Colonialism and Culture

18 Colonialism and Culture Christopher Pinney It is ...too simple and reductive to argue that to control large parts of the world. These dif- everything in European or American culture ferent projects were driven at different times therefore prepares for or consolidates the grand by radically different motives: the Lockean idea of empire. It is also, however, historically inaccurate to ignore those tendencies – whether in natural law justification for the British expro- narrative, political theory, or pictorial technique – priation of American land, the ‘civilizing that enabled, encouraged, and otherwise assured mission’, and ‘whites bring death from afar’.2 the West’s readiness to assume and enjoy the These are some of the modalities, some of the experience of empire. (Said, 1994: pp. 95–96) European progenitors, some of the ideologies that are so deceptively concealed by the As colonialism has come to be seen as some- word ‘colonialism’. And to this we must thing other than just a question of economics add the stages on which all this complex and politics, its ‘cultural’ dimensions have drama was played out: the Americas, Asia, come to the fore. These include not only Australasia,Africa. To add further complexity, the obvious and central issue of the cultural colonialism refuses historiographic compart- dimensions of colonialism as a practice, mentalization: it rapidly unfolds into the but the fact that different colonialisms have history of the modern world: modernity and had their own cultures, the manner in globalization are intimately entangled with which colonialism has come to inform the colonialism. Beyond this we can consider, as metropolitan cultures of Europe, and the ways a coda, non-European empires. It is perhaps in which the colonial experience has itself one of the ironies of colonialism’s tenacity helped constitute the very notion of culture. that Euro-American scholars are reluctant to Colonialism’s variables are complex. We concede visibility to the colonies created by might consider the differences between trade, non-Europeans. conquest and settlement. The list of European In a moment, then, culture. But first, blood aspirants to empire is long: Spain, Portugal, and destruction. Any consideration of the the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, cultural technologies of colonial rule needs Belgium, Italy – even Sweden and Denmark.1 first to inscribe the more brutal technologies Some succeeded and others desired, but failed, on which certain colonial projects were built. [10:17 29/11/2007 5038-Bennett-Ch18.tex] Paper: a4 Job No: 5038 Bennett: The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis Page: 382 382–405 COLONIALISM AND CULTURE 383 Sven Lindquist provides an unforgettably is important not to repeat the forgetting powerful meditation on the technologies of which has characterized Leopold’s legacy, extermination perfected in colonial Africa, when we consider the cultural dimensions prior to their use in twentieth-century of colonialism: Lindqvist and Hochschild’s Europe.3 He recalls reading Conrad in the accounts must remain as moral spectres over 1940s, the ‘black shadows of disease and star- the rest of this discussion vation’ appearing as prophecy of twentieth- The new prominence given in various century death camps, and a refutation of the accounts to colonialism’s cultural dimensions claim for the ‘phenomenological uniqueness’ has also been attendant on the formal decay of the Holocaust. His point resonates with of colonialism as a world historical force: the passionate declaration by the poet of the more distant it has become the more Négritude Aimé Césaire: ‘cultural’ it is seen to have been. Colonialism conceived of as brute economic and political What the very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth oppression has ceded much ground to a vision century cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against humanity, not the of colonialism as a concatenation of ideas, humiliation of humanity itself, but the crime against categories, texts, images and exhibitions: the white man ...; it is the crime of having applied to instead of colonialism as the epiphenomenon Europe the colonialist actions as were borne till now of greed and the desire for conquest, dif- by the Arabs, the coolies of India, and the negroes ferent colonizing projects are increasingly of Africa. (cited by Ferro, 1997: p. x) approached through their complex cultural Adam Hochschild asks how it is that entanglements. the museums of Nazi Germany have been The plausibility of a singular Colonialism destroyed, Moscow’s Museum of the Rev- is now a thing of mere shreds and tatters, olution been utterly transformed and yet although its afterlife in notions of ‘colonial the Royal Museum of Africa at Tervuren worldview’, and ‘colonial discourse’ displays in Belgium