POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM

POSTCOLONIAL
CRITICISM

S
S
ince the complex phenomenon of “postcolonialism” is rooted in the history of
imperialism, it is worth briefly looking at this history. The word imperialism
derives from the Latin imperium, which has numerous meanings including power,
authority, command, dominion, realm, and empire. Though imperialism is usually
understood as a strategy whereby a state aims to extend its control forcibly beyond its
own borders over other states and peoples, it should be remembered that such control
is usually not just military but economic and cultural. A ruling state will often impose
not only its own terms of trade, but also its own political ideals, its own cultural values,
and often its own language, upon a subject state.

The term imperialism as we know it dates back to the last half of the nineteenth
century. But the concept and practice is as old as civilization itself. Both the Western
world and the Eastern world have seen a series of vast empires which have extended
over vast territories, often in the name of bringing the blessings of their civilization
to the subject peoples who were regarded as barbarians. These include the Chinese
empires extending from the eleventh century bc to the tenth century after Christ; the
Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Persian empires; the empires of the
Greeks, which reached a climax with the conquests of Alexander the Great; the Roman
Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the various empires of Islam which lasted until
the early twentieth century.

In modern times, there have been at least three major phases of imperialism.
Between 1492 and the mid-eighteenth century, Spain and Portugal, England, France,
and the Netherlands established colonies and empires in the Americas, the East Indies,
and India. Then, between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I, there was an
immense scramble for imperialistic power between Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
and other nations. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than one fifth of the land
area of the world and a quarter of its population had been brought under the British
Empire: India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Burma, and the Sudan.
The next largest colonial power was France, whose possessions included Algeria, French
West Africa, Equatorial Africa, and Indochina. Germany, Italy, and Japan also entered
the race for colonies. In 1855 Belgium established the Belgian Congo in the heart of


part viii: the twentieth century

Africa, a colonization whose horrors were expressed in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1899). Finally, the periods during and after World War II saw a struggle involving the
countries just mentioned as well as a conflict between America and the communist
Soviet Union for extended control, power, and influence. Needless to say, these imperialistic
endeavors have survived into the present day in altered forms and with new
antagonists.

What concerns us is not only the history of imperialism itself but also the various
narratives of imperialism. The motives behind imperialism have usually been economic
(though liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo were skeptical
of imperialism’s economic benefits, arguing that it only benefited a small group but
never the nation as a whole). Marxists, especially Lenin and Bukharin, saw imperialism
as a late stage of capitalism, in which monopolistic home markets were forced to
subjugate foreign markets to accommodate their overproduction and surplus capital.
A second and related motive has been (and still is) the security of the home state. A
third motive is related to various versions of social Darwinism. Figures such as
Machiavelli, Bacon, Hitler, and Mussolini saw imperialism as part of the natural struggle
for survival. Like individuals, nations are in competition, and those endowed with
superior strength and gifts are able and fit to subjugate the weaker nations. Karl Pearson’s
“arguments” belong to this category. The final motive, propounded by figures such as
Rudyard Kipling (in poems such as “The White Man’s Burden”) and questioned by
writers such as Conrad, rests on moral grounds: imperialism is a means of bringing to
a subject people the blessings of a superior civilization, and liberating them from their
benighted ignorance. Clearly, much of this rationale rests on Western Enlightenment
notions of civilization and progress.

After the end of World War II in 1945 there occurred a large-scale process of
decolonization of the territories subjugated by most of the imperial powers (Britain,
France, the Netherlands, Belgium), with the significant exception of the Soviet Union
and the United States, beginning with the independence of India in 1947. The collapse
of the communist regimes in 1991 left America as the only major remaining colonial
power (though America itself had of course held the status of a colony). Indeed,
colonial struggle is hardly dead: it has continued until very recently in East Timor, and
still persists bitterly in Tibet, Taiwan, Kashmir, and the Middle East.1

Postcolonial literature and criticism arose both during and after the struggles of
many nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America (now referred to as the “tricontinent”
rather than the “third world”), and elsewhere for independence from colonial rule.
The year 1950 saw the publication of seminal texts of postcolonialism: Aimé Césaire’s
Discours sur le colonialisme, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. And in 1958
Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart. George Lamming’s The Pleasures
of Exile appeared in 1960 and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth followed in 1961.
According to Robert Young, the “founding moment” of postcolonial theory was
the journal the Tricontinental, launched by the Havan Tricontinental of 1966, which
“initiated the first global alliance of the peoples of the three continents against imperialism”
(Young, 5). Edward Said’s landmark work Orientalism appeared in 1978. More
recent work includes The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,
and Helen Tiffin and Gayatri Spivak’s The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), as well as
important work by Abdul JanMohamed, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, and Kwame


postcolonial criticism

Anthony Appiah. Robert Young sees postcolonialism as continuing to derive its inspiration
from the anti-colonial struggles of the colonial era. Anti-colonialism had many
of the characteristics commonly associated with postcolonialism such as “diaspora,
transnational migration and internationalism” (Young, 2). Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
also use the term postcolonial in a comprehensive sense, “to cover all the culture
affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day,”
on account of the “continuity of preoccupations” between the colonial and postcolonial
periods.2

Postcolonial criticism has embraced a number of aims: most fundamentally, to
reexamine the history of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized; to determine
the economic, political, and cultural impact of colonialism on both the colonized
peoples and the colonizing powers; to analyze the process of decolonization; and above
all, to participate in the goals of political liberation, which includes equal access to
material resources, the contestation of forms of domination, and the articulation of
political and cultural identities (Young, 11). Early voices of anti-imperialism stressed
the need to develop or return to indigenous literary traditions so as to exorcize their
cultural heritage of the specters of imperial domination. Other voices advocated an
adaptation of Western ideals toward their own political and cultural ends. The fundamental
framework of postcolonial thought has been furnished by the Marxist critique
of colonialism and imperialism, which has been adapted to their localized contexts by
thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Gayatri Spivak.

This struggle of postcolonial discourse extends over the domains of gender, race,
ethnicity, and class. Indeed, we should avoid the danger of treating either the “West”
or the “tricontinent” as homogeneous entities which can somehow be mutually
opposed. Such a rigid opposition overlooks the fact that class divisions and gender
oppression operate in both the West and in colonized nations. Many commentators
have observed that exploitation of workers occurred as much in Western countries as
in the areas that they subjugated. Equally, colonization benefited primarily a tiny portion
of the population of imperial nations. In this sense, colonialism is a phenomenon
internal to imperial nations as well as extending beyond their frontiers (Young, 8–9).
Hence, postcolonial discourse potentially embraces, and is intimately linked with, a
broad range of dialogues within the colonizing powers, addressing various forms
of “internal colonization” as treated by minority studies of various kinds such as
African-American, Native American, Latin American, and women’s studies. All of these
discourses have challenged the main streams of Western philosophy, literature, and
ideology. In this sense, the work of African-American critics such as Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., of African-American female novelists and poets, of commentators on Islam,
and even of theorists such as Fredric Jameson, is vitally linked to the multifarious
projects of postcolonialism.

One of these projects, or rather, one point of convergence of various postcolonial
projects has been the questioning and revaluation of the literary and cultural canon in
Western institutions, through what is loosely called “multiculturalism.” In explaining
the rise of multiculturalism, Paul Berman suggests that a new “postmodern” generation
of activists from the 1960s came into power in American universities. The year
1968 saw left-wing uprisings against the elements of liberal humanism: Western
democracy, rationalism, objectivity, individual autonomy. These were all considered to


part viii: the twentieth century

be slogans which concealed the society’s actual oppression of blacks, working-class
people, gays, women, as well as the imperialistic exploitation of third world countries.
These oppressive ideas, according to radicals, were embodied and reproduced in the
conventional canons of literature and philosophy which we offer to our students: the
literary tradition from Homer to T. S. Eliot and the philosophical spectrum from Plato
to logical positivism. Berman suggests that this reaction against the Western mainstream
tradition was fostered largely by the rise of French literary theory, which insisted that
the text was an indirect expression and often a justification of the prevailing power
structure. This structure was inevitably a hierarchy in which the voices of minorities,
women, and the working classes were suppressed. These voices now had to be heard.

