. In both works, moreover, calligraphy is conceived of as a way of writing that opens up the space between the referent and the realization of the work of art in its appeal to multiple forms of sense. This exploration of calligraphy serves to develop Khatibi’s portrayal of the complexity of Arab culture and the perhaps often forgotten belief in polysemy. A final aspect of Khatibi’s writing worth mentioning here is his study Le Corps oriental (The Oriental body) (2002), which, similarly, uncovers the plurality of meanings associated with the body in Arab and Islamic culture. Khatibi notes in his commentary on this stunning collection of paintings and photographs that the Orientalist gaze of the European nineteenth-century painter seeks to unveil and denude the Oriental body, but also to tie it to its past. Indeed, Khatibi notes that for Delacroix, “Antiquity is no longer in Rome but in the East”, and depictions of Oriental bodies during this period return repeatedly to stock figures of the odalisque, the harem, the slaves at Constantinople and various biblical memories (2002: 175; my translation). The section on Orientalism is fairly brief, however, since Khatibi’s principal endeavour is to explore how the body is used, interpreted, decorated and regulated in diverse ways through the history of Arab and Islamic culture. Indeed, there are not one but three words for the body in Arabic: jism is the concept of the body, badane designates the bodily constitution and jassad signifies sensuality and the flesh. Furthermore, Khatibi explores the art of reading the body by means of the “sensorium” or the flesh: geometric or physiological forms, gestures and whispers have suggestive connotations that need to be translated. The body is, moreover, central to Islamic faith. Mohammed is respected and remembered also for his corporeal presence, and the prophet’s body and acceptance of his mortality serve as a model for Muslims to follow in understanding their own physical strengths and weaknesses. The body is also a focus for endless rituals and rites: the posture of the body during prayer bears meaning, cleanliness is a spiritual value and circumcision is a further way of marking the body with the trace of society and culture. Again, Khatibi has moved far beyond postcolonialism in this work, but his intricate study is relevant here for its insistence on plurality and polysemy in a culture often reduced and misunderstood by the West, by the former colonizer. While Khatibi has not yet received the attention he deserves in anglophone postcolonial circles, his work is becoming increasingly celebrated 134

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in France, as well as in Morocco. Barthes famously produced a brief eulogy, “Ce que je dois à Khatibi” (“What I owe Khatibi”), to be used as the preface for La Mémoire tatouée, in which he celebrates Khatibi’s invention of a “heterological language” and suggests that French thought should learn from this decentring of the Western subject. It has been objected, however, that Barthes’s own response to Khatibi is Orientalist, in that it omits to consider the specific implications of colonialism in Morocco in favour of a somewhat vague and formless celebration of Eastern culture. More recently, Derrida dedicated The Monolingualism of the Other to both Khatibi and Glissant, although Derrida’s comment that he himself is more “franco-Maghrébin” than Khatibi because he experiences alienation or disjunction within the French language, rather than as a result of the confrontation between French and Arabic, can seem a little tendentious. Nevertheless, the support of figures such as Barthes and Derrida is just one sign of Khatibi’s growing importance in francophone thought, and his engagement with Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Hassoun, among others, in his collection of essays on bilingualism further testifies to his insightful participation in francophone debate. As I have suggested, however, Khatibi’s thought is provocative because it succeeds in combining a highly focused study of Morocco, and of Islamic and Arabic culture, with a critique of colonial and ethnocentric thought. Knowledge of the supple traditions ignored by the West is also coupled with an ethical call for attention to the presence of alterity in any language, and this is both a form of Levinasian intractability and the trace of another culture or linguistic idiom. This broader ethical call never becomes universalized in such a way as to occlude the specific experiences of Moroccan bilingual subjects but lingers rather as a force that contests the pernicious determinism of colonial discourse. Finally, this ethics offers a particular vision of poetic enrichment and literary creativity that transcends borders and categories, and that promises a mode of thinking freed from the constraints of both colonialism and metaphysics.

Edouard Glissant and Caribbean Discourse While Khatibi bases his vision of postcolonial ethics on bilingualism and plurality in Moroccan culture, Glissant conceives Caribbean identity and the poetics of “creolization” as the catalyst for what can almost be read as a global cultural revolution. Writing about his native Martinique, which remains a French colony having been accorded the status of a khatibi and glissant

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“département d’outre mer” in 1946, Glissant tracks the oppression and silencing of the Martinican colonized subaltern, but proceeds as a result to propose not only the embrace of bilingualism but the celebration of a vast, open-ended network of cultural interactions operating across the globe and resisting the determinist forms of thinking propagated by colonial regimes. Like Khatibi, Glissant too responds to the political injustices of colonialism by advocating an alternative ethical and cultural model of relationality, although the focus on place in Glissant crucially involves the denunciation specifically of the rupture brought about by the slave trade in the Caribbean. Rather than remaining aware at once of the distinction and the complicity between politics and ethics, however, Glissant clearly moves through his career from an emphasis on the former to an embrace of the latter, and of its expression through aesthetic production. Indeed, the political motivations of his early novels are still perceptible in Caribbean Discourse (1989), but by the time of Traité du tout-monde (1997d) and La Cohée du Lamentin (2005), politics is all but dismissed for its conventional reliance on a territorialism and a determinism that are anathema to Glissant’s cultural ethics. While Khatibi and, above all, Derrida theorize and maintain the tension between ethics and politics in postcolonial criticism, Glissant slips perhaps rather more glibly from one to the other, giving rise to a certain unease among his readers concerning the limited efficacy or practicality of the later work and its contradictions with the earlier militancy. Where Glissant can be seen to be unrivalled, however, is in the dynamism and expansiveness of his poetics and in his conception of the value of that poetics independently of the political requirements of the (post)colony. Glissant’s thought is quite clearly a development and extension of that of the poet and politician Césaire, whose Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1995), an extraordinary and powerful landmark in postcolonial literature, constitutes an incendiary reclaiming of Antillean territory from the colonizer’s warped vision. The “return” performed by Césaire’s poem at once affirms the cultural values of negritude and the traditions of a black African heritage, and eschews French exoticism to confront the sickness and disease of Martinique at the hands of French politicians and slave-owners. The work ends with an image of the slaves rising up and taking control of the slave ship in a compelling gesture of defiance (Césaire 1995: 131). Far from redefining Martinique by means of a new set of categorizations, however, Césaire’s return is crucially at the same time an opening out: it is an exposition of the dynamism and mobility of black Caribbean culture and experience. Similarly, Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2000) is another virulent denunciation of 136

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the colonial project, in which the author explicitly compares the dehumanization engendered by colonialism to the horrors of Nazism. Most famously, Césaire now asserts that colonization is “thingification”: colonialism deprives the colonized of their humanity, dispossesses them of their land and resources, and saps the spirit and energy of the societies under its grasp. Another revolutionary inspiration for Glissant was C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), which charts the revolt of the slaves of San Domingo, inaugurated by Toussaint Louverture in 1791, followed by the creation of an independent Haiti in 1804. First published in 1938, James’s work narrates an allegory of liberation and emancipation and has served as an inspiration for many subsequent anti-colonial thinkers in the Caribbean. Both James and Césaire are major influences in Glissant’s rejection of the dehumanizing force of colonialism and in his exploration of the expansiveness of Caribbean identity and culture. Glissant’s early novels tend to be seen as the most militant of his works in their search to depict some form of subaltern agency. It is in Caribbean Discourse, however, that Glissant articulates his critique of colonialism in quasi-philosophical form, and it is also in this expansive tome that he starts to envisage the link between the political denunciation of slavery and exploitation on the one hand, and an emergent “poetics of Relation” on the other. The full French text of Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) is a weighty, even cumbersome, volume, structured by multiple sections, subsections and subdivisions as if in a parody of French structuralist criticism and its claim to scientism. Its underlying political foundations are perhaps clearest, however, in the section on the relation between “History” and “histories”, and in which official History with a capital H is denounced as a phantasm of the West that specifically occludes plural local histories. Moreover, Glissant argues that “the French Caribbean is the site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade” (1989: 61). Caribbean history is brutally severed from its origins as a result of the transportation of slaves from Africa, and this discontinuity has prevented the people from forming a national solidarity, as the African nations did, against the colonial power. Official History relies on a hierarchy that privileges Europe at the expense of Africans or Americans, but it is also structured by a linearity that fails to account for the disjunctions and losses of Caribbean “non-history”. If the historian can create a continuity out of the History of Martinique, setting out a schema starting with the slave trade, passing through the plantations system and the appearance of the elite, to assimilation and more recently to what Glissant terms “oblivion”, then even this continuity is structured khatibi and glissant

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by changes brought about by the French: they are a function of someone else’s history. The non-history of Martinique turns out to be the basis for Glissant’s economic analysis earlier in the book. Colonialism and slavery bring about the “dispossession” not only of local history but also of the land and resources, but Glissant also argues that the colonizer in Martinique and Guadeloupe lacks control of the market, and runs an economy of bartering: “he exploits on a day to day basis” (ibid.: 38). This means that the Martinican economy is tightly integrated into the French economy, making it difficult for the colonized to rebel. Glissant equally asserts that this structure engenders a lack of collective responsibility, and the consequences of this include in turn an absence of global investment, no accumulation of capital and a tendency towards under-productivity. This exposition of the lack of local agency mirrors at the same time the portrait of lethargy, passivity and stagnation found in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. The forms of resistance that have occurred in Martinique are also, according to Glissant, of the sort that cannot lead to the national overthrow of the colonial regime. The “economy of survival” means that the worker is able to carve out a terrain that assures the upkeep of the family, but this does not lead to any form of collective progress. A more violent mode of resistance is that of the maroons – escaped slaves who started their own plantations on new plots of land – but again, the isolation of the maroons meant that it was difficult for their rebellion to take on a collective force and meaning. Intellectual maroons, a class made up of “mulattos” and sons of agricultural workers who benefited at least from primary education, were then compromised by their reliance on that French education; indeed, “they quickly become the vehicle of official thought” (Glissant 1997e: 119; my translation). What the Martinicans lack, then, is a distinct and active nationalist project that would assure the repossession of their territory. Glissant proposes as a new form of contestation the notion of “Antillanité”, an alternative vision of Caribbean collective identity that will define history and culture in terms that are not structured by Western myths and ideology. This is admittedly unlikely in the end to provide the basis for a national revolution, but Glissant uses it as a starting-point for the invention of an innovative form of historical thinking designed to rescue local people from consignment to “non-history” and to fight the stagnation and passivity diagnosed also by Césaire. Right up until departmentalization in 1946, Glissant argues that “French Caribbean people are thus encouraged to deny themselves as a collectivity, in order 138

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to achieve an illusory individual quality” (1989: 7) and he sets out to re-imagine that collective identity in terms that resist the sweeping universalization of European thought. In sketching this new concept of Antillanité, however, Glissant at the same time rejects Césaire’s use of the notion of a “retour” or “reversion”, since he identifies within that term a reliance on a centred, determinist identity complicit once again with colonial thinking. Césaire’s return no doubt refused this rigid identitarianism in its celebration of the expansiveness of black identity and in its exploration of the active relation between the archipelago and the rest of the world, topographically, politically and culturally, but Glissant’s argument is nevertheless that the concept of return assumes the stability of the returning self. Indeed, “Reversion is the obsession with a single origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being” (ibid.: 16). Conversely, then, Glissant recommends the invention of Antillanité through “détour” or “diversion”: the recourse of the culture that is not directly pitted against an enemy but that needs to conceive its resistance surreptitiously. The détour cannot rely on the construction of a coherent alternative identity, but takes the form rather of “an interweaving of negative forces that go unchallenged” (ibid.: 19). It is also a strategy or moment that should lead to its own “dépassement” or development; its success determines that it ultimately transcends its own confines. Glissant’s prime example of this strategy of détour is the use of the Creole language. In using Creole, the slave or worker embraces the simplified language imposed on him by the master, and he twists and appropriates it so that it symbolizes his difference and his resistance. In Glissant’s terms, “you wish to reduce me to childish babble, I will make this babble systematic, we shall see if you can make sense of it” (ibid.: 20). Creole becomes a ruse used by the slave to alienate the slave-owner and to reclaim the idiom as his own. While for later thinkers and writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant “créolité” names a culture to be affirmed and maintained, however, Glissant’s conception of the use of Creole as a strategy of détour requires that it in turn be surpassed, that it lead somewhere new. Fanon’s revolutionary fervour and Césaire’s poetic language brought concrete change: they used a strategy of détour in order to envisage the world differently and, indeed, according to Glissant they also understood that the détour must on some level be mingled with another return – not to an origin, but “to the point of entanglement” (ibid.: 26). Clinging on to Creole would cause Martinican culture to stagnate, and Glissant fears that this “pidgin” is not a language in which Martinicans can express their creativity. Glissant has been criticized for failing to see the rich potentiality of the Creole khatibi and glissant

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culture and language, but it is nevertheless the argument of Caribbean Discourse that it is not créolité but the exploration of a broader point of entanglement that will serve as a focus for Antillanité. This also means that Glissant recommends the continuous and unpredictable process of creolization, through the embrace of interaction and exchange, rather than the establishment of a specifically Creole identity. This search for a “point of entanglement” at the heart of Antillanité leads next to the elaboration of a “poetics of Relation”: an exploration of Caribbean identity that celebrates its juxtaposition and intermingling of diverse cultural influences and practices. This is not just “métissage”, the simple mixture of black and white, but a more complex interaction or creolization that produces the unpredictable and the unexpected. This dynamic relationality recalls the transculturation celebrated by the Cuban thinker Fernando Ortiz, which, rather than describing the adoption of a new culture implied by “acculturation”, stresses “the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here” (Ortiz 1995: 97). Similarly, Glissant’s poetics of Relation promotes “Diversity” over “Sameness” , and this conception of Diversity brings no new fusion, but “means the human spirit’s striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence” (Glissant 1989: 98). While Sameness privileges Being, Diversity inaugurates relationality, and whereas Sameness fuels the European expansionist project, Diversity emerges in the resistance of the people. In terms reminiscent of Levinas’s work, Glissant offers an ethical critique here of the totalitarianism underpinning European universalism and argues that even the French discourse of human rights is born from this “saturation of Sameness” and blocks the requirements of Diversity. It is in literature or poetics that Glissant suggests that the ethics of Diversity survives and, as we shall see, it is this investment in literariness and aesthetics that will come to dominate Glissant’s later thinking. Glissant’s belief in the power of literature nevertheless does not entail a privileging of the written word. Indeed, the relational culture he seeks to reinvigorate is one that celebrates oral story-telling, and the oral form for Glissant performs the mutability and dynamism encapsulated by the Diverse. Glissant goes so far as to attest that “the written is the universalizing influence of Sameness, whereas the oral would be the organized manifestation of Diversity” (ibid.: 100). Printed forms, although potentially protean in meaning, are nevertheless fixed on the page, whereas the oral form allows the speaker to adapt or revise what he narrates; orality leaves room for digression, omission and recreation. Glissantian 140

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poetics recommends as a result the insertion of the oral into the written form, and the inscription of the dynamism of the spoken language into the literary. Once again, Glissant’s celebration of oral culture does not lead to the privileging of créolité or indeed folklore here, however, and if Glissant conceives a role for folk culture this will be as a strategic affirmation leading to its own necessary transcendence. The poetics of Relation upholds the dynamic and changing interaction of the oral and the written, and not just the retention and affirmation of an existing tradition of story-telling. Furthermore, the Diverse is expressed not only in the use of the Creole language or in oral culture, but through multilingualism. If Khatibi’s conception of bilingualism served to foreground linguistic relationality and dynamism, Glissant goes even further than Khatibi and exalts the interpenetration of any given language with multiple changing idioms. Glissant rewrites Saussure’s distinction between “language”, meaning the language system, and “speech”, denoting particular instances of the usage of the language, in order to criticize the assumed hermeticism of the former and to emphasize the multifarious creativity performed by the latter. Noting that multilingualism through history has frequently fallen back on a belief in the separation and hierarchy between languages, Glissant suggests instead that the very concept of language or “langue” can be opened out by examination of the creative inventions of particular languages or “langages”. For Glissant, “language [la langue] creates the relation, particular instances of language [le langage] creates difference, both of which are equally precious” (Glissant 1997e: 552). It is through the inflexion of his written French with the rhythms and idioms of his spoken Creole, for example, that Glissant creates his own symbiotic language, and it is with these very sorts of singular but multivalent langages that the universalism and standardization associated with French, and instituted through colonialism, can be undermined. Caribbean Discourse suggests that this contestatory dynamism can be created through the mixing of French and Creole, or of the oral and the written. The later sections of the French text additionally introduce the notion of “verbal delirium” as a means of describing “deviant manifestations … which limit themselves to the practice of particular languages (written or spoken)” (ibid.: 625), although these by their very nature should not be taken as exemplary. Nevertheless, Glissant schematizes some of the forms of this “verbal delirium” with a certain self-conscious irony, noting for example the use of repetition, formulae, evidence, structures that proceed by proliferation rather than sequence, and the khatibi and glissant

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vision of the self as determined by the transcendent vision of the other. For the most part, however, this deviance is a dysfunction that may subvert the norms of the French language, but that will eventually be surpassed by a more expansive and creative relationality. Glissant next explores the theatre as a means for the seizing of consciousness, which may pass through a phase of folklore, but whose dynamism should also seek to reach beyond folklore. Crucially, however, these strategies are conceived as forms of contestation that might lead to national liberation and, despite its privileging of poetics, the text retains something of a Marxist vision of repossession. At the end of the study Glissant returns to the “poetics of Relation” as the form that will explore both the complex reality of Martinican culture and the diversity and dynamism of all cultures of the world, but the final pages nevertheless defiantly call for the independence of Martinique via this revolution in cultural mentality. Creolization, conceived alongside Glissant’s more acerbic sections on political and economic inequality, is championed here as a strategic tool leading to national liberation.

