What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?

Benita Parry

New Literary History, Volume 43, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 341-358
(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2012.0019

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v043/43.2.parry.html

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 What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?
Benita Parry

T
hese two essays, although different in theme and style, have
one common feature. Both share a conspicuously partial version
of the genealogy, intellectual inspiration, and theoretical prac-
tices of postcolonial studies. The accounts are tendentious, reiterating
well-worn ideas and positions, while the offered new horizons on the
contemporary condition are severely contracted by insufficient analyses
of globalization and neglect of the intellectual discussion associated with
this most important debate of our times. In Robert Young’s case, his
article is also notable for the provocations of a radical pose calculated
to shock the academic establishment and exasperate the academic
Left. Even though I found some of these sideswipes mildly amusing,
a small reward not always on offer when reading combative criticism,
the verso to such chutzpah is an irresponsible construal of ideas held
by intellectual adversaries—a lapse from which Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
presentation is not immune.
My response here will attempt to locate the theoretical resources
enabling the exegeses presented, question their interpretive authority,
and cast a skeptical eye on the authors’ avowal of a radical vocation.
For Young the urgent problem facing postcolonial studies is to validate
its continued significance as a discipline by making known what has
remained unaddressed and discarded as invisible and unreadable:
“Indigenous struggle, settler colonialism, and Islam”; for Chakrabarty
it is to imagine the figure of the new subject created by the crises of
globalization and global warming, and to consider how postcolonial
thought can be connected to thinking about the human condition in
the age of globalization and the anthropocene—the era when humans
have come to exercise a determinate impact on the earth’s ecosystems.
The promise then is that the theoretical modes of postcolonial stud-
ies have the potential to chart the worldwide contemporary condition.
But because entire continents of the empirical and the conceptual are
missing from their maps, I will indicate another cartography deriving
from critical practices overlooked or traduced by Chakrabarty and Young,
and one which is appropriate, as Perry Anderson wrote as long ago as
1998, to “a totalizing comprehension of the new unlimited capitalism—a

New Literary History, 2012, 43: 341–358

342 new literary history

theory adequate to the global scale of its connexions and disjunctions.”1

There was a time when prominent and apprentice postcolonial critics
dismissed Marxism as foundational, indifferent to culture as well as to
non-European cultures, and wedded to metanarratives. This insouciant
gesture may be less easy to perform now that Marxism has regained a
significant place in the wider intellectual discussion,2 Marxist scholars
are reexamining and glossing the founding texts, and are to the fore in
advancing further analyses of capitalism past and in our times.3
Whereas Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Neil Smith, and Alex Callini-
cos are amongst those currently pursuing what Anderson has named the
“unrenouncable Marxist project” of elaborating globalization as a totality,
essence and appearance, it had previously been addressed by scholars in
sociology, political philosophy, and history.4 Their contention was that
far from being a paradigm shift to a postimperialist age, globalization
incorporated the changing economy of capitalist accumulation on a
world scale, forcing all countries into an intensified division of labor,
exacerbating asymmetries in power, resources, and expectations, and
bringing the escalation, and not the transcendence of, the profound
inequalities between core and periphery/semiperiphery. Since informed
discussions on globalization designate periphery as a structural position
within capitalism, and not a civilizational hierarchy or a cultural ranking,
Young’s mockery of “metropolitan intellectuals” who name as peripheral
the circumstances in which “anti- and postcolonial knowledge formations
were developed” looms as conspicuously maladroit.
Because Young’s view on globalization occludes the Marxist critique
of the capitalist world-system, it is passing strange to read that postco-
lonialism’s “wide-ranging political project” aspires to “turn the power
structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below.”
To present postcolonial studies as reissuing the old revolutionary call—
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . the point is to
change it”—requires that this be accompanied by a coherent study on
why and to what ends the world is in urgent need of transformation, as
well as by strategies for effecting insurrection.5 And this agenda, as even
those casually acquainted with postcolonial studies will know, has been
anathema to prominent critics, and continues to be repudiated by those
advocating a politics of friendship in place of a politics of conflict and
struggle thereby displacing the left tradition of solidarity amongst the
oppressed with a liberal notion of peaceful coexistence with all.6 Indeed
by 1998 Simon During was moved to remark that through deploying
“categories such as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence . . . all of which
laced the colonised into colonising cultures, postcolonialism effectively
became a reconciliatory rather than a critical, anti-colonialist category.”7
what is left in postcolonial studies? 343

No whisper of negative opinion from within the field reverberates in

Young’s implausible acclaim of postcolonial studies: “The postcolonial
remains: it lives on, ceaselessly transformed in the present into new
social and political configurations” (4); it has extended “into almost
every domain of contemporary thought,” its perspectives spreading
amongst disciplines, “reaching into almost every domain of contempo-
rary thought [to] become part of the consciousness of our era.” Despite
Young’s scant regard for the protocols of signification in his fluctuating
and interchangeable use of the postcolonial/postcolonialism (as a con-
dition, a theory, a cognitive mode, an academic discipline, a practice
of radical activism), the reader is left in no doubt that he is proposing
“this remarkable dispersal of intellectual and political influence” as The
Knowledge, able to provide “a theoretical and historical framework for
understanding new phenomena.”
So histrionic is the delivery of this encomium that it may dismay even
those who recognize that important work has been produced under the
banner of postcolonial studies, and who applaud its role in disturbing
the complacency of mainstream scholars in the humanities and social
sciences. They may also be tempted to ask why the authors ignore
the meticulous work produced by scholars on the very issues they ad-
dress—globalization, Islam, indigenous peoples, migration, ecological
degradation, and climate change—and be perplexed to find that such
sources do not necessarily support their assertions. Certainly anyone
familiar with the discipline will be surprised at Young asserting that
sociology was turned from a narrow national focus towards a concern
with globalization by postcolonialists (he cites Arjun Appadurai and
Paul Gilroy), when the extent of earlier and decisive influences on this
direction is well-known.
As dubious is Young’s allegation that indigenous struggles had been
ignored prior to recent work in postcolonial studies, since a visit to
Google would yield a multitude of prior and concurrent studies, not
all of them nugatory,8 as well as numerous accounts of militant action
conducted within the framework of the nation and on nationalist terms,
contradicting his construal of undifferentiated “indigenous peoples” as
inherently antinationalist.9 And what prompts the festive announcement
that in the twenty-first century we have passed from resistance and inde-
pendence struggles to “postcolonial empowerment,” when the systemic
incursions of the core capitalist nations include military interventions to
effect regime change, and a majority in the postcolonial world continue
to know dispossession, impoverishment, and mass unemployment?
For an interested student expecting to find analysis of pre- and postin-
dependence conditions in the mainstream of postcolonial studies, it
344 new literary history

will soon become clear that s/he needs to look elsewhere—in specialist
domains within history and the social and political sciences, and amongst
the dissidents in the field who have been studiously marginalized by
such as Young and Chakrabarty. Amongst these matters are the impact
of capitalist intrusion on the socioeconomic forms and institutions of
precolonial societies, the effects of combined and uneven development
structurally, socially, and aesthetically on the making of the various forms
of peripheral modernity,the transformation of indigenous inequalities
into class relationships, the ideologies and aspirations of the anticolo-
nial movements, the continuing dominion of metropolitan capitalism,
the class structures and conflicts in postindependence nation-states,
and the role of neoliberalism and native compradors in the retreats of
postcolonial regimes.
Bypassing such concrete matters, both essayists concentrate on the
formation of the global economy’s “new subalterns,” defined in terms of
migrancy and diaspora: refugees, asylum seekers, sans papiers, internally
displaced persons, economic and illegal migrants. The appropriation
and reconceptualization of Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern classes
“by modification and singularization” is hailed by Young in this essay
as “one of the most influential theoretical innovations of postcolonial
theory,” one that has “enabled subaltern historians and cultural critics
to recover a whole arena of historical agency that had remained invisible
while history was being written according to the exclusive protocols of
national movements or class conflict” (5).
That Young’s position is symptomatic of a larger tendency is evident in
The Postcolonial Gramsci (2012) where the editors are eager to liberate his
thought from the restrictions of Marxist thinking, which they complain
“quite contrary to the spirit of Gramsci’s own writing, steadfastly offer[s]
a constrained framework as the true context of his political writing.”10
While the volume does contain some well-researched essays, there is a
recurrent theme claiming Gramsci, against the substance and spirit of
his writing, to be a reluctant, dissident Marxist. More immediately, and
because I am constrained to address the questions Young provokes, who
is he out to tease in his contribution to the Gramsci volume by suggesting
that since “the singular figure of the subaltern woman” was definitively
introduced by Spivak, “[I]n a sense it was Spivak, not Gramsci, who
invented the subaltern”?11 Will postcolonial studies be remembered for
a rhetoric joining condescension towards major thinkers with genuflec-
tion to celebrity?
In unfinished and often cryptic essays and fragments, written under
constrained conditions, Gramsci had in early writings casually referred
to subservient social communities in general (slaves, women, religious
what is left in postcolonial studies? 345

groups, races) as “subaltern.” However because he was sensitive to ety-

mologies and Italian history, and knew subaltern to be a military term
designating any officer below the rank of captain in the Roman army
and not low status, he came to use the term with great precision when
identifying the class position of the southern peasantry within the Ital-
ian political order and class structure of the 1920s. As a dispersed and
disunited group situated within a precapitalist process of production
and connected to vestiges of feudal society, Gramsci observed that this
class fraction had not developed a class outlook, was subject to the initia-
tives of the dominant class, did not have access to its own history or to
the means of its own political and discursive representation, and thus
signified a historical condition to be overcome.12
It therefore seems that Gramsci’s repositioning within subaltern and
postcolonial studies was and is only possible because the instigators have
forgotten to remember that Gramsci was a Communist committed to
programmatic and organized politics as the only means to the victory
of the class revolution—and with this, the dissolution of subalternity. In
an avant la lettre critque of the positions and annexations writ large in
these essays, Timothy Brennan commented on how critics abandoned
class and class consciousness for the singular and the experiential, and
instead of perceiving subalternity as a contingent historical experience,
bestowed on it a perennial and virtuous ontological status, while also
making this the occasion to reconfirm the existential value of marginality.
The makeover of Gramsci, begun by theorists in the Italian Socialist
Party, was subsequently and with wider impact pursued by the Subaltern
Studies collective, before participants abandoned his inspiration for the
allure of poststructuralism. This emerges from Chakrabarty’s autobio-
graphic account of an intellectual journey away from the Enlightenment
view of the universal subject and towards the postcolonial/postmodern
critique. It was, he writes, the encounter with Spivak’s epochal essay
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” that “made us confront our theoretical in-
nocence in proposing to make the subaltern the ‘subject of his or her
own history,’” perceived “in the image of the autonomous rights-bearing
person. . . . Becoming human was for us a matter of becoming a subject.”
However on acquiring an understanding of the human “as the same but
endowed everywhere . . . with anthropological difference—differences
of class, sexuality, gender, history, and so on,” the group then “crossed
over from being merely anticolonial historians . . . to being a part of
the intellectual landscape of postcolonial criticism” (26–28). It is impos-
sible to know from this version of the transition whether Chakrabarty is
speaking for the collective or telling the story of his own passage. What
is all too clear is that the dismissal of “merely anticolonial historians”
346 new literary history

is unbecoming in a scholar who proclaims his radicalism, but who is

cavalier about a body of work that had played an indispensable part in
making a history he seeks to deny.
In pursuing avowedly correct ways to theorize the subject in chang-
ing historical circumtances, Chakrabarty distinguishes between Althus-
serian antihumanism and the postcolonial critique, the latter effecting
“a deeper turning towards the human.” By channeling difference “not
through identity politics but through difference-philosophies,” Homi
Bhabha is credited with producing the doubled and inconsistent figu-
rations appropriate to a global regime which denies today’s subaltern
classes “economic rights” and “full civic participation.” Having praised
Bhabha’s recent work for connecting “postcolonial thinking to thinking
about the human condition in the age of globalization,” Chakrabarty,
now in apocalyptic mode, addresses the present and catastrophic con-
juncture of globalization and global warming, the latter demonstrating
“that humans are now part of the natural history of the planet,” and
presenting a threat to “the survival of the species . . . on a world wide
scale” (my emphasis).
The inference of the “now” is that new times demand a radical rethink-
ing of the figure of the human and of agency “over multiple and incom-
mensurable scales.” Thus Chakrabarty, who never quite relinquishes
an affection for humanism, reprimands “the Left on both sides of the
postmodern divide in the 1990s” (29) for regarding as mutually exclu-
sive the human as rights-bearing subject, and as perceived through the
critique of the subject, when the urgent need is to think of the human
“as having both ontological and nonontological modes of existence”
(38). This I understand as conceiving both of a heterogeneous subject-
centered figuration appropriate to the era of globalization, and as a col-
lective nonhuman-human force functional in “the age of the Anthropocene”
(26)—a mission he assigns to postcolonial studies.
A colleague who works in the intersection of postcolonial studies and
Marxist ecology was able to clarify a presentation I had in part found
mystifying. In Mike Niblett’s judgment the very structure of Chakrabarty’s
essay, together with his theoretical vocabulary, highlights a problem
with his argument: despite gesturing to the inextricability of human
and natural history, he ultimately separates analysis of the crisis pre-
cipitated by global warming from the pernicious socioeconomic effects
of globalization. By recoding collective human agency in terms of the
figure of “the nonontological human” acting on the environment—the
last consistently reified as something inert—Chakrabarty waives the
opportunity, in Niblett’s words, “to conceptualize the dynamics of the
socio-ecological totality as a global system, as an immense bundle of
what is left in postcolonial studies? 347

human and extra-human relations and processes organized through

the mode of production.”13
About human intervention in global warming, it is Chakrabarty’s belief
that because “the crisis of climate change will be routed through all our
“anthropological differences,” this means “that however anthropogenic
[environmental pollution originating in human activity] the current
global warming may be in its origins, there is no corresponding ‘human-
ity’ that in its oneness can act as a political agent” (38). These attempts
to undermine the idea of an undifferentiated “humanity” as an actant
are in Niblett’s view a strategy to avoid engaging with political action
and structural change at the level of the system.
Noticeably, Chakrabarty does not refer to the extensive writings on
ecological issues by scholars on the Left, for whom human history is
necessarily unthinkable outside its dialectical relation to natural history,
both intimately bound up with the rise of the capitalist world economy.14
It is therefore unsurprising that Chakrabarty appears unacquainted with
Marxist thinking on the human/nature nexus. To take only the most
philosophical, Adorno across his writings followed Marx in elaborating
a nondualistic account of the relationship between matter and mind,
human history and natural history, his “radical ecology” discernible in
a range of writings that culminate in Dialectic of Enlighenment (1944),
coauthored with Max Horkheimer.15
In Chakrabarty’s presentation ecological catastrophe is limited to global
warming, and nature “in the age of the Anthropocene” is conceived
as having been made by irresponsible human intervention. Since this
ignores the logic of capitalist accumulation on a world scale producing
environmental crises, global capitalism is separated from the global
degradation of nature, this last emerging as a transcendental force out-
side an actually existing world order and beyond the reach of human
agency. In the words of an ecology activist: “We can’t save capitalism
and save the planet.”16
On the genesis of postcolonial ideas, Chakrabarty briefly recounts how
these began as part “of a cultural and critical process by which a postim-
perial West adjusted itself” to decolonization, the findings feeding into
“the literature on globalization,” before taking “by storm the departments
of English literature in the Anglo-American academe during the 1980s
(25–26). Young’s fuller account begins by locating its genesis outside
the United States, selecting for commendation José Carlos Mariátegui’s
understanding of indigenous activism within anticolonial struggles as an
antidote to accounts concentrating on “national narratives of emancipa-
tion.” This version registers a shift from that in Postcolonialism (2001),
where Young gave due attention to national liberation movements, and
348 new literary history

