Acrefore 9780190201098 e 1001

Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonial Theory
Vijay Mishra, Department of English, Murdoch University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1001
Published online: 30 April 2020
Summary
Postcolonial discourse is the critical underside of imperialism, the latter a hegemonic form going back to the
beginnings of empire building. In the languages of the colonized—those of the ruling class as well as its subjects—a
critical discourse of displacement, enslavement, and exploitation co-existed with what Conrad called the
redemptive power of an “idea.” Postcolonial theory took shape in response to this discourse as a way of explaining
this complex colonial encounter. But the discourse itself required a consciousness of the colonial experience in its
diverse articulations and a corresponding legitimation of the lives of those colonized. This shift in consciousness
only began to take critical shape in the mid-20th century with the gradual dismantling of the non-settler European
empires. In Africa anti-colonial agitation congealed, as a theoretical problematic, around the idea of négritude, a
nativist “thinking” that was built around alternative and self-empowering readings of African civilizations. In the
writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire, négritude affirmed difference as it
foregrounded an oppositional discourse against a “sovereign” European teleological historiography. The African
writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o pushed this further by insisting that, where possible, postcolonial writing should be in the
vernacular. But even as difference was affirmed, with the emergence of the psychoanalytic–Hegelian writings of
Frantz Fanon , the discourse ceased to be defiantly oppositional and moved towards an engagement with the larger
principles of Western humanism, including a critique of the instrumental uses of the project of the Enlightenment.
Out of this grew a language of a postcolonial theory which could then trace the colonial experience in its entirety, in
all its complex modes and manifestations, to uncover the genesis of a critical postcolonial discourse, a discourse
shaped in the shadow of the imperialist encounter. However, for the theory to take shape as an analytic it needed
something more than a binary exposition or a simple historical genealogy; it required an understanding of those
power structures that governed the representation of colonized peoples. The text that gave a language and a
methodology for the latter was Edward W. Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism. Although Said did not use the term
“postcolonial theory” in the first edition of his work, his argument (after Foucault) of the links between discourse
and power provided a framework within which a postcolonial theory could be given shape. Works by two key
theorists followed in quick succession: Homi K. Bhabha on complicit postcolonialism and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak on the subaltern and postcolonial reason. The three—Said, Bhabha, and Spivak—regularly invoked as a
triumvirate or a trinity provided solid plinths for the scaffolding of innumerable studies of postcolonialism. Of these
studies, in the Anglophone context a few may be cited here. These are: Robert J. C. Young and Bart Moore-Gilbert on
critical Western historiography and colonial desire, Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry on the globality of
capitalism and the need to historicize scholarship, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam on Eurocentrism, Dipesh
Chakrabarty on provincializing Europe, Gauri Viswanathan on the role of premodern thought in postcolonial
activism, and Harish Trivedi on postcolonial vernaculars. In all these studies the specters of Marx emerge as ghostly
flares, which is why postcolonial theory is not so much an established paradigm with identifiable limits but an idea,
a debate which in existential parlance carries a sense of exhaustion, ennui, that has no closure but is always an
opening delimited only by a given theorist’s disciplinary boundaries.
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Postcolonial Theory
Keywords: postcolonial, negritude, subaltern studies, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak,
recognition, specters of Marx, Conrad, ethnography
Subjects: Literary Theory
Designing, Defining, Declaring an Idea
Colony comes from a rich and important Latin root colo—“to abide, dwell, stay (in a place), to
1
inhabit it”—which is etymologically linked to the Sanskrit root kshi, “to dwell, inhabit. ” From
this meaning it developed a set of related meanings: to work (the earth), to cultivate it, and hence
metaphorically to work the mind or soul; and to worship the gods. These are diverse meanings for
a modern mindset, but in the premodern world in which these terms were formed there is an
intrinsic connection between living in a place, working the land, and honoring its gods, the spirits
of the land. The subject of the col (colony) was thus an inhabitant or a farmer. From this usage it
drifted to refer to a settler in a foreign place, a “colonist” in the modern sense. Yet this drift was
not innocent, and in the Latin the other meanings remained active, part of the ideological work it
did to justify and legitimate different modalities of invasion: living in (and dominating) a new
land, “improving” it by work, and bringing new gods—all strategies that European powers
employed in the 500 years of European colonization, beginning with 1492 when Columbus set sail
2
for the “New” World and when Boabdil lost al-Andalus to Isabella and Ferdinand.
This contradictory legacy over 500 years then underwent an amnesiac shift in the stock of words
of modern European languages. “Colony” came to refer primarily to invasive settlements, not to
a neutral “dwelling.” It also lost its deep roots in premodern ways of life, especially religion. All
these elements are still present in contemporary forms of colonization, in both its classic,
colonial, and postmodern/ postcolonial forms. The realities have not changed, but meaning has
slowly seeped out of the term. The word “postcolonialism,” emerging as it did from this complex
history, is a neologism (created through affixes added to the headword “colony”) that grew out of
older elements to capture a seemingly unique moment in world history, a configuration of
experiences and insights, hopes, and dreams arising from a hitherto silenced part of the world,
taking advantage of new conditions to “search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial
era,” “not [as] the end of colonization [but] … a certain kind of colonialism,” creating an
altogether different vantage point with “locomotive, portmanteau” qualities from which to
3
review the past and the future. If we accept postcolonial theory as an intentional discourse in a
changing and variable historical context (a context whose genesis may be variously located in
1492 when Columbus set sail for the new world, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haitian revolution
which began in 1791, merely two years after the French Revolution, the Barbados slave uprising of
April 1816, or 1947, when India gained its independence) then the question of what shape this
4
critical stance or attitude took begins to acquire variable centers.
In Anglophone postcolonial theory (our brief here) one returns to two “moments” as being
critical, if not foundational. The first is what may be broadly called the triumph of the
“monolingualism” of the conqueror, which had its symbolic origin in a Minute—Thomas
Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education, dated 2 February 1835—aimed principally at
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creating a citizen who would view reality as the colonizer did. The Minute has been so extensively
5
rehearsed that parts of it made their way even into Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. What
Rushdie did not include was Macaulay’s reading of the primacy of English as a civilizing and
cleansing principle.
[These people will form a] class who may be interpreters between us and millions whom
we govern,—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in
opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular
dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from
6
Western nomenclature.
This is imperialist Macaulay, but there is a second “moment” worth remembering. A little under
twenty years after Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education, on 25 June 1853, Marx’s essay on
7
“The British Rule in India” was published in the New York Tribune. Marx gives a dismal picture of
India as a nation prone to invaders from outside, but also mystified from within through “a
religion of sensualist exuberance, … of self-torturing asceticism,” a religion which, as Kevin B
8
Anderson notes, Marx felt was marred by “Hinduism’s deep-seated antihumanism.” Against
this less than endearing historical account (which he clearly borrowed from Hegel) Marx argued
British imperialism was of a very different kind: “the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan
is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer
9
before.” Quoting Sir Stamford Raffles on the capitalist ethos of the Dutch East India Company,
Marx notes that the British East India Company treated people as property from whom labor
10
could be extracted for the “monopolizing selfishness of traders.” This capitalist enterprise,
altogether new for India, “separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all the ancient traditions,
11
and from the whole of its past history.” The end of cottage industries, the products of the
handloom and the spinning wheel (later admired by Gandhi), through the transformation of
agriculture, notably to produce cotton for the mills of Lancashire, had the effect of “blowing up
12
their economical basis” thereby producing the “only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.” It
is at this point, a point of reversal one may say, that Marx turns to the closed world of Indian
communities held together by a barbaric “Oriental despotism” (a function in fact of the social
structure of the Indian village itself) not of the colonial kind but one that restrained the human
mind itself and isolated it from its natural historical development. Bound to quietism (as Nehru
himself acknowledged) the Indian subject lost its sovereignty as a figure of history and subjected
13
itself to a brutalizing worship of nature and religious deities. Marx then observes in a passage
cited by Edward Said as an example, even in a great thinker, of the power of the formidable censor
14
of “Romantic Orientalism,”
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the
vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the
question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental
revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of
15
England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
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The Indian liberationists, notably Gandhi and Nehru, understood Marx’s argument that capitalist
incursion in itself leads to an uprising by the proletariat because the contradictions of capitalism
are far too obvious. And yet both Nehru and Gandhi failed to successfully create a genuine
revolution of the proletariat because, against Marx, as Aijaz Ahmad has argued, Gandhi
celebrated a static, changeless India whose superior wisdom opted for a moral vision contained
16
within a primitive system of production. Marx’s reading of British colonialism is the hidden
subtext of postcolonial theory: colonization may have been brutal, dehumanizing, racist,
exploitative and the rest, but in the narrative of Marx it should have produced a postcolonial
insurgency the product of which would have been the right kind of postcolonial nation. The
specter of Marx haunts postcolonial theory and continues to do so to this day.
Origins of a Theory: Negritude and Liberation
In spite of Marx’s historical teleology, it could be said that postcolonial theory began not as an
17
ideology but as an “aesthetic” aimed at empowering Caliban with the “power to see.” In the
hands of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire (who coined the word
“négritude”) an aesthetic was transformed into an ideology of liberation which, although located
within a Manichaean binary of the colonizer and the colonized, did not part company from the
language of European humanism. For Senghor, negritude was “an instrument of liberation … a
contribution to the humanism of the 20th century,” encompassing as it does “the sum of the
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cultural values of the black world.” To understand what these cultural values are one has to “feel”
that the African “body” is akin to “spirit-matter” where the body itself is an energizing spirit, a
source of knowledge, transcending the Western dualism of spirit and matter as distinct
categories. Borrowing from the affective theories of Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin (both with
strong mystical tendencies) the African body projects the world as part of a larger synthesis of
which it itself is a part. Wolof, the language of Senegal, writes Senghor, has at least three words
19
for spirit—xel, sago, or degal—because matter, which is never dead, itself is an embodied spirit.
The sign “Man” is a sign of a collective responsibility—to one’s fellow-men, to nature, to the
spirit that inheres in all life forms—and not one of self-definition and individuality. What
colonization obfuscates, occludes and finally trivializes is the historical force of the ideas of
negritude in Western thinking itself. From St. Augustine to Rimbaud, Picasso, and Braque the
interplay of forces and the non-mimetic modes of African art (which for the African always
combined social activity with aesthetic judgment) influenced, humanistically, the Western mind.
Negritude was the first of the politics of recognition later theorized by Charles Taylor as a system,
20
an idea, that contributed to the civilizing project of humanity. African harmony, its unity of
form and movement, its mystical sense of oneness with the earth, with climate, with all life
forms, anticipates postcolonial theory’s intervention into areas such as climate change and
21
ecocriticism. More than anything else this was the first unified postcolonial theory to emerge,
and one that brought the affective, the body, into the ideas of recognition and liberation together.
Lamming had anticipated this, and much of British black grime music (a genre that draws on
ragga, hip hop, rap, and the Rastarfari ideology of Bob Marley) continues to reflect this. But, to
quote Bart Moore-Gilbert, “the negritudinists’ … essentialist myth of black identity, social or
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psychic, across the diverse spectrum of black cultures and histories” foreclosed critical
22
discussion; a more historically grounded postcolonial discourse was needed. That discourse
came from the pens of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon.
Memmi and Fanon
In his classic work, The Colonizer and the Colonized (in French 1957; English translation 1965)
Albert Memmi had argued that the colonized were the product of a specific period of colonization
23
out of which grew an anti-colonial discourse. Since the “post-” was not available to Memmi as
24
an epistemic category, the “postcolonial” was emphatically oppositional. Jean-Paul Sartre, who
wrote the Introduction to the first edition of the book (in French), read Memmi’s oppositional
