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Actually Existing Postcolonialism Actually existing postcolonialism Bill Schwarz From the start, there has always been an ambiguity in metropolitan civilizations, apparently immune to the the academic literature on the postcolonial. Does the fact that the historical conditions which originally term ʻpostcolonialʼ refer to a historical process that gave them life have come to their end. Postcolonial has already occurred, such that we are currently living critiques have been most effective when they have in a historical epoch ʻafter colonialismʼ? Or does the been able to demonstrate this continuing afterlife of idea of the postcolonial refer not to the past but to colonial mentalities. the future; to a more intangible notion, encapsulating This, then, might seem to resolve the underlying a desired state of affairs in which postcolonial times ambiguity. On the one hand, an orthodox historio- are yet to come? Are we already postcolonial? Or have graphical solution is clearly too narrow and positivistic we yet to become so? in inclination. It canʼt convincingly be asserted that From a strict historiographical point of view the postcolonialism has ʻhappenedʼ. On the other, the answer might seem clear – and might explain, too, founding assumptions of postcolonial theory are based the impatience many postcolonial theorists seem to on a complex understanding of historical time, in experience with history. The classic age of colonial- which past, present and future (ʻdreaming forwardsʼ, ism indisputably has come to an end. Whatever the in Ernst Blochʼs conceptualization) work not as dis- continuing neocolonial or imperial dispositions of crete, isolated units, but as a complex, interacting global power, and whatever the concomitant uneven- unity. Yet postcolonial theorists have only ever been ness in the distribution of health, wealth and happi- weakly concerned with ʻwhat happenedʼ, and in prac- ness, colonialism on the old model – the rapacious tice overwhelmingly tend to work in a narrow (textual, annexation of territories – has not only ceased, but literary) vein. the majority of once-colonized states have themselves This resolutely anti- or ahistorical mode of thought won political sovereignty. We indeed inhabit a world is something I still find scandalous. But it is a com- ʻafterʼ colonialism. plaint heard often enough before and doesnʼt require But whatever the evident truth of historical reason- repeating here. The point, though, is not to admonish ing like this, it is clearly too hard-boiled to resolve the theorists because in their telling of this or that the dilemma. Although much postcolonial theory story they miss the fine texture of an incident, or may have been prompted by the momentous his- because historians can show them that what pertained torical experiences of Bandung, Algeria, Vietnam, in Northern Rhodesia didnʼt in Southern Rhodesia. To and by the epoch of decolonization they collectively suggest this is to imply that everyone should work like represent, carried too in the postcolonial critique is a historian – which truly is not a sensible or desirable the insistence that the internal mental structures of line to press. It is, rather, the tendency to attribute colonial power outlive their epoch. Habits of thought, to others (to historians) a primitive conception of from the most inconsequential practices of everyday historical time which is the source of the problem. life through to the most highly formalized systems Ironically it is the postcolonial theorists themselves of philosophical abstraction, still reproduce inherited who are most likely to flatten the complexities of the and often unseen colonial mentalities. In matters of relations between past and present into a series of race and ethnicity, most of all, these older systems of thin abstractions. In so doing they compromise their thought gather and accumulate, allowing – in our con- own best intentions. Indeed, it is nowadays historians, temporary postcolonial times – a bewildering variety with an entire historiographical literature devoted to of putatively racial truths to hold their ground in the the practices of memory and to the coexistence of 16 Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) competing historical times, who often appear the more appear new inventive popular forms, diasporic and conceptually sophisticated. It is the historians who are hybrid, symbolically canny, unpicking with unexpected thinking most deeply about memories of empire: not bravura inherited master-systems of power. This is – or not just – about the presence of obvious social a mode of argumentation which has proved easy to representations (fulminating against yet another bank traduce or parody – its most banal manifestations holiday television replay of Zulu), but in the more used to exemplify its most sophisticated. There are complex sense of memories which work by displace- critics from many quarters. Even so, the basic drift ment and repression, and which always possess a of this approach seems to me right. And it seems to mobility and quickness that compel them to disavow me that the figure who has thought this through in its what they are. most theoretically complex forms and who provides And the questions ʻAre we already…?