Postcolonialism: Space, Textuality, and Power

Abstract

1). Postcolonialism and the Critique of HistoricismAs a field of academic inquiry, postcolonialism has its intellectual origins in the writings of a number of intellectuals who came to prominence in the middle part of the twentieth-century, the period of intense anti-colonial struggles against formal European territorial control, especially in Africa and Asia (see Young 2001).These include writers such as C.L.R. James, who recovered the forgotten history of Haitian rebellion in the French Revolution; Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the movement against Portuguese colonialism in Guin÷ and Cape Verde; and Aimé Cesaire, a poet from French Martinique who became an important theorist of the Negritude movement, which asserted the value of previously denigrated African cultures.Each of these writers shared two common concerns.Firstly, each emphasised that colonialism consisted of more than economic exploitation and political subordination; colonialism also involved the exercise of cultural power over subordinated populations.Culture is understood to have been wielded by colonialist powers to denigrate the traditions of non-Western cultures, and to celebrate the superiority of particular versions of Western culture.If these writers understand culture to be an instrument of domination, then regaining control over the means of collective self-definition is regarded as an important strategy in the political struggle for emancipation.One good example of the analysis of this relationship between culture, domination, and resistance, is James' account of the history of cricket in the Caribbean.In Beyond a Boundary (James 1963), the cricket field is refigured as an arena in which relations of racial superiority are asserted and subverted during colonialism, as well as one in which the continuing tensions between newly independent states and the former colonial power are played out after end of formal colonialism.This leads us onto the second emphasis that this generation of anti-colonial writers share, which is a premonition that in so far as relations of colonial subordination are embedded in cultural systems of identity and representation, then the formal end of European colonialism would not necessarily mean the end of colonial forms of power.The clearest link between a generation of anti-colonial writers and the emergence of postcolonialism in the late 1970s and 1980s is, then, this shared concern with the conditions for the 'decolonization of the mind'.This process of decolonizing the mind is concerned with working through the embedded modes of reasoning, thinking, and evaluating that secrete assumptions about privilege, normality, and superiority (Sidaway 2000).The emphasis upon the destruction of non-Western cultural traditions during colonialism might appear to imply that the work of decolonizing the mind requires the recovery and revaluation of these traditions.But this understanding of the cultural politics of postcolonialism can easily re-inscribe a binary opposition between modernity and tradition that is itself a key ideological device used in the denigration of non-Western societies.The invocation of 'authentic' traditions has, in fact, been one of the most problematic ways in which postcolonial elites have continued to wield political power over their citizens.A more complex way of understanding the relationship between the modern and the traditional is illustrated by the career of Ngugi wa Thiongo.His early novels were published in English under the name James Ngugi, but in the 1970s, he became involved in the production of popular theatre using the most widely used indigenous language in Kenya, Gikiyu.Ngugi was imprisoned because of this involvement, and out of this commitment emerged his decision to write original works in this language, rather than in English.In principle, this is an attempt to make his work available to local audiences, in a much broader way than is possible through the use of English (see Ngugi 1986).At the same time,