Glissant’s poetics In addition to Caribbean Discourse and the novels, Glissant produced a series of essays or reflections, now published by Gallimard as a series entitled Poétique and numbered sequentially. There is a large degree of repetition and rewriting across the series and, indeed, The Poetics of Relation (1997c) is also explicitly “a reconstituted echo or spiral retelling” of Caribbean Discourse (Glissant 1997b: 16), as well as of L’Intention poétique (originally published in 1969 but repackaged as Poétique II; 1997b). This spiral structure is evidently itself conceived as an alternative to the linearity of official or European history; indeed, the individual volumes are themselves a subversively hybrid mixture of literary, philosophical and intermittently political language, structured not by linear argument but by overlapping fragments. The later texts of the Poétique series are also markedly different from Caribbean Discourse, however, both in their privileging of aesthetics in place of politics and in their own highly literary form. The Poetics of Relation tells us that Relation not only “binds” and “relays”, but it also “recounts”, suggesting it comes about through the creation and transfer of narratives. The creolization championed in Caribbean Discourse is now the product of an open-ended form of story-telling, where sections of narrative are “relayed” from one narrator to the next. It is also striking that the opening of The Poetics of 142

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Relation expands on the philosophical discussion of the slave trade as the inauguration of a non-history, this time through an intensely poetic evocation of the abyss across which the slave ships sailed on their journey to the Caribbean. The description of this originary exile nevertheless here gives rise to a new concept, that of “errance” or “errantry”, suggesting not so much loss but wandering and discovery. The initial image of the transportation of the slaves in this way leads not to alienation but to the creation and narration of “shared knowledge”. Furthermore, the poetics of that relationality is conceived using a new set of images, derived from Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1988), opposing the root structure with that of the rhizome and building in turn on Derrida’s rejection of origins as far back as Of Grammatology. Glissant moves away from a vocabulary of political strategy and ruse in favour of a wholehearted embrace of “rhizomatic thinking”: a model of cultural identity and exchange based on plural connections rather than on the positing of a single, monologic origin. Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant denounces root structures as reductive, even totalitarian, while celebrating the entangled web of stems and roots that constitute the rhizome structure: the root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. (Glissant 1997c: 11) If the root structure describes an identity firmly planted in the soil, related to an identifiable and immutable origin, the rhizome, a term originally used to name those types of plants whose roots form a complex network, evokes a plural and interactive mode of individuation or self-creation. It also inaugurates a conception of being not as finished product, but as process or, indeed, as singular “trace”. Any specific identity is necessarily now tempered and opened out by its connections with other parts of the rhizome structure. Despite the biological origins of the concept of the rhizome, however, Glissant’s use of it is above all as a creative metaphor, as a poetic descriptor of Caribbean relationality or “nomadic thought”. The rhizome becomes a figure of resistance to colonial thinking and its privileging of monolingualism, territoriality and cultural determinism. It is perhaps not surprising, after this poetic opening, that Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation proceeds by exploring literary examples of khatibi and glissant

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rhizomatic thought. Glissant notes that the very foundational texts of community, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the chansons de geste and African epics, are frequently texts of exile or even errance. These are works in which the possession of territory is questioned, and in which collective consciousness is created through the open-ended exploration of travel and migration rather than through the establishment of borders. In addition, Glissant cites the poetry of Baudelaire, and argues that, in exploring the poet’s inner consciousness, Baudelaire reveals that inner self as vast and expansive. The poetic persona discovers, according to Glissant, that “the alleged stability of knowledge led nowhere” (ibid.: 24). If Baudelaire’s poetry remains within the confines of the French language, however, Rimbaud’s famous pronouncement that “I is an other” becomes for Glissant the archetypal statement of the poetics of Relation. Rimbaud seeks not merely to deepen his knowledge of himself, but to transform that self, to transcend and disrupt tradition and heritage. Segalen’s work is then cited as a further example of an aesthetic that embraces the Diverse and, like Khatibi, Glissant recognizes the importance of Segalen’s conception of a moral or ethical relation with the other. Conversely, Glissant cites Saint-Jean Perse’s work since it operates the reverse movement of returning from the periphery (from his native land Guadeloupe) to the centre. Most importantly, the poetics of Relation can be located across the history of both French and world literature, and at the same time, takes different forms when sketched by different poets. The poetics of Relation is precisely not a specific mode of writing that can be pinned down and determined, but names rather more broadly a straining against boundaries, against territorialism, and against monadic forms of identity. Indeed Perse, one of the writers on whom Glissant dwells at most length, is explored not because he privileges the Caribbean over Europe, but because his writing invests in and desires both worlds. Rather more problematically, Glissant also cites Fanon’s migration from Martinique to France to Algeria as an example of Relation, although of course this overlooks Fanon’s own privileging of national identity in the service of the decolonization of Algeria. A further example of this movement towards the poetics of Relation can be found in Baroque art. For Glissant, “baroque art was a reaction against the rationalist pretense of penetrating the mysteries of the known with one uniform and conclusive move” (ibid.: 77). Baroque art enjoys the proliferation and expansion of aesthetic forms: it turns away from demands for uniformity and eschews transparency. Glissant’s celebration of the métissage of Baroque art recalls the work of the Cuban writer 144

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and thinker Alejo Carpentier, who evokes the richness of “marvellous realism” and the Baroque in Latin America. For Carpentier, Baroque is indeed “art in motion, pulsating art, an art that moves outward and away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders” (Carpentier 1995: 93). This is also a form of art that arises specifically from the rapid meeting of cultures, such as in Latin America as a result of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Postcolonial métissage, for Carpentier, leads to dynamic forms of artistic transformation. Moreover, Baroque art, and the poetics of Relation more generally, refuses to propose unequivocal and monologic forms of meaning, but affirms the value of opacity. Glissant recommends forms of art that do not offer back to the West its own transparent mirror image, but that give voice to the unfamiliar and the unknown. An adherence to modes of writing that remain anchored within the standardized form of French, and that do not explore the contact between French and other languages, will prevent the culture from developing and enhancing in new and enriching ways. As a result, Glissant goes on to argue that the promotion of francophonie as a means of protecting the language and imposing a standard form of French on the rest of the world repeats the colonial gesture of silencing other voices. Francophonie for Glissant must on the contrary be concerned with the evolution of the language and its ability to convey the idioms of diverse cultures and peoples. Furthermore, French has since the eighteenth century been associated with myths of clarity and logic; it has been conceived as a potentially universal tool for expression able to lend rationality to all speakers. In opposition to this, Glissant recommends not so much the right of the colonized to speak their own language, but rather a principle of communication and interaction between languages. Opacity, then, is not “enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity”; it names not the affirmation of a self-enclosed idiom, but the retention of singular but linguistically complex or relational forms of expression (Glissant 1997c: 190). It is a sign of confluence and interchange rather than of isolation. One of the most striking developments of The Poetics of Relation, and indeed of the later volumes of the Poétique series, is the increased emphasis on this relationality as a new form of totality. Glissant repeatedly criticizes the old Eurocentric universalism that imposes its own restrictive values and cultural identity on the colonies. This universalism is deceptive: it masks its own particularity beneath the myth of assimilation. Totality, on the other hand, is the vast, inclusive network of relations and interactions performed in Glissant’s poetics; it is not khatibi and glissant

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a monolithic generalization, but names the whole that is formed by a diverse and pulsating web of connections. Glissant’s thought retains a latent Hegelianism in this championing of a dialectic that would embrace, or even (inadvertently) subsume, the shocks and juxtapositions it recommends. The dialectic is not totalitarian, it is not absolute, but nevertheless names a global force of movement and intermingling. Already in The Poetics of Relation, Glissant also conceives the totality of Relation as the “chaos-monde”, not a fusion or confusion, but the chaotic and unpredictable combination of movements and interactions taking place all over the world. Drawing at times a little spuriously on the science of chaos theory, Glissant uses the model of chaos to describe the contingency and entropic energy of the poetics of Relation, and to emphasize its potentially extensive but unpredictable effects. I suggested at the beginning that Glissant’s thought moves further and further away from a focus on the specificity of the Caribbean, and certainly the concept of the chaos-monde can be seen to trigger this relinquishment of a specified poetics grounded in location. The Poetics of Relation is the third volume in Gallimard’s repackaged series, and the fourth and fifth volumes, Traité du tout-monde and La Cohée du Lamentin, clearly develop this embrace of totality at the expense of the earlier adherence to place. In Traité du tout-monde, Glissant further elaborates and even systematizes the thought of the chaos-monde or the “tout-monde” as the meeting, the mutual interference, the harmony or disharmony between cultures, and this new process is characterized by speed, by unpredictability, by self-consciousness and by the cultures’ mutual valorization. In La Cohée du Lamentin, the vocabulary of totality is coupled with that of “mondialité” or “globality”, distinct from the neo-imperialism of “globalization”, and deployed to evoke diversity and relationality across the planet: this globality projects into the unprecedented adventure that is given to all of us to live through today, and into a world, which, for the first time, so truly and in such an immediate, sudden way, conceives itself as both multiple and One, and inextricable. (Glissant 2005: 15) In addition, Glissant describes the totality of relations as a trembling; this evokes both the trembling of peoples in the face of disaster, and the buzzing movement produced by migration, travel and cultural interchange. Glissant’s concept of trembling privileges the agitation of forms 146

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of artistic production over fixed systems, over tradition and determinism, and adds to the former discussions of relationality the implication of an infinite if at times imperceptible mobility. Glissant’s title La Cohée du Lamentin refers to his birthplace in Martinique, and yet any specific reference to Martinique or the Caribbean in this work is soon subsumed in the whirlwind of this trembling, so that the archipelago is nothing more than a privileged figure for global movement and relationality. Glissant specifically notes that the danger of evoking the Caribbean as a unique site of métissage is precisely the potential occlusion of forms of interaction taking place all over the world. It is this effective dissolution of Caribbean specificity, however, that has troubled some of Glissant’s critics. Peter Hallward argues that the investment in the specificity of Martinique and the construction of subaltern agency in Glissant’s earlier work is thoroughly surpassed in the later texts by a reflection on singular self-differentiation. Beings are continually evolving, totality is constant and interactions between particular groups are dissolved in this all-encompassing whole. The détour, opacity and the focus on place turn out to function only in the service of their own extinction by the totalizing force of the chaos-monde or globality. Indeed, any assertion of opacity takes place in dialogue with other cultures, and the specificity that might have been represented by opacity is diluted and transformed through that dialogue. Any conception of national agency lingering in Caribbean Discourse is now disabled by the larger, singular force of totalization, and if fleeting references to specificity can still be found in The Poetics of Relation, this “has little to do with relations-with and-between particularities as such” (Hallward 2001: 123). Hallward notes in particular that the change in Glissant’s reaction to Perse from Caribbean Discourse to The Poetics of Relation performs this problematic shift, in that in the earlier work Perse was condemned for not offering a sufficiently specific vision of the Caribbean, whereas in The Poetics of Relation he is lauded for his performance of relationality. Ultimately, for Hallward, the upshot of this shift is a disastrous rejection of the very concepts that founded the political bases of Caribbean Discourse: “there can be no national repossession, for dispossession is now the condition (and opportunity) of Creative reality itself ” (ibid.: 124–5). Hallward may well be correct in his diagnosis of Glissant’s startling disengagement from politics; indeed, the defence of Glissant’s political efficacy offered by more positive critics such as Michael Dash can seem a little weak. The call for the liberation of Martinique, still pressing in Caribbean Discourse, was nevertheless clearly even then bound khatibi and glissant

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up with ruses and strategies that were conceived only in the interests of their eventual surpassing, and the seeds of “globality” lie in that early investment in “dépassement” or development. Furthermore, if politics and poetics do to some extent diverge in Glissant’s work, then this may serve the purpose precisely of creating a space for forms of cultural production unconstrained by militancy. In The Poetics of Relation, Glissant argues for a liberatory aesthetics, and although this is clearly related to the denunciation of colonial thinking, the poetic forms recommended by Glissant do not have to function in the service of a specified anti-colonial movement. Like Hallward, Bongie articulates the difficulties of Glissant’s political disengagement in his essay “Edouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality” (2008), and yet it is perhaps useful that Bongie nevertheless concludes by conceding that: the work of the late Glissant provides a valuable reminder of the distance between culture and politics, even if its serene composure cannot help but create a nostalgia for the “rough futures” that a resistant politics, an anti-colonial politics capable not merely of dissenting from but of combating the imperial aspirations of the thuggish proponents of Empire, cannot help but continue to envision. (Bongie 2009) From this point of view, it might be argued that Glissant is unusually bold among postcolonial thinkers in that he does not promote a banal “cultural politics” but conceives a role for aesthetics as a site of experimentation not necessarily linked to the concrete demand for political independence. The poetics of Relation insists on the liberation of the imaginary before the overthrow of political oppression. Finally, the division in Glissant’s work can be seen to recall the schism of Derrida’s reflections on politics and ethics, although there is no doubt that Derrida for the most part retains a self-awareness and rigour at times lacking in Glissant’s cultural utopianism. Despite separating the demands of ethics and politics, moreover, Derrida nevertheless argues for the necessity of thinking each alongside the other, however uncomfortable or uneasy a process this might be. Glissant’s celebration of poetics is also largely ethical, and is reminiscent of Derridean thought in its rejection of origins, territorialism and borders, and in its exploration of singular self-differentiation and being as a “trace”. Nevertheless, if Glissant’s work recalls that of Derrida, he also invests much more in the role not only of ethics but of poetics or aesthetics, and it is perhaps in the text’s creative and evocative whirlwind that it loses touch with the 148

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political altogether. Glissant’s championing of opacity is also reminiscent of Bhabha’s later affirmation of the rights of minority cultures, especially when conceived by a critic such as Britton as “an ethical value and a political right” (1999: 25). When conceived merely as part of the infinite trembling of the poetics of Relation, however, opacity loses its political force and becomes more of a focus of energizing, but ungrounded, cultural experimentation. Indeed, in the recent musings on aesthetics gathered in the volume Une nouvelle région du monde (2006), Glissant explicitly champions the role of aesthetics before ethics and politics, and the dynamism of relation is associated with aesthetic beauty. Clearly, then, Glissant moves from the at once ethically and politically impassioned treatise of Caribbean Discourse to a much more literary and aesthetic vision of infinite cultural relationality, and the latter’s ambitious sweep undoubtedly undermines its political resonance in the place from which it was engendered. Yet that latter stage remains provocative and enriching perhaps precisely because it imagines an aesthetic and cultural ethics that liberates artistic production from the requirements of immediate political engagement, and suggests that poetics has a role that is distinct from that of concrete independence movements. Glissant in this way advocates a form of literary and linguistic experimentation that responds to postcoloniality and sets out to liberate thought from imperialist metaphysics, but that is not subservient to the goal of regime change. Caribbean Discourse offers a vision of ethical and political criticism rooted in the experiences of Martinique. The Poetics of Relation and the later works, however, are provocative above all as a result of their defiant search for an unprecedented postcolonial aesthetics.