ʼ and ʻHave it with the most convincing emancipatory grounding we yet to become…?ʼ are properly historical matters: is Stuart Hall. In effect, his post-Marxist reading of they canʼt be resolved conceptually, working only at postmodernism converged with, and is now largely a high level of abstraction. They suggest that what displaced by, his commitment to what is inadequately confronts us politically is less the postcolonial than but reasonably summarized as postcolonial critique. ʻactually existing postcolonialismʼ – a conceptual strat- Through Marxism, through various poststructuralist egy which carries known political antecedents. procedures, through postcolonialism comes a complex To think historically requires forsaking the singular recasting of the popular. Given Hallʼs characteristic abstraction – increasingly common – of ʻthe post- emphasis on the redemptive – popular and democratic colonialʼ. To think about divergent historical forms of – possibilities of the world decolonized, his concep- postcoloniality means working through the political tion of the postcolonial is one which looks to the configurations of specific conjunctures. As the example future, as the promise or possibility of better things to of ʻactually existing socialismʼ reminds us, the fusion come, albeit with anticipations in the present. Indeed of contradictory elements – progressive and regressive; he often appears to suggest that the break-up of the democratic and authoritarian; popular and adminis- colonial world released the potential for the creation tered – is ultimately what proves most significant. of new vernacular forms whose outcome we have yet In the large corpus of academic writing on the to witness. postcolonial there is the assumption that the work of We may also recall, however, that at a different conceptual critique is allied to a democratic and pop- moment in his public career Hall argued powerfully ular politics. At their best, these critiques have been the degree to which in the Thatcher years the Right grounded in a true sense of emancipation. Principally, had won a political victory on the terrain of popular again, this has turned on questions of race and eth- life and reconstituted its emotional economies. Thatch- nicity. Conceptual critique has endeavoured to prise erism, he indicated at one point, represented a new open the master-categories of race, in order to create instance of ʻregressive modernizationʼ. alternative systems of narration from which non-racial Perhaps only in metropolitan England was it neces- futures can be imagined. But it is not only a matter sary to point out the potentially regressive features of of race. Postcolonial theorists have sought to identify modernization. But, in much the same way, there is the interlocking capacities of colonial authority – in no reason to assume that the popular dimensions of all their manifestations, private as well as public – in the postcolonial are necessarily progressive (if we can which the will to colonize and conquer has been cast. recoup, for a moment, an older vocabulary). This has In this dimension of postcolonial theory lies the demo- proved obvious enough in the former colonies, where cratic promise underwriting its founding wager. the many horrors and barbarisms visited upon peoples This, in turn, is linked to the issue of the popular. who have recently freed themselves from colonialism Implicit in some of the theorizations is the belief have a variety of different causes, not all of which can that postcolonial situations signal the opening of be attributed to the machinations of the neocolonial new possibilities for popular life. This is a line of managers of the new global capitalist institutions. It argument which has been put with differing degrees has been less obvious in the commentaries on the of sophistication. At worst, it opens the way for an erstwhile metropolitan nations. unthinking, banal populism. At best (in my view) it Habits of mind are difficult to break. There is a kind is as smart as anything around. The basic trajecto- of academic common sense now that assumes post- ries of this approach are familiar: in opposition to colonialism to be synonymous with a larger democratic older structures of colonial authority (it is proposed) project, subverting the legacies of the colonial epoch. It Radical Philosophy 104 (November/December 2000) 17 may be, at some point, that this habit becomes a con- Empire has been lostʼ.1 For the next decade Powell scious intellectual choice, although I think I doubt the lived with this defeat, his inventive mind looking for wisdom of such a move. But while this habit of mind all manner of ways in which the empire, without its still holds, it is instructive to be reminded of contrary crowning jewel, might be revived. By the time of the historical experiences in which the bid to leave behind war with Egypt in 1956 he realized the game was up. the colonial epoch rested not on the dismantling of the ʻItʼs overʼ, was his new refrain.
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