The central conservative argument against multiculturalism was advanced by
Allan Bloom, Arthur Schlesinger, and others. It assumed, firstly, that in the past there
existed a period of consensus with regard to the aims of education, political ideals, and
moral values; secondly, that this consensus, which underlies the national identity of
America, is threatened by the cacophonic irreconcilable voices of multiculturalism.
Multiculturalists respond that this past consensus is imaginary: the educational
curricula adopted at various stages both in the United States and elsewhere have been
the products of conflicting political attitudes. In late nineteenth-century America,
conservatives, who desired a curriculum that would foster religious conformism and
discipline, were opposed by those, like the pragmatist John Dewey, who wished to
stress liberal arts, utility, and advanced research. In 1869, President Charles W. Eliot of
Harvard initiated a program of curricular reform, amid much controversy. Disciplines
such as history, sociology, and English itself struggled to gain admission into various
liberal arts curricula. In 1890 the Modern Language Association (MLA) witnessed a
heated debate over the relative merits of the classics and the moderns. And the 1920s
and 1930s saw a struggle to make American literature part of the English program.

A third assumption of conservatives is that great literature somehow conveys
“timeless truths”; Schlesinger states that history should be conducted as “disinterested
intellectual inquiry,” not as therapy; William Bennett, Lynne V. Cheney, and the
National Academies have all appealed to the notion of timeless truths. But, to speak in
such language is to dismiss the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism, existentialism,
historicism, hermeneutic theory, and psychoanalysis, which have attempted to situate
the notion of truth in historical, economic, and political contexts. Various theorists
have responded that, in fact, the appeal to “timeless truths” has always subserved a
political function. The growth of English literature was from the beginning imbued
with ideological motives. Arnold and subsequent professors at Oxford saw poetry as
the sole salvation for a mechanical civilization. The timeless truths of literature were
intended as a bulwark against rationalist and ideological dogma. Literature was to
“promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes,” to educate citizens as to their
duties, to inculcate national pride and moral values. And English was a pivotal part of
the imperialist effort. In 1834 Macaulay argued the merits of English as the medium of
instruction in India, stating: “I have never found one . . . who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia.” We can refrain from commenting on this except to add Macaulay’s own
subsequent statement that “I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic.” Such
statements reveal the depth to which constructions of Europe’s self-image, resting on


postcolonial criticism

the Enlightenment project of rationality, progress, civilization, and moral agency, were
premised on the positing of various forms of alterity or “otherness,” founded on polarized
images such as superstitiousness, backwardness, barbarism, moral incapacity, and
intellectual impoverishment.

In many areas of the globe – including the United States, where the study of English
literature often overbalances that of American writers – the English literary tradition
continues to act as a foundation and norm of value, with texts from other traditions
often being “incorporated” and viewed through analytical perspectives intrinsic to the
English heritage. In India, where English replaced Persian (the language of the former
rulers, the Mughals) as the official state language in 1835, English continues to exert a
pervasive influence on language, literature, and legal and political thought. It is in
profound recognition of this integral relationship between the literary canon and cultural
values that writers such as the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o have written essays
with such titles as “On the Abolition of the English Department” (1968), and important
texts such as Decolonizing the Mind (1986). Many writers, notably Chinua Achebe,
have struggled with the dilemma of expressing themselves in their own dialect, to
achieve an authentic rendering of their cultural situation and experience, or in English,
to reach a far wider audience. It should be noted also that what conventionally passes
as “English” is Southern Standard English, spoken by the middle classes in London and
the south of England. This model of English has effectively peripheralized the English
spoken not only in other parts of England but also in other areas of the world. Today,
there are innumerable varieties of English spoken in many countries, and only recently
has their expression in literature been institutionally acknowledged. These various
debates can now be examined in some of the major figures who have made contributions
to postcolonial criticism and theory.

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

A leading theorist and activist of third world struggle against colonial oppression,
Frantz Fanon was one of the most powerful voices of revolutionary thought in the
twentieth century. Born on the French island colony of Martinique, Fanon fought
against Nazism in France where he subsequently trained as a psychiatrist. His origins
and his experience in both Martinique and France exposed him to the issues of racism
and colonialism. An important influence on him was his teacher Aimé Césaire, a leader
of the so-called negritude movement which called for cultural separation rather than
assimilation of blacks. Fanon’s books included Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), translated
as Black Skin, White Masks (1967), which explored the psychological effects of
racism and colonialism.

In 1954, while Fanon was working as a psychiatrist in Algeria, the Algerians rebelled
against French rule. The violent struggle for Algerian independence was led by the
National Liberation Front. Fanon edited the Front’s newspaper and remained involved
in the revolution until his death in 1961. Independence was not achieved until 1962.
Fanon produced a number of writings connected with Algerian and African revolution;
his most comprehensive and influential work was Les Damnés de la terre (1961),


part viii: the twentieth century

translated as The Wretched of the Earth (1963). This now classic text analyzed the
conditions and requirements for effective anti-colonial revolution from a Marxist perspective,
modified somewhat to accommodate conditions specific to colonized nations.
It also articulated the connections between class and race. Indeed, Fanon points out
the utter difference in historical situation between the European bourgeois class, a
once revolutionary class which overturned feudalism, and the African bourgeoisie
emerging as successor to colonial rule. In an important chapter called “The Pitfalls of
National Consciousness,” Fanon points out the limitations of nationalist sentiment:
while such sentiment is an integral stage in the struggle for independence from colonial
rule, it proves to be an “empty shell.” The idea of the unified nation crumbles into precolonial
antagonisms based on race and tribe.

Fanon attributes this failure of national consciousness and truly national unity to
the deficiencies of what he calls the national middle class, the bourgeois class in the
subject nation that takes over power at the end of colonial rule.3 This class is underdeveloped:
it has little economic power or knowledge, it is not engaged in production
or invention or labor. Such is the narrow vision of this class that it equates “nationalization”
with “transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy
of the colonial period” (WE, 149–152). In other words, the national bourgeoisie appropriates
for itself the privileges formerly held by the colonial power. Indeed, according
to Fanon, this is precisely the “historic mission” of the new bourgeoisie: that of intermediary
between its own nation and imperial capitalism (WE, 152). This bourgeoisie is
historically stagnant, its entire existence absorbed in its identification with, and pandering
to, the Western bourgeoisie, “from whom it has learnt its lessons” (WE, 153). And
because the national bourgeoisie can provide no intellectual, political, or economic
leadership or enlightenment, national consciousness, and the loudly hailed promise of
African unity, dissolve into the regional, racial, and tribal conflict which existed before
colonial rule (WE, 158–159). Colonial powers, of course, exploit these divisions to the
fullest, and encourage, for example, the division of Africa into “White” and “Black”
Africa (north and south of the Sahara, respectively). White Africa is held to have a long
cultural tradition, and is seen as sharing in Greco-Roman civilization, whereas Black
Africa is looked on as “inert, brutal, uncivilized” (WE, 161). The national bourgeoisie
of each of these regions assimilates racist colonial philosophy long propagated by the
Western bourgeoisie; but unlike their Western counterparts, whose chauvinism wore
the mask of democratic and humanist ideals, the African bourgeoisie is devoid of any
humanist ideology (WE, 163).

Fanon’s overall point and conclusion is twofold: firstly, “the bourgeois phase in the
history of underdeveloped countries is a completely useless phase” (WE, 176). In Marxist
thought, the rise of the bourgeoisie is of course an integral and decisive stage in the
ultimate historical progress toward socialism and a classless society. Communism does
not merely sweep away the capitalist world: rather, it acknowledges the vast progress
made by the bourgeoisie over feudalism in economic, legal, political, and social terms.
The aim of communism, according to Marx, was to realize the promise of freedom,
democracy, and equality which was articulated but not fulfilled by the bourgeois class.
In stark contrast with the rich and revolutionary contributions of the Western bourgeoisie,
the national bourgeoisie of colonized countries has none of the virtues of its
counterparts in the West; it came to power in the name of a narrow nationalism which


postcolonial criticism

scarcely masked its pursuit of its own interests. As such, it must be opposed and
neutralized, with the aid of the “honest intellectuals” who truly desire revolutionary
change for the mass of people (WE, 177). The second point is that “a rapid step must
be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness.” By this,
Fanon means that nationalist sentiment must be enriched by a consciousness of social
and political needs, as framed by a humanistic outlook (WE, 203–204).

