Postcolonialism A Very Short Introduction

We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point ot resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide tor relatively obscure areas of tolerance. (Foucault 1978: 101)

Among postcolonial critics, this account of the discursive representa- tion of Orientalism has subsequently been balanced by attention to the reality which that representation missed or excluded and has inspired a whole movement dedicated to retrieving the history of the silenced subaltern: both in terms of the objective history of subaltern or dominated, marginalized groups, 'counter-histories, and in terms of the subjective experience of the effects of colonialism and domination. This demonstrates that they are not in any way 'Other', only that this is how Orientalist discourse presents them according to its own binaristic logic. Foucault's concept of discourse, which revises his earlier account of alterity, does not operate according to this exclusive mechanism.

identity of Muslim women. Only if we see the veiling of women in Muslim culture or as a unique cultural experience, we can then actually learn about what it is to veil n unveil a woman, rather than simply resetting the liberal scene and repeatine commonsensical and clichéd standards in the name of universal emancipation' (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 119). Even here, it might be added, veilıng is presented as a unitary phenomenon. Veiling in fact involves a whole range of very different practices in e and repeating different cultures. Some of them may be oppressive; others not.

This brings out the dialectical relation of some feminisms to local and colonial forms of patriarchy. In the nineteenth century, the fight against patriarchy in the colonies became entwined with the struggle against forms of imperial oppression: the coincidence of the two was not arbitrary, given that the ideology of imperialism was itself highly patriarchal. At the same time, women continued to resist local forms of patriarchal oppression, making strategic use of the colonial agenda for reform, intended to substantiate its claim to be carry- ing out a civilizing mission. Women therefore became doubly positioned in a com- plex way. As women participated alongside men in nationalist struggles for the emancipation of their country, they also sought to win their liberation as a sex, by claiming rights, equality, access to public space and public activism, and to edu- cation.

A commonality of experience brings these together in concern about the violent injustice of the disparity in levels of material well-being of the different peoples of the world and the need ed for radical social change at a transnational level

Postcolonial critique incorporates political and theoretical practices whose re lities of reach ene extends back into the history of the colonial past as well as the day-to-day realitie the postcolonial present, practices which seek to contest the legacies of that past as well as to challenge the priorities and assumptions of its political heirs. Postcolonialism, therefore, operates through the dimensions of time or history, and space, both geographical and the other, third space of cultural reconceptualization, the reordering of the world through forms of knowledge reworked from their entanglement in long- standing coercive power relations (Bhabha 1994). It names the activities by which new subaltern histories, new identities, new geographies, new Conceptualızations of the world - transnational rather than western are fashioned and performed, and seeks through them to redress current imbalances of power and resources in the pursuit of more just and equitable societies. Postcolonialism is defined by this particu- lar combination of historical practice extended into a politics of translation designed to transform the conditions of the present.

While Culture as representation of experience, and cultural critique as challenge of its deter- minants, has always constituted a central preoccupation for anti- and postcolonial theory, its emphasis on cultural issues is also the direct result of some unfinished business ofanti-colonialism. The success of the anti-colonial movements did not fully reestablish the equal value of the cultures of the decolonized nations. To do that, it was necessary to take the struggle into the heartlands of the former colonial powers wnich retained a dominant economic, cultural and military role, in order to attack certain western ideologies and counter them with values and knowledges developed ere That is why it is so politically important for postcolonial critique to oper- Smultaneously inside and outside the west.

Drawing on these resources, its critique of contemporary power struc tures is Combined with an interventionist methodology developed for the analysis of the subjective and material conditions of the postcolonial era articulated with active transformative practices. Postcolonialism therefore designates the perspective of tricontinental theories which analyse the material and epistemological conditions of postcoloniality and seek to combat the continuing, often covert, operation of an imperialist system of economic, political and cultural domination. The global situation of social injustice demands postcolonial critique from the position of its victims, not its perpetrators. Tricontinental activist politics, committed to social transformation, can emerge on different sites in any region - the academic, the cultural, the ecological, the educational, the industrial, the local centre-periphery structure of the city and the rural hinterland, the market-place, the media, the medical in all its different manifestations, the mainstream political, the rainforest, and the socia sphere. Its strength derives from the networks of configurations and common political identities, broaching epistemological, social and institutional boundaries that are thus established and drawn together. Its popular attraction derives from the way in which postcolonialism gives equal weight to to outward historical circumstances and to in the ways in which those circumstances are experienced by postcolonial subjects.

, postcolonialısm id both contestatory and committed towards political ideals of a transnational social Justice. It attacks the status quo of hegemonic economic imperialism, and the history ot colonialism and imperialism, but also signals an activist engagement with positive political positions and new forms of political identity in the same way as Marxısm or teminism.

More radically, postcolonialism- which I would prefer to call tricontinentalism-narmes rheoretical and political position which embodies an active concept of intervention ithin such oppressive circumstances. It combines the epistemological cultural inno- vations of the postcolonial moment with a political critique of the conditions of postcoloniality. In that sense, the 'post of postcolonialism, or postcolonial critique. marks the historical moment of the theorized introduction of new tricontinental forms and strategies of critical analysis and practice.