attributed the birth of postcolonial studies to a marriage between the

Marxist critique and poststructuralism,17 although in subsequent utter-
ances he was to resume his denigration of Marxism, earlier castigated
as Eurocentric.18
In this essay, and without irony, he pronounces the conference “Europe
and its Others,” held in 1984 at the University of Essex, as the “founding
moment of postcolonial studies,” omitting to observe that the speakers
were either émigré postcolonial academics settled in the United States
and Britain, or resident British critics, and that its theme, “colonial dis-
course analysis,” 19 was innocently and in good faith addressed by many
still unaware of “the aporias of representation,” soon to become a major
preoccupation in postcolonial studies.20
Young’s insistence that postcolonial studies has no definable philo-
sophical or theoretical orientation and has always been open to many
different interpretations cannot go unchallenged, it being well-known
that the project came to be identified with poststructuralism, and was
an alignment actively promoted by prominent critics.21 These made
known an implacable hostility to Marxist explanations of imperialism,
as well as to all forms of nationalism, including national liberation
struggles; they ostentatiously addressed difference and subalternity so
as to displace questions of inequality, class, and class conflict, and they
were dismissive as well as censorious of Marxists and materialists working
in or on the borders of the field. It is therefore instructive to look at a
narrative situating the preconditions and progression of the field in a
wider temporal and intellectual context than is usual.
This has been done by Neil Lazarus and Rashmi Varma who in “Marx-
ism and Postcolonial Studies” provide a meticulous account of the
discipline’s beginnings during the 1970s in English and Comparative
Literature departments of elite institutions in the United States and later
the United Kingdom. By drawing attention to a time when, after decades
of postwar amelioration and hope, there was a “savage restructuring
of class relations worldwide . . . under the sign of ‘neoliberalism,’” the
authors identify an environment in which academics in large numbers
“either silently withdrew from or brazenly denounced, left politics,” and
demoralized metropolitan intellectuals on the Left were inclined “to
abandon anti-capitalist ideologies, pronounce communism dead and
Marxism invalidated.” In this unsettling milieu, they maintain, postco-
lonial studies came to register a complex and contradictory response:
on the one hand its practitioners adjusted to a conservative intellectual
climate by describing themselves as postmodern or post-Marxist; on the
other hand because they were launching a critique of Eurocentrism en-
trenched in intellectual systems, they could by the very nature of their
pursuits, present themselves as theoretically ultraradical.
what is left in postcolonial studies? 349

Furthermore by allying themselves with “the new social movements

that swept across university campuses in the US and elsewhere,” they
came to articulate a politics of identity—with reference to race, ethnic-
ity, sex, and gender, as against class struggle—and privilege a rhetoric
of recognition over one of redistribution. “There are then,” Lazarus
and Varma contend, “two aspects to postcolonial studies as an academic
enterprise, one accommodationist, the other subversive.”22 These dimen-
sions continue to be registered in these essays where the absence of an
anticapitalist critique reduces the insurrectionary rhetoric to signifying
nothing.
By contrast, Gyan Prakash, in his sympathetic story of ideological shifts
in the Subaltern Studies project, suggests that the collective had been
motivated by the inability of Marxist studies to comprehend the “lived
experience” of religion known by the oppressed, or the hold of social
customs such as caste—hence overlooking the religious idiom of the
peasant rebels or relegating it “as a stage in the development of revo-
lutionary consciousness.” 23 From the 1980s onwards, the major sector
of the collective has moved away from a project restoring the agency of
social actors, “recovering the subject” being a notion deemed pernicious
in poststructuralist thinking, and towards what Brennan has described
as “an essential subalternity asserting the irreducibility and autonomy
of experience.”24 Such a stance is reiterated here by Young who gives
credence to “the memories of an empirical, experienced history of
colonial rule,” and invokes as the original impulse and preoccupation
of postcolonialism the articulation of “unauthorized and denied knowl-
edges and histories,” naming the present challenge within academia as
addressing “indigenous struggles and their relation to settler colonialism,
illegal migrants, and political Islam.”
Together with the inclusion of political Islam, these constituencies
accord with Young’s desire to make known “the ongoing psychic life of
residues, living remains, lingering legacies,” and to ask what secularism
can learn “from the historical example of non-secular societies.” When
citing cultural forms and histories of societies where “secular practices
may nevertheless still figure in significant ways in an alternative con-
figuration with the religious,” he cites “the example of the history of
practices of toleration in Islamic societies” which include rather than
exclude otherness.
If Young makes a fitting case for Islam as an exemplar of toleration,
then his exposition of political Islam is predetermined by the ambition of
restoring authenticity to modalities of religious resistance in anticolonial
and “anti-Western” struggles. This serves as a backbone connecting the
many vertebral commentaries, moving from esteem for radical Islam to
sneers about secularism, from observing the renowned tolerance of the
350 new literary history

