Postcolonial Theory [A Critical Introduction] - Leela Gandhi

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. 

As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. 

Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

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After Colonialism

In 1985 Gayatri Spivak threw a challenge to the race and class blindness of the Western academy, asking ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1985). By ‘subaltern’ Spivak meant the oppressed subject, the members of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘subaltern classes’ (see Gramsci 1978), or more generally those ‘of inferior rank’, and her question followed on the work begun in the early 1980s by a collective of intellectuals now known as the Subaltern Studies group. The stated objective of this group was ‘to promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). Further, they described their project as an attempt to study ‘the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender, and office or in any other way’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). Fully alert to the complex ramifications arising from the composition of subordination, the Subaltern Studies group sketched out its wide-ranging concern both with the visible ‘history, politics, economics, and sociology of subalternate and with the occluded ‘attitudes, ideologies and belief systems—in short, the culture informing that condition’ (Guha 1982, p. vii). In other words, ‘subaltern studies’ defined itself as an attempt to allow the ‘people’ finally to speak within the jealous pages of elitist historiography and, in so doing, to speak for, or to sound the muted voices of, the truly oppressed. 

Spivak’s famous interrogation of the risks and rewards which haunt any academic pursuit of subalternity drew attention to the complicated relationship between the knowing investigator and the (un)knowing subject of subaltern histories. For how, as she queried, ‘can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 285). Through these questions Spivak places us squarely within the familiar and troublesome field of ‘representation’ and ‘representability’. How can the historian/investigator avoid the inevitable risk of presenting herself as an authoritative representative of subaltern consciousness? Should the intellectual ‘abstain from representation?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 285) Which intellectual is equipped to represent which subaltern class? Is there an ‘unrepresentable subaltern class that can know and speak itself?’ (Spivak 1988 [1985] p. 285) And finally, who—if any—are the ‘true’ or ‘representative’ subalterns of history, especially within the frame of reference provided by the imperialist project? 

The complex notion of subalternity is pertinent to any academic enterprise which concerns itself with historically determined relationships of dominance and subordination. Yet it is postcolonial studies which has responded with the greatest enthusiasm to Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. Utterly unanswerable, half-serious and half-parodic, this question circulates around the self-conscious scene of postcolonial texts, theory, conferences and conversations. While some postcolonial critics use it to circumscribe their field of enquiry, others use it to license their investigations. And, above all, the ambivalent terrain of subaltern-speak has given rise to a host of competing and quarrelsome anti- and postcolonial sub alternities. There is little agreement within postcolonial studies about the worst victims of colonial oppression, or about the 

most significant anti-colonial insurgencies. Metropolitan South Asian, African and West Indian poststructuralists battle Marx ists at home; mainstream intellectuals within ‘settler’ colonies struggle against the claims of indigenous intellectuals and representatives; and feminist critics contest the masculinist evasions of nationalist historiography. Thus, while Spivak concluded her provocative essay by categorically insisting that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1988 [1985], p. 308), postcolonial studies has come to represent a confusing and often unpleasant babel of subaltern voices. How then, can we begin to make sense of—or, indeed, take sense from—this field? 

Over the last decade, postcolonial studies has emerged both as a meeting point and battleground for a variety of disciplines and theories. While it has enabled a complex interdisciplinary dialogue within the humanities, its uneasy incorporation of mutually antagonistic theories—such as Marxism and poststructuralism—confounds any uniformity of approach. As a consequence, there is little consensus regarding the proper content, scope and relevance of postcolonial studies. Disagreements arising from usage and methodology are reflected in the semantic quibbling which haunts attempts to name postcolonial terminology. Whereas some critics invoke the hyphenated form ‘post-colonialism’ as a decisive temporal marker of the decolonising process, others fiercely query the implied chronological separation between colonialism and its aftermath—on the grounds that the postcolonial condition is inaugurated with the onset rather than the end of colonial occupation. Accordingly, it is argued that the unbroken term ‘postcolonialism’ is more sensitive to the long history of colonial consequences. 