(liberationist) rhetoric in the context of a system “born towards the middle of the last (that is
25
nineteenth) century, that will manufacture its own destruction of itself.” In this argument
Sartre also reminded the reader of Marx’s observation that the proletariat “bears within it the
26
destruction of bourgeois society.” Memmi’s early study lends itself to this reading even if, 35
years on, Nadine Gordimer in her Introduction to the later edition of the work argued that as a
programmatic statement about postcolonial struggle, the application of Memmi’s work is limited
because it deals with the Maghrib, not Africa south of the Sahara, where the colonial situation was
more dramatically played out. What is true, though, is Memmi’s reading of racism as not “an
accidental detail, but … a consubstantial part of colonialism … the highest expression of that
27
colonial system.”
Writers on negritude and Memmi had provided a theoretical framework with which to rethink,
and indeed to rewrite, the colonial encounter. It was left to Frantz Fanon to give that framework a
more powerful philosophical grounding by exploring the psyche of the colonizer through an
examination of the dark side of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. Two books of Fanon are
pivotal and quite possibly more influential than other works cited by postcolonial theorists. These
two books—The Wretched of the Earth (in French 1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (in French 1952
)—may be “entered” into more productively through their prefaces written, respectively, by
28
Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi Bhabha. The two prefaces, separated by some 25 years, demonstrate
two key features of postcolonial theory, both arising out of Fanon’s works. The first, by Sartre,
reads Fanon as a revolutionary for whom the anti-colonial struggle never comes to an end, and
would require more than an affirmation of one’s past, more than an unqualified insistence on
one’s national culture (Fanon calls it “Negro-ism”); the second, by Bhabha, sees in Fanon modes
of resistance built into the lives of the colonized, and reads colonization itself as a two-way
trauma. We need to make these positions clear because they remain, to this day, the two principal
tenets of postcolonial theory: to oppose and by opposing end them, or to theorize a process that
has built into it life-worlds that no longer offer non-ambiguous solutions.
In his Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Sartre explores, after Fanon, violence as an
existential imperative produced by the colonial condition. Throughout the Preface Sartre
appropriates the voice of Fanon, who in turn had appropriated the voice of Aimé Césaire. In the
opening pages of his Discours sur le colonialisme (1955) Césaire had begun with the devastating
words: “Une civilisation qui s’avère incapable de résoudre les problèmes que suscite son
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fonctionnement est une civilisation décadente … L’Europe est indéfendable” [“A civilization that
proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization … Europe is
indefensible”]. Sartre captures something of the spirit of Césaire’s polemic as he quotes
approvingly Fanon’s own diagnosis of Europe: “Europe … is running headlong into the abyss; we
29
should do well to keep away from it.” Against the “simulacrum of phony independence,” which
Europe gives his ex-colonies—because the mother country keeps some of its own spitting images
in play and in power even after independence—what is needed is a struggle, a fight, among the
colonized themselves, led by a unified revolutionary class. The struggle is neither a retreat into a
mythic African past, a romantic turn and a withdrawal, nor one around the figure of the Western
ideal of the world-historical individual who projects the Law of Reason, the kind, without naming
him, one discovers in Gandhi with his cult of suffering and non-violence. What the colonized
have inherited from the colonizer is something pernicious, something inhuman, something
degrading—the cult of violence, the power of brute force, and brutality itself. Whereas for the
negritude theorists black Africa offered an alternative romanticism that may redeem Europe
itself, Fanon’s Hegel offered an existential crisis of being; one in which violence—an anti-
colonial struggle—would play a role because violence itself was a profoundly colonial legacy. But
this reading, incisive as it was, faced a more powerful and pervasive postmodern reading which
came from someone who would become a foundational theorist of postcolonialism.
Homi Bhabha’s reading of Fanon’s second book, Black Skin, White Masks, “the only serious
competitor to Said’s (1978) Orientalism as the foundational text of modern Postcolonial Studies,”
is so different. Between the two readings of Fanon—Sartre’s and Bhabha’s—the battleground or
the direction of postcolonial theory is laid out: one steadfastly oppositional; the other almost
30
accommodating and complicit. Before turning to Bhabha’s critique, we must capture Fanon’s
own voice about colonialism by referring to a passage each from The Wretched of the Earth and
from Black Skin, White Masks. From the first:
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the
native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of
the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-
31
colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
And from the second:
I remember, in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between Negro and European poetry, and a
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French acquaintance told me enthusiastically, “At bottom you are a white man.”
In his reading Bhabha must shift Fanon away from the writer of the “seamless narrative” to the
33
“purveyor of the transgressive and transitional truth.” The latter—“transitional truth”—
Bhabha argues, surfaces so dramatically in the “silence of a sudden rupture” in Fanon’s
34
enigmatic pronouncement: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” Bhabha’s
reflection on this utterance captures what may be called a key postcolonial “turn” in as much as
the theoretical point of view took on a definitive stance in postcolonial theory. Bhabha continues,
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That familiar alignment of colonial subjects – Black/ White, Self/ Other – is disturbed
with one brief pause and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed,
whenever they are found to rest on the narcissistic myths of Negritude or White cultural
supremacy. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement that pushes Fanon’s
writing to the edge of things; the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his
35
words, “exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”.
In the hands of Memmi, Fanon, Sartre, and the writers on negritude, colonial history was one of
brutal subjugation which required at the cultural level a clear statement of ethnographic equality
within difference and at the political level a total dismantling of imperialist structures. To
Bhabha, who refers to negritude and White supremacy as myths, the colonial transaction (as
“translation”) had fractured the colonized subject to such an extent that the “post-colonial”
colonized could never function within an absolute Self–Other binary. The language that Bhabha
deploys, seen even in the short passage quoted, is one that would create out of the painful
experience of colonization a world view that would forever put to rest systems of absolute
difference. The theory that defines this approach, in broad terms, is deconstruction encased at
times within a metonymic rendition of the signifier, as found in Lacan’s reading of Freud and
deployed by Fanon himself:
It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan’s theory of the mirror period [stage],
to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at
the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro.
… one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue
36
to be the black man.
Homi Bhabha and Cultural “Hybridity”
It is a broad claim to make but it must be made: there is no postcolonial theory without Homi
Bhabha, disagreements with him, however intense, notwithstanding. As noted already in
Bhabha’s reading of Fanon, he rejects foundationalist historiographies on the grounds that the
postcolonial present (with its global flows and hybrid identity politics) finds them attenuating. In
the alternative historiography fashioned by Bhabha, anti-colonial nationalist practice repeats,
with a difference, an original metropolitan nationalism. Theorists of bourgeois anti-colonial
struggle would agree this often happens. For Bhabha, it seems this is the only model of
nationalist struggle in the domain of anti-colonialism: a metropolitan nationalism repeated with
a difference (an ambivalence) but within a space that is semiotically the same since it is invested
with the same bureaucratic and juridical systems. This is a little uncanny, as Bhabha says,
because it is a kind of return of the repressed, a compulsive repetition but one to which one
desires to return to participate in the (il)logic of having been there before. The colonized subject
is thus bound to mimic (the narrative of the struggle presupposes a prior metropolitan grand
37
narrative) and can only exist in a condition of ambivalent hybridity. But in doing so the move,
38
the theory, the premise, undermines, in Neil Lazarus’s words, the “colonialist script” itself.
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The theory took shape in an early published essay—“Signs Taken for Wonders” (1985)—also
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included as the sixth chapter in Bhabha’s highly influential The Location of Culture. As Bill Bell
says in an historical recontextualization of this essay, “[the essay] constitutes a discourse whose
coinages – ‘hybridity,’ ‘sly civility,’ ‘mimicry’ – have passed into such common usage in the past
twenty-five years that they have come to colonize the postcolonial imagination with an
40
imaginative power rare within the rarefied world of cultural theory.” The value of the essay,
which may be used as representing the entire volume of collected pieces, is that, apart from the
postcolonial coinages noted by Bell, it represents for many the special ways in which a
postcolonial theorist reads an archive.
The essay begins with a conversation recounted in the January 1818 issue of The Missionary
Register between one Anund Messeh, a prized early Brahmin convert to Christianity and now a
catechist, and 500 men and women “seated under the shade of the trees” just outside Delhi in
May 1817 who were reading, according to Anund Messeh (“Masih,” in Hindi a messenger, a
Messiah, is a common surname for Indian converts) “the Gospel of our Lord, translated into the
41
Hindoostanee Tongue.” When told by Anund that the Gospels teach the religion of the
“European Sahibs” and the book is in fact theirs, the elder of the group replies, “Ah! No, that
cannot be, for they eat flesh,” suggesting that meat eaters cannot be recipients of revelation of
what is presumed to be a “Hindu” text. It seems they remain unconvinced even when Anund
insists that it is the European Sahibs who were the original recipients of the book and it is they
who gave it to them. When asked why they wore white they answer “The people of God should
wear white raiment” as a sign of their purity. Anund reads this as a sign of their submission to the
God of the Book (Jesus) and asks them to come to Meerut where a missionary priest would baptize
them “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” They don’t take this offer and
excuse themselves because there is harvesting to be done. But since they meet once a year, the
next meeting may well be in Meerut. Anund then explains to them the nature of the Sacrament
and Baptism. They are happy to undergo Baptism but baulk at the thought of participating in the
holy Sacrament, where wine or sweetened water is shared, because the “Europeans eat cow’s
flesh, and this will never do for us.” One wonders how Anund had explained the Christian
Sacrament and if indeed he had explained it with reference to communal eating (commensalism)
in the Last Supper. To the elder’s retort that the Sacrament would not “do for us” because “the
Europeans eat cow’s flesh” Anund seems to suggest that when the Word of God enters the mind
of men, real understanding (of the Sacrament) would follow. Anund’s account ends as follows:
They replied, “If all our country will receive this Sacrament, then will we.” I then observed,
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“The time is at hand, when all the countries will receive this WORD!” They replied, “True!”
For Bhabha the incident, as recounted by Anund, is metonymic in the sense that it repeats the
moment of the arrival of the Book in colonized societies. The printed book (which can be
mechanically reproduced without any variants) had a mystical power in and of itself. The power is
then linked to its original owners, the English Sahibs, who with the Book brought a new religion
as well as a new polity. To Bhabha the episode is symptomatic of the sly games played by the
subaltern, the levels of mimicry and under-cutting in their responses all the more remarkable
because these subalterns themselves were Sadhs, a rebellious group like the Kabir Panthis and the
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Nath Yogis who emphasized oneness of being and wore white. Whereas Anund Messeh was
complicit as an instrument of evangelical imperialism, the subalterns recognizing his complicity
played along with him.
For the postcolonial theorist Anund is the perfect candidate for the ways in which the self-
interest of the local, the indigenous, combined with the global interest of the conqueror. But was
Anund Messeh himself both complicit and at the same time a sly mimic who simply gave the
master what they, evangelists like Henry Fisher, John Chamberlain and Bishop Wilson, wanted,
43
offering an ironic disturbance even if irony totally bypassed him? In Bhabha’s reading of the
event in the Delhi grove, the mimics were the unknown Sadhs and the voice of authority the
compliant and baptized Brahmin, now an excitable Christian catechist. In Bell’s reading the
mimic is the loquacious and stereotypical sly Indian catechist who plays the game. In this reading
Anund’s gloss on the Gospels (“These books teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR
book”) is not an affirmation of the master text of the masters but one characterized by the
theoretical device of bathos, undercutting. Anund then is the sly stereotypical Indian playing a
game that Hindus have always played, demonstrating as they always did characteristics of
mimicry, sly civility, and hybridity avant la lettre. In the end, as the Indian Mutiny of 1857 rages,
Anund leaves Christianity, returns to the religion of his wife who had never converted and comes
to a tragic end as he is killed by a Muslim, quite possibly for abandoning his faith in the first
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place. Either way, Bhabha’s reading has theoretical value and signifies a larger historical
context in that it is part of an enunciatory process that goes back to Wilson Harris’s contention
that even when a presumed assimilation of contraries has taken place a certain “void” remains
and it is through an entry into this “void” (Bhabha’s “Third Space”) that participation in an alien
45
discourse begins to take shape. When, later, Bhabha returns to a “vernacular
46
cosmopolitanism,” the specters of Harris remain.
The Ghost of Conrad

