Decolonising critical theory
1.6. The black African subject as ‘the human’
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represented. The black African subjectivity, as a historical figure, emerges as represented, first by the colonialist, and in the contemporary by the state, the nation and institutions of global capital.
Spivak combines deconstruction with feminism and Marxist perspectives to “critique capital and the international division of labour, the critique of imperialism and colonial discourse” (Landry and Maclean, 1996: 3). Importantly, working from a feminist perspective, Spivak theorises “the links between racism and capitalism” (Landry and Maclean, 1996: 3). In talking about representation, Spivak insists on the two meanings of the concept, which she draws from Marx:
Vertretung, where representation refers to political representation, and Darstellung where Dar,
‘there’, same cognate, and Stellen, is ‘to place’, so ‘placing there’ becomes representing as in
‘proxy’ and ‘portrait’. Spivak notes that, “the thing to remember is that in the act of representing politically, you actually represent yourself and your constituency in the portrait sense, as well”
(1990: 108). She points out how representation silences those it ostensibly makes present, which effectively means that “the subaltern cannot speak” (Spivak, 1996: 292). The black African subject, throughout history, has been silenced and cannot speak. This means that even if the black African subject speaks, no one listens (Landry and Maclean, 1996).
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language and discourse in which blackness itself is at best a figure of absence, or worse a total reversion?” (Sardar, 2008: xv). Fanon notes that as a result of this, the black subject is a fractured subject in that he has two dimensions and behaves differently when he is around a white man than when he is with a fellow black man. For Fanon the colonized subjects “in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country” (Fanon, 2008: 9).
Sylvia Wynter’s work has been effective in exposing the coloniality of the idea of the human. In sum, what has come to mean ‘the human’ has been under construction since 1542, with the colonisation of the Caribbean. Wynter’s work has been important in exposing the limits of the hegemonic liberal and neoliberal visions of human freedom and liberation in that their conception of subjectivity is rooted in coloniality. In this case, the idea of the human, as a universal subject figure, is riddled with and limited by coloniality. Maldonado-Torres notes that in Wynter, the human appears as a figure separated from the divine through a secular-line and through racialized constructs where an “onto-Manichean colonial line” separates the human and the barbarian (Maldonado-Torres, 2017: 117). Wynter notes that this struggle, over the meaning of the human, is central to a lot of struggles in the present (Wynter, 2003: 260). For Wynter, under modernity, the figure of the white male takes the definition of the human. She therefore insists that, a search for human freedom means challenging this “overrepresentation […] on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards” (Wynter, 2003: 260). The coloniality of being accounts for “our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources” (Wynter, 2003: 260 – 261).
The present struggle can be seen as the “ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle” (Wynter, 2003: 261).
For Wynter, the question of the human arises in the debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas, the missionary priest, and Ginés de Sepúlveda, the humanist royal historian and apologist for the Spanish settlers of then Santo Domingo. This debate is “a dispute […] between two descriptive statements of the human” (Wynter, 2003: 268). Scott notes that the ideas of the human that Wynter grapples with emerge out of a specific time in European history, a time of humanism, where contrary to Fanon’s humanism, here “humanism marks a certain stage in Europe's consciousness
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of itself - that stage at which it leaves behind it the cramped intolerances of the damp and enclosed Middle Ages and enters, finally, into the rational spaciousness and secular luminosity of the Modern (Scott, 2000: 119). Scott draws our attention to the often underplayed story of humanism which is “the connection between humanism and dehumanization [and that] its classical and Christian antecedents is simultaneously the moment of initiation of Europe's colonial project”
(2000: 119 - 120). He therefore sums up the argument this way: “Humanism and colonialism inhabit the same cognitive-political universe in as much as Europe's discovery of its Self is simultaneous with its discovery of its Others” (Scott, 2000: 120).
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s work also focuses on representation and the possibility of overcoming the coloniality in Bolivia. Like Steve Biko, in her work, she affirms a strong faith, in an indigenous solution. Commenting on the nature of coloniality, Cusicanqui points out that “the colonial condition obscures a number of paradoxes. Throughout history, the modernizing efforts of the Europeanized elites in the Andean region resulted in successive waves of recolonization”
(Cusicanqui, 2012: 95). However, Cusicanqui, unlike most scholars of the postcolonial or decolonial moment, posits and is emphatic that the colonial is also the space for resistance, arguing that “although it is true that modern history meant slavery for the indigenous peoples of America, it was simultaneously an arena of resistance and conflict […] a space for the creation of new indigenous languages and projects of modernity” (Cusicanqui, 2012: 95). By language, she is referring to representation because ultimately it is representation that is at issue in this context. Her concept of decolonisation can be likened to Mignolo and Tlostanova’s (2006) concept of border thinking, where it is not necessary to seek decolonisation in boycotting the structures that colonialism built, but to resist within them. Cusicanqui is convinced that “the condition of possibility for an indigenous hegemony is located in the territory of the modern nation —inserted into the contemporary world” (Cusicanqui, 2012: 95). Her argument here is that the designation of an indigenous category has become a representation that is meant to keep them trapped into a time long gone past and in rural spaces without access or contact with the rest of the world. As a result, the indigenous are not ‘present’ (as in here), but absent and continuously exiled to the past, “a past imagined as quiet, static, and archaic” (Cusicanqui, 2012: 95).
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