On a different though related note, some theorists have announced a preference for the existential resonance of ‘the postcolonial’ or of ‘postcoloniality’ over the suggestion of academic dogma which attaches to the notion of postcolonialism. In the main, the controversy surrounding postcolonial vocabulary underscores an urgent need to distinguish and clarify the relationship between the material and analytic cognates of postcolonial studies. In its more self-reflexive 

moments, postcolonial studies responds to this need by postulating itself as a theoretical attempt to engage with a particular historical condition. The theory may be named ‘postcolonialism’, and the condition it addresses is best conveyed through the notion of ‘postcoloniality’. And, whatever the controversy surrounding the theory, its value must be judged in terms of its adequacy to conceptualize the complex condition which attends the aftermath of colonial occupation. 

In this chapter I will examine some dimensions of, and possibilities for, the relationship between postcoloniality and postcolonialism in terms of the decolonising process. The emergence of anti-colonial and ‘independent’ nation-States after colonialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to forget the colonial past. This ‘will-to-forget’ takes a number of historical forms, and is impaled by a variety of cultural and political motivations. Principally, postcolonial amnesia is symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start—to erase painful memories of colonial subordination. As it happens, histories, much as families, cannot be freely chosen by a simple act of will, and newly emergent postcolonial nation-States are often deluded and unsuccessful in their attempts to disown the burdens of their colonial inheritance. The mere repression of colonial memories is never, in itself, tantamount to a surpassing of or emancipation from the uncomfortable realities of the colonial encounter. 

In response, postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past. The process of returning to the colonial scene discloses a relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire between colonizer and colonized. And it is in the unfolding of this troubled and troubling relationship that we might start to discern the ambivalent prehistory of the postcolonial condition. If postcoloniality is to be reminded of its origins in colonial oppression, it must also be theoretically urged to recollect the compelling seductions of colonial power. The forgotten archive 

The colonial encounter narrates multiple stories of contestation and its discomfiting other complicity. 

In addition, the colonial archive preserves those versions of knowledge and agency produced in response to the particular pressures of the colonial encounter. The colonial past is not simply a reservoir of ‘raw’ political experiences and practices to be theorized from the detached and enlightened perspective of the present. It is also the scene of intense discursive and conceptual activity, characterized by a profusion of thought and writing about the cultural and political identities of colonized subjects. Thus, in its therapeutic retrieval of the colonial past, postcolonialism needs to define itself as an area of study which is willing not only to make, but also to gain, theoretical sense out of that past. 

The Colonial Aftermath 

The colonial aftermath is marked by the range of ambivalent cultural moods and formations which accompany periods of transition and translation. It is, in the first place, a celebrated moment of arrival—charged with the rhetoric of independence and the creative euphoria of self-invention. This is the spirit with which Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, initially describes the almost mythical sense of incarnation which attaches to the coincidence of his birth and that of the new Indian nation on the momentous stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947: ‘For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9). Predictably, and as Rushdie’s Indian Everyman, Saleem Sinai, ultimately recognised, the colonial aftermath is also fraught by the anxieties and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the historical burden of expectation. In Sinai’s words, ‘I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 9). To a large extent, Saleem Sinai’s 

obsessive ‘creativity’ and semantic profusion is fuelled by his apprehension that the inheritors of the colonial aftermath must in some sense instantiate a totally new world. Saleem Sinai’s tumble into independent India is, after all, framed by the crippling optimism of Nehru’s legendary narration of postcoloniality: ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 116). 

To quote Jameson’s observations on postmodernism out of context, we might say that the celebratory cyborg of postcoloniality is also plagued by ‘something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps impossible, dimensions’ (Jameson 1991, p. 39). In pursuing this imperative, however, postcoloniality is painfully compelled to negotiate the contradictions arising from its indisputable historical belated ness, its post-coloniality, or political and chronological derivation from colonialism, on the one hand, and its cultural obligation to be meaningfully inaugural and inventive on the other. Thus, its actual moment of arrival—into independence— is predicated upon its ability to successfully imagine and execute a decisive departure from the colonial past. 

Albert Memmi, the Tunisian anti-colonial revolutionary and intellectual, has argued that the colonial aftermath is funda mentally deluded in its hope that the architecture of a new world will magically emerge from the physical ruins of colonialism. Memmi maintains that the triumphant subjects of this aftermath inevitably underestimate the psychologically tenacious hold of the colonial past on the postcolonial present. In his words: ‘And the day oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to emerge before our eyes immediately. Now, I do not like to say so, but I must, since decolonisation has demonstrated it: this is not the way it happens. The colonized lives for a long time before we see that really new man’ (Memmi 1968, p. 88). 

