Postcolonialism

There is no agreed-upon definition of postcolonialism, as it is a highly complex and contested arena of thought and [Page 577]practice. Postcolonial discourse constitutes a transdisciplinary arena of critical discourse that is most generally associated with developing theories and activisms related to globalization and the politics of representation (race, class, gender/ sexuality, ethnicity, nationalisms, religion) as well as to economic, political, social, and psychic dimensions of colonization, neocolonialism, recolonization, and postcolonial conditions. Furthermore, it includes the advancement of liberatory and resistant politics that support decolonization and engages subaltern experience, which involves the perspectives of dominated, marginalized, oppressed, and subordinated peoples.

Many scholars argue that the development of postcolonial culture must be understood within the historical and imperialist context of the European colonialism of the so-called third world or, as many postcolonial theorists describe it, the “tricontinental” (i.e., the southern continents of Latin America, Africa, and Asia), that began over 500 years ago. This violent history of colonization involved massive appropriation of land and territories, slavery, institutionalized racism, enforced migration, murder, torture, genocide, obliteration of cultures, and the imposition of Eurocentric, ideological sociopolitical, economic, and cultural values of the colonizers. This process escalated during the imperialist expansion of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. And although political, cultural, and economic reforms characterized many of the former colonies, which gained independence after the Second World War, one of the most deleterious effects of the multileveled process of colonization has been the development and implementation of a global supercapitalist economic system that is primarily controlled by the West and ultimately mediates all global relations.

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that much of colonial and postcolonial critique emerges before, during, and after the numerous struggles for liberation and decolonization in the twentieth century and employs a critical Marxian perspective, which translates from and transforms classical Western Marxist analysis. Hence, much postcolonialist critique involves the advancement of Marxian analysis that is developed from the perspective and position of the colonized and is situated within the complexities of relations that define the postcolonial experiences and realities. There is a strong focus on the kinds of cultural politics associated with the ideas and practice of cultural revolutions within primarily the tricontinents, which espoused resistance and devised strategies to combat ideological forces of colonialism and neocolonialism. Thus, one of its distinctions from orthodox, European Marxism is identified, by many postcolonial scholars, as “combining critique of objective material conditions with detailed analysis of their subjective effects” (Young 2001:5).

However, some critics argue that an overemphasis on the subjective dimensions of colonization and decolonization in postcolonial discourse is given primacy over the material and concrete conditions, such as class. Yet it is this concern with the dialectics of the relations between the “self” and “other” and the “subjective with the objective” that distinguishes anticolonialist writings and postcolonial critique from more one-dimensional theories of oppression. Indeed, a central feature of anticolonial and postcolonial thought is the recognition that colonization is a sophisticated and multileveled ideological process, which operates both externally and internally. In reality, colonization is not restricted to physical deprivation, legal inequality, economic exploitation, and classist, racist, and sexist unofficial or official assumptions.

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