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Postcolonial Studies After Foucault: Discourse, Discipline, Biopower, and Governmentality As Travelling Concepts

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Postcolonial Studies After Foucault: Discourse, Discipline, Biopower, and Governmentality As Travelling Concepts Postcolonial Studies After Foucault: Discourse, Discipline, Biopower, and Governmentality as Travelling Concepts Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie des Fachbereiches 05 der Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen vorgelegt von Thijs Willaert aus Gießen 2012 Dekan: Prof. dr. Magnus Huber 1. Berichterstatter: Prof. dr. Ansgar Nünning 2. Berichterstatter: Prof. dr. Theo D’haen Tag der Disputation: ................................. Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Postcolonial Studies After Foucault 1 2. Reading Concepts in Contexts 16 2.1. The Concept of Concept 2.2. Methodological Orientation: Analyzing Travelling Concepts in Three Steps 3. Discourse 28 3.1. Foucault and Orientalism : A Controversial Relationship 3.2. Foucault and Discourse: Archaeologies of Knowledge 3.2.1. Context: A Structuralist Approach to Knowledge 3.2.2. Cotext: Knowledge and its Relation to Power 3.2.3. Concept: Discourse as the Structure of Knowledge 3.3. Orientalism and Discourse: Exit Knowledge, Enter Identity, Exit Power, Enter Authority 3.3.1. Context: Between Marxism and Literary Studies 3.3.2. Cotext: A Double Conceptual Architecture 3.3.3. Concept: Double Trouble 3.4. Bhabha and Discourse: Further Down the Psychosocial Road 3.4.1. Context: Poststructuralism Meets Psychoanalysis 3.4.2. Cotext: Exit Knowledge, Enter Intersubjectivity 3.4.3. Concept: Discourse as the Structure of Intersubjective Relations 3.5. Conclusion: Knowledge Versus Identity, Authority, Intersubjectivity 4. Discipline 69 4.1. Foucault and Discipline: Reconceptualizing Power 4.1.1. Context: From Archaeology to Genealogy 4.1.2. Cotext: Three Rationalities of Power 4.1.3. Concept: Is Discipline a Totalizing Concept? 4.2. Mitchell and Discipline: Disciplinary Power as the Power of Modernity 4.2.1. Context: Understanding Modernity 4.2.2. Cotext: Foucault’s Microphysics Meet Derrida’s Metaphysics 4.2.3. Concept: A Non-Subjective Approach to Colonial Power 4.3. Kaplan and Discipline: Is Discipline Another Story of Difference? 4.3.1. Context: Discipline in India 4.3.2. Cotext: Against a Binary Architecture 4.3.3. Concept: Discipline, Eurocentrism, Resistance 4.4. Conclusion: Beyond Monolithic Accounts of Power 5. Biopolitics 109 5.1. Foucault and Biopolitics: The Management of the Population 5.1.1. Context: The History of Sexuality and Society Must Be Defended 5.1.2. Cotext: Sovereign and Disciplinary Power 5.1.3. Concept: Biopolitics and its Racism 5.2. Stoler and Biopolitics: Back to the Concept of Authority 5.2.1. Context: Foucault Meets Freud in Postcolonial Studies 5.2.2. Cotext: Identity and Authority Revisited 5.2.3. Concept: Biopolitics at the Service of Colonial Authority 5.3. Mbembe and Necropolitics: Biopolitics and the Colonial Distribution of Death 5.3.1. Context: Thinking Foucault and Agamben in Tandem 5.3.2. Cotext: ‘Sovereignty’ and its Layers of Meaning 5.3.3. Concept: Is Biopolitics Necropolitics? 5.4. Conclusion: Enter Biopolitics, Exit Identity? 6. Governmentality 150 6.1. Foucault and Governmentality: Power as the Art of Government 6.1.1. Context: The Security, Territory, Population Lectures 6.1.2. Cotext: Sovereignty, Once More 6.1.3. Concept: Governmentality and its Problems 6.2. David Scott’s “Colonial Governmentality”: The Art of Colonial Government 6.2.1. Context: Redefining the Problem of Colonialism 6.2.2. Cotext: Exit Sovereignty? 6.2.3. Concept: Governmentality as Modern Colonial Power 6.3. Duncan and Governmentality: Negotiating Scott’s Issues 6.3.1. Context: Broadening the Picture 6.3.2. Cotext: Bringing ‘Biopolitics’ Back In 6.3.3. Concept: Colonial Governmentality as a Rationale amongst Others 6.4. Conclusion: The Heterogeneity of Power 7. Conclusion: The Foucault Effect in Postcolonial Studies 191 Works Cited Abstract i Acknowledgements I could never have completed this project without the unrelenting support of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). The GCSC provided me not only with the financial support and the security of a three-year scholarship, but also with a stimulating and pleasant climate to work in. I want to thank Prof. dr. Nünning in particular, for believing in me from the moment we met, and for continuing to believe in my work when I no longer did. I thank Prof. dr. D’haen, for encouraging me to pursue a PhD abroad, and for maintaining a strong interest in the development of my work in spite of the distance that separates us. I also wish to express my gratitude to the people behind the International PhD Programme “Literatury and Cultural Studies” (IPP), and the members of the IPP Colloquium in particular, for never tiring of reading lengthy extracts and for providing the kind of feedback only friends can offer. I thank the people who have made me feel at home in Gießen and who have helped me with my work in one way or another. Lauren Greyson, thank you for editing my work – how many