Memmi’s political pessimism delivers an account of postcoloniality as a historical condition marked by the visible apparatus of freedom and the concealed persistence of unfreedom. He suggests that the pathology of this postcolonial limbo between arrival and departure, independence and dependence, has its source in the residual traces and memories of subordination. The perverse longevity of the colonized is nourished, in part, by persisting colonial hierarchies of knowledge and value which reinforce what Edward Said calls the ‘dreadful secondariness’ (Said 1989, p. 207) of some peoples and cultures. So also the cosmetic veneer of national independence barely disguises the foundational economic, cultural and political damage inflicted by colonial occupation. Colonization, as Said argues, is a ‘fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results’ (1989, p. 207). 

In their response to the ambiguities of national independence, writers like Memmi and Said insist that the colonial aftermath does not yield the end of colonialism. Despite its discouraging tone, this verdict is really framed by the quite benign desire to mitigate the disappointments and failures which accrue from the postcolonial myth of radical separation from Europe. The prefix ‘post’, as Lyotard has written, elaborates the conviction ‘that it is both possible and necessary to break with tradition and institute absolutely new ways of living and thinking’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90). Almost invariably, this sort of triumphant utopianism shapes its vision of the future out of the silences and ellipses of historical amnesia. It is informed by a mistaken belief in the immateriality and dispensability of the past. In Lyotard’s judgment, ‘this rupture is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is to say, repeating it and not surpassing it’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 90). Thus, we might conclude that the postcolonial dream of discontinuity is ultimately vulnerable to the infectious residue of its own unconsidered and unresolved past. Its convalescence is unnecessarily prolonged on account of its refusal to remember and recognise its continuity with the pernicious malaise of colonization. 

If postcoloniality can be described as a condition troubled by the consequences of a self-willed historical amnesia, then the theoretical value of postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its ability to elaborate the forgotten memories of this condition. In other words, the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past. The work of this theory may be compared with what Lyotard describes as the psychoanalytic procedure of anamnesis, or analysis—which urges patients ‘to elaborate their current problems by freely associating apparently inconsequential details with past situations—allowing them to uncover hidden meanings in their lives and their behavior’ (Lyotard 1992, p. 93). In adopting this procedure, postcolonial theory inevitably commits itself to a complex project of historical and psychological ‘recovery’. If its scholarly task inheres in the carefully researched retrieval of historical detail, it has an equally compelling political obligation to assist the subjects of postcoloniality to live with the gaps and fissures of their condition and thereby learn to proceed with self-understanding. 

Salman Rushdie sheds light on this necessity in a wonderful moment of betrayal and reconciliation in Midnight’s Children, when the anti-hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, reveal the cultural miscegenation and comic misrecognition of his celebrated birth. Early in the novel, and at the same time as Amina Sinai struggles to produce her child in Dr Narlinkar’s Nursing Home, a poor woman called Vanita suffers neglected labour in the ‘charity ward’. The child she is about to bear is the unexpected consequence of an affair with an Englishman, William Methwold, who boasts direct descent from a particularly imperialistic East India Company officer. When these children are finally delivered, a somewhat crazed midwife called Mary Pereira switches Amina’s and Vanita’s babies around. Thus, Saleem Sinai, hailed by Nehru himself as the child of independent India, is really the son of a reluctantly departing colonizer. But this accident, as the adult Saleem insists, is the allegorical condition of all those who inherit the colonial aftermath: ‘In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118). In his digressive self-narration, Saleem Sinai simultaneously refuses the guilt of authenticity and the desire to withhold the knowledge of his flawed genealogy. The Sinais, we are told, eventually reconcile themselves to the fact of Methwold’s bloodline, namely, to the hybrid inadequacies of their own postcoloniality. As Saleem explains: ‘when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts . . .’ (Rushdie 1982, p. 118). We might modify this narrative wisdom slightly to say that, perhaps, the only way out is by thinking, rigorously, about our pasts. 