In another chapter entitled “On National Culture” (originally delivered as a talk in
1959), Fanon addresses the important connections between the struggle for freedom
and the various elements of culture, including literature and the arts. Colonialism, says
Fanon, entirely disrupts the cultural life of a conquered people. Moreover, every “effort
is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture ...to
recognize the unreality of his ‘nation,’ and, in the last extreme, the confused and
imperfect character of his own biological structure” (WE, 236). A culture under colonial
domination is a “contested culture,” whose destruction is systematically sought.
The native culture freezes into a defensive posture: there are no new developments or
initiatives, only a rigid adherence to “a hard core of culture” which is identified with
resistance to the colonial oppressor (WE, 238).

The various tensions caused by colonial exploitation – poverty, famine, cultural and
psychological emaciation – have their repercussions on the cultural plane. Gradually,
the progress of “national consciousness” among the people gives rise to substantial
changes in literary styles and themes: tragic and poetic styles give way to novels, short
stories, and essays; themes of hopelessness and resignation, once couched in florid
traditional expression, give way before stinging denunciation of the occupying power
and hard realistic exposure of the conditions of life. Eventually, even the audience for
literature changes: the intellectuals, who formerly wrote for the oppressor, now address
their own people. It is only when national consciousness reaches a certain stage of
maturity that we can speak of a national literature, a literature which takes up and
explores themes that are nationalist. This literature, says Fanon, is a “literature of
combat” because “it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation,”
and “molds the national consciousness” (WE, 240). Hence literature is not merely a
superstructural effect of economic struggle: it is instrumental in shaping the nation’s
conscious articulation of its own identity and the values at stake in that struggle.

A number of broad changes result in literature: in the oral tradition, for example,
stories, epics, and songs which followed traditional and now inert formulae are imbued
with new episodes, modernized struggles, and conflict. In Algeria, the epic reappeared,
as “an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value.”
And traditional methods of storytelling were overturned: instead of treating time-worn
themes, the storyteller “once more gives free reign to his imagination,” relating fresh
and topical episodes, interpreting the vast panorama of present political and psychological
phenomena, and presenting a new type of man – man free from the shackles of
colonialism. Significantly, as in Algeria, such literary developments often led to the
systematic arrest of the storytellers by the colonial power (WE, 241).

Fanon’s essential point is that, in the circumstance of colonial domination, the
“nation” is a necessary condition of culture. The “nation gathers together the various
indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture.” The struggle of a
colonized people to reestablish the sovereignty of their nation “constitutes the most


part viii: the twentieth century

complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists” (WE, 245). It is this struggle
that leaves behind a fundamentally different set of relations between men, marked
not only by the disappearance of colonialism but also by the disappearance of the
colonized man (WE, 246). What Fanon is stressing here is that, given that culture is the
expression of “national consciousness,” the stage of national identity cannot be somehow
bypassed, as we progress to a view of our general participation in humanity (WE,
247). Fanon insists that “it is at the heart of national consciousness that international
consciousness lives and grows” (WE, 247–248).

At the end of his book, Fanon stresses that the way forward for the colonized nations
of Africa and other parts of the globe lies not in the imitation of Europe but in the
working out of new schemes on the basis of the unity of humankind: “For Europe, for
ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work
out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (WE, 316). Much of what Fanon
says of African nations applies equally well to other colonized areas, including the
Indian subcontinent and much of the Middle East. His account of culture and national
consciousness, which implicates political struggle in the very fabric of literary production,
provides a revealing counterbalance to certain Western aesthetic attitudes which
have insisted on isolating literature from its social and political contexts, or at least, in
staking out an autonomous domain of purely literary analysis which might be complemented
by considerations of context as long as its borders remain uninfringed. In a
sense, this type of theory presupposes the luxury of political stability or stagnation, as
well as the luxury of the marginalization of literature: in a culture where literature has
no direct impact in the political sphere, there may well be justification for viewing the
literary sphere as a relatively autonomous and self-enclosed domain. This domain can
accommodate the most “radical” perspectives precisely because of its overall insulation
from the political and economic realms. In short, we can be as subversive as we wish in
poetry, because, unfortunately, it makes no difference. Such is the marginalization of
poetry in our culture that its lines of intersection with the mainstream political process
are delicate to the point of indiscernibility. Fanon’s account reminds us, however, that
there are cultures around the world – which in recent times have included much of the
Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, parts of Russia and Yugoslavia – where literature
is often directly and deeply involved in the political process, not merely as effect but as
cause, in a profoundly reciprocal relationship.

Edward Said (1935–2004)

Known as a literary and cultural theorist, Edward Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine.
Having attended schools in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Massachusetts, he received his BA
from Princeton in 1960 and his PhD from Harvard in 1964. From 1963 until his death
he was Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
He was also visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Yale.

Said’s thinking has embraced three broad imperatives: firstly, to articulate the
cultural position and task of the intellectual and literary critic. Said’s formulations in
this area, influenced by Foucault, provided a crucial impetus to the so-called New


postcolonial criticism

Historicism in the 1980s which was in part a reaction against the tendency of American
adherents of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction either to isolate
literature from its various contexts or to reduce those contexts to an indiscriminate
“textuality.” Said’s second concern has been to examine the historical production and
motivations of Western discourses about the Orient in general, and about Islam in
particular. Said’s own origin (or “beginning” as he would prefer) has defined a third,
more immediately political commitment: an attempt to bring to light and clarify the
Palestinian struggle to regain a homeland. Some regarded him as a model of the politically
engaged scholar while others viewed his enterprise as incoherent. This account of
Said’s work will pursue the three lines indicated above.

Beginnings (1975) was Said’s first influential book. Focusing on the question “What
is a beginning?,” Said traces the ramifications and diverse understandings of this concept
in history. Adapting insights from the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s
New Science (1744), Said distinguishes between “origin,” which is divine, mythical, and
privileged, and “beginning,” which is secular and humanly produced. An “origin,” as
in classical and neoclassical thought, is endowed with linear, dynastic, and chronological
eminence, centrally dominating what derives from it, whereas a beginning, especially
as embodied in much modern thought, encourages orders of dispersion, adjacency,
and complementarity.4 Said defines beginning as its own method, as a first step in the
intentional production of meaning, and as the production of difference from preexisting
traditions. If beginning comprises such an activity of subversion, it must be
informed by an inaugural logic which authorizes subsequent texts; it both enables
them and limits what is acceptable (Beginnings, 32–34). Drawing on insights of Vico,
Valéry, Nietzsche, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Husserl, and Foucault, Said argues that the
novel represents the major attempt in Western literary culture to give beginnings an
authorizing function in experience, art, and knowledge. In postmodernist literature,
beginning embodies an effort to achieve knowledge and art through a “violently transgressive”
language.

The problematics of language lie at the heart of “beginnings.” Given their exposure
of the hierarchical and often oppressive system of language, Said places Foucault
and Deleuze within the “adversary epistemological current” running through Vico,
Marx, Engels, Lukács, and Fanon. Following Foucault, he redefines writing as the act
of “taking hold” of language, which means beginning again rather than taking
up language at the point ordained by tradition. To do so is an act of discovery and
is indeed the “method” of “beginning,” which intends difference and engages in an
“other” production of meaning (Beginnings, 13, 378–379). The task for the intellectual
or critic is to combat institutional specialization, ideological professionalism, and a hierarchical
system of values which rewards traditional literary and cultural explanations
and discourages “beginning” critiques. Criticism should be a constant reexperiencing
of beginning, promoting not authority but non-coercive and communal activity
(Beginnings, 379–380).

