Understanding Postcolonialism

understanding postcolonialism
Understanding Movements in Modern Thought

Series Editor: Jack Reynolds
This series provides short, accessible and lively introductions to the

major schools, movements and traditions in philosophy and the history
of ideas since the beginning of the Enlightenment. All books in the
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Published
Understanding Empiricism Understanding Postcolonialism

Robert G. Meyers Jane Hiddleston
Understanding Existentialism Understanding Poststructuralism
Jack Reynolds James Williams
Understanding German Idealism Understanding Psychoanalysis
Will Dudley Matthew Sharpe & Joanne Faulkner
Understanding Hegelianism Understanding Rationalism
Robert Sinnerbrink Charlie Heunemann
Understanding Hermeneutics Understanding Utilitarianism
Lawrence Schmidt Tim Mulgan
Understanding Naturalism Understanding Virtue Ethics
Jack Ritchie Stan van Hooft
Understanding Phenomenology
David R. Cerbone
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Understanding Feminism Understanding Pragmatism

Peta Bowden & Jane Mummery Axel Mueller
Understanding Environmental
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Andrew Brennan & Y. S. Lo
understanding postcolonialism
Jane Hiddleston
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction 1
2 Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call
to arms 25
3 Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi,
Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective 54
4 Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism 76
5 Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics 98
6 Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return
to place 126
7 Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe 151
8 Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the discipline 178
Questions for discussion and revision 186
Guide to further reading 189
Bibliography 193
Index 199
contents v
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford,
and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the Univer-
sity of Oxford for granting me a sabbatical during which to complete
this project. Chapter 1 contains extracts from my article “Dialectic or
Dissemination? Anti-colonial Critique in Sartre and Derrida” (Sartre
Studies International 12[1] [2006]), and Chapter 4 reuses some material
from my essay “Jacques Derrida” (in Postcolonial Thought in the Fran-
cophone World, C. Forsdick & D. Murphy [eds] [Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2009]). I am grateful to the editors of both for allow-
ing me to reprint this material. I would like to thank the series editor,
Jack Reynolds, for suggesting this project in the first place, and Tristan
Palmer at Acumen for his work in bringing the book to fruition. The
anonymous readers also offered invaluable advice and comments, and
I am grateful to them for helping me to sharpen the final version. Kate
Williams has also been a scrupulous editor and has helped to produce
a more polished text. Discussion of aspects of the book came up in
seminars and meetings with a number of graduate students at Oxford,
and I benefited greatly from trying out my ideas with them. Finally, I am
immensely grateful for the help and support of friends and colleagues,
and above all, to Colin, for everything.
Jane Hiddleston
Oxford
vi understanding postcolonialism
one
Introduction
Postcolonialism is a broad and constantly changing movement that has

aroused a good deal of both interest and controversy. Inaugurated in
earnest during and after the fight for independence in the remaining
British and French colonies around the 1950s and 1960s, it has devel-
oped rapidly to become today a major area of intellectual innovation
and debate. While the term first became popular in North American
university campuses, and in particular in literary departments, it is
now widely used both inside and outside Western academic institu-
tions and attracts ever-growing numbers of commentators as well as
students. The term “postcolonialism” can generally be understood as
the multiple political, economic, cultural and philosophical responses
to colonialism from its inauguration to the present day, and is some-
what broad and sprawling in scope. While “anti-colonialism” names
specific movements of resistance to colonialism, postcolonialism
refers to the wider, multifaceted effects and implications of colonial
rule. Postcolonialism frequently offers a challenge to colonialism,
but does not constitute a single programme of resistance; indeed, it
is considered consequently by some to be rather vague and panoptic
in its ever more ambitious field of enquiry. This book will focus on the
philosophical dimensions of postcolonialism, and will demonstrate
the diversity of conceptual models and strategies used by postcolonial
philosophers rather than by political thinkers or literary writers. Post-
colonial philosophy will be shown to feed into these, but detailed dis-
cussion of the politics, economics and literature of postcolonialism is
beyond the scope of this study.
introduction 1
The term “postcolonialism” is a highly ambiguous one. In order to
understand its meanings and implications it is first necessary to define
the colonialism to which it evidently refers. Colonialism should be
conceived as the conquest and subsequent control of another country,
and involves both the subjugation of that country’s native peoples and
the administration of its government, economy and produce. The act
of colonization is a concrete process of invasion and a practical seiz-
ing of control, although it is important for postcolonial studies that
this material, empirical manifestation of colonization is at the same
time backed up by a colonial ideology that stresses cultural supremacy.
Colonialism is from this point of view both a specified political and
economic project, and a larger discourse of hegemony and superior-
ity that is enlisted to drive and support that concrete political act. The
colonial project involves the literal process of entering into a foreign
territory and assuming control of its society and industry, and, on a
more conceptual level, the post facto promulgation of a cultural ideol-
ogy that justifies the colonizer’s presence on the basis of his superior
knowledge and “civilization”.
“Colonialism” is close in meaning to “imperialism”, although at the
same time slightly different. If colonialism involves a concrete act of
conquest, imperialism names a broader form of authority or dominance.
Colonialism is in this way one active manifestation of imperialist ideol-
ogy, but imperialism can also be understood as a larger structure of
economic or political hegemony that does not have to include the direct
rule and conquest of another country. Imperialism could, then, continue
after the end of colonial rule, and indeed, many critics have described
the United States’s current dominance of global markets as a new form
of imperialist rule. This conception of imperialism shows that the term
is wide-ranging, but it certainly helps to conceptualize both past and
present forms of economic and cultural dominance. Imperialism is also
now associated with capitalism, and with the attempt by Western states
to impose their capitalist system on the rest of the world. Colonial con-
quest and settlement was one way in which those states accomplished
the spread of their capitalist ideology, but even after decolonization
this ideology continues to exert its pressure on the ex-colonies and the
“Third World” (and the use of this term itself stresses the subordinate
status of the countries to which it refers).
If these are the distinctions between colonialism and imperialism,
then what do we understand specifically by the term “postcolonialism”?
We might assume that postcolonialism designates the aftermath of any
form of colonial rule. This means it could presumably refer not only to
2 understanding postcolonialism
the effects of British rule in India, for example, or of the French pres-
ence in Algeria, but also to the wake of the Roman Empire, or to the
traces of the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America.
Indeed, some critics believe that the model for current conceptions of
postcolonialism precisely emerges out of the earlier experiences of inde-
pendence and neo-imperialism in Latin America, and certainly, some
thinking around the concepts of liberation and transculturation can be
traced back to this region. So the term could be seen to name a series
of historical contexts and geographical locations that is bewildering in
scope. In fact, however, perhaps as a result of the new understanding
of imperialism as associated with capitalism mentioned above, post-
colonialism is more frequently conceived to describe what has resulted
from the decline of British and French colonialism in the second half
of the twentieth century. Of course, many critics continue to reflect on
the “postcolonial” heritage of Latin America, or, indeed, use the term
to discuss the impact of foreign power on Canada or Australia. It has
even been suggested that the United States is postcolonial in the sense
that it was once a British colony, although it is clear that the conditions
of this colonial project were different from those that were being ques-
tioned specifically in British and French colonies around the 1950s.
Nevertheless, most critics who identify themselves with postcolonialism
focus on the particular form of colonial ideology that was also tied to
capitalism, and that brought about not just the conquest of peoples and
the use of their resources, but also industrialization and the whole-
sale restructuring of their economies. Postcolonial critique of British
and French colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also
focuses very much on the ruthlessness of their methods of exploita-
tion and on the inequality and impoverishment brought about by this
particular form of oppression.
So postcolonial thought is potentially geographically and historically
wide-ranging, but has been narrowed slightly by some of the major critics,
who tend to concentrate on British and French capitalist forms of colo-
nialism. The question of the precise dating of the postcolonial, however,
remains to be resolved. On this matter, thinkers have distinguished
the “post-colonial” from the “postcolonial”, arguing that the removal
of the hyphen designates a shift in meaning. It is widely agreed that
“post-colonial” names a distinct historical period following the end of
direct colonial rule. Post-colonial Algeria, for example, describes the
nation’s trajectory after 1962, once decolonization was agreed after eight
years of bloody conflict. Post-colonialism is in this way narrow in scope
and names a specific, identifiable moment. Postcolonialism, with no
introduction 3
hyphen, is larger and more problematic. For a start, it tends to refer
not to all that happened after the end of colonialism, but to the events
that succeeded its beginning. So postcolonialism also names the period
of colonial rule, together with its gradual weakening and demise. For
this reason, in his book Islands and Exiles (1998), Chris Bongie sug-
gests writing the term in the form post/colonialism, since this stresses
the presence of the colonial within postcolonial critique. Far from cel-
ebrating the definitive conclusion to colonialism, then, postcolonialism
analyses its effects both in its heyday and during the period that followed
the end of the literal, concrete colonial presence. The movement is asso-
ciated with the examination and critique of colonial power both before
and after decolonization.
This expansion of the historical period to which the term
postcolonialism refers means that it has come to be associated with a
range of situations and events. Furthermore, postcolonialism names
the analysis of the mechanics of colonial power, the economic exploita-
tion it brought with it, and a form of both cultural and ethical critique
or questioning. It is both a political and a broader ethical philosophy,
and indeed, it will be the contention of this book that latterly the field
has become split, often artificially, between these two distinct strands.
Overall, it can be agreed that postcolonialism names a set of politi-
cal, philosophical or conceptual questions engendered by the colonial
project and its aftermath. But the approach taken by critics towards
these questions varies significantly, with one school of thought tending
to lean towards a denunciation of colonial politics and economics, and
to call for practical revolution or reform, and another stressing coloni-
alism’s ethical blindness and the cultural regeneration required in the
wake of that oppression. Postcolonialism does not propose one answer
to such questions – although many critics have objected that it tries to
– but offers a framework for their expansion, exploration and clarifi-
cation. So although commentators point out the risks associated with
conceiving the term as a homogeneous label, unifying distinct experi-
ences of oppression, it can be understood to describe a multifaceted and
open process of interrogation and critique. It is not a single structure
or a straightforward answer, but, as Ato Quayson helpfully puts it, it is
a process, a way of thinking through critical strategies. Quayson goes
so far as to propose not a “postcolonialist” analysis, but a “process of
postcolonializing”, or an intellectual engagement with the evolving links
between the colonial period and current or modern-day inequalities.
Postcolonialism is additionally, in this sense, different from post-
coloniality. If postcolonialism involves some form of critique and resist-
ance, despite its proponents’ awareness of capitalism’s neo-imperial
effects, postcoloniality is a looser term for a current moment or epoch.
Postcoloniality is at the same time a condition rather than an intellec-
tual engagement or standpoint, and this term also contains the negative
connotations of a generation still, perhaps unthinkingly, bound up in
the politics of the hegemony of “the West” over its (former) overseas
territories. Moreover, postcoloniality has been described by Graham
Huggan as a particular condition in the market, whereby certain texts,
artefacts or cultural practices are celebrated precisely as a result of their
apparent “marginality” in relation to the Western canon. The irony of
this process of exoticization is that only certain authors or works are
championed, and those who achieve this status do so largely because
they fulfil Western expectations of the nature of the other culture, and
of the form of a good work of art. Some critics have argued that post-
colonialism is also guilty of this fetishization of certain aspects of “Third
World” culture, but we might argue in response that postcolonialism
is the movement that interrogates this cynical process, whereas post-
coloniality is the broader epoch and set of conditions in which such
exoticization has come to thrive. Postcoloniality is from this point of
view intermingled with neocolonialism: that is, with lingering ideologies
of cultural patronage of the sort that originally backed up and fuelled
actual colonial powers.
To return more specifically to postcolonialism, this book will stress
that this is a movement of questioning that seeks not, as critics have
at times objected, to propose a single model or understanding for the
colonial project and its aftershocks, but to analyse the nuances and
implications of its multiple, varying manifestations. Postcolonialism is
equally not a coherent strategy for resistance, but it names the at times
self-contradictory or internally conflictual movement in thought that
examines, unpicks and compares multiple strategies and potential modes
of critique. This book will analyse some of these varying strategies as
they were conceived by some of the major philosophers and thinkers of
the twentieth century, and will explore the distinct approaches that have
been reified by certain critics into a strict, and ultimately rather prob-
lematic, division. While for some readers postcolonialism is an overtly
political movement, concerned above all with the empirical, material
effects of colonialism and its aftermath, for others this field of enquiry
heralds an ethical reflection concerning, rather more broadly, relations
between self and other. Postcolonial thought is, on the one hand, seen
to interrogate the underlying political structures of colonialism, and the
mechanics of its promulgation and subsequent dismantling. Postcolonial
introduction 5
critique goes on to enquire after the structure and efficacy of particular
forms of nationalism as they emerged at the time when colonial ideology
faltered and declined. On the other hand, however, an apparently alter-
native strand to this movement in modern thought forces us to rethink
our understanding of the deeper relations between peoples, cultures or
communities, and the ethical encounter interrupted by colonialism but
crucial to its denunciation. A major part of postcolonial critique concen-
trates on the militant condemnation of a pernicious political ideology,
but another aspect uses that condemnation to challenge and extend our
understanding of how to contemplate the other.
The two strands of postcolonialism draw, respectively, on Marxism
and Levinasian ethics. These influences are evidently combined with
others and used in different ways, but some understanding of Marxist
politics and Levinasian ethics offers insight into two of the dominant
currents in postcolonial philosophy. Marx commented explicitly on
colonial ideology in a number of essays, although it is above all his cri-
tique of capitalist exploitation and his call for revolt that inspired later
postcolonial thinkers. Emmanuel Levinas does not engage openly with
the question of colonial power, but his reinvention of the ethical relation
in the wake of National Socialism is undeniably at the heart of many
later discussions of postcolonial alterity. The rest of this introduction
will sketch the relevant parts of Marx and Levinas, and establish the
philosophical bases on which much subsequent postcolonial thought is
constructed. Nevertheless, in noting that many secondary postcolonial
critics appear to choose between politics and ethics in their reflections
on the works of the major philosophers, much of this book will con-
sider the fragility of the frontier between these apparently distinct poles.
Levinas himself offers an equivocal response to Marx, arguing both that
the latter’s materialist confrontation of the bourgeoisie and the prole-
tariat casts aside the possibility of absolute freedom, and that he never-
theless did universalize French revolutionary ideals by championing
freedom of consciousness. Much more broadly, moreover, postcolonial
thinkers of each camp at times borrow from the other, and leading
critics such as Gayatri Spivak constantly and deliberately dart between
them in the effort to stress their reciprocal uses. Materialist commen-
tators such as Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry may battle
against the “textualist” approach of a critic such as Robert Young, but
most of the leading philosophers address both the politics of colonial
oppression and its underlying, unethical representational structures.
Certainly, the overt goals of political and ethical postcolonialism will
be found to be quite clearly distinct from one another, yet a genuine
understanding of the postcolonial arena will necessitate an engagement
with both levels.
Marxism and ideology
Marx refers directly to colonialism somewhat sporadically through-

out his work, and many of his comments on this subject appear rather
ambivalent. There can be no doubt, however, that he condemns the sub-
jugation and economic exploitation of the underclass that the colonial
system demands. Marx’s most developed observations concerning colo-
nialism are focused on India and on the inequality enforced by British
colonial rule in that context. He notes in numerous journalistic essays,
and in parts of Capital, the misery and poverty suffered by the natives,
the cruelty of their exploitation and the destructive effects of the British
restructuring of the economy. Marx notes that the British effectively
broke down the founding framework of Indian society by taking control
of the means of production and imposing British capitalist principles.
As a result of the British presence, Indian agriculture deteriorated as it
struggled to conform to these principles of free competition, laissez-
faire and laissez-aller. Furthermore, British forms of industry destroyed
local technologies – the handloom and the spinning wheel, for example
– in order to impose a larger-scale manufacturing industry, with the
result that the colonial system entirely recreated the means of the pro-
duction of cotton in the “mother country of cottons”. Smaller farms,
local businesses and family communities were dissolved because they
were based on a domestic form of industry – on hand weaving and till-
ing, for example – and the natives as a result no longer ran or managed
their own resources. Not only was economic control passed over to
the British, but local communities were dissolved and fragmented by
the installation of this foreign form of industry. In addition, the higher
employees of the British East India Company instituted a monopoly on
the tea trade, fixing prices and taking profits away from local workers.
In analysing such instances of restructuring and exploitation, Marx and
Engels both denounce the economic drive conceived as the major basis
for colonial power: “colonialism proclaimed surplus-value making as
the sole end and aim of humanity” (Marx & Engels 1960: 261).
Despite these condemnations of the inequality and exploitation
brought about by the British in India, Marx’s position on colonial-
ism nevertheless at times seems contradictory. First, in arguing that
the British colonizers did make an economic profit out of the colonial
introduction 7
project, he succeeds in both condemning the exploitation associated
with this profit and stressing the success of an economic venture that
anti-colonialists at the time wanted to deny. As Young points out in Post-
colonialism (2001), Marx goes on to contradict himself on this question
of profit, as he mentions how the East India Company was stretching
British finances to the point of potential ruin, but for the most part he
underlines the impact of colonialism in the capitalist drive for finan-
cial gain. Furthermore, if Marx denounces the moral failings of British
colonialism, and laments the suffering of the native population, he does
also note that the British succeeded in imposing some unity on a people
that had been disastrously fractured up until that point. He recalls that
India had previously relied on hereditary divisions of labour, solidified
by the caste system, and these impeded the progress and development
of Indian power and industry. The modern industrial system imposed
by the British, together with the construction of a railway system, in
fact to a certain extent helped to transcend existing petty hierarchies. So
Marx is virulently against colonial exploitation, but does not condemn
every aspect of the colonial project.
Marx is also above all interested less in independence than in the
revolt of the working classes against the bourgeoisie. In order for the
Indian working class to achieve such a revolt, and then to reap the
benefits of British industrialization, Marx argues that the British bour-
geoisie would first need to be supplanted by a strong industrial prole-
tariat capable of undermining the bourgeois control of the means of
production. The first revolution had to happen back home, then, and
the colonized might be able to follow suit if the British working class
had created a model for them to follow. The Indian proletariat needed
to learn from the British proletariat before achieving the conditions
necessary for their emancipation. At the same time, the colonial and
imperialist projects were preventing the socialist revolution in Britain
from taking place, so the danger was that the combined force of colo-
nialism and capitalism mutually strengthened each system, disabling
revolt both at home and abroad. Colonialism is an ideology thrown into
question in Marx’s work, then, but anti-colonial critique is by no means
his first priority. He continues to believe that Indian society might have
something to learn from Britain, and indeed, that an anti-colonial revolt
should not take place at any cost, and without a properly constructed
political framework to support it.
In The Communist Manifesto (1967), Marx and Engels again at once
denounce the capitalist exploitation of colonized countries and remain
hazy on the nature, and appropriate moment, for something as specific
as a nationalist revolution. They vilify the scope of capitalist ambition,
its spread beyond Western nations and drive to rule the economies of
the world. It is a holistic ideology that demands not only the reign of
surplus-value making in Europe, but at the same time the derivation
of further surplus-value using the resources of other countries, of col-
onies. Capitalism for Marx and Engels is also pernicious because it is
propped up by a rhetoric of civilization, and claims to bring moral as
well as economic benefits to foreign territories. They angrily denounce
the way in which capitalism:
compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bour-

geois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what
it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois
themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own
image. (1967: 84)
Nevertheless, if capitalism also brings with it this drive towards col-

onization and the imposition of what it conceives to be its mission
civilisatrice, its overthrow in the colonies should not necessarily be
nationalist. Marx and Engels propose, in the wake of the weakening
of distinctions between nations as a result of the development of the
bourgeoisie, that revolution will be achieved through the unification of
the working classes beyond national differences. They argue that work-
ing men have to seize hold of their own nation, they have to position
themselves as the leading class of the nation in order to achieve politi-
cal supremacy, but once this supremacy has been instated, Marx and
Engels look forward to a utopian world where divisions and conflicts
between nations fade.
Marx’s views on nationalism and anti-colonial revolt alter later in
his career, however, and it is difficult to pin down and reify his atti-
tudes to these phenomena. Again, as Young points out, Marx goes on to
schematize the relationship between colonizing and oppressed nations
according to the same model used for the bourgeoisie and the control
of the proletariat, and this suggests that the colonized nation should
now pull together and unify its forces in order to achieve its emancipa-
tion. Taking into account Marx’s vacillation on nationalism, however, it
remains clear that his broader thoughts on the structures of economic
exploitation and on the nature of a workers’ revolt can tell us some-
thing about the capitalist drive behind colonialism. Ambivalent about
colonialism’s potential benefits, Marx also does not offer a straight-
forward anti-colonial critique, and focuses more on the effects of the
introduction 9
bourgeois control of the means of production than on colonial violence.
His identification of capitalism’s broad sweep and underlying colonial
drive provides, however, a significant context for any understanding of
the mechanics of colonial economic control.
In addition to the practical discussion of economic exploitation,
Marx’s work at the same time offers a foundation for a conception of
ideology that is crucial for the spread and institutionalization of colonial
power. In The German Ideology (1964), Marx and Engels distinguish
the material activity of men and their empirical political and social
relations from the larger ideological superstructure. Marx’s discus-
sion of ideology opens with the observation that the functioning of the
capitalist system starts with actual individuals, who are productively
active in a definite way, entering into a series of definite political and
social relations. These relations are then seen to direct the production
of ideas, of conceptions and of a broader consciousness that remains
tightly interwoven with material and empirical conditions and actions.
Nevertheless, Marx’s theory of the division of labour and the control
of the means of production by the bourgeoisie means that the worker
comes to find himself alienated from the ideas that drive and shape his
existence. Obliged to work for the broader community or the state, the
worker directs his energies into this larger communal life, which is at
odds with his own self-interest. The proletariat work in the service of
the ruling class, who produce the ruling ideas, and these are in turn
divorced from the worker’s perception of his personal needs and aims.
For Marx, the class that retains control of the means of production also
controls the community’s mental production: “the ruling class presents
its interest as a common interest to all members of society” (Marx &
Engels 1964: 60). This common interest can be seen as a dominant ideol-
ogy that has become detached from the individual’s view of his material
conditions; it is an illusion or chimera that nevertheless props up the
capitalist system. Building on Marx, Engels goes so far as to conceive
ideology as false consciousness; it is the illusory gamut of ideas and
dogmas that support and justify the structure of economic exploitation
and inequality. As Terry Eagleton writes in Ideology (1991), however,
Marx’s later reworkings of this notion of ideology move away from the
notion of a false ideology and towards a conception of the duplicity of
actual lived relations.
Marx’s theory of ideology can be used to reveal the illusions and
suppositions promulgated in favour of colonial imposition and domina-
tion. It is not, however, without its inconsistencies. Eagleton’s discussion
of the evolution of ideology in Marx’s work points out that there is
some contradiction in his use of notions of truth and falsity, because the
“falsity” of ideas paradoxically comes to describe the “truth” of the social
order. Ideology also seems integral to social life and at the same time
dissociated from it. Furthermore, it has been observed that the assumed
association between the ruling class and ruling ideology suggests a tight
system of control, when ideology could be seen to function in a broader,
more free-floating manner. Similarly, critics have noticed that Marx’s
theory of ideology implies that ideology is somewhat homogeneous,
although thinkers such as Stuart Hall have stressed that Marx does in
fact allow for ideology to vary in form. Market relations can indeed be
conceived in more multifarious ways than perhaps at first appears. At
the same time, further dissenters have noted that in Marx’s theory, those
who are swayed by the ruling ideology are conceived unfairly as blind
to its falsity and distortion. Once again, however, we might respond
that Marx’s members of the proletariat are not necessarily passive and
ignorant, but rather that his understanding of ideology implies that
parts of the capitalist process either escape their understanding, or
make little sense to them as individuals. What this notion of a domi-
nant consciousness and a ruling set of ideas suggests, moreover, is that
the capitalist system imposes itself both practically and insidiously, by
propagating ideas that justify that initial practical structure. Concomi-
tantly, the workers’ struggle against capitalism requires a form of ideo-
logical transformation: a change in leading values as well as a seizing
of economic control.
If Marx’s theory of ideology has been criticized for its rigidity, then
Antonio Gramsci is one thinker who helps to add nuance to his under-
standing of the mechanics of class domination. Gramsci troubles the
temptation in reading Marx to conceive the ideological superstructure
as tightly knitted to the economic substructure, and stresses instead the
complexity of social formations. Gramsci’s approach is not exclusively
economic, and his writing analyses together economic conditions and
the knotted structure of political and ideological relations that serve to
form the social fabric. Furthermore, Gramsci uses the concept of hegem-
ony to think through structures of domination, rather than sticking to
the notion of a fixed correlation between one ruling class and the ruling
ideology. A hegemonic formation is not necessarily a permanent fixture,
but names the different strategies employed by any ruling class to win
its position of dominance. Hegemony is distinct from coercion, since it
relies on a changeable form of moral and cultural leadership or author-
ity that comes to determine the structure of a given society, rather than
on the use of force. Hegemony names the ways in which the governing
introduction 11
power wins the consent of those it governs. Like Marx’s concept of ideol-
ogy, then, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes the spread of a sort
of cultural and political status quo that props up the leadership of the
ruling class and the bourgeois mentality that goes with it. For Gramsci,
however, unlike for Marx, the relation between base economic struc-
tures and the hegemonic class is wide-ranging and diffuse, and is bound
up with culture and the spread of values as well as with exploitation.
Hegemony also names lived social relations rather than just false ideas or
illusions. Finally, hegemony is for Gramsci necessarily a site of struggle,
as plural subjects under the sway of hegemony nevertheless assert their
multifarious and contradictory forms of social consciousness. This form
of struggle is more important for Gramsci than simply a straightforward,
economistic seizing of control of the means of production.
In addition to opening out Marx’s theory of ideology to stress the role
of culture and morality in the subjugated subject’s strategy for revolt,
Gramsci’s political writing more specifically on the peasantry offers a
model of contestation that could also be usefully anti-colonial. Inter-
spersed with his comments on the subjugation of the Italian peasantry
are observations on the injustice of colonial exploitation and the neces-
sity for the exploited class to come together, united by shared ideas. Like
Marx, Gramsci condemns the capitalist drive behind colonialism, but
then goes on to emphasize the importance of the education of working
men, since a better understanding of their situation would help them
to organize a coherent position of revolt. Resistance would be achieved
through the creation of a powerful and fully realized self-consciousness.
This conception of the role of culture both in the propagation of hegem-
ony and in the service of its overthrow is additionally pertinent in the
colonial context, since the colonial project of course relies not only
on the institution of a capitalist form of exploitation, but also on the
spread of a belief in white racial supremacy. Furthermore, Hall points
out that the discussion of the culturally specific quality of hegemonic
formations enables us to think through the particular determinants of
colonial dominance and allows a flexible understanding of the ways in
which class and race feed into one another. Most famously, Gramsci’s
concept of the subaltern – which names a subjugated social category
not restricted to the notion of class – has been used by Marxist Indian
theorists such as Ranajit Guha and, more loosely, Spivak to examine the
insurgency of the Indian peasantry, as well as its oppression. The signifi-
cance of this thinking lies above all in its conception of a decisive politi-
cal agency claiming a voice of its own. The subaltern is a resistant being
rather than merely a passive object of oppression and exploitation.
The final theorist of ideology worth introducing here is Louis Althus-
ser, who refines and expands on both Marx and Gramsci. Althusser
develops Marx’s understanding of the relation between base and super-
structure by specifying the actual mechanics of ideological domination.
He reads Marx’s work in detail, but points out the theoretical gap in
Marx’s analysis of the question of how the ideological superstructure
works itself into actual economic relations and conditions. In order
to address this lack in Marx, Althusser does not use Gramsci’s theory
of hegemony and cultural supremacy, since he conceives the latter’s
desire to amalgamate economic infrastructure, exploitation, class strug-
gle, the law and the state under the unifying umbrella of “hegemony”
as astonishingly idealistic. Rather, Althusser looks at the State as a
“machine” with a set of apparatuses ensuring the continued domina-
tion of the ruling, bourgeois class. The State is made up of the repres-
sive apparatuses, such as the army and the police, by which it exerts its
force, and these are combined with political apparatuses, including the
head of state, the government, and the body of the administration. Most
famously, Althusser asserts that the ideology of the ruling class is prom-
ulgated via a plurality of ideological apparatuses, such as the education
system. These ideological state apparatuses are the most insidious, and
include major institutions such as schools and colleges, the church, the
legal system, communications, and smaller sites of diffusion such as
the family and the cultural expectations accompanying it. The role of
these apparatuses is to ensure the reproduction of the labour power, so
that workers continue to submit to the ruling ideology and the agents
of exploitation and repression continue to manipulate that ideology.
The ideology produced by these apparatuses denies the existence of
economic exploitation and struggle, and recommends the virtues of
public service. It is also, importantly, a distortion that acts to reshape
individuals’ perception of their relation to the means of production. It
is not bound up with falsity, as in Marx and Engels, and does not imply
that certain conditions are illusory, but describes rather the imaginary
relation of individuals to their actual conditions of existence. Most
importantly, Althusser’s analysis is innovative in that it pinpoints the
material manifestation of this ideology, since this is no longer conceived
merely as a series of ideas or a ruling consciousness but as a concrete set
of mechanics. Ideology, as well as exploitation, gains force and credence
by means of particular institutions or apparatuses, all of which serve
and concretize the bourgeois aims of the State.
Althusser’s notion of ideology also alters our understanding of the
construction of the subject. It is ideology that makes us subjects; it
introduction 13
“interpellates” individuals, which means it addresses them, and con-
structs them as subjects of the State. We are always born into the ideo-
logical system, then, and know ourselves only as formed by that system.
Althusser draws on Jacques Lacan here, and suggests that the subject
recognizes itself by means of an imaginary or deluded vision that is
promulgated by ideology. Most importantly, though, Althusser’s think-
ing is useful here in that it uncovers the vast ideological mirage that the
individual is born into, and that forms each individual as a social sub-
ject. Ideology actually serves in the construction of subjectivity, rather
than acting only on a ready-formed consciousness. Once again, this
conception of the constitution of the subject by ideology could be seen
to inform notions of the colonized as actively formed by colonialism: by
notions of white supremacy that serve to govern the entire social system,
and that are promulgated by the State and its attendant institutions.
Postcolonial critic E. San Juan Jr notes that Althusser’s conception of the
determined, interpellated subject risks ruling out autonomous agency,
but nevertheless stresses the importance of Althusser’s theory of ideol-
ogy for an understanding of capitalist colonialism. Althusser’s use of
the notion of a Lacanian alienated subjectivity will later be taken up by
Homi Bhabha in his specific discussion of the splitting of the colonized
in the face of what will by this time be called colonial discourse.
If Marx himself comments sporadically and even erratically on colo-
nialism, this book will show how his relevance to current postcolonial
debates also exceeds the scope, and indeed the ambivalence, of these
direct references. His critique not only of colonialism, but of economic
exploitation, informs many more recent denunciations of colonialism
and capitalism. Major revolutionary thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and
Jean-Paul Sartre derive their understanding of revolt from Marx’s call to
the proletariat to stand together and seize control of the means of pro-
duction. Anti-colonial critique is not concerned in such contexts just
with the relation between colonizer and colonized, but with the oppres-
sion of the masses by the bourgeoisie, and this must be overturned by
the destruction of both political and economic subjugation. In add-
ition, theories of decolonization and nationalism in India use a Marxist
understanding of the domination of the peasantry by the bourgeoisie,
while also offering a critique of nationalist unity in the preparation of
that struggle. More broadly, the concept of ideology as developed by
Marx, Gramsci and Althusser feeds into postcolonial denunciations of
colonial power as propped up by a system of false images and mirages.
Michel Foucault’s exploration of discourse, although rejecting the term
“ideology”, draws on Marxism in stressing the interweaving of power
with knowledge, and Edward Said in turn builds on Foucault to show
how colonial power is propped up by the production and diffusion of
certain images of the Orient. Critics and commentators on all these
theorists, such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik, go on to use their read-
ings self-consciously and assertively to inscribe Marxism at the centre
of postcolonial theory. San Juan summarizes his discussion of post-
colonialism with the proposition that “capitalism as a world system
has developed unevenly, with the operations of the ‘free market’ being
determined by the unplanned but (after analysis) ‘lawful’ tendencies of
the accumulation of surplus value” (1998: 5). And Lazarus goes so far
as to argue that the Marxist understanding of capitalism is “the founda-
tional category for any credible theory of modern society” (1999: 16).
In this way, many of the more politically oriented postcolonial thinkers
can be seen to rely on concepts that can be traced back to the philoso-
phy of Marx.
Levinasian ethics
Levinas never directly confronts the question of colonialism and its

aftermath, but his work is at every point an expression of his revulsion
for National Socialism, its totalitarianism and imperialism over the
marginalized, the oppressed, the other. Colonialism constitutes a quite
different form of totalitarianism from that enforced by Nazi Germany
and its violence and exploitation are conceived to different ends, but it is
significant that, increasingly, thinkers such as Aimé Césaire have drawn
parallels between them. And indeed, colonialism’s failure to conceive
otherness ethically is related conceptually to the violence that Levinas
condemns throughout his philosophical career. Otherwise than Being,
first published in 1974, is dedicated to the six million victims of the
death camps, and references to Hitlerism, both overt and implied, recur
across the corpus. The early essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of
Hitlerism” explores the association between monotheism and absolute
freedom, together with the link between paganism and fate, and Levinas
condemns the society that cannot accept the freedom of man and that
falls back on a dangerous and reductive biological determinism. This
is a society where:
man no longer finds himself confronted with a world of ideas

