Editor's Column: the End of Postcolonial Theory ? A

1 2 2 . 3 ] Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory ? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel HATISTHESTATUSOFPOSTCOLONIALSTUDIESINTHEGEO- political present? In November 2006, Sidonie Smith and WJennifer Wenzel organized a panel discussion at the Uni- versity of Michigan to tackle this question and to honor Susie Tharu, an early member of the Subaltern Studies Group. Because sparks flew, because a controversial conversation emerged, I solicited posi- tion papers from the panelists—Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Tharu, and Wenzel—and also from Simon Gikandi, asking them to investigate a range of topics, in- cluding the potential exhaustion of postcolonialism as a paradigm; the importance of international, interdisciplinary conversations in considering histories of colonization and decolonization; and the absence of new paradigms for tackling fresh and continuing imperi- alisms. As postcolonial studies seizes its status as a field, can it adapt its methods to the crises of failed states and new sovereignties? What are the field’s contemporary achievements and challenges? Jennifer Wenzel Postcolonial studies today: what is the relation between the state of the field and the state of the world? If, as Arif Dirlik quips, the “‘postcolonial’ begin[s] . when Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe,” then perhaps it ends when every department has hired a postcolonialist (52). In the past two decades, postcolonial studies has been consolidated as a subfield of English studies in the United States, with new hiring in positions variously defined as postcolonial, world, anglophone, or non-Western literatures. This curric- Biographicalnotesaboutthecontribu- ular shift is, I think, irreversible, linked to broader challenges to the torsappearonpages650–51. canon by women writers and United States writers of color. “British [ © 2007 by the modern language association of america ] 633 634 Editor’scolumn [ PMLA and American literature” will no longer suf- the bald assertion of United States empire as fice to describe what English departments do. a fait accompli is the way in which it is in- But will “postcolonialism” endure as a frame- formed (however perversely) by Said’s critique work for interpreting this body of writing? of orientalist knowledge production and its Occurring, as it did, between the end of construction of reality. This empire is a post- the cold war and 9/11, can the institutional poststructuralist, postpostcolonial empire that consolidation of postcolonial studies be un- is able to name the effects of its own naming. derstood as a kind of peace dividend? The After 9/11, at the height of its institutional prospect of negotiated settlements in South consolidation, postcolonial studies was caught Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel-Palestine politically flat-footed, facing criticism from in the early 1990s lent some credence to the right and left. In his testimony to an educa- possibility of thinking after, or beyond, colo- tion committee of the United States House of nialism: European high imperialism’s most Representatives, the neoconservative Stanley intractable conflicts seemed on the verge of Kurtz blamed 9/11 on “Edward Said’s post- resolution, even as globalization and its emer- colonial theory.” Area studies after Oriental- gent critiques raised troubling new (or not so ism, Kurtz lamented, wrested knowledge from new) questions about structural inequality the service of power and left United States pol- and exploitation. icy makers in the dark about the Middle East If there is now a sense of exhaustion in and Islam. He portrayed postcolonial studies postcolonial studies, more is at stake than the as promoting an “extremist,” “anti-American” ebb and flow of academic fashion, the demand apologia for terrorism. Homi Bhabha, on the that tired trends make way for the next big other hand, declares, in his foreword to a new thing (ecocriticism? human rights?). Rather, translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the world has changed, and changed in ways the Earth, that we have been distracted by the that bear directly on the concerns of the field. wrong politics. “Coming to us from the dis- Empire—as theorized by boosters like tances of midcentury decolonization, Fanon’s Niall Ferguson rather than by critics like demand for a fair redistribution of rights and Edward Said—has been embraced in recent resources” can, Bhabha argued in 2004, re- years by those who shape United States pol- frame “a decade-long debate on social equity icy. Does the post-9/11 return to an expan- that has focused perhaps too exclusively on sionist, Manichaean foreign policy imply a the culture wars, the politics of identity, and failure of postcolonial studies? I do feel a cer- the politics of recognition” (xviii). This redis- tain despair