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Khatibi allies decolonization with deconstruction, and recommends (with Derrida) the affirmation of a “pensée autre” (“other thought”) that would attend to cultural differences. He also evolves a theory of bilingualism that explores both the alienating effects, and the creative potential, of writing across two languages. Khatibi’s general postcolonial theory of bilingualism is coupled with detailed exploration of Moroccan, Arab and Islamic cultures. He criticizes Berque for conceiving Arab culture in generalized terms, and investigates calligraphic art as a form of representation that opens up the relation between sign and referent in challenging, and ethical, ways. khatibi and glissant

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Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse calls for the liberation of Martinique as well as for a celebration of cultural relationality not unrelated to Khatibi’s “pensée autre”. Glissant presents Caribbean culture or “Antillanité” as multiple and diverse, and affirms the creative potential of “détour” or “diversion” rather than the straightforward return to roots. Glissant’s later work is less political than Caribbean Discourse, and concentrates on the cultural and aesthetic productivity of “Antillanité” as a site of relationality. Glissant also incorporates the Caribbean into the “chaos-monde”, a buzzing, trembling global network of multiple connections capable of bringing cultural innovation and change. This later divorce between culture and politics is a useful sign of the distinct roles played by each in postcolonial criticism.

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Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe

The work of many of the postcolonial thinkers discussed in this book has both ethical and political implications, yet most tend to privilege one approach over the other. Fanon and Sartre’s militancy is underpinned by an ethical call for freedom and subjective self-invention, but their first objective is the decolonization of Algeria, whereas for thinkers such as Derrida and Bhabha it is the ethical awareness of the other’s intractability that initially provides the basis for political liberation. Moreover, one can detect in Glissant’s evolving trajectory, and in Said’s movement between Palestinian politics or Islam and literary criticism, a distinction between writing that is first and foremost political, and that which insists above all on an ethical or cultural agenda. It is Spivak, Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, however, who engage most explicitly throughout their work both with Marxist political theory and with a form of ethical thinking derived from deconstruction. Particularly in the work of Spivak, this duality can lead to contradiction, since at times she calls for a renewed understanding of subaltern political agency while at others the subaltern is a more intractable figure signifying the resistance of the other to concrete forms of representation. Such contradictions are never fully resolved in Spivak’s work, although she comes up with the notion of “strategic essentialism” in an effort to argue that specific claims for agency might rest on the assertion of an identity, but that identity does not necessarily acquire permanence or “truth”. Nevertheless, the eclecticism of Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe finally suggests that, while politics and ethics do indeed require different modes of thinking, these different modes are both necessary for an ethics with politics?

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understanding of postcolonialism and, indeed, the challenge is to keep both in play without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with the programmatic use of either. These three thinkers are treated together here, then, because despite the differences in their focus – Mudimbe and Mbembe write specifically about colonial and postcolonial Africa – they all draw at once on Marxism and on poststructuralist ethics, and in so doing demonstrate the inevitable multivalency of postcolonial philosophical reflection.

Gayatri Spivak Spivak grew up in Calcutta, where she took her undergraduate degree in English, and she went on to complete her graduate work at Cornell while also teaching at Iowa in the United States. She now teaches at Columbia University in New York, and although earlier in her career she was perhaps best known as the translator of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, her prolific writings on postcolonialism have more recently led her to become one of the field’s most cited thinkers. Spivak’s work broadly sets out to rescue the “subaltern” both from the structures of imperialist and neo-imperialist oppression, and from the voracious grasp of Western academics whose discourse newly occludes and silences the subjugated non-Western other. In this way her thinking is clearly aligned with that of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and she regularly contributed articles to the journal, although she is treated separately here because her work reaches beyond their remit in a number of ways. First, Spivak draws not only on Marx’s theories of economic exploitation and on Foucault’s analyses of the complicity between power and knowledge, but also on Derrida’s explorations of the inaccessible and singular other alienated in language. Secondly, Spivak’s work is distinctive for its focus on gender: when she writes about the oppression of the subaltern, she examines specifically the double subjugation of women by imperialism and by patriarchy. It has been objected more than once that a significant failure in postcolonial studies is the lack of attention particularly to female oppression offered by its major representatives, and it is perhaps true that Spivak is one of the few renowned voices in the field consistently to analyse the suffering of subaltern women. While Bhabha scarcely mentions gender anywhere in his work, Spivak conceives her postcolonial critique as necessarily always feminist. Thirdly, Spivak’s work is unusual in its constant, even excessive, self-consciousness, and confessions of perpetual anxiety about her own work repeatedly serve to 152

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warn the reader of the loopholes and obstacles obstructing the process of forming a postcolonial critique. For many critics this recurrent selfdoubt borders on a crippling narcissism that gets in the way of Spivak’s attending to the real mechanics of colonial oppression, and certainly at times her work seems as much concerned with the self, and with the work of “Theory”, as with the other. Spivak’s self-consciousness is nonetheless highly provocative since, like that of Derrida, it forces us to ask the fundamental question of what postcolonial philosophy is and does. The implications of Spivak’s anxiety will be discussed at the end of this section. One of the major strands of Spivak’s work, then, is her championing of the work of Marx, which she argues is unique and provocative as a result of its revolutionary exegesis of global capitalism. She reads Marx for his generalized political and economic understanding of capital as it functions across the globe, and goes on to use some of his concepts to explore the mechanics of postcolonial or neo-imperialist oppression. Unusually, moreover, Spivak at the same time focuses on the intricacies of Marx’s texts and strains against readings that conceive his thought as deterministic and reductive. One of her most famous essays on Marx, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” (1996b), for example, explores the slippery construction of the notion of value in Marx, and also expands Marx’s critique of the bourgeois ruling class so as to question the inequalities subtending the very academic activity in which she herself is engaged. Spivak starts by raising the question of how to conceive the subject in terms that are neither wholly “materialist” nor entirely “idealist”. In order to answer this, she goes on to identify the potential flexibility and openness in Marx’s writing on value and to stress the “textuality” of his materialist writing. Spivak then shows that value is conceived in Marx as a representation, and even more, as a differential: “what is represented or represents itself in the commodity differential is Value” (Spivak 1996b: 114). Yet having established this, she next demonstrates that in linking labour to value and money via representation, Marx’s thinking masks several discontinuities, such as the fact that money is “separated from its own being as commodity”, or that money is a sort of “vanishing moment facilitating the exchange between two commodities” (ibid.: 115). As a result, Spivak argues of Marx’s schema on the relation between value, money and capital that “at each step of the dialectic something seems to lead off into the open-endedness of textuality: indifference, inadequation, rupture” (ibid.: 116). The process of representation inherent in Marx’s model masks this ambivalence or slippage. Spivak also pinpoints the ambiguity of the notion of use-value, ethics with politics?

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suggesting that it is both inside and outside the system of value determinations, because it is not part of the circuit of exchange, and yet the notion of exchange-value nevertheless relies on the notion of use. This reading of Marx is “textualist”, in that it explores the hidden confusions of Marx’s writing even as it celebrates their pertinence. Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” problematizes Marx’s notion of value in order to reject accusations that his thought is deterministic, but she also goes on to use it to show that the literary academy too supports the international division of labour. Developments in telecommunications further entrench this division, as well as the oppression of women, and Spivak argues that any theory of value needs to take into account the exploitation carried out in the name of the production of technologies on which we rely. In addition, Spivak stresses that Marx’s materialist notion of value should be used to understand processes of canon formation, and she suggests it would be fruitful “to pursue the evaluation of the pervasive and tacit gesture that accepts the history of style-formations in Western European canonical literature as the evaluation of style as such” (ibid.: 129). Not only is Marxist thinking more complex in its textual formulation than has previously been recognized, but its resonance is also more far-reaching than expected, as is testified by Spivak’s application of notions of value and the division of labour to the sphere of academic and literary study. If Spivak finds a suppleness or ambivalence in Marx’s writing, and uses his understanding of the international division of labour with an awareness of the slipperiness of his founding concepts, she nevertheless criticizes Derrida’s reading of Marx for its excessive confusion surrounding the notion of value. In “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value”, Spivak notes that Derrida conceives capital as “interest-bearing commercial capital” rather than industrial capital, and the result is that surplus-value for him becomes “the super-adequation of capital rather than a ‘materialist’ predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself ” (ibid.: 119). Derrida’s reading in this way posits the subject as “idealist”, as consciousness, and as insufficiently materialist. Furthermore, in the essay “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida” (1993), Spivak concedes that there are valuable political lessons to be learned from Derrida, but she nevertheless suggests that Derrida’s reading in The Other Heading of the polysemy in Paul Valéry’s use of the term “capital” displays an inadequate grasp of Marx’s concept. Once again, Derrida also misunderstands the notion of surplus-value as an abstract signifier of an infinite excess of value, rather than as the specific difference between labour-value and exchange-value. Finally, in “Ghostwriting” 154

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(1995), Spivak’s careful engagement with Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), Spivak continues to acknowledge her debt to Derrida and to endorse his ethics, while developing previous observations that he fails to attend to women’s suffering as a result of the international division of labour. Spivak also complains that when he pinpoints the ten plagues of the modern world, he blurs distinct types of value and fails to comprehend “the connection between industrial capitalism, colonialism, so-called postindustrial capitalism, neo-colonialism, electronified capitalism, and the current financialization of the globe, with the attendant phenomena of migrancy and ecological disaster” (Spivak 1995: 68). Most disturbingly, the upshot of Derrida’s reading of Marx, according to Spivak, is that the subaltern has no place in it. The innovation of Spivak’s readings of Marx is her emphasis on textual indeterminacies, and it is perhaps ironic that she uses a deconstructive strategy while criticizing Derrida’s own use of Marx. Her writing on Marx testifies to an extraordinary amalgamation of support for his highly materialist, economic analyses, together with exploration of the linguistic indeterminacy that nevertheless characterizes those analyses. Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is arguably her most often cited piece of writing, and it is also here that she displays most overtly her simultaneous affiliation with both Marx and Derrida. On one level, Spivak again draws on Marx, this time in order to explore the difference, and the problematic conflation, of two forms of representation. The German “Darstellen” designates “rhetoric-as-trope”, or the process of representation in the sense of a depiction, whereas “Vertreten” names “rhetoric-aspersuasion”, or a more political form of representation. Vertreten involves substitution or “speaking for”. Spivak quotes Marx’s comment in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “the small peasant proprietors ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’” (1988: 276–7), and notes that while Marx specifically uses the term Vertreten, he exposes the ways in which this form of political representation is elided with representation as depiction. While the peasants described have no political voice, at the same time they are also occluded by the forms of depiction or understanding imposed on them from outside. The purpose of this further “textualist” reading of Marx is to demonstrate how French philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari are unwittingly guilty of this same slippage. Spivak shows, for example, that in stating that there is no place for representation, only for action, Deleuze too finishes by blurring Darstellen and Vertreten, and leaves the subaltern subject with no voice. She chides these otherwise highly self-conscious philosophers for failing to think through the two senses ethics with politics?

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of representation, and asserts: “they must note how the staging of the world in representation – its scene of writing, its Darstellung – dissimulates the choice of and need for ‘heroes’, paternal proxies, agents of power – Vertretung” (ibid.: 279). Marxist politics is here inscribed into the heart of French intellectual work, as Spivak complains that once again academe itself supports and entrenches the international division of labour in its very ignoring of the economic underpinnings of the philosophical statements it produces. Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and indeed the Subaltern Studies Collective, need to reflect on their own practice, and ask “Can the subaltern speak?”, or does their work too deprive the oppressed subject of a voice? This lapsus is all the more astonishing in the work of thinkers who nevertheless touch on Third World issues, and indeed, Spivak reads Foucault’s omission of the narrative of imperialism from his discussions of institutions of power as a further example of this silencing. Developing the political strand to the essay, Spivak next uses the example of the Hindu practice of sati, or the self-immolation of widows, to demonstrate the practical effects of this elision in the process of representation. On the one hand, colonial officials seeking to abolish the practice of sati can be read as a case of “white men saving brown women from brown men”, while on the other hand, the Indian nativist riposte was that “the women actually wanted to die” (ibid.: 297). The two positions serve to legitimize one another, but both exclude the women’s voice and agency. Police reports included in the records of the East India Company are, according to Spivak, both ignorant and fragmented, and the imperialist attitude towards the practice suggests that the woman is conceived as an “object of protection from her own kind” (ibid.: 299). Moreover, the Hindu law on sati as it is formulated in the Dharmaśāstra and the Rg-Veda is in fact modelled on suicide laws created for men. According to the Dharmaśāstra, suicide is usually reprehensible, but there are two types of suicide that are permissible. The first is when it arises out of “the knowledge of truth”, when “the knowing subject comprehends the insubstantiality or mere phenomenality (which may be the same thing as nonphenomenality) of its identity” (ibid.). The second form of suicide that is permitted is when it is accomplished in a particular place of pilgrimage. Women are permitted to kill themselves, then, if they mimic these laws that were originally destined for men. This means that the woman can “act out” her husband’s insubstantiality, or can immolate herself in the specific place of her husband’s funeral pyre. Part of Spivak’s endeavour in this analysis is to trace the women’s absence of political representation in both colonial and native 156

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discussions of sati. However, it is significant that Spivak’s argument in fact rests on her understanding of subtle slips in the process of representation akin to the sorts of ethical awareness subtending Derrida’s work. Spivak shows that the two forms of sanctioned suicide for widows both blur imitation with intention, and it is in this blurring that the women’s voices lie hidden. First, in immolating herself on the husband’s funeral pyre, the widow performs a sort of displaced suicide: she kills herself by taking her husband’s place. Secondly, when conceived in relation to the sanctioned suicide of the subject who knows his insubstantiality, the widow’s suicide can be seen as a secondary act of mimicry. Spivak notes that the Dharmaśāstra makes an exception here both in its permission of women’s suicide, and in its attribution of agency to widows (who were relegated permanently to a passive, premarital status), in order to justify self-immolation. Yet for Spivak, this agency is fragile, given that it manifests itself, as she shows, on this secondary level both in the woman’s acting out of her husband’s phenomenality and in her taking his place on the funeral pyre. Intention here becomes blurred with imitation, with mimetic performance, and is as a result in itself unidentifiable and unlocatable. The widows’ intention is only a model or a copy, in which it is ultimately impossible to locate any individual’s authentic intention. Agency is a lost potential here, the glimmer of a possibility, but it is also dissolved because the supposed free choice is just an imitation of a code created for men, to be used in other contexts. Spivak’s identification of the blurring between intention and imitation here clearly recalls Derrida’s understanding of iterability, expounded in the essay “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy, as the possibility that a statement, when repeated, can mean something different from originally intended. Spivak’s attention to this potential but hidden shift of meaning in the women’s mimetic act of self-immolation is also close to Derrida’s ethical call for an awareness of singularities that exceed both the sovereignty of all language and the colonizer’s drive for deterministic knowledge. Furthermore, earlier in the same essay Spivak had already established the usefulness of Derrida’s work for this sort of postcolonial reflection. Reading Of Grammatology, Spivak shows how Derrida’s text uncovers the European subject’s “tendency to constitute the Other as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that as the problem with all logocentric and therefore also all grammatological endeavors” (ibid.: 293). As in the colonial discourses on sati, the subaltern’s voice slips outside the European conceptual framework. Even more, Spivak uses Derrida to conceive the Other here not so much to denote a specific and identifiable non-European subject, but as “that inaccessible ethics with politics?

