Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (review)

Postcolonial studies, having had its agenda set by textual idealism early on, has largely ignored or forgotten the breadth of the theoretical terrain available to it. Against this dominant amnesia, there consistently have been dissenting voices in the field, many calling for a materialist perspective that is anathema to the reigning poststructuralism. Benita Parry's Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique collects her essays in this tradition of materialist dissent within postcolonial studies. In pieces ranging from 1987 to 2004, Parry both animadverts on poststructuralism and its most visible postcolonial exponents and suggests theoretical terrain that remains largely ignored.

The first half of the book is devoted to "Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies." The dead ends in postcolonial studies that concern Parry are those theories that have construed imperialism as an epistemological and discursive event, thus isolating cultural from material realities. Gayatri Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha are the key targets in a pair of essays explicitly devoted to critiquing this poststructuralist tradition. Parry reads Spivak as having substituted epistemic violence and cultural colonization for material violence and dispossession. Bhabha she finds emphasizing disjunction, liminality, and hybridity while turning colonization into an enunciatory struggle that confines postcolonial theory to semiotic terrain. Her grounds for critique are no less compelling for being a familiar materialist response, and the essays in which they occur, though older pieces, ultimately complement the newer ones. However, what makes her position most interesting is her insistence, over nearly twenty years of work, on what these idealist agendas cost postcolonial studies.

It is in this regard that Parry redirects us toward resistance and conflict as a political and historical reality, one not to be occluded by the privileged study of epistemological disruption or discursive negotiations. As such she squarely questions both Spivak and Bhabha for their simplification and rejection of the "colonizer/colonized binary" and their espousal of models of power that ultimately diffuse the historical conflict of colonization. These idealist theories cannot but miss the political necessities of decolonization and the theory that was produced for and through struggle, when "master" and "slave" had not merely archival but strategic significance. Unlike other ventures into the history and theory of decolonization, Parry's is not interested in recovering that period for poststructuralism. For Parry, decolonization and the theories it produced are not merely antecedents to the present, they are antithetical to much of our contemporary debate and suggestive of missed opportunities in postcolonial theory as it has been formed.

Key for Parry is the recovery of liberation theory and the Marxist theory it evoked and refined. In her discussion of this body of work, Parry turns to figures such as Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and Amilcar Cabral. Fanon is perhaps our most canoni-cal thinker in postcolonial studies (though often rendered through readings by Bhabha that Parry attempts to redress), but figures like Nkrumah, Lumumba, and Cabral have mostly been ignored. Parry's insistence on the significance of these theorists reminds us of this disavowal of their work as well as postcolonial studies' susceptibility to a fashionable presentism. She works to correct this silencing of liberation theory through readings that address the simplistic accusations, such as that of cultural essentialism, that have been used to justify their omission. She writes that, "when Cabral speaks of 'a return to our history,' his advocacy of new directions and expectations of still unimagined futures should not and cannot be misconstrued as ret-rograde" (89). Furthermore, "to observe the arrest of a community's historical trajectory and celebrate its resumption in the context of a burgeoning modernity, registers neither a nostalgic infatuation with the past nor mimicry of western notions of progress" (89). Theorists such as Cabral remain relevant because "they belong with a larger body of materialist analyses of nation, class, and existential conditions distinct from those in advanced capitalist societies" (83). In evoking this alternative, materialist discussion of nation, class, and consciousness, Parry both recovers liberation theory and invokes its relationship to Marxism.

Of course, when it comes to Marxism, poststructuralism...