But in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983),5 Said argues that critical theory
has retreated into a “labyrinth of textuality” whereby it betrays its “insurrectionary”
beginnings in the 1960s. Said sees even the “radical” factions of the intellectual establishment,
along with the traditional humanists, as having sold out to the “principle of noninterference”
and the triumph of the ethic of professionalism, a self-domestication he


part viii: the twentieth century

sees as concurrent with the rise of Reaganism (WTC, 3–4). He sees contemporary
criticism as an institution for publicly affirming the values of culture as understood in
a Eurocentric, dominative, and elitist sense. Having thereby lost touch with the “resistance
and heterogeneity of civil society,” criticism has effectively presided over its own
(paradoxically) cultural marginality and political irrelevance (WTC, 25–26). The notion
of the “text” thus dirempted from the “world” is what Said is at pains to combat.
He effectively redefines the text as “worldly,” as implication in real social and political
conditions in a number of ways: the most important feature of a text is the fact
of its production (WTC, 50). The specific conditions of a text’s production are constitutive
of its capacity to produce meaning; they constrain their own interpretation
by placing themselves, intervening in given ideological and aesthetic conjunctures.
Texts are marked by an interplay between their speech and the contours of its projected
reception (WTC, 39–40). Moreover, as texts dislodge and displace other texts,
they are essentially facts of power, not of democratic exchange (WTC, 45). Following
Foucault, Said rejects formulations of the discursive situation as one of democratic
equality or political neutrality but likens it to the relation between colonizer and
colonized, or oppressor and oppressed (WTC, 48–49). In short, “Texts are a system of
forces institutionalized by the reigning culture at some human cost to its various
components” (WTC, 53).

Following Foucault, Said sees culture as that which fixes the range of meanings of
“home,” “belonging,” and “community”; beyond this is anarchy and homelessness.
It is within this outright opposition that Said, as he had already hinted in Beginnings,
wishes to carve out a space within civil society for the intellectual and critic, a space of
“in-betweenness.” Echoing Arnold, whose ultimate identification of culture with state
authority he rejects, Said suggests that the “function of criticism at the present time” is
to stand between the dominant culture and the totalizing forms of critical systems
(WTC, 5). Said articulates this in terms of the notions of filiation (which embodies
given ties of family, home, class, and country) and affiliation (an acquired allegiance,
part voluntary and part historically determined, of critical consciousness to a system of
values). Much modernist literature, Said argues, having experienced the failure of filiative
ties, turned to compensatory affiliation with something broader than the parameters of
their original situation in the world. Examples are Joyce and Eliot who both shed their
original ties of family, race, and religion to affiliate themselves, from an exilic position,
with broader visions of the world. The kind of criticism Said advocates lies precisely in
its difference from other cultural activities and from totalizing systems of thought and
method. This “secular” criticism focuses on local and worldly situations and opposes
itself to the production of massive hermetic systems (WTC, 26, 291). It must combat
every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; to promote non-coercive knowledge
in the interests of human freedom and to articulate possible alternatives to the prevailing
orthodoxies of culture and system (WTC, 29–30). Said regards Vico and Swift
as important prototypes of the oppositional stance. His characterization of Swift as
“anarchic in his sense of the range of alternatives to the status quo” (WTC, 27) might
well be applied to himself.

Interestingly, Said traces the emergence of Eurocentrism itself to Renan’s transference
of authority from sacred, divinely authorized texts to an ethnocentric philology
which diminished the status of both Semitic languages and the “Orient,” a theme


postcolonial criticism

which is developed in Orientalism (1978).6 Here, Said examines the vast tradition of
Western “constructions” of the Orient. This tradition of Orientalism has been a “corporate
institution” for coming to terms with the Orient, for authorizing views about it
and ruling over it. Central to Said’s analysis is that the Orient is actually a production
of Western discourse, a means of self-definition of Western culture as well as of
justifying imperial domination of Oriental peoples (Orientalism, 3). Said concentrates
on the modern history of British, French, and American engagement with primarily
the Islamic world. Given his crucial treatment of Orientalism as a discourse, his aim
is not to show that this politically motivated edifice of language somehow distorts a
“real” Orient, but rather to show that it is indeed a language, with an internal consistency,
motivation, and capacity for representation resting on a relationship of power
and hegemony over the Orient.

The book is also an attempt to display Orientalism as but one complex example of
the politically and ideologically rooted nature of all discourse, even those forms which
have been veiled under the mantle of innocence. Thus, “liberal cultural heroes” such as
Mill, Arnold, and Carlyle all had views, usually overlooked, on race and imperialism
(Orientalism, 14). Using a vast range of examples, from Aeschylus’ play The Persians
through Macaulay, Renan, and Marx to Gustave von Grunbaum and the Cambridge
History of Islam, Said attempts to examine the stereotypes and distortions through
which Islam and the East have been consumed. These stereotypes include: Islam as a
heretical imitation of Christianity (Orientalism, 65–66); the exotic sexuality of the
Oriental woman (Orientalism, 187); Islam as a uniquely unitary phenomenon and as a
culture incapable of innovation (Orientalism, 296–298). Also considering America’s
twentieth-century relations with the Arab world, Said suggests that the electronic
postmodern world reinforces dehumanized portrayals of the Arabs, a tendency both
aggravated by the Arab–Israeli conflict and intensely felt by Said himself as a Palestinian.

In The Question of Palestine (1979) Said, himself a member of the Palestine National
Council, attempts to place before the American reader a historical account of the
Palestinian experience and plight. Covering Islam (1981) aims to reveal how media
representations “produce” Islam, and, in reducing its adherents to anti-American
fanatics and threatening fundamentalists, continue the centuries-old function of
Western self-definition. Said’s subsequent book Culture and Imperialism (1993) is
effectively a continuation of the themes raised in Orientalism in that it examines in
a more focused manner the power relations between Occident and Orient hinted at
in the earlier work. Said’s uniqueness as a cultural critic lay in the range of his interests,
which allowed him to explore the nexus of connections between literature, politics,
and religion in a global rather than national or Eurocentric context.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942)

Born in Calcutta, India, Gayatri Spivak was educated at both Indian and American
universities; one of her teachers at Cornell was Paul de Man. She is known for her
translation of, and lengthy preface to, Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and her central
concern with the structures of colonialism, the postcolonial subject, and the possibility


part viii: the twentieth century

of postcolonial discourse draws on deconstructive practices, the feminist movement,
Marxism, and Freud. In her influential and controversial essay “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” (1983), later expanded in her book Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), she
addresses precisely this issue of whether peoples in subordinate, colonized positions
are able to achieve a voice. A “subaltern” refers to an officer in a subordinate position;
the term was used by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to refer to the working
masses that needed to be organized by left-wing intellectuals into a politically self-
conscious force. The term as Spivak uses it also insinuates the “Subaltern Studies
Group” in India, a radical group which attempted to articulate and give voice to the
struggles of the oppressed peasants of the Indian subcontinent.

In broad terms, Spivak sees the project of colonialism as characterized by what
Foucault had called “epistemic violence,” the imposition of a given set of beliefs over
another. Such violence, she says, marked the “remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and
heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.”7 Spivak suggests
that this epistemic violence, perpetrated in colonized nations, was a corollary of the
epistemic overhaul in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, of which Foucault
speaks: she is both extending Foucault’s own argument and situating it within a larger,
global, context, suggesting that the narrative of political and economic development
in Europe was part of a broader narrative that included imperialism and the definition
of Europe in relation to the colonial other. Certain knowledges in both Europe and
colonized countries were subjugated or “disqualified as inadequate” (CPCR, 267). Spivak
gives as an example the British reformulations of the Hindu legal system. Spivak in fact
cites a statement from the English historian and statesman Thomas Babington
Macaulay’s notorious “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), a statement which is
worth requoting in full:

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and
the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the
vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed
from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying
knowledge to the great mass of the population. (CPCR, 268)

These words are all the more chilling in the light of their continued application in
the transformed imperialist economy of the modern world. Nothing has changed in
strategy, merely the name of the new rulers. Spivak’s point is the epistemic violence
enshrined in the imperialist legal project was equally enshrined in the project of
cultural imposition. Her underlying point is that such violence perpetuated – and was
perhaps underlain by – the project of establishing “one explanation and narrative of
reality . . . as the normative one” (CPCR, 267–268).

