Postcolonialism

One of the basic principles of postcolonial thinking is that you really should not say, “one of the basic principles of ‘X’ is ‘Y.‘” Postcolonialism, in its epistemological orientation, stands against what it labels “essentialism,” the identification of central or core characteristics, particularly of peoples, societies, and cultures. However, adhering to this prohibition makes it difficult to identify and discuss anything, including postcolonialism.

In postcolonial thought, there is good reason to reject essentialist characterizations of peoples, societies, and cultures. The reason is that, according to postcolonial thought, “knowledge is power,” but not in the traditional sense of knowledge giving one real understanding of the world, gives one power in the world. Rather, the postcolonial view, following Michel Foucault, is that “knowledge is power” in the sense that what we call “knowledge” is really constructed ideology with no grounds in reality, which is designed to justify the imposition of power over others, to repress and exploit others for fun and profit. Of course, this other postcolonial epistemological principle, that true knowledge does not exist, raises the same kind of awkward question that arises with all relativist theories: must postcolonial doctrines and assertions, like those to which it directs its critical attention, be considered “constructed ideology [Page 1911]with no grounds in reality which is designed to justify the imposition of power over others?”

Postcolonial thought has developed in the context of the confrontation of cultures. Its stance is critical toward imperialism and colonialism, especially European imperialism and colonialism. For example, according to Abdul Jan Mohammed, “Motivated by his desire to conquer and dominate, the imperialist configures the colonial realm as a confrontation based on differences in race, language, social customs, cultural values, and modes of production.” Essentialism is used to define imperial and colonial subjects as different, as “the Other” (as the postcolonialists would say), and to contrast the culture, economy, politics, science, and so on of Europe favorably in comparison.

Postcolonial thought manifests itself in many contexts and is applied in many fields. As Stephen Slemon explains, postcolonialism has been used as a way of ordering a critique of totalizing forms of Western historicism, as a portmanteau term for a retooled notion of “class,” as a subset of both post-modernism and poststructuralism (and conversely, as the condition from which these two structures of cultural logic and cultural critique themselves are seen to emerge), as the name for a condition of nativist longing in postindependence national groupings, as a cultural marker for nonresidency for a third-world intellectual cadre, as the inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist power, as an oppositional form of “reading practice,” and, as the name for a category of “literary” activity which sprang from a new and welcome political energy going on within what used to be called “Commonwealth” literary studies.

In anthropology more specifically, postcolonialism has two main thrusts:First, again at the epistemological level, it challenges anthropological research in “other” cultures, attacking both the authority of anthropologists to speak for other cultures and essentialist descriptions of those cultures. Postcolonial preferences in reporting on other cultures would be for an emphasis on “voices” of the subjects themselves; that is, instead of commentary and analysis by the anthropologist, ethnographic reports would consist of comments and commentaries by the “natives.”

...