Future of Postcolonial Studies: Globalization and Environmentalism

Future of Postcolonial Studies: Globalization and Environmentalism     

  Postcolonialism’s deep alliance with poststructuralism that “focuses on textual issues instead of historical issues” and reads colonialism through the paradigm of representation rather than any other form of socio-economic exploitation. Postcolonialism’s conceptualization of the migrant as the “archetype of a postcolonial identity” that prioritizes the notions of hybridity, ambivalence and in-betweenness, and is essentially based on the postcolonial elite. The temporal ambiguity of postcolonialism that celebrates the contemporary world as an emancipatory space for the free flow of culture and borderless-ness, whereas the materialist critics interpret current globalization through their concerns for neocolonialism.

Postcolonialism’s anti-colonial stand, primarily reached through the binaries between the colonizer and the colonized and evident in the early work of Fanon, Memmi and Mannoni, became redundant in later postcolonialism that was deeply influenced by the interrogations of binaries in poststructuralistm. Postcolonialism’s post-structural turn is epitomized by Bhaba’s concept of the hybridity, “‘hybridity' which is commonly defined as “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” . Thus the binaries of the Self and the Other, the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed were overshadowed by the concepts of in-betweenness, contact zones, cultural amalgamation, multiculturalism, which distinctly aim more at paradigms of synthesis and exchange rather than polarities.  Consequently, this also marks the alienation of postcolonialism from political concerns of anti-colonialism to a cultural concerns of identity and cultural diversity colonialism through “neocolonial” economic globalization and military occupations of the contemporary day and age.

Most of the criticism against postcolonialism as an ineffective tool to understand globalization stems from this critique of postcolonialism as too deeply entrenched in postmodernism. The crux of the issue lies in postcolonialism’s emphasis on ‘hybridity,’ which is identified as an essentially postmodern concept and celebrated as a condition of globalization. One of the most vocal voices against hybridity has been that of Aijaz Ahmad, who in his famous essay “The Politics Of Literary Postcoloniality” critiques postcolonialism for its insistence on postmodernism—a paradigm he describes as nothing but “apocalyptic anti-Marxism”(110). Ahmad’s objection to the postmodern leanings of postcolonial studies concerns its three major thematic concerns: 

a) “the theme of ’hybridity’, ’ambivalence’ and ’contingency’, as it surfaces especially in Bhabha’s writing but also much beyond; 

(b) the theme of the collapse of the nation-state as a horizon of politics; and 

(c) the theme of globalised, postmodern electronic culture, which is seen at times as a form of global entrapment and at other times as yielding the very pleasures of global hybridity”.

 Thus, for Ahmad, while the nation state increasingly gains in importance and continues to play a significant role especially in the context of state control over transnational finance, the celebration of globalization of culture through global electronic media is to foreground the “structural offensive of capital,” or “imperialist ideology” the when substantial proportions of the global population” are deprived of “conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry” . For Ahmad thus, the postcolonial critic claiming cultural hybridity, which he terms as “carnivalesque” , assumes an essentially elite position. Thus, the privileged migrant who can “live a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure” is totally dissociated from the class struggles and local resistances . Ahmad not only declares postcolonialism as incapable of addressing the crisis of contemporary global capitalism, he also echoes in Dirlik’s line of argument, that the postcolonial cultural critics are themselves consumers and producers of interchangeable, commodified cultures that represent the “depthlessness and whimsicality of postmodernism - the cultural logic of Late Capitalism”in Jameson’s superb phrase”

As long as globalization is conceived as a cultural rather than a structural experience, it functions as what Roland Robertson has called ‘‘a site of social theoretical interests, interpretative indulgence, or the display of world-ideological preferences’’; considered as an aggregate of local experiences in displacement rather than a structure patterned by causal relationships, the culture of globalization cannot account for ‘‘the global-human condition.

One of the ways through which the new postcolonial readings of contemporary literature can address the material conditions of globalization is through an understanding of the politics of production, dissemination and reception of the postcolonial texts as cultural commodities in the global literary market. Taking cues from the enquiries of the new historicists, it is important that postcolonialism also explores the historical context of the production of the text and its role as an ideological artifact in the way it responds to the tenets of neoliberal globalization. Thus, the new interventions in postcolonial literary studies, Milz argues, should not merely focus on texts that thematize the socio-economic-political realities of globalization but must go beyond the content of the text and rather understand “the relationship between literature and globalization within the larger context of contemporary power relations between nation-states, institutions, corporations, global markets, international trade and policy instruments  and so on.

