Postcolonialism and its Problems

NICHOLAS A. PRESCOTT; SHAYLA LOCKE; MR; ETHAN DORVAL; AND

There are many problems with the term “postcolonialism”, as addressed by Anne McClintock
in her essay “The Angel of Progress, Pitfalls of the Term Post Colonialism”. “Post” implies a
coming after; therefore the term “postcolonialism” would imply that colonialism and its
effects are over. While colonies as we knew them seem to be a thing of the past, the effects of
colonialism still linger and greatly affect our world. These effects, while not quite “colonial”,
have derived from colonialism. First, colonialism is defined as settlers coming into a land,
setting up a colony, and taking advantage of the land while typically violently removing the
natives or forcing them to conform to their culture. This effectively destroys the colonized
country’s culture. While countries are not actively invading lands anymore, America and
other large countries are still using facets of colonialism in order to keep third world
countries under their power.

One form of a postcolonial system put into practice by colonizers is the idea of a deep settler
colony. With the “decolonization” of a territory from the colonizing country, deep settler
colonies maintain a continuing form of control from this original colonizing body. This can
manifest itself with the establishment of a remaining form of governmental control, or more
commonly with the influence of white settlers still being taken as a priority over the
landscape. One example of this is Zimbabwe, as one-third of the land of this country is still
controlled by British settlers. This goes on to our group’s understanding that the idea of being
a postcolonial nation is an inaccurate statement. With “post” implying the end of something,
we can understand that deep settler colonies keep the presence of colonialism still intact.

The second form of postcolonialism is a “break-away” colony. Unlike deep settler colonies,
breakaway colonies completely separate from their “mother” country. This country forms its
own form of independence from the other country though it can still maintain a trade or
market relationship with the mother country. Examples of break-away colonies are the US,
Australia, and Canada. All of them separated from their founding countries to create their
own “independent” countries. Although these countries may still have trading or market
relations with their mother countries, none of the trades are mandatory or required by the
mother country like you might see in deep settler colonies.

There are many other reasons why the term postcolonialism is problematic. The term
postcolonialism redirects global history in terms of the colonized and the colonizer. Even
more specifically, the word “post” creates an Eurocentric view of the world in which all the
world’s cultures are compared to the colonial powers. This centralizing of focus allows for
the plight of the individual, both globally and within those cultures participating in
colonialism, to go unnoticed. The proponents of postcolonialism argue that the phrase allows
for a more liberated and positive future for the nations that are considered to be postcolonial.
However, this grouping creates a fetishized exoticism of those “postcolonial” nations that
only increase racism and other impediments to equality on the global scale.

Source:
https://pressbooks.pub/opentheoryhandbook/chapter/postcolonialism-and-its-problems/
Postcolonial Theory in the 21st Century: Is the Past the
Future or Is the Future the Past? (February 2021):
Postcolonial Theory and Its Critics from Within.