Islamic state of al-Andalus in the tenth century, to the jejune results of

his “thinking the unthinkable”: “What can nations, which represent the
modern political form of the state, learn from the empires which they
replaced? . . . [I]t is time for some forms of empire to be re-examined
in at least one respect: empire’s structure of diversity was necessarily
organized around the accommodation of diversity, albeit according
to an imperial hierarchy,” a liberality “destroyed by the principle of
nationalism . . . which was often an intolerant principle of autonomous
ethnic or cultural homogeneity that tended to disallow heterogeneity
and difference” (13). Young’s heretical intelligence produces an argu-
ment that resonates in the writings of well-established apologists of
empire like Niall Ferguson, and guides him to applaud the Gulf state
of Qatar for its open-minded multiculturalism. This prompted me to
consult the work of Adam Hanieh about its role in Middle-Eastern and
world politics. What I learned was that the Gulf Cooperation Council,
the core of capitalism in the Middle East and across which some 100,000
U.S. troops are stationed in various bases, is based in Qatar, as is the
United States Central Command, from which U.S. military interventions
in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader Central Asia region were
coordinated. Both organizations subsequently collaborated in seeking
to control the outcome of the popular Arab uprisings. As to its social
structure, Qatar, like all the Gulf states, is reliant on temporary migrant
labor, short-term in nature, lacking associated citizenship rights and mas-
sively exploitable because residency status is directly tied to holding a
job—that is, a community of the new subalterns whose status Chakrabarty
and Young lament.25
On which scholarly resources do Young’s arguments about political
Islam depend? That this constitutes a contemporary oppositional dis-
course and practice is a claim made earlier, and not cited here, by Susan
Buck-Morss,26 while the thesis on which Young draws, Faisal Devji’s desig-
nation of political Islam as a modern, innovative, and hybrid product of
multiple intellectual traditions, was anticipated by mainstream scholars
such as Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy.27 Deferring to Devji, Young states
that a new syncretic configuration of Islam was heralded when Muslims
adhering to different ideologies joined together in transnational support
for the Shia fatwa against Salman Rushdie, this to be followed by the
spectacular manifestation on 9/11. Again following Devji, Young finds
in Al-Qaeda an incarnation of a secularized, heterogeneous, globalized
Islam which, far from being fundamentalist, eschews all forms of Mus-
lim authority, is irreverent towards tradition, demonstrates democratic
tendency, and draws on an international range of supporters, its objec-
tive being “the liberation of the ‘Holy Land’ of Islam from a century of
what is left in postcolonial studies? 351

Western domination,” its hopes fixed on a “transnational utopia created

through the return of the Caliphate” (11).
A secularized Islam dreaming of a free Holy Land presided over by a
Caliphate; radical politics and an ideology of devout redemption: this acme
of hybridity is indeed heady stuff, but will it suffice as an explanation of
political Islam? Here I can do no more than summarize the information
and analyses of the numerous studies on its rise and thinking, none of
which appears amongst Young’s references.28 These accounts repeat-
edly recall that radical secular nationalism was the dominant political
philosophy in nations from Indonesia to Algeria during the postwar
period, when democratic, socialist, and Marxist perspectives shaped
the major programs of protest.29 The failure of these movements, it is
argued, created an ideological vacuum which Islamists were able to oc-
cupy; and because these times coincided with the economic crises and
deepening class inequality of the neoliberal era, the populace were in
search of alternative politics.
Such circumstances fuelled the modern urban phenomenon of politi-
cal Islam, its class support including educated urban youth, the pious
middle class descended from the mercantile classes of the bazaars and
souks, the newly wealthy professionals enriched through employment
in various oil-producing countries, and supported by the international
Islamic banking and financial system spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, and
the very poor, both Hamas and Hezbollah recruiting declassed refugees
and urban slum-dwellers to their ranks.
To the fore in commentaries are: the extensive use of religious forces
by Islamic states to quell the remnants of the old nationalist and com-
munist movements and prevent the rise of a new left wing; the active
role played by the United States in sponsoring and promoting Islamist
groups as a bulwark against secular nationalism and the Left; the alliance
between U.S. foreign policy and the most reactionary tendencies among
the ruling classes of the Arab states, including the emirate of Qatar
and the Saudi kingdom which promoted and provided lavish funding
for Islamic militants. Of immense significance in these analyses is U.S.
support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan as a means of weakening its
Cold War enemy, and who with the help of its allies in the region (Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, Israel, and Pakistan) gave billions of dollars
for the training and arming of the thousands of volunteers. Amongst
the “Afghan Arabs,” the global army of Islamic warriors who poured
in were Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, Palestinians, Algerians, Sudanese,
Iraqi Kurds, Kuwaitis, Turks, Jordanians, Syrians, Libyans, Tunisians,
Moroccans, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Indians, Indonesians, and Malaysians.
As Deepa Kumar writes, “Up to that point, militant Islamists in these
352 new literary history