in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sover-
eign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to
introduction 15
a certain number of these ideas, just as he is linked by birth to
all those who are of his blood. (Levinas 1990b: 70)
Levinas also argues here that the danger of this philosophy is that it
has to be universal, since if it were freely chosen it would contradict
the determinism it upholds, the belief that individuals are necessar-
ily rooted in and circumscribed by their communities. It is from this
insistence on the universal applicability of a form of ethnic determinism
that National Socialism derives its at once colonial and exterminatory
logic.
More generally, however, Levinas’s work can be seen to be pertinent
for postcolonial philosophy because he writes against any conception of
subjectivity as totalized, masterful and dominant over the other. Levinas’s
major works seek to condemn not so much the vocabulary of race as
the related notions of the “totality”, “sovereignty” and “imperialism” of
the self. Totality and Infinity opens with a reference to “the permanent
possibility of war”, and goes on to assert that “the visage of being that
shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates
Western philosophy” (Levinas 1969: 21). War is the inevitable result of
the attempt to conceive the self as entirely whole, self-contained and
self-sufficient, since such a conception inevitably leads to oppression or
exclusion. The notion of “totality” alludes both to the totalitarianism of
National Socialism or of any imperialism, and to Western knowledge
itself, according to which the individual conceives himself as a totality
and subordinates everything that is exterior to himself.
The startling opening of Totality and Infinity, and its stark opposi-
tion between war and morality, develops into an extended critique of
Western metaphysics and ontology, in particular its suppression and
occlusion of the other. Levinas’s critique of ontology will also through-
out be subtended by his desire to ward off the threat of totalitarianism
or the subjugation or expulsion of alterity that might also be described
as colonial. Levinas’s main objective in the initial chapters of the work
consists in criticizing the ways in which Western thought has conceived
the self, or Being, as totalized and self-same: it either excludes or assimi-
lates otherness. A series of terms, including Totality, Being, the Same,
the subject, are all undermined by Levinas as a result of their tendency
to subordinate what lies beyond their totalized confines. In denouncing
Heidegger, via Socrates and Berkeley, for example, Levinas laments that
in ontology the freedom of Being is prioritized before the relation with
the other; indeed, freedom means “the mode of remaining the same
in the midst of the other” (Levinas 1969: 45). The “I” accomplishes a
relation with the other by means of a third term, but this is incorporated
into the self rather than maintained as distinct and external. As a result,
and even worse, the conceptualization of Being suppresses or possesses
the other and privileges the “I can”, the autocracy of the “I”. In a series of
rapid moves, Levinas then connects the philosophy of ontology with the
philosophy of power, which in turn feeds into the tyranny of the State.
In Heidegger, Levinas again traces this back to a belief in rootedness in
the soil, to paganism and a devotion to the “master”. This philosophy
also places the freedom of the self before justice towards the other, and
fails to call into question injustice. Astonishingly swiftly, Levinas has
moved from a critique of ontology to a denunciation of tyranny and
of the association between state politics and war. The error of Western
metaphysics is its reliance on ontology, and war and injustice are pre-
sented as direct consequences of this concentration on the freedom of
Being to the detriment of an ethical relation with the other.
What ontology obscures, according to Levinas, is not an other that
can be incorporated into the self, but the absolute Other. This Other has
no communality with the I, but is a Stranger and is wholly external to
Totality or to the Same. Against Totality, this Other inaugurates the idea
of Infinity, an excess that is wholly resistant to knowledge or assimila-
tion and that needs to be respected for its impenetrability. The infinite
cannot be an object or thing; it is an unending exteriority that can never
be known, encompassed or circumscribed. Here again, Levinas creates
a conglomeration of terms (Infinity, the Other, exteriority, transcend-
ence, alterity) that offset and undermine the mastery and imperialism of
totality. Furthermore, the way in which the Infinity of the Other presents
itself to the self is by means of the face, an ambiguous term in Levinas’s
writing that designates both the expressiveness of the human face and
something that cannot be seen: the face “at each moment destroys and
overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own
measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea” (Levinas
1969: 51). The face both names the features of another individual, and
serves as a figure for the Other that the self cannot assimilate, know
and understand. An awareness or acceptance of this overflow or excess
at the moment of encounter is, for Levinas, the definition of ethics: it
does not tell us how to be or act, but describes the fundamentally ethical
nature of human encounter. The ethical conversation with the Other
means not assimilating its expression but receiving it in the knowledge
that it exceeds and surpasses the idea that the self creates of it. Impor-
tantly, in this ethical relation with the Other, the freedom of the self is
not the first priority but is overtaken and surpassed by the demands of
introduction 17
the relation. Subjectivity is secondary to the encounter with the infin-
ite, which itself occurs in the immediacy of the face-to-face meeting.
Importantly, however, even though Levinas’s work at times appears to
rest on a rather schematic pairing, Infinity is in reality not the opposite
of Totality, and is not entirely separated from it. Totality and Infinity
are not conceived as a binary opposition, but a pairing to be thought
alongside one another. As Howard Caygill writes, “what is ‘otherwise’
than totality is understood more often in terms of what is immanent to
it, what qualifies, checks, displaces or otherwise postpones its opera-
tions” (2002: 95). Absolute Totality does not exist, but finds itself sup-
plemented, invaded and permeated by that which it seeks to exclude
and master. Understanding this permeation and interpenetration is the
ethical demand made by the encounter with the Other’s face.
Having stressed the intractability, which means the difficulty, of
mastering or controlling the expression of the Other in conversation,
Levinas develops in the rest of Totality and Infinity, and in Otherwise
than Being, his understanding of the role of language in establishing
the ethical relation. Discourse, for Levinas, is the site of relationality;
it is not the direct representation and communication of a thought or
intuition, but “an original relation with exterior being” (1969: 66). In
speaking to the Other, the “I” cannot know this Other or put him in a
category, but must apprehend him in all his heterogeneity. This is not
to say that all discourse succeeds in establishing this relation, since
rhetoric for Levinas is a form of language that denies freedom in seek-
ing to persuade. In its expressive function, however, language precisely
both maintains and allows the revelation of the Other. It does not rep-
resent something already constituted and known, but creates sharing
without assuming sameness. It is a sort of interface exposing singular,
intractable and potentially infinite beings to one another without forc-
ing resemblance or complete communion. Language institutes a rela-
tionality without relationality, and does not require the establishment
of communality. In Levinas’s words: “language presupposes interlocu-
tors, a plurality. Their commerce is not a representation of the one by
the other, nor a participation in universality, on the common plane of
language. The commerce … is ethical” (ibid.: 73). Language reveals the
nudity of the face before it has been interpreted or illuminated, and
exposes its intractability. It is vital to the creation of community, not
because it creates identity, but rather precisely because it exposes the
self to the Other. It is not the ground of totality but the space in which
the Other faces the self in all its possible forms, “hostile, my friend, my
master, my student” (ibid.: 81).
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas develops this analysis using another
set of terms. Discourse is divided between two coexisting facets, the
Saying and the Said. The Saying designates what in language overspills
the confines of Being and signals the simultaneous proximity and intrac-
tability of alterity. The Saying is the excess of language, its openness and
resistance to a single and restricted set of meanings. The Said, on the
other hand, is the expression of an essence, a theme or content; it names
the movement of language towards the identification and containment
of its referent. Levinas argues that Western philosophy has traditionally
been preoccupied with the Said, since it produces arguments, hypoth-
eses and propositions that aspire to a status of certainty and truth. In
privileging the Said, however, philosophy has chosen to ignore the
omnipresent excess of the Saying. Once again, these are not opposites
or alternatives to one another, but the Saying constantly expands the
potentially reductive and oppressive boundaries of the Said: “the Saying
is both an affirmation and a retraction of the Said” (Levinas 1981: 44).
The Saying moves towards the Said, but in becoming absorbed into it
strains against its limits and opens it to otherness and the beyond. The
Said creates essence and truth, but the Saying exposes that essence to
alterity and establishes language as the interface of the ethical relation.
The relation between the two terms in Levinas’s writing is constantly
unsettling and at times apparently paradoxical. The one exceeds the
other, but the Saying also relies on the Said and is only manifested
through its apparently secure statements. As in Totality and Infinity,
the opposition is less a distinct dichotomy than a coupling, whereby the
ethical insistence on Infinity, or the Saying, is conceived alongside the
apparent security of Totality or the Said. In both formulations, openness
to excess is the start of an ethical relation.
In addition to expanding the limits of both Being and language,
Levinasian ethics proposes a set of requirements pertinent for post-
colonial criticism. Justice towards the other, for example, is discussed
early on in Totality and Infinity and takes precedence over the freedom
of the self. Being cannot pursue its own ends in the name of spontane-
ity if in the process it exerts power over, or tyrannizes, the other. The
obligation to welcome and do justice to the other restricts the freedom
of the self, although this is not in the sense that the other can oppress
the self, but in the sense that it “calls in question the naive right of my
powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being” (Levinas 1969: 84).
Even more, the welcoming of the other necessitates in the self a feeling
of shame towards his own injustice and pursuit of freedom. Levinas then
goes so far as to define the relation to the other as the demand for justice
introduction 19
over freedom, again criticizing Heidegger for privileging the latter over
the former. Any assumption of the self ’s power, the subject’s ability to
pursue his own chosen ends, is undermined by the requirement that
attention to the other comes first. Furthermore, in Otherwise than Being,
justice requires an admission of the otherness of the self, a realization of
the limited mastery of the ego. Levinas here writes less of a confronta-
tion between Same and Other, than of proximity, of justice as a result
of contact without absorption or assimilation. In his famous “Violence
and Metaphysics”, Jacques Derrida pointed out that Levinas’s terminol-
ogy in Totality and Infinity risked falling into a schematism reminis-
cent of the ontology he was criticizing, and in response Otherwise than
Being associates justice and the ethical relation with the brushing of
subjects against one another rather than with an encounter between two
dichotomous subjects. In both texts, the concept of justice can clearly
be related to postcolonial critiques of cultural domination, sovereignty
and mastery, and could also be used to denounce the colonizer’s pursuit
of his own “free” ends at the expense of the other. The colonial relation
erroneously places the power of the master before the justice owed to
the victim. This resonance in Levinas’s work is amplified by the use of
the term “imperialism” to designate the sovereignty of the self and the
subsequent subjugation of the other: the colonized or the slave.
Justice is at the same time for Levinas associated with responsibility
and, in Otherwise than Being, hospitality. These terms are somewhat
blurred together, since it is the just relation with the other for which the
self finds himself responsible. The ethical relation is also the responsible
relation, in which the subject attends to the difference and demands of
the other. Responsibility is also hospitality, moreover, and requires the
welcoming of the other into one’s dwelling. Dwelling is not an object of
possession; it is the place of shelter, of the constitution of subjectivity,
but it does not root Being securely in the ground. It is not a conduit to
the soil or owned by right, but, pre-existing Being, is merely the space
in which the subject establishes intimacy in the face of the elements.
At the same time, in order not to be constricted by possession, “I must
be able to give what I possess”, and “the Other – the absolutely Other
– paralyzes possession, which he contests by his epiphany in the face”
(Levinas 1969: 171). Thus for Levinas habitation offers security to the
self, but must also be conceived as another space of encounter that
puts into question the possibility of possession. In addition, beyond the
dwelling of the intimate self Levinas throws into question the territory of
the State, since although this concept appears to prioritize proximity, it
too rests on a belief in Being that excludes what lies beyond it. Derrida
explores this exigency in Levinas in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, where
he describes Totality and Infinity as “an immense treatise of hospitality”
(1999: 21), and uses his work to explore a concept of hospitality that
works against the tyranny of the State. This would be an “infinite hos-
pitality” without condition, incommensurate with political regulations
and laws but necessarily conceived alongside these. More practically,
Mireille Rosello uses Levinas in her Postcolonial Hospitality (2001) to
explore the paradoxes of cities of refuge, where the refugee is both wel-
comed and reminded of his otherness. Levinas helps to point out the
ethical limitations of such a condition.
One of the difficulties of Levinas’s work in this area, however, is the
distinction between ethics and politics that in turn troubles and unset-
tles the postcolonial field. Derrida’s reading in Adieu to Emmanuel
Levinas stresses the necessary but impossible conjunction between “the
law of hospitality”, the requirement that the host accept any other, and
“the laws of hospitality”, the conditions that necessarily regulate that
acceptance within the confines of existing states. Derrida argues that
both forms of hospitality are indispensable, but have to be conceived
as an irresolute aporia within which one necessarily conflicts with the
other. For Levinas himself, the political, again necessarily, intervenes in
the ethical relation between self and other in that it introduces a third
party, or other human subjects, perhaps in the form of society or com-
munity. It is the need for negotiation with this third party that upsets the
ethical encounter by adding the obligation to consider external factors.
This very “third term”, however, although establishing the demands of
the political, troubles or throws into question the purity of Levinasian
ethics and the direct, unmediated encounter with the face. At the same
time, it is this third party that disrupts the potential asymmetry of the
encounter (I can put myself in the place of the other, but cannot myself
be replaced); it forces the self to be other differently, or other to another
other. Nevertheless, when asked about the relation between ethics and
politics, Levinas still subordinates the latter to the former, arguing for
an engagement with both while also admitting that there remains a
contradiction between them. The example of Israel leads him to suggest
that “there might be an ethical limit to this ethically necessary political
existence” (1989: 293), but he falls silent on what this would mean for
the Jewish people of that state.
There is not space here to consider the intricacies of Levinas’s writing
on Israel, but certainly it is here that the contradiction between ethics and
politics starts to make the debate disturbingly hazy. As Caygill explores
with great subtlety, Levinas seems confused in Difficult Freedom (1990a)
introduction 21
about whether the Jewish people should be conceived as a “fraternity”
or whether they represent universal ethical concerns. Levinas struggles
to reconcile the political demands of the State of Israel and the uncon-
ditional ethics that he affirms Judaism provides. He suggests a return
to notions of sacrifice, but for Caygill, “this seems dangerously close to
sacrificing to an idol – the most powerful, fascinating and irresistible
of modern idols – the nation-state” (2002: 165). When he goes on to
propose a looser form of state identity to accommodate the Diaspora,
he risks this time falsely unifying Jewish identity. Even more discon-
certingly, Caygill points out that Levinas is unclear about whether he
conceives Islam to play a part in holy history and even describes the
Asiatic world as a stranger to Europe. He also evades the question of
the place of the Palestinians and subsumes their plight into a broader
reflection on universal responsibility. His call for peace at the end of
Totality and Infinity seems ill equipped to deal with the particular ten-
sions of Israel and Palestine.
If Levinas’s thought is flawed in many ways, however, his ethics, if not
his politics, is crucial for postcolonial reflection on alterity. His work
in itself signals some of the problems explored in the current book, in
that his belief in the ethical relation at times fails to tackle the political
requirements of a situation of conflict, in this case one as troubling as
that in the State of Israel. And indeed, his non-engagement with Islam
itself oddly comes close to a colonial drive towards the marginalization
of the other’s culture. It is nevertheless precisely that overwhelmingly
significant strand of his work devoted to ethics and alterity that will
prove a foundation for later conceptions of a postcolonial openness
to difference. Derrida’s criticisms of Levinas’s work have already been
noted, but in fact much more important is Derrida’s debt to Levinasian
ethics, which underpins his entire deconstruction of Western meta-
physics and ethnocentrism. Explicitly engaging with Levinas repeat-
edly, Derrida also uses the ethical encounter to inform his conception
of the blindness of the Western epistēmē or system of knowledge (via
readings of Saussure, Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss), as well as his read-
ing of colonialism and sovereignty in The Monolingualism of the Other
(1998). In addition, Bhabha’s postcolonial philosophy scarcely mentions
Levinas but, as we shall see, his exploration of the flickering presence of
ambivalence and alterity within colonial discourse is highly reminiscent
of Levinas’s permeation of Totality with Infinity, or the Said with the
Saying. Abdelkébir Khatibi’s foregrounding of otherness and bilingual-
ism can also be seen to emerge from a Levinasian understanding of
excess and the intractable, and, finally, Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of
Relation” learns at least implicitly from Levinas’s concept of an encoun-
ter without sameness or consensus. Levinas remains alone in his priori-
tization of ethics over freedom, and postcolonial thinkers for the most
part conceive their ethics rather as a recognition of the freedom of the
other rather than as a relation preceding the affirmation of freedom.
Many subsequent notions of mastery, totalitarianism and irreducible
alterity nevertheless inherit these notions, either overtly or implicitly,
from Levinas’s groundbreaking formulation of twentieth-century ethics.
Poststructuralist currents in postcolonialism, analysed for the most part
in the second half of this book, are deeply indebted to Levinas even if
he is often now not explicitly acknowledged.
As major influences for postcolonial thinkers, Marxism and Levina-
sian ethics raise quite distinct questions concerning the errors of colo-
nialism and the strategies or modes of thinking crucial to its overthrow.
Many later critics have chosen to foreground the strands in postcolonial
critique related to one of these schools, and certainly political and eth-
ical thinkers express their goals in quite different, even contrasting,
ways. Parry comments explicitly on this disjunction between Marxism
and poststructuralist ethics, and, advocating a Marxist-oriented frame
of analysis, points out that “the rejection by poststructuralism of the
Marxist notions underpinning left anti-colonial thinkers – capitalist
system, structural divisions, nationalism, an emancipatory narrative,
universalism – suggests that the discrepancy between the informing
premises is not readily negotiated” (2004: 7). This study will explore
the differences between these approaches within postcolonialism, while
also revealing the potential overlap between them, the overlap that crit-
ics such as Parry believe is under-analysed. Controversy has arisen in
the confrontation between political and ethical thinkers, but closer
inspection reveals that the two approaches are not directly opposed,
but can be conceived as related, if not identical in their aims. More-
over, while it may seem reasonably clear that a militant such as Fanon
requires a different framework and vocabulary from a philosopher as
ethically minded, and indeed as “textualist”, as Derrida, thinkers such as
Spivak and Mudimbe oscillate constantly between ethics and politics as
if to stress their necessary contiguity. These latter theorists also include
criticisms of both Marxism and deconstructive ethics in their work,
and use strands of each to reveal the shortcomings associated with the
unequivocal embrace of either school. A genuine understanding of the
multiple levels and layers of postcolonial critique will require a reflec-
tion of each field as it alternately interweaves with and diverges from
the other.
introduction 23
Key points
• Postcolonialism consists of the multiple political, economic, cul-

tural and philosophical responses to colonialism. It is a broad
term that is used to refer to effects following the beginning of
colonial rule, and, although it covers all regions, is most com-
monly now associated with the aftermath of British and French
colonialism.
• The field of postcolonial studies has often been divided between
those who concentrate on political critique and those interested
in postcolonial ethics. This split is somewhat artificial, but the two
currents can be understood in terms of the influences of Marxism
and Levinasian ethics on postcolonialism.
• Marx was ambivalent about the colonial project. He criticized the
economic exploitation it brought with it but also saw the bene-
fits of wiping out the hierarchies of the caste system in India. His
writings on capitalism, on ideology and on revolution have been
enormously influential to postcolonial thinkers.
• Levinasian thought can be seen to be at the root of postcolonial
ethics. Levinas denounced the concepts of Totality and mastery
that underpin all forms of totalitarianism, and recommended
openness and respect towards the other as other. His notions of
justice, responsibility and hospitality are also useful in conceiving
a postcolonial ethical critique.
two
Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism

and the call to arms
Frantz Fanon is undoubtedly one of the most significant and influ-

ential of anti-colonial revolutionary thinkers. Born in Fort-de-France,
Martinique in 1925 to a middle-class family, he grew up thinking of
himself as French. He was educated in a French school and, before fin-
ishing his education, fought for France in the Second World War. Even
when serving his country, however, Fanon experienced racism from
his French allies, and he criticizes the caste system within the army,
whereby whites were positioned at the top, with the Senegalese, the first
to be sent into battle, at the bottom. After the end of the war, Fanon
went to study psychiatry in Lyon, and published Black Skin, White
Masks in 1952. Disillusioned with metropolitan culture, he denounces
the Manichaean divisions of the colonial system and rails against the
rigid classification of the “negro” as inferior and “other”. After finish-
ing medical school, Fanon took a position at the Blida-Joinville psy-
chiatric hospital in Algiers, where he began to investigate culturally
sensitive approaches to madness. A year after he arrived, however, the
Algerian War of Independence began, and Fanon quickly found himself
caught up in the revolutionary struggle. Treating torture victims and
those with psychological illnesses related to the violence, he witnessed
at first hand the mental scarring caused by the conflict and began to
speak out against its horrors. When the increasing intensity of the vio-
lence made practising psychiatry difficult, he resigned his position, left
Algeria and worked for the National Liberation Front openly from his
exiled position in Tunis. Some of his most influential writing stems
from this period. The Wretched of the Earth (1967) analyses the process
fanon and sartre 25

of decolonization in Algeria in order to evolve a universal revolutionary
politics, advocating violence and national cohesion. The essays collected
in A Dying Colonialism (1980) discuss the changes the Algerian revolu-
tion wrought on social relations and everyday life.
Fanon is clearly a highly militant thinker and, indeed, The Wretched
of the Earth has been seen as no less than a “handbook” for revolution-
ary action. The decolonization of Algeria was its immediate focus, but
the Marxist struggle for liberation proposed by the text has also been
interpreted to be applicable more broadly. The book was used by leaders
in contexts as different as that of Malcolm X in the African-American
Black Power movement of the 1960s and Steve Biko in the Black Con-
sciousness movement in South Africa during the same period. If Fanon
is often seen as one of the most militant and incendiary critics of colonial
politics, however, his writing is not uniformly directed towards practi-
cal revolution. The Wretched of the Earth advocates decolonization with
more urgency and immediacy than Black Skin, White Masks; it is here
that he denounces the physical violence of colonialism and advocates
that this must be countered with direct violence against the colonizer.
The mission is the absolute overthrow of the colonial system, by force if
necessary. In Black Skin, White Masks, however, although Fanon is cer-
tainly highly critical of colonial politics, and although he gives vent to his
anger towards the colonizer’s sense of superiority and towards the stark
reductions of the stereotypes that continue to circulate around notions
of “black identity”, he perceives the violence of colonialism as a cultural
situation: part of a system of significations and associations that weave
themselves insidiously into the consciousness of both colonizer and colo-
nized. The colonized is the victim above all of the pernicious image of his
identity propagated by colonial ideology, rather than of brute force. To
summarize, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon examines less the myths
of colonized identity than the politics or modes of thinking necessary for
their overthrow. In the earlier work, his overt focus remains rather on
identity, desire and the psychoanalytic structures of alienation.
Many have noted, reinforced or condemned this division in Fanon’s
philosophy between concrete political engagement and a more psy-
choanalytically oriented investigation of identity and alienation. David
Macey, Fanon’s biographer, comments on his two apparently distinct
guises, the post-colonial or early Fanon, and the militant, “Third World-
ist” revolutionary Fanon:
the “post-colonial” Fanon is in many ways an inverted image of

the “revolutionary Fanon” of the 1960s. “Third Worldist” read-
ings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs;
post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that
text and studiously avoid the question of violence.
(Macey 2000: 28)
Celia Britton explores the rather less neutral reactions of a range of

critics towards his leap from psychoanalysis to politics and society,
noting both Diana Fuss’s assumption of their successful amalgamation
and objections levied by thinkers such as Henry Louis Gates Jr and
Françoise Vergès that the exploration of alienation does not take into
account social factors. Britton’s own reading concentrates more specifi-
cally on Fanon’s adaptation of Freudianism to suit the context of the
Caribbean, namely his rejection of the Oedipus complex in favour of an
exploration of social alienation. Certainly, however, unlike Britton her-
self, many readers of Fanon have chosen to foreground either one side of
his vision or the other, as if his deeper reflections on the configuration
of self and other in the psyche were not part of his call for concrete lib-
eration. Most strikingly, perhaps, Homi Bhabha, having noted Fanon’s
eclecticism, goes on to explore the obscure and ambivalent function of
desire in the colonial vision: the white man’s fantasized answer to the
question “What does the black man want?” independent of context.
Bhabha stresses the Lacanian resonances of Fanon’s Other, the continu-
ally displaced subject that slides beneath the signifier and that disables
the rigid binary opposition between Manichaean essences. Lazarus, on
the other hand, reads Fanon’s new form of nationalism for its question-
ing of the future of capitalism. Although Lazarus expresses reservations
concerning Fanon’s ability fully to understand the consciousness of the
colonized, he nevertheless stresses the significance of Fanon’s Marxist
call to transform the prevailing social order.
My argument here is that these distinct strands in Fanon’s work are
not contradictory, and are not separated between the two major works
as starkly as it appears. Both Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched
of the Earth are at once devoted to specific political contexts – the former
that of Martinique, and the latter that of Algeria – and reach far beyond
the confines of that original historical and geographical location. Both
denounce the colonial system, albeit from different points of view, while
proposing a far broader, quasi-humanist “dialectic of experience” and
a belief in self-invention. Fanon is at once, and in both texts, a political
activist and a philosopher of what it means to be human and, even more,
this revised, anti-Eurocentric form of humanism touches, at least impli-
citly, on an ethical commitment to otherness and to the new. Although
fanon and sartre 27

he is conceived most often either as a militant or as a psychoanalytic
thinker, Fanon is in fact not only both of these but, in fusing these two
approaches, finishes by proposing a vast and far-reaching renewal of
the very concept of the human, of endless self-creation as opposed to
reification and stasis. He advocates at the same time respect for the
other’s dynamism and denounces the ontological categorization of the
other as well as the practical mechanics of domination. Freedom is at
the heart of Fanon’s call, unlike that of Levinas, for whom the ethical
encounter precedes freedom, but nevertheless in Fanon the embrace of
freedom originates in the overthrow of the masterful imposition of an
ontological category on the subjugated other. Fanon may also appear
to contradict himself in championing both the self-affirmation specifi-
cally of the black man and a re-evaluation of the human, but his work is
ingenious precisely because it marries a dynamic reclaiming of “negro”
identity politics with an urge to question “identity”, and a belief in spon-
taneous and ongoing mutation.
This dynamic conception of self-creation is also, despite their differ-
ences, one of the points on which Fanon is united with Sartre. Another
militant calling for the decolonization of Algeria, Sartre was closely
allied with Fanon and wrote the passionately polemical preface to The
Wretched of the Earth. Fanon repeatedly refers to Sartre in Black Skin,
White Masks, comparing the alienation of the black man with Sartre’s
discussion of Jewish identity in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948a). Although
critical of Sartre’s conception of negritude as a stage in a dialectic, how-
ever, Fanon continued to share the former’s understanding of the impor-
tance of a new form of humanist creativity that would transcend the
ossified images promulgated by the colonizer and that would posit the
black man as spontaneously self-inventing as well as specifically “negro”.
The intricacies of Fanon and Sartre’s relation will be discussed later in
this chapter, but it is nevertheless worth stressing for now that both are at
once deeply engaged in a political anti-colonial movement and involved
in a larger, philosophical and at times ethical struggle upholding a pro-
tean form of humanity free from political totalitarianism and from an
imperialist ontology that over-determines and hypostatizes the other.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Black Skin, White Masks was written while Fanon was at medical school
in Lyon, and much of what he explores in this text stems from the way
in which he was treated, having arrived in France believing that he was
French. Fanon argues above all that colonialism entailed not integra-
tion but separation: the radical division of society along crude racial
lines. French society failed to welcome him but made him feel both
foreign and inferior or subordinate. Concomitantly, Fanon describes
the relation between black and white engendered by colonialism as
a stark binary opposition, and although, crucially, Fanon himself is
not Manichaean in his thinking in the way that some critics believe,
the object of his criticism is precisely the rigid binary divisions of the
colonial vision. Black and white are rigidly polarized, and there is no
communication or blurring between them: “the white man is sealed in
his whiteness. The black man in his blackness” (Fanon 1968: 9). Colo-
nial racism involves this process of reification or objectification, as the
white man creates a fixed, phantasmal image of the black man’s essence.
Racism denies the identity of the other; it over-determines that identity
from the outside and prevents the colonized from inventing himself in
his own way. As a result, “what is often called the black soul is a white
man’s artifact” (ibid.: 12). Black identity is understood by means of a set
of fixed and reductive stereotypes.
One of the most famous, and most arresting, passages in the text is
the anecdote that opens the chapter “The Fact of Blackness” describing
the alienation of the black man in France. It is here that Fanon’s language
is the most startlingly visceral and immediate, and the reference to the
everyday at the same time reinforces his demand for attention to actual
lived experience. Expecting to be treated in France as a citizen and
compatriot, Fanon’s autobiographical persona tells of his shock when
he observes a young boy pointing to him and crying, “Mama, see the
Negro, I’m frightened” (ibid.: 79). The little boy associates Fanon’s black
skin with a whole gamut of stereotypes, including illiteracy, physical
strength and rhythmic sense: “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual defi-
ciency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above
all: ‘sho good eatin’” (ibid.), the latter phrase translating the image of
a black colonial infantryman eating from a billycan and pronouncing
“C’est bon, Banania” in a Creole dialect. Reacting to this over-determi-
nation, Fanon describes the trauma of being forced to look at himself
from the outside and failing to recognize the image with which he is
presented. Fixed and objectified by the white man’s gaze, the black man
fails to identify with the image projected onto him and is disjointed and
ruptured from himself. In Fanon’s words, he experiences “an amputa-
tion, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with
black blood” (ibid.). It is as if his body has been torn open and covered
in black blood, connoting at once the destruction of the self and the
fanon and sartre 29

reinforcement of his black identity. The upshot is that in North and
South America, West Africa and the Caribbean, black people have been
divorced from the rest of society and treated as beasts. Robbed of his
identity, the black man is told what he is by the white man, who believes
incontrovertibly in his own superiority.
Fanon explains that this alienation and failure of identification entails
a particular type of splitting. Comparing his understanding of racism to
Sartre’s description of anti-Semitism, Fanon argues that in both cases the
victim is over-determined from without. Sartre’s formulation is that “the
anti-Semite creates the Jew” (1948a). In the case of the Jew, however, the
stereotype evolves from the idea that the anti-Semite retains of Jewish
identity, not from the latter’s physical characteristics. The Jew is there-
fore not alienated from his own body, according to Fanon. In the case
of the black man, however, it is his very skin that is over-determined,
and the black subject is alienated not only by the other’s erroneous
imagination, but also from himself, from his own appearance. It is from
this internal splitting that Fanon derives the image of the “black skin,
white masks”.
This sense of a double or split identity also stems from the colonized
subject’s use of the French language. This has extraordinarily complex
implications, since Fanon’s own writing in French precisely brought
him the recognition he deserved and made his work accessible to a far
broader audience than the use of Creole would have allowed. Never-
theless, French remains the colonial language and its usage signals
in some sense a participation in the culture of the colonizer. Accord-
ing to Fanon, the black man’s use of French compromises his sense of
identity, and constitutes the very white mask of which his title speaks.
In using French, the black man becomes whitened; he is masked by
the screen of colonial culture and divorces himself further from any
sense of a “native” identity, of his original roots. Fanon’s analysis of
this phenomenon is further complicated by his scorn for “negro” dia-
lects that patronize the black man and enclose him in a narrow and
limited world. He argues, “speaking in pidgin-nigger closes off the
black man; it perpetuates a state of conflict in which the white man
injects the black with extremely dangerous foreign bodies” (1968: 27).
The black man is as a result caught up in a double bind. In speaking
local dialects, he perpetuates his subordinate position and allows the
white man to retain his preconceptions of the black man’s linguistic
incompetence. In speaking French, he reinforces the hegemony of
the colonial language and supports the culture that necessarily accom-
panies it.
The psychoanalytic dimension of Fanon’s work will already be per-
ceptible in this summary, but it is important that in this investigation
he also reads and adapts the work of other analysts. In his discussion of
the inferiority complex, Fanon draws on Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and
Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956), and indeed, he expresses
his gratitude to Mannoni for producing such a detailed study of colo-
nial structures in Madagascar. Nevertheless, Fanon sets about unpick-
ing Mannoni’s hidden Eurocentric assumptions and, most significantly,
criticizes the latter’s belief that the complex pre-dates colonization. He
also objects to Mannoni’s assertion that the black man was colonized
because he was dependent on the European, and reverses the logic so
as to stress how the European precisely made the black man dependent
through the imposition of the colonial system. According to Fanon,
Mannoni forgets that the Malagasys he took as the object of his analysis
exist in the way they do precisely because of the European presence:
they were created by the colonizer. Furthermore, Mannoni goes on to
analyse the Malagasy’s unconscious, the web of impulses and neuroses
that contribute to his desire to become white, but Fanon suggests again
that this desire is the result of the colonial presence. It is therefore not
strictly an unconscious desire, but the result of an internalized image of
himself created by the presence of the colonizer. It is in this sense that
Fanon also departs from Freud, since he argues that the very notion of
the unconscious is too generalized and universal to account for the spe-
cific historical and cultural conditions shaping the black man’s psyche.
Fanon’s use and recreation of psychoanalytic models continues in the
chapter on psychopathology. Here colonialism specifically in the Carib-
bean is analysed for its psychic effects on the colonized. Fanon argues
that the black man does not suffer from the Oedipus complex because
his neurosis originates instead in his cultural situation. If for the Euro-
pean the relation with the family becomes a model for social interaction,
in the case of the Antillean the subject is forced to choose between family
and society. Using Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious, Fanon
asserts that the Antillean is forced to internalize a white unconscious,
imposed by society and not by the authority of the family. He does not,
then, enter society as a result of his separation from the mother and
adherence to the law of the father, but continues to experience family
authority and societal authority as conflictual. In addition, Fanon dis-
cusses the sexual associations of racism towards the black man, together
with their effects on the black man’s psyche. The white man’s fabricated
image of the black man stresses the latter’s sexual prowess, and this
fantasy of the virile black man makes him an object of both fear and
fanon and sartre 31

desire. “The Negro symbolizes the biological” (Fanon 1968: 118), and
it is in this curious conjunction of fascination and disgust that readers
such as Bhabha have uncovered the ambivalence in Fanon’s notion of
the colonial psyche. Conscious that his analysis appears to veer away
from “the real”, Fanon nevertheless stresses that this fantasized imago
precisely structures the actual colonial project, and it is the white man
who occludes the cultural specificity of the Antillean behind his rei-
fied vision of the “negro” more broadly. This culturally created set of
images is what forms for Fanon the Jungian collective unconscious:
this is the ideological burden that is imposed on the black man and
that divorces him from himself. The sexualized imagery surrounding
the black man is further explored by Fanon in the chapters on gender
relations between the black woman and the white man, and the black
man and the white woman. Fanon criticizes Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis
Martiniquaise (1948) for exposing the black woman’s desire for the white
man, and her fantasy of cleansing and becoming white. He also explores
Réné Maran’s Un Homme pareil aux autres (1947), and the central char-
acter Jean Veneuse’s self-doubt and self-loathing, his inability to believe
that a white woman loves him, as an indication of how the black man
internalizes the white man’s myth.
Fanon’s final chapter develops this conception of the white mask
through readings of Alfred Adler and G. W. F. Hegel. Fanon uses Adler,
for example, to argue that “the Negro is comparison” (1968: 149); the
Antillean has no value of his own but is seen only as a sign of the other.
His analysis differs from Adler’s model, however, in that it applies not
to individuals but to a whole society. The black man in general becomes
dependent on the white; he has no being-for-itself, no Sartrean reflexive
consciousness other than the image constructed for him by the white
man. In his reading of Hegel, Fanon then argues that the relation between
the black man and the white man resembles Hegel’s dialectic between the
master and the slave, except that in Hegel’s schema the relation is based
on reciprocal recognition. In Fanon’s configuration of the white man and
the black man, however, there is no recognition: “the Negro is a slave
who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master” (ibid.: 156).
There is therefore no meeting of consciousnesses where one subsequently
takes control over the other. The white man has already determined and
trapped the black man as slave by claiming to have granted him freedom
and preventing him from acquiring it for himself.
If this summary offers a certain coherence to Fanon’s philosophy in
Black Skin, White Masks, however, this does not mean that the work is
without apparent inconsistencies. In developing his vision of the black
man’s splitting, Fanon appears first to imply nevertheless that there is
a specificity to the category “negro” and later to abandon the category
altogether. On the one hand, Fanon confidently affirms “I am Negro”,
and he seems to want to reinforce his sense of belonging to a distinct
and particular race. On the other hand, the text also sets out to affirm
the liberation of the individual self and champions a form of existen-
tial freedom, the ability to reinvent oneself. Despite his continued use
of the specified term “negro”, much of the text rejects its unifying and
homogenizing implications, and the curious statement in the conclu-
sion that “the Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (ibid.: 165)
displays his mistrust for any inherent black being-in-itself. The oddly
disjointed sentences, severed with an abrupt full stop, cut the reader
short and force us to confront our presumptions regarding black identity
and existence.
Fanon also vacillates in his evaluation of the negritude movement.
Negritude was important in West Africa during the struggle for inde-
pendence in countries such as Cameroon and Senegal, and certainly the
Senegalese poet and political leader Léopold Sédar Senghor promoted
the cause from both a cultural and a political standpoint. Senghor’s
poetry reclaims black identity by returning to a vision of traditional
African life, championing values such as emotion, spontaneity, physical-
ity, rhythm and dance. Negritude was at the same time a political ideol-
ogy for Senghor, which, together with a form of modernization learned
from the French, ironically, would serve to redefine the African nation
on its own terms. Senghor’s negritude was also humanist; it conceived as
human “this trading between the heart and the mind” and promoted a
“‘confrontation’, ‘participation’, ‘communion’ of subject and object” (Sen-
ghor 1954: 9). The Martinican writer and politician Césaire similarly
used the term to describe the revolutionary power of black poetry and,
indeed, Fanon often quotes Césaire’s vision of negritude as a dynamic
movement of reinvention and creativity. Césaire writes of a “return”
to the native land, although this is once again less a backwards move-
ment towards origin and essence than a dynamic process of recreation.
On some level, then, in parts of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon does
seem to be upholding a similar notion of black specificity and asserting
that this alternative identity category can act in contradistinction to the
myths imposed by the colonial gaze. A return to some sort of “authentic-
ity” (albeit fictitious, in particular in the Caribbean) can help the black
man to restore a sense of self and to repair the psychological damage
of colonial deculturation. But it is nevertheless important for Fanon
that there can be no single set of “black values”, since black identity is
fanon and sartre 33

inevitably mobile and changeable, and the notion of any kind of black
specificity entails a determinism that reduces and glosses that variabil-
ity. Negritude culture uncannily reproduces some of the stereotypes
produced by the colonizer, since it calls for a return to African soil and
a reinstatement of black virility and strength.
Fanon’s rousing conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks for this reason
reaches far beyond the concerns of identity politics and celebrates
instead the extraordinary richness and mobility of the human. “History”
no longer has the capacity to over-determine the human; rather, the
subject rises out of its confines and posits itself beyond its conditioning.
Fanon’s now universal persona affirms “I am not a prisoner of history.
I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny” and resolves
“in the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself ”
(1968: 163). Drifting away from notions of both the negro and the Antil-
lean, Fanon’s writing subject speaks for humanity and urges that each
individual shapes his own path while recreating himself as he moves
forwards. Driven now less by identity politics than a form of existential-
ism, he advocates continual self-renewal and singularization regardless
of the determinations of context. This transcendence is, importantly,
the outcome of Fanon’s dialectic, which moves through an embrace
of History and an understanding of Manichaeism in order precisely
to emerge afterwards in this realm of endless reinvention. It does not
liquidate difference, as some critics have suggested, but acknowledges
difference while refusing to allow it to be confined to a static category.
Fanon’s dialectic is also one rooted in lived experience, but he uses that
engagement with the concrete and the everyday to create an altered
and renewed form of self-consciousness. While Parry has argued that
Fanon never actually resolves this contradiction in his engagement with
negritude and identity politics, I would stress that Fanon’s majestic con-
clusion precisely shows how the black man, condemned by colonialism
to an over-determined and over-specified place in History, must adapt
his consciousness of himself so as to look beyond this. This entails not
a denial of his Manichaean context but a dynamic engagement with it,
as a result of which he would succeed in imagining himself anew.
If Fanon is most ostensibly a defiant political thinker, he also her-
alds in this conclusion the seeds of a phenomenological and even ethical
reconfiguration of self and other. If the white man’s tyranny lay in his
imposition of a reified image onto the black man and in the black man’s
subsequent splitting and disavowal, then the overthrow of that tyranny
demands the liberation of the other from the controlling gaze of the
self. Fanon’s belief in reinvention and mobility proposes an alternative
ontology that refuses to allow Being to attain the mastery and stasis of
Totality. Self and other coexist in the world and, in meeting, perceive
one another’s inassimilable difference. Political liberation requires at the
same time this alternative perception of Being that stresses its continual
processes of recreation, and Fanon’s demand for attention to this notion
of Being does implicitly belong to the realm of what humanity “ought”
to do. Freedom is of course not secondary here, as it is for Levinas, but
the affirmation of the freedom of the self also requires the recognition of
the other’s ability to recreate himself freely. Fanon’s return to the notion
of the human also proposes a broad terminology obliging each subject
to recognize and accept the individuality of the other. This humanism
is no longer that of the universalization of European values, but a more
open demand for a liberated form of individual self-creation, as well
as a specific symbol of resistance rather than a new transcendentalism.
Recognition of the other’s humanity entails an understanding of his or
her singular form of self-invention. Lastly, Fanon finishes Black Skin,
White Masks with a call for a form of encounter with the other that
allows the self to touch, feel, experience his otherness: “why not the quite
simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other
to myself ” (1968: 165). This is not quite the relation without relation of
the Levinasian encounter, but an embodied, affective ethics of contact,
acceptance and recognition, operating viscerally at the level of the skin.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
The Wretched of the Earth is without doubt from the outset a more
overtly committed and militant text than Black Skin, White Masks.
Fanon opens quite starkly with a clear call to arms: “national libera-
tion, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people,
Commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new for-
mulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent process” (1967:
27). One of the central tenets of the collection will therefore be that the
overthrow of colonial violence must itself be a violent process. Given the
intransigence of colonial force, decolonization can occur only when that
force is met with equal antagonism. The colonized should not wait to
try to subvert the system from within (Bhabha’s invocations of colonial
ambivalence, of representational uncertainties on both sides, have little
resonance here). Rather, the colonized can only mimic the techniques of
the colonizer, who from 1830 onwards subjugated native Algerians with
the use of force. Furthermore, Fanon’s description of the underlying
fanon and sartre 35

structure of colonial thinking is equally stark. Colonizer and colonized
are pitted against one another in the form of a rigid binary opposition,
and there is no possible communication or mediation between them.
The colonial society of Algiers in particular is also “in compartments”;
it is segregated and divided along racial lines in such a way as to fix and
stultify the colonized. Algiers is divided between designated areas for
colonizer and colonized, and that segregation is accompanied by social
inequality. The frontiers between these areas are guarded by police or
military officers. The only go-between is the soldier, and the transgres-
sion of the border is vigilantly supervised, in turn reinforcing the racial
divide. So colonialism in Algeria relies on this stark segregation of one
society from another, and the termination of that system demands the
dramatic and violent rejection of the hegemonic community by those
who have been expropriated and subordinated.
Fanon again argues that the native is the product of colonialism, that
he is formed and created by colonial ideology. The creation of the native
by the colonizer requires that he channel his aggression inwards rather
than outwards, so that it does not affect the colonial structure itself.
His energy becomes directed towards himself, a phenomenon that for
Fanon characterizes the real anguish of his colonized position. Revolu-
tion occurs, then, when the native succeeds in turning that aggression
back against the colonizer. Liberation is characterized precisely by this
moment of realization and by the violent rejection of colonial society
using the very terms the latter had used in its enterprise of subjuga-
tion. Decolonization is in turn an absolute process and entails the total
destruction of one society and its replacement with an entirely different
social structure. It is a fundamental change, and can involve no negotia-
tion or mediation because it necessitates the end of an entire regime, and
the substitution of existing rulers for different men. Colonialism itself
is not an ideology that is open to questioning but a total system, whose
effects can be attenuated only by the destruction of the system itself.
Non-violence is for Fanon acquiescence, the acceptance of the colonial
vision, and resistance must be expressed by the use of force: “colonialism
is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties.
It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted
with greater violence” (1967: 48).
Fanon’s evidently controversial paean to violence is nevertheless not
simply a means to condone the shed of revolutionary blood, but also a
call for creativity and spontaneity. The new revolution gives rise to the
creation of new men, to new forms of consciousness that can sweep
away the injustices and prejudices of the old:
This people that has lost its birthright, that is used to living in
the narrow circle of feuds and rivalries, will now proceed in
an atmosphere of solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of
the nation as it appears in the various localities. In a veritable
collective ecstasy, families which have always been traditional
enemies decide to rub out old scores and to forgive and forget.
There are numerous reconciliations. Long-buried but unfor-
gettable hatreds are brought to light once more, so that they
may be more surely rooted out. The taking on of nationhood
involves a growth of awareness. (Ibid.: 105)
In addition to this new unity, Fanon champions spontaneity as opposed

to the affirmation of a rigid form of black specificity. Throwing aside
the constraints of colonial society, he predicts the advent of a liberated
upsurge in creative energy, promising unregulated innovation. He also
observes the proliferation of cults and superstitions under colonialism,
spread as a result of the fear of the colonized and the inward channel-
ling of his energy. Decolonization will herald the end of superstition in
favour of a more free-thinking and uninhibited community.
Since colonial ideology manifests itself both practically, through
social segregation, and linguistically, in its propagation of skewed,
stereotypical narratives, the attempt to challenge its tenets requires
engagement with all sides. The colonized cannot simply question the
details of the colonial vision, but need to eradicate its entire discourse
before installing a regime that is utterly new. It is owing to this that Fanon
makes a distinction between the strategies of the colonized intellectual
and those of the indigenous masses. Fanon argues that the colonized
intellectual perceives liberation within the terms of the colonial system.
Inheriting many of its insights, the colonized intellectual tries to free
himself through assimilation to the ruling system, rather than seeking
to overturn that system itself. In this sense, the intellectual risks find-
ing himself part of “a kind of class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who
are individually free” (ibid.: 47). By achieving a distinguished position
within the colonial structure, the intellectual succeeds not in total libera-
tion but in a sort of compromised, privileged acquiescence. The masses
or the people, however, demand the absolute refutation of all aspects
of colonial logic. They do not want to achieve the same status as the
colonizer, but precisely seek to replace him and to eliminate his power
in favour of the new regime. Revolution requires the actual replacement
of colonizer with colonized. It demands this systematic eradication, and
not a partial engagement with the entrenched, hegemonic terms: “for
fanon and sartre 37

them, there is no question of entering into competition with the settler.
They want to take his place” (ibid.). It is the magnitude of this overthrow
that demands the use of violence, as well as the unification of the people
against the former power.
This relationship between the intellectual, or indeed the political
leader, and the masses is a constant preoccupation in The Wretched of
the Earth. Although the revolution requires organization and direction,
Fanon is at pains to stress that leaders and thinkers frequently have dif-
ferent concerns from those of the people and risk detaching themselves
from the urgency of their requirements. Those in charge of organizing
the revolt tend to mire themselves in detail and in local strategy rather
than keeping in mind the greater goal of regime change. For the revolu-
tion to be truly effective, however, Fanon asserts that the voice of the
masses needs to be heard. While the leaders and intellectuals lose track
of the unity of the movement, Fanon argues:
the people, on the other hand, take their stand from the start
on the broad and inclusive positions of bread and the land:
how can we obtain the land, and bread to eat? And this obsti-
nate point of view of the masses, which may seem shrunken
and limited, is in the end the most worthwhile and the most
efficient mode of procedure. (Ibid.: 39)
In a self-consciously Marxist tone, Fanon affirms that the revolution is

in the hands of the people, who retain its goal as an absolute in itself.
Fanon tacitly criticizes the obscure political machinations of those who
attempt to take control. He is suspicious of the colonized bourgeoisie,
and his text speaks in favour of the simple demands of the underprivi-
leged and disenfranchised proletariat.
Fanon’s relationship with Marxism is a complicated one, however,
and demands further reflection. Certainly, Fanon places the concerns
of the people above all else, and his revolutionary polemics are often
couched in the language of class revolt. Fanon also mistrusts bourgeois
thinking, and he is concerned that the decolonization of Algeria should
result in the return of power to the hands of the people, rather than to
a narrow privileged elite. Indeed, Sartre’s reading of Fanon contains the
straightforward assertion that “the national revolution will be socialist”
(Sartre 2001: 139). Fanon’s engagement with Marxism is highly spe-
cific, however, and although he uses its structures, he is also at pains to
stress the particularity of anti-colonial revolution as opposed to class
struggle. While he advocates the overthrow of the ruling order by the
disenfranchised and exploited people, he emphasizes that the nature of
this struggle in the colonial context is different from that in any other,
since the ruling class is not merely wealthy but also foreign. Colonial
power is pernicious because it is other, it is imposed from the outside
and its managers are therefore even more divorced from the people over
whom they wield their influence:
it is neither the act of owning factories, not estates, nor a

bank balance which distinguishes the governing classes. The
governing face is first and foremost those who come from
elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, “the
others”. (Fanon 1967: 31)
In the chapter “Spontaneity: Strength and Weakness”, Fanon develops