47
V. S. Naipaul once observed: “And I found that Conrad … had been everywhere before me.” This
is true of postcolonial theory because, recalling Dostoevsky on Gogol, it, too, has come out of
Conrad’s coattails. A recurring starting point of postcolonial theory is related to the project of the
Enlightenment, where the subject is fashioned around personal autonomy and the Law of
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Reason. Individualism, in this regard, is prized as a valuable thing in itself. Other subjects—
those who had not been “cooked” by the Enlightenment (or European civilization more
generally)—could (and should) strive towards this goal of autonomy. This is how imperialism
was structured—Europe went out to “cook” other subjectivities into its own rational design and
the process of civilization was connected to how well the native could be like “us.” The turn of the
20th century, however, began to show signs of a “new ethnographic conception of culture” where
other ways of speaking about cultural subjects were shown to be equally valid as the new breed of
ethnographers advanced a theory of critical cultural relativity against the older cultural
essentialism. James Clifford, to whose work I now turn, develops his reading of cultural relativity
through a comparison between Conrad and the anthropologist Malinowski, founder of what is
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now termed ethnography or the study of cultures.
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The argument hinges on the very straightforward idea that ethnography has yet to find its
Conrad. What does Clifford mean by this? Reading through Clifford’s juxtaposition of
Malinowski’s Diary and Conrad’s Darkness we immediately note that Malinowski cannot free
himself from Eurocentric discourses of self and identity. Malinowski is thus faced with a dilemma
—how indeed to represent the truth of “discrepant worlds” even as one works within the
discipline of ethnography. So Malinowski goes, in a sense, to Conrad, representing his life in
Conradian terms, and rewriting themes from Heart of Darkness.
Both Heart of Darkness and the Diary portray “a crisis of identity” at the limits of Western
civilization. But since the crisis, in the case of Kurtz (leading as the crisis does to moral and
spiritual disintegration) is far too great, and is beyond representation, it has to be transformed
either into a “horror” or a lie. The latter is what Marlow does when he is asked to tell the truth
about Kurtz to his betrothed. He offers a more palatable version of the character, not the mystery
of the horror, but the circumspection of reassurance. The betrothed feels relieved, the life of
Kurtz is not wasted but put to good use. Honor triumphs, although this honor is possible because
Marlow lies. Truth is known only to the small group of listeners on the Nellie. In the world beyond
it is the lie that will persist. One is tempted to say that James Clifford—and Malinowski before
him—is actually seeing in Conrad’s narrative a parable of ethnography and by extension the
postcolonial. The white anthropologist working in liminal societies (but located in a complex
linguistic/ cultural formation) constructs cultural differences against the European push to slot
cultures into a binary (civilized/ barbaric; raw/ cooked, etc.). This “anthropologist,” however,
composes a text beneath which lies a host of other texts, notes of conflicting kinds, that he/she
had produced during field work. Marlow’s tale is similarly constructed; it is a fiction, a lie, behind
which are truths that exist within contradictory discourses and genres. If one has to find truth
one has to locate it through contrapuntal readings of Marlow’s discoveries such as his encounter
with the book by one Towsor or Towson “lovingly stitched” (as we discover later by a Russian
sailor in harlequin whom Marlow meets), found in a shack by the riverbank. The “dead” and
useless book is placed against the vibrant river as the sign of civilization, a commodity which
makes more sense to Marlow than the tenebrous river itself. A contrapuntal reading—in fact a
postcolonial reading following on Edward Said’s description of a new postcolonial hermeneutic—
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discloses the triumph of the novel as dialogic form, for it does what ethnography cannot do.
There is, of course, the matter of structure itself: in Heart of Darkness, even Marlow’s monological
narrative can be undercut through the “ironic” structure of the mediated frame narration. What
Clifford is saying is that Conrad provides us with a model of writing about cultures, and the novel
form does precisely what a critical ethnography has not been able to do. Conrad’s work is the
model for both postcolonial theory and practice.
Chinua Achebe, author of the foundational postcolonial/ African novel Things Fall Apart (1958),
does not buy this reading of Conrad. In a lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts in
1975 and later revised in 1987 Achebe writes how Conrad sets up Africa as a “foil to Europe, as a
place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own
spiritual grace will be manifest … [an] ‘other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore
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civilization.” The uncited subtext here is F. R. Leavis’s reading of Heart of Darkness in his
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influential The Great Tradition (1948). Deploying the language of high literary criticism and
English sensibility, Leavis read Heart of Darkness as an exemplary text that achieved “its
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overpowering evocation of atmosphere by means of ‘objective correlatives’.”
Against Leavis’s emphasis on the work’s sinister and fantastic “atmosphere” and Towser or
Towson’s book on seamanship as a “symbol of tradition, sanity, and the moral idea … in the dark
heart of Africa,” that gave the right language to an emotion, Achebe isolates phrases such as
“ugly,” “the savage,” and contrasts Conrad’s treatment of black men and what seems like
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Kurtz’s African mistress with Kurtz’s betrothed, the European woman. Denied the full force of
language, the black man in the novel speaks twice: once as a cannibal, a second time voicing the
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famous line “Mistah Kurtz – he dead,” which is mispronounced and incorrectly syntaxed. For
Leavis, representing as he does the canonical literary critic/ ideal reader, the latter is a statement
about death without “adjectival qualification” or the use of a copula (a sign of predication with
the verb to be); for a black critic this is sheer parody of the black man’s failure to master
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language: “Language is too grand for these chaps; let’s give them dialect,” writes Achebe. As to
the argument that it is not Africa but the European mind which is being dismantled and Conrad is
in fact even less charitable to the Europeans, Achebe remains unconvinced: “Can nobody see the
preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up
of one petty European mind?” he writes. The damnation is straightforward and alarming:
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“Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.”
To Achebe, whose own training in literary criticism in colonial Nigeria was heavily influenced by
Leavis, the pertinent question is whether such a novel can be called a great work of art? Achebe’s
answer is an emphatic “No.” He suggests that Conrad has a problem with “niggers” as there is
too much in common between Marlow and Conrad’s biographies to deny this identification. For
Achebe Heart of Darkness is an offensive and deplorable book because (1) the humanity of black
people is questioned, and (2) the illusion is given that this is somehow the truth. Achebe’s reading
of Conrad anticipates Said’s argument: the West needs its dark Other. In Achebe’s words, “the
West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need
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for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.”
Postcolonial defense of Conrad’s work has come from all quarters. Following the lead of Jim
Clifford who saw Conrad’s novel as a model for ethnography because of its dialogic form,
postcolonial critics have mounted a similar defense. A couple of examples will be sufficient.
According to Wilson Harris, Conrad’s work showed that the homogeneous cultural order (upon
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which the novel form was based) contained a hideous bias, expressed by “horror.” It is this
homogeneity, the bias, that produced imperialism, and Conrad deconstructs the form to expose
the bias built into the form. Others, including Nico Israel and Edward Said, have turned to the
metaphor of the halo in Heart of Darkness: truth is not a kernel (as Achebe finds it) but a series of
complex centers depending on how we read the central images of the haze and the light in
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Conrad. Said himself would return to Conrad (and Flaubert) in Culture and Imperialism (1993)
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under the sub-heading “The Native Under Control.” Although later in the section Said would
acknowledge “Chinua Achebe’s well-known criticism of Conrad (that he was a racist who totally
dehumanized Africa’s native population)” he would add that in his later novels, notably Nostromo
and Victory, Conrad treats both the local Indians and the ruling-class Spaniards with the “same
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pitying contempt and exoticism he reserves for African Blacks.” Conrad, of course, has a
European readership to address, and Said notes this, but Said does not read Conrad directly as a
spokesperson for imperialism. The person who does so is the narrator Marlow, who “confirms
Kurtz’s action: restoring Africa to European hegemony by historicizing and narrating its
strangeness” and whose voice Achebe unproblematically identifies with Conrad. Said, however,
notes that in James Ngugi’s [Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s] The River Between, Conrad’s dark river at the
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heart of the continent, is full of life, has a name, and is redemptive.
Edward W Said
The reference to Conrad in Said, whose first major publication was on Conrad, takes one to the
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work that is considered foundational in the history of postcolonial theory. The work in question
is Orientalism (1978), for which he wrote an Afterword in 1994. One turns to the Afterword to map
out the connections between Said’s magisterial work and the advent of postcolonialism, as it is
here that postcolonial theory is addressed. Although Said’s own position remains a lot more
ambiguous and he does not, in any impartial reading, make a direct, derivational connection
between his book and postcolonial theory, the book, as he concedes in the Afterword, has become
“several different books” with each theory (postcolonial, multicultural, subaltern, to name three
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obvious ones) in different ways claiming direct lineage to it as the source text.
Orientalism, Said argued, was a system like many others from which liberation was necessary. As
Bart Moore-Gilbert glosses, “Western domination of the non-Western world is not some
arbitrary phenomenon but a conscious and purposive process governed by the will and intention
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of individuals as well as by institutional imperatives.” It was for this reason that Said
wanted readers to make use of [his] work so they might then produce new studies of their
own that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a generous,
enabling mode … The invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses; the
analyses of subaltern history; the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political
science, art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast new
developments in feminist and minority discourses – to all these … I am pleased and
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flattered that Orientalism often makes a difference.
The modern version of Orientalism—and postcolonial theory addresses this—manifests itself in