countries had no program outside of isolated acts of urban terror. The

Afghan war served to unite them, train them, and give their movement
life” (62)—surely a more potent cause for a globalized Islam than the
Muslim united front backing the Rushdie fatwa.
After the defeat of the Soviets, the fighters dispersed to other regions
such as Bosnia and Kashmir, while the former CIA asset, bin Laden, in
alliance with the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahari, formed Al-Qaeda, turning
the combat in Afghanistan into a global jihad with a distinct political
program. About its significance and future, there are contending as-
sessments. In a review essay of books by Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel,
Mahmood Mamdani cites Kepel’s understanding of Knights under the
Prophet’s Banner, written under the name of Ayman al-Zawahiri (parts of
which Kepel has translated) as marking “a critical shift in strategy and
tactics, and emerging as “the most politically grounded and compre-
hensive manifesto on global jihad.” This document calls for a shift in
the jihad’s target from the “nearby enemy” to the “faraway enemy,” for
which a new leadership must be installed, one that is sufficiently “sci-
entific, confrontational, [and] rational,” capable of rethinking relations
between “the elite” and “the masses” and wielding inspirational slogans.30
When looking at investigative and analytic commentaries on political
Islam, I was alerted to the absence in Young’s narrative of any discus-
sion of terrorism as a political strategy, and remembered that in the
postcolonial discussion, epistemic violence had long ago displaced
imperialism’s massive aggression and entrenched use of force; while
questions of armed anti-imperialist struggle have been routinely avoided,
in favor of resistance manifested as silence, withdrawal, and passive pro-
test. This predilection manifests the accomodationist tendencies of the
field, its radical credentials gravely undermined by a failure to address
revolutionary violence, on which a critical and serious literature exists.
In a pamphlet, Terrorism and Communism (1911), Trotsky, who opposed
the politics of terrorism, refrained from castigating those anarchists
who in the face of Tzarist repression were prepared to risk their lives.
Instead he spoke of the collective struggle against an existing system,
which committed crimes against humanity and inflicted indignities on
the human body and spirit, while expressing moral indignation at the
violence visited on those who implemented state terror. 31
On reading the plentiful sources Young disregards, I cannot but ask:
is the confrontational and contentious presentation of Young’s sub-
stantively insufficient treatise on political Islam calculated to shock an
academic bourgeoisie fearful of Islamic terrorism, in which task it may
succeed? But if its purpose is to display an intellectual temperament
more red than any known on the political spectrum, then all it will
what is left in postcolonial studies? 353

induce in those he seeks to outstrip in the radical game is disbelief in

what is said and not said.
In endorsing the return of invisible and unreadable knowledges to
the sphere of the politically modern, Young finds, as do critics like Gauri
Viswanathan, a potential for subaltern agency in religious belief and ad-
herence to custom. This registers indifference towards Gramsci’s negative
analysis of premodern societies, and neglect of the many studies on the
hazards in evoking the cognitive modes of olden times, which inter alia,
has been examined in a famous essay by Ernst Bloch. Written in 1932 at
the moment of fascism’s rise, Bloch uncovers the potential danger in a
resurgence of survivals and returns to the past, distinguishing between
stale modes of being and memories out of touch with the times—the
“false consciousness and abstract romanticism” that must be exorcized—
and an understanding that must “take into its house the subversive and
utopian elements, the repressed matter of that which is not yet past
. . . those very elements in the past which are not past and continue to
be effective.”32 Rather than recuperating those repressed “subversive and
utopian elements” in neglected and marginalized knowledges, Young
bestows ontological, existential, and experiential value on the authen-
ticity of premodern consciousness, on the folkloric, on what he names
“ideas of the sacred and attachment to ancestral land.”
Since Bloch was addressing European backwardness, this may preempt
the charge of Eurocentrism being made against those who cast a cold
eye on cultural obscurantism elsewhere, who recognize the constraints
of premodern socioeconomic conditions and ancestral beliefs, and reject
as specious the demand that these be respected on the grounds that
they constitute the subaltern’s culture and characteristics. In the face of
such prohibitions, it is salutary to observe the stance of Amílcar Cabral:
while acknowledging popular culture as a positive heritage, he urged the
importance of opposing “without violence all prejudicial customs, the
negative aspects of the beliefs and traditions of our people,” with whom
he identifies in his use of “our,” and toward whom he shows admirable
pedagogical tact: “We are proud of not having forbidden our people
to use fetishes, amulets and things of that sort, which we call mezinhas
. . . We let our people find out for themselves, through the struggle,
that their fetishes are of no use.”33
There are yet further consequences to Young’s defense of the invisible
and the illegible. The exclusionary notion of “the other” is attributed
to the “founding conceptual framework of modernity,” which relegated
those “visibly different to the casual eye . . . to the status of an immature,
primitive, and scarcely human ‘other’”; while the presuppositions of race
theory are ascribed to “the discriminatory foundations of modernity”
354 new literary history