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blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text” (ibid.: 294). Derrida does not as a result invoke “letting the other speak for himself ”, but appeals to the “tout autre” or “quite other”, a singular, intractable presence close in conceptual terms to Levinas’s Infinity. An ethical conception of the subaltern as this “inaccessible blankness” rather than as a specific subject position prevents the postcolonial philosopher from over-determining her or speaking in her place, and this prevention is privileged over the achievement of political agency. If, then, on the one hand Spivak uses Marxism to criticize the politics of the representation of the specific subaltern subject, she also in the same essay cites Derrida in order to emphasize our ethical obligation towards the subaltern’s singular intractability. Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was later rewritten and published again in her monumental A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), however, and it is perhaps significant that the later version is even more self-conscious about the ethics of the theorist’s own writing. She omits a number of sections in the later version, such as her comments near the beginning of the discussion of the sati stressing the relationship between information retrieval in anthropology, political science, history and sociology on the one hand, and her own challenge to the construction of a subject position that underpins such work on the other. The paragraph containing this assertion is absent from the version printed in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, suggesting that she no longer wants to make such bold claims for her strategy. This later version is clearly more doubtful about its broader resonance and impact than the earlier text. Furthermore, the revised version is less trenchant, and contains more discussion, and more ambivalence, about its own practice. Here, Spivak precedes her analysis of the Dharmaśāstra with the observation that the colonial subject normalizes the notion of “woman” in this context and avoids the question of psychobiography, and she goes on to ask, “what is it to ask the question of psychobiography?” (1999: 291). The question remains unanswered, but indicates the impossibility of telling the subaltern woman’s biographical story, and introduces a further level of methodological unease absent from the earlier version. In addition, in the later version Spivak inserts a further section developing the resonance of Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend as a signifier of the impasse or block between two incompatible positions, and the expansion of this analysis indicates a less dogmatic attitude to the subaltern’s silencing. Spivak describes the aporia between the patriarchal admiration of the women’s free will and the rhetoric of colonial benevolence by quoting Lyotard at length, and stresses that these 158

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are two perspectives between which there is no common ground, no terms in which to negotiate. For Spivak, however, the widow’s response lies in the space between these poles, the space left open by the differend. Spivak goes on to underline the impossibility for the woman to overcome this differend, but indicates that her analysis will end with a reflection on “an idiomatic moment in the scripting of the female body”, which will remain in the space of the differend, but which is nevertheless not the same as total effacement or silence. Even if this space is one of impossible negotiation, the terminology of space connotes a chink that can be analysed, rather than outright effacement or ignorance. This potential field of analysis then relates to Spivak’s discussion of the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, a young girl who hanged herself at the age of sixteen or seventeen because she was involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence, but did not want to commit an assassination. She killed herself while menstruating, however, so that it was clear that it was not because she was pregnant as a result of an illicit affair, and Spivak shows how reports and accounts of the story again gloss over her actual motivations. In the earlier version, Spivak concludes the discussion with the stark statement: “the subaltern cannot speak”. In the revised version, however, she admits that this was an inadvisable remark since, of course, in its certainty it silenced the very other whose voice she was trying to rescue. The aim was not so much to reinforce the effacement of the subaltern’s voice, as to problematize the endeavour to respond in her place. In the later version of the essay, then, Spivak attempts not to stress the foreclosure of Bhaduri’s speech, but to leave the text open enough to reveal the ambivalence of her gesture, to allow the uncertainty of the act to emerge through the lines of her own reading rather than to speak in the other’s place. In this way, by the time of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak emerges as a careful reader of herself and also of others, and although she still shifts erratically between affiliation with Marx and Derrida, much of the work consists in attentive readings of both political and ethical injustice. The revised version of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is printed in a section on “History”, and hinges, as I suggested, on careful engagement with archives on the sati with the aim both of unearthing past forms of political oppression and the collusion of these with unethical silencing. In addition to the “History” section, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason also includes a chapter on “Philosophy” comprising subtle readings of particular details in Kant, Hegel and Marx. Spivak tracks the troubled position of the “native informant”, and again, she moves from a more ethical critique of Kant and Hegel’s blindness to the Third World Other ethics with politics?

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to a regeneration of Marx, although this will again be based on the latent “textualism” of his writing. First, Spivak analyses Kant’s treatment of the concept of “man” in the three critiques, and notes that, in a passing gesture of dismissal, Kant suggests that “the New Hollander or the man from Tierra del Fuego cannot be the subject of speech or judgment in the world of the Critique” (Spivak 1999: 26). This failure to conceive the other or the “native informant” as human is exemplary of the very forms of postcolonial exclusion against which Spivak’s work tirelessly rails. Equally, Hegel’s aesthetics contains comments on the Bhagavad Gita but, although Hegel’s remarks are benevolent, “they still finally point at the mindless gift for making shapes [verstandlose Gestaltungsgabe] and an absence of the push into history” (ibid.: 44). Spivak then goes on to show that in fact the representation of time in the Bhagavad Gita does follow a Hegelian model: “‘Hegel’ and the ‘Gita’ can be read as two rather different versions of the manipulation of the question of history in a political interest, for the apparent disclosure of the Law” (ibid.: 58). Finally, Spivak returns to Marx and notes that despite the apparent stasis and generalization of the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, it does function as a useful, non-empirical figure for difference in Marx. The rest of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason continues to track the troubled representation of the “native informant” and stresses in particular the occlusion of the female subaltern. A section on “literature”, made up largely of previously published essays, explores the double subjugation of the Third World woman and, again, the textual emphasis of the section suggests a call for ethical attention to the violence of imperialist forms of representation and silencing. Spivak begins by discussing Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the figure of Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, is described in terms that blur the border between human and animal; indeed, Jane refers from time to time to her desire to free women of the Third World from their ignorance and servitude. Spivak also discusses a passage in which Mr Rochester recounts the return to Europe from the West Indies as a divine injunction, and the site of the imperialist conquest is conceived as Hell. In Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, however, Bertha Mason’s humanity is left intact, and Spivak also draws out Rhys’s use of metaphors of mirroring to argue that the text depicts the colonial subject confronted with the image of itself as other. She notes in addition that the colonized other of the text is less Bertha/Antoinette than the black plantation slave Christophine, a deliberately marginalized figure, and yet the only one capable of judging and analysing Rochester. Spivak’s next example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a text not explicitly concerned 160

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with imperialism, but nevertheless one where “the master alone has a history” (ibid.: 140). Finally, Mahasweta Devi’s story “Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Suhay” shifts the discussion to the postcolonial context. Spivak argues that the work deliberately constructs the colonized as subaltern rather than citizen, and figures the pterodactyl, which “may be the soul of ancestors”, as an impossibility whose portrayal is also separated structurally from the frame of the story. This deliberately mimics the marginalization of local history by dominant colonial discourses. Spivak’s chapter on “literature” also contains readings of three “masculine” texts, including literary texts by Baudelaire, Kipling and a paper laid before the East India Company, in order to offer further evidence of imperialist ideology even within writing that is conceived as oppositional. These are then contrasted with exploration of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, in which the “native” is this time also an agent. There will not be space here to discuss each of these readings in turn; however, Spivak’s strategy is once again to uncover the ways in which the subaltern is not only politically subjugated but also unethically marginalized within literary discourse. The final section of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason revolves slightly more loosely around “culture”, and contains a discussion of Frederic Jameson’s conception of postmodernism and late capitalism. Spivak notes that Jameson’s theory at once attempts to obliterate the notion of a secure subject position and continues paradoxically to rely on its presence. This contradiction emerges in part from Jameson’s use of Derrida, since in order to decentre the subject, deconstruction too must retain a notion of the centred subject. Spivak also invokes several examples from the fashion industry, including Barthes’s Empire of Signs (1983), to uncover the repeated assumption of a neutralized European “I” that forecloses the native informant: throughout this book, my point has been that the subjectposition of this I is historically constructed and produced so that it can become transparent at will (even when belonging to the indigenous postcolonial elite turned diasporic like the present writer). (Ibid.: 343) The culture of the native informant, however, is “always on the run”; its constant self-singularizing eludes the European discourses that repeatedly but fruitlessly seek to grasp it. The distinctiveness of much of Spivak’s work, moreover, stems from her awareness of her own complicity with the discourses she sets out to undermine. Constantly vigilant about her own position, Spivak ethics with politics?

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characterizes her theory not as a source of knowledge but as a form of anxious self-reflexivity, the offering up of a set of propositions and their immediate questioning or withdrawal. She critiques the assumed opposition between positivism or essentialism and Theory, and suggests that this very division makes of Theory an artificially distinct category in which, again, “the position of the investigator remains unquestioned” (ibid.: 283). “Theory”, with a capital T signifying a grand narrative or master discourse, is undermined in favour of Spivak’s own “implausible and impertinent readings”, her “obtuse angling” constantly in dispute with itself. Spivak also peppers her work with autobiographical reflections, partly in order to confess the limitations of her vision, her potential partiality or blindness, although it is significant that even these are usually fleeting and often ironic or self-contradictory. Spivak wants both to emphasize that her discourse is necessarily subjective or incomplete, and to avoid falling into the trap of narcissism by altering or indeed quickly retracting her autobiographical voice before it hardens into an established, identitarian subject position. Equally, her constant revision and rewriting of her work suggests that she does not conceive her arguments to be finite and immutable. Her prose is frequently criticized for its convolutions, but Spivak’s difficulty stems from her ability constantly to refine, explore and interrogate her own arguments, and her desire to present her standpoints as part of an evolution, an internal debate. All these features of the writing perform an ethical resistance to mastery and an openness to the alterities that the critic cannot capture. The success of Spivak’s writing strategy remains nevertheless a subject of some controversy. In White Mythologies (1990), Young discusses Spivak’s interrogation of Western discourses on the Third World and notes her vigilance towards the ways in which her own discourse risks perpetuating the structures she criticizes, but he asserts at the same time that she does retain a classical Marxist position. Conversely, however, Eagleton laments that Spivak spends so much time examining the bad faith of her own writing that she fails properly to address the political mechanics of colonial oppression. In addition, Parry famously objects that Spivak exaggerates the importance of the work of the postcolonial female intellectual, and that her endless critiques of the Western institution still leave no space for the voice of the subaltern. Ultimately, and in spite of herself, “Spivak in her own writings severely restricts (eliminates?) the space in which the colonized can be written back into society” (Parry 2004: 23). Furthermore, with perhaps more nuance, Hallward criticizes Spivak’s concept of the subaltern for positing her voice as singular and inaccessible, and for failing to think through 162

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the means by which she might consolidate her identity and voice. For Hallward, “the subaltern, in other words, is the theoretically untouchable, the altogether-beyond-relation: the attempt to ‘relate’ to the subaltern defines what Spivak will quite appropriately name an ‘impossible ethical singularity’” (2001: 30). Against Young, then, these critics imply that Spivak’s self-conscious ethics backfires, and that her deconstructive conception of the intractable subaltern is politically ineffective. Yet Spivak herself ultimately levels many of the same objections at Derrida’s work, and while her appendix to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason suggests that there are ways in which Derridean thought might turn out to be useful for marginalized cultural groups, “the possibility of these connections remains dubious as long as the ‘setting-to-work’ mode remains caught within the descriptive and/or formalizing practices of the academic or disciplinary calculus” (Spivak 1999: 429). It would seem that Spivak persists in wanting to combine the use of deconstructive ethics, learned from Derrida, with a more pragmatic, empirical and economic objective. Her fluctuating attitude to the work of Derrida is in turn mirrored by an idiosyncratic engagement with Marx, whereby she by turns applauds the systematic analysis of global praxis and opens up the Marxian text to reveal its hidden slippages, its ambivalences and its resistance to determinism. It is difficult to resolve Spivak’s eclectic engagements with Marx and Derrida and to extract from her work an overarching or at least a dominant approach to postcolonialism. Where her provocation, or for some her difficulty, lies is in her unusually sensitive writing and reading strategies. Her eclecticism and her self-conscious anxiety do not offer a single model of critique but precisely warn against the adoption of the sort of dogmatic, determinist discourse that occludes the subalternity to which it claims to attend. Postcolonial theory must avoid either assimilating or excluding the others it examines, and it must reveal its situatedness, rather than claiming the transparency and neutrality of the Western discourses that Spivak denounces. As Michael Syrotinski points out, Spivak’s engagement with materialism in Derrida and Marx also seeks to undermine facile oppositions between empirical practice and “textualism”, and offers a compelling example of the necessity of a careful “labour of reading” applied to both (Syrotinski 2007: 59). Certainly, Spivak’s acuity is most apparent in her readings of other thinkers, writers and critics, and what her work recommends is this form of ethical, attentive reading as a means of understanding all the facets of postcolonial oppression, including the political and the economic. Spivak at times seems to privilege politics over ethics, and at others it is ethics with politics?

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ethics that comes before politics, but it is in her readings that it becomes clear how attention to the workings, and blindnesses, of ideological discourse is relevant to an understanding of particular instances of political oppression. Her writing does not call for the sorts of immediate political action found in Fanon, Sartre or Gandhi, but it does suggest that attentive reading can offer insight into specific moments of both ethical and political violation.

