The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 76
did not necessarily equate with liberation and post colonialism.
One of Fanon’s most controversial essays, ‘Concerning violence’, pub-
lished in The Wretched of the Earth, serves to justify the use of violence.
In this essay, Fanon argues that not only is violence sometimes a necessary resort but that violence has a cathartic and regenerative effect. Robert Young writes:
Fanon’s intervention as what Sartre described as the anti-colonial ‘theo-
retician of revolutionary violence’ marked the historical shift in tricon-
tinenal nationalism towards a violent indigenous cultural assertion that
soon transformed the radical politics of Marxism, even in the West, a
shift whose initial culmination came in the events of May 1968. Fanon’s
revolutionary violence also signalled the defeat of Gandhi’s alternative
form of anti-colonial violence. (Young 2001: 296)
Young also observes that Fanon, as a doctor who treated torturers, was
aware that the agents of violence do not escape its shattering effects and
that violence perpetuates further violence. It may be said, therefore, that the question of violence is not decisive for Fanon, on the basis of the essay concerned, but remains an impasse across Fanon’s work where he does not
condone the militarism of independent Africa.
The recourse to violence in anti-colonial histories of resistance makes the achievements of Gandhi all the more remarkable. The Indian intellectual,
Ashis Nandy (1937– ), like Fanon, draws on psychoanalysis in his work on
colonialism and, like Senghor, he appeals to an alternative philosophical tradition. In The Intimate Enemy (1983), Nandy proposes that Gandhi was able to deploy a non-deterministic notion of history against the Western idea of the progress of history as pervasively determined by the past in an unfolding Untitled-2 492
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sequence. Regarding this alternative historical sense, in that the past constitutes an unfinished genesis that continues to live on in the present, it can be changed in the present so as to open up further possibilities including
the alteration of the past. Gandhi’s view of revolution is thus profoundly
creative in its orientation, and furthermore, his notion of time accords with that of the quantum physicist, David Bohm, who writes:
The past by itself is not fully determinate, but is ambiguous as to what it is (or was). The future helps to determine what the past really was. Thus,
the past does not fully determine the future. (If only because in some
measure, the future partly determines the past.)’ (Bohm 1999: 126)
In this view, there can be no cathartic breaking with the past but the past can always be unexpectedly remade.
Nandy emphasises how, in an Indian context, colonialism is considered as
transient where the colonised are able to protect themselves in the historical episode that colonialism constitutes through strategic accommodations.
Here, resistance to oppression may take the form of compromise and delib-
erate mimicry. The West may be trivialised through being comically copied,
and mimicry may actually serve as a defence against certain identifications with and damaging internalisations of colonial ideology. Nandy’s ideas on
mimicry, together with his work on ambiguous identities and ambivalent
identifications, have been expanded on and widely disseminated by Homi
Bhabha, one of the most prominent postcolonial theorists whose work is
represented in the next section.
The Poststructuralist Turn
As the above account has begun to indicate, the theoretical critique of
colonialism is premised on a discrepancy between Enlightenment ideals
upholding liberty and democracy for a common humanity and the reality
of such ideals being reserved for Europe and withheld from its colonies.
What is significant here is that liberation movements are not just opposi-
tional nationalist movements but, as often overlooked, movements that call
for a wider universality. The poststructuralist turn of postcolonial theory both marks a certain mutual recognition of this demand on both sides
of the coloniser/colonised divide as well as a certain problematisation of
modes of accommodation in that the accommodation at stake pertains to
the assimilation of the postcolonial within the scope of the poststructuralist post-Enlightenment critique.
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The coming together of poststructuralist theory and postcolonial theory
is an event marked by the publication of Robert Young’s White Mythologies.
What this study foregrounds is the uptake of the theories of Derrida,
Foucault and Lacan in the work of Homi Bhabha (1949– ), Gayatri Spivak
(1942– ) and Edward Said (1935–2003), where the latter three are presented
as the founders of postcolonial theory. Thus, White Mythologies may be understood to constitute a political act of inclusion, especially at a juncture when poststructuralism was being accused of being ahistorical and at time
when educational institutions in Britain were under pressure to decentre
their canons. However, this well-intentioned framing of the beginnings of
postcolonial theory serves unintentionally to displace the significance of
liberation theory in the genealogy of postcolonial history and thought at
the same time that it serves to imply that postcolonial theory is a derivative offshoot of poststructuralism.1 As shown in the previous section, liberation theory had from its inception unfolded as an intellectual engagement with
French philosophy, entailing also a dialogue with psychoanalysis. It should also be pointed out that if thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault attracted the attention of Bhabha, Spivak and Said this is perhaps due to how, in the first place, the decolonisation of French North Africa had its own effects on the development of poststructuralist theory. In fact, at the outset of White Mythologies, Robert Young makes a passing reference to the formative importance of North African history, as follows: ‘If “so-called poststructuralism” is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence – no
doubt itself both a symptom and a product’ (Young 2004: 32).
