postcolonial criticism

CHAPTER 28
POSTCOLONIAL
CRITICISM

ince the complex phenomenon of postcolonialism is rooted in the history of

imperialism, it is worth briefly looking at this history. The word imperialism
derives from the Latin imperium, which has numerous meanings including power,
authority, command, dominion, realm, and empire. Though imperialism is usually
understood as a strategy whereby a state aims to extend its control forcibly beyond its
own borders over other states and peoples, it should be remembered that such control
is usually not just military but economic and cultural. A ruling state will often impose
not only its own terms of trade, but also its own political ideals, its own cultural values,
and often its own language, upon a subject state.
The term imperialism as we know it dates back to the last half of the nineteenth
century. But the concept and practice is as old as civilization itself. Both the Western
world and the Eastern world have seen a series of vast empires which have extended
over vast territories, often in the name of bringing the blessings of their civilization
to the subject peoples who were regarded as barbarians. These include the Chinese
empires extending from the eleventh century bc to the tenth century after Christ; the
Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Persian empires; the empires of the
Greeks, which reached a climax with the conquests of Alexander the Great; the Roman
Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the various empires of Islam which lasted until
the early twentieth century.
In modern times, there have been at least three major phases of imperialism.
Between 1492 and the mid-eighteenth century, Spain and Portugal, England, France,
and the Netherlands established colonies and empires in the Americas, the East Indies,
and India. Then, between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I, there was an
immense scramble for imperialistic power between Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
and other nations. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than one fifth of the land
area of the world and a quarter of its population had been brought under the British
Empire: India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Burma, and the Sudan.
The next largest colonial power was France, whose possessions included Algeria, French
West Africa, Equatorial Africa, and Indochina. Germany, Italy, and Japan also entered
the race for colonies. In 1855 Belgium established the Belgian Congo in the heart of
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part viii: the twentieth century