his argument in favour of the agency of the masses, yet this time he
stresses the danger not only of the dissociation between the intellectual
and the people but also of a lack of communication between rural and
urban areas. First, this is presented as a time lag or difference of rhythm
between the leaders of the independence party and the people. This dis-
junction is exacerbated in the colonies, where the nationalist organiza-
tion is copied from the colonial system and seeks its constituents in
urban areas. The risk is that the concerns of the rural people are ignored
or forgotten by the preoccupations of the town and, indeed, stereotypes
circulate that associate the peasantry with inertia and backwardness.
Secondly, however, with the development of a new relationship between
urban militants and the rural masses, as well as the evolution of a new
type of revolutionary organization, Fanon’s concept of the time lag finds
a new expression. The immediacy of mass spontaneous action against
the colonial system requires the formation of a group of militant leaders
who are able productively to oversee the different facets of the struggle
and to help to formulate a broader national strategy. If there is a history
of little contact between the urban leaders and politicians and the rural
masses, then the eventual encounter between the militant from the town
and a peasant revolutionary force marks an important moment in the
creation of a new decolonized order.
One difficulty identified by Fanon in the existing status quo is that the
rural masses can tend to equate the urban colonized with the colonial
order itself. When urban militants and thinkers arrive in the rural areas
expecting to be treated as leaders, this attitude of resistance and mistrust
can be aggravated, creating tension rather than leading to new unity.
Furthermore, Fanon observes that the leaders themselves can persist in
fanon and sartre 39

conceiving of the peasantry in terms informed by colonial ideology. They
associate rural culture with a backward return to tradition rather than as
an alternative set of practices to those imposed by the colonizer. Against
this tendency, Fanon recommends perceiving the peasant’s regard for
tradition as evidence of his intransigence against colonial influence.
Denouncing the persistence of stereotypes regarding the peasantry,
Fanon sets out to explore the ways in which urban and rural modes of
resistance could come to inform one another. Fanon’s vision consists of
a universal revolution, where the intellectual returns to his roots while
the peasant’s traditions are enlisted as a positive and progressive form of
critique. Most importantly, he wants to end the intellectual’s estrange-
ment from the people and hopes for a wider force of solidarity.
At the centre of Fanon’s call for solidarity between peasants and intel-
lectuals, between rural and urban areas, is a politics of nationalism.
Using an argument that would now be controversial, at the time of the
anti-colonial movement Fanon claims that nationalism forms a crucial
locus of critique. Most importantly, the creation of a national culture
would not be governed and restricted by a limited bourgeoisie. In the
chapter “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, Fanon warns against
the risk that posts filled by colonial officials become filled with native
bourgeois leaders who maintain the entrenched deficiencies of the colo-
nial system and who fail to unify the citizens of the new independent
nation. He wants to guard against the possibility that the new ruling
class would appropriate the national identity and mould it to suit its
own, narrow economic concerns. What Fanon does argue in favour of,
however, is the evolution of a specific, unified and identifiable national
culture, created by the community of the former colony’s native inhabit-
ants, which would function as a concrete alternative to that imposed by
the colonizer. Like the renowned leader of the independence movement
in Guinea-Bissau, Amílcar Cabral, Fanon recommends the creation of a
cultural community that would link the colonized in solidarity against
the oppressor. National culture acts in contradistinction to the colonial
culture and proves that the colonized have an identity other than that
imposed on them by the invading power. It also paves the way towards
the future, burying the inequalities and prejudices of the past with a
celebration of new practices and creative forms of expression.
So what constitutes this national culture? It is not necessarily a return
to tradition, since the culture of the nation progresses and moves for-
wards as decolonization is achieved. Once a people has engaged in revo-
lutionary struggle, the signification of its practices and art forms changes.
During a period of such intense change, long-standing traditions come
into question and can be replaced by alternative practices. Artists who
seek to return to their origins by depicting the original rituals and cus-
toms of African peoples risk obscuring the fact that the very people to
whom they refer have undergone a massive upheaval. The most impor-
tant element in the creation of a national art form is precisely that it
engages with the contemporaneity of its subject. Fanon champions,
for example, the poetry of revolt, rather than the poetry of an origi-
nal return, and he reinforces the particular dynamism of the present.
Indeed, the evolution of a national culture occurs at the very heart of the
resistance movement and cannot be separated from its unfolding. “The
national Algerian culture is taking on form and content as the battles are
being fought out, in prisons, under the guillotine, and in every French
outpost which is captured and destroyed” (Fanon 1967: 187). Rather
than looking back to the past, national culture lives out its present and
reaches forwards into the future, towards the creation of an improved
order freed from the influence of the colonial other. National culture
is in this sense intricately bound up with the particular history of the
nation’s development, and since processes of decolonization in Algeria
and Morocco, for example, were dramatically different, any shared post-
colonial culture will inevitably become a vague abstraction.
Finally, the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth forms a powerful
statement of Fanon’s revolutionary vision and brings together some of
the fundamental precepts of his thought. Most important is his uncon-
ditional demand for change. Fanon rejects every aspect of the present
colonial order and summons the colonized people to action. His tone
is apocalyptic, advocating the participation of all citizens in the anti-
colonial struggle. Using the metaphor of awakening, he jolts the people
into a realization of their acquiescence and calls for the overthrow of
entrenched ideology and familiar patterns of behaviour: “we must
leave our dreams and abandon our beliefs and friendships of the time
before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating
mimicry” (ibid.: 251). This opposition between old and new is coup-
led with further recollection of the contrast between Europe and the
(ex-)colony. Again using black-and-white rhetoric, Fanon categorically
associates Europe with the systematic enslavement of its Third World
other. European culture also connotes a demand for stasis, immobility
and resistance to change. Europeans freeze and atrophy the cultural
dynamism of their colonized peoples, and they resist the free invention
of new structures. Even more, European thinking maims and kills the
people it wants to govern and denies colonized men their humanity. It
sweeps away individual creativity in favour of the relentless working
fanon and sartre 41

of the colonial power machine. In response to this destruction, Fanon
advocates a return to the body, and the release of physical power and
movement within those who have become divorced from themselves:
“let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our
brains in a new direction. Let us try and create the whole man, whom
Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth” (ibid.: 252).
Reintegrating mind and body, Fanon wants to restore man in his totality
and to reconnect the colonized with those parts of himself that have
been denied freedom of expression.
One particularly striking rhetorical feature of Fanon’s conclusion
is the repetition of the term “we”. On the one hand, this focuses the
polemic, since it addresses the colonized people directly and calls them
immediately to action. The inclusive implications of “we” also stress
again the importance of community and solidarity between natives who
might initially have felt alienated and dispersed. The “we” is in this sense
performative: actively bringing together the people it addresses in order
to confirm their unity in the face of colonial oppression. It reminds the
colonized that they are not isolated in their alienation and emphasizes
the strength derived from sharing and collaboration with others. One
of the difficulties of this generalized call, however, is that since much
of the preceding chapter on national culture was nonetheless focused
on Algeria, the conclusion can appear to be an addendum, divorced
from history and lost in the rhythms of its own rhetoric. If Fanon has
been criticized for this gesture of universalization, however, it must
be remembered that the immediate goal of the writing is to move and
persuade, to call his readers to action. Fanon also successfully restores
the notion of the human as an ethical category so as to advocate creativ-
ity independently of the determinations of context, even if it remains
clear that this is a specific response to colonialism. Alternating the old
with the new, metaphors of atrophy with inspiring evocations of an
alternative world, the primary referent of the conclusion is the language
of change, the call for a more just foundation to society, and no longer
the specific requirements and conditions of the colonized Algerian’s
move to freedom.
While many of the other sections of the text are certainly more
grounded and more specified than the rousing rhetorical flourishes
of the conclusion, this self-conscious use of conceptual language is
something that remains at the forefront of Fanon’s work. The lack of
historicity, of specific reference, in The Wretched of the Earth places
the text in the realm of hypothesis, of philosophical experimentation
rather than of truth. Fanon also repeats himself frequently, circulat-
ing around notions of Manichaeism, community, national culture and
innovation rather than dealing with the details of each concept in turn.
He progressively investigates the nuances of these revolutionary ideas
by endlessly re-describing their mechanisms rather than by exploring
the specific workings of each as they manifest themselves in Algeria. It
is this exploration of the language and conceptual foundations of colo-
nialism, as much as its empirical manifestations, that connects Fanon’s
startlingly politicized philosophy with a vision larger than itself, and
larger than its nevertheless crucial historical context. Fanon is as con-
cerned with ontology, humanity, relationality and creativity as he is with
the mechanics of the decolonization movement and, indeed, conceives
such concerns as interdependent. The objective of Black Skin, White
Masks was a call for black self-affirmation and mobility, while in The
Wretched of the Earth, the conclusion repeatedly refers to a demand for
the new. In both cases, the practical overthrow of colonialism involves
a vast, universal and inescapably ethical liberation from the mastery of
self over other.
Jean-Paul Sartre
One of the most celebrated philosophers of twentieth-century France,

Sartre is also one of the most politically engaged. Having vilified the
Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War, he cham-
pions both political and ontological freedom throughout this work, and,
during the 1950s and 1960s, writes frequently and fervently in favour
of the decolonization of Algeria. While Albert Camus, the “existential-
ist” with whom Sartre is frequently associated, was born in Algeria and
retained a highly ambivalent attitude towards the French presence in
what he perceived (rightly) to be his homeland, Sartre was resolutely
anti-colonialist. Sartre’s thinking on colonialism critique is neverthe-
less diverse, protean and frequently self-contradictory, and has gener-
ated a good deal of controversy. His celebrated and notorious “Orphée
noir”, or “Black Orpheus” (1948b), written as the preface to Senghor’s
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française
(Anthology of new Negro and Malagasy poetry in French), has been
read as both veneration and critique of the negritude movement, and he
has been named both spokesman and traitor of anti-colonial resistance
in Africa. Explicating the dynamics of an assertion of black identity
in contradistinction to colonial influence, he introduced revolution-
ary black poetry to the European audience it was directed against.
fanon and sartre 43

Nonetheless he was soon condemned by some of the other negritude
thinkers as Eurocentric and blinded by his own position as a metro-
politan, and therefore colonial, intellectual. The version of negritude
promoted in the essay was criticized by such thinkers for being too
rigid and essentialist, and yet, conversely, Fanon objected that Sartre’s
stress on the movement as transitory and provisional was insufficiently
immersed in “authentic black experience”. In addition, Sartre’s journal-
istic writing calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of
the French presence in Algeria aptly served to draw attention to dissen-
sion about the Algerian question within French society, but the Marxist
approach underpinning these pieces has been seen as universalizing.
Sartre’s emphasis on the structures of political and economic oppression
was condemned by Claude Lévi-Strauss as obfuscatory of the particu-
lar dynamics of colonial and racial exploitation, and the philosophical
expansion of such analyses in the Critique of Dialectical Reason has also
been seen to generalize European experiences of capitalism.
Sartre’s multifarious works on colonialism no doubt merited some of
the responses they provoked, but in many ways the variety and passion
of the comments generated by the corpus testify to its richness. Closer
attention to texts such as “Black Orpheus” uncovers the seeds of a highly
sophisticated, self-conscious mode of thinking that reveals the neces-
sarily multiple layers of postcolonial critique, and that also turns out to
be closer to Fanon’s vision than it might at first have appeared. Sartre’s
provocative and multidimensional analysis of negritude manages to
combine a call for political assertion with a philosophically sophisti-
cated critique of identity politics. His stress on negritude as a stage in
an anti-colonial dialectic, and his description of the colonizer’s own
alienation, also dissolves the work’s apparent essentialism and commu-
nitarianism without attenuating its political impact. Sartre’s valorization
of active self-invention provides the seeds of a political strategy, but his
anti-colonial critique is again, like Fanon’s, at least partly ethical in its
far-reaching call for self-invention and for the subject’s recognition of
this endless self-invention in the other.
One of the central premises of “Black Orpheus” is the reclaiming of
black identity through poetry, and the revolutionary potential of this
re-appropriation. Sartre asserts that colonialism oppressed the black
man as black, and although the structure of the colonized’s oppression
is similar to that imposed on the worker by capitalist society in Europe,
the colonizer in Africa uses race to justify and prop up the economic
and political hierarchy. Just as in Sartre’s analysis the anti-Semite creates
the Jew and over-determines him from the outside, so the colonizer
over-determines black identity and then positions the black man as
subordinate, although, as Fanon pointed out, in this case it is the black
man’s very skin that he does not recognize according to the white man’s
racialist system. It is for this reason that anti-colonial resistance must,
for Sartre, involve the reclaiming of black identity in terms invented and
controlled by the black man himself:
The black man is the victim, as a black man, as a colonized

native or as a deported African. And since he is oppressed in
his race and because of it, he must first seize consciousness of
his race. Those who, for centuries, have vainly tried to reduce
him to the status of a beast because he is a negro, he must force
to recognize him as a man.
(Sartre 1948b: xiii–xiv; my translation throughout)
It is only by showing black identity to be other than that which the

colonizer supposed that the colonized African can overthrow those
stereotypes and rediscover his humanity. The goal of the negritude
poets is to display the black soul, to represent collective black identity
in new terms, to recreate it and display its otherness to the colonizer.
This assertion of black authenticity has a direct political purpose, since
it overthrows the colonizer’s stereotypes and returns to the black man
control over his self-image.
It is important, however, that this assertion of black identity is not
a straightforward return, and is not dictated by a soul that is already
constituted. Sartre himself affirms quite explicitly that the black soul was
not already there, not itself at the time of the colonizer’s invasion. The
over-determination of black identity by the colonizer also influences the
black’s self-perception and alienates him from himself; he does not know
or recognize himself: “he is split, he no longer coincides with himself ”
(ibid.: xvi). This separation from the self, again as in Fanon, also takes
place on the level of language, since, educated in the French system,
the negritude poets use the French language to voice their dissent but
that language also only dissociates them further from themselves. The
poetry they write cannot therefore convey any identical, original self,
since it still reshapes their self-expression and glosses over an other-
ness that can never be captured or formulated. As a result, rather than
reading into negritude poetry a comfortable recovery of a black being at
harmony with itself, “we should rather speak of the slight and constant
discrepancy that separates what he says from what he would like to say,
when he speaks of himself ” (ibid.: xix). So although Sartre does spend
fanon and sartre 45

time in the essay exploring the imagery of negritude, its reclaiming of
the natural environment, its use of African rhythms as opposed to Euro-
pean, and its insertion of terms from indigenous languages, these are not
conceived as pure and originary. Negritude constructs a self that it then
claims as “authentic”, but it does not propose a straightforward return
to a mythical, pre-colonial, essential state. Negritude’s “authenticity” is
an invention that serves as a riposte to colonial constructions of black
identity but that cannot represent an origin or an essence.
Negritude is also not essentialist in Sartre’s view because it is in no
sense a state, or a “disposition”; it is a challenge to political alienation,
but not a denial of its effects. It is also not a set of values but the black
man’s “being-in-the-world”, his multiple and changing ways of reacting
to the world and transforming it. Sartre equally stresses that it can never
be a completed product or an end in itself. Instead, it is the negative
response to the colonizer, but its gesture of negation will lead to a new
social structure. It is part of a dialectic and not a totalized position, and
it works as a redressing of an unequal balance, rather than as a goal of
its own. Having spent much of his essay praising the affirmation and
innovation of revolutionary negritude poetry, then, Sartre’s conclusion
nevertheless stresses its provisionality: “Negritude must destroy itself, it
is a transition and not an endpoint” (ibid.: xli). Negritude in this sense
contains the seeds of its own destruction: it must turn against itself in
order paradoxically to attain its real end. It is a crucial strategy, but its
values must also be questioned and ultimately rejected. The use of the
term “negritude” is, on the one hand, supposed to lead to a new stage,
a new society that does not need such classifications. But the term is
also questioned because its label opens up a chain of meanings that
reach beyond its classificatory grasp, so that it must also abolish itself.
Sartre uses the concept of negritude, reveals its essentialist foundations,
reworks it and turns it against itself.
This reading of Sartre’s essay crucially contests Fanon’s response as
expressed in Black Skin, White Masks. As already signalled, Fanon and
Sartre were closely engaged in one another’s work on colonialism, per-
haps most explicitly and enthusiastically during the campaign for the
decolonization of Algeria. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectic Reason was a
major influence in Fanon’s writing of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon
asked Sartre to write the preface, and both thinkers’ reflections on vio-
lence appear to learn and borrow from one another. Fanon’s reaction to
“Black Orpheus” was, however, problematic, and he focused on Sartre’s
dismissal of black identity in contrast to his own celebration of the
latter’s potential. If Sartre conceived negritude as a process, a stage in
the transition to a higher synthesis, Fanon argued that this diminished
its significance and robbed it of its revolutionary force. In Black Skin,
White Masks, Fanon rails against the European scorn for the black man’s
strategies of self-affirmation:
I wanted to be typically Negro, – it was no longer possible. I

wanted to be white, – that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the
level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude,
it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my
effort was only a term in the dialectic. (1968: 94)
Sartre’s conception of negritude as just a stage in the dialectic was for

Fanon too schematic, too reductive, and reduced the potential of black
self-reinvention. Even worse, Nigel Gibson observes that “because Black
consciousness merely contributed to an inevitable and pre-existing goal,
Fanon felt that Sartre was curtailing possible futures” (Gibson 2003: 74).
Gibson goes on to explain that Fanon believed that colonial imposition
impeded the black man’s creation of his subjectivity, so that his resist-
ance had to reach back to a moment before the beginning of the dia-
lectic. The creation of black subjectivity would then be an open-ended
and ongoing process, rather than a passing phase before the arrival of
the “society without race”.
Fanon’s critique of Sartre was in many ways a justified one, and the
dialectic is clearly a problematic structure in several respects. Not only
does it apparently curtail negritude, but it also denies its “substantive
absoluteness”: a term borrowed from Hegel, and which Fanon uses to
convey its irreducibility, its immediacy, its roots in lived experience.
Fanon’s reservations about “Black Orpheus” also stem from the objec-
tion that it does not provide a sense of the real experience and actuality
of the black man, the materiality and affect of his everyday life. Fanon
is in many ways correct in his reading of Sartre, and it is no doubt true
that Sartre’s position has to remain constrained by his position within
a clearly European philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, it is also pos-
sible to read the conclusions to “Black Orpheus” not as a rejection of the
open-ended potentiality of negritude, but precisely as a warning that the
movement must not at any stage become closed, completed or, indeed,
too clearly defined. Its perpetuation would only increase the risk that
its dynamism might slow and that its label might stabilize and become
entrenched. A reading of “Black Orpheus” that takes account of Sartrean
concepts of the disordered freedom and contingency of being-for-itself
would stress that he is attempting to prevent negritude from slipping
fanon and sartre 47

into bad faith, into a category that would betray the very creativity and
invention it promotes. The disagreement between Fanon and Sartre
from this point of view is less that the former conceives black identity
as endlessly self-inventing whereas the latter reduces it to stereotypes;
rather, the dispute centres on the term negritude itself, which Fanon
believes can remain open-ended, while Sartre insists it has to negate
itself to remain faithful to its own principle. It is “an explosive fixity, an
expression of pride that renounces itself, an absolute that knows itself
to be transitory” (Sartre 1948b: xliii). Later, however, Fanon went on
to revise his criticisms of Sartre and came round to the idea that there
were dangers associated with negritude’s totalizing discourse.
Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth goes some way to reconcil-
ing the two thinkers’ versions of anti-colonial critique. First, it is impor-
tant that Sartre’s reading of Fanon’s work adds to its incendiary quality
and reiterates its dynamic call to arms. Sartre stresses also the necessary
unity of the revolutionary people, referring in a Marxist tone to the role
of the peasantry as the radical class but calling at the same time for the
collapsing of boundaries between intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and the
masses. This is less the movement of a specific community than a rising
up of forces claiming human freedom. Concomitantly, Sartre argues that
what colonialism denies is the humanity of the colonized: “no effort will
be spared to liquidate their traditions, substitute our languages for theirs,
destroy their culture without giving them ours; they will be rendered
stupid by exploitation” (Sartre 2001: 142–3). As in Fanon’s work, Sartre
upholds a concept of an underlying humanity, the respect for which
requires also an understanding of the other’s difference, the customs and
cultures of the colonized people. This is not the hypocritical humanism
of European civilization, or the obfuscatory rhetoric of “liberty, equality,
fraternity” that props up the myth of the French Republic while subjugat-
ing its oppressed other, but a demand for the recognition of otherness.
Above all, the preface demands again the overthrow of colonialism by
means of violence, and addresses this call to violence to the Europeans
against whom it is directed. Sartre asserts that Fanon’s text was an appeal
to the colonized, but his own role is to show how this revolutionary call
will impact on the colonizer, how it will tear him apart in just the same
way as he severed the black man from himself: “the colon within each of
us is being removed in a bloody operation” (ibid.: 150).
Sartre’s critique also builds on Fanon, however, and can even be
seen to foreshadow subsequent forms of postcolonial theory indebted
to poststructuralism. Sartre, like Fanon, argues more than once that
colonialism is self-defeating in its very structure: it is necessarily bent
on its own destruction. Again in the preface to The Wretched of the
Earth, Sartre notes that the colonizer wants to kill the colonized, and
yet he also wants to exploit him. Colonialism in reality therefore urges
the elimination of the subjugated other, only this would necessarily
end the project of exploitation and subjugation. Sartre’s essay on Albert
Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized expands this structure of co-
dependence, noting once again that the colonizer hates the colonized he
oppresses but, brought to its logical conclusion, this hatred means that
he wants either to eradicate the colonized, or to collapse the division
he relies on by creating an assimilated society. The system as a result
requires the colonizer to keep the colonized in a sort of limit position,
capable of work but paid the lowest possible wages, and this system
inevitably generates rebellion and brings the colonizer’s violence back
on to himself. Critique of Dialectical Reason similarly tells us that the
rebellion provoked by the colonizer’s oppression mimics the violence
that he himself imposed on the native, so that the structure necessarily
becomes reciprocal. Reworking the Hegelian dialectic between master
and slave, Sartre shows that colonialism is not a masterful structure, but
one that leads necessarily to its own destruction, and one that cannot
maintain itself in the form on which it paradoxically relies. Once again,
the colonizer is not assured in his position of power, but becomes poten-
tially the victim of his drive to maintain that power.
Sartre concomitantly, and controversially, insists that colonial aliena-
tion is an experience that belongs to both sides, to both colonizer and
colonized. In the essay “Colonialism is a System” reprinted in Coloni-
alism and Neocolonialism, for example, Sartre provides a quick history
of political and economic expropriation in Algeria, and concludes by
stressing that this is indeed a system in which both colonizer and colo-
nized are cogs. It is not an abstract mechanism; it is one that is created by
human beings, but the point is that individuals on both sides are trapped
and determined by the system, even as they perpetuate it. As a result,
“the colonist is fabricated like the native; he is made by his function and
his interests” (Sartre 2001: 44). Even as early as “Black Orpheus”, the
colonized is not oppressed by a master who knows himself and possesses
his own language. Sartre’s discussion of colonial relations reminds the
colonizer that he too is alienated, that he possesses nothing, that he is
impure and non-essential. “Black Orpheus” opens with the startling
reminder that while the white man believed that his gaze was pure,
that his belief systems were correct and true, the black man now throws
that gaze back on him and shows him to be both powerless and other
to himself. Just as the white man’s gaze over-determined and alienated
fanon and sartre 49

the black man, the negritude poets’ returning gaze in turn alters and
defamiliarizes the former’s self-perception: “our whiteness appears to
us as a strange, pale veneer that stops our skin from breathing” (Sartre
1948b: ix). In addition, the negritude poets’ use of the French language
twists and deforms it until the white man is alienated by it, and forced
to recognize that he cannot possess, contain and control it. Both the
white man and the black man experience a sense of non-belonging in
language, a lack of self-identity, so that “there is a secret blackness to
the white, and a secret whiteness to the black, a fixed flickering of being
and non-being” (ibid.: xxii). Neither colonizer nor colonized is secure
in his being, but both are confronted with traces of otherness, of their
own contingency, in their use of a language that can never be entirely
their own.
Surprisingly, then, one of the outcomes of Sartre’s revolutionary writ-
ing is its revelation that the master, or colonizer, may claim possession of
his identity, but this is a gesture of denial, or bad faith. The experience of
alienation in language is a universal one: language separates all speak-
ers from themselves, and what the colonial system did was doubly to
alienate the colonized people by forcing a foreign language on them, a
language that the colonizer could then claim as his own. The colonized
are forced to live in a society governed in a language that is not theirs,
so their alienation operates on two levels, and also becomes entrenched
by political inequality and oppression. On this point, Sartre comes close
to anticipating Derrida’s discussion of colonialism in the much later The
Monolingualism of the Other (1998), first published in French in 1996.
In The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida’s initial reflection on the
specific experience of Algerian Jews dissolves into a discussion of our
universal alienation in language, together with an exploration of the
author’s own pursuit of a process of self-singularization. This means that
both colonizer and colonized are alienated, but the colonizer denies his
alienation and claims to possess his culture and language while enforcing
it on the other so as to concretize the other’s dispossession. As in Sartre,
then, the crux of this is again that both colonizer and colonized are in
exile, and neither is able to control and possess his language, to fix both
his own being and that of the subordinate other. Sartre stressed in “Black
Orpheus” that the negritude poets forced the colonizer to experience the
sense of separation from himself that colonialism forced on the colo-
nized. Derrida’s work dwells on this universal and reciprocal alienation
at length, and argues that if we speak of the dispossession of the colo-
nized, we must also remember that the colonizer, the master, is no more
in possession of his language than the colonized he oppresses and tries
to assimilate. The disjunction between self and language is universal,
and far from dissolving the specifics of the colonized’s oppression, this
universal, ethical theorization provides the basis for its concretization
and politicization in the colonial context: “the master is nothing. And
he does not have exclusive possession of anything” (Derrida 1998: 23).
Although Sartre’s comments on the colonizer in “Black Orpheus” are
less extensive than those of Derrida in The Monolingualism of the Other,
the argument that both sides are alienated is offered in the earlier work,
and certainly ties in with the generalized contingency of being-for-itself
in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1989).
Although Sartre does predict a totalized “society without race”, then,
his awareness of the constantly self-inventing being-for-itself stresses
the infinite singularization of all beings, their disjunction from the lan-
guage they are constrained to use. Sartre’s ideal society, conceived as the
ultimate aim of the dialectic, crucially remains deferred, and although
he wants to imagine a complete, totalized and synthetic resolution, its
very deferral means that his thinking finishes by positing an ongoing
process of invention in the search for that higher goal. At the end of
“Black Orpheus” Sartre is in any case hesitant in his elucidation of the
third phase of the dialectic, and although he is adamant that negritude
remains a transitory stage, his idea of synthesis remains tentative. It is
reminiscent of the Marxist vision of a “classless society”, but is not fle-
shed out as a goal of its own. Reading the essay, one is left with the sense
that the dialectic is not a step towards totalized harmony, but rather a
process that must keep moving, but that may remain indefinitely unfin-
ished. Sartre’s dialectic is not the rapid dismissal of negritude poetry,
nor the promise of a naive harmony, but the argument that no stage in
the resistance process, no self-affirmation, should be allowed to freeze
into a static position and should retain a sense of its movement beyond
itself. His dialectic names an evolution and not an endpoint; it privi-
leges continual reinvention rather than a finite achievement or stasis.
Sartre succeeds in setting out a clear purpose to this process of continual
invention, but the deferral of its endpoint, and his questioning of the
use of any label because of the proliferation of its significations, means
that his strategy stretches beyond the concerns of immediate liberation
and into a deconstructive and ethical interrogation of language, identity
and mastery.
Sartre succeeds in offering a distinct anti-colonial standpoint and
proposal, and voices this with an urgency to rival that of Fanon. At the
same time, however, he manages to collapse colonialism as a sustainable
conceptual structure, to expose its delusions and myths, and in so doing
fanon and sartre 51

he sows the seeds of a broader, deconstructive and ethical critique of its
philosophy of language and culture. He demands the immediate over-
throw of colonialism, but also considers the weakness within the system
itself, its self-defeating nature and its deluded collusion with a certain
metaphysics of identity and linguistic possession. Closer attention to
“Black Orpheus” and the other essays brings out the multiple layers
of Sartre’s writing on colonialism: his ability to take a political stand
and to make positive proposals while criticizing the simplicity of any
“identity politics”. His tone is contestatory and revolutionary, but it also
contains the seeds of a complex, meticulous deconstruction of the very
language of the colonial system, its self-defeating contortions, and the
implications of that deconstruction for the elucidation of anti-colonial
critique. From this point of view the work is an amalgam of negritude
and Hegelianism, it anticipates deconstruction, and problematizes both
the construction and maintenance of colonial power and the fraught
process of its undermining. Like that of Fanon, it offers an astonishing
combination of the most militant political polemic with a philosoph-
ical and ethical enquiry reaching far beyond the requirements of the
moment of independence.
Key points
• Fanon’s work has both psychoanalytic and political dimensions.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explores the psychic alienation
of the black man, his sense of splitting from himself. In response,
on the one hand Fanon affirms the black man’s “negro” identity,
and on the other hand he champions the black man’s belonging
to a universal humanity.
• In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s political denunciation of
colonialism in Algeria rests on a critique of its Manichaean struc-
ture. This divisive structure must be overthrown by means of vio-
lence, and should give way to a completely new society. Fanon
draws on Marxism in his sketch of an anti-colonial revolution,
although he also points out the limits of Marxist thinking in this
context. Fanon affirms the importance of national culture while
elucidating the risks of its dominance by the bourgeoisie.
• Sartre celebrates black poetry as a space of resistance and self-
reinvention, but he too remains ambivalent towards the affirma-
tion of black identity recommended by the negritude movement.
He stresses that negritude is only a stage in a dialectic and should
lead to the transcendence of any racial category. Fanon conceives
Sartre’s reading as an unfair dismissal of negritude.
• Sartre’s analysis of colonialism in Algeria emphasizes that both
colonizer and colonized are victims of the colonial system. He
calls for the immediate dismantling of this oppressive system.
Moreover, Sartre’s thinking anticipates Derrida’s form of post-
colonial critique, in that he undermines the mastery of colonial
discourse.
fanon and sartre 53

three
Decolonization, community, nationalism:

Gandhi, Nandy and the Subaltern
Studies Collective
If Fanon and Sartre’s writing on colonial Manichaeism, emergent

nationalism and the new humanism is clearly directed against French
colonialism in Algeria, Africa and the Caribbean, then the undoing of
British colonialism required, at least for the major Indian anti-colonial
thinkers, a rather different form of critique. French colonialism, in par-
ticular in Algeria, promoted the assimilation of the foreign territory
to French control and to French culture, whereas British colonialism
tended to privilege a form of paternalism or indirect rule. Moreover,
the conquest and control of Algeria had been from beginning to end a
bloody process and, despite the French policy of assimilation, resulted in
repeated violent clashes and ongoing segregation. The French “mission
civilisatrice” also produced, according to Fanon and Sartre, a disturbing
form of racism that utterly severed and destroyed the colonized’s very
self-image. In exploring British colonialism in India, thinkers such as
Mahatma Gandhi, Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee stress less strik-
ingly the Manichaeism of the colonial vision and focus instead on its
administrative structures, its association with capitalism and economic
and social inequality. Fanon and Sartre were also clearly virulently anti-
capitalist in their writings on colonialism but, unlike these thinkers,
in their writing on India Gandhi and the others do not conceive the
shortcomings of the European economic and political system as related
to such a distinct binary opposition between colonizer and native.
Indeed, one of Gandhi’s persistent preoccupations was why the British
had colonized India or, more precisely, why the Indians had apparently
surrendered the control of their territory to them. Gandhi lamented the
weakness of his compatriots in succumbing to the British and colluding
in their imposed administrative system, although in fact, rather ironi-
cally, early on he himself supported some aspects of the British presence,
again suggesting a certain ambivalence in relations between colonizer
and colonized. Furthermore, Chatterjee notes that postcolonial India
did not transform the basic institutional arrangements of colonial law
and administration, and although nationalism and a specific national
identity were at the time a significant part of anti-colonial discourse,
competing versions of these already complicated any notion of a stark
binary between British and Indians, or between East and West. The
movement to overthrow British colonialism was a deeply fractured and
ambivalent process, and leading thinkers and commentators on the
movement waver in their configuration of the relation between cul-
tural and ethnic groups (British, Hindu and Muslim) in the struggle
for power.
Gandhi was one of the most influential figures in India’s emergent
anti-colonial movement, however, and it is to him and his critics and fol-
lowers that this chapter turns. His work has two striking features worthy
of particular attention that set it apart from that of the thinkers already
discussed. First, he is not a nationalist philosopher and his call for resist-
ance at no point hinges on a concept of national identity. Fanon, writ-
ing of course after Gandhi and at the moment where the anti-colonial
movement in Algeria was at its most desperate, upholds national culture
even as he denounces the narrow vision of the bourgeoisie who risk
over-determining that culture. Gandhi, however, nowhere recommends
Indian nationalism, and this is both one of his unique strengths and,
for some, as we shall see, one of the possible limitations of his vision.
Anxious to avoid homogenizing Indians and creating a false unity,
Gandhi perceives home rule or “Swaraj” as a return to an independent
Indian civilization, a rich conglomeration that is necessarily both vari-
egated and unified. Hindus and Muslims from this point of view live
alongside one another without assuming a national identity but sharing
nevertheless a common spirit tied to their Indian past. Concomitantly,
Gandhi believed that the real conflict lay not between two nations, nor
between East and West, but between modernity and tradition. His anti-
colonialism is a reclaiming not of a national culture but of an intricate
web of customs and beliefs opposed to the individualist, competitive
spirit of modern civilization and capitalism.
Secondly, while Fanon specifically advocates violence, Gandhi’s strat-
egy is that of non-violence. Fanon argues that the overthrow of a colo-
nial system predicated on violence requires that the same violence be
decolonization, community, nationalism 55

turned back against the colonizer, but Gandhi will not condone violence
of any sort and recommends a form of passive resistance. The use of
violence is entirely incompatible with Gandhi’s belief in the traditional
Indian spirit, and is necessarily complicit with the mastery, individual-
ism and destructiveness that Swaraj sets out to eradicate. The concept of
non-violence, and its practical manifestation in acts of passive resistance
or civil disobedience, mutates throughout Gandhi’s career, a mutation
that testifies to the thinker’s tentativeness in recommending a clear set
of policies in the fight against the inequality imposed by the British.
The aim of Gandhi’s evolving philosophy of non-violence nevertheless
rests on the firm credence that violence ultimately begets more violence;
even if it succeeds in its goals it creates a precedent and encourages the
belief that violence can be justified as a means to an end. Conversely,
the strategy of non-violence or passive resistance disquiets the onlooker,
destabilizes the position of those in power and crystallizes the system’s
injustices. It makes it difficult for the oppressor to react, since further
violence blatantly appears morally unjustifiable whereas the decision
to take no action weakens the oppressor’s image of power. The difficul-
ties of this vision will be discussed later, but certainly it is important
to recognize the strength and significance of Gandhi’s strategy of non-
cooperation as an alternative form of anti-colonial critique to that of
the more militant and aggressive Fanon.
If Fanon was a revolutionary political philosopher whose work had
ethical undertones, Gandhi, with his critique of violence, conceived
politics and ethics or morality as inextricably bound together. Once
again, if later critics of colonialism in India have become polarized in
their privileging of either ethics or politics, Gandhi himself made no
such choice and presented his highly political objectives as infused with
an awareness of moral obligation. Critical of Marx, Gandhi neverthe-
less draws on his denunciation of capitalist inequality, and his battles
revolved precisely around real economic issues including the laws deter-
mining the activities of the peasants, or the excessive salt tax that he
marched against in 1930. His call for an independent India was also a
direct rejection of the British government’s imposition of a competitive
market where the rich lined their own pockets at the expense of the
exploited and the poor. Yet at the same time, Gandhi repeatedly used
a moralizing vocabulary, designating colonialism as “evil”, as well as
“corrupt” and “diseased”, and the fight for Indian civilization was above
all in defence of his people’s spirit of integrity and equability. Independ-
ence from British rule was also inseparable from personal freedom and
the full realization of the human self. It involved a spiritual project, a
search for self-knowledge and internal harmony derived in part, and at
times rather problematically, from Hindu tenets and the Bhagavad Gita.
It is for this reason that Gandhi’s methods were rigorously ethical, and
foreclosed any possibility of domination and mastery over the other. His
strategies of non-cooperation and non-violence worked against both
the practical policies of the British system and its underlying pitting
of self against other, its individualist ends. Chatterjee and the historio-
graphical thinkers of the Subaltern Studies Collective develop and build
on the political analysis of decolonization and nationalism, while the
celebrated postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha, discussed in Chapter 4,
retracts from the political in favour of ethics and cultural criticism.
Nandy, not unlike Fanon, ignores this dichotomy and discusses colonial-
ism in India, and Gandhi’s work, in terms of politics, psychology and
representation. More than anyone, however, it is Gandhi who explicitly
refuses to divorce his practical from his spiritual goals and was prepared
to face the inconsistencies that this fusion nevertheless brought.
Mahatma Gandhi
Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1869 at Porbandar, Gujarat,