those binary discourses of difference that relegate minorities and people of color to fixed
identities, treating them as racial enclaves, breeds, ethnicities outside of the humanistic ethos of
the West. The erstwhile category of the Third World and the present category of the Global South,
even as the latter is read as an alternative economic bloc, perpetuate the orientalist discourse of
fixed identities and binary absolutisms.
In spite of Achebe’s devastating critique of Conrad, Said’s work—which was not a wholesale
denial of the achievements of Western civilization—led, in postcolonial studies, to a “re-reading
of the canonical cultural works, not to demote or somehow dish dirt on them, but to re-
investigate some of their assumptions, going beyond the stifling hold on them of some version of
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the master–slave binary dialectic.” He went on to suggest that postcolonial writers such as C. L.
R. James, Césaire, Rushdie, and Walcott show how their daring formal achievements “are in effect
a re-appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and transformed into a
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new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re-formulation.” Although Said himself
speaks about how his classic work was an inspiration rather than a direct influence, the impact of
his work has been so extensive that the anthropologist Stanley Kurtz in a testimony on Said to the
US House Subcommiitee on Select Education (June 19, 2003) could say, distorting Said’s complex
book,
The ruling academic paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Eastern
studies) is called “post-colonial theory.” Post-colonial theory was founded by Columbia
University professor of comparative literature, Edward Said. Said gained fame in 1978,
with the publication of his book, Orientalism. In that book, Said equated professors who
support American foreign policy with 19th century intellectuals who propped up racist
colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a
scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American
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power.
The Subaltern School
In his Afterword Said had singled out the work of the Subaltern School for special attention. He
wrote,
Perhaps the most brilliant revisionist work was done not in Middle East Studies, but in
the field of Indology with the advent of Subaltern Studies, a group of remarkable scholars
and researchers led by Ranajit Guha. Their aim was nothing less than a revolution in
historiography, their immediate goal being to rescue the writing of Indian history from
the domination of the nationalist elite and restore to it the important role of the urban
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poor and the rural masses.
Frantz Fanon had remarked on phony independence against which a proper revolutionary
movement was necessary. The inspirational leader of the Subaltern Studies Group, Ranajit Guha,
embraced a similar point of view. There was nothing particularly altruistic in the motives of the
Indian nationalist leaders as the subsequent historiography of the nationalist struggle, filtered as
it was through the visage of a privileged class, did not and could not (because it had no theoretical
apparatus with which to do so) explain, interpret or even acknowledge “the contribution made by
the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this
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nationalism.” This unhistorical historiography, a product of a particular class with its privileged
class outlook, had no way of handling the contribution of the subaltern classes, whose resistance
and modus operandi had little to do with the dominant and privileged indigenous society whose
resistance remained principally legalistic and constitutional against the more radical,
unorganized, violent, and immediate one of the subaltern. The indebtedness to Antonio Gramsci
is clear. In his “History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria” Gramsci had made the
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point that the State, representing in its “unity” the interests of the ruling class, is to be seen in
terms of its excluded opposite, the subaltern classes, who lack unity and cannot be unified within
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the structural definition of a state (which expresses the ideology of a unified class).
Excluded from a “vertically” defined politics, the Indian bourgeoisie never spoke for them; their
removal from history was complete. Yet their presence should have been self-evident; their silent
interactions with the elite obvious. Vivek Chibber, who has written most persuasively on the
subject, makes the following perceptive observation on the Guha passages already cited.
Thus, Guha concludes, whereas the European bourgeoisie had come to power by forging a
hegemonic coalition with workers and peasants, there would be no parallel experience in
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the colonial world. The bourgeoisie would exercise dominance, but not hegemony.
For postcolonial theory, the subaltern thesis had a larger universal appeal in that the same
process was underway elsewhere too: a process of complicity and, by extension, the continuing
power of Western, Great Man historiography, where the subaltern is no more than a cypher. And
it may well be that the failure to adequately incorporate and acknowledge the subaltern in the
narrative of struggle accounts for the failure of independence leaders to create a more inclusive
idea of state and civic society.
In subaltern theory, as in postcolonial theory, the “heroic” figure was the silent or silenced
marginalized figure of the peasant as revolutionary. This notion of a composite subject in need of
redemption (but whose presence was nevertheless real) changed with Gayatri Chakravorty
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Spivak’s epochal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Whether “sovereign” or a “cypher” the
subaltern—in Spivak’s deconstructive thinking—challenged the idea of the human itself because
the autonomous [subaltern] subject can only be envisaged as the subject excluded from the Law
of Reason. In Spivak’s later work—A Critique of Postcolonial Reason—the figure is conceptualized
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as the native woman informant foreclosed by/in history. Defined as “that mark of expulsion
from the name of Man – a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation” in Kant she
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has no “autonomy of the reflexive judgement which allows freedom for the rational will.” This
excluded native informant is the man in the raw [dem rohen Menschen] who comes into his own in
the figure of the woman. What Spivak does so astutely is locate the “foreclosed (woman) native
informant” in the master texts of Europe (Kant, Hegel, and Marx) and, by extension, in colonial
discourses. Hence, insofar as the native informant is foreclosed (used in the Lacanian sense of the
forthright rejection of an incompatible idea by the ego on the basis that the idea had never
occurred at all) he/she remains the undertheorized subject of postcolonial theory. The project of
postcolonialism will be “misinformed” and lacking in the “ethical relation” without this
subaltern subject. But there remains the overriding proviso: such an undertaking requires paying
close attention to those material conditions that produce (reproduce) the idea of a just society.
Postcolonial reason requires the moment of the subaltern woman to check the excess of
(muscular) reason, and gender it too. A valuable work of fiction here is Arundhati Roy’s The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) the central theme of which is the loss of humanity’s moral
fiber, its belief in the ethical relation. Roy goes to the absolute Other of Indian life—the eunuch,
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the Hijra, seen by many as a gender apart, neither transgender nor bisexual, as if nature had
created something unnatural, grotesque and then mechanically reproduced it—to rework
Spivak’s foreclosed native informant into postcolonial life worlds.
The Death of a Theory
“Like most US feminism,” wrote Terry Eagleton, “post-colonialism is a way of being politically
radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist, and so is a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism
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for a ‘post-political’ world.” Embedded in Eagleton’s understated dismissal of postcolonial
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theory is what Aijaz Ahmad has referred to as an absence of historical specificity in the theory.
Using Hamza Alavi’s 1972 New Left Review essay as his anchoring point, Ahmad critiques three
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fundamental simplifications in the theory. The first, a lazy habit of “posting” which has led to a
“sort of inflation” that has expanded the common use of the postcolonial (Alavi, like many
others, had limited the usage to “independent states that arose out of the near-complete
dissolution of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, during roughly the first fifteen
years after the Second World War”) to “the American Revolution, the decolonization of Latin
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America, the founding of Australia.” The “frequent inflation of the term,” says Ahmad, deprives
postcolonial theory of any real precision as it is applied to any nation that has undergone a
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colonial experience be it as imperialist power or colonized subject. The second is the failure to
ground a concept in an historical process that would allow the concept, through self-criticism
and realignment with new events, to generate new concepts. In other words, the concept itself
should be subject to constant critique and reevaluation, but always with reference to its prior
history. To make this clear, Ahmad adds, “Decolonization was such an event, and it required
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theoretical alignment in the very framework of the existing history of the state.” The third, via a
qualification of Alavi’s own definition, relates to the need to offer a theory of the state itself that
would address both the “normal” and the “exceptional” state, the latter characterized by a
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“military–bureaucratic oligarchy” not uncommon in many postcolonial nations. Drawing on
Marx, the postcolonial state must be defined through the coexistence within this state of multi-
class structures and prior non-capitalist modes of production and life worlds, precisely the points
made by Marx in his 1853 essay on “The British Rule in India.”
Failure to address the ongoing conflict between labor and capital in the contemporary “world-
system” has led to a dominant postcolonial theorization that stresses, in the words of Neil
Lazarus, heterogeneity and unevenness, “disavows nationalism as such and refuses an
antagonistic or struggle based model of politics in favor of one that emphasizes ‘cultural
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difference’ [and] ‘ambivalence’.” These moves eclipse the powerful narrative of anti-colonial
struggles that played such a key role in an earlier anti-imperialist understanding of
“postcolonialism.” As a consequence, a class-based materialist critique based on Fanon’s notion
of violent resistance is made irrelevant (because, if identities are always in flux, nations are
purely imaginary with no memory as such) from which it follows that the celebrated texts are
those that explore “in-betweeness,” “hybridity,” “migrancy,” “newness,” “a little of this, a
little of that,” and related ideas. The postcolonial literary canon celebrates works that run with
these ideas, the exemplary text being Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). For Lazarus,
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two modes of critical inquiry become urgent: first a turn to the specters of Marx and a critical
revaluation of class in postcolonial studies and, second, a turn to “minor” works and works in the
vernacular. The historical triumph of capitalism—that “achievement” which was able to
incorporate peasant, village, and even feudal economies of colonized peoples into a “capitalist
world-system”—haunts the postcolonial and requires constant critique through an openness
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towards the “centrality of capitalism to colonialism.” Gramsci had noted it years before as the
ground of an anti-colonial class struggle: “But today flames of revolt are being fanned
throughout the colonial world. This is the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their
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white exploiters and murderers.”
If alarm bells had begun to come from the Marxist quarter, they were not limited to only Marxist
critiques. They came from liberal humanism too. In 2007 PMLA published the output of a
colloquium on “The End of Postcolonial Theory” held at the University of Michigan in November
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2006. The general consensus of the colloquium may be readily summarized. Postcolonial
theory, ascendant between the end of the cold war (1989) and 9/11 (2001), when “Third world
intellectuals … arrived in First world academe,” failed to redress neoconservative power in
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America. In speaking about the “post” as an epistemic and a temporal marker, one of the PMLA
participants, Mamadou Diouf, argued that more attention should be paid to “(dis)connections
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among colonized societies, groups and Individuals.” Applied to Africa, postcoloniality, he had
noted earlier, needs to address “concrete historical processes to pay attention to the violence,
cultural and political domination, and economic exploitation of colonial and postcolonial
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rules.” In the absence of such a reading, postcoloniality, as the Ghananian writer Ama Ata Aidoo
observed, is a “most pernicious fiction” of value only to theorization that emerges from white
settler countries. Such theorization remains spectacularly unaware of the ethics of postcolonial
theory, the point made so powerfully by Spivak in her discussion of the “sign” of the excluded
native [woman] informant.
A Theory’s Afterdeath
The critical literature on postcolonial literary theory is vast and near-unmanageable. Indeed in
his contribution to the PMLA colloquium Simon Gikandi remarked, “What postcolonial theory is
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and what work it does depend on one’s disciplinary formation.” Where the theory is at now may
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be framed with a close reading of essays published in two 2012 issues of New Literary History.
The invited essays in volume 43, no. 1 were by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Robert J. C. Young, and one
assumes that the then editor of New Literary History, herself a very astute theorist, invited them to
write the “target” essays because she felt that they had something new and original to say on
postcolonial theory. The respondents to their essays were also carefully chosen. Between the
target essays and the careful responses we get a sense of where postcolonial theory is at, its
pitfalls and its future displayed with equal vigor. The essays may be used to bring this
retrospective on postcolonial theory to a close, with the proviso that when it comes to
postcolonial theory both beginnings and ends are inconclusive, depending as they are on the
theoretician’s own perspective and preferences.
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I begin with the first essay by Dipesh Chakrabarty in which he turns to the definition of the
historical subject as it enters the epoch of the Anthropocene, an epoch where humans have
become geological agents, the latter explored at some length in his seminal essay published three
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years earlier. The procedure takes him to postcolonial thinkers and he confesses, “What I have
learnt from postcolonial thinkers is the necessity to move through contradictory figures of the
human, now through a collapsing of the person of the subject as in liberal Marxist thought, and
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now through a separation of the two.” And here Homi Bhabha’s account of the new subaltern
classes—“the stateless,” “migrant workers, minorities, asylum seekers [and] refugees”—enters
Chakrabarty’s thinking. Quoting Balibar, Bhabha says they are neither “outsiders nor insiders.”
Bhabha’s point, as Chakrabarty reads it, is that these new subalterns challenge definitions of
subjectivity embedded in the narratives of cosmopolitanism and globalization as they are “the
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human-human and the nonhuman-human.” They offer a contradictory mode of being, an
incommensurable idea of subjecthood as they are denied full civic participation even when they
exist within borders. They are classic survivors without any degree of recognition, representing
as they do contradictory signifiers, neither normative (as the ideal subject in transition celebrated
in diaspora theory) nor “onto-existential” as the human grounded in a recognizable and
mutually understandable concept of the subject. Chakrabarty extends Bhabha’s incommensurable
subjects to argue that the human in the age of the Anthropocene is now viewed “simultaneously
on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as apolitical agent” belonging at once to
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geological time and historical time. This is something new and dramatic, a consciousness that
should permeate all social theories including postcolonial theory. Concludes Chakrabarty, “All
progressive political thought, including postcolonial criticism, will have to register this profound
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change in the human condition.” Our ethical responsibility was once to our fellow men because
the Other was to be loved as oneself; now the consciousness of this responsibility is even more
marked and urgent because collectively we are a force with no consciousness, just as geological
time has no consciousness. The latter was true of the Holocene; it will be true of the
Anthropocene as well.
In the second essay, Robert J. C. Young, author of the encyclopedic compendium Postcolonialism,
insists, contrary to the disillusionment that marked the PMLA contributors, that “the twenty-
first century is already the century of postcolonial empowerment,” because the latter’s political
project is “to reconstruct Western knowledge formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power
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structures upside down, refashion the world from below.” Young is able to make this bold
assertion, offer an idealist definition of postcolonialism that echoes the words of the satirical
poet Baal in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), because, for him, postcolonialism plays
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an active role in ensuring a fair and just society.
To make the point, Young picks up three urgent themes with which postcolonial theory should be
concerned: “indigenous struggles and their relation to settler colonialism, illegal migrants, and
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political Islam.” These are also cases where the politics of “invisibility” and “unreadability”
have obstructed reasoned analysis and critique. Because it does not have a unified theory,
postcolonialism must address matters foundational as well as antifoundational simultaneously.
Hence the rights of indigenous or First Nation people to return to their sacred or ancestral lands
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should not stump, override or exclude a “celebration of delocalized hybrid identities.” If
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indigenous people, refugees and the like are invisible, then Islam, which should be on every
postcolonial agenda, too is “unreadable.” The current “demonization” of Islam forgets that long
before multiculturalism was invented in Canada it was alive and well in the Caliphate of Cordoba
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(929–1031). The various historical Islamic polities—from Moorish al-Andalus to Mughal India
—are seen by Young as examples of tolerance as these ethically responsible polities
acknowledged the necessity of a multicultural social order.
And so where is postcolonial theory now? For Young, one of postcolonial theory’s foundational
binaries, the construction of an “Other,” is in need of deconstruction because there is no “Other”
as such only “individuals or groups who have been, or feel that they have been, othered by
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society.” In other words, the principal contemporary Others, as the essay itself has
demonstrated, are First Nation people, refugees, minorities within nation states, and Islam. But
even as we recognize these “new” Others Young suggests, after Levinas’s move to “auto-
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heteronomy” that “the psyche is the other in the same.” Here the same defines itself against
the Other but in the act unsettles the idea of the same itself and determines its limits. If the Other
therefore is within the self, its function is one of making the self “self-aware” in an ethical order
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where “every other (one) is every (bit) other (the wholly other) [tout autre est tout autre].”
The next issue of New Literary History (43, no. 2 (2012)) published responses by Simon During,
Benita Parry, Ato Quayson, and Robert Stam and Ella Shohat. Marx remains a powerful force in
postcolonial theory even if his presumed grand post-Hegelian Eurocentric bias jettisons minor
narratives. Like Ahmad, Lazarus and others, Benita Parry is very clear about the prevailing sense
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of anxiety among postcolonial scholars about how to validate “its continued significance.” She
views Chakrabarty’s and Young’s essays as texts motivated not by a presentation of new
knowledge (as Bell did with reference to Bhabha) but as voices eager to capture whatever may be
deemed to be under threat here and now. This threat has an insistent social imperative in Young,
where it is argued that the current objects of “threat” are principally indigenous people and
Islam, both consigned to the domain of “invisibility.” For Chakrabarty the threat is trans-human
since humans, as “agents,” are now instruments of geological change. These are very big ideas,
ideas that require specialist scholarship, something that no postcolonial theorist is particularly
adept at, which is why, it is suggested, postcolonial theorists tend to transform these difficult
ideas into an existential experience. And so whereas Marxist doctrine was driven by
“redistribution,” the postcolonial is driven by “recognition,” the latter (after Charles Taylor) a
central philosophical tenet of multiculturalism. For postcolonial theory the object of this
existential angst is the “marginalized.” Without the kinds of knowledge a specialist may bring to
the subject, the postcolonial, as in the case of Young, oversimplifies political Islam and applies to
it all the badges common to postcolonial theory, badges such as heterogeneity, secularism, open-
mindedness, multiculturalism, marginality, diaspora, and the like. In this idealism, marked by an
accommodationist (complicit, reconciliatory) rhetoric, there is no theory of either revolutionary
violence or class struggle. Instead a degree of humanist romanticism celebrates “premodern
consciousness” and even “cultural obscurantism” as Young limits the subject of the postcolonial
to varieties of diaspora, the indigenous and Islam even as he argues against positioning any of
107
them as the “Other” of Western modernity. Parry concludes with words that echo those of the
participants in the PMLA seminar:
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What I have attempted to suggest is that postcolonial studies is in sore need of a different
theoretical paradigm if it is to participate in the critique of globalization, and that this can
108
be found in the very legacies of thought absent from these presentations.
Young’s idealist or “romantic” reading of postcolonialism leads Ato Quayson to recall Ann Laura
Stoler’s reference to a malaise, an exhaustion, a sense of ennui that characterizes postcolonial
109
theory. Endorsing Stoler’s critique Quayson notes “the supreme confidence with which
postcolonialism seems to have felt itself capable of mapping out the temporalities and
110
cartographies of empire without a proper understanding of history.” It is the failure to ground
postcolonial theory in proper historical contexts that leads to idealist readings of tolerance such
as that noted by Young with reference to historical Islam. The latter’s golden age—Spain and the
Baghdad Caliphate—is presented as exemplary instances of Islamic tolerance. This may have
been true during discrete historical moments, but current Islam, from Boko Haram to ISIS, shows
a “violent othering of nonbelievers” which sits uncomfortably with Young’s call for the end of the
“other.” Notes Quayson:
It would appear, then, that Young’s argument on tolerance is sensitive to human-to-