Postcolonial Remembering 

In his comments on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, announces that memory is the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural identity. Remembering, he writes, ‘is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63). Bhabha’s account of the therapeutic agency of remembering is built upon the maxim that memory is the submerged and constitutive bedrock of conscious existence. While some memories are accessible to consciousness, others, which are blocked and banned—some times with good reason—perambulate the unconscious in dangerous ways, causing seemingly inexplicable symptoms in everyday life. Such symptoms, as we have seen, can best be relieved when the analyst—or, in Bhabha’s case the theorist— releases offending memories from their captivity. The procedure of analysis–theory, recommended here, is guided by Lacan’s ironic reversal of the Cartesian cogito, whereby the rationalistic truth of ‘I think therefore I am’ is rephrased in the proposition: ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’ (Lacan 1977, p. 166). In the process of forging the reparative continuity between cultural identity and the historical past, the theorist/analyst is also required to recognise the qualitative difference between two types of amnesia. The mind, as both Freud and Lacan maintain, engages in either the better known neurotic ‘depression’—Verdrängung—of memory; or, and more devastatingly in its psychotic ‘repudiation’—Verwerfung (see Bowie 1991, pp. 107–9). If the activity of Verdrängung censors and thereby disguises a vast reservoir of painful memories, the deceptions of Verwerfung tend to transform the troublesome past into a hostile delirium. The memories and images expelled through the violence of repudiation enter into what Lacan describes as a reciprocal and ‘symbolic opposition to the subject’ (Lacan 1977, p. 217). These phantasmic memories thus become simultaneously alien, antagonistic and unfathomable to the suffering self. 

To a large extent, the colonial aftermath combines the obfuscations of both Verdrängung and Verwerfung. Its unwillingness to remember what Bhabha describes as the painful and humiliating ‘memory of the history of race and racism’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 63) is matched by its terrified repudiation and utopian expulsion of this past. In response, the theoretical re-membering of the colonial condition is called upon to fulfill two corresponding functions. The first, which Bhabha foregrounds as the simpler disinterment of unpalatable memories, seeks to uncover the overwhelming and lasting violence of colonization. The second is ultimately reconciliatory in its attempt to make the hostile and antagonistic past more familiar and therefore more approachable. The fulfillment of this latter project requires that the images expelled by the violence of the postcolonial Verwerfung be reclaimed and owned again. This is, of course, another way of saying that postcoloniality has to be made to concede its part or complicity in the terrors—and errors—of its own past. In Sara Suleri’s words: ‘To tell the history of another is to be pressed against the limits of one’s own—thus culture learns that terror has a local habitation and a name’ (Suleri 1992, p. 2). Thus, we might conclude that the forgotten content of postcoloniality effectively reveals the story of an ambivalent and symbiotic relationship between colonizer and colonized. Accordingly, the reparative proddings of postcolonial theory/analysis are most successful when they are able to illuminate the contiguities and intimacies which underscore the stark violence and counter-violence of the colonial condition. Albert Memmi has argued that the lingering residue of colonization will only decompose if, and when, we are willing to acknowledge the reciprocal behavior of the two colonial partners. The colonial condition, he writes, ‘chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependence, molded their respective characters and dictated their conduct’ (Memmi 1968, p. 45). Memmi’s prediction of this perverse mutuality between oppressor and oppressed is really an attempt to understand the puzzling circulation of desire around the traumatic scene of oppression. The desire of the colonizer for the colony is transparent enough, but how much more difficult it is to account for the inverse longing of the colonized. How, as Memmi queries, ‘could the colonized deny himself so cruelly . . . How could he hate the colonizers and yet admire them so passionately?’ (1968, p. 45) 

This situation of hate and desire described by Memmi poses a problem for ‘oppositional’ postcolonial theory, which scav enges the colonial past for what Benita Parry describes as an ‘implacable enmity between native and invader’ (Parry 1987, p. 32). The aim of this combative project is to promote, in Parry’s words, ‘the construction of a politically conscious, unified revolutionary Self, standing in unmitigated opposition to the oppressor’ (p. 30). In fact, the colonial archive mitigates these simple dichotomies through its disclosure of the complicating logic and reciprocity of desire. It shows that the colonized predicament is, at least partly, shaped and troubled by the compulsion to return a voyeuristic gaze upon Europe. How should we as theorists respond to this gaze? How does it fit into the theoretical economy of combat and enmity? We might gesture toward some answers by saying that the battle lines between native and invader are also replicated within native and invader. And—as Memmi might say—the crisis produced by this self-division is at least as psychologically significant as those which attend the more visible contests of colonization and colonization. 