Gandhi later became known as “Mahatma” or “Great Soul” as a result
of his achievements as leader of the independence movement in India.
Despite his renown, however, he was himself uncomfortable with the
adulation expressed by his followers and with his position as a figure
of authority. He also stressed repeatedly that his philosophy did not
amount to “Gandhism”, to any specific or fixed agenda, and, indeed, it
is clear that his thinking mutates throughout his career in response to
the historical changes he witnesses. Furthermore, Gandhi was in no way
an abstract thinker but was deeply committed to political action, and
his writings often took the form of scattered musings or glosses on his
militant activities. He admired simplicity and set out to work closely
with the people; he was committed to making his beliefs concrete and
meaningful to India’s victims – the exploited, the weak and the poor. It
is difficult, then, to systematize his thinking and to create a unified body
out of his work. He offers no single anti-colonial philosophy but a series
of observations and experimental methods of critique.
Gandhi’s militant career began when he was working as a lawyer
in South Africa. He himself experienced racial discrimination, and
began campaigning against the mistreatment of Indians soon after his
arrival in the country in 1894. He founded the Natal Indian Congress,

an organization that set out to fight anti-Indian racial laws. Never-
theless, he assisted the British during the Boer War by working as a
stretcher-bearer, and at this stage he supported the colonial power even
as he became aware of its injustices. Also during his time in South
Africa, Gandhi wrote frequently for the newspaper Indian Opinion and
gradually shaped his views on the evils not so much of colonialism
but of modern civilization, as well as on the techniques necessary for
its undermining. He formally adopted the term “satyagraha”, which
designates the power of truth, love and non-violence, and which also
involves a variety of concrete acts of resistance and civil disobedience.
Frequently imprisoned as a result of his militancy, Gandhi nevertheless
lobbied relentlessly for his cause and continued to organize campaigns
and marches as a means of expressing protest. He returned to India in
1915 and began his work defending and speaking up for his disadvan-
taged compatriots. He applied the principles of satyagraha in a series
of disputes, settling the grievances of indigo workers in Champaran
and the textile workers’ strike in Ahmedabad. He lead a movement of
peaceful resistance against the Rowlatt Bills of 1919, which proposed
severe measures to deal with terrorism, and even contributed to the pan-
Islamic Khilafat movement in the same year. He also fasted repeatedly,
notably in protest against the Indian caste system and the mistreatment
of the untouchables. Nevertheless, when in 1922 the non-cooperation
movement got out of hand and a number of Indian policemen were mas-
sacred as a result of civil disobedience, Gandhi was deeply saddened and
revised his understanding of satyagraha in order to stress its necessarily
peaceful nature. Another of Gandhi’s significant achievements was the
salt satyagraha of 1930: a two-hundred-mile march against the tax that
the British Raj had placed on salt. The movement was also, however, a
broader statement of protest against the British presence and became a
significant moment in the move towards independence. Gandhi went
on to launch the Quit India movement in 1942 ahead of Indian inde-
pendence, and partition, in 1947.
This is a highly cursory summary of Gandhi’s activities, but these
moments need to be noted for their influence on his evolving philosophy.
At the centre of this is his far-reaching critique of modern civilization,
expounded above all in Hind Swaraj, a series of comments and reflections
written in ten days during his return from England to South Africa in
1909. If there is any seminal text in Gandhi’s corpus it is this one, since
it is here that he elaborates most succinctly on the philosophy behind
the call for Swaraj, or home rule. It is not Englishmen themselves that
he vilifies, but the evil and selfishness promoted by modern civilization.
Modern concepts of civil liberty and equality are certainly admirable for
Gandhi, but the greed of rampant capitalism is not, and at the heart of
modern civilization lies the flawed premise that “people living in it make
bodily welfare the object of life” (Gandhi 1997: 35). This prioritization of
material comfort in turn means that men “are enslaved by the temptation
of money and of the luxuries that money can buy” (ibid.: 36). They ignore
both morality and spirituality, lack strength and courage, and find them-
selves isolated from one another. Concomitantly, India suffers because
it is “being ground down not under the English heel but under that of
modern civilisation” (ibid.: 42). Technological advancements brought
on by the British have contributed only to India’s suffering. Railways, for
example, served only to spread plague and, furthermore, Gandhi argues
that they actually helped to harden India’s internal divisions. Later in
the text, Gandhi similarly laments the effects of modern machinery, the
dreadful working conditions of factory employees and the destruction of
traditional methods of production. Indians can produce their own cloth,
their own goods, by means that eschew the cruelty of modern civilization.
Ultimately, the British obsession with commercial selfishness is a form
of violence and vanity that negates even their own spirit of Christian-
ity. Their colonial project was the worst and final manifestation of this
aggressive and exploitative drive.
Gandhi’s thought is related to that of Marx in its denunciation of capi-
talism. Gandhi argues against the capitalist concept of private property,
for he believes that there is no inherent reason why one man should
claim exclusive ownership of the fruits of his labour. The good func-
tioning of society depends on cooperation and on self-sacrifice, and
the capitalist drive towards private ownership undermines this need
for sharing. Gandhi also believes that capitalism dehumanizes its work-
ers, requiring them to work in unacceptable conditions and breeding
discontent and aggression among them. This emphatically does not,
however, make Gandhi a Marxist; indeed, he vilifies communism as
much as he does capitalism. Communism is also based on material-
ism, according to Gandhi; it occludes the people’s spiritual needs and
inflates the power of the state. Moreover, while Marx lamented the slow
pace of change in India, this link with the past and with tradition is, for
Gandhi, his country’s strength. So Gandhi shares with Marx a disgust
for the avaricious drive of capitalism and a belief in the necessity of
its destruction, but conceives an alternative Indian society in starkly
contrasting terms.
Gandhi believes that the British came to India only in search of
material gain, and a new market for their goods. Indians, however, were

seduced into colluding with the imposition of this modern civilization,
and it is in this collusion that they forget their traditions and their past.
They ignore the spiritual teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, the path of
self-purification and self-sacrifice, and the relinquishment of short-
term, self-serving goals. They forget their communal spirit and the
moral necessity that each man look after the other. In a series of stark
oppositions, Gandhi opposes this ethical spirit to the greed of modern
civilization in order to champion Indian integrity: “the tendency of
Indian civilisation is to propagate the moral being, that of the Western
civilisation is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is
based on a belief in God” (ibid.: 71). Moving swiftly and deftly between
ethics and politics, moreover, Gandhi takes the spinning wheel as a
symbol of India’s traditional spirit, and uses it to represent a refusal of
the machinery of Western civilization. The spinning wheel stands for an
ethical means of production free from the denigrating and dehuman-
izing effects of industrialization on a large scale. Gandhi argues that in
adopting the spinning wheel, Indians “declare that we have no inten-
tion of exploiting any nation, and we also end exploitation of the poor
by the rich” (ibid.: 167). The restoration of such traditional modes of
production is both a vigorous statement in defiance of capitalism and
an ethical promise to end the rule of the guiding values of selfishness
and avarice.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the imposition of modern civilization
divided a country that Gandhi stresses had previously been able to live
peacefully. India’s plurality and diversity is part of its richness; it is a vast
and protean civilization and not a unified nation, but the differences
between, for example, Muslims and Hindus are perceived by Gandhi
to be mutually nourishing. Noting in Hind Swaraj that they have long
since ceased to fight, Gandhi argues that “religions are different roads
converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take differ-
ent roads, so long as we reach the same goal?” (ibid.: 53). Gandhi also
wrote about the confrontation with British colonialism and the move
towards independence as a statement of unity, where Indian civilization
was united against the oppressor. He notes:
more and more, as they realize that amid differences of creed

and caste is one basic nationality, does agitation spread and
take the form of definite demands for the fulfilment of the
solemn assurance of the British Government that they should
be given the ordinary rights of British subjects.
(Gandhi 1962: 101)
Gandhi’s call, in his move towards a demand for independence, is in this
way directed to all Indians, and part of his endeavour is to abolish caste
distinctions and internal inequalities. He also, like Fanon, addresses
the masses; he wants to call the attention of the people, and not an elite
native bourgeoisie who would risk once again oppressing and speaking
in the place of the peasants. Gandhi similarly seeks to reconcile divi-
sions between rural and urban cultures. A return to Indian civilization
would entail the handing over of the land to the people and the aban-
donment of inegalitarian, divisive economic and political structures.
Of course, the difficulty with Gandhi’s belief in unity is that it seeks
to deny real and painful divisions between Muslims and Hindus, which
escalated to reach an apotheosis during the conflicts leading up to
partition. By 1946 India was enmeshed in a civil war, inaugurated in
earnest by the Great Calcutta Killing in August of that year. Having
tried previously to ignore the rupture that was tearing India apart, by
1947 Gandhi was gravely troubled by the growing violence, visited the
city and resolved to fast. While Hindu protestors initially saw Gandhi’s
attempts to make peace with Muslims as an act of betrayal, in the end his
powers of persuasion worked, and, indeed, on the day India became an
independent nation the city remained surprisingly peaceful. The calm
was short-lived, but Gandhi continued to believe in reconciliation and in
the powers of satyagraha to achieve his aims. If he did succeed in healing
some rifts between Muslims and Hindus, however, Gandhi’s philosophy
was inevitably rooted in the Hindu religion and culture, and critics have
observed that his rhetoric of unity sat uneasily with his highly particu-
larized use of the Bhagavad Gita. At the same time, he was moving
further and further away from an engagement with the economic and
historical roots of the conflict and glossed over the politics of the rift
with a spiritualism ill equipped to deal with its complexity.
Gandhi’s conception of a unified and spiritual Indian civilization
is complemented by a series of multifaceted and mutating concepts
that require further elucidation. The first of these is undoubtedly sat-
yagraha, a term that I have already used a number of times to describe
Gandhi’s non-violent methods of resistance. Etymologically, it comes
from “satya”, meaning truth, and “agraha”, a form of insistence without
obstinacy. Initially it is related to passive resistance, although Gandhi
rejects this term quite quickly, first because he argues that it was asso-
ciated with a dangerous and potentially destructive form of contesta-
tion, with a “preparation” for violence, and secondly because for him
it actually implies weakness. It is nevertheless noteworthy that passive
resistance is a concept used by Levinas, in a very different context, to

describe the encounter with the face and the resistance of the other to
the self ’s desired power and mastery. Gandhi’s thought is much more
politically oriented than that of Levinas, but his notion of resistance does
contain this vision of an ultimately moral confrontation between a being
that believes itself to be masterful and the raw and naked suffering of
the other. The concept of satyagraha, if it is not quite passive resistance
in Gandhi’s view, is, moreover, at once an affirmation of strength and a
deeply ethical embrace of the virtues of love and charity. Satyagraha is
an active form of opposition, committed to non-violence, but bold and
affirmative in its claims for what is right. The satyagrahi is not afraid,
but promotes “self-help, self-sacrifice and faith in God” in his pursuit
of justice and freedom (Gandhi 1962: 80). He is prepared to suffer and
to use his suffering as a tool to achieve the ends to which he remains
committed, and, in turn, it is his suffering that shames the oppressor
and reminds him of the evil of which he is the cause. The power of
satyagraha comes from strength of will, which is always far superior
to the power exerted by brute force. Satyagraha as a form of truth is
also complemented by “ahimsa”, the rule of non-violence as an agent
of change, and this concretizes the demands made by the former term.
Ahimsa is again both a personal notion, bound up with self-will and
self-sacrifice, and a political tool, manifested by fasting and marching,
or in practical movements of civil disobedience. This disobedience must
remain peaceful, however, and disturbed by the violence that did emerge
in 1922, Gandhi was increasingly at pains to stress the necessity for its
careful planning.
Satyagraha is conceived as the key method in the pursuit of Swaraj,
or home rule. Although Gandhi applied it to his protests against the
caste system and the violence between Muslims and Hindus, it was con-
ceived around the time of Hind Swaraj as part of the necessary return to
Indian (Hindu?) values and traditions. In campaigning for Swaraj, for
example, Gandhi stresses “my Swaraj will not be a bloody usurpation of
rights, but the acquisition of power will be a beautiful and natural fruit
of duty well and truly performed” (ibid.: 171). This Swaraj is, moreover,
an equally complex concept comprising multiple layers. First, it is the
direct and urgent call for the withdrawal of the British from India. Yet
this withdrawal is not just a political demand for decolonization but an
aspiration to reclaim Indian civilization and to return it to its traditional
values and customs. Secondly, then, Swaraj names not only political
home rule but “self-rule”: it connotes the freedom of the individual to
create himself according to his own principles while sacrificing himself
to others. Gandhi argues that home-rule is self-rule or self-control: it
is the establishment of an Indian spirituality that combines affirmation
against the British with a belief in sharing, community and the sacrifice
of the self before the other. Swaraj is at the same time inconceivable
without “swadeshi”, or community: “the principle of relying on the prod-
ucts of India rather than foreign goods” (quoted in Dalton 1993: 249).
Swadeshi names the attachment to the land and to the environment that
Gandhi champions in his call for the restoration of Indian civilization,
and it implies not only political autonomy but also cultural and moral
independence and cohesion. The call for independence in this way has
profound spiritual and moral consequences, drawn from this deep-
rooted adherence to community, integrity and truth.
Gandhi’s philosophy is deeply politicized in its direct engagement
with the masses, with specific injustices and with the Indian National
Congress and its movement towards independence. Yet the depth and
complexity of his core concepts implies a thinking that stretches beyond
the practical and the immediate, and that speaks not just to Indians but
to humanity more broadly. Like Fanon and Sartre, Gandhi retains a
strong concept of a common humanity, distinct from any Eurocentric
humanism and unrelated to the obfuscatory notion of “human nature”,
but important as an ethical category. Again like Fanon and other anti-
colonial thinkers such as Memmi, Gandhi rails against colonialism,
or its imposition of modern civilization, because of its dehumanizing
tendencies, and he uses the term “human” to advocate the crucial rec-
ognition of the other. For Gandhi humanity is unified and indivisible,
and a proper understanding of the human requires respect for and
attention to other humans, and the refusal of exploitation and degra-
dation. This unity is not the same as similarity, and does not obstruct
Gandhi’s pluralism, but establishes a common foundation on which
individuals construct mutual respect. As a result, the call for freedom
applies not only to India but to all peoples: “the spirit of political and
international liberty is universal and, it may even be said, instinctive.
No race appreciates a condition of servitude or subjection to a con-
quering or alien race” (Gandhi 1962: 102). Gandhi’s aim is at the same
time greater than independence, as he seeks “to deliver the so-called
weaker races of the earth from the crushing heels of Western civilisa-
tion” (ibid.: 164). This universalist strand certainly creates difficulties
for Gandhi’s readers, as the sweeping rhetoric moves a long way from
the more pressing political goals of his work, and the breadth of his
references, from Plato and Socrates to Tolstoy and Ruskin, obscures
his immediate objectives. Indeed, the resistance to Western civilization
is couched in terms that are still unavoidably inflected with Hinduism

and with India’s specific past in ways that are clearly objectionable to
Muslims. This combination of the specific with the universal lacks the
elegance with which Fanon elaborates his dialectic between negritude
and the new humanism, partly because Gandhi’s very language is bound
up in a spiritual tradition that it claims to be able to transcend. It is this
ethical ambition, however, that lifts his work into the realm of philoso-
phy and that continues to influence postcolonial thought many decades
after his assassination 1948.
Gandhi’s thought was nonetheless mired in other problems that he
struggled to resolve. In her essay “Concerning Violence”, Leela Gandhi
asserts that Gandhi’s ethics, unlike that of Levinas, is totalizing, and does
not leave space for contingency. The Levinasian encounter cannot be
subsumed into totality and is conceived only in terms of the immediacy
of the face-to-face encounter, but Gandhi’s demand for universal love
actually deflects the other’s appeal for proximity (L. Gandhi 1997: 109).
Commentators such as Bhikhu Parekh also, while sympathetically expli-
cating Gandhi’s philosophy, express concern about his uncompromising
embrace of suffering, since its precise effects are difficult to trace and it
borders at times on a form of ritualism. Equally, Young has commented
on the potential hypocrisy of Gandhi’s self-image, which was highly
mediatized and broadly disseminated, despite his critique of modern
technology. Leela Gandhi and others have also criticized Gandhi’s vision
of female agency, since, while helping women to contribute to satya-
graha and Swaraj, these concepts allow them to do so only within their
traditional role in the family. Perhaps most troublingly, Gandhi’s latter
withdrawal from the political makes his vision of postcolonial India
highly questionable. Adhering to principles of satyagraha and Swaraj,
Gandhi refuses to contemplate the formation of a modern Indian state,
even if this was what his nation urgently required. His inspirational
capacity derives much more from the ethics embedded in his strategy
for resistance than from his model of postcoloniality.
Ashis Nandy
Nandy is a leading Indian intellectual, a follower and critic of Gandhi,

who develops the work of his forerunner precisely by conceiving of
anti-colonialism and postcoloniality together. A self-proclaimed Marx-
ist, Nandy’s distinction, however, is that his reading of colonialism
and postcolonialism is not historicist but psychological. A constant
dissenter, Nandy is also difficult to pigeonhole; unlike many Indian
postcolonial intellectuals he was not educated outside India, and also
does not hold a post in a university department. He has for a long time
been associated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in
New Delhi, but his work does not sit comfortably within the boundaries
of a single academic discipline. His writing style is elliptical, punchy but
at times allusive, and although he has been hugely influential within
India, his work has tended to be somewhat under-explored in Western
postcolonial circles. Although he has spoken out on a diversity of issues,
ranging from nationalism in India to the use of psychoanalysis in South
Asia, it is his thinking on colonialism and its aftermath that is most cele-
brated and that will form the focus of this section. His approach to these
questions is provocative and unique, his militant style contrasting with
his refusal of empiricism and his innovative use of psychoanalysis. His
language is nevertheless not abstract and theoretical but dedicated, like
that of Gandhi, to local culture and folkloric tradition, and it is through
this eclecticism that he creates a new and distinct form of hybridization
between postcolonial politics and ethics.
Nandy’s best-known work, The Intimate Enemy, opens with the bold
claim that modern colonialism “colonizes minds in addition to bodies”
(1983: xi). Although the statement contains echoes of the Kenyan Ngugi
Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind published in 1986, it announces
more particularly a psychoanalytic understanding of colonialism as
damaging in its effects on both the colonizer and the colonized’s self-
perception, and on their understanding of the relation between India and
the West. Indeed, Nandy notes at the outset that even Fanon, from whose
psychological approach he draws many insights, writes his critique in a
style inherited from Sartre, with the result that “the West has not merely
produced modern colonialism, it informs most interpretations of colo-
nialism” (1983: xii). Colonialism infiltrates the ways in which both colo-
nizer and colonized express themselves and corrupts even the process of
forming a strategy for resistance. Nandy goes on to argue that the ideol-
ogy of colonialism was in operation well before the full institution of the
Raj, as well as after its demise, and that this ideology propagates itself in
two ways: via codes that shape the cultural practices of both sides, and via
a series of insidious strategies for managing and controlling dissent (for
example the system’s failure to recognize the violence it inflicts on the
colonized). The psychology of colonialism is also expressed through the
ideology’s fusion of sexual and political dominance, an effect that devel-
oped through the nineteenth century. Indians were conceived according
to the British idea of the martial races: “the hyper-masculine, manifestly
courageous, superbly loyal Indian castes and subcultures mirroring the

British middle-class sexual stereotypes” (ibid.: 7). This image of mas-
culinity served both to prop up colonial prejudice and to encourage
colonized subjects to act as “counterplayers of the rulers according to
the established rules” (ibid.: 11). This sexualization of the native clearly
recalls Fanon’s discussion of the stereotypical virility of the black man,
although Nandy will go on to explore counter-examples in thinkers such
as Gandhi in a way that Fanon does not.
A second stereotype informing the psychology of colonialism for
Nandy is that of the childlike quality of the native. This critique leads
Nandy to denounce Marx’s vision of progress as complicit with colonial
ideology, since Marx goes so far as to claim that “whatever may have
been the crime of England she was the unconscious tool of history”
(quoted in Nandy 1983: 13). European intellectuals were able in this
way to describe colonialism as an evil, but a necessary one, since it
worked to the benefit of the uncivilized and barbarian natives who could
learn from the knowledge of their superior Western counterparts. This
ideology seeps into primitivist images of the noble savage in need of
management and reform. Oddly, however, this myth was at the same
time countered by that of India as aged, clinging to a heroic past but
degraded and past its peak. Nandy recalls that in the view of the colo-
nizer, “like a sinful man Indian culture was living through a particularly
debilitating senility” (ibid.: 18).
Another of Nandy’s innovations in The Intimate Enemy is his argu-
ment that the colonizer too is damaged by colonialism. While Sartre
had already stressed that both colonizer and colonized were cogs in the
system, in Nandy’s work this observation is developed by an exploration
of the system’s perverse psychic effects on the colonizing mind. Nandy
observes, for example, that during the colonial period intellection and
introspection were conceived as feminine traits secondary in impor-
tance to the dominant social values of competition and productivity.
At the same time, colonialism made British people believe in a false
cultural homogeneity among their own people, since those who did
not conform were packed off to the colonies. Next Nandy asserts that
colonialism brought the “isolation of cognition from affect – which
often is the trigger for the ‘banal’ violence of our times – and … a
new pathological fit between ideas and feelings” (ibid.: 34). Colonial-
ism was in this sense not merely a political theory but a vast ethical,
quasi-religious belief, reinforced in turn by technology. Finally, colonial-
ism had the pernicious effect of deluding colonizers into believing that
they were omnipotent: the British would be able not only to conquer
foreign territories but to found new forms of self-consciousness. These
pathologies find a response in the work of Rudyard Kipling, who equates
the savage with childishness, and, conversely, in George Orwell, whose
critiques of totalitarianism reveal the entrapment of the oppressor as
well as the oppressed. Another type of response included that of Oscar
Wilde, whose transgressive sexuality functioned as a way to threaten
the basic premises of the British colonial attitude.
It is on Gandhi that Nandy dwells at greatest length, however, and
it is in his reading of Gandhi’s response to colonialism that Nandy
envisages the troubled emergence of another culture, another India.
Part of Gandhi’s subversive quality stems, for Nandy, from his use of
Western, indeed Christian, references. Gandhi also set out to liberate
both the British and the Indians from colonialism, and he achieved
this by troubling the Western belief in the superiority of masculinity:
first by positing the transcendence of both femininity and masculinity
at the top of the hierarchy, and secondly by privileging femininity. In
this way “activism and courage could be liberated from aggressiveness
and recognized as perfectly compatible with womanhood, particularly
maternity” (ibid.: 54). In response to the colonial belief in progress, and
the figuration of the native as childlike, Gandhi again reversed the hier-
archical structure and conceived myth as superior to history. History
was also not an official, sanctioned and monologic discourse but made
up of the subjective recollections of the people: “public consciousness
was not seen as a causal product of history but as related to history
non-causally through memories and anti-memories” (ibid.: 57). Nandy
goes on to argue that Gandhi reversed the progressivist schema of the
development from child to adult by using a language of continuity with
the past, together with a language of self-understanding, which would
come before the attempt to understand the other. Both approaches are
antithetical to modern colonial thinking and reverse its destructive
effects. The difficulty, as we have seen, is that Gandhi lays himself open
to charges of ahistoricism, but his achievement, according to Nandy, is
nonetheless that his languages “gave societies the option of choosing
their futures here and now” (ibid.: 62).
Nandy’s emergent argument is that India must conceive itself in dif-
ferent terms from those imposed by the colonizer: that the goal must
be the achievement of another India. This India would not have to
choose between East and West, and it would be neither modern nor
anti-modern, but defined by its own composite terms. India cannot
reject the West, for in doing so it rejects some of its own traditions, but
must work its European influences into its own traditions to create a new
pluralist yet self-conscious identity. In Nandy’s terms, Gandhi’s ethnic

universalism “takes into account the colonial experience, including the
immense suffering colonialism brought, and builds out of it a maturer,
more contemporary, more self-critical version of Indian traditions”
(ibid.: 75). Furthermore, ingeniously blending Fanon with Gandhi,
Nandy describes India’s split self-image: the psychological disjunction
between the colonizer’s imposed image and the native’s perception of
his or her culture’s traditions. Less divorced from the political in his
psychoanalytic reflections than Fanon, Nandy uncovers the emergence
of that split image through celebrated writers and thinkers, and links it
with Gandhi’s deployment of notions of traditional Indian civilization in
his very methods of resistance. As a culmination of this analysis, Nancy
then criticizes myths of a wholly authentic India as either martial or
spiritual, and argues for a vision of a “non-heroic”, trans-cultural, trans-
gendered conglomeration of influences. A precursor to Bhabha in this
vision of hybridity, Nandy’s proposal is also more rigorously constructed
through his readings of colonial and anti-colonial psychological affects
and tropes, and it is out of these interweaving readings that he advocates
his particular experimental, cultural blend. This affirmation, moreover,
deftly knits together political, psychoanalytical and ethical critique, as
Nandy concludes by observing, “knowledge without ethics is not so
much bad ethics as inferior knowledge” (ibid.: 113).
The Subaltern Studies Collective
Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy was produced at around the same time
that a group of Indian academics inaugurated another approach, char-
acterized this time by a focus on historiography. The Subaltern Studies
Collective is a group of historians similarly focused on colonialism and
postcolonialism in India and drawing not infrequently on Gandhi, but
committed above all to a critique of how the history of India has been
written. Founded by Guha in 1982, Subaltern Studies was an annual
publication of historiographical essays, with frequent contributions by
intellectuals such as Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose object-
ive, in contrast to Nandy’s psychoanalytic approach, was to rewrite the
political history of colonial India from the point of view of the people.
The term “subaltern” was taken from Gramsci, and referred to those
“of inferior rank”: in this case, the disenfranchised peasantry exploited
by the colonists and deprived at the same time of a voice with which
to express their response to their condition. The mission of the journal
was to point out the ways in which historical texts on colonial and
postcolonial India were constructed either from a colonial perspective,
or from the point of view of a native bourgeois elite, and the histori-
ans themselves tried to fill in the gaps and expose the peasants’ own
views and experiences at the mercy of both the capitalist system and the
emerging nation state. It is perhaps with the emergence of the Subal-
tern Studies Group, moreover, that postcolonial studies began to divide
between an emphasis on the political and the economic, and a more
self-conscious pursuit of the ethical. Despite their focus on historiog-
raphy and therefore writing, thinkers such as Guha, Chatterjee and
Chakrabarty are highly politicized in their approach. They are steeped
in Marx, although critical of his methods, and they also uncover the
complicity between power and knowledge, and reveal how economic
oppression is directly mirrored by the suppression of the voice. As we
shall see in Chapter 4, Bhabha conversely pursues the psychoanalytic
approach proposed by Nandy, while Spivak, partly involved with Sub-
altern Studies, endeavours to bridge the division. The historians of the
journal itself, however, precisely condemn the less political aspects of
Gandhi’s vision, and they steer postcolonialism away from Nandy’s psy-
chology and ethics back to a militant form of historicism.
Guha’s manifesto in the opening issue of Subaltern Studies boldly
sketches the journal’s radical objectives. Guha argues that the histori-
ography of Indian nationalism has been dominated by both colonial
and bourgeois-nationalist elitism, and that both of these are ideological
by-products of British rule in India. The colonial elitist form of history
presents Indian nationalism as the sum of activities and ideas by which
the Indian hegemonic class responded to the colonial establishment.
The bourgeois elitist version defines Indian nationalism as an “idealist
venture in which the indigenous elite led the people from subjugation
to freedom” (Guha 1982: 2). The problem with these two approaches is
that they fail to address how the Indian masses conceived and created
their own nationalism. The agency of the peasantry in reassessing and
reconfiguring its position in relation to the state was merely perceived
as a problem of law and order by the colonialists, and the bourgeois
nationalists in turn believed that the peasants only participated in the
nationalist movement under the direction of their own narrow and
hierarchical structures of leadership. Guha concludes that the role of the
journal will be to explore both the conditions of the exploitation of the
masses and the workings of the people’s autonomous political agency.
Guha’s historiographical critique has three strands, all of which shape
the remit of the journal and which come together in the three essays
reprinted in his Dominance without Hegemony (1997). The first of these

is the argument against what he conceives as the universalizing tendency
of capital (Guha 1997: 4). Guha uses Marx to denounce capitalism’s drive
to create a world market and to subjugate every moment of production
to the broader system of exchange-value. Reading Marx’s Grundrisse
(1973), Guha shows how Marx rails against this univeralizing tendency
by exposing the uneven progress of material development across the
world, but laments that readers have tended to focus rather blindly on
this universalist drive rather than on its limits and insufficiencies. In
Guha’s words, “historiography has got itself trapped in an abstract uni-
versalism thanks to which it is unable to distinguish between the ideal
of capital’s striving towards self-realization and the reality of its failure to
do so” (1997: 19). The result of this error is that historiographers assume
that capitalism was successfully instituted in India, and that it overcame
the obstacles posed by the colonized on the path to colonialism and self-
expansion. They mistake dominance for hegemony, in that they believe
that Indians accepted the imposition of capital without resistance, and
forget the agency of the masses in contesting the dominant structures
imposed on them from above. Chakrabarty articulates a similar objec-
tion to the use of Marxist critique in studies of India, and asserts bitterly
that in Marx’s own discussion of universalism in Capital, “for ‘capital’
or ‘bourgeois’, I submit, read ‘Europe’” (1992: 4). Marx himself was not
a historicist but a conceptual political thinker, and the difficulty of his
work, according to Chakrabarty, is that it has lent itself to misappropria-
tion in contexts such as that of colonial dominance in India.
Secondly, Guha argues that the bourgeois leaders of the national-
ist movement also mistook dominance for hegemony and erroneously
stressed their unifying power over the masses mobilized against the
colonial regime. The Swadeshi movement set out to unite the people
in the drive towards independence, but for Guha this claim was elitist
in that it suggested that “mobilization was the handiwork of prophets,
patriarchs, and other inspirational leaders alone and [implied that] the
mobilized were no more than an inert mass shaped by a superior will”
(1997: 103). The rhetoric surrounding this claim was also abstract
because it ignored the real tension between force and consent on which
the movement relied. This is a dissimulation of which, according to
Guha, Gandhi himself was guilty. In the non-cooperation campaign
of 1920–22, Gandhi distinguished between social and political boy-
cott, and he argued that sanctions, for example on medical care, were
a form of social boycott and were immoral. Gandhi was enraged by
these sorts of activities, and frequently described the people engaged
in them as “‘unmanageable’, ‘uncontrollable’, ‘undisciplined’” (quoted
in ibid.: 139). Guha goes on to describe this conflict as a further mani-
festation of the gap between elitist and subaltern politics and asserts:
Gandhi’s theory of leadership amounted thus to a formula

to dissolve the immediacy of mobilization in the subaltern
domain, and open up a space for the nationalist elite to step in
with its own will, initiative, and organization in order to pilot
the political activity of the masses towards goals set up by the
bourgeoisie. (Ibid.: 143)
Guha demands in the place of Gandhi’s elitist and bourgeois leadership

renewed attention to the masses’ own processes of self-mobilization.
The final element in Guha’s critique of Indian historiography is the
exposition of the interplay between power and knowledge. We shall
see in Chapter 4 how this fusion is theorized at length by Foucault,
but Guha’s analysis draws on Foucault to explore from a practical and
empirical point of view the colonial state’s mission to prop up its posi-
tion of mastery by means of the dissemination of knowledge. Guha
begins by revealing how in the early, formative phase of the colonial
state, officials were perturbed by their lack of understanding of local
agriculture. In response the East India Company set out to inform itself
about the character and value of landed property, expressly so as to
command the natives who worked on it. Early officials set out “to his-
toricize the Indian past” (Guha 1997: 163), but they did so by means of
their own European historiographical methods and in order to impose
their own administrative system more effectively. Concomitantly, the
British went on to extend their power by means of education, which,
far from emancipating the natives, “was designed to harness the native
mind to the new state apparatus as a cheap but indispensable carrier of
its administrative burden” (ibid.: 167). This led also to the spread of the
use of English, so that the language became a symbol of power and a
source of prestige. The imposition of English on educated Indians cut
them off from their own languages and from their own past. The British
then in turn learned the native languages so as to harness these too to
the construction of the colonial state apparatus.
If Guha was the founder of Subaltern Studies, Partha Chatterjee was
one of its best-known contributors. Chatterjee’s work is similarly Marx-
ist, and his major contribution to postcolonialism has been his expan-
sion of Guha’s critique of nationalism in India into a sophisticated and
far-reaching exposition of nationalism’s paradoxes and shortcomings.
Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought in the Postcolonial World (in Chatterjee

1999) is both a philosophical dissection of nationalism and a specific
and politicized account of its deficiencies in the Indian context and, once
again, in the thought of Gandhi. The first part of the text explores the
fundamental paradox of Eastern nationalism: it imitates in its structure
a “Western” mode of thinking even though its purpose is to establish a
distinction between colonial culture and the specific traditions of the
native, colonized community. Chatterjee sifts through the work of a
number of historians of nationalism, including the influential thought
of Benedict Anderson on the invention of the nation as an ideological
construction (executed, for example, by the development of print lan-
guages), and uncovers in each case a more or less hidden Eurocentric
agenda. Next, he identifies a split between the “thematic” of nationalism,
the broader epistemological system, and the “problematic” of national-
ism in India, its concrete manifestation as it unfolds in dialogue with the
“thematic”. Chatterjee’s argument is that the thematic and the problem-
atic weave together in complex ways: nationalist thought takes some of
its precepts (the “thematic”) from Western rational thought but it must
also contest the arguments and objectives of colonial knowledge. The
problematic of nationalism in India must then open up the framework
of knowledge that seeks to dominate it, and create itself differently. It
is, in sum, “a different discourse, yet one that is dominated by another”
(Chatterjee 1999: 42).
The rest of Chatterjee’s text examines three moments in the history of
nationalist thought in India: the moments of departure, manoeuvre and
arrival. There is no space here to summarize all three, but the moment
of manoeuvre comprises a discussion of Gandhi that is worth noting in
the context of this chapter. Chatterjee explores Gandhi’s critique of civil
society and stresses that this is directed not against the West but against
modern civilization. As we know, Gandhi was also not nationalist, and
even more, for Chatterjee his thought is barely historical but predomi-
nantly moral. Gandhi’s thinking turned out to rely on a disjuncture
between politics and morality, even though the concept of “ahimsa”
had attempted to bridge that gap, and even though Hind Swaraj had
tried to sketch a movement that accomplished a fusion between them.
Gandhi’s increasingly utopian use of notions of truth, of morality and
the ideal was ultimately antithetical to political thinking: his thought
“saved its Truth by escaping from politics” (ibid.: 110). One example of
this difficulty in Gandhi was his involvement in the khadi movement:
the principle that rural production would be for self-consumption and
not for sale. In promoting this movement, however, Gandhi empha-
sized that the people should follow above all the morality behind the
movement, and he had no theory for its political execution. The upshot
was once again that his vision of the nation was distanced from the
people on whose participation it nevertheless depended.
Chatterjee continues to explore the multiple facets of India’s prob-
lematic nationalism, and he locates in Nehru’s attempt to invent a sov-
ereign nation state an ongoing, residual failure to incorporate into that
state the life of the nation it governs. Chatterjee’s subsequent work The
Nation in Fragments (in Chatterjee 1999) develops the critique of the
colonial state, together with that of the bourgeois nationalist vision, and
explores the fragmentary narrative also of the nation’s pasts before colo-
nialism. Chatterjee equally significantly identifies the troubled position
of women in nationalist narratives. Since British colonialists justified
their mission by claiming also to “civilize” the natives in their treatment
of women, nationalism became associated in part with a resistance to the
“Westernization” of women. Women were perceived to have a specific
form of spirituality, distinct from that of men, but that did not neces-
sarily prevent them from participating in social and public life. That the
nationalist movement conceived itself to be regulating the question of
women’s positions on its own nevertheless meant that it was not a key
part of their negotiation with the colonial state. If women’s lives did
change dramatically during the period of nationalist agitation, Chat-
terjee argues that they were nevertheless excluded from the conception
of the new nation state.
The work of the Subaltern Studies Collective is broad in its range and
militant in its call for attention to the ongoing oppression of the people,
including women and the peasantry. The group’s highly politicized form
of historiography ran up against difficulties, however, perhaps not least
of which was their omission of a clearly ethical and self-reflexive cri-
tique. Spivak’s controversial essay “Deconstructing Historiography”
(1996a), initially printed in Subaltern Studies, volume IV, argues that
the group find themselves adhering to a positivist notion of subaltern
consciousness as recoverable even as they remind us that the subaltern’s
voice is available to us only via the discourse of the elite. In this sense
they risk turning against their own premises in their belief that they can
access the subaltern’s voice, even though they display its obfuscation by
existing colonialist or bourgeois accounts. Spivak writes in support of
the enterprise and affiliates herself to it, but argues that this paradox
in the endeavours of the Subaltern Studies Collective means that they
need to deconstruct the notion of the subject on which they rely, and
she renames their focus not subaltern consciousness but “the subaltern
subject-effect”. She goes on to define this as “that which seems to operate

as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network (‘text’ in
a general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, eco-
nomics, history, sexuality, language, and so on” (1996a: 213). The group’s
notion of an identifiable subject position is strategic, then, and their
proposal that the subaltern’s consciousness might be recoverable should
be understood only against the background of this poststructuralist
awareness of the inevitably textual reconstruction of that consciousness.
In addition to Spivak’s nuanced critique, it also quickly emerged that
the sources available to the Subaltern Studies historians were in the end
highly limited. If they set out to rewrite Indian history from the point
of view of the masses, it was ultimately difficult for them to know the
complex facets of that occluded and subjugated perspective. In assert-
ing the political motivations of its new form of historiography, and in
criticizing Gandhi’s foregrounding of the moral to the detriment of the
political, the movement did not fully take on board the ethical difficul-
ties of its own project. The journal Subaltern Studies was influential in
its identification of the imbrication of history or narrative with power,
and it supplemented Nandy’s psychoanalytic analysis with examination
of the occluded position of the people in India’s evolving nationalist
discourse, but it never quite resolved the problem, to use Nandy’s terms,
of the necessary connection between knowledge and ethics within its
own militant lines.
Key points
• Gandhi’s critique of British exploitation in India was moral as well

as political. He vilified the capitalist system and its mistreatment
of native workers, and championed a return to spirituality and
tradition. For Gandhi, however, the enemy was less the British
than the evils of modern civilization.
• Gandhi called for home rule in India by means of “satyagraha”
or a form of passive resistance. Unlike Fanon, he disapproved of
violence and recommended peaceful forms of protest, together
with strength of will. A powerfully influential figure, Gandhi was
nevertheless unable to conceive the political organization of a new
India.
• Nandy draws on both Gandhi and Fanon to explore the psychol-
ogy of colonialism, and the damaging effects of the stereotypes
and myths of the native. He argues that inferior knowledge leads
to bad ethics.
• The Subaltern Studies Collective sought to fill the gaps in Indian
history by attending to the voice of the masses. They criticized
the universalism of Marxism and the dominance of the local, elite
bourgeoisie, and also uncovered the co-implication of power and
knowledge. Their work lacked a self-conscious reflection on its
own ethics.

four
Foucault and Said: colonial discourse

and Orientalism
The work of Michel Foucault is a useful forerunner to postcolonial phil-

osophy in its groundbreaking dissection of the relation between power
and knowledge. The Subaltern Studies historians argue that both colo-
nial and bourgeois elitist power structures are at work within historical
writing on colonialism and nationalism in India, since the exclusion of
the subaltern from his own history mirrors his economic and politi-
cal subjugation. It is Foucault, however, who establishes a full-blown
theory of the intersection between the production and dissemination of
knowledge on the one hand, and the operation and expansion of power
structures on the other. Foucault’s philosophy invents a unique mode of
analysis, which he terms “archaeology”, and which retains as its goal the
exploration of how knowledge operates as a part of a system or network
propped up by social and political structures of power. This means that
the creation and use of knowledge itself is political, and can serve to
propagate and reinforce the social marginalization and oppression of
those who do not conform to the norms of the dominant discourse. In
exploring the potentially totalitarian, or at least authoritarian, effects of
discourse and representation, moreover, Foucault crucially opens the
way for thinkers such as Said to uncover the forms and uses of colonial
knowledge.
In drawing on Foucault, however, Said moves away from both the
revolutionary fervour and the empiricism encountered so far, and
examines the academic study of the Orient, together with the fanta-
sized images of colonial territories that seep into cultural representa-
tion, and the ways in which these feed into the politics of the colonial
mission. Said uses Foucault’s notion of discourse as expounded in The
Archaeology of Knowledge (2001b) and Discipline and Punish (1991)
to theorize the ways in which the Orient is discursively created as an
object of knowledge, and this process of construction and categorization
serves to reinforce the colonial project of conquest and subjugation.
He argues in the process that there is a direct link between concrete
politics and textual representation (via the media and history, as well as
literature), and his critique of the political abuse of ideology is inflam-
matory, although he departs very clearly from the Marxist framework
lingering in Fanon and Sartre, or in the work of the Subaltern Studies
Group. Furthermore, this inauguration of a thoroughgoing investiga-
tion of imagery and representation heralds a new understanding of the
fantasized relation between self and other that structures the colonial
vision. The Orient for Said is the conglomeration of images and forms
that stand for Europe’s other, and the colonialist creates his position of
mastery and dominance over that other by claiming to define, categor-
ize and know its difference from the self. Not at all overtly Levinasian,
Said’s analysis will nevertheless also turn out to be close to Levinas’s
ethical critique in its denunciation of the drive to subsume the other
into the familiar framework of the self. This examination of knowledge
and representation inaugurates postcolonialism’s ethical awareness of
the intractability of the marginalized other, and the movement’s call for
openness and responsibility towards the other’s difference.
Michel Foucault
Foucault does not engage anywhere directly with the mechanics of

colonialism, but his thinking is nevertheless highly influential because
he helps us to think through the mechanisms by which power is con-
structed and disseminated. Rather than using the term “ideology”,
however, with its Marxian connotations of falsity as opposed to truth,
Foucault writes about the ways in which knowledge is shaped by the
production of discourse, and this in turn props up the power struc-
tures of any given society. One of Foucault’s most influential works is
The Archaeology of Knowledge, and it is here that he examines most
explicitly the methodology underpinning the rest of his work. Archae-
ology in this text names a new approach to history that relies not on
continuity, on notions of tradition, direct influence, development or an
underlying spirit, but on the identification of ruptures and discontinu-
ities within and between discourses in history. Foucault argues that the
foucault and said 77

history of ideas has tended to try to suppress contradiction, whereas
his approach will “be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its
sudden irruption” (2001b: 25). This means that any illusory coherence
will be replaced by a vast examination “of the totality of all effective
statements (whether spoken or written), in their dispersion as events
and in the occurrence that is proper to them” (ibid.: 27). The focus of the
analysis will be on relations between statements in fields of discourse
(such as that of madness, or pathology, or, later, sexuality), and these
relations will be explored according to their transformations through
time, in terms of their internal ruptures rather than in the service of a
coherent history. Foucault’s discursive fields are made up of coexistent,
dispersed statements that can either interlock or exclude one another,
but that can be examined on a broad scale according to the rules of their
formation. Foucault also goes on to analyse objects of discourse (types
of behavioural disorder, for example, in the field of psychopathology),
which might in turn be highly dispersed, but which can be analysed
together if their emergence can be identified by a particular discursive
formation. This analysis is juxtaposed with a discussion of modalities
(the conditions of production of the discourse), concepts and strat-
egies at work within the discourse. The text then explores the complex
production of the statement (the elementary unit of discourse), and
the system of the vast, contradictory and discontinuous archive within
which the statement functions.
One of Foucault’s first examples of a discourse conceived along these
lines is that of madness and reason, and here it is clear that the dis-
cursive formation structures knowledge in such a way as to prop up
relations of power. In Madness and Civilisation (2001a), Foucault sets
out to examine the ways in which discourses about madness precisely
created the madman as external to reason and to civilization, and he
argues that society has required this division in order to conceive a
sense of its own consistency and coherence. Subsequently summarizing
some of this method in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault affirms
that in the nineteenth century, for example, the medical profession,
together with the legal system, religious authority and even literature
and art, constructed madness as an object: delinquency was conceived
in pathological terms. So madness is never a given in Foucault’s sci-
ence, but is something that is made and shaped by those in a position
of authority. The discursive formation of madness as it is explored by
Foucault in Madness and Civilisation is, however, once again dispersed
and discontinuous. In the late Middle Ages, for example, the madman
was a wanderer, adrift on the ship of fools, although this was also as a
result of his social expulsion. Around this period madness was equally
potentially frivolous: it was the satirical punishment of ordered science,
and it revealed the hidden potential of dreams and illusions. In the fif-
teenth century, however, madness becomes “moored” and institutional-
ized, and the hospital served to silence and stultify the voice of unreason.
By 1656, the Hôpital Général had achieved an almost judicial power
over the madman, requiring sequestration and confinement. Foucault’s
analysis works through the various categories and images associated
with madness from this moment of institutionalization, uncovering
endless shifts and emergent beliefs, but in order above all to show its
construction as society’s feared and relegated underside. In each case it
is discourse that creates the category of unreason, and marginalizes or
excludes from society those who are consigned to that category.
This “archaeological” exploration of the interplay between discourse
and power continues in Discipline and Punish, in which the focus is
not on the institutionalization of madness but on the evolution of sys-
tems of punishment and surveillance. Foucault argues here that the
gradual disappearance of torture as a public spectacle in the second
half of the eighteenth century was accompanied by the formulation
of new codes and rules of procedure. This new penal system set out to
punish not the crime, the individual act, but the “soul” of the criminal.
The question of guilt revolved not only around who committed the
crime, but also around the causal processes that surrounded it, with
the result that “a whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, norma-
tive judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the
framework of penal judgement” (Foucault 1991: 19). Judgement and
punishment are enmeshed in a system of knowledge and understand-
ing, a set of “scientific discourses” determining what is acceptable to
society, what is not, and how both are understood. This initial hypoth-
esis then forms the basis for Foucault’s highly influential theory of bio-
power, since it is now the man, the individual and his body that are the
objects of penal intervention, rather than the crime. The penal system
is regularized, refined and homogenized at the end of the eighteenth
century, and what it acts on now is the individual in contravention of
the social contract and not simply the contingent action. In addition,
Foucault analyses the development of the prison system, together with
the complex operation of “discipline” and social surveillance. There is
not space to discuss the intricacy of this evolution here, but in both
cases Foucault’s crucial argument is that increasingly the individual is
constructed, watched over and regulated by a range of disciplinary sys-
tems built on the combination of knowledge and power. This process of

surveillance, the control of behaviour and the drive to categorize those
whose behaviour exceeds or transgresses the law will serve Said as a
model for the management of the colonized other via morality as well
as politics and culture.
Both Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish rely on
an understanding of the subject as formed, shaped and determined
by dominant and regulatory discourses operating on him or her con-
stantly. Foucault went on to express his reservations towards this ana-
lysis in particular as it is worked through in Madness and Civilisation.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge he regrets that this text came close to
proposing a generalized subject of history. Subjects are conceived as
entirely formed by the discourses acting on them, and Madness and
Civilisation also stresses that the dominant discourse rigorously divides
and opposes inside and outside, normal and abnormal. Discipline and
Punish does not emphasize and reinforce classificatory categories in
this way, but Foucault still conceives the subject here as shaped by the
all-pervasive operation of institutions of power. In The History of Sexu-
ality (1978), however, Foucault comes to a more fluid understanding
of the subject’s ability at the same time, reciprocally, to shape and “care
for” him- or herself. By the time of the later volumes of The History
of Sexuality, Foucault explores not only the workings of power and
authority on the individual, in this case via discourses of repression,
perversion and transgression, but also the subject’s self-examination
and self-creation in relation to these discursive forces. The discourse
of repression now also triggers a proliferation of counter-discourses,
and these are what incite Guha and the other Subaltern Studies his-
torians to deploy Foucault’s association of power and knowledge to
explore the response of the subjugated native. Importantly, however,
Foucault’s evolving methodology is concerned not with ideology, with
a notion of false consciousness, but with the production of a network
of potentially contradictory discourses that exert authority over the
very construction of our subjectivity, and our subsequent position-
ing within, or indeed outside, society. If in Madness and Civilisation
unreason is defined by the dominant category of reason, then in The
History of Sexuality perversion is created by a discourse of repression,
and this isolates, intensifies and consolidates peripheral sexualities
(even though there is now a sense of a mutual negotiation between the
margin and the centre). In these works, and in Discipline and Punish,
Foucault exposes the complex interweaving of discursive formations
that create in more or less determinate ways society’s marginalized
and subjugated others.
Through discourses such as those of madness, criminality and per-
version, and through the authority that such discourses wield over
social formations, Foucault’s subjects are shaped and given a position
in society. For Foucault, “the individual, with his identity and charac-
teristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies,
multiplicities, movements, desires, forces” (1980: 73–4). In turn, this
power is a vast and net-like organization that traverses and produces
forms of knowledge, and is propagated not only by the state but by
individuals as they live out and reproduce its effects. No single indi-
vidual possesses power, but it is channelled and exercised through
the web of individuals that make up the social fabric. For Foucault,
power operates on a wider level than that implied by Althusser’s state
apparatuses: it is not only wielded by the state or by the sovereign sub-
ject but is produced in much more intricate localized systems. Fur-
thermore, the notion of discourse replaces ideology as the vehicle of
power because it no longer relies on an opposition between truth and
falsity, and, equally, it does not occupy a secondary position in rela-
tion to a distinct economic base. Foucault’s analyses show how know-
ledge and power mutually create and structure one another and are
diffused across the discursive formation. The individual subject lives
within this formation and is always already in dialogue with it: there is
no underlying set of lived relations on which discourse would then act
from the outside.
We shall see in the next section how Said used Foucault’s notions of
power and discourse to think more specifically about the mechanics of
colonialism. The summary above already indicates, however, that his
work lends itself to the analysis of subjugated subjects, and it has also
been observed that it was in writing The Archaeology of Knowledge in
Tunis that Foucault was better able to critique the authoritarianism and
ethnocentrism of French culture. In addition, the notion of bio-power
explored in Discipline and Punish and, more comprehensively, in The
History of Sexuality could be seen to work on, and marginalize, the racial
other and to contribute to the oppressive construction of ethnicity. Ann
Laura Stoler has explored the potential resonances of Foucault’s work for
a critique of racism, and has argued that the “biopolitical” state creates a
notion of sexual degeneracy that also intersects with race (Stoler 1995).
Foucault’s work fails overtly to take into account the practical field of
empire, nor does he write of the concrete mechanics of citizenship, but
his analysis of discourses of normativity and exclusion can be deployed
in an examination of the subjugation of the colonized as a result of his
or her ethnic difference.