human relations but not the embedding of humans within the religio-social structures
111
that fundamentally distort their sense of what it is to be human in the first place.
Two themes in Chakrabarty and Young—the ecological and the indigenous—are read by Robert
Stam and Ella Shohat as humanity’s greatest challenge and therefore postcolonial theory’s
112
urgent concerns. After pointing out common criticisms of postcolonial theory—notably its
elision of class, its ahistorical tendencies, its emphasis on old imperialist histories at the expense
of neo-imperialism, its stress on hybridity, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism plus the elite
standing of its theorists—Stam and Shohat offer their own “history” of postcolonialism. They
mark its beginning in the cataclysmic moment of the “various 1492s.” Like Young they speak of
al-Andalus as a “model of tolerant multiculturalism avant la lettre” destroyed by a “victorious
Spain of the Reconquista” that immediately instituted ethnic cleansing by demonizing both
113
Muslims and Jews alike. Stam and Shohat find Young’s reference to practices that have grown
out of resistance to imperialism and colonialism heartening as they too believe that any study of
114
coloniality/ postcoloniality “must go at least as far back as the Reconquista.” With the other
1492, of course, began Columbus and the conquest of the New World. What followed was the
history of the West as overwhelmingly imperialist and exploitative. This history now requires a
deconstructive reading through Young’s own foregrounding of indigeneity and a second look at
the history of indigenous communities and their exclusion from the grand narratives of nation
states. Their inclusion would also require a different understanding of life-worlds and especially,
as one saw in the movement of negritude, the inseparability of man and nature.
Another postcolonial paradigm—and the foundations of this paradigm, epistemologically, is no