Foucault (1999) has himself said that his experience of living in Tunisia
was more important to his political and intellectual formation than May ’68
in Paris. In Tunisia, Foucault was witness to a turbulent period of Marxist-inspired student demonstrations. While Foucault disliked the revolutionary
jargon, he was affected by the real freedom of spirit that manifested itself (Miller 1993: 170–1). The experience of this real freedom of spirit may
be said to have had the effect of showing up the very theatricality of the
‘bourgeois’ discourses by which we live. For instance, Foucault states: ‘We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life … one must put “in play”, show up, transform,
and reverse the systems which quietly order us about’ (Foucault in Miller
1993: 180). This attempt to configure the discursive field as less a reflection of reality than a performative act is also very evident in the work of Jacques Derrida.
Derrida maintains that the performative is not just a special kind of
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speech act, as in the work of Austin, but that there is nothing authentically outside of the performative (Derrida 1999: 224). This question of the ‘nothing outside’ formula may be understood in terms of a thinking of a widely
pervasive condition of immigrancy, one that attains a philosophical status in the work of Derrida, serving at the same time to ‘postcolonialise’ European philosophy. Derrida, in speaking of his childhood in Algeria, repeatedly
refers to the crisis of his being excluded from his French school on the
grounds of his Judaism, inferring this experience to constitute a particularly formative wound (Derrida 1991). Accordingly, his work engages with questions of belonging and hospitality, is sensitive to the problematics of borders and margins, and puts forward its theories of the trace and the crypt, the
foreign body, the parasite virus, and so on. In describing Marx as a ‘clan-
destine immigrant’, belonging to a time of disjunction and an economy of
the uncanny, Derrida could also be describing himself (Derrida 1994: 174).
Homi Bhabha’s work may be said to bear the imprint of poststructural-
ist theory in its attention to the performativity of identity and to a certain theoretical thematics of unstable assimilation within the trajectory of
Westernisation. Whereas the earlier liberation theorists such as Fanon and
Césaire are concerned with arriving at their own consciousness of authen-
ticity in the face of European hypocrisy, for Bhabha, colonial discourse is something to be performatively subverted from within. In ‘Of mimicry and
man’, he writes:
Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is not what
Césaire describes as ‘colonization-thingification’ behind which there
stands the essence of the présence Africaine. The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse
also disrupts its authority. (Bhabha 1994: 88)
Whereas for Ashis Nandy, mimicry may be a strategy whereby the colo-
nised only pretend to go along with prescriptive norms in order to conceal
and protect a consciousness of cognitive, ethical and cultural differences, for Bhabha mimicry is not a mask so much as a mirror. As such, it is a
means of reflecting the images of the coloniser back to the coloniser, showing the supposed original to be but a copy, a groundless doubling entailing the uncanny disruptions of the unfamiliar as familiar and the familiar as
unfamiliar. Regarding this, Bhabha’s way of thinking is closely influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis for which subject formation is a matter of coming
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identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity … – it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image’ (Bhabha 1994: 45).
Bhabha’s theories are similar to those of Judith Butler, herself much influenced by Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, as well as by Hegel. In Gender Trouble (which appeared a few years before Bhabha’s The Location of Culture), Butler writes: ‘The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside constructed identities … The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition’ (Butler 1990: 147). For Butler, as for Bhabha, what this means is that agency is located in a deformation of pre-existing
norms or a deconstruction of pre-existing constructs. The reason why this
is a question of immigrancy could be spelt out as the predicament of there
being no place of origin and no place for originality outside of the colonisation of the origin, originality as instituted through the act of appropriation.