If Foucault is influential in his conceptualization of discourse and
power, however, his work has also been highly controversial. Spivak’s
famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), for example, analysed
in Chapter 6, opens with a discussion of Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s
blindness towards their own assumptions of Western cultural hegemony,
and this effectively mars their ability to speak about colonized peoples.
Spivak notes that in Foucault’s writing the subject is never at odds with
itself, the relation between desire and interest is never questioned, and
some level of agency is assured. As a result, Spivak holds that Foucault
and Deleuze perhaps unwittingly retain a conception of the sovereign
subject, and this is effectively the “Subject as Europe” (Spivak 1988: 280).
In Foucault’s writing, Spivak determines that the subject can know and
speak for itself, it retains a sense of agency, and for her this derives from
Foucault’s presumption that the marginalized subject is still European
and still has a voice. Furthermore, in analysing society’s excluded others,
Foucault apparently forgets to draw attention to the division between
his perspective and that of the subaltern worker: “neither Deleuze nor
Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital,
brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international
division of labor” (ibid.: 275). Everything in Foucault’s work rests on
the assumption that the subject analysed is European, and his exegeses
are unable to conceptualize the highly complex and elusive workings
of power and desire on what she terms “the unnamed subject of the
Other of Europe” (ibid.: 280). Even an intellectual exercise that sets
out to reflect on structures of marginalization remains anchored in an
ethnocentric framework perpetuating European dominance. Foucault’s
marginalized others are only ever shadows or reflections of a European
self and the colonized other is consequently forgotten and erased in
his work.
Spivak’s criticisms are undoubtedly somewhat equivocal, and her
observations certainly do not mean that Foucault’s influence on post-
colonial studies has been abortive. Said drew extensively on Foucault’s
work in his Orientalism ([1978] 1995), although he understands dis-
course in more coherent and more historically grounded terms than
those suggested by Foucault’s proliferating networks of power. In add-
ition, Young writes about the resonance of Foucault’s reflections on
rupture and discontinuity for an understanding of the limits of West-
ern versions of History. As Young also discusses, however, if Foucault’s
work has been instrumental in shaping the evolution of postcolonial
critique, some of its schematism might be loosened, and Derrida’s read-
ing of Foucault on madness goes some way to achieve this suppleness. In
“Cogito and the History of Madness” in Writing and Difference (1978),
Derrida notes that Foucault separates madness and reason in order to
argue precisely that madness is reason’s other. This suggests at the same
time that madness is excluded from reason, and that it is outside the self-
contained structure of rationality and civilization. According to Derrida,
however, this means that Foucault’s writing gets caught in a trap, since
he claims somehow to be analysing madness using a language that is
distinct from that of reason, even though he turns out, of course, to be
unable to do so. Foucault also writes as if he knows what madness is, as if
the signifier can be understood in logical language. Derrida then traces
Foucault’s use of Descartes, and shows that Descartes sought to distin-
guish reason from madness without enquiring into the nature of the
language used to execute that distinction. As a result of both readings,
Derrida argues that madness must on the contrary be considered as a
linguistic supplement at work within reason, that it is the différance, the
uncontrolled chain of traces that reason is unable to exclude. To return
to the postcolonial, although Derrida does not spell out this implica-
tion here, the location of otherness within the language of reason, or
within the hegemonic discourse, helps to trouble any reductive oppo-
sition between self and other, between those in power and those who
are oppressed. In turn, Derrida’s reading might go some way to resolv-
ing Spivak’s anxiety about the apparent security and self-presence of
Foucault’s analytical, and indeed oppressed, subject. Foucault also
revised his work after receiving Derrida’s critique, and certainly his later
theories of resistance operating within the power structure seem more
consistent with the Derridean perception of otherness within the domi-
nant discourse of the centre. Derrida’s critique may nonetheless turn out
still to be pertinent to Said’s clearly postcolonial use of Foucault, and it
is to this deployment that this chapter will now turn.
Edward Said, Orientalism
Said was a Palestinian born in Jerusalem in 1935, and was educated

in Cairo before continuing his studies and developing his career in
America. His work is distinctive in the sense that, in his role as “public
intellectual”, he combines literary criticism with politics and cultural
philosophy, and accomplishes the unusual achievement of moving
seamlessly between these discrete levels of analysis and in addressing as
a result a broad audience of both specialized academics and the general
public. Critics have tended to focus either on his academic and literary

critical writing or on his interventions on Palestine, but Said himself
perceived these endeavours very much as part of the same project of
unsettling the West’s vision of the Orient, the colony and Islam. It is also
one of the principal arguments of Orientalism that one can identify the
link between culture and politics by analysing colonial discourse along-
side the mechanics of conquest and economic exploitation. Although he
has been criticized for dehistoricizing the discourses he analyses, Said
nevertheless argues that literary as well as historical or popular texts
absorb and disseminate contemporary forms of knowledge that can
serve to support the colonial power structure operating at the time. The
difficulties associated with this move in Said’s work will be discussed
later in this section, and there are certainly shortcomings in his cursory
treatment of literary works, as well as in his vast, wide-ranging and per-
haps generalized theory of Orientalist discourse. Beneath the critique
of Orientalism is nevertheless the ardent belief that all human beings
engage with a “contrapuntal” meeting of cultural influences, and forms
of knowledge that do not address this connectivity misunderstand the
specificity of “human experience”.
Said’s argument is in this sense universal, and although problem-
atic in its broad sweep, rests once again on an ethical understanding
of both the diversity and the commonality of human experience. It is
perhaps surprising that the term “human” crops up so frequently in
the work of the postcolonial thinkers analysed so far, since Fanon and
Sartre, as well as Said, vilify a Eurocentric form of humanism even as
they uphold the importance of a new notion of the human necessitat-
ing an understanding of the freedom and the alterity of the other. Said
also departs from Foucault in retaining the notion of the human rather
than deconstructing with the latter the very notion of the subject by
displaying consistently its formation in discourse. A number of crit-
ics have objected to Said’s humanism, both because it contradicts his
engagement with poststructuralists such as Foucault, and because it can
appear somewhat under-theorized. This difficulty will be dealt with fur-
ther later in the chapter, but it is worth noting for now that Said is both
distinctive and controversial because, like Fanon and Sartre, he finishes
by combining a historical and political critique of colonial oppression
with a conception of the unity as well as the diversity of the human as
a symbol of resistance.
Orientalism sets out to define the notion of Orientalist discourse
and to criticize its delusions, which perniciously feed into the diffu-
sion of colonial power. The term Orientalism covers three interrelated
meanings. First, Said argues that it names the academic study of the
Orient, in the multiple disciplines of anthropology, sociology, history
or philology. Secondly, however, Orientalism is “a style of thought based
upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between
‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’” (Said 1995: 2). In this way Orientalism
tends to rely on a binary opposition between East and West, and this
dichotomy is both misleading and destructive, since the Orient comes
to stand for all that is “other” to the West and therefore threatening.
Thirdly, Orientalism can be seen as “a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (ibid.: 3). Ori-
entalism is from this point of view a discourse in Foucault’s sense: it
is a wide-ranging network of texts, images and preconceptions, all of
which serve to designate the Eastern other as “a sort of surrogate and
even underground self ” (ibid.). It is a way of representing the Orient, a
discourse that reconstitutes the East using a number of preconceptions
and assumptions, and this discourse helps to reinforce the position
of the West as the site of power. Said uses Foucault here because the
notion of discourse enables him to move between text and world, and
to support his affirmation of the dialogue between culture and politics.
He develops Foucault, however, by drawing attention to the spatial or
geographic functioning of discourse, together with its infiltration into
cultural performance.
Said’s definition of Orientalism relies on the argument that the ideas
about the Orient propagated by Orientalists have concrete and empirical
foundations and effects. If Gustave Flaubert’s depiction of the Egyptian
courtesan Kuchuk Hanem never allows her to speak for herself, for
example, then this mirrors the broader pattern whereby the West seeks
to govern the East: to represent it in familiar terms the better to enforce
its own position of strength. Said asserts that “Orientalism, therefore,
is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of
theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a
considerable material investment” (ibid.: 6). Said also draws on Gramsci
here to theorize the ways in which certain ideas predominate over others
and achieve a form of cultural hegemony, and this hegemony is assured
also by the consent of society. Orientalist views of the Orient acquire
hegemony and serve to prop up myths of European superiority that
are largely accepted by the society in which they are propagated. The
link between Orientalist ideas and concrete power structures is not,
according to Said, direct and unidirectional, and yet these ideas clearly
participate in a sort of uneven exchange with various sites of power,
whether these be intellectual, cultural, moral or political, and closely
related to the colonial or imperial establishment. In examining this

“exchange”, Said at the same time criticizes the rigidity of the Marxist
division between superstructure and base, and stresses that his goal is
precisely to explore the interpenetration of these two levels, to show
how “political imperialism governs an entire field of study” (ibid.:
14). The analyses he carries out with this aim will also focus more on
individual influences than Foucault’s archaeological probings, but will
nevertheless demonstrate how these come together in their creation of
a certain cultural hegemony. Orientalism is unified as a discourse, but
it is important for Said that it can be analysed by means of a series of
individual texts.
The main body of Said’s work sifts through a multitude of exam-
ples of Orientalist discourse in political and historical texts, literature
and, more recently, the media. Said begins, for example, by referring to
Balfour’s lecture, addressed to the House of Commons on 13 June 1910,
on the subject of Britain’s hold on Egypt and the difficulties in keeping
that hold secure. Said notes that Balfour’s speech appears to refuse an
attitude of British superiority over Egypt, but nevertheless the argu-
ment revolves around the premise that the British know the civilization
of Egypt. This apparently thorough knowledge of Egypt, according to
Said, equates here to Egypt itself, it is Egypt, and the assurance of this
knowledge also gives Britain authority over the Oriental country. At no
point does Balfour address the perceptions of the Egyptians themselves
– any Egyptian who spoke out would merely be conceived as an agita-
tor – and Balfour insists that British occupation is clearly good for the
native population. He speaks as a result on behalf of Britain or, indeed,
the civilized world, at the same time as he speaks for the Egyptians. Simi-
larly, Said goes on to trace overlapping preconceptions in Lord Cromer’s
discourse on Egypt, even if this is based not on abstract knowledge
but on the day-to-day experience of managing the colony. Cromer too
insists on Britain’s supposedly superior knowledge of the country and of
what is right for its inhabitants. This assumption is backed up by a gamut
of stereotypes of Orientals or Arabs as gullible as well as cunning, and
lethargic as well as dishonest. Political discussions of the role of Brit-
ain overseas are in this way underpinned by a reservoir of knowledge,
and Said also argues that this justified in advance the colonial project
(although it is perhaps noteworthy that in the introduction he affirmed
rather that it served to prop up the mission once it was in place). In any
case, the colonial presence is shown to be intricately bound up with a
history of contacts, of voyages of discovery and the preconceptions that
emerge from these, all achieved against the background of a belief that
Europe was necessarily in a position of strength.
If Orientalism is conceived as a drive for knowledge of the other, that
knowledge is structured by a set of images that serve to encapsulate and
classify its object. Islam, for example, is a focal point for the Oriental-
ist, and comes to symbolize barbarism, fanaticism and terrorism. The
Orientalist seizes on preconceptions such as these and uses them to
define the entire religion and the culture that accompanies it, so that the
Orientalizing gesture is at the same time one of reduction. Even with the
development of the understanding of Islam in the West, the Orientalist
still strives to manage and domesticate the image of the Islamic other.
Said argues as a result that the Orientalist “will designate, name, point
to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which
then is considered either to have acquired, or simply to be, reality” (Said
1995: 72). Napoleon’s desired conquest of Egypt, for example, was bound
up with a claim both to know and understand the Muslims, together
with the belief that a colonial mission could teach them the evidently
superior ways of the French. Furthermore, Said argues that from this
point on, Orientalist discourse developed to the extent that it lost its
descriptive realism and hinged itself on the wholesale creation of the
Oriental other: “the Orient as reconstructed, reassembled, crafted, in
short, born out of the Orientalists’ efforts” (ibid.: 87). Subsequent writ-
ers such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine
and Flaubert all learn from these creations, these stylized simulacra, as
indeed did more scientific projects such as Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Suez
Canal in its endeavour to bring together East and West.
Said’s analysis of the vast scope of Orientalism is juxtaposed with an
examination of its representational structures in the work of a series of
writers and thinkers. During the eighteenth century, four elements linked
the structure of Orientalist discourse, all of which will later be parodied
in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1999). These four elements include
the expansion of the territory to which the term “Orient” referred, the
contribution of historians as well as travellers to Orientalist representa-
tion, the sympathetic perception of a coherent spirit within the Orient
and, finally, the drive towards classification. These structures at the same
time contributed to the secularization of Orientalism, so that it was no
longer simply a question of Islam versus Christianity, even if old reli-
gious patterns continued to enter into the Orientalist vision. Said also
now associates the Orientalist drive with the “mission civilisatrice” and
with a move towards modernization: “the modern Orientalist was, in
his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and
strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished” (ibid.: 121).
Said’s most controversial example of such a modernist belief in the West

as the harbinger of progress can be found in his discussion of Marx, in
which he locates a contradiction between repugnance towards the treat-
ment of the exploited natives and the persistent belief in the historical
necessity of Britain’s transformation of Indian society. Ahmad criticizes
Said’s reading of Marx, arguing that the former paints a dismissive and
reductive portrait of Marx’s complex writing on India. Nevertheless, the
example allows Said to reveal the creeping of Orientalist beliefs even
into non-Orientalist, secular modern discourse.
The exoticism of nineteenth-century discourses on the Orient is con-
jured most colourfully in Said’s readings of Chateaubriand, Lamartine,
Gérard de Nerval and Flaubert. For Chateaubriand, for example, again
the Oriental’s voice and experience are of little importance, and “what
matters about the Orient is what it lets happen to Chateaubriand, what
it allows his spirit to do, what it permits him to reveal about himself, his
ideas, his expectations” (ibid.: 173). Texts such as René and Atala, as well as
the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, testify, even more, to the author’s desire
to absorb and consume what he sees. Lamartine surveys the Orient from
a similar position of assumed knowledge and portrays Oriental terri-
tory as “‘waiting anxiously for the shelter’ of European occupation” (ibid.:
179). For Nerval and Flaubert, on the other hand, the Orient was “not so
much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited
aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility” (ibid.:
181). In this sense Nerval and Flaubert depart from orthodox Oriental-
ism because they are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge, but
experience these limits as a source of seduction and allure. For Nerval, the
Orient is a place of sexual intrigue, the locus of a mysterious and desir-
able femininity, although the female sexual object always nevertheless
exceeds his grasp. Flaubert’s writing on the Orient is so rich and com-
plex as to be difficult to summarize, but Said nevertheless finds within
it the repeated confrontation between the search for an exotic spectacle
and the actual discovery of “decrepitude and senescence” (ibid.: 185).
If the notebooks betray disappointment, works such as Salammbô set
about reconstructing the image of Oriental glory. At the same time, like
Nerval, Flaubert and his characters Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau
associate the Orient with sexual desire, erotic energy and discovery. Said
notes Flaubert’s self-consciousness and complexity, however, but tends
to underplay the irony that pervades his writing: his knowing depiction
of the Orientalist vision as both seductive and reductive.
In the final section of Orientalism, Said moves away from literary
criticism into a discussion of the prevalence of Orientalist discourse in
the more recent cultural context, within both academe and the media.
Orientalism is now conceived not just as a discourse prevalent at the
particular historical moment of colonial expansion, but as a tradition
and a doctrine affirming the superiority of the West that continues to
hold sway. Said notes that the Orientalist study of Islam lags behind the
rest of the human sciences in its retention of retrograde assumptions and
cursory methodology. Even more, since the Second World War and in
the wake of the Arab–Israeli wars, the Arab is increasingly and repeatedly
stereotyped. Arabs are blamed for oil shortages, and it is seen as a sign of
injustice that many countries with oil reserves should be populated by
Arabs. The Arab is also “the disrupter of Israel and the West’s existence”,
an obstruction in the creation of Israel in 1948 and “a shadow that dogs
the Jew” (ibid.: 286). Equally, Orientalist images now are not only the
preserve of popular culture, but continue according to Said to be propa-
gated by academics. Even The Cambridge History of Islam published in
1970 is vague and methodologically flawed, and contains a multitude of
misconceptions about the religion as well as its history. Said’s at times
virulent attack on contemporary Western representations of Islam is also
developed just a few years later in Covering Islam (1981), a rather more
journalistic text railing against the reductive and ignorant perception of
Islam as propagated by the media. Here again, Said criticizes the use of
clichés and labels, the construction of Islam as a monolithic entity and
the association of that entity with hostility and fear. This ignorance about
Islam is particularly pernicious in the United States, where the religion
is connected for many Americans solely with issues such as oil, the wars
in Afghanistan and Iran, and terrorism.
Said in this way traces the development of Orientalist discourse all
the way from Aeschylus to modern journalism, and this identification
of continuity creates a powerful polemic against the destructive effects
of what Nandy might have dubbed “inferior knowledge”. One of the
frequent criticisms levelled against Said, however, is precisely that his
concept of Orientalist discourse is vast and generalized, and that the
discussion glosses over differences between distinct types of Orientalist
discourse. Said does trace shifts and variations as he works through his
series of examples, but his argument is precisely that Orientalism is a
superficial appropriation of multiple and distinct others into the broad
schema of the superior West pitted against the inferior East. It is none-
theless true that the overarching framework of Orientalism encour-
ages a synthetic view of how various types of Orientalist discourses
operate. The critique of Flaubert, for example, distinguishes him from
Chateaubriand and Lamartine, but underlines the exoticism of his
vision of the Orient and fails to draw attention to his subversive irony.

The text of Orientalism tends to subsume its intricate examples into an
all-consuming, homogenizing framework at the expense of potential
subtleties and dislocations within individual instances of Orientalist
discourse. In this sense Said’s Orientalism differs from the forms of
discourse theorized by Foucault, since Foucault’s point was precisely to
analyse discontinuities and ruptures within the larger system. For Said,
conversely, although Orientalist discourse does mutate and develop,
what is far more striking is the persistence of outworn structures and
approaches in modern forms of Orientalism, and it is the broad, con-
tinuous sweep of the Orientalist vision that prevails. It is for this reason
that Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, and its
tendency to homogenize and separate discourses of reason from exam-
ples of unreason, might equally be applied to Said. Just as reason cannot
exclude the irrational other, the discourse of Orientalism is permeated
with ambivalence, with internal dissent. Bhabha denounces this false
unity and smoothness in Said’s portrayal of Orientalism, and theorizes
on the contrary the dislocations within Western culture. This criticism
of Orientalism’s false unity can also be linked to the objection levelled
by more materialist critics that Said’s analysis is insufficiently historical
and empirical, and risks occluding specific contextual differences in the
discourses examined.
A further difficulty with Said’s analysis in Orientalism is that it does
not accord space to the natives’ response. The Subaltern Studies histo-
rians drew our attention to the risk that academic discourse can speak
in the place of the colonized other, but Said himself criticizes Orien-
talist discourse without discussing how those misrepresented by that
discourse might have answered back. Moreover, Said does not only
silence the voices of the exploited and subjugated, but also those of the
colonized country’s elite. Ahmad denounces this omission from Said’s
work, and argues that Orientalism “examines the history of Western
textualities about the non-West quite in isolation from how these textu-
alities might have been received, accepted, modified, challenged or over-
thrown by the intelligentsias of the colonized countries” (1992: 172).
Furthermore, in his position of exile Said appears to set himself up as a
privileged observer, and he reminds us at the beginning of Orientalism
that it was his experience of racism in America that fuelled the writing
of the book. Nevertheless, Said is clearly extremely well educated and
attained a comfortable, accepted position within the Western academy,
and his identification with the marginalized and the disenfranchised can
be seen to have become a little tenuous. As a result, it is not clear that
Said can distinguish himself from the producers of coercive discourse
that he describes and, indeed, his analysis might be accused of the same
drive towards occlusion as those he takes as the object of his critique.
Finally, however, there remains an underlying ambiguity in Oriental-
ism concerning the notion of the “Orient” at its heart, and this ambigu-
ity troubles his concept of an anti-colonial response. Young points out
that Said at times suggests that Orientalist discourse misrepresents the
Orient, that it deforms and distorts a place and a people that actually
exist. At others, however, Said implies that there is no “real” Orient,
since the signifier applies only to a fantasy, an idea with no foundation
outside its own construction. “Orientalist” at once occludes some real
or authentic feature of the Orient, and fabricates an image of a locus
that does not really exist. This difficulty in turn problematizes the ques-
tion of whether or not there could be an alternative to the forms of
representation that Said denounces. If Orientalism misconceives a real
Orient, then some reference to an alternative, corrected version might
have been helpful. However, if the Orient is only ever a product of
discourse, then any suggested alternative would also be a construction
and, although it would be significant and informative if this were pro-
duced by a native rather than by the colonizer, this construction could
not be taken necessarily as an accurate representation of the real. Both
Orientalists and their dissenters propose structures and modes of writ-
ing rather than mimetic representative forms that can encapsulate the
Orient as a single, identifiable culture or place. By the time of Culture
and Imperialism, however, Said addresses these questions, includes a
whole chapter on narratives of resistance and proposes a subtle and
informative understanding of “contrapuntal” textuality. By now no work
can be seen to be representative of one thing, “East” and “West” are not
configured into a stark binary opposition, and resistance is figured as a
process of discursive negotiation and exchange.
Culture and Imperialism
Culture and Imperialism was published a number of years after Orien-

talism, in 1993, and sets out at once to expand and develop its scope,
and to fill its gaps. First, this later work no longer focuses exclusively
on the Middle East, as Orientalism did, but examines a larger pattern
in discourses and representations of Europe’s overseas territories. The
study includes writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia
and the Caribbean, and traces persistent tendencies to conceive these
lands as the other of the metropolitan centre. Secondly, Said notes that

he omitted to address the question of resistance in Orientalism, and
affirms now that “there was always some form of active resistance and,
in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out”
(Said 1993: xii). Said again departs from Foucault in this renewed atten-
tion to movements of resistance, and argues in The World, the Text, the
Critic (1984) that one of the deficiencies of Foucault’s thinking is that
the system of power it proposes is so all-encompassing. This awareness
of widespread resistance means that in this work Said both spends time
reading the colonized’s responses to colonialism, and becomes more
attentive to the uncertainties and ambivalences operating in metropoli-
tan representations of the colonies. While in Orientalism the implica-
tion was that a writer or thinker was either Orientalist or was not, in
Culture and Imperialism key figures such as Joseph Conrad are revealed
to be at once critical of and complicit with colonial discourse.
Said at the same time develops his argument from Orientalism con-
cerning the link between culture and politics, and in this instance argues
specifically for the political inflections of narrative. While culture on
one level retains relative autonomy from economics, politics and social
issues, on another level Said asserts that narrative nevertheless shapes
and reflects back ideas on material conditions and empirical events.
For Said:
the main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when

it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and
work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now
plans its future – these issues were reflected, contested, and
even for a time decided in narrative. As one critic has sug-
gested, nations themselves are narrations. (Ibid.: xiii)
Cultural narratives are in this sense not entirely divorced from the
context in which they are produced, culture should not be “antisep-
tically quarantined from its worldly affiliations”, and the novels that
Said takes as his focus are shown quite manifestly to absorb, reproduce
and reshape the imperial process of which they are necessarily a part
(ibid.: xv). Furthermore, the mechanics of empire depend on the idea of
empire as it is constructed in metropolitan society, and it is by means of
culture and narrative that that idea is developed and disseminated.
The range of texts examined by Said in Culture and Imperialism
is once again vast, but a few arresting examples will be worth noting
for their demonstration of a certain ambivalence towards the colonial
project. Conrad, for example, is significant for Said because his work is
at once progressive and reactionary. His vision does not have the smooth
certainty Said found in Orientalist discourse, but turns out to be at war
with itself. In depicting Marlow’s African journey in Heart of Darkness,
Conrad emphasizes not only his adventures but also his telling of the
story to British listeners, and the contingency of the narrative suggests
that despite the impression given of the power of colonialism, that power
is limited to the specific situation and moment of the telling. Said argues
that there are two possible postcolonial responses to Heart of Darkness:
one would perceive in it a depiction of sovereign imperialism at its
height, whereas the other would stress that its historical specificity also
implies that it will at some point come to an end. In Said’s words:
since Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records

its illusions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nos-
tromo), he permits his later readers to imagine something
other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European col-
onies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that
Africa might be. (1993: 28)
In addition, Said shows that Conrad’s narrators are self-conscious: they

worry about colonialism rather than buying into it without question,
and this anxiety hints at the unconscious presence of creeping doubts.
Conrad offers Said a particularly subversive example of a simulta-
neous complicity with and undermining of colonialism, but many of
Said’s less provocative readings in Culture and Imperialism also do not
set out to blame those authors who reproduce aspects of colonial dis-
course in their texts. Written at the quasi-official period of empire in
India but also at the moment when its demise was becoming apparent,
Kipling’s Kim expresses great affection for the native Indians but sup-
ports the colonial mission unquestioningly. Kipling genuinely considers
the British presence in India to function in the interests of the Indians
themselves, and although his work appears to be riven with contradic-
tions in its affiliation with both Indians and British, colonialism was
the dominant ideology at the time of Kipling’s upbringing, and he had
inevitably absorbed it as part of the status quo. The text cannot help but
reproduce this ideology, even though its author was at the same time
committed to living alongside the natives, and treating them with the
utmost benevolence. Similarly, in his discussion of Jane Austen’s Mans-
field Park Said argues that structures of domestic authority mirror the
colonial relation between Britain and Antigua, but this is at the same
time a testimony to how imperialism functioned in British society at the

time. Austen’s depiction may contain irony, and yet “Austen reveals her-
self to be assuming (just as Fanny assumes, in both senses of the word)
the importance of an empire to the situation at home” (Said 1993: 106).
Said’s reading of Camus equally shows how, born in Algeria, Camus
inherited uncritically beliefs that the French belong in North Africa,
even though history was beginning to overtake him. Camus clings to
Algeria because it is his homeland, and perhaps, like Kipling or even
Austen, he grew up believing that the colonial presence was simply a
given, part of the natural order of things, even though he lived at the tail
end of the colonial epoch. This complicity becomes highly fraught with
the start of the Algerian War of Independence, and yet Camus continued
to believe passionately in harmony and communion with the Arabs. He
was for Said “a moral man in an immoral situation”, utterly defined by
France’s mission in Algeria and lost when the validity of that mission
was thrown into question (ibid.: 210).
One of the distinctions of Culture and Imperialism is nevertheless that
it theorizes the production of narratives of resistance, and Said explores
not only testimonies of local anti-colonialism but signs of dissent within
metropolitan texts. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India portrays Indian
animosity towards the colonial presence, even though the novel tries at
the same time to underplay signs of a deeper conflict between colonizer
and colonized. Other forms of ambivalence are found in texts by indig-
enous authors, since ostensibly anti-colonial writers at times model their
works on colonial and metropolitan texts. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migra-
tion to the North mirrors Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Césaire’s Une
Tempête is evidently a rewriting of the Shakespeare play. Writers such as
these subversively rework the original in order to represent the perspec-
tive of the colonized and the oppressed, but the works are necessarily
“contrapuntal” in their engagements with both sides. More militantly,
Fanon is heralded as a thinker who calls for the destruction of the binary
opposition between colonizer and colonized and the establishment of a
new form of history that would bridge the gap between black and white.
Said notes Fanon’s ambivalence towards nationalism, and also refers in
this context to Chatterjee’s observation that even as it set out to specify
the difference of the colonized, nationalism borrowed its ethic from the
influence of the power it set out to overthrow. This argument serves not
to undermine the gesture of resistance but to support Said’s overriding
belief in ongoing cultural interaction, and in the necessity of understand-
ing the porosity of cultural frontiers in the wake of colonialism. Said
does not examine how the subaltern might come to achieve a position
of agency, and he does note the paradoxical role of intellectuals such
as Guha, and surely himself, who simultaneously want to attend to the
subaltern while their work is conditioned by their upbringing within
an elite. Despite these difficulties, Said’s aim is to outline a broad notion
of resistance as working both within and against imperialist modes of
representation, and in this sense his work learns from poststructuralism
(perhaps, again, from Derrida’s critique of Foucault). Said’s endeavour
in this work is to demonstrate precisely that “no one today is purely one
thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no
more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for
only a moment are quickly left behind” (Said 1993: 407).
Said’s embrace of cultural mixing is rooted in his ethical resistance to
an ontology of mastery, whereby the dominant self defines the other by
means of the hegemonic discourse and uses that definition to tyrannize
the other and restrict his or her freedom. Controversially, however, Said
then distances himself from any passing deconstructive influence even as
he draws on some of its methods. He formulates the ethical requirement
that we remain open to the other’s difference and, indeed, to the other
as internally multiple and hybridized, in terms of a belief in a common
humanity. At the end of Orientalism, Said states that “in having to take up
a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered
alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience,
failed to see it as human experience” (Said [1978] 1995: 328). The con-
clusion of Culture and Imperialism similarly suggests that “human life”
is not about separation and distinctiveness (1993: 408), and in Covering
Islam Said laments that it is specifically the “human dimension” of Islam
that is constantly overlooked (1981: 135). Even the more militant analysis
in The Question of Palestine (1979) retains as one of its goals the call for
attention to the human experience of Palestinians. Finally, the posthu-
mously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism argues that it is
possible to criticize humanism in the name of humanism, and conceives
a new form of humanism based on openness to other cultures: “human-
ism … must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant,
barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind
of testimony that doesn’t make it onto the reports” (2004: 81). This return
to the notion of the human clearly has an ethical function here, since in
recognizing the humanity of the other, the self no longer conceives that
other as an object but as self-creating and endlessly developing. The term
is a problematic one, however: it suggests the restoration of an unde-
constructed subject position, and its universalism has been perceived as
somewhat empty and banal. The humanist perspective is also denounced
for its evident androcentrism: it is a category that tends to be equated

with “man” and excludes “woman”. The human is a notion that has been
criticized for its dissimulation of feminine experience beneath the mask
of a discourse that refers ostensibly to men.
Despite the risk of androcentrism in Said’s use of the notion of the
human, it is worth noting in passing that his work has in fact had a
considerable influence on gender studies within postcolonialism. Ori-
entalist discourse involved not only the reductive drive to “know” the
Oriental other, but also the exoticist fantasy of the Oriental woman’s
mysterious sexual allure. Although philosophers such as Fanon and
Nandy emphasized the colonizer’s image of the sexually potent black
man or the virile Indian native, Said’s concept of Orientalism allowed
subsequent thinkers to develop their understanding of the particular
oppression of women by the colonial gaze. Said does not dwell on this
at length himself, and it has been observed that his readings of female
writers such as Austen do not take into account sufficiently the ways
in which women writers related differently to the dominant discourse
of imperialism, but it is clear that his work has provided a theoretical
backdrop against which the representation of colonized women can be
assessed. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1987), for example, is a
collection of colonial postcards of North African women, and Alloula’s
analysis explores the colonizer’s overt obsession with the Oriental harem.
The postcards of veiled women, and later of unveiled women in erotic
poses often displaying their breasts for the pleasure of the viewer, testify
to the male colonizer’s desire for sexual as well as territorial possession.
The role of sexuality in the colonial project, the drive to penetrate the
colony via its seductive and alluring females, is hinted at in Said’s work
and further explored by Alloula. In addition, anti-colonial writers such
as Assia Djebar set out to recreate the image of the colonized woman
as a result at once of this sexual violence and of this fetishized mode of
representation.
Finally then, despite the risk of a latent androcentrism lingering in
Said’s retention of the notion of the human, his work paves the way for
a more developed examination of the position of women in colonial
discourse and postcolonial theory. Circumspection is undoubtedly nec-
essary in regenerating the concept of humanity as an ethical category,
but in Said’s use of this concept there is also, nevertheless, an urgent
call for recognition of a shared freedom and a shared communality in
defiance of colonial structures of power and knowledge. A deeply flawed
concept, the human still serves Said as a basis on which to construct
his demand for universal emancipation together with his celebration of
“contrapuntal” mixing, and the advantages of the term are indeed that it
necessitates an understanding of the other in ethical terms. This human-
ism remains oddly unheeding of deconstructive conceptions of the sub-
ject constructed and disseminated in language, but retains a curious
merit here in its desperate call for an ethical response. Said’s notion of
a common humanity demands an awareness of the basic requirements
of freedom and of the ability to create oneself independent of imposed
structures of mastery and imperialist knowledge. The conception of
the other as human functions as an antidote to Orientalist objectifica-
tion and reification, and implies an understanding of the residue or
the excess that lies beyond the scope of those gestures of oppression
and tyranny. Said’s humanism lacks the militancy of that of Fanon or
Sartre, and he perhaps never solves the problem that his perspective
on the human is necessarily inseparable from his comfortable posi-
tion within Western academic discourse. Said’s ongoing privileging of
the intellectual equally accords the latter a special status that could be
seen to be at odds with his claimed emancipatory universalism. There
is nevertheless in his persistent and daring tenacity with regard to the
concept of the human a crucial and influential alternative to the “bad
ethics” implicit in colonialism’s “inferior knowledge”.
Key points
• Foucault explores the relation between power and knowledge, and

uses the examples of madness, the prison system and sexuality to
show how discourse can serve to prop up relations of subjugation.
He has been criticized for not himself examining colonial discourse,
but his methodology is highly relevant to postcolonialism.
• Said draws explicitly on Foucault in his exposition of Oriental-
ist discourse. For Said, Orientalism is the academic study of the
Orient, but it is also a set of images or a way of thinking about the
Orient that supports the West’s dominance over the East.
• Culture and Imperialism expands on Orientalism by examining a
broader range of colonial territories and, crucially, by including
exploration of the native’s resistance. The analysis is also distinc-
tive because it draws out the ambivalence towards the colonial
project of writers such as Conrad, Kipling and Camus.
• Said recommends constant attention to the “contrapuntal” meet-
ing of cultures, but his thinking is also deeply humanist. His post-
colonial humanism calls for an ethical awareness of the other’s
difference.