V. Y. Mudimbe The work of Valentin Yves (Vumbi Yoka) Mudimbe evolves out of a very different context from that of Spivak, since Mudimbe engages specifically with the discipline of African studies and, although well known in this domain, is less frequently associated with postcolonialism. Mubimbe himself was born in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), although he went to live in a Benedictine monastery in Rwanda at the age of 9, before studying linguistics in Besançon, France and in Louvain, Belgium. Although he taught in DRC between 1973 and 1982, he subsequently moved to the United States in part to escape the regime of Mobutu, and he is now a professor at Duke University. In many ways Mudimbe’s philosophical work can be seen as related to Said’s Orientalism in that his thinking centres on a critique of the parallel concepts of “Africanism” – the production of knowledge about Africa – and the dangers of allowing that knowledge to be corrupted by forms of ideology that efface the African other. Mudimbe is treated here alongside Spivak, however, because his work similarly revolves around questions of representation, and combines a critical engagement with Marxism with an ethical denunciation of “the history of the same”, informed this time by Foucault, as well as by Sartre, Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss, and, more obliquely, Derrida. His philosophical works shift regularly between discussion of colonial systems, anthropological methods, religious practice and ideology, and philosophy; the critique of Africanism in this sense incorporates both a call for political freedom and a desire to discover ethical forms of African knowledge released from the shackles of “the Same”. In his more political moments Mudimbe is nevertheless highly wary of unmediated forms of empiricism, since he conceives these as potentially reductive, while at the same time his call for an ethical awareness of the difficulty of knowing and specifying Africa shies away from excessive textualism and upholds the necessity of seeking real forms of African authenticity. The eclecticism of his work, and the 164

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convolutions of his intellectual trajectory, are perhaps best summed up by his own comment at the opening of Parables and Fables: “here I was, so to speak, the margin of margins: black, Catholic, African, yet agnostic; intellectually Marxist, disposed toward psychoanalysis, yet a specialist in Indo-European philology and philosophy” (1991: x). Mudimbe writes in both English and French, and has published both novels and philosophical works, but his most famous text is perhaps The Invention of Africa, published in 1988. Like Mudimbe’s subsequent works Parables and Fables and The Idea of Africa (1994), The Invention of Africa seeks to survey and analyse the practice of African philosophy or “gnosis”, a term proposed by the author to refer to “a structured, common, and conventional knowledge, but one strictly under the control of specific procedures for its use as well as transmission” (1988: ix). Like Said, Spivak and the Subaltern Studies Collective, Mudimbe draws on Foucault to theorize the ways in which power structures are subtended by, as well as actively propagating, the conception or indeed the creation of the other by the West, and he also stresses with Foucault that the structures under analysis are diverse and discontinuous. Again like Spivak, Mudimbe asks who is producing knowledge about Africa, and to what extent the discourses shaping that knowledge assimilate the other into a framework governed by Western assumptions and expectations. Unlike Spivak, however, whose “subaltern” remains a singular, intractable figure, Mudimbe holds on to a belief in the possibility of an alternative knowledge, even if, as we shall see, it is not always clear that his writing can access this dreamed authenticity. Mudimbe’s fragile vision of African authenticity will nevertheless provide the basis for a new political and ethical philosophy that recognizes as well as criticizes the European currents on which it is founded. The Invention of Africa opens with a systematic and clearly Foucauldian analysis of the political and ethical violence inherent in the project of colonialism. Mudimbe argues that etymologically the term colonialism derives from the Latin “colĕre”, meaning to cultivate or design, and that the concept has at its root the notion of organization or arrangement. This process of organization has three facets to it: “the procedures of acquiring, distributing, and exploiting lands in colonies; the policies of domesticating natives; and the manner of managing ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production” (ibid.: 2). In other words, these three facets include the political domination of the territory, the (unethical) direction of the local people’s identity and mentality, and the seizing of economic control. Mudimbe goes on to comment on Marxist analyses of the ways in which overseas ethics with politics?

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territories are restructured and subjected to the colonizer’s economic model, although it will emerge that he conceives the Marxist reading itself as excessively generalized and adrift from the specific experiences of individual African communities. Nevertheless, here Mudimbe maps this conception of the colonizer’s economic control onto the ideological creation of a whole gamut of oppositions, such as that between the traditional and the modern, or between the oral and the written, all of which serve to undermine the local culture. Furthermore, it is not only the colonial apparatus itself but a broader set of representations and hypotheses that separate and hypostatize cultures according to a dominant and Western set of values. African tourist art is just one example for Mudimbe of the ways in which, to use distinctly Levinasian terms, “alterity is a negative category of the Same” (ibid.: 12). And even worse, the practice of anthropology is similarly criticized for an “ethnocentrism” linked both to the specific epistēmē defining the discipline and to various moral or behavioural attitudes exhibited by anthropologists. Mudimbe’s next section explores in more detail the methodology of Africanist critique. Here, he develops his engagement with Foucault, and he notes that for the latter, after an epistemological shift at the end of the eighteenth century, three paradigms come to structure the production of knowledge: “function and norm, conflict and rule, signification and system” (ibid.: 26). The movement towards the latter term in each couple brings at the same time both an understanding of the plurality of individual codes, and a new unity over and above these within the human sciences. Analysis conducted on the basis of norm, rule and system privileges the enclosure and internal coherence of the code analysed, and this is used to assume a greater generality. This shift coincides with the invention of the concept of “Man” as a subject who knows, and the consequence is that “stories about Others, as well as commentaries on their differences, are but elements in the history of the Same and its knowledge” (ibid.: 28). In addition, Mudimbe shows how, rather than charting the “archaeology” of Western knowledge, LéviStrauss explores the “primitives” and “savages” that the West endeavours to caricature, and the upshot of his work is that “the usefulness of a discourse on others goes beyond the gospel of otherness: there is not a normative human culture” (ibid.: 33). Foucault tracks “the history of the Same” while Lévi-Strauss rails against its universalizing gestures, but both lament its blindness. According to Mudimbe, however, both Foucault and Lévi-Strauss are themselves unable to extract themselves from the history they denounce. Mudimbe seeks rather a methodology faithful to African epistemology: he seeks to retrieve an African order 166

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of knowledge that doubts the value of schemata such as that of “norm, rule and system”. While criticizing Foucault, however, Mudimbe nevertheless uses his concept of “archaeology” to offer a critique in the rest of the work of various epistemological structures that posit the African as inferior or other. The first of these is missionary discourse, which promotes the spiritual transformation of Africans. Mudimbe asserts that missionary discourse served a crucial role in backing up the expropriation and exploitation of conquered lands with its ideology of civilization and spiritual conversion. Africans are depicted according to a variety of models: they are seen as poor and pagan, or as savages, but their culture is always inferior to the great ideals of Christianity. Even Placide F. Tempels, who lived among the Luba Katanga people in Central Africa for more then ten years, doubts myths of African backwardness while nevertheless promoting a Christian policy for the improvement of African natives. Subsequent philosophers such as Alexis Kagame refine Tempels’s study of Bantu philosophy and stress that the latter is “an organized and rational construction”, and both conceive African culture as “an original alterity” to be assessed independently (ibid.: 151). Nevertheless, this school of African philosophy, paradoxically for Mudimbe, emerges from a Western epistemological grid. Mudimbe also comments on the negritude movement, and suggests that although it seeks to establish the sorts of African authenticity that he supports, in the end Sartre’s argument that negritude must be part of a dialectic and surpass itself makes sense. Similarly, Mudimbe affirms that Senghor’s provisional use both of notions of African tradition, and of Marxist revolution, can be defended precisely because he conceives neither as a permanent system that would ossify into the history of the Same. Mudimbe is sensitive to the ambiguities of certain forms of African knowledge, then, and the chapter on the West Indian observer and commentator E. W. Blyden notes the curious intermingling of colonial ideology with African nativist views. However, the history of knowledge about Africa that Mudimbe tracks in The Invention of Africa constantly reveals gaps and blanks, biases and hasty assumptions. He finishes by wondering whether “the discourses of African gnosis do not obscure a fundamental reality, their own chose du texte, the primordial African discourse in all its variety and multiplicity” (ibid.: 186). This obscured “chose du texte” names the authenticity that lingers elusively behind the textual artifice. Mudimbe’s critique of the political exploitation and ethical silencing of the African other rests on a deep-seated anxiety about the concept ethics with politics?

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of the subject, an anxiety that he theorizes explicitly in Parables and Fables. Mudimbe reads Sartre’s reworking of Descartes, and shows how Sartre’s concept of self-consciousness severs the Cartesian ego’s apparent mastery and self-presence. For Sartre, being is a tension between the in-itself, the brute materiality of existence, and the for-itself, or reflexive consciousness. One understands oneself only as an other, or under the gaze of the other. In addition, Mudimbe cites Rousseau’s statement in his Confessions that “in truth, I am not ‘me’ but the weakest most humble of others” (Mudimbe 1991: xiv). Lévi-Strauss in turn allows Rousseau’s thinking to inform his conception of ethnology as a confrontation with the stranger that puts the ethnologist’s very self into question. Mudimbe then notes how in his Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss reveals how “the master-meaning is always discreet, invisible, beyond the apparent rationality and the logical constructs of the visible surface” (ibid.: xvi). Anthropology or ethnology will always be circling around this hidden, elusive and unconscious meaning that escapes the secure framework of the anthropologist’s knowledge. In this way, although Sartre presents consciousness as other to itself, Lévi-Strauss goes further, according to Mudimbe, in that he theorizes an unconscious claim to uncover “hidden forms”, as well as showing how myths perform a search for “discreet, unconscious, containing structures” (ibid.: xvii). Lévi-Strauss also throws into question the position of the anthropologist in relation to the other he analyses. Uneasy about the Western frames of reference to which he adheres here, Mudimbe nevertheless uses these thinkers to argue that the contemplation of African cultures requires a fundamental rethinking of the way in which the subject conceives itself in relation to the other. Like The Invention of Africa, Parables and Fables sifts through a number of forms of African knowledge or “gnosis” in order to pick out the difficulties associated with certain philosophical approaches. In the course of his analyses Mudimbe distinguishes three methodological groups: anthropological philosophy, which also includes linguistic philosophy; speculative and critical philosophy, which comprises also metaphilosophy; and, finally, Marxist projects. There will not be space here to explore all the thinkers analysed by Mudimbe, but it is worth noting nevertheless his ambivalence towards Marxism. Although he identifies himself as a Marxist intellectual in the extract from Parables and Fables cited above, he is also deeply sceptical of its universalizing tendencies and suggests that the generalization of the Marxist model is another example of the “history of the same”. Mudimbe’s politics may be Marxist, but he also perceives in the application of Marxism 168

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to Africa an unethical lack of attention to specific African cultural differences. Mudimbe examines the use of Marx in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, for example, and suggests that although in Anti-Oedipus they seek to undermine imperialist forms of history, “they make a move toward a possible universal historicization of individualities by distinguishing types of interpretation of socioeconomic disharmonies” (ibid.: 71). In addition, in a chapter on “Anthropology and Marxist Discourse”, Mudimbe offers a critique of Peter Rigby’s Persistent Pastoralists (1983), the upshot of which is a further critique of the Marxist method. Mudimbe reads in detail Rigby’s study of the Ilparakuyo people of East Africa, but argues that Rigby conceives the future of the Ilparakuyo precisely according to the dreams of the rational, Marxist social scientist. More broadly, figures such as Senghor and, indeed, Mudimbe himself, promoted the “dubious acculturation of Marxism in Africa”, but the problem was that they thought in the 1960s that “Africa was an absolutely virgin terrain on which we could experiment and succeed in organizing socialist societies” (ibid.: 184). Marxists tend to overlook the question of the specific epistemological roots of their own discourse. Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa continues this critique of the creation of Africa as a product of the West, and includes further comments both on the political successes of Marxism and on its obfuscation of the African other. This volume also includes examination of myths of Africa reaching as far back as Philostratus’s story of Hercules among the pygmies of Libya, and Mudimbe exposes here the association between pygmies and backwardness or straightforward stupidity. Equally, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1989) portrays the “savage” as a faceless victim, while dictionaries of the sixteenth century baldly use the term “Aethiops” to name any dark-skinned person. Mudimbe then notes a change around the 1950s, after which the African becomes an empirical fact to be observed and studied by the anthropologist, although again the tendency remains even now to impose various totalizing models (such as that of Marxism) on the unfamiliar other. Furthermore, museum collections of “primitivist” art similarly serve to appropriate African cultures to suit the imagination of the West. Ironically, even local discourses on Africa, an extreme example of which might be Mobutuism, turn on “figures and images, analogies and resemblances in figurative constructions that simulate reality rather than signifying or representing it” (Mudimbe 1994: 145). Almost all the forms of knowledge discussed in Mudimbe’s text are ultimately fictions that serve only to silence the subjugated African. ethics with politics?

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One of the dangers of Mudimbe’s form of criticism, like that of Spivak, is that it can be turned back on itself and denounced for its own failure to attend to the subjugated others it seeks to rescue. D. A. Masolo characterizes Mudimbe’s work as deconstructive in its stated resistance to philosophical mastery or totalization, but he goes on to object that “although Mudimbe makes an important contribution to the debate on the creation of knowledge, he lamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance” (Masolo 1994: 179). This means that Mubimbe may successfully offer a multitude of examples of invented or ideological Africanist representation; he does not offer a constructive alternative. His readings, from this point of view, mask an inability to redefine African culture authentically and on its own terms. Certainly it is true that Mudimbe spends rather more time unravelling the loopholes and identifying the blindspots of existing discourses than he does constructing a concrete image of African identity to replace these deceptive images. Again, like Spivak, his major achievement is perhaps his perceptive engagement with the philosophical archive, and not the creation of a positivist vision of African subjectivity. However, Masolo’s critique also rests on a partial misreading of Mudimbe’s use of deconstruction, since the latter’s deconstructive project still champions a belief in African authenticity, and in this search for an independent, African order of knowledge he certainly reaches beyond the forms of questioning proposed for example by Derrida. This authenticity is provocative, moreover, precisely because it is not figured in Mudimbe’s thought or in his novels as an identifiable essence, but as a horizon towards which the writer aspires even if he will remain unable to reach it. Indeed, the Africa of Mudimbe’s novels is a site of conflict as well as of uncertainty, and he never has recourse to reassuring, nostalgic images of an original homeland or tradition. The Rift, for example, is the story of an African intellectual in Paris on a quest for African knowledge who struggles to find himself between competing discourses of African history, and whose disoriented condition borders on schizophrenia. Just as Spivak seeks a form of subaltern agency while underlining the other’s necessary singularity or intractability, Mudimbe upholds a notion of specific African knowledge while persisting in depicting that knowledge as fragmentary, conflictual and elusive. This elusive but specific knowledge is at the same time what both Marxism and deconstructive ethics ignore. Finally, Mudimbe is another thinker who questions not only political and economic conditions associated with colonialism and its aftermath, but also the ethics of reading, writing and theorizing about the other. 170

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This questioning has a particular resonance in the context of African studies since, as Mudimbe shows, the African is conventionally perceived to be incapable of philosophy and consigned to the status of a savage. It is all the more urgent, then, that the philosopher should locate authentically African forms of knowledge, although the impact of colonialism on Africa is such that the native is never free from its intellectual influence even after the termination of its political grasp. Christopher Miller’s study Theories of Africans (1990) explores how the very practice of theorizing has been conceived as the exclusive domain of the Westerner, who applies his own structures of knowledge to the African “void” or “blank”. Mudimbe’s recommendation for a specifically African epistemology in this way directly answers back to a particularly pernicious set of Africanist stereotypes, even if he remains anxious about how to create this authentic knowledge. In addition, it is perhaps also relevant that Miller goes on to explain that ethics, in the sense of an openness towards the intractable other, is (erroneously) seen to be at odds with any more concrete notion of “ethnos”, or an African specificity. Western Marxist thinking promotes an ethics of liberation while glossing over ethnic specificity, and deconstructive ethical thinking promotes attention to infinite otherness while excluding particular others. Mudimbe’s work both rescues the African from the myth of philosophical ineptitude, then, and goes some way to promoting what Miller conceives as a necessary interplay between ethics and ethnicity in African studies. This precarious combination, as in Spivak’s work, is the result of profound self-consciousness and vigilant attention to the conditions and precepts of postcolonial philosophy, and it is not always clear that Mudimbe is able to follow through his celebration of the specific. His awareness of the multiple requirements of postcolonial African philosophy, including political and ethical requirements, and the need to conceive both a specific African ethnos alongside an understanding of its ineffability, nevertheless offers a challenge to postcolonial thinking and exposes the limits of its habitual Marxist and deconstructive paradigms.

Achille Mbembe The work of Achille Mbembe clearly emerges out of an engagement with Mudimbe and, once again, can be seen ostensibly as both a political and an ethical project. Mbembe was born in Cameroon in 1957, studied history at the Sorbonne and, having worked in various institutions in the United States, is now a senior researcher at the Wits ethics with politics?