When Bhabha objects to Césaire’s ‘colonisation=thingification’ it is
because he interprets this as a matter of the colonised being turned into
an object without agency while his own project is one of reclaiming agency
through the ability of the colonised to show up the artificiality and ruses of what colonial ideology attempts to naturalise. However, Césaire’s protest is much better understood as being directed against the commodification of
human lives, both economically and in terms of a representational logic of
cloning. Here, Bhabha’s notion of racial and colonial stereotypes and the
stereotype in general are best understood in terms of fetishism (Bhabha
1994: 41–66). In brief, the stereotype-fetish, read by Bhabha as a means
of disavowing the difference of the other through a logic of fixed forms, a commodity-cloning logic, may be understood precisely as a disavowal of
the other as origin and of other origins. Yet Bhabha is not positing other
sources or sources of the other, say, outside of a Western capitalist economy of appropriative origination.
Certainly what is interesting to note in the light of the above is that Bhabha’s own theories of ‘mimicry’, ‘hybridity’, ‘third space’ ‘ambivalence’, and so on, have come to be widely fetishised or academically commodified. Ironically,
the self-fashioning affirmation of mimicry and hybridity are in turn cast as an authoritative postcolonial form of identity politics, with identity as the internalisation of difference, a question of the Hegelian dialectical sublation of contradiction. This could further be considered a question of how
terms such as ‘hybridity’ are conceptually generalised, shedding historical considerations of their formations and considerations that would arise from analyses of the relevance of particular political economies. For instance, in
‘Notes on the “Postcolonial” ’, Ella Shohat argues the following:
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As a descriptive catch-all term, ‘hybridity’ per se fails to discriminate
between the diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced assimila-
tion, internalized self-rejection, political co-optation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence. (Shohat 1992: 110)
Derrida has maintained of deconstruction that it does not seek to provide
philosophical alternatives to what it calls into question. Gayatri Spivak, the translator of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, summarises the significance of deconstruction for her work in the following:
Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there
is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth. It is not the exposure of error. It is
constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. That’s
why Derrida does not say logocentrism is a pathology, or metaphysical
closures are something you can escape. Deconstruction, if one wants a
formula, is, among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot
not want. And, in that sense, it’s right there at the beginning. (Spivak
1996: 27–8)
As with Foucault and with Bhabha, what is at stake is a showing up of the performative mechanisms of truth production, a resistance to the naturalisation of truths, as opposed to a search for alternative truths. And it can be added that this implies a theoretical practice of close reading, which is Derrida’s main mode of philosophical engagement. Deconstruction, attending to the
discursive construction of truths, may be said to constitute a literary turn within the tradition of European philosophy, and this further explains the
appeal of Derrida to Bhabha and Spivak, as well as to Said. Not only are
Bhabha, Spivak and Said intellectual immigrants choosing to live in the
West, like Derrida himself, they are all in terms of their disciplinary foundations literary critics, especially influenced by Western modernist writing as a calling into question of realist forms of representation. With reference
to Spivak’s statement above, amongst what could be specified as what we
‘cannot not want’, it would not be cynical to propose that this, for Derrida, Bhabha, Spivak and Said at least, would include a post-Enlightenment
Western education in the arts and humanities.
For Spivak, as she posits in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, what compromises the Kantian Enlightenment tradition is its foreclosure and
consequent encrypting of ‘the name of the native informant.’ She writes:
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name of Man’ (Spivak 1999: 5).That is, Spivak does not interrogate the man/nature divide and equation of ‘man’ with the ‘human’, as a certain
feminism would, but rather interrogates the equation of the human (man)
with the European. What this implies in postcolonial terms is a desire for the recognition of the symbolic authority (as opposed to natural originality) of the formerly colonised. Spivak objects to Kant’s quasi-pantheist positing of aboriginal man on the side of nature. What Spivak’s desire for acknowledg-ment of the name of the native informant would mean presumably is a de-
racialising of privileged positions of authority, whereby for instance, Spivak might emerge as a wayward Kantian heir with her own critique of reason, a
postcolonial one. Here Spivak both maintains that it is necessary for Western subjects to unlearn their privileges, and that there is an inevitable complicity between resistance and what is resisted (Spivak 1996). Nonetheless, there is a pervasive concern in Spivak’s work with what might be called other forms
of agency or the agency of the other, even if this is negatively construed
by Spivak (1996) in terms of the impossible: let us say, an impossibility we cannot not want.
While the native informant in Spivak’s theories appears as a figure of
assimilation, there is her further attempt to theorise the position of the subaltern as one of problematic non-assimilation. Spivak objects to the activism of Foucault and his followers on the grounds that it constitutes an attempt to stand in for the oppressed, speaking not on their behalf but rather in their place out of an ‘unexamined romanticism’ (Spivak 1996). At the same time,