The future of postcolonial studies :-

The field of Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s influential critique of Western constructions of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within the academy of the term “postcolonial” (sometimes hyphenated) was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then, the use of cognate terms “Commonwealth” and “Third World” that were used to describe the literature of Europe’s former colonies has become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of the field and the definition of the term “postcolonial,” in a very general sense, it is the study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period. The European empire is said to have held sway over more than 85% of the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control over several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its disintegration after the Second World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature and criticism in our own times.

[there is] a prevailing version of postcolonial studies in the United States that so embraces its aura of ‘new work’ and its dual allegiances to high theory and a rather reified, distanced, and monolithic ‘Third World literature’ that it largely estranges itself from the individual and collective histories of several important allied traditions such as American studies, Native-American studies, African-American studies, Asian-American studies, Latino studies, and Gay and Lesbian studies.(Cooppan 1999: 7)

Despite the fact that there are pressing political overlaps between disenfranchised peoples and groups across the world , there are also important differentials between them: Native Americans or African-Americans, however disenfranchised, are citizens of the most powerful nation-state in the world; on the other hand, at least within the United States, many immigrants from the third world are either from relatively well-off sections of society, or even when not, have participated in what Toni Morrison has called a ‘most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born black population’, an ugly process that makes solidarities as difficult as they are necessary.

The list of former colonies of European powers is a long one. They are divided into settler (eg. Australia, Canada) and non-settler countries (India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka). Countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe which were partially settled by colonial populations complicate even this simple division between settler and non-settler. The widely divergent experiences of these countries suggest that “postcolonial” is a very loose term. In strictly definitional terms, for instance, the United States might also be described as a postcolonial country, but it is not perceived as such because of its position of power in world politics in the present, its displacement of native American populations, and its annexation of other parts of the world in what may be seen as a form of colonization. For that matter, other settler countries such as Canada and Australia are sometimes omitted from the category “postcolonial” because of their relatively shorter struggle for independence, their loyalist tendencies toward the mother country which colonized them, and the absence of problems of racism or of the imposition of a foreign language. It could, however, be argued that the relationship between these countries to the mother country is often one of margin to center, making their experience relevant to a better understanding of colonialism.
The debate surrounding the status of settler countries as postcolonial suggests that issues in Postcolonial Studies often transcend the boundaries of strict definition. In a literal sense, “postcolonial” is that which has been preceded by colonization. The second college edition of The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “of, relating to, or being the time following the establishment of independence in a colony.” In practice, however, the term is used much more loosely. While the denotative definition suggests otherwise, it is not only the period after the departure of the imperial powers that concerns those in the field, but that before independence as well.
The formation of the colony through various mechanisms of control and the various stages in the development of anti-colonial nationalism interest many scholars in the field. By extension, sometimes temporal considerations give way to spatial ones (i.e. in an interest in the postcolony as a geographical space with a history prior or even external to the experience of colonization rather than in the postcolonial as a particular period) in that the cultural productions and social formations of the colony long before colonization are used to better understand the experience of colonization. Moreover, the “postcolonial” sometimes includes countries that have yet to achieve independence, or people in First World countries who are minorities, or even independent colonies that now contend with “neocolonial” forms of subjugation through expanding capitalism and globalization. In all of these senses, the “postcolonial,” rather than indicating only a specific and materially historical event, seems to describe the second half of the twentieth-century in general as a period in the aftermath of the heyday of colonialism. Even more generically, the “postcolonial” is used to signify a position against imperialism and Eurocentrism. Western ways of knowledge production and dissemination in the past and present then become objects of study for those seeking alternative means of expression. As the foregoing discussion suggests, the term thus yokes a diverse range of experiences, cultures, and problems; the resultant confusion is perhaps predictable.
The expansiveness of the “postcolonial” has given rise to lively debates. Even as some deplore its imprecision and lack of historical and material particularity, others argue that most former colonies are far from free of colonial influence or domination and so cannot be postcolonial in any genuine sense. In other words, the overhasty celebration of independence masks the march of neocolonialism in the guise of modernization and development in an age of increasing globalization and transnationalism; meanwhile, there are colonized countries that are still under foreign control. The emphasis on colonizer/colonized relations, moreover, obscures the operation of internal oppression within the colonies. Still others berate the tendency in the Western academy to be more receptive to postcolonial literature and theory that is compatible with postmodern formulations of hybridity, syncretization, and pastiche while ignoring the critical realism of writers more interested in the specifics of social and racial oppression. The lionization of diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, for instance, might be seen as a privileging of the transnational, migrant sensibility at the expense of more local struggles in the postcolony. Further, the rise of Postcolonial Studies at a time of growing transnational movements of capital, labor, and culture is viewed by some with suspicion in that it is thought to deflect attention away from the material realities of exploitation both in the First and the Third World.