different from Young’s or even negritude—may be used to make this clear. For this paradigm
Stam and Shohat make the case for a post 1492 “Red Atlantic” modelled on Paul Gilroy’s “Black
115
Atlantic.” The “subaltern” figure behind this version of the (Red) Atlantic is the Indian, whose
presence, like that of the African remarked on by Senghor, “constructs” Europeans because they
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116
are constituted “in relation to the Indian.” From Montaigne to Lévi Strauss “the philosopher
becomes Indian” because in an unremarked two-way traffic not only did the Indian go to Paris
but the Parisian went to study the Indian. In this flow of historical ideas and people, Indians
affected Jacobin and social revolutions; they influenced European ideas on gender, power, class,
equality, and communal property. They are not banished and behind the times but prescient and
prophetic, signifying yet another silenced subaltern whose historical role remains unaccented.
Conclusion: The Road Not Taken
As an urgent social theory, the message of postcolonial theory is clear. Fanon had noted the
phony independence that “post-1947” brought to the colonies and declared that, post-
independence, a revolution from within was necessary. In the long shadow of the specters of
Marx, generating new concepts, realigning inequalities, and engaging in a social transformation
of postcolonial countries from within, like a “glow that brings out a haze,” is critical to the
postcolonial project. To transcend an almost universal sense of ennui or exhaustion that
characterizes much postcolonial theory, attention to concrete historical processes acquires
urgency. Such an awareness alone can lead to productive readings of texts as varied as
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Nigerian study of patriarchy in Purple Hibiscus (2004), Patricia
Grace’s negotiation of “Maoriness” within intergenerational conflict in Dogside (2001), Andrew
McGahan’s study of settler guilt in The White Earth (2004) or diasporic consciousness in Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). The awareness would also produce intertextual readings of those
“postcolonial counter texts” that challenge a prior, ur- or proto- text. Here, the twinning of
Shakespeare and Césaire (via The Tempest and Une Tempête (1969)), of Shakespeare and
Virahsawmy (via The Tempest and Toufann (2001)), of Charlotte Brönte and Jean Rhys (via Jane
Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)) and of Dickens and Peter Carey (via Great Expectations and Jack
Maggs (1997)) would confirm the critical purchase that postcolonial theory brings. Only through
self-criticism and radical realignments with historical processes and new events can postcolonial
theory continue to generate new concepts, maintain its links with prior histories and act as an
instrument of change.
Discussion of the Literature
The critical bibliography on Anglophone postcolonial theory is vast. Much of it affirms Emily
Apter’s (1999) reading of postcolonialism as a mobile metaphor with “a locomotive, portmanteau
quality.” Unlike other theories—Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis or those like
structuralism that grew out of the linguistic turn of the early 20th century —postcolonial theory
cannot claim a specific mode of analysis or critical discourse. Instead it may be seen as an
explanatory model or a procedure which examines the relationship between culture and
imperialism from 1492 onwards. In this reading the “post-” of postcolonial theory is not a
temporal or teleological marker suggesting something after an event but a signifier of the
colonial encounter in both its “complicit” (that is the colonizer–colonized encounter within the
dialectic of imperial power) and its “oppositional” (that is an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist
struggle) moments. To do this, the “theory” needed ways of thinking that would subvert a
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powerful Hegelian historicism with its sovereign European subject. How can one then bypass an
“historical narcissism” and engage with the Other with respect and understanding? A different
kind of thinking was necessary and this “thinking” drawing on radical versions of European
historicism such as Marxism (with its emphasis on class), psychoanalysis (with its emphasis on a
non-transcendental subjectivity), creative ethnography (such as négritude), Manichean
dichotomy in the colonizer–colonized situation (as in the works of Fanon), and poststructuralism
(with its emphasis on the legitimation of minor narratives against a nation’s grand narrative) is
now linked to the works of three influential scholars. These three—Edward W. Said, Homi K.
Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—referred to by the first major synthesizer of their
works, Robert J. C. Young, as “the Holy Trinity” of postcolonial theory, provided approaches to a
reading of colonial histories that have become the stock-in-trade of current postcolonial theory
and discourse. Apart from Young whose early work (1990) emphasized the need for a new non-
Marxist historicism with which to address postcolonialism but who later adopted a more
accommodating position (1995, 2001), one of the most important surveys of the current state of
postcolonial theory has come from Moore-Gilbert (1996). Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa’s edited
volume (2013) indicates how postcolonial theory provincializes Europe by making the idea of
empire itself central to 18th-century European history. To a number of principally Marxist
readers, notably Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry, a criticism of postcolonial theory
has been its seeming ahistoricity. Others such as Gikandi (1996) have examined the culture of
Englishness, a thesis taken up later by Young too (2008) where he argues that “Englishness”
developed as an idea in the making of Empire itself. Some of the more important studies have
expanded key issues raised by Said, Bhabha and Spivak. Thus Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have
rethought “Eurocentrism” (1994) and examined culture wars in the “postcolonial
Atlantic” (2012) while in a study that has had a huge impact on history and lived experience
(capital’s life processes) Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has reexamined “Eurocentrism” by
provincializing Europe itself. Works by Trivedi (1995), Viswanathan (1998), Erickson (1998) and
Boehmer (2005) have examined colonial transactions from the point of view of the native
“combatants” themselves. A valuable summary of debates may be found in PMLA (2007) <https://
doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.633> and a useful survey of recent works on postcolonial theory in
the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50th anniversary edition (2015) <https://
journals.sagepub.com/toc/jcl/50/3>.
Further Reading
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.
Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Apter, Emily. Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Bahadur, Gaiutra. Coolie Woman. The Odyssey of Indenture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
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Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Bonn, M. J. The Crumbling of Empire: The Disintegration of World Economy. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938.
Brozgal, Lia N. Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2013.
Brydon, Diana ed. Postcolonial Critical Concepts. 5 Volumes. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Bundy, Andrew ed. Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. London: Routledge, 1999.
Carey, Daniel and Lynn Festa, eds. Postcolonial Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso, 2000.
Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Erickson, John. Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, preface Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Penguin
Books, 1990.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.
Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society. London and Port of Spain, Trinidad: New Beacon Publications, 1973.
Huggan, Graham ed. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Israel, Nico. Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
James C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Diego Revolution. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 50th Anniversary Issue <https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jcl/50/3>. Volume 50,