The postcolonial is a dialectical concept that marks the broad historical facts of decolonization and the determined achievement of sovereignty - but also the realities of nations and peoples emerging into a new imperialistic context of economic and sometimes political domination. The experience of that new sovereignty typically encouraged the development of a postcolonial culture which radically revised the ethos and ideologies of the colonial state and, at the same time, reoriented the goals of the independents ence movement towards the very different conditions of national autonomy. The postcolonial also specifies a transformed historical situation, and the cultural forma- tions that have arisen in response to changed political circumstances, in the former colonial power. The term 'postcoloniality, by contrast, puts the emphasis on the economic, material and cultural conditions that determine the global system in which the postcolonial nation is required to operate one heavily weighted towards the interests of international capital and the G7 powers. Postcoloniality can still register, however, the resistant pressure and agency of the postcolonial world within such Conditions, demonstrating that there is no postcolonial condition' outside specific gether s, that now instances of complex interminglings of structural forces with local, personal experi- ence.

lt is this mixture of material, historical conditions and hybrid discourses, together with analysis of their cultural effects on peoples' identities and epistemologies, that captures the distinctive, constitutive feature of the postcolonial as a form of know- ledge.

. Nevertheless this shift towards local forms and differences also reflects the critique of Rostow et al.'s development theory as ethnocentric, always assuming the western model as the only possible para- digm (Hadjor 1993: 276-8; Leys 1996). The notion of the stages of development, in which non-western countries would pass through the same phases as had occurred in the history of Europe, was based on the same sort of assumptions as the earlier ethno- centric anthropological notion of different races and cultures being unequal in achieve- ment, but all progressing on the same line of mental development. Just as the different peoples of the world were regarded as a living museum of the history of humankind, so the different nations of the world were a living museum of its economic history. Their only way forward was to imitate the west (Tucker 1999).

. In 1980, in the Brandt report, the liberal capitalist constituency accepted the new form of Marxist argument by high- lighting the unequal division of the world into what it characterized as the North and the South (Brandt et al. 1980). This has since become a discreet way of referring to the haves and the have-nots, the dominant and the dominated peoples of the world.

The post-war capitalist economic world system assumed a theory of economic growth as a series of linear stages of development, given an impetus by large-scale industral or intrastructure projects undertaken by a centralized state, en- abling a country to 'take off from a traditional agricultural economy to a 'modern' industrial one (Weiner 1966; Rostow 1960).

1Stan, Iraq, Libya, Serbia or Sudan, as and when it chooses. What it does not do is to Tegister and conceptualize the changing modes of resistance and cultural assertion that have developed in response to the political developments since the early years of 1ndependence. As a concept, neocolonialism is as disempowering as the conditions it portrays. Removal of the possibilities of agency is equally a problem of more recent theories of power operating through economic exploitation.

The result of neocolonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neocolonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. (Nkrumah 1965: x)

Nkrumah argued thathe essence of neocolonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic System and thus political policy is directed from outside' (Nkrumah 1965: 1x). Independence, therefore, is a sham. Historically, Nkrumah suggested that neocolonialism, like colonialism before it, represents the export of the social conflict of capitaist countries; in particular, the demands of western welfare states, with their compar atively high working-class living standards, meant that class conflict within the nation-state had been transformed into an international division of labour. The international division of labour would become a defining characteristic of the postcolonial era.

In the neocolonial situation, the ruling class const tutes an elite that operates in complicity with the needs of international capital for its own benefit.

Certainly the word 'neocolonialism' was a fitting term to describe the immediate set- up of the postcolonial epoch. Although the formerly colonized territories gradually had their political sovereignty returned to them, they nevertheless remained subject to the effective control of the major world powers, which constituted the same group as the former imperial powers. Neocolonialism denotes a continuing economic hegemony that means that the postcolonial state remains in a situation of dependence on its former masters, and that the former masters continue to act in a colonialist man- ner towards formerly colonized states.

Paradoxically, in the move between colonial rule and independence an essential factor was lost: agency. Anti-colonial struggles involved the assumption of a new level of agency by colonized people against the conditions in which they lived. Inde- pendence was the object of that struggle, and the assumption was that it would fully realize the ideal of self-determination. The reality was not always so simple. Kwame Nkrumah, for example, the man who had been able to transform the politics of Ghana and pressurize the British into leaving without a single shot being fired, found that with independence, in many ways his power was only nominal: he had political power, but he did not gain control of the economy.

it also accurately char acterizes the primarily economic motive of US imperialısm, which subsequently pre- ferred forms of indirect rule and influence to direct colonial control. When the colonil powers themselves began to switch to this American form, giving their colonies inde pendence but maintaining economic influence or control, colonialism was renamed neocolonialism. However, the former colonial powers only possessed a relative au- tonomy, for what was distinctive about US imperialism was that it was hegemonic (Abdel-Malek 1981, II: 124).

The high point of general jingoistic imperialism, from 1898 to the First World War, was the ne hutt contiguous territory through a militarized form of settler expansion, to one of diree acquisition and control of colonies overseas on the European model.

Imperialism was a dynamic, never a static system, and reflected in its international basis the expansive process of production and consumption that mature capitalism had introduced into the world economic structure.