Africa, a colonization whose horrors were expressed in Conrads Heart of Darkness
(1899). Finally, the periods during and after World War II saw a struggle involving the
countries just mentioned as well as a conflict between America and the communist
Soviet Union for extended control, power, and influence. Needless to say, these imperialistic endeavors have survived into the present day in altered forms and with new
antagonists.
What concerns us is not only the history of imperialism itself but also the various
narratives of imperialism. The motives behind imperialism have usually been economic (though liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo were skeptical
of imperialisms economic benefits, arguing that it only benefited a small group but
never the nation as a whole). Marxists, especially Lenin and Bukharin, saw imperialism
as a late stage of capitalism, in which monopolistic home markets were forced to
subjugate foreign markets to accommodate their overproduction and surplus capital.
A second and related motive has been (and still is) the security of the home state. A
third motive is related to various versions of social Darwinism. Figures such as
Machiavelli, Bacon, Hitler, and Mussolini saw imperialism as part of the natural struggle
for survival. Like individuals, nations are in competition, and those endowed with
superior strength and gifts are able and fit to subjugate the weaker nations. Karl Pearsons
arguments belong to this category. The final motive, propounded by figures such as
Rudyard Kipling (in poems such as The White Mans Burden) and questioned by
writers such as Conrad, rests on moral grounds: imperialism is a means of bringing to
a subject people the blessings of a superior civilization, and liberating them from their
benighted ignorance. Clearly, much of this rationale rests on Western Enlightenment
notions of civilization and progress.
After the end of World War II in 1945 there occurred a large-scale process of
decolonization of the territories subjugated by most of the imperial powers (Britain,
France, the Netherlands, Belgium), with the significant exception of the Soviet Union
and the United States, beginning with the independence of India in 1947. The collapse
of the communist regimes in 1991 left America as the only major remaining colonial
power (though America itself had of course held the status of a colony). Indeed,
colonial struggle is hardly dead: it has continued until very recently in East Timor, and
still persists bitterly in Tibet, Taiwan, Kashmir, and the Middle East.1
Postcolonial literature and criticism arose both during and after the struggles of
many nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America (now referred to as the tricontinent
rather than the third world), and elsewhere for independence from colonial rule.
The year 1950 saw the publication of seminal texts of postcolonialism: Aim Csaires
Discours sur le colonialisme, and Frantz Fanons Black Skin, White Masks. And in 1958
Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart. George Lammings The Pleasures
of Exile appeared in 1960 and Fanons The Wretched of the Earth followed in 1961.
According to Robert Young, the founding moment of postcolonial theory was
the journal the Tricontinental, launched by the Havan Tricontinental of 1966, which
initiated the first global alliance of the peoples of the three continents against imperialism (Young, 5). Edward Saids landmark work Orientalism appeared in 1978. More
recent work includes The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,
and Helen Tiffin and Gayatri Spivaks The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), as well as
important work by Abdul JanMohamed, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, and Kwame
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postcolonial criticism
Anthony Appiah. Robert Young sees postcolonialism as continuing to derive its inspiration from the anti-colonial struggles of the colonial era. Anti-colonialism had many
of the characteristics commonly associated with postcolonialism such as diaspora,
transnational migration and internationalism (Young, 2). Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
also use the term postcolonial in a comprehensive sense, to cover all the culture
affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day,
on account of the continuity of preoccupations between the colonial and postcolonial
periods.2
Postcolonial criticism has embraced a number of aims: most fundamentally, to
reexamine the history of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized; to determine the economic, political, and cultural impact of colonialism on both the colonized
peoples and the colonizing powers; to analyze the process of decolonization; and above
all, to participate in the goals of political liberation, which includes equal access to
material resources, the contestation of forms of domination, and the articulation of
political and cultural identities (Young, 11). Early voices of anti-imperialism stressed
the need to develop or return to indigenous literary traditions so as to exorcize their
cultural heritage of the specters of imperial domination. Other voices advocated an
adaptation of Western ideals toward their own political and cultural ends. The fundamental framework of postcolonial thought has been furnished by the Marxist critique
of colonialism and imperialism, which has been adapted to their localized contexts by
thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Gayatri Spivak.
This struggle of postcolonial discourse extends over the domains of gender, race,
ethnicity, and class. Indeed, we should avoid the danger of treating either the West
or the tricontinent as homogeneous entities which can somehow be mutually
opposed. Such a rigid opposition overlooks the fact that class divisions and gender
oppression operate in both the West and in colonized nations. Many commentators
have observed that exploitation of workers occurred as much in Western countries as
in the areas that they subjugated. Equally, colonization benefited primarily a tiny portion
of the population of imperial nations. In this sense, colonialism is a phenomenon
internal to imperial nations as well as extending beyond their frontiers (Young, 89).
Hence, postcolonial discourse potentially embraces, and is intimately linked with, a
broad range of dialogues within the colonizing powers, addressing various forms
of internal colonization as treated by minority studies of various kinds such as
African-American, Native American, Latin American, and womens studies. All of these
discourses have challenged the main streams of Western philosophy, literature, and
ideology. In this sense, the work of African-American critics such as Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., of African-American female novelists and poets, of commentators on Islam,
and even of theorists such as Fredric Jameson, is vitally linked to the multifarious
projects of postcolonialism.
One of these projects, or rather, one point of convergence of various postcolonial
projects has been the questioning and revaluation of the literary and cultural canon in
Western institutions, through what is loosely called multiculturalism. In explaining
the rise of multiculturalism, Paul Berman suggests that a new postmodern generation of activists from the 1960s came into power in American universities. The year
1968 saw left-wing uprisings against the elements of liberal humanism: Western
democracy, rationalism, objectivity, individual autonomy. These were all considered to
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part viii: the twentieth century