remains packed with colonial a huge tenacity. Perhaps this should not sur- forgetting and lies. The museum celebrates prise us for, as Nicholas Thomas observes, we campaigns against ‘Arab’ slavers, shows need to theorize colonialism ‘but discussion black and white films of Pende masked may be obstructed if we assume that the dances, preserves spears and fish traps in glass word relates to any meaningful category or cases. But in this whole museum, swarming totality’ (Thomas, 1994: p. ix). The binary of with numerous visitors, there is not the Master and Slave has been displaced by the ‘slightest hint that millions of Congolese met complexities of the different European cul- unnatural deaths’ (Hochschild, 1999: p. 293). tural matrices that informed national empires When Leopold II was forced to officially cede and a growing awareness of the manner in his private killing fields in the Congo basin – which the transactions and ‘translations’in the the Congo Free State – to Belgium in 1908, the encounters between colonizers and colonized furnaces burnt for eight days incinerating the can hardly be reduced to a pure domain of records of his holocaust. Leopold, through power or economics. his private army in the Congo, the Force Although this enormous empirical diversity Publique, was responsible for the death of, at a makes it difficult to generalize about colonial- conservative estimate, ten million Congolese. ism itself, it remains possible to sketch certain The new historiography of colonialism has trajectories of thinking about colonialism. rightly reacted against what is sometimes In the next section I will consider differ- referred to as the ‘fatal impact’ thesis (the ent approaches to the cultural technologies reference here is to Moorhead’s popular 1966 associated with colonialism which vary in book of the same name), and has sought to the degree of efficacy that they grant to stress the ambivalence and incompleteness cultural practices in creating and sustaining of colonial projects, and the resilience of asymmetrical relations in colonial situations. those who were colonized.4 However, it Following this, the rest of this chapter will [10:17 29/11/2007 5038-Bennett-Ch18.tex] Paper: a4 Job No: 5038 Bennett: The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis Page: 383 382–405 384 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL ANALYSIS focus on vision, incarnated in a Foucauldian ‘became an object to be used in the political, fusion of visibility and power. This will be cultural and religious battles at the heart of explored as a theme in academic analysis, and [Indian] politics’ (Cohn, 1990: p. 250). Most then in the concluding part of the Chapter as importantly, Cohn demonstrated the precise an ongoing concern in visual arts practices mechanics through which objectifications predominantly by ‘fourth world’ artists. passed from ‘hand to hand’ and transformed worldviews. Hierarchy also appeared in the British appropriation of the ritual idioms of CULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES darbars, which they turned into spectacles OF COLONIALISM of submission and obedience. Following the Government of India Act of 1858 (which We might start by considering what we might ‘de-sacralized’ the Mughal Empire), British think of as ‘strong’ theories of the cultural rule faced the problem of ‘internalizing’ technologies of colonial rule (Dirks, 1996: itself within the Indian polity. Seeking to p. ix). These are predicated on the efficacy anchor their authority in the security of the of colonial ideology and practice.5 Initially past, Mughal court rituals of display and articulated as an alternative to ‘punishment’ incorporation became the model for a British paradigms of colonialism, which stressed neo-traditional idiom of power. Complex and military and economic dimensions, some of contradictory though this neo-feudal idiom these ‘disciplinary’6 approaches have para- was, it established a trope, to be affirmed or doxically come to mirror an earlier Imperial negated in the future: early Indian National History in the power they grant to the Congress meetings replicated its basic form; colonizer. Gandhi’s later political semiology directly The Nietzschean power/knowledge formu- repudiated it. lation quickly passed via Foucault into the Cohn’s concerns with the impact of British ‘cultural’ study of colonialism. The Saidean ‘systematizations’ of Indian cultural practice variant of this (that is, following the insights is taken up by Dirks, in his detailed ethno- of Edward W. Said) is undoubtedly the most history of a small south Indian polity and his celebrated and derided, but other important subsequent study of colonial understandings versions of this paradigm have also had of caste. Cohn, and subsequently Inden (1990) a great impact. Many

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