However, as Spivak has already said, this uniform project was in fact itself heterogeneous,
as Foucault had pointed out concerning its operations in Europe. She also
points out that “the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogenous” (CPCR,
270). Hence she rejects any possibility of an outright opposition between colonizer and
colonized, oppressor and victim. Even radical intellectuals, she explains, who would
speak on behalf of the oppressed, effectively romanticize and essentialize the other:


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possibly, she says, “the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the
Other as the Self ’s shadow” (CPCR, 266). The temptation is great simply to view the
other as a projection or shadow of oneself: an example might be a Western feminist
imposing her schema for liberation onto women in colonized areas, a procedure that
might overlook the culturally specific character of both oppression and liberation.
Such a binary opposition overlooks and perpetuates the complicity between radical
discourses and the colonial discourses they seek to undermine. Spivak even sees the
Subaltern Studies Group in India as tainted by an essentialist agenda in some ways, as,
for example, in this group’s endeavor to characterize “subaltern consciousness” (CPCR,
271–272). Spivak astutely remarks that, although many radical discourses, such as
those of feminism, are opposed to essentialism and positivism, a “stringent binary
opposition between positivism/essentialism . . . may be spurious” since it represses “the
ambiguous complicity between essentialism and critiques of positivism.” Her statement
here is supported by the insight that the notion of essence pervades the work of
Hegel, the modern inaugurator of “the work of the negative,” and is recognized by
Marx as persisting within the dialectic (CPCR, 282).

In this chapter, Spivak recounts a powerful story of a young woman in India,
Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, who committed suicide in 1926 on account of her inability to
perform a political assassination that had been assigned to her. Spivak notes that she
timed this suicide to occur when she was menstruating so as to deter what would be
the usual diagnosis of her act: that she had become pregnant. This suicide, says Spivak,
was “an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide.” And
yet, when Spivak herself questioned the girl’s nieces about the incident, they “recalled”
it as a “case of illicit love” (CPCR, 306–307). Spivak was so unnerved by this “failure of
communication” that she emphatically stated (in her first version of this essay) that
“the subaltern cannot speak.” While she calls her own remark “inadvisable,” she proceeds
to point out how Bhubaneswari’s own “emancipated” granddaughters actually
continued the process of her silencing: one of them became a US immigrant and
attained an executive position in a transnational company. Hence, “Bhubaneswari had
fought for national liberation. Her great grandniece works for the New Empire. This
too is a historical silencing of the subaltern” (CPCR, 311). Spivak’s point is that the
new empire, the new imperialism, had become global, and that complicity within its
circuits and its operations is inevitable. While she recognizes that the speech of the
subaltern girl was made to speak in her own (Spivak’s) text, even radical intellectuals
are complicit in the muting of subaltern voices (CPCR, 309–310).

Yet Spivak’s stance is not entirely negative. To some extent, we must undertake an
“unlearning” project, acknowledging our participation, even complicity, in the objects
of our own investigation and impugnment (CPCR, 284). Elsewhere, Spivak talks
usefully of a “strategic” essentialism whereby we can use essentialist language in a
self-conscious way for practical, political purposes. In this essay she makes a number
of suggestions that might prevent one’s own position being indeterminate and merely
a negative critique. She suggests that intellectuals recognize the importance of the
economic sphere but without investing it with any kind of absolute or ultimate
explanatory power (CPCR, 267). She adds that participation in the political process –
access to citizenship, becoming a voter – will help to mobilize the subaltern on “the
long road to hegemony” (CPCR, 310).


part viii: the twentieth century

Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949)

Like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha extends certain tenets of poststructuralism into
discourses about colonialism, nationality, and culture. These tenets include a challenging
of the notion of fixed identity, the undermining of binary oppositions, and an
emphasis on language and discourse – together with the power relations in which these
are imbricated – as underlying our understanding of cultural phenomena. But, as in
the case of Spivak, this “extension” is not a simple extrapolation of poststructuralist
principles in their purity to colonial subject matter; the process of extension itself is
used to display the limits of these principles and the altered nature of their applicability.
Bhabha takes some of the foregoing ideas from Derrida; from Mikhail Bakhtin
he draws the notion of the “dialogic” (indicating the mutuality of a relationship) in
order to characterize the connection between colonizer and colonized; he draws also
on Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary work on colonialism, as well as on the concept of
“nation” as defined in Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities (1983).

The notion of “hybridity” is central to Bhabha’s work in challenging notions of
identity, culture, and nation as coherent and unified entities that exhibit a linear historical
development. Hybridity expresses a state of “in betweenness,” as in a person
who stands between two cultures. The concept is embodied in Bhabha’s own life (as in
the lives of many intellectuals from colonial nations who have been raised in Western
institutions): born into a Pharsi community in Bombay, India, he was educated both
in his native country and at Oxford University; he subsequently taught at universities
in England and America, and now teaches at Harvard.

In his important essay “The Commitment to Theory” (1989), Bhabha attempts to
respond to recent charges that literary and cultural theory (including deconstruction,
Lacanianism, and the various tendencies of poststructuralism) suffers from at least
two crippling defects: it is inscribed within, and complicit with, a Eurocentric and
imperialist discourse; and, as such, it is insulated from the real concerns, the “historical
exigencies and tragedies” of third world peoples.8 Bhabha sees this “binarism of theory
vs. politics” as reproducing, in mirror image, the “ahistorical nineteenth century polarity
of Orient and Occident which, in the name of progress, unleashed the exclusionary
imperialist ideologies of self and other.” It is a “mirror image” because, in the modern
situation, it is depoliticized Western theory itself (rather than the Orient) which is the
“Other.” Bhabha questions this binarism: “must we always polarize in order to polemicize?”
Must we, he asks, simply invert the relation of oppressor and oppressed (LC, 19)?

Bhabha himself is in no doubt about the continued aspirations of imperialism, as
it presses into a “neo-imperialist” phase: “there is a sharp growth in a new Anglo-
American nationalism which increasingly articulates its economic and military power
in political acts that express a neo-imperialist disregard for the independence and
autonomy of peoples and places in the Third World.” Bhabha cites, as recent examples,
Britain’s war against Argentina over the Falklands in 1982 and the first Gulf War of
1991. Such economic and political domination, he adds, “has a profound hegemonic
influence on the information orders of the Western world, its popular media and its
specialized institutions and academics” (LC, 20). There is a tacit admission here that
Western academic institutions will fall to some extent under the sway of the Western


postcolonial criticism

ideology of political dominance. Nonetheless, he raises the question as it concerns the
“new” languages of theoretical critique in the West: “Are the interests of ‘Western’
theory necessarily collusive with the hegemonic role of the West as a power bloc? Is
the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western
elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power–knowledge
equation?” (LC, 20–21).

Bhabha reposes these questions within the specific perspective of postcolonial discourse:
he asks what the function of “a committed theoretical perspective might be,
once the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world is taken as the
paradigmatic place of departure” (LC, 21). In addressing this, Bhabha begins by rejecting
the opposition between “theory” and “activism” since, he argues, they are both
“forms of discourse” which “produce rather than reflect their objects of reference”
(LC, 21). In other words, as Bhabha explains using insights from the British cultural
critic Stuart Hall, political positions cannot be charted out in advance as true or false,
progressive or reactionary, bourgeois or radical, prior to the specific conditions in
which they emerge. In this sense, they are marked by the hybridity and ambivalence of
“the process of emergence itself ” (LC, 22). This is a way of acknowledging “the force of
writing, its metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse, as a productive matrix which
defines the ‘social’ and makes it available as an objective of and for, action” (LC, 23).
Bhabha is here using “writing” in a Derridean sense, signifying the intrinsically metaphorical
nature of language and discourse, their inability to make statements which are
absolutely clear and unequivocal since they are constituted by a vast network of signifiers
in which any given position is structured by what is outside of it, this externality
infecting with its diversity and ambivalence any presumed internal coherence of the
position itself. Bhabha cites J. S. Mill’s essay “On Liberty,” which describes knowledge
and a given political stance as arising only through continual self-questioning and
confronting at each stage of its articulation other stances that are opposed to it. As
Bhabha interprets it, Mill sees “the political as a form of debate and dialogue”; the
political is dialogic not by abstractly acknowledging other perspectives and then circumventing
them but by recognizing that its own perspective, recognizing its own
limitations in their light, is at every point riven by ambivalence. It is this discursive
ambivalence in the subject of enunciation itself that marks the truly public and political
(LC, 24). This type of political “negotiation,” says Bhabha, “goes beyond the unsettling
of the essentialism or logocentrism of a received political tradition, in the name
of an abstract free play of the signifier” (LC, 25).

