A Thriving Postcolonialism: Toward an Anti-Postcolonial Discourse

Writing with her characteristic density in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak offers a loaded and revealing account of the contemporary “Third World.” “Postcolonial studies,” Spivak (1991, 1) argues, “unwittingly commemorating a lost object, can become an alibi unless it is placed within a general frame.” Deeply impacted by the Enlightenment, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is a treatise on how the postcolonial is (and has been) thought, a mapping of the“frame” through what are, according to Spivak, its primary epistemological and philosophical antecedents: “Kant's cosmopolitheia, Hegel's itinerary of the Idea, and Marx's socialist homeopathy” (9). The attempt to identify “postcolonial studies's” historicity, to “place it within a general frame” (ibid.) has over the past decade become an increasingly important project for scholars in the field. In a historical moment in which “Third World” nations have proven to be especially vulnerable to the disarticulations of global capital, to political instability, disease, and famine, inter alia, postcolonial studies has demonstrated a newfound proclivity for definition.

Postcolonial theorists have taken on the project of (re)enunciating both old and new forms of indigenous opposition to colonialism and its heirs, whether these formations are labeled “neocolonialism” or “global capitalism.” All of this signals, however transiently and implicitly, the reclamation of anticolonial resistance as a grand narrative, as arguably the last such instantiation of the twentieth century. Thinkers such as Spivak and Homi Bhabha have conducted their investigations by way of “residual time lag,” an approach that rejects the historicity and the disjunctures contained within temporality. This critique of (postcolonial) temporality is not satisfied with reducing postcolonialism to the marking off of the colonial from the postcolonial based solely upon chronology, a strategy required and undergirded by the unsettling implication that the residues of colonial rule (and Western domination) have seeped not so imperceptibly into the postindependence state. Bhabha's (1992, 57) conception of the “relation between temporality and meaning” has a certain resonance in this context. Postcolonialism is, paradoxically, an epistemology so deeply grounded in the temporal that its key historical events—or occasions—function not only as chronological signifiers but as markers (and producers) of “meaning.”

But postcolonialism should also be more broadly understood as a dual ideological commitment, a paradigm that both includes and is distinct from postcolonial theory. Postcolonialism constitutes the commitment to a certain writing of “peripheral” and “metropolitan” history as well as to the explicatory power of postcolonial “theory.” Postcolonialism describes the actual working out of politics on the ground, an articulation of postcoloniality in terms of existing social, cultural, and economic conditions—an accurate representation of the actually existing present. Postcolonialism, deductively argued, is the process by which postcolonial theory expresses itself as actual political strategy. (Postcolonial theory is that body of work which has critiqued history and political enactments since the final moments of the anticolonial struggle, a corpus that can be traced from, say, the writings of C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon to contemporary thinkers such as Spivak, Bhabha, and Stuart Hall. “Postcolonial studies,” as deployed by A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, marks both the theorization and historization of “postcolonialism.”)

Temporality, however narrowly and uncritical a component of postcolonialism it might constitute, retains a remarkable resilience. All too frequently the sign postcolonialism is reduced to its temporal marker: in this instance it functions denotatively, indicating the end of colonialism, the triumph over indirect rule from and exploitation by Europe, the achievement of independence, the dawn of a new era “after European rule.” Temporality, in this instance, constitutes its own loaded, overdetermined series of meanings. Postcolonialism's “signality,” however, has long since been politically eroded and has lapsed—or degenerated into—a temporal “indistinguishability.” In its more recent instantiation, the postcolonial paradigm has been characterized by a too easy commensurability between colonial past (European rule) and “Third World” present (IMF/World Bank, Washington rule). It is a historical slippage and an epistemological burden...