There is a savage account of such postcolonial schizophrenia in Vikram Seth’s epic novel, A Suitable Boy (1993). The impossibly home-grown, or desi, shoemaker hero, Haresh, is attempting to impress his suitability upon the heroine’s obnoxious Anglophile brother, Arun Mehra, who has just been holding forth about the singular joys of Hamely’s toy shop. Mehra claims to know the exact location of Hamley’s, ‘on Regent Street, not far from Jaeger’s’. And yet, when Haresh— of the brown-and-white co-respondent shoes—politely inquires when the Mehras were last in the imperial capital, we discover that they have never been to London. There is an awful pause, long enough for our readerly sympathies to attach themselves firmly on the side of the shoemaker, before Arun splutters, ‘but of course we’re going in a few months' time’. Seth’s harsh satire on the Arun Mehras exploits the stigma of authenticity which haunts the ‘Orient’s’ longing for its conquering others. And yet, there is a pathos even in the Mehras’ excessive Anglophilia. Homi Bhabha might say that they are ideologically interpellated by the restrictive confinement of knowledge and value to the sovereign map of Europe. The Europe they know and value so intimately is always elsewhere. Its reality is infinitely deferred, always withheld from them. Worse still, their questing pursuit of European plenitude, their desire to own the colonizer’s world, requires a simultaneous disowning of the world which has been colonized. Arun Mehra can only sustain his apprentice brown-sahib ship by speaking in the language of his conquerors. A hard day in the office produces the following ruminations: ‘The British knew how to run things . . . They worked hard and they played hard. They believed in command, and so did he . . . What was wrong with this country was a lack of initiative. All the Indians wanted was a safe job. Bloody pen pushers, the whole lot of them’ (Seth 1993, p. 422). And so Arun Mehra loses the respect of his author and his readers. A more sympathetic gloss on the Mehras might suggest that their postcolonial investment in Europe is also accompanied by a progressive, and ultimately crippling, loss of ‘home’. In an early poem called ‘Diwali’, Seth offers a literary preamble to the Mehras through a considerably more sympathetic self portrait (Seth 1994). This poem too considers the deleterious effects of a colonial education—but with a greater sense of the irresistible literary and cultural temptations of Europe. Its ambivalent apotheosis to ‘Englishness’ enacts what Ashis Nandy has eloquently described as the ‘intimate enmity’ of the colonial condition (Nandy, 1983). Seth’s poem is spoken from a cultural crossing where the privileges and passions attached to the magic of ‘English’ literature are constantly undone and unworked by an underlying sense of cultural transgression. Traversing the genealogy of a Punjabi family from rural self sufficiency to colonized civility, ‘Diwali’ chronicles the effort it takes for six generations of Punjabi peasants to finally gain ‘the conqueror’s authoritarian seal’, by sending ‘a son to school’ (Seth 1994 [1981], p. 64). Suddenly, family history is rewritten as a faltering generational progress into coloniality. The crisis turns on the paradox that what is eminently desirable through Englishness—‘a job . . . power’—is also, and at the same time, rendered utterly undesirable, once again, through the taint of ‘snobbery, the good life’ (1994 [1981], p. 65) Likewise, and perhaps more painfully, the etymology of the language that is loved so intimately by the poet belongs elsewhere and at a distance, to another—sometimes hostile and abusive—‘tongue’. This younger Seth ponders the impossibility of crawling, willingly, beside the ‘meridian names’ of the English poets ‘Jonson, Wordsworth’, in the face of Macaulay’s prophecy: ‘one taste / Of Western wisdom “surpasses / All the books of the East''’(1994 [1981], p. 65). Herein lies the faultline of what Seth describes as the ‘separateness’ and ‘fear’ (1994 [1981], p. 65) attached to the self-conscious acquisition of English. To speak in the desired way is, from now on, to also learn how to speak against oneself. It is to concede, as Seth does toward the end of this poem, that his ‘tongue is warped’ (1994 [1981], p. 68). To make theoretical sense of Seth’s literary illustration of the colonized complicity in the colonial condition, we need to allow for a more complex understanding of the mechanisms of power. While the logic of power, as critics like Benita Parry insist, is fundamentally coercive, its campaign is frequently seductive. We could say that power traverses the imponderable chasm between coercion and seduction through a variety of baffling self-representations. While it may manifest itself in a show and application of force, it is equally likely to appear as the disinterested purveyor of cultural enlightenment and reform. Through this double representation, power offers itself both as a political limit and as a cultural possibility. If power is at once the qualitative difference or gap between those who have it and those who must suffer it, it also designates an imaginative space that can be occupied, a cultural model that might be imitated and replicated. The apparent political exclusivity of power is thus matched, as Foucault argues, by its web-like inclusiveness: 

Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing or exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are like vehicles of power, not its points of application (Foucault 1980a, p. 98). 

At an obvious level, Foucault’s analysis seems to convey the quite basic idea that power is best able to disseminate itself through the collaboration of its subjects. But Foucault’s more subtle point is that such apparent ‘collaboration’ is really symptomatic of the pervasive and claustrophobic omnipresence of power. It is the unavoidable response to a condition where power begins to insinuate itself both inside and outside the world of its victims. Thus, if power is available as a form of ‘subjection’, it is also a procedure that is ‘subjectivised’ through, and within, particular individuals. According to Foucault, there is no ‘outside’ to power—it is always, already, everywhere. In his book The Intimate Enemy (1983), Ashis Nandy adapts Foucault’s analysis of power to account for the particularly deleterious consequences of the colonial encounter. For Nandy, however, modern colonialism is not just a historical illustration of Foucault’s paradigmatic analysis. It is, more significantly, a sort of crucial historical juncture at which power changes its style and first begins to elaborate the strategies of profusion which Foucault theories so persuasively. 

Nandy’s book builds on an interesting, if somewhat contentious, distinction between two chronologically distinct types or genres of colonialism. The first, he argues, was relatively simple-minded in its focus on the physical conquest of territories, whereas the second was more insidious in its commitment to the conquest and occupation of minds, selves, cultures. If the first bandit-mode of colonialism was more violent, it was also, as Nandy insists, transparent in its self interest, greed and rapacity. By contrast, and somewhat more confusingly, the second was pioneered by rationalists, modernists and liberals who argued that imperialism was really the messianic harbinger of civilization to the uncivilized world. 

Despite Nandy’s compartmentalisation of militaristic and civilisational imperialism, modern colonialism did, of course, rely on the institutional uses of force and coercion. In addition, it enacted another kind of violence by instituting ‘enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges—the colonizer and the colonized, the Occidental and the Oriental, the civilized and the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, the developed and the developing’ (Prakash 1995, p. 3). The effect of this schematic reinscription of the colonial relationship is now well acknowledged. The colonized was henceforth to be postulated as the inverse or negative image of the colonizer. In order for Europe to emerge as the site of civilisational plenitude, the colonized world had to be emptied of meaning. Thus, as Nandy writes: 

This colonialism colonized minds in addition to bodies and it released forces within colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all. In the process, it helps to generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside, in structures and in minds (Nandy 1983, p. xi). 

Colonialism, then, to put it simply, marks the historical process whereby the ‘West’ attempts systematically to cancel or negate the cultural difference and value of the ‘non-West’. 

Nandy’s psychoanalytic reading of the colonial encounter evokes Hegel’s paradigm of the master–slave relationship, and he is not alone in this implicit theoretical debt to Hegel. In fact, whenever postcolonial theory queries what Irene Gendzier describes as ‘the Other—directed nature of the reactions of the colonized and his need to struggle to free himself of this externally determined definition of Self’ (Gendzier 1973, p. 23), it evokes categories which are reminiscent of Hegel’s paradigms. 