in this regard: our critiques have covery of the wretched of the earth seems to proved inadequate to obstruct or reroute the add Bhabha’s voice to long-standing radical imperialist, racist logic of fighting over there critiques of postcolonial studies’ depoliticiz- to maintain power over here. ing celebrations of hybrid identities, cultural But this idea of a failure of postcolonial flows, and elite migrancy—celebrations that, studies seems too simple—and too optimis- it must be said, often took Bhabha’s work as a tic—in the light of the infamous dismissal point of departure. of the “reality-based community” by an un- Barbara Christian once observed that named Bush administration official in 2004: literary theory decenters the subject at the “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we very moment that subjectivity is claimed by create our own reality. And while you’re study- women and people of color. If the era of post- ing that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll colonial studies is over, it ends just when the act again, creating other new realities” (qtd. need for historically informed critiques of in Suskind 51). What’s more startling than imperialism could not be more urgent. Editor’scolumn 1 2 2 . 3 ] 635 Simon Gikandi production, is based on a series of errors Lately there has been a lot of talk about the and misunderstandings. I want to comment end of postcolonial theory. This kind of talk briefly on a few of those mistakes. reminds me of Martin Heidegger’s famous First, there is what I will call an episte- 1969 essay “The End of Philosophy and the mological error—namely, the confusion of Task of Thinking,” in which the German phi- postcolonial theory and the condition of post- losopher, reflecting on the question of being coloniality, the assumption that a theory developed to account for the place of the “other” and time, raised the issue of what it meant to subject in the narrative of European identity talk about the end of philosophy. “We under- has anything to do with “other” geographies stand the end of something too easily in the and their cultural traditions. To be fair, post- negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack colonial critics themselves have rarely made of continuation, perhaps even as decline and this error. Their primary works are marked impotence,” Heidegger noted. “In contrast, by a bifurcation of systems of knowledge what we say about the end of philosophy production and systems of reading, divided means the completion of metaphysics” (56). between the narrative of the other in the Eu- Our challenge here is to figure out what ropean narrative and the people who live in this talk about the end of postcolonial theory the other places—the global South—who can- means. Is the end of postcolonial theory a not claim to be other. Most of us are aware mere stopping, a symptom of its decline and of the distinction between the task of reading impotence? Or is this end the completion of a texts that emerge in the crisis of postimpe- theoretical project, whose work has become rial Europe and the task of accounting for the ensconced as another authorized version of narratives of decolonization in the nation- literary and cultural analysis? If postcolonial states that emerged after decolonization. theory has ended, what exactly ended, and Second, there is an apparent error in the what was its task? infrastructure that has been developed for For me, the presumed end or death of the reading of postcolonial cultural products, postcolonial theory, like all narratives of such as texts. It is a universally acknowledged endings, triggers an ambivalent response: it fact that postcolonial theory doesn’t make seems to designate, on one hand, an arrival sense to literary and cultural scholars outside into the institution of interpretation and, English. Or, to put it in more modest terms, on the other hand, an evacuation from the in order for postcolonial theory to make sense same edifice. To talk about the end of any to other linguistic and literary traditions, it theory is, of course, to recognize the place it has to be transformed or disfigured. The -An has institutionally come to occupy. Stories of glocentrism of postcolonial theory has often endings—the end of history, the end of phi- been explained in terms of the imperial im- losophy, the end of art—have functioned, at perative that underwrites English as a disci- least in the Western tradition, as authorized pline or field of study. But there is a simpler moments of closure and sublation. And that is explanation: postcolonial theory emerged as not a bad thing. The question that needs to be a reaction against the institutionalization of addressed is the meaning and function of the English as the discipline of empire. In its be- postcolonial thing that has reached its end, in ginnings, it was haunted by the legacy of the a nonpejorative sense.

Load more