be slogans which concealed the societys actual oppression of blacks, working-class
people, gays, women, as well as the imperialistic exploitation of third world countries.
These oppressive ideas, according to radicals, were embodied and reproduced in the
conventional canons of literature and philosophy which we offer to our students: the
literary tradition from Homer to T. S. Eliot and the philosophical spectrum from Plato
to logical positivism. Berman suggests that this reaction against the Western mainstream
tradition was fostered largely by the rise of French literary theory, which insisted that
the text was an indirect expression and often a justification of the prevailing power
structure. This structure was inevitably a hierarchy in which the voices of minorities,
women, and the working classes were suppressed. These voices now had to be heard.
The central conservative argument against multiculturalism was advanced by
Allan Bloom, Arthur Schlesinger, and others. It assumed, firstly, that in the past there
existed a period of consensus with regard to the aims of education, political ideals, and
moral values; secondly, that this consensus, which underlies the national identity of
America, is threatened by the cacophonic irreconcilable voices of multiculturalism.
Multiculturalists respond that this past consensus is imaginary: the educational
curricula adopted at various stages both in the United States and elsewhere have been
the products of conflicting political attitudes. In late nineteenth-century America,
conservatives, who desired a curriculum that would foster religious conformism and
discipline, were opposed by those, like the pragmatist John Dewey, who wished to
stress liberal arts, utility, and advanced research. In 1869, President Charles W. Eliot of
Harvard initiated a program of curricular reform, amid much controversy. Disciplines
such as history, sociology, and English itself struggled to gain admission into various
liberal arts curricula. In 1890 the Modern Language Association (MLA) witnessed a
heated debate over the relative merits of the classics and the moderns. And the 1920s
and 1930s saw a struggle to make American literature part of the English program.
A third assumption of conservatives is that great literature somehow conveys
timeless truths; Schlesinger states that history should be conducted as disinterested
intellectual inquiry, not as therapy; William Bennett, Lynne V. Cheney, and the
National Academies have all appealed to the notion of timeless truths. But, to speak in
such language is to dismiss the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism, existentialism,
historicism, hermeneutic theory, and psychoanalysis, which have attempted to situate
the notion of truth in historical, economic, and political contexts. Various theorists
have responded that, in fact, the appeal to timeless truths has always subserved a
political function. The growth of English literature was from the beginning imbued
with ideological motives. Arnold and subsequent professors at Oxford saw poetry as
the sole salvation for a mechanical civilization. The timeless truths of literature were
intended as a bulwark against rationalist and ideological dogma. Literature was to
promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes, to educate citizens as to their
duties, to inculcate national pride and moral values. And English was a pivotal part of
the imperialist effort. In 1834 Macaulay argued the merits of English as the medium of
instruction in India, stating: I have never found one . . . who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia. We can refrain from commenting on this except to add Macaulays own
subsequent statement that I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. Such
statements reveal the depth to which constructions of Europes self-image, resting on
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postcolonial criticism
the Enlightenment project of rationality, progress, civilization, and moral agency, were
premised on the positing of various forms of alterity or otherness, founded on polarized images such as superstitiousness, backwardness, barbarism, moral incapacity, and
intellectual impoverishment.
In many areas of the globe including the United States, where the study of English
literature often overbalances that of American writers the English literary tradition
continues to act as a foundation and norm of value, with texts from other traditions
often being incorporated and viewed through analytical perspectives intrinsic to the
English heritage. In India, where English replaced Persian (the language of the former
rulers, the Mughals) as the official state language in 1835, English continues to exert a
pervasive influence on language, literature, and legal and political thought. It is in
profound recognition of this integral relationship between the literary canon and cultural values that writers such as the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiongo have written essays
with such titles as On the Abolition of the English Department (1968), and important texts such as Decolonizing the Mind (1986). Many writers, notably Chinua Achebe,
have struggled with the dilemma of expressing themselves in their own dialect, to
achieve an authentic rendering of their cultural situation and experience, or in English,
to reach a far wider audience. It should be noted also that what conventionally passes
as English is Southern Standard English, spoken by the middle classes in London and
the south of England. This model of English has effectively peripheralized the English
spoken not only in other parts of England but also in other areas of the world. Today,
there are innumerable varieties of English spoken in many countries, and only recently
has their expression in literature been institutionally acknowledged. These various
debates can now be examined in some of the major figures who have made contributions
to postcolonial criticism and theory.

Frantz Fanon (19251961)

A leading theorist and activist of third world struggle against colonial oppression,
Frantz Fanon was one of the most powerful voices of revolutionary thought in the
twentieth century. Born on the French island colony of Martinique, Fanon fought
against Nazism in France where he subsequently trained as a psychiatrist. His origins
and his experience in both Martinique and France exposed him to the issues of racism
and colonialism. An important influence on him was his teacher Aim Csaire, a leader
of the so-called negritude movement which called for cultural separation rather than
assimilation of blacks. Fanons books included Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), translated as Black Skin, White Masks (1967), which explored the psychological effects of
racism and colonialism.
In 1954, while Fanon was working as a psychiatrist in Algeria, the Algerians rebelled
against French rule. The violent struggle for Algerian independence was led by the
National Liberation Front. Fanon edited the Fronts newspaper and remained involved
in the revolution until his death in 1961. Independence was not achieved until 1962.
Fanon produced a number of writings connected with Algerian and African revolution; his most comprehensive and influential work was Les Damns de la terre (1961),
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