Hence, the language of political critique is effective not because it maintains rigid
oppositions between terms such as master and slave but because it “overcomes the
given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity”
which engages in the construction of a new (rather than preconceived) political object
and endeavor. Such a language will be dialectical without recourse to “a teleological or
transcendent History . . . the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory
and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and
destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory
and practical-political reason.” Bhabha notes that there can be “no simplistic, essentialist
opposition between ideological miscognition and revolutionary truth.” Between
these is a “historical and discursive différance” (LC, 25). Hence our political priorities


part viii: the twentieth century

and referents – such as the people, class struggle, gender difference – “are not there in
some primordial, naturalistic sense. Nor do they reflect a unitary or homogeneous
political object” (LC, 26). All of this makes us recognize, claims Bhabha, that the
“question of commitment” is “complex and difficult.” This should not lead, however,
to quietism or inertia, but to a demand that “questions of organization are theorized
and socialist theory is ‘organized’ ” (LC, 26).

As an example of this refusal of outright opposition, Bhabha cites the miners’ strike
in Thatcher’s Britain of 1984–1985. Originally this conflict might have been seen in the
received terminology of a class struggle. But when miners’ wives were interviewed, they
began to question their roles within the community and family, and challenged elements
of the very culture they were ostensibly defending. This circumstance, says
Bhabha, displays the “importance of the hybrid moment of political change,” whereby
there was a rearticulation of the terms of the struggle that was “neither the One (unitary
working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides, which
contests the terms and territories of both. There is a negotiation between gender and
class.” Bhabha sees in Stuart Hall’s suggestion that “the British Labour Party should
seek to produce a socialist alliance among progressive forces that are widely dispersed
and distributed across a range of class, culture and occupational forces” as an acknowledgment
of the “historical necessity” of his own notion of “hybridity” (LC, 28).

Returning to his original question of whether critical theory is “Western,” Bhabha
sees this as “a designation of institutional power and ideological Eurocentricity.” He
acknowledges that much European theory, having “opened up the chasm of cultural
difference,” uses the metaphor of Otherness to “contain the effects of difference . . . the
Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of
articulation.” Being analyzed and showcased, “the Other loses its power to signify, to
negate . . . to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse.” In these ways,
critical theory has reproduced “a relation of domination” (LC, 31). But Bhabha chooses
to distinguish between the institutional history of critical theory and “its conceptual
potential for change and innovation.” He cites Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault as opening
up other possibilities of understanding history, the relations of production, and the
ambivalent structure of subjectivity (LC, 31–32). Many poststructuralist ideas, he notes,
are “themselves opposed to Enlightenment humanism and aesthetics. They constitute
no less than a deconstruction of the moment of the modern” (LC, 32).

According to Bhabha, such a revision of the history of critical theory is informed by
a notion of “cultural difference” (rather than cultural “diversity,” which embodies a
received and static recognition), which foregrounds the ambivalence of even Western
cultural authority in its own moment of enunciation or articulation. This notion
of difference “problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and
modernity” (LC, 35). It harbors the recognition that cultures “are never unitary in
themselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other. It embodies an
acknowledgment that the “act of cultural enunciation . . . is crossed by the différance of
writing.” The pact of interpretation, says Bhabha, is never just an act of communication
between two interlocutors; these two “places” must pass through a “Third Space,
which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication
of the utterance” (LC, 36). This Third Space, “though unrepresentable in itself,” makes
meaning and reference “an ambivalent process,” which challenges “our sense of the


postcolonial criticism

historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the
originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People.” We must recognize,
then, the “hybridity” of all cultural statements. Fanon recognized, says Bhabha, that
those who initiate revolutionary change “are themselves the bearers of a hybrid identity”
(LC, 38). By way of example, Bhabha cites the Algerian struggle for independence,
which “in the moment of liberatory struggle” destroyed many elements of the very
nationalist tradition that had opposed colonial cultural imposition.

In closing, Bhabha claims that theoretical recognition of “the split-space of enunciation”
may open the way to thinking of “international culture, based . . . on the inscription
and articulation of culture’s hybridity.” It is the “in-between space . . . that carries
the burden of meaning of culture . . . And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude
the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (LC, 38–39). Bhabha
curiously understands the notion of différance as the embodiment of ambivalence
rather than of endless relationality. In asserting the need to recognize the ambivalence
of enunciation, he effectively perpetuates the very binarism he seeks to avoid.

One of the problems with Bhabha’s argument is that it is uncritically founded on
Derrida’s notion of différance, which is itself abstract. Bhabha even admits that his
own “Third Space” is “unrepresentable in itself,” denying any possibility of its articulation
and allowing it to wallow in transcendence. The central valuable insight in Bhabha’s
essay is that political endeavors cannot be fully theorized in advance because they must
always be adapted to local conditions and possibilities. But this insight is somewhat
marred by its coercion into more generalized and somewhat vague assertions about the
way language functions. The notion of hybridity bears within itself the origins of
whatever polarization it was intended to transcend; as such, it is inadequate for comprehending
the diverse constitution of political commitment, which is often not marked
by a mere blending of two factors such as class and gender. Finally, Bhabha sets up
many straw targets: who does claim that “culture” or “subjectivity” or “truth” is somehow
an unproblematic unity? The so-called opposition between ideological error and
truth that Bhabha’s notions of ambivalence and hybridity are intended to overcome
has already been abrogated – in a dialectic deriving from Hegel – in the long tradition
of Marxist thought, which has seen truth as institutionally grounded and as itself the
formalized projection of various ideologies.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (b. 1950)

The most prominent contemporary scholar of African-American literature, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. has sought to map out an African-American heritage of both literature and
criticism, as well as to promote and establish this heritage in academic institutions, the
popular press, and the media. Central to this project has been his endeavor to integrate
approaches from modern literary theory, such as deconstructive and structuralist notions
of signification, with modes of interpretation derived from African literary traditions.
Born in West Virginia, Gates was educated at the universities of Yale and Cambridge; he
has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard, where he is Chair of African-American
Studies and directs the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African-American Research. He


part viii: the twentieth century

has edited a number of pioneering anthologies such as Black Literature and Literary
Theory (1984), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986), and The Norton Anthology of
African American Literature (1997), as well as helping to found African-American journals.
The important works authored by Gates include Figures in Black: Words, Signs,
and the “Racial” Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism (1988). One of his goals in these texts is to redefine the notions of
race and blackness in the terms of poststructuralist theory, as effects of networks of
signification and cultural difference rather than as essences. Gates has been criticized
for the integrative and assimilative nature of his work: radicals have seen him as overtly
compromising toward the white, elitist, mainstream Anglo-American and European
traditions. Yet his work has influenced, and displays analogies with, the output of
critics such as Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Wahneema Lubiano.