five
Derrida and Bhabha: self, other

and postcolonial ethics
The postcolonial thinkers discussed so far have all articulated a clear set
of political goals and have tended to tie their writing to some form of
direct political activism. Fanon and Gandhi were major revolutionary
figures, Sartre and Said both combined academic work with political
journalism, and Foucault and the Subaltern Studies Collective gave his-
toriography a militant political agenda. Yet within the series of think-
ers outlined so far it is nevertheless possible to discern an increasing
interest in culture, language and the “politics” of representation, and it
is to this more “textualist” postcolonialism that this chapter will turn
via an exploration of Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha. These latter
philosophers do not overlook the political, although the controversy
surrounding their degree of political efficacy will be examined later, but
it is nonetheless indisputable that their postcolonial critique is directed
not so much against individual regimes as against the ethnocentrism
of Western metaphysics. Derrida and Bhabha target not the mechan-
ics of colonial exploitation in Algeria or India but the structure of the
Western epistēmē, which positions the European subject at the centre
and subordinates other cultures. This analysis of the Western philo-
sophical tradition and its configuration of self and other may have a
political dimension but, unlike the work of militants such as Fanon and
Sartre, the objective is not political liberation (Derrida and Bhabha in
any case write after the decolonization of many overseas territories in
the 1950s and 1960s), but the creation of a postcolonial ethics. Derrida
and Bhabha invite their readers to question assumptions of Euro-
pean hegemony, to rethink the relation between self and other and to
conceptualize differently the creation of that relation through language.
They deconstruct the mastery of the subject and the assimilation or
rejection of the other by the dominant discourse, and they insist on an
ethical relation of openness to mobile and potentially intractable forms
of difference. In this sense they help to think through the shift identified
by David Scott in Refashioning Futures (1999) between the moment of
decolonization and postcolonial ethics.
Derridean philosophy is deeply indebted to Levinasian ethics, and
although Bhabha engages only fleetingly with Levinas, his thought
learns from the latter’s conceptions of Infinity and alterity in turn
via Derrida. Both philosophers, like Levinas, respond to violence by
undermining the totalitarianism of a certain type of metaphysics and
by conceiving the relation between beings as the necessary confronta-
tion with, and acceptance of, plurality or the unknowable. In moving
away from militant or activist postcolonialism, moreover, the achieve-
ment of these thinkers is not only the application of Levinasian ethics
to postcolonial debate but a deeper questioning of the nature of post-
colonial philosophy. Derrida and Bhabha do not analyse the specifics
of any given regime; they interrogate the structure of thinking behind
colonialism in general, and in this sense their work is more properly
philosophical than that of those who investigate historically the exploi-
tation of particular regimes. At the same time, however, Derrida raises
the question of whether such a universalizing analysis can account both
for the specific experiences of Algerians, indeed of Algerian Jews, and
for the infinitely singular responses of distinct subjects. Philosophy con-
ventionally involves abstraction from the concrete and the construction
of universals that transcend the specific, but postcolonial critique must
be both historically grounded on some level and, crucially, engaged
with the singular marginalized subjects that colonial thinking precisely
set out to oppress. Indeed, the very ethnocentric gesture that Derrida
denounces is one that subsumes the other into an apparently universal-
ized framework, and the colonial mission also in practical terms rests on
the belief that colonial culture can assimilate native practices. Derrida
encourages us to ask how postcolonial philosophy might both accom-
plish the philosophical gesture of abstraction or universalization, and
attend to the singularities that were occluded precisely by that gesture of
assimilation in the colonial context. Bhabha also sketches a new concep-
tion of “theory”, and suggests that marginalized subjectivities precisely
exceed the boundaries of established discourses: those of colonialism,
nationalism and, potentially, the philosopher himself. This means that
“theory” itself must be a force of questioning, a heterogeneous process
derrida and bhabha 99

of ethical and potentially political contestation, rather than a claim for
secure knowledge.
Derrida, ethnocentrism and colonialism
Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, near Algiers, into a family of Algerian
Jews. He went to school at the local collège and then lycée, although he
was traumatically excluded for two years, when the Vichy government
deprived Algerian Jews of their French citizenship during the Second
World War. Eventually returning to school in 1944, he read French phil-
osophy, and passed his baccalauréat in 1948. He then went to the Lycée
Louis-le-Grand in Paris, then on to the École Normale Supérieure, and
passed the agrégation in 1956. He visited Harvard University, completed
his military service, finished his thesis and went on to publish an intro-
duction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry in 1962. The major works
Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference
were published in 1967, and Margins of Philosophy followed quickly in
1972. Derrida did not explicitly address the question of colonialism, and
indeed his own upbringing in Algeria, until much later in his career, and
his most sustained treatment of this subject matter is The Monolingualism
of the Other, published as recently as 1996. It is important, however, that
despite this initial reticence about Algeria, notions of excentricity and
decentring have nevertheless been “central” to Derrida’s thought from the
beginning. Derrida’s work has always been concerned with alterity, with
the supplementary traces accompanying the main thrust of philosophical
discourses, and the decentring of those discourses through attention to
“other” allusions within them. This gesture is associated with the dis-
mantling of the hegemony of “Western” philosophy and its self-deluding
ethnocentrism, and with a demand for increased attention to the other
that “the West” ignores or leaves out. “The West” is, as a result, itself a con-
cept that must be undermined and denounced for its false self-presence
and assumed security. Indeed, it can be argued that poststructuralist
scepticism towards apparent hierarchies and institutional divisions was
already rooted in postcoloniality, in the collapse of colonial ideology as
announced by the atrocities of the Algerian war. Deconstruction is not
just an unravelling of “philosophical thought” in general, but precisely an
overturning of “Western thought”, its denial of its hidden supplements,
its conceptual and cultural alterity.
Of Grammatology is one of Derrida’s first works to offer a critique
that could be conceived as “postcolonial”. Here Derrida explores the

“Western” concept of language as associated with the voice, self-presence
and immediacy, and he reveals this as both deluded and ethnocentric.
Logocentrism is the affirmation of presence in language: it names the
privileging of phonetic writing, in which meaning is apparently unmedi-
ated and perfectly captured. This phonetic writing assumes that speech
is primary, since it depends on the controlling presence of the speaker,
and writing then mimics or follows speech, claiming in turn to signify
presence. Derrida locates this privileging of the logos in philosophers
from Plato to Hegel, and goes on to trace its development in Saus-
sure, Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau. His purpose, however, is not only to
unravel a certain myth of language as the signifier of presence, but also
to show that this is an ideology that both predominates specifically in
“the West”, and excludes and denies the cultural others that it cannot
contain. For Derrida:
phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, sci-

entific, technological, and economic adventure of the West,
is limited in space and time and limits itself even as it is in
the process of importing its laws upon the cultural areas that
escaped it. (1976: 10)
Logocentrism offers an illusion of presence, as if to signify control over

meaning, but Derrida argues that this ideology fails to admit its own sit-
uatedness, and the intractable, unassimilable meanings that lie beyond
its reach. To translate this into the terms of Levinasian ethics, Derrida’s
endeavour will be to supplement logocentric philosophy with an ethical
call for attention to the Infinity it claims to totalize.
Derrida asserts that in Saussure’s work, for example, the spoken
language is coupled with phonetic writing, but any traces of the non-
phonetic are seen as interruptions, moments of disturbance that unset-
tle the transparency of the logos, but do not upset his privileging of its
rule. These interruptions are unruly traces of an otherness that resides
beyond the reach of a clearly “Western” desire for presence, but that
Saussure is at pains to relegate to the margins. Derrida’s next exam-
ple is Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (1976), in which he similarly sees
a privileging of a specifically “Western” conception of writing. Lévi-
Strauss analyses the “society without writing” (Derrida 1976: 109) of
the Nambikwara of Brazil, but Derrida argues that this analysis relies
on a separation of speech and writing that is ethnocentric. Lévi-Strauss
argues that the tribe’s authentic oral culture is occluded by the colonial
presence and its distribution of printed texts but, in spite of itself, this

critique hinges on the very privileging of the logos central to Western
thought. Lévi-Strauss refuses to conceive of “drawing lines” as a form of
writing, and also conserves the immediacy and self-presence of speech
by naively distinguishing it from the supplementary structure of writing.
The upshot is a fantasized vision of the Nambikwara’s innocence fuelled
by a specifically European privileging of mastery and self-presence in
speech. Derrida’s conclusion is that:
to recognise writing in speech, that is to say the différance and

the absence of speech, is to begin to think the lure. There is
no ethics without the presence of the other, and consequently,
without absence, dissemination, detour, différance, writing.
(1976: 139–40)
An adherence to a narrow, restricted conception of speech consti-

tutes a denial of the trace, of the alterity, that structures all writing.
This ties in with the “Western” myth of the certainty and hegemony of
the logos.
Derrida’s other important reading of Lévi-Strauss, “Structure, Sign
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Dif-
ference, develops this charge of ethnocentrism and broadens it further
to deconstruct the very structures that shape and define “Western”
thought. Derrida begins by identifying the persistent “centre” that
structures the “Western” epistēmē. This centre serves to give thought
a point of presence, a fixed origin, and although it grounds thought it
also remains outside the structure it creates. Paradoxically, “the con-
cept of centred structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a
fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental
immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach
of play” (Derrida 1978: 279). Up to a point, Lévi-Strauss also relies
on this concept of a centre as he persists in seeking to systematize his
investigations of other cultures. In the course of his researches, how-
ever, Lévi-Strauss later finds that this mythical “centre” is necessarily
an illusion, and that his practice as an anthropologist instead resembles
“bricolage”: the use of various instruments of analysis without the posit-
ing of an originary ground or centre. This process is then itself subject
to mythologization, but the analysis allows Derrida to show that anthro-
pology, while devoted to the study of the other, has relied on the “West-
ern” construction of a centre, although this centre is always in tension
with the “play” that escapes it. Interpretation as a result can proceed in
two ways: it can continue to pursue its own centre, or relinquish that

search entirely in favour of an embrace of the play of signs. Once again,
Derrida’s implication here is that anthropology, the very science of the
other, has difficulty in remaining open to that other, to its intricacies
and singularities, and has repeatedly relied on foundations conceived
by the ethnocentric anthropologist and not the object of enquiry. Later,
in the “White Mythology” (in Margins of Philosophy), Derrida again
undermines the self-created security of the “Western” episteme. Derrida
argues that “Western” metaphysics has systematically effaced the eth-
nocentric origin and myth on which it rests. White mythology claims
the originary and centred status of its discourse and, in so doing, denies
the self-supporting fabrication of its idiom.
The impact of Derrida’s initial deconstruction of ethnocentrism on
postcolonialism is significant and wide-ranging, and will emerge expli-
citly in my discussions of Bhabha, Khatibi and Spivak. Young is one of
the first thinkers to explore the links between Derridean deconstruction
and postcolonial critique and, indeed, asserts that the inauguration of
poststructuralism was not the upheavals of May 1968 but the Algerian
War of Independence. From this point of view, texts such as Of Gram-
matology and Writing and Difference can be read as a new response to
the collapse of empire and the effects of that collapse on metaphysics.
Derrida’s early intervention into the question of postcolonialism is not,
however, without its difficulties, and has been conceived by a number
of critics to backfire. In the most general terms, the work is seen to be
excessively “textualist”, in the sense that the reflection on language is
disengaged from colonial politics and inadequate to the demands of a
rigorous political critique. I shall return to this question of Derrida’s
politics shortly, but for the moment it is worth noting that Marxist post-
colonial thinkers such as Parry have little patience with the convolutions
of the links between Derridean philosophy and actual colonial regimes.
Furthermore, Azzedine Haddour offers a detailed critique of Derrida’s
deconstructive gestures in Of Grammatology and Dissemination (1981),
and suggests that the insistence on play obscures specific differences,
such as those of the colonized. This erosion of specific differences then
prevents the marginalized from forming a distinct community as a
symbol of resistance to the imposed culture. Haddour complains that
“to reduce difference to a play through which the subject of Western
metaphysics is constituted is to deny difference its agency and subjec-
tivity” (2000: 158). Dissemination is even, according to Haddour, akin
to the colonial policy of assimilation, and the universalism of Derrida’s
thinking at the same time, problematically, makes all forms of oppres-
sion appear the same.

Spivak offers a more specific critique of Of Grammatology in her
translator’s preface. Spivak notes first that Derrida’s conception of
“writing” risks elevating the term to the status of a transcendental
signifier, and secondly that Derrida retains a rather facile association
between logocentrism and the West. And although he fleetingly dis-
cusses Chinese writing in the first part of the text, for the most part
he fails to consider the role and position of the East. Rey Chow devel-
ops this critique in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(2002), and argues that Of Grammatology oddly insists on maintain-
ing a certain boundary between East and West. Derrida argues that
Chinese is not phonetic but ideographic but, according to Chow, this
conception of the Chinese language is mythical, and related to popu-
lar stereotypes surrounding the “inscrutable Chinese”. Consequently,
Derrida retains “a rhetorical essentialism whereby the East is typecast
as difference, a difference that, moreover, is seen in the apparently self-
coincident or transparent form of the graphic, the ideogram” (Chow
2002: 63). In short, Derrida is guilty of categorizing and glossing over
the other, just as Western metaphysics blindly occludes non-European
difference.
These observations and criticisms add useful nuance to Derrida’s
thinking but, in spite of its shortcomings, the critique of ethnocentrism
remains influential to postcolonialism because it suggests that colo-
nialism operates within the very language of philosophy. Moreover,
if Of Grammatology contains a persistent blindness towards Eastern
cultures, the later exploration of colonialism in The Monolingualism
of the Other appears as more acutely self-conscious concerning the
difficulties of its own urge towards philosophical universalization.
In The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida on one level sets out to
deconstruct the ethnocentrism of any “sovereign” language and exam-
ines the alienation in language experienced by all speakers, including
those who claim hegemony. The universalism of this argument serves
to undermine the colonizer’s claim to mastery, since it reminds us
that no speaker possesses his language and culture. Language always
suppresses without extinguishing alterity, and Derrida denounces the
“sovereignty whose essence is always colonial, which tends, repres-
sively and irrepressibly, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the
hegemony of the homogeneous” (1998: 39–40). The tyranny of colo-
nial culture brings material violence, but it also reveals in condensed
form the oppressiveness of any language and culture. At the same time,
however, Derrida’s analysis here is clearly grounded in the specific con-
text of the Algerian Jews and explores the community’s loss of French

citizenship under the Vichy government, despite their monolingual-
ism. Derrida repeats the refrain “I only have one language; it is not
mine” to evoke the Algerian Jews’ specific sense of alienation and dis-
possession when the Vichy government forced them to perceive that
their culture and language did not belong to them. Consequently it
may never be possible to “inhabit” or “possess” a language and, indeed,
as we saw in the discussion of Sartre, Derrida signals that the colonizer
too is alienated: “the master is nothing. And he does not have exclusive
possession of anything” (ibid.: 23). But the Algerian Jews experienced
this dispossession in a traumatic manner when the Vichy government
demonstrated in practical terms their non-belonging within the lan-
guage they had thought was theirs.
In this way, Derrida’s text shifts nervously between the universal
and the specific, between a conceptual reflection on the relation of all
beings to language and a historically grounded discussion of Algerian
Jews during the Second World War. In exploring that shift, he asks us
to consider the ways in which the colonizer, although fundamentally
alienated, used his position to deny his own alienation and to concretize
that of the other. In moving between these dimensions of the universal
and the particular, however, the text deliberately asks more questions
than it answers: is Algeria only an example of a universal difficulty, or
is it unique in its brutal institutionalization of a generalized experience?
Can the philosopher extrapolate from Algeria to theorize about the
relation between language and sovereignty, or is that extrapolation a
betrayal of Algeria’s uniqueness? How do Algerian Muslims fit in with
Derrida’s discussion of Algerian Jews and colonialism more broadly?
Postcolonial philosophy demands both that specific colonial experi-
ences serve as an example of a broader conceptual phenomenon, and
that that example announces itself as distinct from the law it never-
theless helps to elucidate.
If Derrida discusses the specific experience of Algerian Jews in The
Monolingualism of the Other, however, it is at the same time important
that Jewishness is at no point conceived as the name for an identifiable
and determinate community. Derrida may be drawing attention to the
experiences of a particular group of people, but this sharing does not
imply sameness, the determination of a resistant cultural collective. The
Algerian Jews were at the same time cut off from Jewish culture, con-
taminated by Christian culture and internally fragmented. In a more
recent essay on Jewishness entitled “Abraham, l’autre” (2003), Derrida
explains that if he has not frequently mentioned his Judaism in his
philosophy, this is because he belongs without belonging to both Jewish

culture and religion. Once again, however, this raises the question of
the dynamic interplay between the law and the example, since Derrida
argues that Jewishness is defined by a resistance to communitarianism,
by diaspora and dispersal. For this reason, he who appears to be the
least Jewish is in fact the most Jewish. Jewishness cannot be manifested
or claimed in an exemplary way, but this resistance to the claiming of
exemplarity is nevertheless an exemplary characteristic of Jewishness.
The Jews were the community who were specifically excluded under
colonialism in Algeria, then, but their specificity lies in the absence of
any claim for specificity. Indeed, the one text in which Derrida does
explore his own Judaism, the fragmented musings of “Circonfession”
(Circumfession) (in Bennington & Derrida 1993), explores the traumas
of the mother’s death and of circumcision while making the identifica-
tion of a clear subject position impossible. Derrida’s recourse to the
specific in his reflection on the situation of Algerian Jews at the same
time problematizes and disseminates that specificity.
To return to The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida here too
problematizes and moves beyond both the universal and the specific
with a call for attention to a singular autobiographical subject. Derrida
undermines the gesture of philosophical neutralization by incorporat-
ing scattered musings on his own singular past, so as to trouble his urge
towards universalization. Nevertheless, these musings are not produced
by a knowable individual, but express the intermittent anxieties of a
fragmented, ghostly “I”, which in turn theorizes its evacuation from the
exegesis. The text is haunted by singular traces of the writer’s “self ”, but
which the writer can never catch up with and encapsulate. The turn to
autobiography is an anxious expression of resistance to the universaliza-
tion of postcolonial critique, but the text also never fully encapsulates
the singular “I” of the enunciation. It is “an account of what will have
placed an obstacle in the way of this auto-exposition for me” (Derrida
1998: 70).
In a further twist, moreover, the work begins with the confession “I
only have one language”, but the first person is already distinguished
from any authorial voice because the quotation is set up as a hypotheti-
cal statement, analysed and unravelled in turn by a second apparently
authorial voice. On one level, this further troubles the notion that the
singular “I” of Derrida’s persona can be pinned down in language, but
the “I” also, at the same time, acquires a certain philosophical general-
ity, and the statement suggests once more that all speakers fail to pos-
sess their language. What might have been read as an autobiographical
narrative of Derrida’s own experience of dispossession turns out to fall

back into the universalist structure that the fleeting autobiographical
references set out to problematize. The analysis of colonialism requires
a resistance to the universal, but Derrida also refuses the identification
of an authorial subject position that would over-determine him, so that
the text is condemned to a constant and paradoxical movement against
each stance it adopts.
In its curious and irresolute shifting between the universal, the spe-
cific and the singular, The Monolingualism of the Other provocatively
questions the practice of postcolonial philosophy and self-consciously
signals its traps. Derrida’s postcolonialism undermines the colonizer’s
erroneous claim to possess his language and either to assimilate or reject
the marginalized but culturally diverse speakers of that language, and
reveals instead the master’s hidden contingency and alienation. Having
signalled this universal dispossession, however, Derrida pinpoints the
particular experience of the Algerian Jews in being dispossessed of
their citizenship and of a sense of belonging in language, although he
uncovers at the same time the aporia between the need to present that
experience as unique and its exemplification and concretization of the
broader law. In drawing attention to the alienation brought about at a
specific historical moment, moreover, Derrida also refuses to accord
the Algerian Jewish community a false determinism that would once
again tyrannize and totalize the singular differences of distinct Jews.
Although revealing for a reflection on the open-ended community of
Judaism, however, Derrida’s analysis somewhat problematically does not
include discussion of the French oppression of Algerian Muslims and
this raises further questions about the status of the universal. Finally,
Derrida subverts both the gesture of philosophical generalization and
the examination of a historical specificity further in his pursuit of a form
of individuation that refuses positionality or the location of a theoretical
norm. The singular “I” of Derrida’s own autobiographical project, and his
endeavours at self-exploration, “let all my specters loose” (ibid.: 73). The
Monolingualism of the Other displays the tension between “theory” itself
and the necessity for a form of writing that does not fall into the same
traps of totalization and determinism that colonial discourse set for the
colonized. Derrida’s singularity, however, is necessarily depersonalized,
with the result that that singularity once again, paradoxically, becomes
universal. The text demonstrates in this way the contradictory demands
of postcolonialism and the tensions inherent in the philosophical con-
templation of the limits of colonial or totalizing thinking.

Derrida’s ethics and politics
It is perhaps already apparent that Derrida’s critique of ethnocentrism

and colonialism is undertaken in the name of ethics. Moreover, Derrida
has always been committed to exploring and developing Levinasian
ethics not only by means of the deconstruction of ethnocentric meta-
physics but also in his very reading strategies. Deconstruction is not
just an engagement with Levinasian ethics, but performs that ethics in
its careful attention to the other’s text and in its teasing out of hidden
traces. Derrida’s reading practice is precisely concerned neither simply
to repeat the premises of the original (this would not be ethical since it
would reduce the text to the rule of the Same), nor to read into the oth-
er’s text meanings produced and imposed from the outside. Rather, the
reading practice carried out across Derrida’s works consists in an ethical
confrontation with the other’s discourse and a rigorous engagement
with the potentially infinite meanings that linger beneath the surface
of the writing. The text is conceived as a discourse in the Levinasian
sense, in that it is not the communication of a specified message but a
space of encounter and a forum for the pursuit of multiple allusions.
This conception of an encounter with the text’s openness or Infinity,
with the chains of associations that proliferate beneath the work’s arti-
fice, can also be seen as an exploration of the Saying behind the state-
ments of the Said. If the Said names the text’s ostensible content, then
Derrida works away at the proliferating possibilities of the Saying, the
traces of meaning that are not controlled and determined by the grasp
of the Said. This reading practice devoted to the aspects of the text that
appear to work against its apparent assertions is called clôtural read-
ing, since it perceives the text’s closure at the same time as it ethically
searches beyond that apparently enclosed framework of meaning. For
Simon Critchley, “a clôtural reading analyses a text in terms of how it
is divided against itself in both belonging to logocentric conceptuality
and achieving the breakthrough beyond that conceptuality” (Critchley
1992: 30). Derrida’s readings in this way explore both the text’s primary
content and the traces that exceed that content.
Derrida offers several specific readings of Levinas, beginning most
famously with the essay “Violence and Metaphysics” published in Writ-
ing and Difference. Importantly, however, this reading itself both expli-
cates Levinas’s position in Totality and Infinity and works against the
text’s grain. It is clear that, on one level, Derrida is wholly persuaded
by Levinas’s thought, and in an interview in Altérités he affirms: “before
a thought like that of Levinas, I never have any objection. I am ready

to subscribe to everything he says” (1986: 74; my translation). Derrida
nevertheless goes on to explain that this does not mean that he thinks in
exactly the same way as Levinas and, indeed, “Violence and Metaphys-
ics” also explores what might be conceived according to the later notion
of the Saying, the traces of meaning that linger behind Levinas’s overt
philosophical propositions. First, Derrida explores Levinas’s rejection
of the metaphysics of Heideggerian ontology and its neutralization of
the other. Having worked through this engagement with Heidegger,
however, he proceeds to argue that Levinas in fact himself relies on a
certain ontology in his understanding of the relation with the other.
The face of the other is also a body and a being. Next, in interrogating
Levinas’s relation with Husserl and the former’s insistence on the Infinity
of alterity, Derrida discovers that Levinas’s “infinitely other” folds in on
itself, since “being other than itself, it is not what it is. Therefore, it is not
infinitely other, etc.” (1978: 185). Derrida rejects Levinas’s vocabulary
of “scission” or division between the Same and the Other, since if being
is divided it must also be at once Same and Other, and the opposition
collapses. Levinas’s own language turns against him in forcing a rupture
or an opposition at odds with the original thought. Levinas’s own meta-
physics turns out to presuppose the transcendental phenomenology that
it set out to overturn. Returning to the relation with Heidegger, Derrida
then argues that Heidegger’s thought is in reality not so far from that of
Levinas, that being is not in Heidegger the anonymous principle per-
ceived by Levinas and that, indeed, ontology commands the respect of
the other for what he is. Heideggerian ontology does not imply ethical
violence, and Heideggerian being does not have the mastery Levinas
perceived. For Derrida, then, ethics in purely Levinasian terms is impos-
sible: Levinas’s attempt to write an ethical philosophy denies the ethical
precepts it supports. Nevertheless, Derrida’s own reading is in a sense
still faithful to Levinasian ethics, precisely because it troubles any poten-
tial systematization and uncovers the Saying beneath the seemingly
rational philosophical account. Ethics emerges performatively in this
reading encounter rather than by means of philosophical exposition.
The Monolingualism of the Other and “Violence and Metaphysics”
suggest, then, that an ethically aware philosophy does not set up secure
proposals, but either self-consciously questions itself or emerges ten-
tatively via reading. This philosophy attentive to otherness is also not
a critique, implying a process of judgement, nor a method or system,
but a sort of unfolding that must remain incomplete. If Derrida’s extra-
ordinary gift lies in his meticulous, attentive readings both of himself
and of the other, however, this ethical writing remains at one remove

from the practical demands of politics and the creation of an active,
political assertion or position. Following Levinas himself, Derrida for
this reason separates politics and ethics, even though he insists that they
must nevertheless be thought alongside one another. Ethics names the
commitment to the form of reading summarized above: it is the patient
engagement with infinity in discourse and an open-ended confrontation
with alterity. Politics, on the other hand, requires decision-making, the
creation of a specified standpoint and argument, and for Derrida works
against the openness necessary for ethical thought. Returning to the
question of Derrida’s contribution to postcolonialism, we find that he
offers an ethical critique of ethnocentrism, and of the colonial, sover-
eign language, but perceives this as a process entirely distinct from the
creation of a practical, anti-colonial resistance strategy. Such a coherent
strategy remains beyond the boundaries of his project, and would work
against the rigorous undermining of metaphysics and ethnocentrism
that he conceives as the foundation for colonial thinking. This absence
of a political strategy in Derrida’s thought does not mean that this is
unthinkable for him, but that its demands would run counter to the
ethics that he retains as his priority.
Many of Derrida’s more politically oriented works explicitly theorize
this division between ethics and politics and consequently uncover the
aporia-fracturing concepts such as hospitality and democracy, which
in turn can help to inform our understanding of his postcolonialism.
In The Other Heading (1992), for example, Derrida’s analysis of Europe
and of the conception of European hegemony ends with a series of dual
requirements, a set of paradoxes necessary for a responsible understand-
ing of the European community but severed by the contrasting demands
of ethics and politics. Responsibility requires both that we conserve
European memory and a sense of communal identity, and that Europe
be conceived as open to all that exceeds her borders. A conception of
Europe necessitates “this double contradictory imperative” that we open
ourselves to all that exceeds reason without allowing politics itself to
become irrational (1992: 79). So an ethical notion of Europe is one that
explores its permeability and incompletion, but some conception of a
shared culture and, indeed, of rationality is indispensable to the politi-
cal functioning of Europe. More broadly, in The Politics of Friendship
Derrida goes on to argue that democracy works as an (ethical) critique
of totalitarianism because it privileges the differences between its par-
ticipants, but it also relies on a political notion of community: “there
is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity,
but there is no democracy without ‘the community of friends’ (koína

ta philōn), without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable,
stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal” (1997: 22). This duality can
be seen to inform Derrida’s postcolonialism, even if he does not theo-
rize the aporia clearly in this context. An ethical anti-colonial critique
requires an awareness of the singularities that exceed the colonial law,
but a political resistance movement at the same time would rely on the
formation of a working community. The Monolingualism of the Other
attempts to engage with both levels, but the disjunction between them
is one that the analysis struggles to smooth over.
Derrida’s later writing on Levinas similarly displays this leap. In Adieu
to Emmanuel Levinas Derrida further elucidates Levinas’s concept of
hospitality, and notes that for Levinas hospitality is unconditional and
absolute. While the concept of hospitality relies on the existence of bar-
riers, it also negates itself in its insistence on absolute openness and the
absence of a need for consensus or commensurability. In On Hospital-
ity (2000), moreover, Derrida separates the ethical “law” of hospitality,
the unconditional demand that we accept and welcome any stranger,
and the “laws” of hospitality, or practical conditions and functioning
norms. The law of hospitality allows for the singularity of every visitor,
whereas the laws of hospitality are built on workable codes and practical
principles. Ethics, then, demands infinite openness, but politics rests
on concrete issues arising from immigration law, citizenship and the
granting of asylum. In this way Derrida suggests that Levinas’s concept
of hospitality contains an aporetic split, but that, far from losing himself
in an abstract and impracticable ethics, Levinas obliges us to continue to
conceive this unconditional ethics even as we contemplate the political
position of the stranger. Ethics and politics are radically distinct, even
opposed, modes of reflection, and yet they must be thought alongside
one another. Once again, this double bind within the concept of hospi-
tality can serve to theorize also the duality in postcolonialism between
an awareness of the singular migrant subject and the potential, necessary
integration of that subject within the state.
The aporetic structure of Derrida’s thinking on politics and ethics
has been the subject of much controversy. According to Morag Patrick
(1997), Derrida helps to reinvent the political because he shows that
political thinking is not self-same, and that every decision glosses over
the singular possibilities excluded by its remit. Geoffrey Bennington
(2000) concedes that Derrida is not an activist but insists that his
achievement is to inscribe alterity into the heart of political reflection.
For Critchley (1992), conversely, Derrida’s work contains an impasse
and fails to negotiate the treacherous path between ethics and politics,

and certainly, as I have suggested, the direct translation of ethical phil-
osophy into anti-colonial political critique is not attempted anywhere
in Derrida’s work. Nevertheless, Critchley concludes his chapter on
Derrida’s politics by returning to Levinas’s movement from the ethi-
cal relation to the intervention of the third party, and argues that this
movement establishes a transition between the ethical relation and the
question of multiple others, leading in turn to the contemplation of
justice towards those others. This way of shifting from ethics to politics
excludes totalitarian politics (for Levinas, National Socialism, but for
our current purposes this could also be colonial sovereignty), and cre-
ates the foundation for a politics based on the acceptance of multiplicity
and difference.
There can be no doubt that Derrida’s contribution to postcolonialism
is not as clearly politicized as that of Fanon, Sartre or Gandhi, but it is
nevertheless crucial in its careful consideration of the contrasting ethics
and politics that might inform postcolonial thought. His separation and
juxtaposition of ethics and politics perhaps helps us to think again why
Fanon’s militant call for decolonization in Algeria chimes discordantly
with his universal humanism, for example, but it also encourages us to
attend to both aspects of the work and to try to think them through
together. Reading Fanon through Derrida, we can conceive the commu-
nitarianism of Fanon’s vision as a practical response that simultaneously
includes, on another level, an awareness of Algerian multiplicity and the
self-creation of each oppressed singular being. Derrida’s own political
thinking is evidently never territorial, as Fanon’s intermittently is, and
in apparently prioritizing ethics it does not help to theorize the reclaim-
ing of the land from the hands of the oppressor. Derrida’s innovation is
nevertheless his understanding of the simultaneous division and com-
plicity between a conception of something like territorial politics and
the ethical critique of totalitarianism. It is not possible, according to
Derrida, to address the political and the ethical by the same means, but
by tending to them at the same time on different levels we might come
closer to an understanding of the complexity and multidimensionality
of postcolonialism. The Monolingualism of the Other teaches us that a
universalized deconstruction of claims for linguistic mastery reveals
colonialism’s ethical transgression, but the discussion of the specific
exclusion of Algerian Jews operates on another level, and the relation
between these two levels remains uneasy. Derrida shows that postcolo-
nialism cannot be a holistic critique; it must continually shift and nego-
tiate between its divergent ethical and political requirements, but it is
this dynamism that prevents the field from becoming programmatic

and stops the critic from falling into complacency when contemplating
an evolving and still traumatized field.
Homi Bhabha
The work of Bhabha is perhaps best known for its explicit endeavour
to combine poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Bhabha’s essays are
littered with references to the work of Derrida, and many of his key
concepts are taken from the latter’s philosophy. Colonial discourse, for
example, is conceived as structured in spite of itself by the movement
of the “supplement”, by chains of meaning that it cannot possess, and
both colonial and colonized cultures are “deconstructed” by means of
attention to their complex and deferred significatory processes. Simi-
larly, Bhabha uses the concept of “dissemiNation” to explore how the
construction of a national identity always covers over traces and patches
of discrepant cultural meanings produced by that nation’s heterogene-
ous and plural people. His discussions of colonialism and resistance
share with Derrida’s work a resistance to binary oppositions and a
meticulous attention to the ambivalence underpinning any apparently
fixed and assertive subject position. Bhabha adds to Derrida’s explora-
tion of the overlap between ethnocentrism and logocentrism a further
engagement with the mechanics of colonial power and with the ways in
which minority voices trouble the hegemonic cultural and national dis-
courses operating on them. Indeed, more than once he criticizes Der-
rida for remarking on colonialism only in passing, and for not paying
sufficient attention to specific and determinate systems of oppression.
Nevertheless, Bhabha’s more consistent attention to colonialism scarcely
makes his thought more militantly politicized, and his focus remains,
like that of Derrida, ethical or at least “ethical political”. Indeed, if much
of Bhabha’s work is descriptive of the workings of colonial or migrant
culture, he also frequently slips into prescription and stresses the ethical
requirement that we “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as others
of our selves” (Bhabha 1994: 39). He even, if fleetingly, draws on Levinas
and argues that the notion of ethical proximity helps to unsettle notions
of territoriality and national belonging.
Bhabha was born into the small Parsi community of Bombay in 1949,
and he has more than once emphasized that his was a minority culture.
Nevertheless, having received his undergraduate degree from the (then)
University of Bombay, he went on to do graduate work at Oxford Uni-
versity, taught at Sussex and Chicago, and now occupies the illustrious

position of Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard.
Critics have argued that his assimilation into the American academy
and membership of the cultural elite, together with the abstraction of
his writing style, distance him disastrously from the marginalized and
oppressed subjects about whom he writes. Indeed, it is clear that Bhabha’s
highly knowing and at times abstruse philosophy is not concerned with
the conditions affecting colonized or migrant people’s everyday lives.
Like Derrida, however, his achievement is perhaps less to conceive a
postcolonial politics than to show how colonialism operates within dis-
course itself and to draw attention to the delusions of modes of thinking
that claim to know and assimilate the other. He uncovers the ambiva-
lence of colonial discourse, the limits of the grasp of the colonial lan-
guage over its subjects, and undermines colonialism by focusing on its
loopholes and blind spots. Bhabha criticizes Said for presenting colonial
discourse as fixed and for configuring West and East or colonizer and
colonized as reified in a binary opposition. Bhabha’s aim is instead to
reveal the anxiety at work in colonial narratives, and he draws on Freud
and Lacan in order to analyse the neuroses structuring discourses on
self and other, and the “uncanny” that the colonizer sets out to occlude.
Anxiety in Freud is a temporally ambivalent state, “at once the ‘recall’ of
a situation – its memorial – and its performative anticipation or expecta-
tion” (Bhabha 1996: 192), and Bhabha uses this notion of a borderline
temporality to argue that culture too can be seen as anxiously hovering
between sedimentation in the past and a future reinvention. Colonial
and national discourses rely nervously on the notion of a collective past
while failing to catch up with the multiple narratives and practices that
make up their disjunctive present and future. Bhabha’s psychoanalytic
approach here is evidently far removed from empiricism, but its success
is nevertheless this inscription of doubt into the production of any dis-
course of assimilation. And again, as in Derrida, this helps us to rethink
or conceive differently the potentially assimilatory drive of theory or
philosophy itself: the ambivalence of colonial discourse is “a necessary
caution against generalizing the contingencies and contours of local
circumstance, at the very moment at which a transnational, ‘migrant’
knowledge of the world is most urgently needed” (Bhabha 1994: 214).
The opening chapter of Bhabha’s famous collection of essays The Loca-
tion of Culture prefaces the ensuing analyses of colonialism and culture
with a reflection on “theory” itself. Bhabha notes the frequent criticism
that theory is “the elite language of the socially and culturally privi-
leged” (1994: 19) and asserts that he is alert to the dangers of assuming
authority by producing knowledge of the other. In defence of the very

notion of a postcolonial philosophy or theory, however, Bhabha goes
on to champion the sorts of double movement performed in Derrida’s
work, whereby the philosopher deconstructs philosophy from within, or
uses the language of logocentrism to undermine logocentrism. Bhabha
then adds to Derrida’s approach a more politicized angle, as he recalls
John Stuart Mill’s argument that political knowledge has to come about
through dialogue, debate and dissension, and suggests that despite Mill’s
rationalism, this argument reveals an understanding of the presence of
otherness at work in the creation of knowledge. Theoretical discourse,
similarly, must attend to alterity in its pursuit of knowledge, and it
must resist both logocentrism and essentialism, the drive (falsely) to
define and categorize its subjects, even as it inevitably claims a new
authority. In reading Mill, Bhabha’s purpose is to confer on Derrida’s
deconstruction of logocentrism and ethnocentrism an emphasis on the
resonance of this self-conscious theorizing for political representation. If
it is concerned with language and discourse, theory nevertheless offers
important insights into political knowledge, because it opens up the
space between the political objective and its slippery representation. In
Bhabha’s terms, “denying an essentialist logic and a mimetic referent to
political representation is a strong, principled argument against political
separatism of any colour, and cuts through the moralism that usually
accompanies such claims” (ibid.: 27). A theoretical understanding of
the slippage between discourse and referent works directly against both
colonial assimilation and racist determinism, since both rely on classify-
ing and dividing self and other, inside and outside, black and white.
Bhabha then conceptualizes this slippage in language by inventing
his own theory of the Third Space. The Third Space is not, as it sounds,
an identifiable alternative position to those of colonizer and colonized,
or East and West. Rather, it names the gap in enunciation between
the subject of a proposition and the subject of the enunciation: that is,
between the production of the statement, with all its contextual con-
tingencies, and the other to which the statement refers. It names the
interstices between sign and referent, the Derridean movement of traces
of meaning along the chain of associations, and Bhabha conceives this
as a locus of cultural ambivalence as well as productivity:
The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which

makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent
process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cul-
tural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open,
expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges

our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogeniz-
ing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept
alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the
disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of
the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively
describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time.
(Ibid.: 37)
Theory is necessary according to Bhabha, then, because its attention

to language and representation allow us to understand properly the
ambivalence of culture, and the violence and delusion of claims to cul-
tural purity, determinism and separatism. It is also perhaps significant
that theory itself might contain this sort of anxiety or slippage, but we
can use our theoretical knowledge to make ourselves better readers
of theory. Bhabha argues later in the work that Foucault, for example,
may initially omit to comment on the role of colonialism in Western
thought, but the colonizing mission is referred to only subsequently in
passing. This movement, however, itself opens up “the space for a new
discursive temporality, another place of enunciation that will not allow
the argument to expand into an unproblematic generality” (ibid.: 196).
The gap in Foucault’s discourse is precisely what allows his theory’s
productive expansion.
Bhabha also famously reads Fanon in such a way as to highlight the
ambivalence of colonial discourse in his work, rather than to elucidate
his call for revolutionary action. Bhabha’s Fanon reveals the colonial
culture’s fetishization of black identity and locates a force of resistance
in the exploration of cultural interstices. Bhabha knows that Fanon
ardently desires complete political transformation, but argues that his
insight lies in his perception of uncertainty within processes of identifi-
cation and self-creation. The very disjunction of Fanon’s famous phrase
“the Negro is not. Any more than the white man” is conceived to per-
form the rupture and dispersal of racial identity, and Bhabha’s language
stresses this displacement and anxiety and not Fanon’s more militant call
for agency. Furthermore, Bhabha explores the psychoanalytic under-
pinnings of Fanon’s work. His analysis turns on the enigma of Fanon’s
Freudian question: what does the black man want? Bhabha examines the
fear and desire of the colonizer and the splitting of identity as a result of
the meeting of black and white. He applauds in Fanon’s work:
the image of post-Enlightenment man tethered to, not con-

fronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man,

that splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his bound-
aries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the
very time of his being. (Ibid.: 44)
Similarly, the native too is split: he wants both to occupy the place of the
colonizer and to maintain his difference from him, as well as his anger
towards him. If Lacan teaches that identity is constructed in the gaze of
the other, and “bears the mark of the splitting in the Other place from
which it comes” (ibid.: 45), then Fanon’s colonizer and colonized also
identify themselves on the basis of this doubling of self and other and
the alienation that arises from it. Fanon’s apparently Manichaean struc-
ture is troubled by this ambivalent doubling and splitting created by the
construction of the self through the image of the other. This reading of
Fanon deliberately glosses over his humanism, his existentialism and
his militancy; indeed, Bhabha openly confesses that his “remembering
Fanon” paradoxically requires a certain forgetting, presumably of the
moments in his work where he shies away from what Bhabha sees as
his most provocative insights. This strategy of reading Fanon selectively,
through the lens of Lacanian ambivalence, has perhaps not surprisingly
generated much controversy, to which I shall turn later in the chapter.
Faithful to his own understanding of “theory”, however, Bhabha’s com-
mentary on Fanon reads between its lines, draws out its anxieties and
locates in Fanon’s allusions to psychic alienation and uncertainty the
core of his subversive intent.
Many of Bhabha’s essays in The Location of Culture propose
new definitions of key postcolonial concepts, and it will be worth
summarizing the most influential of these here. The first of these is
the stereotype, one of the central tropes of colonial discourse, which is
for Bhabha not merely a caricature or fixed image, but an idea whose
iteration masks its producer’s uncertainty. Colonial discourse desires
“fixity”, it seeks to know and define the other, but the repetition of the
stereotype betrays the absence of proof and the real precariousness
of that fixed image. In commenting on the colonial search for fixity,
Bhabha argues that:
the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form

of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is
always “in place”, already known, and something that must be
anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic
or the bestial sexual licence of the African needs no proof, can
never really, in discourse, be proved. (Ibid.: 66)