Hegel’s brief but influential notes on ‘Lordship and Bond age’ are framed by the theorem that human beings acquire identity or self-consciousness only through the recognition of others (see Hegel 1910, vol. 1, pp. 175–88). Each Self has before it another Self in and through which it secures its identity. Initially, there is an antagonism and enmity between these two confronting selves; each aims at the cancellation or death and destruction of the Other. Hence, and temporarily, a situation arises where one is merely recognised while the other recognises. However, the proper end of history—viz. The complete and final revelation of historical truth—requires that the principle of recognition be both mutual and universal. Charles Taylor captures Hegel’s conclusions in the following aphorism: ‘for what I am, is recognition of man as such and therefore something that in principle should be extended to all’ (Taylor 1975, p. 153). As harsh realities would have it, though, it doesn’t quite work out this way. The peculiarly human history of servitude, or the historical subordination of one self to another, belies the Hegelian expectation of mutuality. 

In his philosophical elaboration of the ‘master–slave rela tionship’, Hegel maintains that the master and slave are, initially, locked in a compulsive struggle-unto-death. This goes on until the weak-willed slave, preferring life to liberty, accepts his subjection to the victorious master. When these two antagonists finally face each other after battle, only the master is recognisable. The slave, on the other hand, is now a dependent ‘thing’ whose existence is shaped by, and as, the conquering Other. Or, as Sartre writes of the slave in his monumental reworking of Hegel’s summary text: ‘I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am’ (Sartre 1969; cited in Gendzier 1973, p. 31). 

The postcolonial recovery of the colonial condition, which we have been discussing, is, in the first place, an attempt to reveal the coloniser and the colonised as a historical incarna tion of Hegel’s master and slave. But the task of postcolonial theoretical retrieval cannot stop there. For if history is the record of failure, it also bears testimony to the slave’s refusal to concede the master’s existential priority. As Nandy tells us, it is crucial for postcolonial theory to take seriously the idea of a psychological resistance to colonialism’s civilizing mission. To this end, it needs historically to exhume those defenses of mind which helped to turn the West ‘into a reasonably manageable vector’ (Nandy 1983, p. xiii). In this regard it is worth recalling that the slave figure in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness also makes the following revolutionary pronouncement: ‘I lay claim to this being which I am; that is, I wish to recover it, or, more exactly, I am the project of the recovery of my being’ (cited in Gendzier 1973, p. 31). 

Gandhi and Fanon: the slave’s recovery 

Colonialism does not end with the end of colonial occupation. However, the psychological resistance to colonialism begins with the onset of colonialism. Thus, the very notion of a ‘colonial aftermath’ acquires a doubleness, inclusive of both the historical scene of the colonial encounter and its dispersal, in David Lloyd’s words, ‘among the episodes and fragments of a history still in process’ (Lloyd 1993b, p. 11). We have already considered the implications of a theoretical alignment between the adverse symptoms of the ‘colonial past’ and the ‘postcolonial present’. It is also necessary, as Gyan Prakash writes, ‘to fully recognise another history of agency and knowledge alive in the deadweight of the colonial past’ (Prakash 1995, p. 5). The task of this ‘full recognition’ requires that acts of anti-colonial resistance be treated not only as theories able but, as Prakash would have it, as fully comprehensive, fully conceptualized ‘theoretical events’ in their own right. Thus, Prakash insists, we might start to ascertain the first elaborations of a postcolonial theory itself in historical figures like Gandhi and Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial Algerian revolutionary. In so doing, we might be guided by Benita Parry’s warning against ‘the tendency to disown work done within radical traditions other than the most recently enunciated heterodoxies, as necessarily less subversive of the established order’ (Parry 1987, p. 27). 

Prakash’s brilliant juxtaposition of Gandhi and Fanon invites further attention, for in these two figures we find two radically different and yet closely aligned elaborations of postcolonial self-recovery. The differences between Gandhi and Fanon are stark and self-evident. If Gandhi speaks in an anachronistic religio-political vocabulary, Fanon’s idiom is shot through with Sartre’s existential humanism. If Gandhi’s encounter with British imperialism generates a theology of non-violence, Fanon’s experience of French colonialism produces a doctrinaire commitment to the redemptive value of collective violence. And if Gandhi enters Indian national politics in middle age, the more impetuous Fanon is dead, after a career of anti-colonial resistance, at the age of 36. 