(19–20). Young’s telescopic and distorted perception of modernity re-

hearses the tendency in postcolonial criticism to define modernity in
terms of the racism of its self-consciousness and the “Eurocentrism” of its
teleology,34 and thus to argue that the Western discourse on modernity be
confronted/demystified by a countermodernity which interrupts, inter-
rogates, and displaces its truth claims. Paradoxically, although with very
different intent, this position is not alone in conceiving the time, con-
sciousness, and experience of modernity as belonging exclusively to “the
West,” with the imperial nations casting themselves as the only creators
and inhabitants of modern times, and hence as donors or exporters of
material modernization, rational social orders, and moral enlightenment
to the retarded peoples of Africa, Asia, and South America.
His stance places Young outside the ongoing discussion of modernity’s
universal reach, central to which is the understanding that modernity is
singular because global and by the same token, of infinite variety.35 Peter
Osborne has designated modernity as “our primary secular category of
historical totalization . . . a category of historical periodization, a quality of
social experience and an (incomplete) project.”36 This brings a perspective that
can be made yet more substantive if we attend to Samir Amin’s insistence
on modernity as inextricable from capitalism. In the second edition of
Eurocentrism, Amin, a constant supporter of modernity as constructed on
the principles of questioning authority, rethinking dogma, respecting the
faculty of reason, and validating human agency, undertakes a critique
of its Eurocentric deformation on the grounds that its close relation to
the birth and growth of capitalism conditioned the historic limits of its
really existing incarnation.37
The argument for modernity as coextensive with capitalism’s worldwide
and violent consolidation, and thus as the temporal condition of popula-
tions everywhere, rests on understanding that when the peripheries and
semiperipheries were conscripted into capitalism’s expansionist orbit,
by force or negotiation, they were exposed to a money economy and a
mode of production which undermined existing economic relationships,
destabilized ancient social bonds, and generated new forms of conscious-
ness. Hence if such societies were not, as has been argued, “latecomers
to modernity,” they were marked by a marginal or subordinate status
within a world system.
In his study History’s Disquiet Harry Harootunian opposes “fashion-
able descriptions,” such as “alternative,” “divergent,” “competing,” and
“retroactive modernities” for implying the existence of an “original”
formulated by the “West, followed by copies and lesser modulation.”
Instead of “transmuting a temporal lag into a qualitative difference,”
he defines “the idea of modernity as a specific cultural form and a
consciousness of lived historical time that differs according to social
what is left in postcolonial studies? 355

forms and practices,” depending on the experience of place and time,

as marking the intersection between the new and “the residual stemming
from a different time, histories and cultural conventions,” and therefore
producing “coeval, or better yet, peripheral modernities . . . in which
all societies shared a common reference provided by global capital and
its requirements.”38
In the light of this compelling argument, consider the veracity of
Young’s declaration: “The postcolonial question now is how to make
the dream of emancipation accessible for all those people who fall out-
side the needs of contemporary modernity” (9). Where Chakrabarty’s
concern with saving the human race from the destructive effects of
global warming is ecumenical, Young’s protest has a delimiting clause,
the new subaltern classes being classified as those “forced into the
desperate decision to migrate illegally across whole continents in order
to survive”; who “form an invisible tricontinental diaspora, made up of
refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless persons, asylum seekers,
economic migrants, illegal migrants, irregular migrants, undocumented
migrants, illegal aliens” (8–9, my emphasis).
This discriminatory gesture is wholly out of keeping with Young’s plea
that postcolonial studies rethink the category of the other, retaining only
the phenomenological understanding of alterity as fundamental to being
itself, and abandoning its usage as a strategy of exclusion. Were Young’s
use of modernity and “the West” to be replaced with “capitalism,” and
were the deprivations of the diaspora extended to the dispossessed and
exploited, then the question would surely be to make the dream of eman-
cipation from the worldwide depredations of a global system accessible
to all people, whether in the core or peripheries and semiperipheries.
The assumption of these essays is that analysis of the phenomena
characterizing globalization requires shifting conceptualizations, as
provided in the proposed agendas, but not, as Young explicitly writes,
“the regular production of new theoretical paradigms.” What I have
attempted to suggest is that postcolonial studies is in sore need of a
different theoretical paradigm if it is to participate in the critique of
globalization, and that this can be found in the very legacies of thought
absent from these presentations.

University of Warwick
NOTES

My thanks to Tim Brennan, Keya Ganguly, Priya Gopal, Neil Larsen, Neil Lazaus, Pablo
Mukherjee, and Mike Niblett for criticism, comments, and directing me to relevant sources.
1 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 6.
356 new literary history