no. 3 (2015): 259–410.
Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2011.
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Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld, intr. Jean-Paul Sartre, new intr. Nadine
Gordimer. London: Earthscan Publications, 2003.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1997.
Morris, Rosalind C. ed. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010.
Mullaney, Julie. Postcolonial Literatures in Context. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Olson, Gary A. and Lyn Worsham, eds .Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial. Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1999.
Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge, 2004.
Ramone, Jenni. Postcolonial Theories. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times [Features] (July 3, 1982): 8.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York: New York
University Press, 2012.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.
1548-1360.2008.00007.x>.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 191–219.
Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998.
Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman eds. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Hassocks, UK:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Young, Robert J. C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
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Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Young, Robert J. C. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Notes
1. J. White and J. Riddle, A Latin-English Dictionary (London: Longmans, Green Co., 1876), 330. Cited in Vijay Mishra and
Bob Hodge, “What was Postcolonialism?” New Literary History 36 (2005): 375–402.
2. The momentous event is the subtext of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
3. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 6. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Composition:
Stuart Hall on Ethnicity and the Discursive Turn” [an interview with Julie Drew], in Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial,
ed. Gary A. Olson and Lyn Worsham (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 230. Emily Apter, Continental
Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. The new vantage
point is captured in the key citation for “postcolonialism” in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Setting these texts within
an intentional discourse on postcolonialism affords them a political and historical context” taken from an essay by
Sandra Ponzanesi (“The Past Holds No Terror? Colonial Memories and Afro-Italian Narratives” <https://doi.org/
10.1080/02690050008589675> published in Wasafiri 31 (2000): 16–19). The definition captures what can only be termed
the register of a proactive cultural logic aimed at the creation of “postcolonialism” as an intentional object that would
open up, as the rest of the Ponzanesi essay reads, “an Italian literary tradition that many consider stifling.”
Postcolonial theory is deeply connected to this idea of an intentional discourse, as Ponzanesi (and the OED which
endorses it) give a phenomenological twist to Homi Bhabha’s definition of “postcolonial discourse” as “a theoretical
and cultural intervention in our contemporary moment” (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994, 74).
4. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory? <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0010>”
New Literary History 43 (2012): 373. C L R James’s Toussaint functions as the exemplary figure, “a slave who was a
great soldier, a Caliban as Prospero had never known him,”(George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1992, 150), and a figure who had touched the imagination of the great poet Wordsworth
himself who in a sonnet (“To Toussaint L’Ouverture”) addressed to the revolutionary had written, “Thou hast left
behind/ Powers that will work for thee.” Jenni Ramone, Postcolonial Theories (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).
5. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 276.
6. “Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay dated the 2nd February 1835 <http://www.mssu.edu/projectsouthasia/
history/primarydocs/education/Macaulay001.htm>.”
7. Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” in Selected Works, Volume One (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 488–493.
8. Marx, “British Rule,” 488. Kevin B Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15.
9. Marx, “British Rule,” 488.
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13. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109.
14. Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 154.
15. Marx, 493.
16. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 237.
17. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 107.
18. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hassocks, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 27. Senghor,
“Negritude,” 28.
19. Senghor, “Negritude,” 30.
20. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1994).
21. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2010).
22. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso, 1997), 145–146.
23. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld, intr. Jean-Paul Sartre, new intr. Nadine
Gordimer (London: Earthscan Publications, 2003).
24. See Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-)colonialism? <https://doi.org/10.1080/09502369108582124>”
Textual Practice 5 (1991): 399–414.
25. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 24.
28. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, preface Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Penguin
Books, 1990). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
Homi Bhabha’s introduction (“Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition”) in the 1986 Pluto Press
edition reprinted in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader
(Hassocks, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 112–123.
29. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,, 8.
30. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), xxiv.
31. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 169.
32. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 38.
33. Bhabha in Williams and Chrisman, 113
35. Bhabha in Williams and Chrisman, 113.
37. For a critique of Bhabha’s use of “hybridity” see Robert J C Young, Colonial Desire (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995), 22–28.
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38. Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 134.
39. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
40. Bill Bell, “Signs Taken for Wonders: An Anecdote Taken from History <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0015>,” New
Literary History 43 (2012): 309. See also Alex Callinicos, “Wonders Taken for Signs: Homi Bhabha’s Postcolonialism,” in
Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism, ed. M. Zavarzadeh and D. Morton (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1995),
98.
41. The Missionary Register, 1818, 18–19. Cited in Bell, “Signs Taken for Wonders.”
42. Bell, “Signs Taken for Wonders <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0015>,”311; and Bhabha, The Location of Culture,
104.
43. W. L. Allison, The Sadhs (Calcutta: YMCA. Publishing House, 1935), 18–29.
44. Bell, “Signs Taken for Wonders <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0015>,” 324.
45. Wilson Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society (London and Port of Spain, Trinidad: New Beacon Publications,
1973), 48–64.
46. Homi Bhabha, “The Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Voices of the Crossing, ed. Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem
Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 133–142.
47. V. S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad (London: André Deutsch, 1980), 216.
48. Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey in fact provincialize Enlightenment when they write, “Postcolonial theory invites us to
reconsider the Enlightenment both as an eighteenth-century phenomenon and as a concept that bears on modern
political formations.” See Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey, “Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: ‘What is
Postcolonial Enlightenment?’” in Postcolonial Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 5.
49. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). In The Johns Hopkins
Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 756–767, Georg M
Gugelberger’s and Diana Brydon’s essay on postcolonialism is collected under the rubric, “Postcolonial Cultural
Studies.”
50. See Daniel Carey, “Reading Contrapuntally” in Carey and Festa, Postcolonial Enlightenment, 105–136.
51. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness,
ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 252.
52. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 194.
53. Leavis, The Great Tradition, 196.
54. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 69. To Leavis Kurt’s utterance acquires great
cultural value because of its use as the epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (Leavis, The Great Tradition,
193).
55. Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 262.
58. Wilson Harris in Joseph Conrad,Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 262–268.
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59. Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 190–
191, suggests that Achebe reads the novel through the eyes of Marlow.
60. Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 196–204.
61. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 200.
62. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 198. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 254.
63. Edward W Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
64. Said, Orientalism, 330.
65. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, 37.
69. Quoted in William V Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 2.
71. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the
Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000), 2.
72. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: ElecBook, 1999). Transcribed from the edition
published by Lawrence and Wishart, London 1971, ed. and trans. by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. See
also Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs, intr. Eric Hobsbawm (New York: New York
University Press, 2000).
73. Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 13.
74. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in ed. Williams and Chrisman, 66–111.
75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
76. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 6.
77. Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2003), 164.
78. Aijaz Ahmad, “Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Román de la Campa, E Ann Kaplan,
and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995): 11–32.
79. Ahmad, “Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?” 14.
81. Ahmad, “Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?” 30
84. Neil Lazarus, The Political Unconscious (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12.
85. Lazarus, The Political Unconscious, 38.
86. Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader,), 113.
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87. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando
Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel <https://doi.org/10.1632/
pmla.2007.122.3.633>,” PMLA 122 (2007): 633–651.
88. This idea was first advanced by Arik Dirlik in “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343914>,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 328–356.
89. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? <https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.633>” 646.
90. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? <https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.633>” 640
91. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? <https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.3.633>” 649.
92. New Literary History 43, no. 1 <https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/25633> and New Literary History 43, no. 2 <https://
muse.jhu.edu/issue/25943> (2012).
93. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.
2012.0007>,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–18. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate Of History: Four
Theses <https://doi.org/10.1086/596640>,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222.
94. Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0007>,” 5.
98. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Robert J. C.
Young, “Postcolonial Remains <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0009>,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 20.
99. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988), 97: “A poet’s work . . . [is] To name the unnameable, to
point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
100. Young, “Postcolonial Remains <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0009>,” 22.
105. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 68
106. Benita Parry, “What is Left in Postcolonial Studies? <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0019>” New Literary History
43 (2012): 341.
107. Parry, “What is Left? <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0019>” 353.
108. Parry, “What is Left? <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0019>” 355.
109. Ato Quayson, “The Sighs of History: Postcolonial Debris and the Question of (Literary) History <https://doi.org/
10.1353/nlh.2012.0021>,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 359–370.
110. Quayson, “The Sighs of History <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0021>,” 360.
111. Quayson, “The Sighs of History <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0021>,” 368.
Page 28 of 29
Postcolonial Theory
112. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory? <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.
2012.0010>” New Literary History 43 (2012): 371–390.
113. Stam and Shohat, “Whence and Whither? <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0010>” 373.
115. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
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Postcolonial Theory