The stereotype is used to justify and prop up the colonial project of sub-
jugation, but further analysis of the function of the stereotype reveals
it as another indicator of the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The
uncertainty of the stereotype is what Bhabha accuses Said of neglecting
in his discussion of the correlation between latent and manifest Orien-
talism, which for Bhabha revolves around an unproblematic intentional-
ity. Said’s writing alludes in passing to the simultaneous recognition and
disavowal of cultural difference through the stereotype, but in quoting
him Bhabha opens a sequence of questions relating to the projection,
fear and desire that subtend the colonizer’s discursive gesture. Further-
more, Bhabha’s stereotype is a fetishization, originally the result of the
anxiety of castration and sexual difference, and it functions to smooth
over that anxiety by providing an illusory wholeness. The fetish disa-
vows difference and sets out to restore an original presence. If for Freud
the fetish plays between the affirmation that “all men have penises” and
the anxiety of a potential lack, in the colonial context the fetish vacillates
between the assumption that “all men have the same skin/race/culture”
and the awareness of what are experienced as disturbing racial and
cultural differences (ibid.: 75). This is for Bhabha beautifully demon-
strated by Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where the stereotype that
disavows difference by means of the “white mask” only splits the image
of the subject from itself. Bhabha’s prescriptive ethics emerges here in
his concluding recommendation for a recognition of difference that
precisely liberates it from the fixation of the stereotype.
In addition to this uncovering of the stereotype’s uncertainty, Bhabha
also proposes mimicry as a sign of the ambivalence of colonial dis-
course. The colonial literature of writers as diverse as Kipling, Forster,
Orwell and V. S. Naipaul is, according to Bhabha, peopled with “mimic
men”: natives by birth who have taken on the tastes, attitudes and beliefs
of the colonial culture. Such men are the fruits of the mission, conceived
by Thomas Macaulay in 1835, to create a class of “interpreters”’ who
would mediate between the colonial authorities and the masses they
seek to govern. If, in their mimicking, they appear to reinforce the power
of colonial discourse, however, Bhabha points out that mimicry in fact
exposes colonialism’s excess and expansion. Mimicry is not sameness,
but “a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite” (ibid.:
86), and the act of imitation always includes slippages and traces of
alterity. On the one hand, mimicry appears to ensure the control and
regulation of the native, but on the other hand, it inserts difference into
the dominant discourse of colonial power. The mimic men seem to
be “authorized versions of otherness”, but in mimicking the colonizer

only in part, they reveal the limits of the colonizer’s drive to authorize,
regulate and control his subjects. Bhabha goes on to use Lacan’s under-
standing of mimicry as camouflage to stress how it functions in the same
way as metonymy: it is “not a harmonization or repression of difference,
but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by
displaying in part, metonymically” (ibid.: 90). It is disturbing precisely
because it hides no essence, no clear identity, but inscribes a subtle,
partial alterity into a discourse that had conceived itself as self-same.
Mimicry lies at the limits of what is acceptable and familiar: it plays
by the rules of the colonizer but at the same time works against them.
Like the stereotype, it announces the falsity of the colonial discourse of
certainty and self-presence, and questions the identity of what might
have been taken for the “original”. If for Bhabha mimicry borders on
mockery, however, and could function as a powerful force of subver-
sion, it is noteworthy that the Latin American thinker Octavio Paz, with
whom Bhabha does not engage, conceives it much more as a sign of
emptiness and self-loss; mimicry, dissimulation and irony are “traits of
a subjected people who tremble and disguise themselves in the presence
of the master” (Paz 1967: 62). Bhabha conceives mimicry as a potential
means to deconstruct colonial discourse, whereas in Paz it is a symptom
of a hermeticism built out of the fear, mistrust and suspicion still present
in Mexico long after the end of the colonial period.
Another of Bhabha’s related, much-celebrated concepts is that
of hybridity, which again serves to undermine the fixed opposition
between colonizer and colonized and to draw attention to movement
and play within the colonial discourse. In the chapter “Signs taken for
Wonders”, Bhabha discusses the Indian catechist Anund Messeh’s asser-
tion, in 1817, that the Indians should accept the sacrament and help
to create “a culturally and linguistically homogeneous India” (Bhabha
1994: 105). Building on the analysis of mimicry, however, Bhabha argues
that the English book is not accepted as “a plenitudinous presence” but
that it is received in a context so far removed from its production that
it is altered by the transfer:
As a signifier of authority, the English book acquires its mean-

ing after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cul-
tural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic
image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can
neither be “original” – by virtue of the act of repetition that
constructs it – nor “identical” – by virtue of the difference that
defines it. (Ibid.: 107)

Bhabha again uses Derrida here to explore how the colonial text “does
not occupy a simple place” (ibid.: 108, quoting Derrida 1981), although
he stresses that his endeavour is not so much to explore the process of
interpretation as to question the propagation of power through texts.
The upshot of the analysis here, moreover, is to evoke the process of
hybridization: the dissemination of the text was supposed to assimilate
the natives, but in fact it recreates the colonial culture as hybridized
and different from itself. Hybridity “displays the necessary deformation
and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (ibid.:
112); it names the expansion of the colonial culture beyond itself and
outside its much treasured borders. Hybridity is the effect of the drive
towards the cultural assimilation of the colonized, but at the same time
it subverts the authority and self-presence of the imposed culture. It is
not an alternative identity, but an effect that can in turn be deployed as
a ruse against the authority from which it is, in part, derived.
The last of Bhabha’s reinvented concepts is that of the nation, which
emerges as a plural site of dispersed cultural meanings. Bhabha’s edited
collection Nation and Narration (1990) contains essays by a series of
major philosophers of nationalism, and tracks an evolving awareness
of the nation’s multi-layered construction. Bhabha’s introduction argues
that the nation is “Janus-faced” because it is caught between progres-
sion and regression, but also because its rhetoric distances it from its
people; it is, then, “a figure of prodigious doubling” (1990: 3). Bhabha’s
essay “DissemiNation”, printed in Nation and Narration and again in The
Location of Culture, argues above all that the narrative of the nation is
subject to a time-lag, which means that the imagined unity of the nation
can never catch up with the discrepant “shreds and patches of cultural
signification” produced by its plural people. Furthermore, the narrative
of the nation must be thought of in “double time”:
the people are the historical “objects” of a nationalist peda-

gogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the
pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people
are also the “subjects” of a process of signification that must
erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to
demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as
contemporaneity. (1994: 145)
This means that the narrative of the nation claims to root itself in the past
of its people, as if to assure a shared origin, but it must also erase that
past if it is to grant its people the ability to narrate their culture in their

own terms. This duality is also conceived by Bhabha as a split between
the pedagogical, that is the creation and propagation of a shared past,
and the performative, or the self-renewing cultural practices and acts
of the people. Again, Bhabha’s thinking is deeply indebted to Derrida
here, as he conceives the performative as a “supplementary movement”
at work within the writing of the pedagogical.
Bhabha’s highly abstract theorizing, and his extensive use of decon-
struction, have been much criticized by other postcolonial thinkers.
Many have objected to his convoluted writing style and to its lack
of engagement with the material effects of colonialism on colonized
peoples. One of Bhabha’s most rigorous critics is Parry, who laments
that the extensive focus on ambivalence in colonial discourse obscures
both the horrific violence of the colonial enterprise and the force of
the colonized’s counter-insurgency. The discussion of language effects
occludes the real horror of armed struggle, and the focus on anxiety
and the uncanny within colonial discourse replaces any understanding
of the role of concrete resistance. Bhabha’s reading of Fanon, for exam-
ple, makes the latter into a “premature poststructuralist” and tempers
his revolutionary ethos. Parry also concedes that subjectivity is indeed
often “hybridized” or criss-crossed with multiple identifications, but she
argues that this does not mean that the colonial situation did not pit
communities against one another in an acutely antagonistic struggle.
Bhabha may be right to question the division of colonizer and colonized
into a binary opposition, but in so doing his thinking also glosses over
the real tensions brought about by colonial imposition. The difficulty
with Bhabha’s thought, then, is that it “dispenses with the notion of
conflict, which certainly does infer antagonism, but contra Bhabha, does
not posit a simplistically unitary and closed structure to the adversial
forces” (Parry 2004: 56). Furthermore, Parry reads into Bhabha’s ethics
a somewhat facile “recommendation of coalition politics and rainbow
alliances” that might be conceivable for the “privileged postcolonial” but
that means little to the genuinely disenfranchised (ibid.: 71).
In addition, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity has been challenged by
more than one critic. Young is largely sympathetic to Bhabha, but his
Colonial Desire (1995) nevertheless reminds us of the lingering, prob-
lematic connotations of the term “hybrid”. Young traces its nineteenth-
century associations with corruption, dilution and degeneration, and
explores potentially ongoing anxieties with the loss of racial purity. The
study is in no sense a critique of Bhabha, but perhaps a reminder that
the term “hybridity” is not necessarily a celebratory figure for cultural
enrichment. Rather more acerbically than Young, Antony Easthorpe

argues that the problem with Bhabha’s concept of hybridity is that it is
constantly opposed to non-hybridity, and this in itself becomes another
unhelpful binary opposition. Bhabha’s writing suggests that it is either
possible to have a complete identity, or no identity at all, and even worse,
Easthorpe asserts that he treats hybridity as a “transcendental signified”
(1998: 345). Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997) notes that, for Bhabha, all cul-
tures are hybrid, but this means that it is not clear how useful the term is
in describing specifically postcolonial experience. Bhabha’s writing slips
into a universalism that is not necessarily productive for the invention
of a specific anti-colonial political strategy.
These points are often linked to a general unease with Bhabha’s highly
theoretical, frequently psychoanalytic idiom, and to a frustration with
his over-inflated belief in the efficacy of the philosopher’s role. Bhabha is
accused of overlooking historical contexts, of blurring different experi-
ences of colonialism and, indeed, of failing to consider the particular
role of gender in the construction of a postcolonial identity. In each case,
the implication is that there is no room in his thought for the specificity
or the agency of the colonized: concrete policy and action are occluded
by an excessively generalized, even at times universalized, discussion of
the workings of discourse. These criticisms are in many ways justified,
and it is certainly true that Bhabha has little to say about the mechanics
of armed struggle. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that he never
claimed that his own style of analysis should replace a more material-
ist postcolonialism, and one might conceive of the theory of colonial
ambivalence as another level of critique but not as a holistic programme.
His aim, like that of Derrida, is also to uncover the anxiety underpin-
ning claims for knowledge and mastery, and in the process he implies
that he knows his own thought might contain blind spots, moments of
uncertainty and incompatible goals. His writing does not use form to
explore the same dynamic between universalism, specificity and sin-
gularity as Derrida’s does, but Bhabha’s self-consciousness nevertheless
testifies to an understanding of the difficulties of any drive for secure
and stable knowledge of the other in his own work.
Moreover, in his engagement with thinkers such as Guha, Bhabha
does raise the question of native agency. His own argument is that agency
is created in a context of contingency, which means that although it is
grounded in a moment, it is not totalized by that process of ground-
ing. Insurgent agency responds strategically to its moment, but that
moment is also one of indeterminacy. Solidarity and collective identity
can be invented in the name of emancipation, but this might be with
an awareness of the contingency of those constructs. Indeed, Bhabha

notes that Guha’s own concept of agency stresses “the hybridised signs
and sites” (1994: 187), for example of the Tebhaga movement in Bengal
in 1946 (where peasants demanded to reduce the proportion of their
crops taken by landlords). A thinking of agency is compatible with an
awareness of ambivalence and hybridization, even if Bhabha’s focus is
more on the complexity of its construction than on the mechanics of
its deployment.
Bhabha’s recent work on minority rights is also more clearly politi-
cal than the essays of The Location of Culture. In his Oxford Amnesty
lecture “On Writing Rights”, Bhabha notes that in his discussion of the
recognition of equal rights, political theorist Charles Taylor implies,
perhaps unwittingly, that “all cultures deserving of respect are whole
societies, their ‘wholeness’ represented by a long, deep, historical con-
tinuity”, and even more, Taylor excludes what he calls “partial milieux”
(Bhabha 2003: 166). These “partial milieux” are hybridized cultures,
minority groups in the interstices between national identities, but
Taylor’s implication is that these groups are somehow not worthy of
the same rights as those assimilated into the national community. Even
more, Bhabha alludes to an amendment to article 27 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights based on a similar exclusion. If,
formerly, it had been held that unassimilated minorities presented a
challenge to the nation, then the amendment stated that this was not
necessarily the case if the group had been in residence for a long period
of time. Again, the implication is that interstitial groups are somehow
outside the discourse of human rights: rights are only accorded to
those who “over a long period of time” have enhanced the life of the
nation. Bhabha goes on to read a poem by Adrienne Rich as a call
for attention to subjects whose differences are constantly negotiated,
rather than accorded any permanent essence and sovereignty. Subjects
do not necessarily belong to either one group or another and, indeed,
the individual and the group, singularity and solidarity, are no longer
pitted against one another. These new minorities are between state and
non-state, and create affiliations across various milieux. Once again,
Fanon is another example of a thinker who proposes a notion of culture
that requires continual questioning, and this affirmation of movement
and negotiation continues to have resonance in a society still run by
discrimination and hierarchy.
Bhabha’s ethical political recommendation here is for the “right
to narrate”: the right to affirm one’s cultural reinvention and for that
reinvention to be recognized in the discourse of human rights. This
“right to narrate” is also integral to Bhabha’s vision of democracy:

[it] assumes that there is a commitment to creating “spaces” of
cultural and regional diversity, for it is only by acknowledging
such cultural resources as a “common good” that we can ensure
that our democracy is based on dialogue and conversation, dif-
ficult though it may be, between the uneven and unequal levels
of development and privilege that exist in complex societies.
(Ibid.: 181)
It is clear that Bhabha’s thinking here is very much based on the notions
of ambivalence and hybridization sketched in The Location of Culture,
but in essays such as this he gives them a clearer political mission, even
if this is politics as guided by the ethical rather than by concrete policy.
Bhabha strives now to think ethically and politically at the same time:
his fundamental principles of respect for difference, and his belief in
subjectivity as fractured and evolving, are now expressed in terms of the
politics of human rights and the achievement of social equality. It may
remain unclear quite how Bhabha proposes to ensure this equality, but
his attention to the discourse of minority rights marks the beginning
of a transition into the political.
Finally, it is intriguing that, like Fanon, Sartre and Said, Bhabha returns
to the notion of the “human” in his attempt to unite politics and ethics.
Despite his earlier criticisms of Said, in his encomium to Said’s work
after his death what Bhabha pauses on is the latter’s careful, thoughtful,
ethical humanism. Again, this is not the Eurocentric humanism rejected
by Foucault and Derrida, but a more modest call for attention to the
multiplicity and diversity of human experience and an awareness of the
tensions and conflicts that still govern that experience. Bhabha applauds
what he calls Said’s “slow humanist reflection”, which takes into account
the constant mediation between part and whole, between the individual
and the group, and which “strengthens our resolve to make difficult and
deliberate choices relating to knowledge and justice, ‘how and how not?’
in the face of contingency, silence, and mortality” (Bhabha 2005: 376).
In addition, in his essays on rights and democracy Bhabha repeatedly
invokes the notion of the human to express a “strategic” call for the
recognition of all subjects. The term necessitates an understanding of
the negotiation between the singular and the collective, rather than
an insistence on any reductive and enclosed national framework. For
Bhabha, “the ‘human’ is identified not with a given essence, be it natural
or supernatural, but with a practice, a task” (Bhabha 2000: 3). The term
enables him to think outside the borders of “whole societies” and offers
a conception of subjectivity as evolving, and worthy of respect as a result

of that evolution. This retention of the notion of humanity is, then,
surprising in a thinker as vehemently poststructuralist as Bhabha but,
despite its flaws and risks, the term does function in postcolonialism as
a means to think through both ethical and political emancipation. It is
ethical in its call for respect for the potentially “infinite” other, and it is
political in its demand for the accordance of rights, such as citizenship,
on the basis of that respect. It is with this return to the “human”, then,
that Bhabha proposes to bridge the gap left open in Derrida’s work and,
although the practical implementation of Bhabha’s recommendations
remains sketchy, the achievement of this curious return is precisely its
tentative articulation of a political ethics and an ethical politics.
Key points
• Derrida criticizes the ethnocentrism of Western metaphysics

and draws attention to the exclusion of the other in the work
of thinkers such as Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. He also explores
the violence of the imposition of the colonial language on Alge-
rians in The Monolingualism of the Other. This text is challeng-
ing, moreover, because it raises questions about the very nature
of postcolonial critique. Derrida shifts here between a universal
denunciation of sovereignty in any language, a reflection on the
alienation of Algerian Jews, and a personal memoir.
• Derrida draws explicitly on Levinas in his elucidation of an
ethics. Ethics is also separate from politics, according to Derrida,
although they need to be thought alongside one another.
• Bhabha’s postcolonial theory is deeply indebted to that of Derrida,
as he deconstructs the apparent mastery of colonial discourse
and draws attention to the “supplement” of the native’s differ-
ence. Bhabha shows how nationalism is always underpinned by
cultural hybridity: by multiple fragments of cultural practices that
elude any unified postcolonial category.
• Bhabha turns to the question of minority rights in his later work,
and argues for the attribution of rights to those who live between
cultures. Although frequently critical of Said, Bhabha finishes by
upholding his humanism as a way of celebrating the dynamism
and mobility of cultural identity.

six
Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics

and the return to place
The Moroccan thinker Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Martinican Edouard

Glissant both combine the use of deconstructive philosophy with reflec-
tion on the history of the specific postcolonial places within which
they write. Highly indebted to the work of figures such as Derrida
and Foucault, Khatibi and Glissant explore the cultural plurality and
relationality created by colonialism, but recommendations for a gen-
eralized ethical awareness of multiple differences are here tied to a
specific engagement with the effects of colonialism in the Maghreb or
the French Caribbean. This attention to the conditions affecting spe-
cific places does not, however, entail a political and empirical study of
an individual colonial regime, nor does it lead to a grounded form of
activism. Rather, Khatibi and Glissant show how the sorts of universal
ethical opening proposed by Derrida and, by extension, Levinas have
particular resonance in their own regions of the world as a result of
the colonial presence and the region’s patchwork history. Khatibi and
Glissant spend less time exploring the disjunction between the univer-
sal and the specific than Derrida, but nevertheless root their analyses in
the concrete locations of the Maghreb and the Caribbean even as they
derive from these analyses a broader ethics of relationality. If, then,
Derrida and Bhabha swing away from politics in their universalized
reflections on linguistic mastery, différance and cultural ambivalence,
Khatibi and Glissant pursue the ethical opening associated with those
reflections but re-anchor ethics in the particular context of regions that
have been ruptured and fragmented by the colonial presence in distinct
ways. Deconstructive ethics is given a more grounded geographical

resonance, even though this resonance is bound up not with militant
action but with ways of conceiving local history that serve to promote
freedom and to account for multiplicity.
Khatibi’s work is diverse and eclectic, but its resonance for post-
colonialism stems above all from the conception of a “plural Magh-
reb” in the wake of decolonization. Khatibi explicitly draws on Derrida
by aligning deconstruction with decolonization, and by arguing that
any thought of the Maghreb must take into account its plurality and
internal differences rather than relying on an essentialized notion of a
traditional past. Reflection on the Maghreb requires a “pensée autre” or
“other thought”: an alternative conceptual structure privileging also the
region’s multiple languages and their mutual interpenetration. Glissant’s
work calls for a similar opening out of Caribbean identity, although
Glissant goes further than Khatibi in stressing not just bilingualism
but a chaotic melting pot of languages and cultures relating the specific
place of the Caribbean with the rest of the world. The French Caribbean
is the result of a particular combination of cultures, its origin is the
rupture and displacement of the slave trade, and its present is at once
francophone and a complex, changing, Creole fusion of interlocking
cultures and identities. Nevertheless, this specific history engenders a
new understanding of global culture as dynamic and relational, and the
political conditions of the French Caribbean in the end necessitate a
broader ethical call for the embrace of global diversity. In Glissant, this
shift constitutes an uneasy movement within the corpus, and the later
emphasis on globality appears to contradict earlier references to the spe-
cific Caribbean context. Glissant’s writing lacks the self-consciousness of
Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other on this matter, and has been
criticized for its obfuscation of the political. In his most recent work,
however, Glissant apparently relinquishes his goal of political activism,
although he continues to use the example of the Caribbean as a figure
for globalized ethical, aesthetic and cultural renewal.
Abdelkébir Khatibi
Khatibi was born in El-Jadida, Morocco in 1938, and he attended both

Koranic and French schools, before studying sociology at the Sorbonne.
He completed his thesis on the Moroccan novel in 1969, and went on
to publish his autobiography La Mémoire tatouée (Tatooed memory)
in 1971. Khatibi was a member of Souffles, the bilingual literary review
founded in 1966, until it was banned in 1972, but has continued to
khatibi and glissant 127

write and teach, and has become one of Morocco’s leading intellectual
commentators. The scope of Khatibi’s writing is notably wide-ranging,
since he has published both novels and theory, and has treated subjects
as diverse as calligraphy and Islamic art, Orientalism and bilingual-
ism, as well as contemporary Moroccan politics. His distinction among
postcolonial thinkers is that he analyses not only the effects of colo-
nialism on Maghrebian identity and culture, but also the precolonial
past together with the traditions and complexity of modern Arabic and
Islamic culture. His reflections on Morocco are as a result not exclu-
sively bound up with the influence of Francophonie, and although one
of his best-known works is his exploration of the “plural Maghreb” and
its bilingualism after decolonization, his perspective is not narrowly
defined by the history of colonialism (Morocco was, after all, a French
protectorate only for the short period between 1912 and 1954). If he
is a provocative and sophisticated postcolonial thinker, then, he is also
an acclaimed authority on Islamic art and on the condition of modern
Morocco both in the context of the aftermath of colonialism and in
respect of more recent internal developments. His philosophical precur-
sors are Arabic and Islamic scholars such as Suwahardi and Ibn Arabi,
as well as French writers such as Victor Segalen and poststructuralists
such as Derrida and Foucault.
Despite his academic success in both France and Morocco, Khatibi’s
autobiographical narrative La Mémoire tatouée figures its subject as torn
between cultures and exiled in the French language in which the text is
nevertheless written. Like much of the work on bilingualism, however,
this rupture is figured alternately as a source of self-loss and aliena-
tion and as a trigger for creativity and invention. Khatibi’s first name,
Abdélkebir, bears the mark of a violent severing, since it contains the
echo of “Aïd el Kébir”, the festival of the commemoration of the sacri-
fice by Abraham of his son Isaac and the day of the author’s birth. La
Mémoire tatouée opens with the revelation of this originary destruc-
tion, as if the narrative persona carries the wound of the violation of
Morocco by the French presence. Next, Khatibi’s autobiographical per-
sona reflects on the disjunction caused by his education in a secular
French school, where colonial and republican values are grafted on to,
but do not weld with, his Islamic upbringing. The French language is
also a “tattoo” or graft whose shapes cover without obliterating both the
Arabic learned at the Koranic school and the Berber language spoken
at home. Expressions of disorientation and perplexity are nevertheless
increasingly juxtaposed with celebrations of intercultural exchange, as
the narrator travels jubilantly from Paris to Berlin, London, Stockholm

and Cordoba. The narrative finishes with a theoretical reflection that
will go on to inform his thinking in Maghreb pluriel (Plural Maghreb)
(1983), and in which Khatibi explores the interpenetration of one lan-
guage with another within the expression of the bilingual subject. If the
persona’s mother tongue retreats when he writes or speaks in French,
it nevertheless resurfaces in the form of fleeting traces and fragments
that upset the rhythm of the French. This lingering murmur of one
idiom within the tones of the other forms the basis for Khatibi’s theory
of language as the dynamic and constantly mutating product of its rela-
tions with other languages.
In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi uses this conception of linguistic relation-
ality and plurality to propose an alternative understanding or “pensée
autre” of the Maghreb. Quoting Fanon’s call for the definitive termina-
tion of the European society in the Maghreb, Khatibi argues that a claim
for difference in that region should not be a straightforward affirmation
but a mode of identification that continually calls itself into question.
Thinking the Maghreb requires a “double critique”: one that points out
the limitations of the region’s Western heritage and another that rejects
the return to an archaic patrimony, since this is in turn too rigid, too
theological and patriarchal. Khatibi recommends a “plural thought”,
a definition of the Maghreb that leaves behind the quest for roots, for
origins and an essential identity based on tradition, and that renews
itself by exploring the continuously developing and multiple differences
that make up North Africa. This call for an alternative thought of the
Maghreb consists for Khatibi in the rejection of three unhelpful schools
that have hindered its development. First, Khatibi rejects “traditional-
ism”, in this case the return to a rigid and immutable conception of
theological doctrine or, in Khatibi’s words, “metaphysics reduced to the-
ology” (1983: 24; my translation throughout). This hardened theology is
not at all a commemoration of the region’s past but its denial or forget-
ting. Secondly, Khatibi laments the failures of Salafism, a broadly Sunni
school of thought upholding the early days of Islam as exemplary, and
he qualifies this movement as “metaphysics that has become a doctrine”.
Khatibi at the same time condemns the use of that doctrine in the for-
mation of political objectives and social pedagogy: Salafism is unable to
cope with the modern Maghreb, since it too insists on a strict division
between itself and the other (ibid.: 25). Thirdly, Khatibi reveals the defi-
ciencies of rationalism, “metaphysics that has become technical” (ibid.).
Khatibi’s point here is to demonstrate the limitations of the work of the
ideological thinker, Abdallah Laroui, whose Idéologie arabe contempo-
raine (Contemporary Arab ideology) insists on a separation between the

three fields despite their interpenetration in Maghrebian thought, and
whose historicism or rationalism results in too neat and too schematic a
continuity in the history of that troubled region. The alternative “pensée
autre” of the Maghreb would, conversely, take into account disorder
and dissymmetry, and would “broaden our freedom of thought” (ibid.:
33). This call for freedom means that thought, or philosophy, is itself
brought into the realm of social and political struggle.
Khatibi conceives this new thought of the Maghreb with reference
to the work of Derrida and Foucault. For Khatibi, “decolonization”
necessarily entails the “deconstruction” of logocentrism and ethnocen-
trism, the undermining of the Western belief in self-presence and self-
sufficiency. Khatibi’s deconstruction calls for the philosopher to stand
outside his assumed frameworks, to do away with binary oppositions
(such as that between reason and unreason) and to subvert the very
logic within which he writes. This mode of thinking is at the heart of
decolonization, since in Khatibi’s words, “to decolonize would be the
other name for this other thought, and decolonization: the silent ending
of Western metaphysics” (ibid.: 51). Furthermore, Khatibi points out the
difficulties associated with using Marxism to theorize decolonization,
since Marx’s thought still rests on the notion that the colonized must
adopt a mode of thinking that is Western in origin. Khatibi concedes
that Marx was inspirational in helping countries of the Third World to
conceive a revolution, but denounces his drive to unify the world by
means of his global system. Marx’s thought is, in spite of itself, another
form of Hegelian absolute knowledge. Later on in the text, Khatibi
also notes the insufficiency of Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of
production, and argues that in the precolonial Maghreb, for example,
politico-military violence was as significant as economic violence. It
is the self-critical impulse of Derrida and Foucault, then, that Khatibi
champions as a liberatory form of philosophy, and not the revolutionary
militancy of Marx. Khatibi also adds to the work of the former thinkers
a call for attention to bilingualism as a means of conceptualizing a philo-
sophical language estranged from itself. Arab knowledge, for example,
is constantly influenced and interrupted by Western knowledge, but
this influence passes through a process of translation. In this way it
dramatizes exchange between languages, Khatibi’s “pensée en langues”
or thought that takes place in more than one language at once.
Maghreb pluriel also contains a chapter on Orientalism, which
consists in a somewhat devastating reading of the renowned French
thinker and sociologist Jacques Berque’s work on the Islamic world.
Khatibi notes that Berque attempts to establish links between an Arab

present and an Arab past, between the Koran and both modern and
classical poetry, and between technology, decolonization and multiple
examples of Arab culture. In so doing, however, he creates a unified
artifice underpinned, according to Khatibi, by Western metaphysics.
This means that Berque identifies a determinate being that he calls the
Orient; he gives it an ontology. Orientalism of this sort, propagated
also by Louis Massignon, confers on the Orient specificities that result
in an affirmed essentialism. Furthermore, Orientalism is for Khatibi
accompanied by positivism, and also by a form of humanism, which
in Berque is derived from Enlightenment thinking. In addition to this
reliance on metaphysics, however, Berque goes on to draw on sociology,
referring to particular customs and practices, but his descriptions serve
only to reify and caricature the Arab people. The son of a colonial offi-
cial in Algeria, Berque was born there and later lived in Morocco, but
his mistake was to use that experience in Morocco to try to speak for
the whole of the Arab world. He finishes by fixing the identity of the
Arab people, whereas for Khatibi “the other cannot be reduced and
brought back to an essence, be it one of paradise, warm and fragrant”
(1983: 133). Berque assumes an astonishingly neat continuity between
classical and modern Arabs, and encapsulates a diversity of traditions
into the framework of a homogeneous identity. Orientalism for Khatibi
should be bilingual, in that it should, as Berque also dreams, accomplish
an exchange between cultures, but Khatibi reminds us that there will
nevertheless always remain the trace of the untranslatable. The error
of Berque was to translate the untranslatable into a stilted rhetoric that
immobilized and homogenized the other’s difference, rather than retain-
ing a Levinasian sense of the openness and potential inaccessibility of
that difference.
Khatibi constantly champions through his work an understanding
of bilingualism as an open-ended exchange and a movement between
languages in which linger, nevertheless, merely hints of the untrans-
latable. In the essay “Bilingualism and Literature”, printed in Maghreb
pluriel, he explores the example of the novel Talismano, by Tunisian
writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, and reads into its French expression both
intercultural exchange and the inevitable silencing of the original. The
very title page of the novel inaugurates this study of hidden traces. The
initial phoneme “A” of the author’s first name is already a mistranslation
of a sound that only exists in Arabic, and which, in a form of archaic
calligraphy, figures also the “eye”. The result of this mistranslation is
that the work is introduced by this effect of effacement: it “opens with
an absent eye, with blindness, with the invisible and the unreadable”

(Khatibi 1983: 182). Writing in French, for the Arab author, in this way
at the same time evacuates the mother tongue. Nevertheless, Khatibi
goes on to argue that Meddeb’s text constantly uses the preposition “à”
(“to” or “at”), as if the accent on the “a” could transliterate the original
Arabic sound excluded from the title page, and to make up for this
absence. The work contains the trace of the author’s name, but this trace
constantly undergoes a process of transformation: “it falls under the
sway of a double genealogy, a double signature, which are as much the
literary effects of a lost gift, of a giving that is split in its origin” (ibid.:
186). In this process of translation, Khatibi suggests that the two lan-
guages signal to each other but at the same time exclude one another,
and this simultaneous interaction and withdrawal defines the narra-
tive that “speaks in languages”. There is a bilingualism within Meddeb’s
French, which operates both a movement of transformation and a split-
ting or division. The narrative forms an example of a language existing
in relation to other languages, which by turns interrupt its rhythms and
lie dormant beneath its surface.
This bilingual writing is a source of both alienation and enjoyment.
Khatibi locates in Meddeb’s text a certain hermeticism, in that the lan-
guage becomes a sort of formal edifice that hides the memories that the
author nevertheless seeks to translate. Memories and traces of the mater-
nal language, conceived also in psychoanalytic terms as the language of
fusion with the mother, are traumatically repressed and occluded even
as they scatter themselves beneath the artifice of the French. These traces
figure the Lacanian “fragmented body” of the narrator, the disintegra-
tion of an irrevocably lost totality. In Khatibi’s own novel of bilingual-
ism, Love in Two Languages (1990), however, this alienation and loss
are constantly juxtaposed with jubilation and creativity. Love across
languages results in a confrontation with the incommunicable, but it is
also a trigger for desire and a quest for fusion. Bilingualism is a form
of separation, but the form also engenders a plural, relational form of
writing for Khatibi, in which languages jostle against one another and
provocatively permeate one another with fragments of alterity. The
bilingual text contains silence, and yet, by the end of the text, it gives
rise to a “folie de la langue”, the chaotic accumulation of phonemes and
signifiers in the creation of a new, plural mode of expression. This dual
attitude equally characterizes Khatibi’s study of the stranger in French
writing (Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française; 1987), a text
in which analyses of writers such as Segalen, Jean Genet and Roland
Barthes are capped with a championing of “literary internationality”.
The figure of the stranger implies untranslatability, but in the works

examined this can also become an invigorating and enriching encounter
with alterity.
Khatibi’s tentative move towards a celebration of bilingual relation-
ality is at the same time an aesthetic and an ethical call. In an essay on
Derrida and borders, for example, Khatibi concludes by enquiring after
the effects of an awareness of foreignness within languages: “in what
way is this impropriety, this hybridization and this troubling of identity
favourable to idiomatic and stylistic inventions?” (Khatibi 1994: 449;
my translation). An awareness of otherness in language is also a way
to seek new forms of writing, new styles and new sources of creativity.
Khatibi’s celebration of bilingual writing can also be seen as Levinasian,
in that it calls for attention to the intractable and the untranslatable, and
makes of that attention an ethical condition of the use of any language.
All language, for Khatibi, contains traces of other languages, and, like
Levinas’s discourse, it is a site for encounter across differences, although
its proper understanding does not allow the reduction of difference to
the same. Khatibi’s “pensée en langues” and Levinas’s discourse are both
forums for an ethical encounter with an other that resists essentialism,
knowledge and metaphysics. In this way, Khatibi adds to Levinasian
ethics a further dimension in his exploration of bilingualism, and gives
that ethics particular resonance in the context of intercultural com-
munication between France and Morocco. There is nevertheless in this
exploration of French and Arabic bilingualism in the aftermath of colo-
nialism a universal conception of relationality and ethical exchange
within and between all languages.
Moving away from engagement with the context of colonialism and
postcolonialism in the Maghreb, Khatibi also writes about calligraphy
and Islamic art. His analyses have resonance here, however, because
again they provide a means of imagining the open-ended process
of signification in language in a way that subverts the colonial urge
to mastery and knowledge. In the commentary on Meddeb, Khatibi
notes that Arabic calligraphy, in its untranslatability, is the lost source
language of the text. Yet in La Blessure du nom propre (The wound of
the proper name) (1974), Khatibi explores the richness of calligraphic
art, as the calligraphic letters hover between emptiness and plenitude.
Calligraphy confers dynamism on the sign, since calligraphic letters
fluctuate between phonetics, semantics and geometric design. The cal-
ligraphic sign functions musically, pictorially and semantically, and its
potential suggestiveness is heightened and multiplied by the operation
of these different levels of sense. Equally, Khatibi’s L’Art calligraphique
arabe (Arabic calligraphic art) explores the origins of Arabic calligraphy

in the Koran and its link with the belief that the language of the Koran
is sacred or “uncreated”. The writing of the Koran is the direct word of
God, passed down to Mohammed and transcribed, and must be treas-
ured not only for its meaning but also for its form. In both works, more-
over, calligraphy is conceived of as a way of writing that opens up the
space between the referent and the realization of the work of art in its
appeal to multiple forms of sense. This exploration of calligraphy serves
to develop Khatibi’s portrayal of the complexity of Arab culture and the
perhaps often forgotten belief in polysemy.
A final aspect of Khatibi’s writing worth mentioning here is his study
Le Corps oriental (The Oriental body) (2002), which, similarly, uncov-
ers the plurality of meanings associated with the body in Arab and
Islamic culture. Khatibi notes in his commentary on this stunning col-
lection of paintings and photographs that the Orientalist gaze of the
European nineteenth-century painter seeks to unveil and denude the
Oriental body, but also to tie it to its past. Indeed, Khatibi notes that for
Delacroix, “Antiquity is no longer in Rome but in the East”, and depic-
tions of Oriental bodies during this period return repeatedly to stock
figures of the odalisque, the harem, the slaves at Constantinople and
various biblical memories (2002: 175; my translation). The section on
Orientalism is fairly brief, however, since Khatibi’s principal endeavour
is to explore how the body is used, interpreted, decorated and regulated
in diverse ways through the history of Arab and Islamic culture. Indeed,
there are not one but three words for the body in Arabic: jism is the con-
cept of the body, badane designates the bodily constitution and jassad
signifies sensuality and the flesh. Furthermore, Khatibi explores the art
of reading the body by means of the “sensorium” or the flesh: geometric
or physiological forms, gestures and whispers have suggestive connota-
tions that need to be translated. The body is, moreover, central to Islamic
faith. Mohammed is respected and remembered also for his corporeal
presence, and the prophet’s body and acceptance of his mortality serve
as a model for Muslims to follow in understanding their own physical
strengths and weaknesses. The body is also a focus for endless rituals
and rites: the posture of the body during prayer bears meaning, cleanli-
ness is a spiritual value and circumcision is a further way of marking the
body with the trace of society and culture. Again, Khatibi has moved
far beyond postcolonialism in this work, but his intricate study is rele-
vant here for its insistence on plurality and polysemy in a culture often
reduced and misunderstood by the West, by the former colonizer.
While Khatibi has not yet received the attention he deserves in anglo-
phone postcolonial circles, his work is becoming increasingly celebrated

in France, as well as in Morocco. Barthes famously produced a brief
eulogy, “Ce que je dois à Khatibi” (“What I owe Khatibi”), to be used
as the preface for La Mémoire tatouée, in which he celebrates Khatibi’s
invention of a “heterological language” and suggests that French thought
should learn from this decentring of the Western subject. It has been
objected, however, that Barthes’s own response to Khatibi is Oriental-
ist, in that it omits to consider the specific implications of colonialism
in Morocco in favour of a somewhat vague and formless celebration of
Eastern culture. More recently, Derrida dedicated The Monolingualism
of the Other to both Khatibi and Glissant, although Derrida’s comment
that he himself is more “franco-Maghrébin” than Khatibi because he
experiences alienation or disjunction within the French language, rather
than as a result of the confrontation between French and Arabic, can
seem a little tendentious. Nevertheless, the support of figures such as
Barthes and Derrida is just one sign of Khatibi’s growing importance in
francophone thought, and his engagement with Tzvetan Todorov and
Jacques Hassoun, among others, in his collection of essays on bilin-
gualism further testifies to his insightful participation in francophone
debate. As I have suggested, however, Khatibi’s thought is provocative
because it succeeds in combining a highly focused study of Morocco,
and of Islamic and Arabic culture, with a critique of colonial and ethno-
centric thought. Knowledge of the supple traditions ignored by the West
is also coupled with an ethical call for attention to the presence of alterity
in any language, and this is both a form of Levinasian intractability and
the trace of another culture or linguistic idiom. This broader ethical call
never becomes universalized in such a way as to occlude the specific
experiences of Moroccan bilingual subjects but lingers rather as a force
that contests the pernicious determinism of colonial discourse. Finally,
this ethics offers a particular vision of poetic enrichment and literary
creativity that transcends borders and categories, and that promises a
mode of thinking freed from the constraints of both colonialism and
metaphysics.
Edouard Glissant and Caribbean Discourse
While Khatibi bases his vision of postcolonial ethics on bilingualism

and plurality in Moroccan culture, Glissant conceives Caribbean identity
and the poetics of “creolization” as the catalyst for what can almost be
read as a global cultural revolution. Writing about his native Martinique,
which remains a French colony having been accorded the status of a

