In this chapter postcolonial theories have been discussed. The literature reviewed helps us to understand the basis for the ongoing troubling nature of black identity in its encounter with whiteness and its encounter with racism. The tension in the previous chapter, chapter two, was based on the progressive model of how blackness could overcome, function and become a psychologically well-rounded being. In this chapter the focus is on the tensions and struggles, as blackness emerges as grounded in the politics, the social, the economic and the historical past.
The work of Said (1978) has been used as a starting point in the discussion and positions of postcolonial theories. Said‟s (1978) theory of Orientalism and Otherness illustrates how black identity continues to be framed in whiteness. Said focuses on the differences and oppositions between the colonised and the coloniser. In this theory all the power is possessed by the coloniser. As a result of this hierarchical structure between black and white, whiteness defines, creates and recreates blackness. This depicts colonial discourse as all-powerful, resulting in black identity being constructed through white eyes. It is from this perspective that Said sees black identity as the study of Europe‟s „Other‟. In other words, the otherness of blackness is both a condition of being black and the fundamental aspect of the dynamics of political and economic colonialism. Said‟s work focuses on the differences between black and white and examines the processes that divide and dominate the world. According to Said, the mark of oppression unifies black people into one category, the colonised, who are subjects of the colonial rule.
Contrary to Said‟s theory of Orientalism, Bhabha (1983) uses the dimension of ambivalence and hybridity; he claims that the two poles are implicated by each other. In essence, Bhabha contests Said‟s claims that colonial power is never possessed entirely by the coloniser. In fact, Bhabha conceptualises the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser as ambivalent and open for negotiation. Whilst Bhabha also examines the processes that divide, categorise and dominate the world, his approach examines the positions of similarity between the coloniser and the colonised. In so doing he illustrates how ambivalence works in constructing postcolonial blackness at different moments of colonial discourse. He sees this discourse as producing subordinate subjects that mimic the coloniser. In other words, mimicry is a process that emerges
62 in the context of ambivalence, producing blackness as an incomplete version of whiteness. The colonial authority depends on the notion of „fixity‟ in the construction of blackness as the „Other‟
of whiteness. Bhabha declares fixity as a sign of cultural/historical and racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, which constructs blackness and whiteness in binary oppositions. In this process, racial difference (othering) and stereotypes are used to produce a troubled black identity as unavoidable, fixed and expected.
In addition to this are various theorists who conceptualise shifts in black identity that move beyond the notion of fixity.
As was evident in the case of the psychology literature, this chapter shows us that there are various struggles ongoing in black identity construction. What distinguishes this chapter from the previous one is that, although it is psychological in its concern with the subjective experience of oppression, its primary focus is not psychologically adjusted to the sociohistorical structures that frame and produce such subjectification.
This chapter has seen a discussion of the postcolonial perspectives in order to consider redressing the construction of black identity and the ambivalence present in the construction of a contemporary black identity in South Africa. This notion of postcolonialism has been useful as a conceptual framework for interpreting the meaning of change and ambivalence in black identity construction in the empirical work of this study (cf. ch 6). This framework directs me to understand the conditions needed for the form of hybridity and the form of ambivalence that we see in black identification today. In this postcolonial work, identity has been revealed by the positioning of the „other‟ and contains the notions of true self – a kind of guarantee of individuality. In postcolonial theorising the concept of black identity is presented as both complex and problematic, and is challenge by the emergence of the hybrid or new identity.
Consequently, black identity is contradictory and ambivalent. The works of Bhabha have made an important contribution to the changing perspective on colonial discourse, particularly his perspectives on hybridity and the multiplicity of black identity, which make ambivalence an issue for the construction of black identity by the self and the other.
63 In essence, the postcolonial framework helps us understand that black identity in postcolonial terms cannot fully escape the structures established under colonialism. So, to some extent there is change because there is reversal of power; however in terms of identity there seems to be many sticking points, and these are what I need to investigate. All the information about fixity and hybridity involves a theorised mechanism by which this lack of transformation in terms of identity. Unlike the psychological literature there is a presumption that you can move beyond the problems of the scheme of racism. In this literature it is not easy move beyond these problems because of the theorised imbrications of blackness and whiteness: one mimics the other and they make reference to each other. Hence, it is not something easy that it is simple to transcend.
The following chapter introduces us to the method used in this study in order to understand the complexity of identity as demonstrated in chapter 2 and in this chapter.
64 CHAPTER FOUR
THE RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY