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Postcolonial theory denotes a field of political theory that questions the universal character of modernity and takes into account the fact of colonialism to understand the relationship between the global North and the global South. The term denotes a field of theoretical analysis that focuses on the effects of colonialism in the history of Asian and African independent nations, and the problems that colonial practices bring about in the process of nation-building. Postcolonial theory, without the hyphen, analyzes the effects of colonialism during and after colonial rule, and it cannot be reduced to the theoretical analysis vernacular of something occurring after the end of colonialism. There has been some discussion about the effects of colonialism on Latin American nations, but Latin American scholars hold that postcolonial theory should be a term that denotes only the Asian and African experience; in its stead they have introduced the concepts of coloniality of power and de/colonial theory to address Latin American colonial and post-colonial history.

Sources

Postcolonial theory finds its sources in two bodies of research developed in the 1970s and 1980s. First, it draws upon the discursive analyses of Indian history and the emergence of the subaltern classes in Indian historiography in the late 1970s and early 1980s that led to the creation of the Subaltern Studies Group; this included Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha Chaterjee, amongst others. These scholars questioned the kind of traditional history occurring and being taught in India and concluded that there was a need to take into account other experiences—those of the subaltern. By analyzing colonial subaltern experiences, they had to take into account British imperialism in the region and therefore the effects of colonialism on Indian identity. Second, Palestinian scholar Edward Said, using French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis on the discursive history of human sciences in his book The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (1969), analyzed the development of a particular field of studies, oriental studies. In 1978 in his book Orientalism, Said reached the conclusion that oriental studies told more about the West and its own self-perception than about the East. He held that orientalism is the discursive construction of a field of knowledge that is used to control and dominate the East (the Orient).

Poststructuralism And Memory

Poststructuralism, which is a political analysis of language and knowledge, is central in subaltern and postcolonial studies because it helps foster understanding of the knowledge and power practices of colonial subjects and how they have been discursively constructed. Indian scholar Ranajit Guha shows that subaltern classes are not present in the writing of the elites, but he holds that they can be found by taking into account what elites hide or what they oppress, a technique he calls writing in reverse. As American scholar John Beverley demonstrates, Guha means by this the prose of counter insurgency “not only the record contained in the nineteenth century colonial archive, but also the use, including the use in the present, of that archive to construct academic discourses (historical, ethnographic, literary, and so on) that purport to represent these peasant insurgencies and place them in a teleological narrative of state formation” (27).

The nineteenth-century archive, and the historical archive in general, becomes a central tool for remembering the past, not only in the historiographic sense but also as a history of the present, because as postcolonial scholar Homi Bhaba puts it, as quoted in Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory (1998), “Memory is the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural identity” (9).

In the 1990s, African scholar Valentin Mudimbe and Latin American scholars Arturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo built their theories about Africa, Latin America, and the developing countries on the foundations of Said’s work. These authors also have used anticolonial discourse, and anticolonial scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire have analyzed the colonial state to build a real post-colonial state and not one that replicates colonial domination but within the conditions of a politically independent state.

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, is one of the most important texts in anticolonial analyses and shows the importance of the concept of the nation to the idea of colonialism. Fanon writes from the perspective of the colonial subject in a struggle for liberation who is trying to think about the post-colonial period. What makes Fanon’s conception of the nation interesting is that he is not proposing a bourgeois or a Eurocentric nation. In his analysis, he shows that those bourgeois intellectuals who want solely to replace the colonizer cannot lead a nation. He also shows that it is precisely through the elimination of the bourgeoisie that the nation can be a reality. The real nation implies the participation of the people and the government made by themselves without intermediaries. For Fanon, the elites do not mediate the process of construction of a nation—it is not the elites’ nation, as in the European process, but the people’s nation.

Fanon shows how the colonizer likely dissolved the traditional forms of government and society existing in the colonized countries. The nation did not arise during colonization, but precisely in the moment in which the colonized identified themselves as oppressed and fought for their liberation. Fanon analyzes Algerian colonial history, and shows how post-colonial Algeria had a limited nation, for instance with regard to women’s rights. The process is completely different from the one in Europe, in which elites built their nations. For Fanon, it is in the struggle that the intellectual becomes part of the nation; it is the fight and not the discourse that makes the nation in underdeveloped countries. In this fight, nationhood and national culture emerges, and nationalism is put aside as a European product that needs to be eliminated.

Aimé Césaire

Writing from the perspective of a French Caribbean colonized subject, Aimé Césaire denounces the universalism of the European idea of knowledge, that is, the idea that the way European science works is the way scientific knowledge should be done, which Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez has called the hybris of the point zero. Césaire illustrates how European ideas are hegemonic in the composition of post-colonial nations and proposes in their stead a pluriversalism in which the history, ways of life, and knowledge of the colonized are taken into account in the development of new nations. According to Césaire, European universalism is racist and colonial, and political independence is not the end of colonialism but just a first step. Césaire proposes a nonracist and localized universalism that is the result not of a colonial imposition but rather of an intercultural dialogue among people who see themselves as equals.

Conclusion

Postcolonialism could then be defined as a theoretical and political position that embodies an active concept of intervention to end the oppressive conditions left by colonial domination. In that sense, the post of postcolonialism denotes a critique and a commitment to transnational social justice. It is an approach to colonial relations that recognizes the fact that colonialism is an important part of modern times that needs to be addressed and eliminated.

Bibliography:

Beverley, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. (Post-contemporary Interventions). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999
Castro-Gómez, Santiago. La hybris del punto cero. Bogotá, Columbia: Instituto Pensar, 2005.
La Poscolonialidad explicada a los niños. Bogotá, Coumbia: Universidad del Cauca e Instituto Pensar, 2005.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: MR, 1972.
Dube, Saurabh, ed. Pasados poscoloniales: Colección de ensayos sobre la nueva historia y etnografía de la India. Mexico City: Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios de Asia y África, 1999.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1990.
Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Grosfoguel, Ramón, and Margarita Cervantes, eds. The Modern/Colonial/ Capitalist-World System in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002.
Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Colonial Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Mudimbe,V.Y. Nations, Identities, Cultures. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University, 1994.
Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Blackwell, 2001.

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