In essays such as “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes” (1985), he conducts
an acute analysis of the concept of race, and draws attention to the explicit or implicit
assumptions about race that inform the Western literary and philosophical traditions.
Gates acknowledges that in twentieth-century literature and theory, race has been an
“invisible quality,” at best only implicitly present. But this, he explains, was not always
the case. By the mid-nineteenth century, metaphors such as “national spirit” and “historical
period” were widely used in the study and creation of literature. It was the
French literary historian Hippolyte Taine who posited “race, moment, and milieu” as
the foundational criteria for analyzing of any work of art. This notion, says Gates, was
the “great foundation” upon which subsequent notions of “national literatures” were
erected.9 In race Taine had located the peculiar character of the “intellect and . . . heart,”
and race was “the first and richest source of these master faculties from which historical
events take their rise” (LCNCW, 46). Gates acknowledges that Taine’s originality lay
not in expressing such ideas about race – which were derived “from the Enlightenment,
if not from the Renaissance” – but in their “scientific” application to literary history.
The growth of “national” literatures, says Gates, “was coterminous with the shared
assumption among intellectuals that ‘race’ was a ‘thing,’ an ineffaceable quantity, which
irresistibly determined the shape and contour of thought and feeling” (LCNCW,
46–47). Moreover, discourses about race often have their sources in the “dubious
pseudo-science” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Race in these usages “pretends
to be an objective term of classification, when it is in fact a trope.” Though it is
a fiction, it has been accorded the “sanction of God, biology, or the natural order.”
Indeed, race has become “a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures,
linguistic groups, or practitioners of specific belief systems . . . Race is the ultimate
trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application” (LCNCW, 48–49).
Writers in many European traditions have sought to make the metaphors of race
“literal” by making them “natural, absolute, essential . . . they have inscribed these differences
as fixed and finite categories . . . But it takes little reflection to recognize that
these pseudoscientific categories are themselves figures of thought. Who has seen a
black or red person, a white, yellow, or brown? These terms are arbitrary constructs,
not reports of reality” (LCNCW, 50).

The metaphors of race lay at the heart of a widespread European debate, since the
Renaissance and through the Enlightenment, over “the nature of the African.” This
debate prompts Gates into an “alternative” reading of Enlightenment philosophy, one


postcolonial criticism

which reveals its “nether side” (LCNCW, 57). He notes that after Descartes, “reason”
was privileged among human characteristics; and writing, especially after the advent
and proliferation of the printing press, was taken as the “visible sign of reason.” The
Enlightenment, says Gates,

used the absence and presence of “reason” to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity
of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been “discovering” since the
Renaissance. The urge toward the systematization of all human knowledge, by which we
characterize the Enlightenment, led directly to the relegation of black people to a lower
rung on the Great Chain of Being. (LCNCW, 54–55)

Gates traces this “extraordinary subdiscourse” of European philosophy and aesthetics
through a number of major writers. The “subdiscourse” consisted largely in the
privileging of writing, the visible sign of reason, as the “principal measure” of the
humanity of blacks and of their capacity for progress (LCNCW, 56). Sir Francis Bacon,
in his The New Organon (1620), turned to the arts as the “ultimate measure of a race’s
place in nature.” Bacon averred that the difference between the life of civilized and
savage races sprang “not from soil, not from climate, not from race, but from the arts”
(LCNCW, 57–58). A few years later, Peter Heylyn published his Little Description of the
Great World, affirming that Black Africans “lacked completely” the use of reason, and
were possessed of “little Wit” (LCNCW, 58). Literacy – the mastery of reading and
writing – was directly correlated with political rights, and writing was transformed into
a commodity: learning to read and write was reserved for the master and was a violation
of the law for a slave. There was a “direct relation between freedom and discourse”
(LCNCW, 58–59). By 1705, says Gates, the Dutch explorer William Bosman had
“encased Peter Heylyn’s bias into a myth,” the myth that, given a choice by God, blacks
had chosen gold whereas whites had chosen the alternative, the knowledge of letters.
As punishment for their avarice, God decreed that blacks should always be slaves to
whites. It was David Hume, Gates suggests, who “gave to Bosman’s myth the sanction
of Enlightenment philosophical reasoning” (LCNCW, 59). In his essay “Of National
Characteristics” (1748), Hume had stated that the negroes were “naturally inferior to
the whites,” and that one index of this difference of “nature” was that negroes had “no
arts, no sciences” (LCNCW, 60).

Predictably, says Gates, Hume’s opinion became “prescriptive.” In an essay of 1764
entitled “Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” Kant had
extrapolated Hume’s comments into an affirmation of a fundamental difference of
“mental capacities” between the black and white races, squarely correlating “blackness”
and “stupidity.” Kant based his “observations” on the absence of published writing
among blacks (LCNCW, 60–61). Thomas Jefferson’s opinion was hardly more salutary:
“Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain
narration.” He vehemently denied that the blacks were capable of poetry (LCNCW,
61). Gates also recounts – all too briefly – Hegel’s strictures concerning the lack of
history and of writing among black people. Gates points out that Hegel was echoing
Hume and Kant, and that all of these writers shared the assumption about the “absence
of memory,” a collective, cultural memory. Gates adroitly summarizes the connections
made or implied by these thinkers between reason, writing, history, and humanity:


part viii: the twentieth century

“Without writing, there could exist no repeatable sign of the workings of reason, of
mind. Without memory or mind, there could exist no history. Without history, there
could exist no ‘humanity,’ as defined consistently from Vico to Hegel” (LCNCW, 62).

Gates observes a change in the visibility of the concept of race in twentieth-century
literature and theory, a movement away from Taine’s “race, moment, and milieu”
toward the New Critical focus on the “language of the text.” Like other allegedly
“extrinsic” features, race was bracketed or suspended. Yet it remained implicit in ideas
of “canonical cultural texts that comprise the Western tradition in Eliot’s simultaneous
order.” The Anglo-American, Gates notes, “was the castle in which Taine’s criteria
took refuge ...a canon of texts whose authors purportedly shared a ‘common culture’
inherited from both the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian traditions” (LCNCW,
47). Hence even this reductive formalism, which purported to exclude material not
readable in the text “itself,” was premised upon a canon, a “republic of literature,” whose
citizens “were all white, and mostly male.” Gates detects a racism in the works of Southern
Agrarians/New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Allen Tate (LCNCW, 47–48).

Gates suggests that Anglo-African writing “arose as a response to allegations of
its absence” (from the Renaissance onward). The need to record an authentic black
voice as proof of the blacks’ humanity was so “central . . . to the birth of the black
literary tradition” that the earliest slave narratives drew upon the same tropes correlating
blackness with silence, such as the trope of the “talking book” (whereby a book is seen
as “talking” only to whites, and as being urged to speak to blacks). Such narratives,
suggests Gates, formed the “very first black chain of signifiers,” which implicitly signified
upon another chain, the “metaphorical Great Chain of Being . . . these writers implicitly
were Signifyin(g) upon the figure of the chain itself, simply by publishing autobiographies
that were indictments of the received order of Western culture” (LCNCW, 64).
Gates questions, “how can the black subject posit a full and sufficient self in a language
in which blackness is a sign of absence? Can writing, the very ‘difference’ it makes and
marks, mask the blackness of the black face that addresses the text of Western letters,
in a voice that ‘speaks English’?” (LCNCW, 65). Similar questions confront the use of
theory by black critics, a topic addressed only summarily in this essay. Gates states that
it is imperative to “ ‘deconstruct’ . . . the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of
race, to take discourse itself as our common subject . . . to reveal the latent relations of
power and knowledge inherent in popular and academic usages of ‘race’ ” (LCNCW,
50). He urges that “to use contemporary theories of criticism to explicate these modes
of inscription [of racial difference] is to demystify large and obscure ideological relations
and indeed theory itself ” (LCNCW, 51).