Postcolonial theory has its critics from within its own ranks whose main criticisms are
fourfold. First, the assumption that colonialism is over and a postcolonial world is here does
not hold up. Second, postcolonialism’s methodological toolkit is too obsolete to deal with
emerging world problems. Third, the field’s selective geographic focus has omitted “problem
areas,” such as the Middle East. Fourth, postcolonialism’s stance on anti-colonial movements
and a struggle-based model of politics is contrary to revolutionary political practice. For these
reasons, many critics, including Watson and Wilder; Lazarus; Loomba, Kaul, Bunzl, Burton,
and Esty; and Timothy Brennan, in his texts, “Re-imagining Postcolonial Studies,” “The
Illusion of a Future,” and At Home in the World, declared postcolonial theory irrelevant to
the contemporary human condition.
In The Postcolonial Contemporary, Watson and Wilder claim that postcolonialism had
passed its prime by the close of the 1990s, whereas in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond,
Loomba et al. discover that its existing lifespan ran from the 1978 publication of
Said’s Orientalism to the 2001 publication of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Neil Lazarus meanwhile argues in The Postcolonial Unconscious that it had ceased to be a
“historical category” after the 1970s. In particular, these critics are tired of the field’s
infatuation with the past at the expense of the present—as elucidated by Watson and Wilder
in The Postcolonial Contemporary, Lazarus in The Postcolonial Unconscious, and Lazarus
and Priyamvada Gopal in their 2006 “Editorial” for After Iraq—its faith in the primacy of
“culture” over “politics” (Loomba et al., 2005), and its turn away from materiality to a self-
invented, dematerialized world. Readers can investigate this last topic in greater detail in
Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies,
Lazarus’s “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism” in The Postcolonial Unconscious,
Brennan’s At Home in the World, and Arif Dirlik’s 1994 essay in Critical Inquiry, “The
Postcolonial Aura.”
Many theorists, including Ball and Mattar, Lazarus, and Said, have objected to the
designation of postcolonial, arguing that colonialism continued in different forms, such as the
US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which Lazarus presents as evidence of neocolonialism
and neoimperialism in The Postcolonial Unconscious. Earlier, Gopal and Lazarus argued in
their 2006 editorial that the US invasion of Iraq was a paradigmatic event to have “a
fundamental change in the framing assumptions, organsing principles and intellectual habits
of the field” for the “contemporaneity of imperialism, colonialism[,] and capitalism” (p. 7).
They chastised Neil Larsen for his “misperception” that the decline of insurgent anticolonial
movements in the 1960s–70s signaled “an end of all forms of revolutionary political
practice,” as he advanced in his essay for the edited volume A Companion to Postcolonial
Studies, “Imperialism, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism” ( p. 7). Their ire was particularly
reserved for the hubris with which Hardt and Negri (2001) trumpeted that “imperialism is
over,” and that “no nation-state can today … form the center of an imperial project.” They
denounced this assertion as Negri and Hardt’s “characteristic mix of recklessness and sheer
intellectual perversity” (pp. 7-8).
Similarly, Ella Shohat, in “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’” (published in the journal Social
Text), and Joseph Massad, in “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony” (published in the collection The
Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies), reject postcolonialism as a designation, finding it
inapplicable to the Palestinian context. Shohat argues that it entails “the ‘ahistorical,
universalizing’ and ‘depoliticizing’ implications of … ‘the postcolonial condition’ and ‘post-
coloniality’” (p. 104), while Massad likewise contends that “‘the synchronicity of the colonial
and the postcolonial’ in the contemporary space of Israel/Palestine … renders the teleology
suggested by these designations incoherent” (p. 312). In his previously mentioned 1998
interview with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba, Edward Said likewise
remarks that the term postcolonialism falsely implies that colonialism is over, thereby
“distort[ing] or mask[ing] the prevalence of ‘neo-colonialism’ both ‘in [his] part of the world’
and in the activities of globalizing agents such as the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund” (p. 82).
Watson and Wilder are particularly critical of postcolonialism’s dismissal of Western
epistemologies as Orientalist modes of inquiry. They argue that the discipline has lagged far
behind major events of recent vintage, such as the Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab
Spring in the Middle East, to explore their true dynamics from a distance. These events, they
argue, challenge the theory’s basic premise of an East-West split (i.e., the inadequacies of
Western epistemologies) that assumes non-Western people cannot rise above their purported
ossified caste, class, racial, religious, and ethnic identities to forge an overarching solidarity,
and that to do so will require the deprovincializing of the Global South.
Watson and Wilder further stress the need to replace postcolonial theory’s “cultural turn”
with a “political turn” they call “the postcolonial contemporary.” Earlier, Loomba et al.
(2005) deemed the discipline’s assumptions and methodologies, invented in the 1970s,
inadequate for the challenges posed by the information age. In the same vein, Lazarus (2011)
notes that postcolonial theory’s dated assumptions and methods, which were meant to
comprehend the post-Soviet “dematerialized” world, were outmatched by the economic
challenges of the great recession of 2008, the severity of austerity programs in Europe, and
the parallel capitalist-imperialist material conditions.
Postcolonialism has also come under harsh scrutiny for its geographical bias, especially for
its near-total omission of the Middle East. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial
Middle East, coeditors Ball and Mattar offer a scathing critique of the field for this elision.
They write that even “as postcolonialists around the world sought to legitimate their work …
they tended to neglect the politics, societies and cultures of the region, and … even repress,
the Middle Eastern origins of their adopted models of colonial discourse, the
colonizer/colonized interface and cultural resistance” (p. 4).
Ball and Mattar hold up The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin, as “the classic statement of
the field’s self-definition.” As they demonstrate, it offers an exhaustive list of postcolonial
literatures and cultures comprising “those of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh,
Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore,
South Pacific Island countries … Sri Lanka, [and] the [US],” (p. 4), but conveniently neglects
those of the Middle East. They conclude that postcolonial theory is overdue for a renewed
interest in the Middle East, a region whose thinkers (Frantz Fanon, who was prominent in
Algeria; Albert Memmi from Tunisia; and Edward Said from Palestine and the Levant) were
the founding inspiration for postcolonial studies.
Many postcolonial theorists, including Lazarus, Ahmad, Parry, Brennan, and Dirlik,
disapproved of postcolonialism’s turn away from materiality to a self-invented,
dematerialized world. In his contribution to the The Edinburgh Companion to the
Postcolonial Middle East, Karim Mattar in particular focused on three key figures of the
discipline—Aijaz Ahmad, Homi Bhabha, and Bill Ashcroft—and called out their intended or
unintended “Mis/Readings and Mis/Appropriations” (p. 24) of Edward Said. As he argues,
these thinkers detached Said from the context of the Middle East and depoliticized his active
struggle for Palestinian rights.
In a similar critique, Lazarus devotes three chapters of The Political Unconscious to
postcolonialists’ “misreading” of Frantz Fanon, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said. He
chastises Homi Bhabha for writing a “flawed” foreword to the 2004 edition of The Wretched
of the Earth by Fanon and argues that “there is not only a yawning chasm, but active
opposition between the position staked out by Bhabha … and that articulated by Fanon” (p.
181). Finally, Lazarus laments that Jameson’s particular concept of the Third World is
villainized by Ahmad (in the essay “Jameson’s Rhetoric of ‘Otherness’ and the ‘National
Allegory’”), that Fanon’s passionate call to arms is ignored by Bhabha, and that Said’s
humanist stance and advocacy of the intellectual representative is conveniently forgotten by
most postcolonialists. In his sharpest observation, Lazarus reveals that “the world has …
typically been more adequately registered and rendered in postcolonial literature than
in postcolonial criticism” (p. 36).

Source: https://ala-choice.libguides.com/c.php?g=1117036&p=8151904