Dynamics of colonial encounters

SOME critics, though pioneers of what once was called "Commonwealth" literature, staunchly remain bogged in the Leavisite tradition, disabling themselves from even casting a sympathetic gaze at what is presently known as Postcolonial Culture Studies.

I have all respect for them, but I do realise that they belong to a school of critics who constantly question the status and value of postcolonial/postmodern modes of cultural analysis. They challenge postcolonial theory on several fronts: on its interdisciplinary competence, on the politics of its location, and its implicit will to power over all other kinds of histories of analyses. Derrida and Foucault stand outside their consideration. This has resulted in heated debates, often personalised to the extent that many issues at stake stand ignored.

It must be realised that the field of colonial studies is very vast, covering a large part of the world we live in and any attempt to codify its principles amounts to overriding the complexity of a field so heterogeneous and almost as old as the day Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. As Ania Loomba points out in her recent book, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism,"each scholar of colonialism, depending on her disciplinary affiliation, geographic and institutional location and identity, is likely to come up with a different set of examples, emphasis, and perspective on the question".

Her book is certainly a clear-headed account of this very crucial and complex area, focusing on some key terms and debates that have preoccupied scholars both in the West and the East. I would not like to disparage the book in any way, but to use her own words in an essay written elsewhere, we could call it a "kunji (mug-books, or literally, 'keys')". But it certainly stands head and shoulders above the traditional Bar notes or York notes and is a comprehensive study of a field that has in the last few years become a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project which covers areas such as cultural studies, women's studies, gender studies and ethnic studies.

The area of postcolonial studies as Georg M. Gugelberger writes, is "one of the latest 'tempests' in a postist world replacing Prospero's Books (the title of Peter Greenway's 1991 film) with a Calibanic viewpoint".

It is quite clear that the very act of validating modernism was directly linked with the recognition of primitive cultures. I do not think that postmodernism is "specifically Western malice which breathes angst and despair instead of aiding political action and resistance", as pointed out by Loomba. The tremors of this interest in modernism as well as postmodernism can be traced back to the early 1950s when writers like Beckett became interested in writing plays such as Waiting For Godot and Sartre wrote a scathing critique of French imperialism in Algeria, or when the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya a posed a threat to western hegemony. More than this, it was a time when Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks and the works of Cesaire and Albert Memmi became seminal to the uprisings of nationalist movements, thereby giving impetus to the whole question of rewriting history. As Gugelberger again emphasises, it was the year 1958 when "the Western narrative paradigm in which an author anthropologist fabricates the other was seriously questioned in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, which clearly illustrates the sensationalism and inaccuracy of Western anthropology and history".

Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth, with its preface written by no other that Sartre, or the reworking of The Tempest by Geroge Lamming further added to the ongoing rush of a deep-seated impulse to write oneself back into history. Postcolonial writing, therefore, came to be constituted in counter-discursive practices. The marginalised began to have a voice, minority discourses contended with the over privileging of Western history and literature, leading to rethinking about fossilised curricula in English departments and multiculturalism.

As Patrick Brantlinger says, postcolonial studies intended to "discipline the disciplines" and thereby moved the margin to the centre. The master narrative of Western discourse stood challenged finally in Edward Said's two major works, Orientalism And Culture And Imperialism. In fact, it was with the appearance of Orientalism that postcolonial studies got institutionalised and even departments previously opposed to any radical changes, like the English Faculty of Cambridge, decided to start a programme in postcolonial literatures. Robert Young has shown immense interest in this area and is mainly instrumental in promoting research at Oxford. This has also led to the initiation of a journal on postcolonial studies called Interventions, of which the first issue would be appearing soon.

Ania Loomba has examined the significant features of the ideas that relate to discourse analysis in the light of sexual, racial, and class differences within the broad area of colonial ideologies and postcolonial theories. I wonder if apart from clarifying certain concepts, such books on the subject of postcolonial cultural studies really achieve much by way of a radical change in the politics of location and identity.

Undoubtedly, the interest in this field has given rise to many debates and conferences, but finally one can say that it is only a replacement of "one problematic with another". Will the deconstruction of West monolithic forms and epistemologies or the rejection of the Hegelian-inspired totalising worldview really lead us anywhere except for generating some heated and vigorous academic debates? Though one can perceive that such a study calls for a change, neo-colonialism still prospers and an obsession with Western critical paradigms has not in any way helped to counter the onslaught of Western capitalism and MTV culture.

We could, therefore, ask if postcolonialism is a true counter discourse or just another fashionable academic game that involves the migrant academic moving from West to East to West for reasons which seem to be more personal than political or sincerely academic. Undoubtedly they have tried to wage a war on totality and recognised the postmodern notion of difference, but they have not succeeded in evolving an expression or an idiom that emerges from their specific cultural and political circumstances. I am not sure if they have succeeded really in moving from the Fanonian first stage of slavish aping of the western forms to the second or the third stage of nativism or the intense revolutionary stance of voicing their views from a wholly indigenous cultural location. How then can we really call their discipline "postcolonial" when it refers neither to the "historical break" signifying the end of colonial rule, nor to an "ideological orientation" which carries the implication of some form of continuing resistance as well as oppression, though not a complete break from the weight of neo-colonial tendencies?

I am quite sceptical of a totally uncontaminated postcolonial theory which positions itself within the universalist or Eurocentric domain and thereby, incapacitates itself to speak from the outside. The long history of colonialism cannot be wished away as it has left its indelible mark on the postcolonial consciousness. Rephrasing the inherent problems of Third-Worldism in the language of poststructuralism may not be the only answer. Global hegemony of western paradigms still persist and, it would be right to agree with Ella Shohat that "Third World" is a better nomenclature than "postcolonial" as it has the connotations of collectively resisting all influences of neo-colonialism.

Loomba has illustrated the dynamics of colonial encounter, the notions of discourse analysis, and hybridity quite authoritatively and her book should be a required reading for all undergraduate literary students. Graduate students and researchers will undoubtedly find it comprehensive and useful in coming to grips with theoretical aspects of Gramician, Foucaultian and Althuserian ideas, but I do not think there would be anything new here which could be offered to them.

Perhaps that is not the intention of the book, though it is a fairly exhaustive treatment of the subject with a framework that is geographically rather extensive.

SHELLEY WALIA

Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba, Routledge, London, 1998, p.289, œ8.99. ISBN 0-415-12809-9

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Essays on natural history
Next     : Bihar is in flames