2 The vigor of current discussion on Marxism and communism is evident in the dis-
tinctive nonuniform writings of such as Slavoj Žižek, Peter Hallward, and Bruno Bosteels;
while Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière continue to engage with Marxism negatively by
contemplating communism without Marxism.
3 Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume 1 (London: Verso, 2011);
Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2008); David Harvey,
A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010).
4 A sample of the scholarship on globalization that is absent from both essays would
include Gilbert Achar, Samir Amir, Giovanni Arrighi, Daniel Bensaïd, Robert Brenner,
István Meszaros, Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Peter Worsley.
5 Young’s less-than-radical questioning as to “why, millions of people in this world still
live without things that most of those in the West take for granted. Clean water, for ex-
ample” registers a concern shared and actively pursued by countless NGOs, think tanks,
and charities who have no desire to turn the world upside down.
6 See the well-known writings of Homi Bhabha. More recently, Gayatri Spivak discuss-
ing comparative literature in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003)
has eschewed “the politicization of the discipline” and advocated “a depoliticization of
the politics of hostility toward a politics of friendship to come.” In Affective Communities:
Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke
Univ. Press, 2004) Leela Gandhi claims to provide an alternative history of anti-imperialism
by looking at a very small number of metropolitan, mainly British, and all theatrically
eccentric persons, whose capacity for personal hybridity and radical alterity, she asserts,
enabled them to develop an affinity with the oppressed. This ethical demonstration of
“hospitality and xenophilia” constitutes a politics of friendship to replace a politics of con-
flict. See also Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation
in Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2011).
7 Simon During, “Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation After All?”
Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 31.
8 See Intercontinental Cry, an information network on “the most pressing and under-
reported Indigenous Struggles”: http://intercontinentalcry.org; Jonathan Friedman, “In-
digenous Struggles and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” Journal of world-systems
research 5, no. 2 (1999): 391–411; Arissa media group (http://www.arissa.org/indigenousseries.
html), also the large literature on the Chiapas and guerilla struggles in Bolivia, Guatemala,
and elsewhere in Latin America.
9 See Marcus Colchester, Guyana, Fragile Frontier: Loggers, Miners and Forest Peoples
(London: Latin American Bureau, 1997); Maximilian C. Forte, Indigenous Resurgence in
the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival (New York: Peter Lang, 2006);
Mike Krebs, “Roots and Revolutionary Dynamics of Indigenous Struggles in Canada: A
Movement for Land and Self-Determination,” November 20, 2007, http://www.socialistvoice.
ca/?p=227
10 Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya, eds., The Postcolonial Gramsci (London:
Routledge, 2012).
11 Robert Young, “Il Gramsci meridionale,” Postcolonial Gramsci, 30–31.
12 As further archives within Italy are discovered, the already large scholarly literature
on Gramsci is set to expand. Meanwhile a truncated list of recent work would include:
Marco Scotini, “Hegemony and Subalternity: Reading Antonio Gramsci,” Chtodelat 10
(2006), http://www.chtodelat.org; Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left
and Right (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006) and Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian
Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism (London: Haymarket Books), 2011.
13 Unpublished correspondence with Michael Niblett.
what is left in postcolonial studies? 357

14 Consider Chris Williams, Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis
(London: Haymarket Books, 2010); John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York,
The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010);
J. W. Moore, Capitalism as World Ecology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 2003); Harriet
Friedmann, “What on Earth is the Modern World-System?,” Journal of World-Systems Research
6, no. 2 (2000): 480–517; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
15 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” Telos 60 (1984): 111–24; Max
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979).
16 Derek Wall, Green Left Weekly, www.greenleft/org.au/node/46497.
17 Robert Young, Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
18 Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge,
1990).
19 Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, Diana Loxley, eds., Europe and Its Oth-
ers: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature 1984, (Colchester: Univ. of
Essex, 1985). Here Edward Said first delivered “Orientalism Revisited.”
20 See Neil Larsen, “Marxism, Postcolonialism and The Eighteenth Brumaire,” in Marxism,
Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 204–20, for a comprehensive and critical discussion of the
poststructuralist position on “representation.”
21 From the outset, Timothy Brennan maintains, dominant trends within postcolonial
studies “were driven by a set of ethical postulates popularized by poststructuralist theory:
the striving for ambivalence as a matter of principle; the ardent belief that answering a
question forecloses it; the elision of meaning in pursuit of epistemological doubt as a
desired goal.” Wars of Position, 139.
22 Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvélakis, eds., Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism
(Leiden: Brill, 2008), 309–31. See also Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011).
23 Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical
Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1475–90.
24 Brennan, Wars of Position, 242.
25 Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2011). See too Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, links.org.au/node/2279
and “ Class and Capitalism in the Gulf—The Political Economy of the GCC,” in New Left
Project, December 2011.
26 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London:
Verso, 2003).
27 Kepel notes the use of “internet websites, satellite television links, clandestine finan-
cial transfers, international air travel, and a proliferation of activists ranging from the
suburbs of Jersey City to the rice paddies of Indonesia”; Roy observes that “religion has
been secularized, not in the sense that it is under the scrutiny of modern sciences, but
to the extent that it is debated outside any specific institutions or corporations.” Qtd. in
Mahmood Mamdani, “Whither Political Islam?,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 1 (2005): 150.
28 See Gilbert Achar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World
Disorder (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); Deepa Kumar, International Socialist Re-
view 76 (March–April 2011) and 78 (July–August 2011); John Esposito, ed., Political Islam:
Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform? (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997); Tariq Ali, The Clash
of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002).
29 Maxime Rodinson (1915–2004) had for long contested writers who construed an
unchanging entity called “Islam” and purveyed the stereotype of Islam as hostile to the
secular and modernity. Also see Aziz- Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso,
1993).
358 new literary history

30 Mahmood Mamdani, “Whither Political Islam?,” 150.

31 www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/index.htm. See also Mike Davis, Buda’s
Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London: Verso, 2007).
32 Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics,” New German
Critique 11 (1977): 36–37.
33 In Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, trans. Richard Handyside (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1972), 87, 160. Cabral, born 1924, assasinated 1973, was prominent in the
liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of
independence against the Portuguese. For a measured discussion on indigenous knowledge
systems, see Paulin Hountondji, “Knowledge Appropriation in a Post-colonial Context,” in
Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems: Towards a Philosophy of Articula-
tion, ed. Catherine A. Odora (Claremont, SA: New Africa Books, 2002).
34 Tsenay Serequeberhan, “The Critique of Eurocentrism,” in Postcolonial African Philoso-
phy: A Critical Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Ez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 142–43.
35 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London:
Verso, 2002).
36 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995),
5, 29.
37 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism
and Culturalism, 2nd ed., trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2009).
38 Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of
Everyday Life (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000), 62–63, 163.