Decolonising critical theory
1.5. The uneasy dialogues: Postcolonial, Marxist and decolonial theories
It has been noted that when Foucault declares the subject dead, postcolonial theorists demand to know which subject Foucault is referring to (Alessandrini, 2009). Particularly, in her classic essay, Can the Subaltern Speak, Spivak (1988) takes Foucault and other Western scholars on, arguing that in mourning the end of the subject they are referring to the western subject, and in fact, are mourning the western subject that they wish they could preserve. The western subject is the ethnoclass Man that has been under construction in the West since 1542 after the conquering of the Americas (Wynter, 2003). However, the postcolonial theory challenge to Western theory emerges partly out of poststructuralist thought as a way of extending the critique of European Enlightenment (Morton, 2007). Here, the work of the earliest postcolonial scholars, especially Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, has been seen as anchored on poststructural thought which they consider to be “part of a broader questioning of the values of the European enlightenment, and its claims to universalism” (Morton, 2007: 161). However, Marxist critics like Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik and Pal Ahluwalia, point out that postcolonial studies’ reliance on poststructuralism depoliticises it. These Marxist critics, however, have some measure of faith in postcolonial studies that have “origins in left-oriented national liberation movements” (Morton, 2007: 161). Another strand of postcolonial studies has its roots in the materialist approach allowing for dialogue between Marxism and postcolonialism. Although not all materialists are Marxists, “their work is informed by Marx’s conceptual framework for the analysis of power relations within society” (Murphy, 2007: 181). Murphy notes that they have, however, “not uniformly rejected postcolonial studies; nor has postcolonial studies been as hostile to materialist criticism as has often been suggested” (2007: 181). Materialist approaches emphasise historicity and context (Murphy, 2007: 181). The criticism of materialist approaches has been that, when it is not complex, it tends to come across as deterministic (Murphy, 2007: 181).
Mcleod (2007) notes that postcolonial studies are pre-occupied with issues of inequalities, hierarchies and contrasting experiences of people after colonialism has ended. The inequalities and contrasting experiences are a direct result of “colonialism: its irreversible impact beyond Europe on lived, and built, environments, population change and demographics” (Mcleod, 2007: 1).
Postcolonial studies also focus on the material and economic realities of colonialism where, as
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described by Gramsci, “the colonized ‘native masses’ were often co-opted into a vast European capitalist machine which had begun to expand in the late sixteenth century” (Mcleod, 2007: 2). In postcolonial studies, colonialism is linked to the Atlantic slave trade, the system of indentured labour that brought South and East Asian people to the Caribbean and Africa, and the genocidal annihilation of indigenous people in North and South America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific (Mcleod, 2007: 2). Importantly, what is at the heart of postcolonial studies is the question of representation and the questions of the subject. For postcolonialism, the subject emerges as colonized and in danger of annihilation. Here, postcolonialism is in agreement with decolonial approaches. Drawing on Foucault, Said notes that imperialism and colonialism “are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination” (2003: 8). For Said, it is worth noting that the vocabulary of imperial culture includes words such as “‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’,
‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ‘expansion’, and ‘authority’” (2003: 8). Mcleod observes that “colonialism was a matter of representation […] the act of representation itself is also securely hinged to the business of empire” (2007: 5).
Colonialism provoked migration, and by extension the creation of diaspora communities, that have become central to postcolonial studies. The concept of the diaspora emerges as a way of challenging “the supremacy of national paradigms” (Procter, 2007: 151). Here diaspora names “a geographical phenomenon – the traversal of physical terrain by an individual or a group – as well as a theoretical concept: a way of thinking, or of representing the world” (Procter, 2007: 151). For Brah, diaspora “invokes images of multiple journeys” (1996: 181). Significantly, the concept of the diaspora is important in anchoring 1492 as a year with “foundational significance in postcolonial studies as the year in which the Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas” (Procter, 2007: 151). This has been the claim in decolonial theory especially in the work of Sylvia Wynter. It is also significant to note here that Fanon, and especially Wynter, who are some of the writers that have been considered as foundational to decolonial theory at some point considered themselves as postcolonial thinkers. Due to the centrality of migration and the diaspora, for Gilroy, “the figure of the migrant must be made part of Europe’s history” (2004: xxi).
From a decolonial politics, this is, however problematic in that such a move would still centre the history of Europe in the ‘colonial present’ of contemporary politics. As Tuck and Yang note, it
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might ruin the possibility of decolonization, recentre, rehabilitate and resettle whiteness and Europe’s theory and its subject (2012:3).
Bhambra locates decolonial theory in the work of the Modernity/Coloniality school that emerged from the work of, among others, the sociologists Anibal Quijano and María Lugones, and the philosopher and semiotician, Walter D Mignolo, in Latin America (2014: 115). She points out that, this school was strongly linked to at least three influences: the world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, the scholarly work in development and underdevelopment and the Frankfurt School of critical social theory (Bhambra, 2014: 115). Similar to postcolonial theory, decoloniality theory emerges in a forceful way from diasporic scholars, in this case from South America (Bhambra, 2014: 115). Mignolo and Walsh submit that decoloniality, as a critique of coloniality, is not a new set of theories and note that “without a doubt, the critique of coloniality and the possibilities of decolonial horizons of praxis, knowledge, and thought (though not always with this same use of terms) have a legacy” (2018: 8). They point out that it can be traced in the work of W. E. B. Dubois, Anna Julia Cooper, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon, characterising them as “only several examples of the decolonial thinkers visibly present in the early and mid-twentieth century”
(Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 8). They add that the list of Decolonial thinkers is long including Guaman Poma de Ayala, Ottobah Cugoano, Sojurner Truth, Mahatma Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, Dolores Cacuango, Amilcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, Steve Biko, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sylvia Wynter “to the many other racialized, genderized, and borderized decolonial thinkers whose herstories, transtories, and ourstories of thought have been made invisible by the racism and heteropatriarchy of the modern/colonial order” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 8).
The dialogue between Marxism and both postcolonial and decolonial approaches can be best appreciated in the work of Spivak. In her work around representation and the subaltern, Spivak, follows Marx (1963) and Gramsci (1971), to theorise subalternity as the condition where a social group is “removed from all lines of social mobility”, and lacks agency (2005: 477). She insists that the category of the subaltern does not simply equate to “the oppressed” but refers to those who have to grapple with the impossibility of representing themselves. In a larger sense, this has been seen as the situation of most subjects in the formerly colonized spaces now labouring under postcoloniality, as theorised by Hall (1996), and coloniality. The subaltern is almost always
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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).