Subjects: Literary Theory

Designing, Defining, Declaring an Idea

Origins of a Theory: Negritude and Liberation

Memmi and Fanon

And from the second:

Homi Bhabha and Cultural “Hybridity”

The Ghost of Conrad

The modern version of Orientalism—and postcolonial theory addresses this—manifests itself in

The Subaltern School

The Death of a Theory

It would appear, then, that Young’s argument on tolerance is sensitive to human-to-

Another postcolonial paradigm—and the foundations of this paradigm, epistemologically, is no

Conclusion: The Road Not Taken

Discussion of the Literature

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 50th Anniversary Issue <https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jcl/50/3>. Volume 50,

Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2011.

Mullaney, Julie. Postcolonial Literatures in Context. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge, 2004.

Ramone, Jenni. Postcolonial Theories. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

5. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 276.

9. Marx, “British Rule,” 488.

10. Marx, “British Rule,” 489.

11. Marx, “British Rule,” 489.

12. Marx, “British Rule,” 492.

15. Marx, 493.

17. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 107.

19. Senghor, “Negritude,” 30.

22. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso, 1997), 145–146.

25. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 24.

26. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 25.

27. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 41.

29. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,, 8.

31. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 169.

32. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 38.

33. Bhabha in Williams and Chrisman, 113

34. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 231.

35. Bhabha in Williams and Chrisman, 113.

36. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 161.

39. Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

44. Bell, “Signs Taken for Wonders <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0015>,” 324.

53. Leavis, The Great Tradition, 196.

55. Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 262.

56. Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 257.

57. Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 261.

61. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 200.

64. Said, Orientalism, 330.

65. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, 37.

66. Said, Orientalism, 339.

67. Said, Orientalism, 350.

68. Said, Orientalism, 350.

70. Said, Orientalism, 350.

76. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 6.

77. Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent (London: Verso, 2003), 164.

79. Ahmad, “Postcolonialism: What’s in a Name?” 14.