Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (review)

Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, by Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. xiii + 294 pp. ISBN 0-521-62493-2 paper.

This is a powerful and ambitious book, impressive in the depth and breadth of its learning and in the clarity of its intelligence. It works through closely reasoned critiques of a long series of significant thinkers: Theodor Adorno, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Giddens, Samir Amin, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Christopher Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Edward Said, and C. L. R. James. This form Lazarus has chosen risks collapsing into a series of book reviews, but his ability to cut through intellectual clutter and the strength of his purposes keep his argument moving.

The book is "intended as a self-consciously Marxist contribution to the academic field of postcolonial studies--one capable of suggesting a credible historical materialist alternative to the idealist and dehistoricizing scholarship currently predominant in that field in general," which Lazarus sees as "paying a huge price for its [. . .] premature repudiation of systematic theory" (1, 9). Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory is this book's obvious rival; Lazarus differentiates his book from Ahmad's polemic by his commitment (rather in the spirit of Fredric Jameson) to give the authentic insights and advances generated by postcolonial criticism their due even while demonstrating the superior conceptual reach of Marxism.

The first chapter, "Modernity, Globalization, and the 'West,'" mounts a tenacious and sophisticated defense of a basic Marxist tenet: the categorical primacy of capitalism as the enduring, systematic force behind the three terms of the chapter title. Theories that privilege these terms over capitalism, Lazarus argues, suffer from one or another form of idealism and a tendency to overestimate the restructurings of the present, which in turn sponsors exaggerated or merely sensationalistic philosophical riders. The heart of the book is the second chapter, "Disavowing Decolonization: Nationalism, Intellectuals, and the Question of Representation in Postcolonial Theory," and at the center of this chapter is a battle over the legacy of Fanon against (on one side) the tendentious poststructuralist appropriation of Fanon by Bhabha and (on the other) Miller's argument that Fanon's speaking of and for Africans is an ethnocentric imposition hardly better than that of colonialism itself. Lazarus mounts his own searching critique of Fanon's "intellectualism," but is careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water: far worse is the "intellectualist anti-intellectualism" (101) that prematurely rejects any representation and so collapses all nationalisms together, regardless of their ideological differences or consequences, and disables the proper and indispensable work of intellectuals. Lazarus likes to bring the charge of "empirical insufficiency" against those claiming to advance readings too subtle and sophisticated to fit within a comprehensive framework such as Marxism, and he regularly and tellingly refers to stakes in the real world, ending this chapter with a paean to the permanent value of the successful struggle for decolonization.

The sentences of this book are uniformly graceful, but the larger structures are not always so. The Introduction is in some ways rhetorically and strategically infelicitous--is Adorno really the best point of departure for this project? The chapter on cricket and C. L. R. James feels disjointed and the last chapter, on Afropop, trails off when it should summon the book's accumulated power for a final knock-out punch. These final chapters, while interesting, are not powerful enough to provide a dynamic, transformative example of the way forward for postcolonial studies, and the ringing affirmations of the tradition of socialist anti-imperialism which end several chapters do not finally feel adequate to dispel or guide us through the postcolonial malaise which gave rise to academic "postcolonialism" in the first place. Still Lazarus does fulfill a substantial part of his enormous ambition. His critique of the field of postcolonialism will have to be reckoned with, and he provides a compelling rehabilitation...