people know the joy of working with an editor that writes jokes in the margins? Katharina Zilles, thank you for translating the untranslatable – and for the hospitality! Andreas Hübner, thank you for the golf sessions. Wherever we all go, this is a beginning, not an end. I thank the friends I have had to leave behind, for taking away my fears: no matter how much time we spend apart, we will never be strangers. I thank my parents, my brother and my sister, for letting me go, and having me back. Evelyn, well, “I were but little [grateful] if I could say how much.” 1. Introduction: Postcolonial Studies After Foucault In 2007, data from the ISI Web of Science singled out Michel Foucault as the most cited author in the humanities. Whether in Literature, History, Anthropology, or almost any other discipline in the Humanities, the name of Foucault at times appears ubiquitous – a situation that is unlikely to change soon, given the continued generation of posthumous publications. 1 The relatively younger field of Postcolonial Studies forms no exception in this regard: champions and critics of Foucault alike have argued that his work has played a seminal role in the production of analyses of (de)colonization. Ann Laura Stoler has claimed that ‘no single analytic framework has saturated the field of colonial studies so completely over the last decade as that of Foucault’ (1995: 1). Similarly, Timothy Brennan has argued that ‘the greatest influence, theoretically speaking, on the postcolonial tendency of the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s has been that of Foucault’ (2006: 103). It is this effect of Foucault’s work on Postcolonial Studies that forms the subject of this study. In contrast to the starting points Stoler and Brennan imply, a more logical place to begin this analysis would be Edward Said’s Orientalism , published as early as 1978. Orientalism was not only the first attempt to bring the work of Foucault to bear on processes of colonization, it was also one of the first major texts to take Foucault’s work seriously and to render it visible in the Anglophone world. That should alert us to the fact that it is not just that Foucault’s ‘influence’ saturates the humanities, including Postcolonial Studies; rather, one may argue that Postcolonial Studies has actively contributed to the popularity of Foucault’s work. Breaking free of a model that posits Postcolonial Studies as a passive recipient of ‘saturation’ or ‘influence,’ the present study hopes to do justice to the intricate interrelations between Foucault and Postcolonial Studies. By focusing on the concepts of ‘discourse,’ ‘discipline,’ ‘biopower,’ and ‘governmentality,’ the following chapters will analyze how and why postcolonial scholars have appropriated and transformed a Foucauldian vocabulary in their efforts to conceptualize colonialism. These four concepts are not only central to Foucault’s work, they have also played an important role in the work of some key figures in postcolonial studies. It is this role we need to understand in order to make sense of the postcolonial interest in Foucault. 1 Starting with Society Must Be Defended in 2003, eight of the lecture series Foucault delivered yearly at the Collège de France have now been translated and published in English. The earliest lectures, from 1970 to 1973, have not been translated yet. 1 In seeking to analyze the interrelations between Foucault’s work and Postcolonial Studies, the focus of this undertaking lies not so much on the interrelations per se , as on the consequences of these interrelations for our understanding of Postcolonial Studies. However, if this description suggests a field called ‘Postcolonial Studies’ as a solid setting for this project, this impression is false. In fact, a closer look at the opening paragraphs of this text already reveals the difficulty in locating the referent of ‘Postcolonial Studies.’ Even though Orientalism never makes use of the term ‘postcolonial,’ it is not uncommon to consider Said’s publication as the constitutive event of Postcolonial Studies. 2 Another star of Postcolonial Studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, even explicitly criticizes the label, only to be subsumed under it after all. 3 The question of who is in and who is out of Postcolonial Studies is, from the outset, a fraught one. Timothy Brennan has observed that In spite of being clearly marked (if not segregated) within individual academic departments, postcolonial studies is a porous entity rather than a discrete field. It arose in the form of a political metaphorics rather than a bordered space, either "field" or "discipline". In disciplines like history and anthropology, postcolonial studies came into being under other names and without any claim to being a distinct subspecialty or field, as it did in English departments. (quoted in Loomba et al. 2005: 3) Thus, it is not only that certain texts have been considered part of Postcolonial Studies although they reject the label and its implications, but also that there are texts that do not contain such a rejection, and yet are not considered part of Postcolonial Studies in spite of their thematic similarities.
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