Yet, there are significant similarities between these two revolutionary thinkers. Both of them complete their education in the colonizing country—Gandhi to become a reluctant lawyer and Fanon a despairing psychiatrist—and both prepare the theoretical underpinnings of their anti-colonialism in a third country, Gandhi in South Africa and Fanon, despite his Martiniquian roots, in Algeria. It is probably for this reason that neither Fanon’s nor Gandhi’s resistance to colonialism is matched by a corresponding nationalism. Both remain wary of the national elite and eventually seek, although equally unsuccessfully, the disbanding of nationalist parties in favor of a more decentralized polity closer to the needs and aspirations of the vast and unacknowledged mass of the Indian and Algerian peasantry. In addition to these theoretical contiguities, Gandhi and Fanon are united in their proposal of a radical style of total resistance to the totalising political and cultural offensive of the colonial civilizing mission. To this end, both men carefully elaborate Nandy’s notion of a psychological resistance to colonialism. As Fanon wrote toward the end of his revolutionary manifesto in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘Total liberation is that which concerns all sectors of the personality’ (Fanon 1990, p. 250). 

The principle underlying Fanon’s project of ‘total liberation’ requires the enslaved figure of the colonized to refuse the privilege of recognition to the colonial ‘master’. In Fanon’s words: ‘Colonialism wants everything to come from it. But the dominant psychological feature of the colonized is to withdraw before any invitation of the conqueror’s’ (Fanon 1965, p. 63). Fanon’s image of a resolute colonized subject politely declining the primacy of Europe appears as the figurative masthead to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj—a polemical critique of Western civilisation written in 1909. Whereas Fanon is optimistic and confident about the colonized ability to valiantly resist the cultural viscosity of Europe, Gandhi’s prickly text laments the Indian moha, or desire for the superficial glitter of ‘modern’ civilisation. In his words: ‘We brought the English, and we keep them. Why do you forget that our adoption of their civilisation makes their presence in India at all possible? Your hatred against them ought to be transferred to their civilisation’ (Gandhi 1938, p. 66). 

In their categorical disavowal of cultural colonialism, both thinkers attempt, albeit through very different strategies, to transform anti-colonial dissent into a struggle for creative autonomy from Europe. And it is this quite specific emphasis on creativity rather than authenticity which ultimately prevents both from espousing a nostalgic and uncritical return to the ‘pre-colonial’ past. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth resounds with an unequivocal ‘no’ to the ‘question of a return to nature’ (Fanon 1990, p. 253). So also Gandhi’s interrogation of the West is matched by a series of quite heterodox—even heretical—revisions of religious and social tradition. Both thinkers are shaped by an obsession with the rhetoric of futurity. Fanon’s revolutionary narrative moves with a compelling urgency toward the recognition that ‘the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence’ (Fanon 1967, p. 229). We might also recall that Gandhi treats his anti-colonial interventions as scientific ‘experiments’, geared toward the discovery of a hitherto unprecedented political style. While fully acknowledging the complicity or infection of the colonized subject, both men treat the project of national liberation as an imaginative pretext for cultural self-differentiation from Europe and, thereby, as an attempt to exceed, surpass—even improve upon—the claims of Western civilization. As Fanon writes in his address to the colonized world: ‘Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth’ (Fanon 1990, p. 252). This defiant invitation to alterity or ‘civilisational difference’ carries within it an accompanying refusal to admit the deficiency or lack which is, as we have seen, the historical predicament of those who have been rendered into slaves. 

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks invokes both Hegel and Sartre to diagnose the condition of the colonised slave as a symptom of ‘imitativeness’. In Hegel’s paradigm, the slave must ultimately turn away from the master to forge the meaning of his existence in labour. He can only regain his integrity by working over the density of matter to which he is henceforth confined. However, as Fanon argues, the racialisation of the master–slave relationship breeds a new and disabling discon tent. For whenever the black slave faces the white master, s/he now experiences the disruptive charge of envy and desire. The Negro, Fanon writes, ‘wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave. In Hegel the 

slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object’ (Fanon 1967, p. 221 note). As both Fanon and Gandhi were to recognise, the slave’s hypnotised gaze upon the master condemned this figure to a derivative existence. Herein lay the creative failure of a less than total liberation. In Gandhi’s extravagant prose, the problem was this: ‘that we want the English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature but not the tiger . . .’ (Gandhi 1938, p. 30). The only way forward, accordingly, was to render the tiger undesirable. 

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