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Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. His most famous work, On the Postcolony, was published in English in 2001, and is distinctive among the postcolonial studies discussed here for its focus specifically on political regimes in Africa, after independence, as well as under colonialism. This text theorizes contemporary forms of oppression and exploitation in Africa and offers insight into the troubling and persistent force of neocolonialism. Like the work of Spivak and Mudimbe, Mbembe’s writing is diverse and eclectic as a result of its engagements both with Marxism and with Derridean deconstruction. His thinking is highly innovative, however, because at the same time it reaches beyond both in its vibrant, almost demonic vision of the injustices of the African postcolony. Recalling Mudimbe, Mbembe’s study opens with a critique of prevailing images of the African native as sub-human and, in typically colourful style, the author rails against the “invention” of Africa by the imperialist visions of the West. In order to elucidate his critique, however, Mbembe first dismisses “an outdated Marxist tradition” in favour of a psychoanalytic critique of the construction of the African as Other, only then to lament the absence of a framework with which to conceptualize economic exploitation in the African postcolony (Mbembe 2001: 5). Mbembe’s approach promises to fluctuate, then, between reflection on processes of representation and exegesis of the structures of economic oppression. Moving away from Mudimbe’s call for an African order of knowledge, however, Mbembe’s study of the entangled forces of tyranny in postcolonial Africa offers a vision of resistance that operates only within the repetition or simulation of the ritualistic discourse of power. There is no authentic African subjectivity in Mbembe’s vision, only the suppressed laughter generated by mimicry of a discourse whose oppressiveness is persistent and unrelenting. The first section of On the Postcolony analyses structures of “commandement” or governance in Africa and explores the development of these structures in the move from a colonial to a postcolonial regime. Mbembe argues that state sovereignty in the colony rested on the inflation of the right to conquest together with the diminution of the right to debate and discussion. Equally, Mbembe uses Derrida’s understanding of the violence of the law to argue that colonial sovereignty was self-creating and self-perpetuating. Founded on an initial order of violence, the colonial power then executes a second order, “to give this order meaning, to justify its necessity and universalizing mission – in short, to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority” (ibid.: 25). A third order follows 172

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that assures the maintenance, the spread and the permanence of the colonial regime. Mbembe uses Derrida here to envisage law as circular or self-generating, and its very self-ratifying structure constitutes an act of ethical violence towards the other. Mbembe then takes as a specific example the notion of the indigénat, which refers to the specific administrative system applied to natives in French colonies before 1945 that rested on the creation of a generalized, subordinated category subjected to particular constraints and punishments. The practical mechanics of colonial law, for example the exclusion of the African from citizenship, were in this way fuelled by an unethical homogenization and subjugation of native others. This again stems from the empty, self-fulfilling drive to control, direct and exploit. This tyrannical form of state sovereignty was, moreover, appropriated by Africans after decolonization. African traders came to occupy positions as middlemen between colonial firms and consumers and, together with a stratum of well-off planters, finished by perpetuating the old hierarchies after independence. In addition, the new states were formed in such a way as to deny individuals rights as citizens, and Mbembe argues that a structural problem was created because “the act of establishing colonial sovereign authority was never a contract since, strictly speaking, it involved no reciprocity of legally codified obligations between the state, powerholders, society, and individuals” (ibid.: 42). Public affairs quickly became confused with the use of unbridled violence, because the structures of authority were, as in the colonial model described above, conceived as given. Mbembe goes on to explore the chaotic economic structures of the new regimes, and observes that by the 1970s “the bulk of national wealth was, for all practical purposes, part of the ‘eminent domain’ of a tyrant acting as a mercenary with state funds and the national treasury” (ibid.: 50). One of the consequences of the economic structural points explored by Mbembe is that African nations are unable to fit into the international division of capital. A stratified labour market, and in some cases the dissolution of the public sector, has also led to deepening poverty. This structure of economic hierarchy and inequality stems, once again, from the violence and circularity of state sovereignty learned during the colonial period. Mbembe’s next section examines what he terms the structure of entanglement that perpetuates the violence of postcolonial African regimes. This entanglement names not only the coercion exercised on individuals, but also “a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture, and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised and rationalized” (ibid.: 66). At the centre of this cluster is the notion of ethics with politics?

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“private indirect government” and the weakening of state structures, of any notion of “public good”. Society is run by coercion, hardly any sector is free from venality and corruption, and a crisis in the taxation system means that there is no longer a necessary bond between the ruler and the ruled. If the principle of taxation rests on the notion that both the state and its citizens mutually owe something to one another, Mbembe observes that in certain African contexts poorly defined borders and the use of taxes to fund an apparatus of coercion have interrupted that principle and have led to the dissolution of the crucial founding notion of common good. The most famous part of Mbembe’s analysis, however, must be his vision of the “vulgarity”, excess and theatricality of power in the postcolony. Mbembe takes Cameroon as an example of a state in which the “commandement” is constantly ratified by its own rituals and institutionalized “as a fetish to which the subject is bound, and in the subject’s deployment of a talent for play, of a sense of fun, that makes him homo ludens par excellence” (ibid.: 104). Power is manifested and disseminated through excessive representation, through pomp and fables, as well as through images of sexual potency. This is equally a regime obsessed with bodily functions and orifices, and the body becomes the site on which power is performed and inscribed. The “commandement” fantasizes its power through images of penetration, hence the obsession with orifices, and phantasms of virility serve to mime state dominance over its subjects. At the same time, however, this excessive performance is an empty simulacrum, whose mimicry allows for subtle shifts and hints of subversion. Mbembe uses Bakhtin to think through the splitting of the image of the simulacrum and its potential opening to a logic of resistance, although this resistance will always itself be an empty practice, a performance rather than an affirmation of agency and a call for change. Mbembe argues: People whose identities have been partly confiscated have been able, precisely because there was this simulacrum, to glue back together their fragmented identities. By taking over the signs and language of officialdom, they have been able to remythologize their conceptual universe while, in the process, turning the commandement into a sort of zombie. (Ibid.: 11) If the people can enact passing gestures of resistance, in a manner consistent with Bhabha’s theory of mimicry as a subversive performance of at once sameness and difference, however, Mbembe stresses that the 174

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regime will remain one governed by vacuous theatricality and carnival. The state can be de-authorized through the repetition of its own symbols of ratification, but this undermining does not alter the practice of performance and excess on which the regime continues to rely. Mbembe’s study goes on to develop this exploration of representation as a mask through an examination of cartoon images of the autocrat. The text pushes the analysis of the tyranny of representation in the postcolony perhaps furthest, however, in the chapter “Out of the World”. Here Mbembe examines the function of annihilation and oblivion in modern and contemporary discourse on Africa, offering a vision of terrifying emptiness beneath the simulacra discussed above. In a manner that recalls Spivak’s analysis of Hegel’s misapprehension of Hindu culture, Mbembe explores the Hegelian image of Africa as “a vast tumultuous world of drives and sensations, so tumultuous and opaque as to be practically impossible to represent, but which words must nevertheless grasp and anchor in pre-set certainty” (ibid.: 176). Hegel explores an African verbal economy in which language is a discordant cacophony adrift from referentiality, a swarm of noise and energy that covers only a void. Mbembe notes also how Hegel’s Negro is indolent and untrustworthy, and Hegel’s words become the arch example of colonial discourse in their reduction of the African native to a facelessness that borders on inhumanity. Like Fanon, Mbembe also comments on Hegel’s dialectic between the master and the slave and the mutual recognition of self-consciousness, and he notes that the Negro in Hegel is in fact deprived of this self-consciousness and consigned to the status of an animal. Even more disturbingly, Mbembe goes on to ask what effects this discourse leaves in the postcolony: “what death does one die ‘after the colony’?” (ibid.: 197). If the Negro was annihilated by colonial discourse, in what form does he survive if he is living “when the time to die has passed”? (ibid.: 201). Laughter, for Mbembe, serves as a possible response to this oblivion, but the analysis ends with a disturbing reflection on the dislocation or dismemberment of any stable notion of existence in the postcolony. Mbembe’s study concludes by calling for the affirmation of free will, but the book’s immersion in the tyranny of language as performance gives little sense of how that freedom might be achieved. It can easily be objected that Mbembe’s analysis in On the Postcolony is both somewhat hyperbolic and extraordinarily generalized. The very term “postcolony” is a somewhat abstract notion, and critics have suggested that Mbembe’s study would benefit from further attention to the historical specificity of particular regimes. Like Mudimbe, Mbembe can ethics with politics?

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also be accused of feeding off the very Western discourses he contests in his own use of Derrida, Foucault and Bakhtin. Indeed, Mbembe is apparently less openly self-aware than Mudimbe in his espousal of theories and philosophies created in the West. In addition, it is perhaps disturbing that Mbembe does not question whether the slave’s capacity for revolt in Hegel might provide the African with a model for selfassertion, and much of the work suggests that there is no clear road to liberation for the dehumanized African. The deconstruction of state power through subversive mimicry is certainly not presented as a coherent strategy for change. If Mbembe deliberately sets out to undermine conventional and facile oppositions between resistance and passivity, the liberatory tactics he does recommend do not provide an identifiable path to emancipation. While it should be conceded that Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe all hold back from offering the sorts of emancipatory vision to be found in Fanon or Gandhi, however, this is perhaps a necessary testimony to the perpetuation of yet more forms of oppression after decolonization. The most militant and politicized philosophers explored in this book write in the lead-up to independence, and the more anxious, ambivalent and troubled work of thinkers such as Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe suggests that the end of colonial or neocolonial oppression is neither imminent nor easily conceived. With Spivak and Mudimbe, Mbembe implies that postcolonial criticism requires both the denunciation of political and economic inequality, be it in terms that are clearly Marxist or post-Marxist, and an awareness of the tyrannical forms and structures of representation working on postcolonial societies in diverse ways. Furthermore, if the international division of labour, or the newly oppressive regimes apparent in some parts of postcolonial Africa, institute forms of inequality that these thinkers all vilify, the systematic and total overthrow of such structures emerges as difficult to imagine. The ethical critique of the violence of representation is, then, the most significant strategy by which these thinkers construct their postcolonial critique, and if Mbembe moves furthest from any claim to subaltern agency or authenticity, he perhaps comes closest to communicating the horrors of a neocolonial discourse that uses representation or performance to back up its regime of tyranny and violence. He may merely shake without crumbling the edifice of authority’s simulacrum, but he also reminds us all too lucidly of the power of representation when abused to the extreme in a world still ravaged by postcolonial oppression.

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Key points • Spivak’s work draws on both Marxism and poststructuralist ethics. Her readings of Marx tend to focus on textual slippages and moments of ambivalence, as she explores, for example, the indeterminacy in his notion of value. This form of reading is itself deconstructive, and yet Spivak also criticizes the blindspots of Derrida’s engagement with Marx. • One of Spivak’s key concepts is the “subaltern” or native informant. Her works denounce the ways in which subaltern women in particular have been silenced, and she shows how their voices echo between the lines of Western philosophy and literature. Her work is also distinctive for its self-consciousness, and she constantly reminds readers of her own complicity with the imperialism she sets out to undermine. • Mudimbe’s work consists in a political and ethical critique of “Africanism”. Mudimbe vilifies both the mechanics of the colonial project and the forms of knowledge that support it. He argues that knowledge about Africans has often incorporated them into the “history of the Same”. He calls for a more authentic form of African knowledge, while admitting that this authenticity is difficult to attain. • Mbembe criticizes the way in which colonial law homogenizes and subjugates the native, but he also denounces the violence of African regimes in the postcolony. He reveals how these regimes are characterized by excess, vulgarity and theatricality, and how they also disallow resistance. His analysis is testimony to the difficulty of overcoming both colonial and postcolonial violence.

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Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline

This book has attempted to demonstrate that postcolonialism is a set of at times overlapping and at times distinct strategies aimed at undermining colonialism, as well as wider forms of imperialist subjugation. Postcolonial philosophy is a complex intermingling of political and ethical thinking, and theorists such as Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe show how an understanding of both empirical and discursive structures of oppression is necessary for the establishment of a critique. If Derrida points out that ethics and politics require the deployment of different sets of concepts (he argues that the former insists on absolute openness while the latter requires the creation of norms and rules), most of the thinkers assessed in this study engage at least to some extent with both levels. Nevertheless, the split among readers of postcolonial thought remains palpable. “Materialists” such as Parry and Lazarus turn away from the “textualism” of Bhabha or Spivak, while more “deconstructionist” thinkers such as Syrotinski or Philip Leonard imply that the ethical reading strategies recommended by Derrida and his followers must be embraced before political liberation can occur. Certainly, Glissant’s work indicates that there should be a distinct space for cultural and aesthetic postcolonial experimentation, and when the ethics of relationality is explored through literature and art it is clear that it should not have to submit to a clear political agenda. But I hope to have shown that, despite the hostility accompanying debates among postcolonial readers, postcolonial ethics and politics remain a more or less anxious coupling detectable from Fanon to Mbembe. 178

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Despite the efforts of philosophers, critics and intellectuals, however, neo-imperialist oppression remains formidable long after many colonies achieved independence. The need for postcolonial questioning did not disappear with the decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, contemporary power structures are perhaps all the more pervasive because they are insidious. Glissant’s work on Martinique, for example, demonstrates that although national liberation is becoming less and less viable, the hierarchies and inequalities characteristic of the colonial regime in its heyday are far from extinct in the French Overseas Departments and Regions today. Mbembe’s horrifying exegesis of the African postcolony, although abstract, suggests that the drive for power originally exhibited by the colonizer is now pushed to excess by local leaders and tyrants in countries such as Cameroon. Moreover, Spivak reminds us that global capitalism and the international division of labour have entrenched the subjugation and exploitation initiated by colonialism and, even more, this neo-imperialist economic oppression is supported by Western academics blind to the experiences of the subaltern others to whom they claim to attend. Western thinkers rely on technologies produced in the Third World and ignore the exploitation on which the production of these technologies rests, while at the same time risking ventriloquizing for the other in their academic work. Lastly, commentators on postcolonial Latin America such as José Carlos Mariátegui serve to demonstrate to critics of British and French neocolonialism just how long after independence the effects of imperialist domination persist. Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality explores the ways in which Peru is still, even after emancipation in 1824, corrupted by the sin of conquest, because the bourgeoisie, propped up by foreign investors, remains in control of banks and industry. The Spanish conquistadors destroyed an abundant and progressive Inca society, and Mariátegui insists, at least at the time of publication in 1927, that the feudal economy that the colonialists instituted has not been overthrown or replaced. Neocolonialism can be seen to operate in three principal ways that can be sketched briefly in this conclusion. First, the inaugural president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, vilifies the persistence of colonial domination in the immediate aftermath of decolonization. In Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah explains that “the essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside” (1965: ix). African neocolonial states depend on foreign capital, but that capital is conclusion

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not used for the development of local initiatives and instead entrenches the exploitation of the poor. International capital controls the world market, at the expense of local regeneration. Furthermore, Nkrumah argues that neocolonialism is pernicious because it executes power without assuming responsibility; it is an insidious ideology that seeks to serve the interests only of developed countries. “Aid”, for example, merely increases the debt of Third World countries, and specifically military aid also stalls rather than promotes development since sooner or later weapons fall into the hands of the opponents of the neocolonial regime and war perpetuates the ex-colony’s misery. The only way in which the African ex-colonies can attempt to resist this powerful and omnipresent force, however, is to assert African unity. Nkrumah argues that: it is only when artificial boundaries are broken down so as to provide for viable economic units, and ultimately a single African unit, that Africa will be able to develop industrially for her own sake and ultimately for the sake of a healthy world economy. (Ibid.: 25) However, although Nkrumah’s vision of pan-African union, influenced by Marxism, was politically ambitious, Young points out that his thinking lacked an understanding of the economic unity that might have helped African development in the wake of colonialism. Even more, Mudimbe notes that once he was in power Nkrumah’s rhetoric started to ring hollow and he became something of a dictator; he certainly failed to put his ideals into practice. It is nevertheless significant for my current purposes that in the wake of independence neocolonialism was conceived by Nkrumah as the ongoing dominance of foreign economic power over African regeneration. Moreover, Mbembe’s study of economics in the postcolony suggests that this foreign influence still wields power today. Secondly, it is noteworthy that Nkrumah’s, and later Spivak’s, conception of the power of international capital has been seen by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to have been transformed more recently into a new, magisterial form of “Empire”. This “Empire”, according to Hardt and Negri, is quite distinct from colonialism as settlement, as well as from old forms of imperialism that still rely on a notion of state sovereignty. This new system of Empire has emerged with the decline in the power of the nation state and can be seen as an alternative form of sovereignty “composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united 180