In the Introduction to his Figures in Black, which is perhaps the most succinct
statement of his overall endeavor as a black critic, Gates offers a more detailed account
of his own engagement with contemporary European and American literary theories
and his use of these in analyzing black literary traditions, situating his endeavor within
the broader historical development of African-American literary criticism. Gates openly
declares, adopting a term from Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, that he practices “a sort of
critical bricolage,” a making do with the materials already at hand, materials which
may have been constructed originally for other purposes, rather than somehow starting
anew. Yet this very necessity (for it is of course impossible to start anew) poses a
problem for Gates: can black critics “escape a mockingbird relation to theory, one


postcolonial criticism

destined to be derivative,” and mechanically imitative?10 His point here is that a core
of racism runs through much of the Western intellectual tradition. Can black critics
“escape the supposed racism of so many theorists of criticism, from David Hume and
Immanuel Kant through the Southern Agrarians [later known as the New Critics]
. . . Aren’t we justified in being suspicious of a discourse in which blacks are signs of
absence?” (FB, xviii). The dilemma is somewhat analogous to that formulated by many
feminists and other oppressed groups: can the oppressed escape speaking the language
of the oppressor, thereby perpetuating the basic concepts and the broad world view
contained in that language? In Derridean terms, can the language of marginal groups
even be spoken without drawing on the syntax and vocabulary of the centers of domination
and power? Gates uses Derridean terminology in explaining that some black
critics (like many feminist critics) resist the very notion of theory, in “healthy reactions
against the marriage of logocentrism and ethnocentrism in much of Western aesthetic
discourse” (FB, xix). Gates notes, however, that in the eyes of other black critics, “the
racism of the Western critical tradition was not a sufficient reason for us to fail to
theorize about our own endeavor.” He also observes a renewed interest in theory
inspired by a recognition that close textual reading has been “repressed” in African-
American literary criticism; hence much theory is driven by a need to address “the very
language of the black text” (FB, xix).

Gates characterizes his own use of theory as a practice of transformation rather than
mere application: “I have tried to work through contemporary theories of literature
not to apply them to black texts, but to transform these by translating them into a new
rhetorical realm” (FB, xx). One assumes that the antecedent of “these” is left deliberately
ambiguous: what will be “transformed,” then, are both the theories and the texts.
Only by such critical activity, thinks Gates, can the “profession” – which, presumably,
is the profession of black criticism – “redefine itself away from a Eurocentric notion of
a hierarchical canon of texts – mostly white, Western, and male – and encourage and
sustain a truly comparative and pluralistic notion of the institution of literature” (FB,
xx). Gates emphasizes that using theory to analyze the language of a black text is an
endeavor to “respect the integrity, the tradition, of the black work of art,” and to
“produce richer structures of meaning than are possible otherwise” (FB, xx–xxi). Summarizing
this general endeavor, Gates suggests that this “is the challenge of the critic of
Afro-American literature: not to shy away from literary theory, but rather to translate
it into the black idiom, renaming principles of criticism where appropriate, but especially
naming indigenous black principles of criticism and applying these to explicate our
own texts” (FB, xxi).

Gates recounts that he has drawn upon variants of formalism, structuralism, and
poststructuralism in order to “defamiliarize the black text” (FB, xxii, xxiv). He wished
to see the text as “a structure of literature” rather than as a simple reflection of black
experience (FB, xxiv). Gates suggests that the connection between the development of
African-American criticism and contemporary literary theory can be charted in four
stages, corresponding broadly to his own development: the first was the phase of the
“Black Aesthetic”; the second was a phase of “Repetition and Imitation”; the third,
“Repetition and Difference”; and, finally, “Synthesis” (FB, xxv).

The Black Aesthetic theorists of the first stage attempted both to resurrect “lost” black
texts and to formulate a “genuinely black” aesthetic, and were persistently concerned


part viii: the twentieth century

with the “nature and function of black literature vis-à-vis the larger political struggle
for Black Power” (FB, xxvi). Gates identifies his own radical innovation as lying in the
emphasis he accorded to the “language of the text,” a hitherto repressed concern in
African-American criticism. His engagement with formalism and structuralism led to
the second phase of his development, that of “Repetition and Imitation.” Realizing that
a more critical approach to theory was called for, Gates’ work moved into the stage of
“Repetition and Difference,” using theory to read black texts but thereby also implicitly
offering a critique of the theory itself. The final stage of Gates’ work, that of
“Synthesis,” involved a “sustained interest in the black vernacular tradition as a source
field in which to ground a theory of Afro-American criticism, a theory at once self-
contained and related by analogy to other contemporary theories” (FB, xxix).

Gates urges that an analysis of the connection between a black text and its “critical
field” constitutes implicitly “a theory of the origins and nature of Afro-American literature”
(FB, xxxi). This theory, argued in the current book and elsewhere, is basically
that, since its origins in the seventeenth century at least through the New Negro
Renaissance of the 1920s, black literature has been produced in defiant response to,
and counter-exemplification of, assertions that the dearth of a black literary tradition
signifies the black’s “innate mental inequality with the European” (FB, xxxi). Charged
with such lack of intellectual capacity and correlative lack of humanity, black authors
have literally attempted to write themselves into existence, to achieve an identity through
the narratives of their own lives, an identity that subsists primarily in language: the
very language in which they had been designated as absences was itself appropriated as
the sign of presence.

Yet it could be argued that such gestures – effectively creating a literary tradition
in response to allegations of its absence – implicitly accept the racist terms and operate
within the racist outlook that is ostensibly in question. Such unwitting complicity, as
Gates has already intimated, leads to a “dead end.” In an essay of 1988 entitled “Talking
Black: Critical Signs of the Times,” Gates recounts the intellectual journey of the
nineteenth-century pan-Africanist Alexander Crummell. Falling prey to the “tragic
lure of white power,” Crummell “never stopped believing that mastering the master’s
tongue was the sole path to civilization, intellectual freedom, and social equality for the
black person” (LCNCW, 73). Nonetheless, while Gates cautions against Crummell’s
“mistake of accepting the empowering language of white critical theory as ‘universal,’ ”
he is equally insistent that “We [black critics] must redefine theory itself from within
our own black cultures, refusing to grant the racist premise that theory is something
that white people do . . . We are all heirs to critical theory, but critics are also heir to
the black vernacular critical tradition as well” (LCNCW, 83). Black critics must, says
Gates, “turn to our own peculiarly black structures of thought and feeling to develop
our own languages of criticism,” using the black “vernacular to ground our theories.”
Those critics must “don the empowering mask of blackness and talk that talk, the
language of black difference”; only by doing this can they escape the possibility that
using theory might be “merely another form of intellectual indenture, a mental
servitude” (LCNCW, 77).

While Gates addresses in these texts the genuinely problematic issue of what kind of
language is available to black critics, it could be argued that the terms of his inquiry
tend somewhat to perpetuate the subordination of black criticism to the languages of


postcolonial criticism

modern critical theory. For example, to talk of “the language of black difference” is
merely to transpose into black studies a hypostatization of the very concept of difference:
why ground an “alternative” language on a trope that is often abstract even on its
native soil? Gates speaks of “theory” as if somehow engagement with “it” will automatically
replenish black studies. Yet modern theories do not all speak the same language,
and indeed often conflict profoundly with one another’s claims and insights.
The lately privileged concept of “difference” is merely one of the latest reifications
propagated by the aesthetics of late capitalism; as used by many modern theorists, it is
torn from its history in philosophy and the history of its connection with the notion of
identity. Why accept these categories – dating all the way back to Aristotle (himself an
owner of slaves and theorist of slavery) – as overseeing the project of black criticism?
Why even refer to them as a starting point? It may be that there is no choice but to use
the “master’s” language for one’s own ends, but surely our starting point could be
more substantial than the contentless and clichéd abstraction of pure “difference.”
Surely the use of this effectively rehearses – at the level of theoretical reflection –
Crummell’s strategy in the face of the grand Enlightenment claims concerning blacks,
that of accepting the master’s tropes and the master’s critical idiom. In fairness to
Gates, he valuably articulates the problems surrounding any black critical use of
so-called “theory.” And his own project is indeed informed by recourse to native
African idioms and traditions.

Notes

1
Several points in this account are taken from the excellent chapter “Colonialism and the
Politics of Postcolonial Critique,” in Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Hereafter cited as Young.

2
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice
in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2. Hereafter
cited as EWB.

3 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1963), pp. 148–149. Hereafter cited as WE.
4 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985), pp. xii, 373. Hereafter cited as Beginnings.
5 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1983). Hereafter cited as WTC.
6 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Hereafter cited as Orientalism.
7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA and

London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 266. Hereafter cited as CPCR.
8 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 19.
Hereafter cited as LC.

9
“Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons:
Notes on the Culture Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 45.
Hereafter cited as LCNCW.

10
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xviii. Hereafter cited as FB.