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under a single logic of rule” (Hardt & Negri 2000: xii). Empire from this point of view is decentred and deterritorialized: it manifests itself as a network of power and does not originate in a single source (this is not a name for the diffuse power held over the rest of the world by the United States). The force of Empire transcends the borders between nations, as well as divisions between the First, Second and Third Worlds, and also signals the decline of factory labour in favour of “communicative, cooperative, and affective labour” (ibid.: xiii). Moreover, its processes of globalization bring new economic structures but also regulate social life and human nature itself by means of its regime of biopower. Although Empire names a new order of global domination, however, it is not a monolith and its multiple branches and processes may also, according to Hardt and Negri, trigger the invention of new democratic forms. Empire presents itself as a broad totality outside history, but the authors of this provocative study nevertheless argue that the movements of “the multitude”, the poor and disenfranchised, against this apparently transcendent system of Empire might bring alternative, more liberated structures of organization. For Hardt and Negri, then, the sorts of postcolonial criticism offered by thinkers such as Bhabha engage with old forms of colonialism and imperialism. Bhabha rails against the binary divisions that pit colonizer against colonized, but Hardt and Negri show how the hybridities he champions as an alternative are themselves part of this new structure of Empire. This structure has already moved away from the divisions that Bhabha spends his time challenging, and wields its power in a postmodern, multifaceted but global form through institutions such as those of international law, the United Nations (UN) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank. While old forms of colonialism revolve around a notion of difference, Hardt and Negri stress that Empire is, on the contrary, blind to difference: “all are welcome within its boundaries, regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth” (ibid.: 198). Having accomplished this gesture of assimilation, Empire is, in a second movement, capable of recognizing difference, but this must be cultural difference rather than political. This form of difference is accepted because it can nevertheless be controlled, in a third movement, by Empire’s all-encompassing embrace: “the triple imperative of Empire is incorporate, differentiate, manage” (ibid.: 201). Furthermore, in this new structure of Empire migration occurs on a massive scale, but while population movements might have the potential to work against conclusion

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the controlling grasp of Empire, often they lead in the end to further disenfranchisement and poverty. It is in this mobility that Hardt and Negri detect a force for the dismantling of Empire, but the manner in which the multitude might practically organize itself so as to challenge the dominant sites of power remains elusive in this new, smoothed-out order of global capital. Hardt and Negri’s text is an extraordinarily bold endeavour to rewrite Marxist theory for the twenty-first century, and it has been highly influential. However, it has also been criticized for its abstract jargon and its privileging of buzzwords such as “deterritorialization” and “hybridity” over concrete economic analysis. Slavoj Žižek comments that the notion of “global citizenship” that Hardt and Negri offer as a force of resistance to Empire is hopelessly impractical, since it implies literally the eradication of state borders. Certainly, if Hardt and Negri intend to update Marxist analysis for the postmodern, post-imperialist era, their writing lacks elucidation of the sorts of workable revolutionary strategies found in Marx or Gramsci. Although they argue that the new capitalism of Empire is vulnerable to attack from the forces of the multitude, they fail to offer a properly political account of how that attack might take place. In addition, in his review of Empire published in the New Left Review in 2000, Gopal Balakrishnan suggests that Hardt and Negri underplay the significant role played by the United States in the control of global capital in their inflation of the postmodern, deterritorialization of Empire. More broadly, Hardt and Negri somewhat prematurely diagnose the end of old power structures in their argument that the smooth force field of Empire replaces the “striations” of imperialism, its reliance on hierarchies of sovereignty. As Paul Gilroy (2005) has shown, the recent rhetoric of “security” has in fact strengthened again the power of the nation state. The text of Empire is as a result rather closer to the abstract, postmodern creativity of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus than to militant Marxism, and dismisses perhaps rather swiftly the potentially lingering effects of old forms of neo-imperialism. The work deserves mention here, however, because it signals at least the beginnings of a shift in the workings of imperialism beyond the confines of the nation state. The third approach to neocolonialism pertinent here refers to the very discipline of postcolonial studies. It is perhaps rather strong to denounce postcolonialism necessarily as a function of neocolonialism, but radical Marxists such as Ahmad and Dirlik nevertheless lament the complicity of postcolonial academics in the West with capitalism, and vilify the postmodernist celebration of postcolonial cultures as a 182

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commodification of otherness. Ahmad perceives postcolonial theory as a “marketplace of ideas” adrift from real political and economic questions of inequality and oppression (Ahmad 1992: 70). For Dirlik, postcolonialism is “a discourse that seeks to constitute the world in the self-image of intellectuals who view themselves (or have come to view themselves) as postcolonial intellectuals” (1994: 339) and, like Ahmad, Dirlik goes on to argue that the focus on culture obfuscates specific material conditions. Both commentators believe that postcolonial intellectuals’ lack of attention to global capitalism means that they obfuscate the oppressive structures they set out to critique. Huggan’s more nuanced study The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) emphasizes that this sort of criticism might apply to some, but certainly not all, postcolonial thinkers and, indeed, we have already seen that Spivak is highly aware of the potential complicity of academic study with the international division of labour. For Huggan, the danger lies rather in the broader, global commodification of cultural difference. Postcolonialism tips over into a sort of neocolonial exoticism, then, not merely when its proponents draw on culture and theory, but when its consumers fail to read postcolonial texts properly. In Huggan’s terms, this is: when creative writers like Salman Rushdie are seen, despite their cosmopolitan background, as representatives of Third World countries; when literary works like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) are gleaned, despite their fictional status, for the anthropological information they provide; when academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, despite their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashionable study of cultural otherness. (2001: vii) An exoticism complicit with neocolonialism occurs precisely through the misinformed and careless treatment of literary texts. These sorts of observations paint a rather pessimistic view of the discipline, and the problems associated with Hardt and Negri’s work, together with Huggan’s denunciation of the phenomenon of cultural commodification, suggest that there remains a failure among intellectuals to engage with the structures and mechanics of postcolonial inequality as it manifests itself in the present. The process of decolonization produced militants such as Fanon and Gandhi, but more recent calls for liberation and equality lack that precision of focus perhaps because the forces of oppression are now rather more insidious, diffuse and difficult to pin down. The aporias of Derrida’s thinking around colonialism and conclusion

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ethnocentrism testify to a struggle between different forms of critique, and the eclecticism of Spivak or Mudimbe equally betrays a restlessness and an anxiety concerning the tools necessary for emancipation and change. The return to a form of humanism in many thinkers is compelling, but it also signals a reliance on old categories rather than the invention of a new idiom. Political science may well be equipped to pinpoint the workings and effects of globalization, but postcolonial philosophy continues to struggle to come up with broader conceptual models of resistance to postcolonial and neocolonial domination. Finally, however, despite the uneasiness that persists in the discipline of postcolonial studies, what many thinkers writing after decolonization share is a commitment to careful reading and writing. Unlike the consumers to whom Huggan refers, the philosophers explored here are rigorous readers, attentive to the ways in which colonial power is played out in the production, diffusion and consumption of texts. It is perhaps not the role of postcolonial philosophers to herald new political regimes, then, but rather to use their reading strategies to undermine the violent, masterful and ethnocentric modes of thinking that lie at the foundations of imperialist and neo-imperialist ideology. These discourses of postcolonial violence enact both political and ethical injustice, and although resistance to such injustice may be conceived in neo-Marxist, deconstructive, Levinasian or even humanist terms, the philosophical and discursive core of that injustice must be denounced. Said, Bhabha and Spivak, for example, are united in their careful exegeses of the blindnesses and errors of the colonial discourses they read and, although their approaches differ, their critique relies on this attention to the ways in which colonial knowledge is created in language and disseminated in texts. In addition, postcolonial philosophy offers new modes of writing that are vigilant towards the potential assumptions and biases of the critic. To a greater or lesser extent, all the postcolonial thinkers explored here learn from their own subtle reading strategies and engender on that basis an alternative mode of theorizing that resists temptations of mastery and assimilation. From Said and the Subaltern Studies Collective through to Derrida and Spivak, postcolonial philosophers express in their writing a lucidity, and at times an acute anxiety, in relation to their own project that stems from an unprecedented awareness of the ethics of theorizing itself. This anxiety may rightly be conceived to impede direct political action, and should perhaps be surpassed in the future by a more affirmative mode of discourse, but at the time of writing it nevertheless testifies to a new openness in philosophical language appropriate to the demands of postcolonialism. 184

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Key points • Nkrumah conceived neocolonialism as the ongoing dominance of foreign economic power over African regeneration. • For Hardt and Negri, the old imperialism has been replaced by “Empire”: a diffuse network of power operating beyond the borders of the nation state. “Empire” is linked to the economic and political forces of globalization and is propagated through organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and the UN. • Critics such as Dirlik suggest that postcolonial studies itself as a discipline is complicit with neocolonialism. Huggan argues more specifically that postcolonial studies have created a new “exotic” that celebrates literatures from the colonies and ex-colonies but that elides their historical specificities. • The future of postcolonial studies remains uncertain, but the anxiety now inherent in the discipline in itself reflects a useful vigilance with regard to processes of representation, to the challenges of reading and writing about cultural difference in the current postcolonial context.

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Questions for discussion and revision

one Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

What is the difference between colonialism and imperialism? What is the difference between postcolonialism and postcoloniality? In what ways was Marx ambivalent in his attitude to colonialism? How does Marx’s theory of ideology inform more recent forms of postcolonial thought? How is Gramsci’s notion of hegemony distinct from Marx’s concept of ideology? Define the Levinasian concepts of Totality and Infinity. What aspects of Levinas’s thought can be used to offer a critique of colonialism? How does Levinas conceive the relation between politics and ethics?

two Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms 1. How does Fanon configure the relation between black and white in Black Skin, White Masks? 2. How does Fanon use and critique psychoanalytic models in his analysis of colonialism? 3. Analyse Fanon’s use of the term “negro”. 4. In what sense is Fanon’s thought ethical? 5. What does it mean if the colonial structure is “Manichaean”? 6. How does Fanon respond to the politics of nationalism? 7. How does Sartre conceive the role of negritude? 8. How does Sartre position the colonizer in relation to the colonized? 186

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three Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Why does Gandhi vilify modern civilization? How does Gandhi define Indian civilization? What do you understand by the term “satyagraha”? What does Gandhi mean by “Swaraj”? How does Nandy understand the psychology of colonialism? How does Nandy use Gandhi’s thought? What were the main objectives of the Subaltern Studies Collective? Why does Chatterjee conceive the Indian nation as ambivalent?

four Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism 1. How does Foucault theorize the position of the minorities or marginalized subjects in both Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish? 2. How does Foucault conceive the effect of power on the construction of the individual subject? 3. What criticisms were levelled against Foucault’s conceptions of power and subjectivity? 4. How does Said define Orientalism? 5. How was Said’s Orientalism criticized? 6. How does Said’s approach differ in Culture and Imperialism and in Orientalism? 7. What does Said mean by the term “contrapuntal”? 8. What are the basic tenets of Said’s humanism?

five Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics 1. What examples does Derrida offer of the ethnocentrism of Western philosophy? 2. How does Derrida conceive the relation between language and colonialism? 3. How does Derrida conceive the relation between the universal, the specific and the singular? 4. What is the relation between politics and ethics in Derrida’s thought? 5. How does Bhabha conceive the role of theory? 6. What does Bhabha mean by the “Third Space”? 7. How does Bhabha explore the notion of ambivalence in colonial discourse? 8. In what ways is Bhabha’s recent writing on minority rights more politicized than the former work?

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six Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

How does Khatibi describe his “pensée autre” of the Maghreb? In what ways does Khatibi draw on both poststructuralism and Marxism? What does Khatibi perceive as the effects of bilingualism? How is Khatibi’s thought at once ethical and political? What is the difference between “history” and “History” in Glissant’s thinking? 6. What are the diverse features that make up the notion of “Antillanité”? 7. What does Glissant conceive as the ultimate aim of Caribbean Discourse? 8. Describe the form of cultural production recommended in The Politics of Relation.

seven Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe 1. How does Spivak read Marx? 2. How does Spivak criticize existing accounts of the Hindu immolation of widows? 3. In what ways does Spivak draw on Derrida? 4. Examine the importance of gender in Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason. 5. What sorts of African “gnosis” does Mudimbe vilify? 6. What, for Mudimbe, is the best way to offer resistance to the deluded discourses of Africanism? 7. How does Mbembe theorize the operation of power in the postcolony? 8. What, for Mbembe, are the available forms of postcolonial resistance?

eight Conclusion 1. How is neocolonialism defined by Nkrumah, by Hardt and Negri, and by Huggan? 2. How might postcolonialism divorce itself from neocolonialism? 3. What does postcolonialism tell us about the power of representation? 4. Can postcolonial ethics and politics be reconciled?

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Guide to further reading

one Introduction There are several introductions to postcolonialism that might complement the present study. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (1993), edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, contains many key essays. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989) is one of the first introductions to postcolonial literature, followed by Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004), edited by Neil Lazarus, updates some of this earlier work. Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998) is an introduction to postcolonial culture and thought, and Ato Quayson’s Postcolonialism (2000) offers an interesting take on the practice endorsed by the discipline of postcolonial studies. Robert Young’s comprehensive Postcolonialism (2001) is a long and highly detailed exploration of colonial history and postcolonial thought. Young’s book includes the best introduction to Marx’s views on colonialism, and the slim volume by Marx and Engels On Colonialism (1960) presents a series of extracts in which the philosophers comment on colonialism. A lucid introduction to Levinas in general is Colin Davis’s Levinas (1996). Howard Caygill’s Levinas and the Political (2002) provides a detailed summary of his engagement with National Socialism and totalitarianism.

two Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to arms The two important works by Fanon are Black Skin, White Masks (1968) and The Wretched of the Earth (1967). The best guide to Fanon’s work is Nigel Gibson, Frantz Fanon (2003). David Macey’s biography Frantz Fanon (2000) helps to situate his work in the context of his career and political activism. Ato Sekyi-Oto’s book Fanon’s further reading

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Dialectic of Experience (1996) offers a detailed reading of the philosophical underpinnings of his work, and Lewis Gordon, D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White’s edited collection Fanon (1996) includes essays on a variety of aspects of his thought. Sartre’s Orphée noir (1948b) presents his views on negritude, and the volume Colonialism and Neocolonialism (2001) offers a useful survey of Sartre’s writing on colonialism. Young’s White Mythologies (1990) situates Sartre in relation to the broader history of colonialism and postcolonialism in twentieth-century thought.

three Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi, Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies Collective A useful selection of Gandhi’s writing can be found in The Essential Gandhi (1962), and his An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1982) together with Hind Swaraj (1997) also clarify his intellectual development and key ideas. Dennis Dalton’s Mahatma Gandhi (1993) explores Gandhi’s life and work, and Bhikhu Parekh’s Gandhi’s Political Philosophy (1989) concentrates specifically on his thought. Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy (1983) is the principal text for study used here. Nandy has tended to be under-studied, but Young’s Postcolonialism contains some commentary on his work. For more information on the Subaltern Studies Group, the best place to start is the journal Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak’s volume Selected Subaltern Studies (1988) provides a useful overview, and Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony (1997) and Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) expand on the journal’s mission.

four Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism Relevant works by Michel Foucault include Madness and Civilisation (2001a), The Archaeology of Knowledge (2001b), Disclipline and Punish (1991) and Power/Knowledge (1980). Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (1995) is the only full volume devoted to the links between Foucault’s thought and questions of colonialism. Edward Said’s volumes Orientalism (1995) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) are his most frequently cited interventions into postcolonialism. Most introductions to postcolonialism contain detailed commentary on Said, but good examples include Young’s White Mythologies and Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory (1997). There is also a useful collection edited by Michael Sprinker entitled Edward Said (1992). Bryan Turner’s Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (1994) develops Said’s thinking in the context of globalization.

five Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) outlines his critique of ethnocentrism, while The Monolingualism of the Other (1998) contains specific commentary on colonialism in Algeria. Young has signalled the importance of postcolonialism to Derridean 190

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deconstruction in White Mythologies and in the essay “Deconstruction and the Postcolonial” (2000). Michael Syrotinski’s Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (2007) contains exposition not only of Derrida’s relation with postcolonialism but also that of deconstruction more broadly, as does Philip Leonard’s Nationality between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory (2005). Homi Bhabha’s key work is the volume The Location of Culture (1994). An example of his recent writing on rights is “On Writing Rights” (2003). Criticism of Bhabha is abundant, but good examples are again Young’s White Mythologies and Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory. Young’s Colonial Desire (1995) is an intriguing study of the notion of hybridity, used by Bhabha. David Huddart’s Homi K. Bhabha (2005) is a useful summary of Bhabha’s thought, also containing discussion of the recent work on minority rights.

six Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to place Khatibi’s work is not widely translated, but Maghreb pluriel (1983) is the key volume for an understanding of his thinking on postcolonialism. There is also little criticism of Khatibi in English, but Réda Bensmaïa’s Experimental Nations, or, The Invention of the Maghreb (2003) contains a chapter on Khatibi and multilingualism. Walter Mignolo champions Khatibi in Local Histories, Global Designs (2000). Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (1989) and The Poetics of Relation (1997c) are key theoretical texts by Glissant available in English. Celia Britton’s Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory (1999) offers a sophisticated reading of his novels as well as his theory, and J. Michael Dash provides an overview in Edouard Glissant (1995). Chris Bongie’s Islands and Exiles (1998) situates him in relation to Caribbean and Creole culture more broadly, and Peter Hallward offers a provocative critique of Glissant in Absolutely Postcolonial (2001).

seven Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe Spivak is a prolific writer, but a lot of her thinking is condensed in the volume A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). The famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) is also a useful place to start, and The Spivak Reader (1996c) contains many key essays. Young’s White Mythologies and Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory contain intelligent readings of Spivak, and more critical viewpoints can be found in Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies (2004) and in Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992). Mark Sanders’s Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2006) is a clear, synoptic introduction. Key works by Mudimbe include The Invention of Africa (1988) and Parables and Fables (1991). The best reading of Mudimbe can be found in Syrotinski’s Singular Performances (2002). Mbembe’s important text is On the Postcolony (2001), and there is a chapter on Mbeme in Syrotinski’s Deconstruction and the Postcolonial.

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eight Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline The key work by Kwame Nkrumah on neocolonialism is Neo-colonialism (1965). Young’s Postcolonialism also contains summary of Nkrumah’s career. Hardt and Negri’s provocative volume is Empire (2000), followed up by Multitude (2004). Both are long, detailed explorations of the authors’ controversial theory. Arif Dirlik’s The Postcolonial Aura (1997) offers a critique of the neocolonialism of postcolonial studies, and Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) explores the marketing of postcolonial literature. Another provocative article on the commercialization of postcolonial studies is Chris Bongie’s “Exiles on Main Stream” (2003). David Scott’s Refashioning Futures (1999) is a more general exploration of the future of postcolonial thought.

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Index

aesthetics 140, 142, 148, 149, 160 Africa colonialism in 54, 152 neocolonialism in 180, 185 postcolonial 171–7, 179 representations of 91, 164–77 and sexuality 117 and slavery 137 African–American Black Power Movement 26 African identity and heritage 41, 43–7, 93, 136, 164–77 Africanism 164, 177, 188 African rhythm 46 agency female 64, 156, 157 and the masses/the subaltern 39, 69, 70, 137, 138, 147, 170, 176 native 122–3 political 12, 14, 39, 116, 122, 151, 158 and the subject 82, 94, 103 ahimsa 62, 72 Ahmad, A. 6, 15, 88, 90, 182, 183, 191 Algeria 3, 25–8, 35–8, 41–55, 94, 98–100, 103–7, 112, 125, 131, 144, 151, 190 Algerian War of Independence 25, 94, 100, 103 alienation and the black man 26–30 and the colonizer 44, 49 and the Jew 105, 107, 125 and language 50, 104, 128, 132, 135 and Orientalism 87

political 46 psychoanalytic 26–7, 52, 117 Alloula, M. 96 Althusser, L. 13–14, 81 Anderson, B. 72, 116 androcentrism 95–6 anthropology 85, 102–3, 158, 166, 168 antillanité 138–40, 150, 188 Arabs 86, 89, 94, 128–35, 149 archaeology 76–81, 166, 190 Austen, J. 93–4, 96 Baroque art 144–5 Barthes, R. 132, 135, 161 Baudelaire, C. 144 Bennington, G. 111 Berber 128 Berque, J. 130–31, 149 Bhabha, H. 14, 22, 27, 32, 35, 57, 68–9, 90, 98–9, 103, 113–25, 126, 149, 151, 152, 174, 178, 181, 184, 190–91 Bhagavad Gita 57, 60, 61, 160 bilingualism 22, 127, 128, 130–35, 136, 141, 149, 188 biopower 79, 181 Boer War 58 Bongie, C. 4, 148, 191 bourgeoisie 6, 8–10, 14, 38, 40, 48, 52, 55, 61, 71 Britton, C. 27, 149, 191 Brontë, C. 160 Cabral, A. 40 index

199

calligraphy 128, 131, 133–4 Camus, A. 43, 94, 97 Capécia, M. 32 capitalism and colonialism 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 24, 54, 70 European 44 global 153, 155, 179, 182, 183 and modern civilization 55, 59, 60 and postmodernism 161, 182 struggle against 11, 27, 60 Caribbean 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 91, 126, 127, 135–50, 151, 188, 191 Caygill, H. 18, 189 Césaire, A. 15, 33, 94, 136–9 Chakrabarty, D. 68–70, 190 chaos-monde 146–7, 150 Chateaubriand 87–8 Chatterjee, P. 54, 55, 57, 68, 69, 71–3, 94, 187, 190 Chow, R. 104 Coetzee, J. M. 161 colonial discourse 14, 22, 76–97, 107, 113–25, 135, 157, 161, 175, 184, 187 colonial ideology 24–6, 36–7, 40, 65–6, 100, 101 Conrad, J. 92–4, 97 créolité 139–41 Critchley, S. 108, 111–12 Dash, J. M. 147 Deleuze, G. 82, 143, 155, 156, 169, 182 Derrida, J. 98–113, 178, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190–91 and Bhabha 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 124–5 and Foucault 82–3 and Glissant 135–6, 143, 148, 149 and Khatibi 126–8, 130, 133 and Levinas 20–23 and Mbembe 176–7 and Sartre 50–51 and Spivak 151–5, 157, 159, 161–5, 170, 173 Devi, M. 161 dialectic 27, 28, 32, 34, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 64, 146, 153, 167, 125 Diaspora 22, 106 Djebar, A. 96 deconstruction 22, 52, 100, 103, 108, 112, 115, 121, 127, 130, 149, 151, 161, 170–72, 176, 178, 191 departmentalization 138 Descartes, R. 83, 168

200

understanding postcolonialism

Dirlik, A. 15, 182, 183, 185, 192 dispossession 50, 105–7, 138, 147 Eagleton, T. 10, 162 East India Company 7, 8, 71, 156, 161 equal rights 123 exoticism 88–9, 136, 183 exoticization 5 exploitation 3, 4, 6–15, 24, 44, 48, 49, 60, 63, 69, 74, 84, 98–9, 137, 152, 154, 167, 172, 179–80 Egypt 85–7 ethnicity 81, 171 ethnocentrism 22, 81, 98, 100–107, 110, 113, 115, 125, 130, 157, 166, 184, 187, 190 Fanon, F. 14, 23, 25–35, 77, 112, 151, 164, 183, 186, 189–90 and Bhabha 116, 118, 121, 123, 124 and Gandhi 54–7, 61, 63, 64, 68, 74 and Glissant 139, 144 and Khatibi 129 and Mbembe 175, 176, 178 and Nandy 65–6 and Said 84, 94, 96, 97, 98 and Sartre 35–53 femininity 67, 88 Flaubert, G. 85, 87–9 Forster, E. M. 94, 118 Foucault, M. 14–15, 71, 76–83, 84–6, 89–92, 95, 97, 98, 116, 124, 126, 128, 130, 152, 155, 156, 164–7, 176, 187, 190 Fuss, D. 27 Gandhi, L. 70 Gandhi, M. 54–64, 98, 112, 164, 176, 183, 187, 190 and Nandy 65–8 and the Subaltern Studies Collective 69–72, 74 gender 32, 96, 122, 127, 152, 181, 188 Gilroy, P. 182 Glissant, E. 22, 126–7, 135–50, 151, 178, 179, 199, 191 Gramsci, A. 11–14, 85, 182, 186 Guattari, F. 143, 155, 156, 169, 182 Guha, R. 12, 68–71, 80, 95, 122, 123, 190 Haddour, A. 103 Hall, S. 11–12 Hallward, P. 147–8, 162–3, 191

Hardt, M. 180–82 Hassoun, J. 135 Hegel, G. W. F. 32, 47, 49, 52, 101, 130, 146, 159–60, 175–6 Heidegger, M. 16, 17, 20, 109 Hinduism 55, 57, 60–63, 156, 175, 188, 190 Huggan, G. 5, 183–5, 188 humanism 27, 35, 48, 54, 63–4, 84, 95, 97, 112, 117, 124, 123, 131, 184, 187 human rights 123–4, 140 hybridity 68, 119, 122, 125, 182, 191 ideological state apparatus 13 ideology 2, 3, 6–15, 74–7, 80–81, 93, 138, 161, 164, 167, 180, 186 India 3, 7–8, 12, 14, 24, 54–75, 76, 88, 91, 93–8, 119, 156, 159, 161, 187 industrialization 3, 8, 60 Islam 22, 58, 84, 87, 89, 95, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 134, 149, 151 Israel 21, 22, 89 James, C. L. R. 137 Jews 21, 22, 28, 30, 105–7 Judaism 22, 105–7 Khatibi, A. 22, 103, 126–35, 136, 141, 144, 149, 150, 188, 191 Kipling, R. 67, 93–4, 97, 118, 161 Koran 127–8, 131, 134 Lacan, J. 14, 27, 114, 117, 119, 132 Lamartine, A. de 87–8 Latin America 3, 119, 145, 179 Lazarus, N. 6, 15, 27, 178, 189 Levinas, E. 6, 15–23, 24, 28, 35, 140, 184, 186, 189 and Derrida 99, 101, 108–13, 125, 126, 158 and Khatibi 131, 133, 135 and Glissant 140 and Mudimbe 166 and passive resistance 61–2, 64 and Said 77 Lévi-Strauss, C. 22, 44, 101, 102, 125, 164, 166, 168 logocentrism 101, 104, 113, 115, 130 Louverture, T. 137 Macey, D. 26–7, 189 Maghreb 126–35, 188, 191 Mannoni, O. 31 Mariátegui, J. C. 179

Martinique 25, 27, 135–50, 179 marvellous realism 145 Marx, K. 6–15, 56, 59, 66, 69–71, 88, 130, 152–60, 163, 177, 186, 188–9 Marxism 6–15, 23, 24, 152, 177, 180, 182 and Fanon 38, 52 and Khatibi 130 and Mbembe 172 and Spivak 158 and the Subaltern Studies Collective 75 masculinity 66–7 Masolo, D. A. 170 Mbembe, A. 151, 152, 171–7, 178, 179, 180, 188, 191 Meddeb, A. 131–3 Memmi, A. 49, 63 metaphysics 16, 17, 20, 22, 52, 98, 99, 103, 104, 108, 110, 125, 129, 130, 131, 135, 149 métissage 140, 144, 145, 147 migration 144, 146, 181 Miller, C. 171 mimicry 41, 118, 119, 157, 172, 174, 176 mission civilisatrice 9, 54, 87 Moore-Gilbert, B. 122, 190, 191 Morocco 41, 127–35 Mudimbe, V. Y. 23, 151, 152, 164–71, 172, 175–8, 180, 184, 188, 191 Naipaul, V. S. 118 Nandy, A. 54, 57, 64–8, 69, 74, 89, 96, 187, 190 National Liberation Front 25 National Socialism 6, 15, 16, 112, 189 Negri, A. 180–82 negritude 28, 33, 34, 64, 136, 167, 186, 190 Sartre on 43–52 Nehru, J. 73 Nerval, G. de 88 non-violence 55, 56–9, 62 North Africa 94, 96, 129 ontology 16, 17, 20, 28, 35, 43, 95, 109, 131 opacity 145, 147, 149 Ortiz, F. 140 Orwell, G. 67, 118 Palestine 22, 84, 95 Parry, B. 6, 23, 34, 103, 121, 162, 178 passive resistance 56, 61, 62, 74 Patrick, M. 111

index

201

Paz, O. 119 peasantry 12, 14, 39, 40, 48, 68–9, 73 Perse, S. J. 144 poststructuralism 23, 48, 95, 103, 113, 188, 191 poetics of relation 137, 140, 141, 142, 144–9 proletariat 6, 8–11, 14, 38 Quayson, A. 4, 189 race 12, 16, 33, 44–5, 47, 51, 63, 65, 81, 118, 181 Rhys, J. 160 Rich, A. 123 Rimbaud, A. 144 Rosello, M. 21 Rousseau, j. J. 22, 101, 164, 168 Rowlatt Bills 58 Said, E. 19, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83–97, 98, 151, 184, 187, 190 and Bhabha 114, 118, 124, 125 and Mudimbe 164, 165 Salih, T. 94 San Juan Jr, E. 14–15 Sartre, J-P. 14, 25, 28, 43–53, 54, 63, 65, 66, 77, 84, 97, 98, 105, 112, 124, 151, 164, 186, 189–90 and Fanon 30, 32, 38 and Mudimbe 167–8 sati 156–9 satyagraha 58, 61, 62, 64, 74, 187 Scott, D. 105 Segalen, V. 128, 132, 144 Senghor, L. S. 33, 43, 167, 169 sexuality 67, 74, 78, 80–81, 96, 97 Shelley, M. 160–61

202

understanding postcolonialism

South Africa 26, 58 sovereignty 16–18, 20, 22, 104, 105, 112, 123, 125, 157, 172, 173, 179, 180, 182 Spivak, G. 6, 12, 23, 151–64, 165, 170, 171, 172, 176–80, 183–4, 188, 190, 191 and Derrida 103, 104 and Foucault 82, 83 and the Subaltern Studies Collective 73–4 Stoler, L. A. 81 subaltern 12, 76, 68–75, 82, 94–5, 136–7, 147, 151, 152, 155, 165, 170, 177, 179 and Spivak 157–63 Subaltern Studies Collective 54, 57, 68–75, 76, 77, 90, 98, 152, 156, 184, 187, 190 surplus value 7, 9, 15, 154 swadeshi 63, 70 Swaraj 55, 56, 58, 60, 62–4, 72, 187, 190 Syrotinski, M. 163, 178, 191 Taylor, C. 123 Thiong’o, N. W. 65 Todorov, T. 135 totalitarianism 15, 16, 23, 24, 28, 67, 99, 110, 112, 140, 189 transculturation 3, 140 use value 153 Vichy 100, 105 virility 34, 66, 174 Young, R. 6, 8, 9, 29, 64, 82, 91, 103, 121, 162–3, 180, 189, 190, 191, 192 Žižek, S. 182