“département d’outre mer” in 1946, Glissant tracks the oppression and
silencing of the Martinican colonized subaltern, but proceeds as a result
to propose not only the embrace of bilingualism but the celebration of
a vast, open-ended network of cultural interactions operating across
the globe and resisting the determinist forms of thinking propagated
by colonial regimes. Like Khatibi, Glissant too responds to the political
injustices of colonialism by advocating an alternative ethical and cultural
model of relationality, although the focus on place in Glissant crucially
involves the denunciation specifically of the rupture brought about by
the slave trade in the Caribbean. Rather than remaining aware at once
of the distinction and the complicity between politics and ethics, how-
ever, Glissant clearly moves through his career from an emphasis on the
former to an embrace of the latter, and of its expression through aesthetic
production. Indeed, the political motivations of his early novels are still
perceptible in Caribbean Discourse (1989), but by the time of Traité du
tout-monde (1997d) and La Cohée du Lamentin (2005), politics is all but
dismissed for its conventional reliance on a territorialism and a deter-
minism that are anathema to Glissant’s cultural ethics. While Khatibi
and, above all, Derrida theorize and maintain the tension between ethics
and politics in postcolonial criticism, Glissant slips perhaps rather more
glibly from one to the other, giving rise to a certain unease among his
readers concerning the limited efficacy or practicality of the later work
and its contradictions with the earlier militancy. Where Glissant can be
seen to be unrivalled, however, is in the dynamism and expansiveness of
his poetics and in his conception of the value of that poetics independ-
ently of the political requirements of the (post)colony.
Glissant’s thought is quite clearly a development and extension of that
of the poet and politician Césaire, whose Notebook of a Return to My
Native Land (1995), an extraordinary and powerful landmark in post-
colonial literature, constitutes an incendiary reclaiming of Antillean ter-
ritory from the colonizer’s warped vision. The “return” performed by
Césaire’s poem at once affirms the cultural values of negritude and the
traditions of a black African heritage, and eschews French exoticism to
confront the sickness and disease of Martinique at the hands of French
politicians and slave-owners. The work ends with an image of the slaves
rising up and taking control of the slave ship in a compelling gesture of
defiance (Césaire 1995: 131). Far from redefining Martinique by means
of a new set of categorizations, however, Césaire’s return is crucially at
the same time an opening out: it is an exposition of the dynamism and
mobility of black Caribbean culture and experience. Similarly, Césaire’s
Discourse on Colonialism (2000) is another virulent denunciation of

the colonial project, in which the author explicitly compares the dehu-
manization engendered by colonialism to the horrors of Nazism. Most
famously, Césaire now asserts that colonization is “thingification”: colo-
nialism deprives the colonized of their humanity, dispossesses them of
their land and resources, and saps the spirit and energy of the societies
under its grasp. Another revolutionary inspiration for Glissant was C. L.
R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), which charts the revolt of the slaves
of San Domingo, inaugurated by Toussaint Louverture in 1791, followed
by the creation of an independent Haiti in 1804. First published in 1938,
James’s work narrates an allegory of liberation and emancipation and has
served as an inspiration for many subsequent anti-colonial thinkers in
the Caribbean. Both James and Césaire are major influences in Glissant’s
rejection of the dehumanizing force of colonialism and in his exploration
of the expansiveness of Caribbean identity and culture.
Glissant’s early novels tend to be seen as the most militant of his
works in their search to depict some form of subaltern agency. It is in
Caribbean Discourse, however, that Glissant articulates his critique of
colonialism in quasi-philosophical form, and it is also in this expansive
tome that he starts to envisage the link between the political denun-
ciation of slavery and exploitation on the one hand, and an emergent
“poetics of Relation” on the other. The full French text of Le Discours
antillais (Caribbean Discourse) is a weighty, even cumbersome, volume,
structured by multiple sections, subsections and subdivisions as if in a
parody of French structuralist criticism and its claim to scientism. Its
underlying political foundations are perhaps clearest, however, in the
section on the relation between “History” and “histories”, and in which
official History with a capital H is denounced as a phantasm of the
West that specifically occludes plural local histories. Moreover, Glissant
argues that “the French Caribbean is the site of a history characterized
by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade”
(1989: 61). Caribbean history is brutally severed from its origins as a
result of the transportation of slaves from Africa, and this discontinu-
ity has prevented the people from forming a national solidarity, as the
African nations did, against the colonial power. Official History relies on
a hierarchy that privileges Europe at the expense of Africans or Ameri-
cans, but it is also structured by a linearity that fails to account for the
disjunctions and losses of Caribbean “non-history”. If the historian can
create a continuity out of the History of Martinique, setting out a schema
starting with the slave trade, passing through the plantations system
and the appearance of the elite, to assimilation and more recently to
what Glissant terms “oblivion”, then even this continuity is structured

by changes brought about by the French: they are a function of someone
else’s history.
The non-history of Martinique turns out to be the basis for Glis-
sant’s economic analysis earlier in the book. Colonialism and slavery
bring about the “dispossession” not only of local history but also of
the land and resources, but Glissant also argues that the colonizer in
Martinique and Guadeloupe lacks control of the market, and runs an
economy of bartering: “he exploits on a day to day basis” (ibid.: 38).
This means that the Martinican economy is tightly integrated into the
French economy, making it difficult for the colonized to rebel. Glis-
sant equally asserts that this structure engenders a lack of collective
responsibility, and the consequences of this include in turn an absence
of global investment, no accumulation of capital and a tendency towards
under-productivity. This exposition of the lack of local agency mir-
rors at the same time the portrait of lethargy, passivity and stagnation
found in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. The forms
of resistance that have occurred in Martinique are also, according to
Glissant, of the sort that cannot lead to the national overthrow of the
colonial regime. The “economy of survival” means that the worker is
able to carve out a terrain that assures the upkeep of the family, but
this does not lead to any form of collective progress. A more violent
mode of resistance is that of the maroons – escaped slaves who started
their own plantations on new plots of land – but again, the isolation of
the maroons meant that it was difficult for their rebellion to take on a
collective force and meaning. Intellectual maroons, a class made up of
“mulattos” and sons of agricultural workers who benefited at least from
primary education, were then compromised by their reliance on that
French education; indeed, “they quickly become the vehicle of official
thought” (Glissant 1997e: 119; my translation). What the Martinicans
lack, then, is a distinct and active nationalist project that would assure
the repossession of their territory.
Glissant proposes as a new form of contestation the notion of
“Antillanité”, an alternative vision of Caribbean collective identity that
will define history and culture in terms that are not structured by West-
ern myths and ideology. This is admittedly unlikely in the end to provide
the basis for a national revolution, but Glissant uses it as a starting-point
for the invention of an innovative form of historical thinking designed
to rescue local people from consignment to “non-history” and to fight
the stagnation and passivity diagnosed also by Césaire. Right up until
departmentalization in 1946, Glissant argues that “French Caribbean
people are thus encouraged to deny themselves as a collectivity, in order

to achieve an illusory individual quality” (1989: 7) and he sets out to
re-imagine that collective identity in terms that resist the sweeping uni-
versalization of European thought. In sketching this new concept of
Antillanité, however, Glissant at the same time rejects Césaire’s use of the
notion of a “retour” or “reversion”, since he identifies within that term
a reliance on a centred, determinist identity complicit once again with
colonial thinking. Césaire’s return no doubt refused this rigid identitari-
anism in its celebration of the expansiveness of black identity and in its
exploration of the active relation between the archipelago and the rest
of the world, topographically, politically and culturally, but Glissant’s
argument is nevertheless that the concept of return assumes the stability
of the returning self. Indeed, “Reversion is the obsession with a single
origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being” (ibid.: 16). Con-
versely, then, Glissant recommends the invention of Antillanité through
“détour” or “diversion”: the recourse of the culture that is not directly
pitted against an enemy but that needs to conceive its resistance sur-
reptitiously. The détour cannot rely on the construction of a coherent
alternative identity, but takes the form rather of “an interweaving of
negative forces that go unchallenged” (ibid.: 19). It is also a strategy or
moment that should lead to its own “dépassement” or development; its
success determines that it ultimately transcends its own confines.
Glissant’s prime example of this strategy of détour is the use of the
Creole language. In using Creole, the slave or worker embraces the
simplified language imposed on him by the master, and he twists and
appropriates it so that it symbolizes his difference and his resistance. In
Glissant’s terms, “you wish to reduce me to childish babble, I will make
this babble systematic, we shall see if you can make sense of it” (ibid.:
20). Creole becomes a ruse used by the slave to alienate the slave-owner
and to reclaim the idiom as his own. While for later thinkers and writers
such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant “créolité” names a
culture to be affirmed and maintained, however, Glissant’s conception
of the use of Creole as a strategy of détour requires that it in turn be sur-
passed, that it lead somewhere new. Fanon’s revolutionary fervour and
Césaire’s poetic language brought concrete change: they used a strategy
of détour in order to envisage the world differently and, indeed, accord-
ing to Glissant they also understood that the détour must on some level
be mingled with another return – not to an origin, but “to the point
of entanglement” (ibid.: 26). Clinging on to Creole would cause Mar-
tinican culture to stagnate, and Glissant fears that this “pidgin” is not
a language in which Martinicans can express their creativity. Glissant
has been criticized for failing to see the rich potentiality of the Creole

culture and language, but it is nevertheless the argument of Caribbean
Discourse that it is not créolité but the exploration of a broader point of
entanglement that will serve as a focus for Antillanité. This also means
that Glissant recommends the continuous and unpredictable process of
creolization, through the embrace of interaction and exchange, rather
than the establishment of a specifically Creole identity.
This search for a “point of entanglement” at the heart of Antillanité
leads next to the elaboration of a “poetics of Relation”: an exploration
of Caribbean identity that celebrates its juxtaposition and intermingling
of diverse cultural influences and practices. This is not just “métissage”,
the simple mixture of black and white, but a more complex interaction
or creolization that produces the unpredictable and the unexpected.
This dynamic relationality recalls the transculturation celebrated by
the Cuban thinker Fernando Ortiz, which, rather than describing
the adoption of a new culture implied by “acculturation”, stresses “the
highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of
the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place
here” (Ortiz 1995: 97). Similarly, Glissant’s poetics of Relation promotes
“Diversity” over “Sameness” , and this conception of Diversity brings no
new fusion, but “means the human spirit’s striving for a cross-cultural
relationship, without universalist transcendence” (Glissant 1989: 98).
While Sameness privileges Being, Diversity inaugurates relationality,
and whereas Sameness fuels the European expansionist project, Diver-
sity emerges in the resistance of the people. In terms reminiscent of
Levinas’s work, Glissant offers an ethical critique here of the totali-
tarianism underpinning European universalism and argues that even
the French discourse of human rights is born from this “saturation of
Sameness” and blocks the requirements of Diversity. It is in literature or
poetics that Glissant suggests that the ethics of Diversity survives and,
as we shall see, it is this investment in literariness and aesthetics that
will come to dominate Glissant’s later thinking.
Glissant’s belief in the power of literature nevertheless does not entail
a privileging of the written word. Indeed, the relational culture he seeks
to reinvigorate is one that celebrates oral story-telling, and the oral form
for Glissant performs the mutability and dynamism encapsulated by the
Diverse. Glissant goes so far as to attest that “the written is the universal-
izing influence of Sameness, whereas the oral would be the organized
manifestation of Diversity” (ibid.: 100). Printed forms, although poten-
tially protean in meaning, are nevertheless fixed on the page, whereas
the oral form allows the speaker to adapt or revise what he narrates;
orality leaves room for digression, omission and recreation. Glissantian

poetics recommends as a result the insertion of the oral into the writ-
ten form, and the inscription of the dynamism of the spoken language
into the literary. Once again, Glissant’s celebration of oral culture does
not lead to the privileging of créolité or indeed folklore here, however,
and if Glissant conceives a role for folk culture this will be as a strategic
affirmation leading to its own necessary transcendence. The poetics of
Relation upholds the dynamic and changing interaction of the oral and
the written, and not just the retention and affirmation of an existing
tradition of story-telling.
Furthermore, the Diverse is expressed not only in the use of the
Creole language or in oral culture, but through multilingualism. If
Khatibi’s conception of bilingualism served to foreground linguistic
relationality and dynamism, Glissant goes even further than Khatibi
and exalts the interpenetration of any given language with multiple
changing idioms. Glissant rewrites Saussure’s distinction between “lan-
guage”, meaning the language system, and “speech”, denoting particular
instances of the usage of the language, in order to criticize the assumed
hermeticism of the former and to emphasize the multifarious creativity
performed by the latter. Noting that multilingualism through history
has frequently fallen back on a belief in the separation and hierarchy
between languages, Glissant suggests instead that the very concept of
language or “langue” can be opened out by examination of the creative
inventions of particular languages or “langages”. For Glissant, “language
[la langue] creates the relation, particular instances of language [le lan-
gage] creates difference, both of which are equally precious” (Glissant
1997e: 552). It is through the inflexion of his written French with the
rhythms and idioms of his spoken Creole, for example, that Glissant
creates his own symbiotic language, and it is with these very sorts of
singular but multivalent langages that the universalism and standardi-
zation associated with French, and instituted through colonialism, can
be undermined.
Caribbean Discourse suggests that this contestatory dynamism can be
created through the mixing of French and Creole, or of the oral and the
written. The later sections of the French text additionally introduce the
notion of “verbal delirium” as a means of describing “deviant manifesta-
tions … which limit themselves to the practice of particular languages
(written or spoken)” (ibid.: 625), although these by their very nature
should not be taken as exemplary. Nevertheless, Glissant schematizes
some of the forms of this “verbal delirium” with a certain self-conscious
irony, noting for example the use of repetition, formulae, evidence,
structures that proceed by proliferation rather than sequence, and the

vision of the self as determined by the transcendent vision of the other.
For the most part, however, this deviance is a dysfunction that may
subvert the norms of the French language, but that will eventually be
surpassed by a more expansive and creative relationality. Glissant next
explores the theatre as a means for the seizing of consciousness, which
may pass through a phase of folklore, but whose dynamism should also
seek to reach beyond folklore. Crucially, however, these strategies are
conceived as forms of contestation that might lead to national liberation
and, despite its privileging of poetics, the text retains something of a
Marxist vision of repossession. At the end of the study Glissant returns
to the “poetics of Relation” as the form that will explore both the com-
plex reality of Martinican culture and the diversity and dynamism of all
cultures of the world, but the final pages nevertheless defiantly call for
the independence of Martinique via this revolution in cultural mental-
ity. Creolization, conceived alongside Glissant’s more acerbic sections
on political and economic inequality, is championed here as a strategic
tool leading to national liberation.
Glissant’s poetics
In addition to Caribbean Discourse and the novels, Glissant produced

a series of essays or reflections, now published by Gallimard as a series
entitled Poétique and numbered sequentially. There is a large degree of
repetition and rewriting across the series and, indeed, The Poetics of Rela-
tion (1997c) is also explicitly “a reconstituted echo or spiral retelling” of
Caribbean Discourse (Glissant 1997b: 16), as well as of L’Intention poé-
tique (originally published in 1969 but repackaged as Poétique II; 1997b).
This spiral structure is evidently itself conceived as an alternative to the
linearity of official or European history; indeed, the individual volumes
are themselves a subversively hybrid mixture of literary, philosophical
and intermittently political language, structured not by linear argu-
ment but by overlapping fragments. The later texts of the Poétique series
are also markedly different from Caribbean Discourse, however, both
in their privileging of aesthetics in place of politics and in their own
highly literary form. The Poetics of Relation tells us that Relation not only
“binds” and “relays”, but it also “recounts”, suggesting it comes about
through the creation and transfer of narratives. The creolization cham-
pioned in Caribbean Discourse is now the product of an open-ended
form of story-telling, where sections of narrative are “relayed” from one
narrator to the next. It is also striking that the opening of The Poetics of

Relation expands on the philosophical discussion of the slave trade as
the inauguration of a non-history, this time through an intensely poetic
evocation of the abyss across which the slave ships sailed on their jour-
ney to the Caribbean. The description of this originary exile nevertheless
here gives rise to a new concept, that of “errance” or “errantry”, suggest-
ing not so much loss but wandering and discovery. The initial image of
the transportation of the slaves in this way leads not to alienation but to
the creation and narration of “shared knowledge”.
Furthermore, the poetics of that relationality is conceived using a
new set of images, derived from Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thou-
sand Plateaus (1988), opposing the root structure with that of the rhi-
zome and building in turn on Derrida’s rejection of origins as far back
as Of Grammatology. Glissant moves away from a vocabulary of political
strategy and ruse in favour of a wholehearted embrace of “rhizomatic
thinking”: a model of cultural identity and exchange based on plural
connections rather than on the positing of a single, monologic origin.
Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant denounces root structures
as reductive, even totalitarian, while celebrating the entangled web of
stems and roots that constitute the rhizome structure:
the root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing
all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome,
an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the
ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over
permanently. (Glissant 1997c: 11)
If the root structure describes an identity firmly planted in the soil,

related to an identifiable and immutable origin, the rhizome, a term
originally used to name those types of plants whose roots form a com-
plex network, evokes a plural and interactive mode of individuation or
self-creation. It also inaugurates a conception of being not as finished
product, but as process or, indeed, as singular “trace”. Any specific iden-
tity is necessarily now tempered and opened out by its connections with
other parts of the rhizome structure. Despite the biological origins of
the concept of the rhizome, however, Glissant’s use of it is above all as
a creative metaphor, as a poetic descriptor of Caribbean relationality
or “nomadic thought”. The rhizome becomes a figure of resistance to
colonial thinking and its privileging of monolingualism, territoriality
and cultural determinism.
It is perhaps not surprising, after this poetic opening, that Glissant’s
The Poetics of Relation proceeds by exploring literary examples of

rhizomatic thought. Glissant notes that the very foundational texts of
community, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the chansons de geste and African
epics, are frequently texts of exile or even errance. These are works in
which the possession of territory is questioned, and in which collec-
tive consciousness is created through the open-ended exploration of
travel and migration rather than through the establishment of borders.
In addition, Glissant cites the poetry of Baudelaire, and argues that, in
exploring the poet’s inner consciousness, Baudelaire reveals that inner
self as vast and expansive. The poetic persona discovers, according to
Glissant, that “the alleged stability of knowledge led nowhere” (ibid.:
24). If Baudelaire’s poetry remains within the confines of the French
language, however, Rimbaud’s famous pronouncement that “I is an
other” becomes for Glissant the archetypal statement of the poetics
of Relation. Rimbaud seeks not merely to deepen his knowledge of
himself, but to transform that self, to transcend and disrupt tradition
and heritage. Segalen’s work is then cited as a further example of an aes-
thetic that embraces the Diverse and, like Khatibi, Glissant recognizes
the importance of Segalen’s conception of a moral or ethical relation
with the other. Conversely, Glissant cites Saint-Jean Perse’s work since
it operates the reverse movement of returning from the periphery (from
his native land Guadeloupe) to the centre. Most importantly, the poetics
of Relation can be located across the history of both French and world
literature, and at the same time, takes different forms when sketched
by different poets. The poetics of Relation is precisely not a specific
mode of writing that can be pinned down and determined, but names
rather more broadly a straining against boundaries, against territorial-
ism, and against monadic forms of identity. Indeed Perse, one of the
writers on whom Glissant dwells at most length, is explored not because
he privileges the Caribbean over Europe, but because his writing invests
in and desires both worlds. Rather more problematically, Glissant also
cites Fanon’s migration from Martinique to France to Algeria as an
example of Relation, although of course this overlooks Fanon’s own
privileging of national identity in the service of the decolonization of
Algeria.
A further example of this movement towards the poetics of Relation
can be found in Baroque art. For Glissant, “baroque art was a reaction
against the rationalist pretense of penetrating the mysteries of the known
with one uniform and conclusive move” (ibid.: 77). Baroque art enjoys
the proliferation and expansion of aesthetic forms: it turns away from
demands for uniformity and eschews transparency. Glissant’s celebra-
tion of the métissage of Baroque art recalls the work of the Cuban writer

and thinker Alejo Carpentier, who evokes the richness of “marvellous
realism” and the Baroque in Latin America. For Carpentier, Baroque
is indeed “art in motion, pulsating art, an art that moves outward and
away from the center, that somehow breaks through its own borders”
(Carpentier 1995: 93). This is also a form of art that arises specifically
from the rapid meeting of cultures, such as in Latin America as a result
of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Postcolonial métissage, for Car-
pentier, leads to dynamic forms of artistic transformation.
Moreover, Baroque art, and the poetics of Relation more generally,
refuses to propose unequivocal and monologic forms of meaning, but
affirms the value of opacity. Glissant recommends forms of art that do
not offer back to the West its own transparent mirror image, but that
give voice to the unfamiliar and the unknown. An adherence to modes
of writing that remain anchored within the standardized form of French,
and that do not explore the contact between French and other languages,
will prevent the culture from developing and enhancing in new and
enriching ways. As a result, Glissant goes on to argue that the promotion
of francophonie as a means of protecting the language and imposing a
standard form of French on the rest of the world repeats the colonial
gesture of silencing other voices. Francophonie for Glissant must on the
contrary be concerned with the evolution of the language and its abil-
ity to convey the idioms of diverse cultures and peoples. Furthermore,
French has since the eighteenth century been associated with myths of
clarity and logic; it has been conceived as a potentially universal tool
for expression able to lend rationality to all speakers. In opposition to
this, Glissant recommends not so much the right of the colonized to
speak their own language, but rather a principle of communication and
interaction between languages. Opacity, then, is not “enclosure within
an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singu-
larity”; it names not the affirmation of a self-enclosed idiom, but the
retention of singular but linguistically complex or relational forms of
expression (Glissant 1997c: 190). It is a sign of confluence and inter-
change rather than of isolation.
One of the most striking developments of The Poetics of Relation,
and indeed of the later volumes of the Poétique series, is the increased
emphasis on this relationality as a new form of totality. Glissant repeat-
edly criticizes the old Eurocentric universalism that imposes its own
restrictive values and cultural identity on the colonies. This universal-
ism is deceptive: it masks its own particularity beneath the myth of
assimilation. Totality, on the other hand, is the vast, inclusive network
of relations and interactions performed in Glissant’s poetics; it is not

a monolithic generalization, but names the whole that is formed by a
diverse and pulsating web of connections. Glissant’s thought retains
a latent Hegelianism in this championing of a dialectic that would
embrace, or even (inadvertently) subsume, the shocks and juxtaposi-
tions it recommends. The dialectic is not totalitarian, it is not absolute,
but nevertheless names a global force of movement and intermin-
gling. Already in The Poetics of Relation, Glissant also conceives the
totality of Relation as the “chaos-monde”, not a fusion or confusion,
but the chaotic and unpredictable combination of movements and
interactions taking place all over the world. Drawing at times a little
spuriously on the science of chaos theory, Glissant uses the model of
chaos to describe the contingency and entropic energy of the poetics
of Relation, and to emphasize its potentially extensive but unpredict-
able effects.
I suggested at the beginning that Glissant’s thought moves further
and further away from a focus on the specificity of the Caribbean, and
certainly the concept of the chaos-monde can be seen to trigger this
relinquishment of a specified poetics grounded in location. The Poetics
of Relation is the third volume in Gallimard’s repackaged series, and
the fourth and fifth volumes, Traité du tout-monde and La Cohée du
Lamentin, clearly develop this embrace of totality at the expense of the
earlier adherence to place. In Traité du tout-monde, Glissant further
elaborates and even systematizes the thought of the chaos-monde or the
“tout-monde” as the meeting, the mutual interference, the harmony or
disharmony between cultures, and this new process is characterized by
speed, by unpredictability, by self-consciousness and by the cultures’
mutual valorization. In La Cohée du Lamentin, the vocabulary of total-
ity is coupled with that of “mondialité” or “globality”, distinct from the
neo-imperialism of “globalization”, and deployed to evoke diversity and
relationality across the planet:
this globality projects into the unprecedented adventure that

is given to all of us to live through today, and into a world,
which, for the first time, so truly and in such an immediate,
sudden way, conceives itself as both multiple and One, and
inextricable. (Glissant 2005: 15)
In addition, Glissant describes the totality of relations as a trembling;

this evokes both the trembling of peoples in the face of disaster, and the
buzzing movement produced by migration, travel and cultural inter-
change. Glissant’s concept of trembling privileges the agitation of forms

of artistic production over fixed systems, over tradition and determin-
ism, and adds to the former discussions of relationality the implication
of an infinite if at times imperceptible mobility. Glissant’s title La Cohée
du Lamentin refers to his birthplace in Martinique, and yet any specific
reference to Martinique or the Caribbean in this work is soon subsumed
in the whirlwind of this trembling, so that the archipelago is nothing
more than a privileged figure for global movement and relationality.
Glissant specifically notes that the danger of evoking the Caribbean as
a unique site of métissage is precisely the potential occlusion of forms
of interaction taking place all over the world.
It is this effective dissolution of Caribbean specificity, however, that
has troubled some of Glissant’s critics. Peter Hallward argues that the
investment in the specificity of Martinique and the construction of
subaltern agency in Glissant’s earlier work is thoroughly surpassed in
the later texts by a reflection on singular self-differentiation. Beings
are continually evolving, totality is constant and interactions between
particular groups are dissolved in this all-encompassing whole. The
détour, opacity and the focus on place turn out to function only in the
service of their own extinction by the totalizing force of the chaos-monde
or globality. Indeed, any assertion of opacity takes place in dialogue
with other cultures, and the specificity that might have been repre-
sented by opacity is diluted and transformed through that dialogue.
Any conception of national agency lingering in Caribbean Discourse is
now disabled by the larger, singular force of totalization, and if fleeting
references to specificity can still be found in The Poetics of Relation, this
“has little to do with relations-with and-between particularities as such”
(Hallward 2001: 123). Hallward notes in particular that the change in
Glissant’s reaction to Perse from Caribbean Discourse to The Poetics
of Relation performs this problematic shift, in that in the earlier work
Perse was condemned for not offering a sufficiently specific vision of
the Caribbean, whereas in The Poetics of Relation he is lauded for his
performance of relationality. Ultimately, for Hallward, the upshot of
this shift is a disastrous rejection of the very concepts that founded
the political bases of Caribbean Discourse: “there can be no national
repossession, for dispossession is now the condition (and opportunity)
of Creative reality itself ” (ibid.: 124–5).
Hallward may well be correct in his diagnosis of Glissant’s startling
disengagement from politics; indeed, the defence of Glissant’s politi-
cal efficacy offered by more positive critics such as Michael Dash can
seem a little weak. The call for the liberation of Martinique, still press-
ing in Caribbean Discourse, was nevertheless clearly even then bound

up with ruses and strategies that were conceived only in the interests of
their eventual surpassing, and the seeds of “globality” lie in that early
investment in “dépassement” or development. Furthermore, if politics
and poetics do to some extent diverge in Glissant’s work, then this may
serve the purpose precisely of creating a space for forms of cultural pro-
duction unconstrained by militancy. In The Poetics of Relation, Glissant
argues for a liberatory aesthetics, and although this is clearly related to
the denunciation of colonial thinking, the poetic forms recommended by
Glissant do not have to function in the service of a specified anti-colonial
movement. Like Hallward, Bongie articulates the difficulties of Glis-
sant’s political disengagement in his essay “Edouard Glissant: Dealing in
Globality” (2008), and yet it is perhaps useful that Bongie nevertheless
concludes by conceding that:
the work of the late Glissant provides a valuable reminder of

the distance between culture and politics, even if its serene
composure cannot help but create a nostalgia for the “rough
futures” that a resistant politics, an anti-colonial politics capa-
ble not merely of dissenting from but of combating the impe-
rial aspirations of the thuggish proponents of Empire, cannot
help but continue to envision. (Bongie 2009)
From this point of view, it might be argued that Glissant is unusually

bold among postcolonial thinkers in that he does not promote a banal
“cultural politics” but conceives a role for aesthetics as a site of experi-
mentation not necessarily linked to the concrete demand for political
independence. The poetics of Relation insists on the liberation of the
imaginary before the overthrow of political oppression.
Finally, the division in Glissant’s work can be seen to recall the schism
of Derrida’s reflections on politics and ethics, although there is no doubt
that Derrida for the most part retains a self-awareness and rigour at
times lacking in Glissant’s cultural utopianism. Despite separating the
demands of ethics and politics, moreover, Derrida nevertheless argues
for the necessity of thinking each alongside the other, however uncom-
fortable or uneasy a process this might be. Glissant’s celebration of poet-
ics is also largely ethical, and is reminiscent of Derridean thought in its
rejection of origins, territorialism and borders, and in its exploration
of singular self-differentiation and being as a “trace”. Nevertheless, if
Glissant’s work recalls that of Derrida, he also invests much more in the
role not only of ethics but of poetics or aesthetics, and it is perhaps in
the text’s creative and evocative whirlwind that it loses touch with the

political altogether. Glissant’s championing of opacity is also reminiscent
of Bhabha’s later affirmation of the rights of minority cultures, especially
when conceived by a critic such as Britton as “an ethical value and a
political right” (1999: 25). When conceived merely as part of the infinite
trembling of the poetics of Relation, however, opacity loses its politi-
cal force and becomes more of a focus of energizing, but ungrounded,
cultural experimentation. Indeed, in the recent musings on aesthetics
gathered in the volume Une nouvelle région du monde (2006), Glissant
explicitly champions the role of aesthetics before ethics and politics, and
the dynamism of relation is associated with aesthetic beauty. Clearly,
then, Glissant moves from the at once ethically and politically impas-
sioned treatise of Caribbean Discourse to a much more literary and aes-
thetic vision of infinite cultural relationality, and the latter’s ambitious
sweep undoubtedly undermines its political resonance in the place from
which it was engendered. Yet that latter stage remains provocative and
enriching perhaps precisely because it imagines an aesthetic and cul-
tural ethics that liberates artistic production from the requirements of
immediate political engagement, and suggests that poetics has a role
that is distinct from that of concrete independence movements. Glissant
in this way advocates a form of literary and linguistic experimentation
that responds to postcoloniality and sets out to liberate thought from
imperialist metaphysics, but that is not subservient to the goal of regime
change. Caribbean Discourse offers a vision of ethical and political criti-
cism rooted in the experiences of Martinique. The Poetics of Relation and
the later works, however, are provocative above all as a result of their
defiant search for an unprecedented postcolonial aesthetics.
Key points
• Khatibi allies decolonization with deconstruction, and recom-

mends (with Derrida) the affirmation of a “pensée autre” (“other
thought”) that would attend to cultural differences. He also evolves
a theory of bilingualism that explores both the alienating effects,
and the creative potential, of writing across two languages.
• Khatibi’s general postcolonial theory of bilingualism is coupled
with detailed exploration of Moroccan, Arab and Islamic cultures.
He criticizes Berque for conceiving Arab culture in generalized
terms, and investigates calligraphic art as a form of representation
that opens up the relation between sign and referent in challen-
ging, and ethical, ways.

• Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse calls for the liberation of Martinique
as well as for a celebration of cultural relationality not unrelated
to Khatibi’s “pensée autre”. Glissant presents Caribbean culture
or “Antillanité” as multiple and diverse, and affirms the creative
potential of “détour” or “diversion” rather than the straightfor-
ward return to roots.
• Glissant’s later work is less political than Caribbean Discourse,
and concentrates on the cultural and aesthetic productivity of
“Antillanité” as a site of relationality. Glissant also incorporates
the Caribbean into the “chaos-monde”, a buzzing, trembling global
network of multiple connections capable of bringing cultural
innovation and change. This later divorce between culture and
politics is a useful sign of the distinct roles played by each in
postcolonial criticism.

seven
Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe,

Mbembe
The work of many of the postcolonial thinkers discussed in this book

has both ethical and political implications, yet most tend to privilege
one approach over the other. Fanon and Sartre’s militancy is under-
pinned by an ethical call for freedom and subjective self-invention,
but their first objective is the decolonization of Algeria, whereas for
thinkers such as Derrida and Bhabha it is the ethical awareness of the
other’s intractability that initially provides the basis for political lib-
eration. Moreover, one can detect in Glissant’s evolving trajectory, and
in Said’s movement between Palestinian politics or Islam and literary
criticism, a distinction between writing that is first and foremost politi-
cal, and that which insists above all on an ethical or cultural agenda. It
is Spivak, Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, however, who engage most
explicitly throughout their work both with Marxist political theory and
with a form of ethical thinking derived from deconstruction. Particu-
larly in the work of Spivak, this duality can lead to contradiction, since
at times she calls for a renewed understanding of subaltern political
agency while at others the subaltern is a more intractable figure signi-
fying the resistance of the other to concrete forms of representation.
Such contradictions are never fully resolved in Spivak’s work, although
she comes up with the notion of “strategic essentialism” in an effort to
argue that specific claims for agency might rest on the assertion of an
identity, but that identity does not necessarily acquire permanence or
“truth”. Nevertheless, the eclecticism of Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe
finally suggests that, while politics and ethics do indeed require differ-
ent modes of thinking, these different modes are both necessary for an
ethics with politics? 151

understanding of postcolonialism and, indeed, the challenge is to keep
both in play without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with
the programmatic use of either. These three thinkers are treated together
here, then, because despite the differences in their focus – Mudimbe
and Mbembe write specifically about colonial and postcolonial Africa
– they all draw at once on Marxism and on poststructuralist ethics, and
in so doing demonstrate the inevitable multivalency of postcolonial
philosophical reflection.
Gayatri Spivak
Spivak grew up in Calcutta, where she took her undergraduate degree

in English, and she went on to complete her graduate work at Cornell
while also teaching at Iowa in the United States. She now teaches at
Columbia University in New York, and although earlier in her career she
was perhaps best known as the translator of Derrida’s Of Grammatology,
her prolific writings on postcolonialism have more recently led her to
become one of the field’s most cited thinkers. Spivak’s work broadly sets
out to rescue the “subaltern” both from the structures of imperialist and
neo-imperialist oppression, and from the voracious grasp of Western
academics whose discourse newly occludes and silences the subjugated
non-Western other. In this way her thinking is clearly aligned with that
of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and she regularly contributed art-
icles to the journal, although she is treated separately here because her
work reaches beyond their remit in a number of ways.
First, Spivak draws not only on Marx’s theories of economic exploi-
tation and on Foucault’s analyses of the complicity between power and
knowledge, but also on Derrida’s explorations of the inaccessible and
singular other alienated in language. Secondly, Spivak’s work is distinc-
tive for its focus on gender: when she writes about the oppression of the
subaltern, she examines specifically the double subjugation of women by
imperialism and by patriarchy. It has been objected more than once that
a significant failure in postcolonial studies is the lack of attention par-
ticularly to female oppression offered by its major representatives, and it
is perhaps true that Spivak is one of the few renowned voices in the field
consistently to analyse the suffering of subaltern women. While Bhabha
scarcely mentions gender anywhere in his work, Spivak conceives her
postcolonial critique as necessarily always feminist. Thirdly, Spivak’s
work is unusual in its constant, even excessive, self-consciousness, and
confessions of perpetual anxiety about her own work repeatedly serve to

warn the reader of the loopholes and obstacles obstructing the process
of forming a postcolonial critique. For many critics this recurrent self-
doubt borders on a crippling narcissism that gets in the way of Spivak’s
attending to the real mechanics of colonial oppression, and certainly
at times her work seems as much concerned with the self, and with
the work of “Theory”, as with the other. Spivak’s self-consciousness is
nonetheless highly provocative since, like that of Derrida, it forces us
to ask the fundamental question of what postcolonial philosophy is and
does. The implications of Spivak’s anxiety will be discussed at the end
of this section.
One of the major strands of Spivak’s work, then, is her championing
of the work of Marx, which she argues is unique and provocative as a
result of its revolutionary exegesis of global capitalism. She reads Marx
for his generalized political and economic understanding of capital as
it functions across the globe, and goes on to use some of his concepts
to explore the mechanics of postcolonial or neo-imperialist oppression.
Unusually, moreover, Spivak at the same time focuses on the intricacies
of Marx’s texts and strains against readings that conceive his thought as
deterministic and reductive. One of her most famous essays on Marx,
“Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” (1996b), for exam-
ple, explores the slippery construction of the notion of value in Marx,
and also expands Marx’s critique of the bourgeois ruling class so as to
question the inequalities subtending the very academic activity in which
she herself is engaged. Spivak starts by raising the question of how to
conceive the subject in terms that are neither wholly “materialist” nor
entirely “idealist”. In order to answer this, she goes on to identify the
potential flexibility and openness in Marx’s writing on value and to stress
the “textuality” of his materialist writing. Spivak then shows that value is
conceived in Marx as a representation, and even more, as a differential:
“what is represented or represents itself in the commodity differen-
tial is Value” (Spivak 1996b: 114). Yet having established this, she next
demonstrates that in linking labour to value and money via representa-
tion, Marx’s thinking masks several discontinuities, such as the fact that
money is “separated from its own being as commodity”, or that money
is a sort of “vanishing moment facilitating the exchange between two
commodities” (ibid.: 115). As a result, Spivak argues of Marx’s schema
on the relation between value, money and capital that “at each step of
the dialectic something seems to lead off into the open-endedness of
textuality: indifference, inadequation, rupture” (ibid.: 116). The process
of representation inherent in Marx’s model masks this ambivalence or
slippage. Spivak also pinpoints the ambiguity of the notion of use-value,

suggesting that it is both inside and outside the system of value deter-
minations, because it is not part of the circuit of exchange, and yet the
notion of exchange-value nevertheless relies on the notion of use. This
reading of Marx is “textualist”, in that it explores the hidden confusions
of Marx’s writing even as it celebrates their pertinence.
Spivak’s “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” prob-
lematizes Marx’s notion of value in order to reject accusations that his
thought is deterministic, but she also goes on to use it to show that
the literary academy too supports the international division of labour.
Developments in telecommunications further entrench this division, as
well as the oppression of women, and Spivak argues that any theory of
value needs to take into account the exploitation carried out in the name
of the production of technologies on which we rely. In addition, Spivak
stresses that Marx’s materialist notion of value should be used to under-
stand processes of canon formation, and she suggests it would be fruitful
“to pursue the evaluation of the pervasive and tacit gesture that accepts
the history of style-formations in Western European canonical literature
as the evaluation of style as such” (ibid.: 129). Not only is Marxist think-
ing more complex in its textual formulation than has previously been
recognized, but its resonance is also more far-reaching than expected,
as is testified by Spivak’s application of notions of value and the division
of labour to the sphere of academic and literary study.
If Spivak finds a suppleness or ambivalence in Marx’s writing, and
uses his understanding of the international division of labour with an
awareness of the slipperiness of his founding concepts, she nevertheless
criticizes Derrida’s reading of Marx for its excessive confusion surround-
ing the notion of value. In “Scattered Speculations on the Question of
Value”, Spivak notes that Derrida conceives capital as “interest-bearing
commercial capital” rather than industrial capital, and the result is that
surplus-value for him becomes “the super-adequation of capital rather
than a ‘materialist’ predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself ”
(ibid.: 119). Derrida’s reading in this way posits the subject as “ideal-
ist”, as consciousness, and as insufficiently materialist. Furthermore,
in the essay “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida” (1993), Spivak
concedes that there are valuable political lessons to be learned from
Derrida, but she nevertheless suggests that Derrida’s reading in The
Other Heading of the polysemy in Paul Valéry’s use of the term “capital”
displays an inadequate grasp of Marx’s concept. Once again, Derrida
also misunderstands the notion of surplus-value as an abstract signi-
fier of an infinite excess of value, rather than as the specific difference
between labour-value and exchange-value. Finally, in “Ghostwriting”

(1995), Spivak’s careful engagement with Derrida’s Specters of Marx
(1994), Spivak continues to acknowledge her debt to Derrida and to
endorse his ethics, while developing previous observations that he fails
to attend to women’s suffering as a result of the international division
of labour. Spivak also complains that when he pinpoints the ten plagues
of the modern world, he blurs distinct types of value and fails to com-
prehend “the connection between industrial capitalism, colonialism,
so-called postindustrial capitalism, neo-colonialism, electronified capi-
talism, and the current financialization of the globe, with the attendant
phenomena of migrancy and ecological disaster” (Spivak 1995: 68).
Most disturbingly, the upshot of Derrida’s reading of Marx, according
to Spivak, is that the subaltern has no place in it.
The innovation of Spivak’s readings of Marx is her emphasis on tex-
tual indeterminacies, and it is perhaps ironic that she uses a deconstruc-
tive strategy while criticizing Derrida’s own use of Marx. Her writing on
Marx testifies to an extraordinary amalgamation of support for his highly
materialist, economic analyses, together with exploration of the linguis-
tic indeterminacy that nevertheless characterizes those analyses. Spivak’s
essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is arguably her most often cited piece
of writing, and it is also here that she displays most overtly her simul-
taneous affiliation with both Marx and Derrida. On one level, Spivak
again draws on Marx, this time in order to explore the difference, and
the problematic conflation, of two forms of representation. The German
“Darstellen” designates “rhetoric-as-trope”, or the process of representa-
tion in the sense of a depiction, whereas “Vertreten” names “rhetoric-as-
persuasion”, or a more political form of representation. Vertreten involves
substitution or “speaking for”. Spivak quotes Marx’s comment in The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “the small peasant propri-
etors ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’” (1988:
276–7), and notes that while Marx specifically uses the term Vertreten, he
exposes the ways in which this form of political representation is elided
with representation as depiction. While the peasants described have no
political voice, at the same time they are also occluded by the forms of
depiction or understanding imposed on them from outside.
The purpose of this further “textualist” reading of Marx is to demon-
strate how French philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari
are unwittingly guilty of this same slippage. Spivak shows, for example,
that in stating that there is no place for representation, only for action,
Deleuze too finishes by blurring Darstellen and Vertreten, and leaves
the subaltern subject with no voice. She chides these otherwise highly
self-conscious philosophers for failing to think through the two senses

of representation, and asserts: “they must note how the staging of the
world in representation – its scene of writing, its Darstellung – dis-
simulates the choice of and need for ‘heroes’, paternal proxies, agents of
power – Vertretung” (ibid.: 279). Marxist politics is here inscribed into
the heart of French intellectual work, as Spivak complains that once
again academe itself supports and entrenches the international division
of labour in its very ignoring of the economic underpinnings of the
philosophical statements it produces. Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari,
and indeed the Subaltern Studies Collective, need to reflect on their
own practice, and ask “Can the subaltern speak?”, or does their work
too deprive the oppressed subject of a voice? This lapsus is all the more
astonishing in the work of thinkers who nevertheless touch on Third
World issues, and indeed, Spivak reads Foucault’s omission of the nar-
rative of imperialism from his discussions of institutions of power as a
further example of this silencing.
Developing the political strand to the essay, Spivak next uses the
example of the Hindu practice of sati, or the self-immolation of widows,
to demonstrate the practical effects of this elision in the process of repre-
sentation. On the one hand, colonial officials seeking to abolish the prac-
tice of sati can be read as a case of “white men saving brown women from
brown men”, while on the other hand, the Indian nativist riposte was
that “the women actually wanted to die” (ibid.: 297). The two positions
serve to legitimize one another, but both exclude the women’s voice and
agency. Police reports included in the records of the East India Company
are, according to Spivak, both ignorant and fragmented, and the imperi-
alist attitude towards the practice suggests that the woman is conceived
as an “object of protection from her own kind” (ibid.: 299). Moreover,
the Hindu law on sati as it is formulated in the Dharmaśāstra and the
Rg-Veda is in fact modelled on suicide laws created for men. Accord-
ing to the Dharmaśāstra, suicide is usually reprehensible, but there are
two types of suicide that are permissible. The first is when it arises out
of “the knowledge of truth”, when “the knowing subject comprehends
the insubstantiality or mere phenomenality (which may be the same
thing as nonphenomenality) of its identity” (ibid.). The second form of
suicide that is permitted is when it is accomplished in a particular place
of pilgrimage. Women are permitted to kill themselves, then, if they
mimic these laws that were originally destined for men. This means that
the woman can “act out” her husband’s insubstantiality, or can immolate
herself in the specific place of her husband’s funeral pyre.
Part of Spivak’s endeavour in this analysis is to trace the wom-
en’s absence of political representation in both colonial and native

discussions of sati. However, it is significant that Spivak’s argument in
fact rests on her understanding of subtle slips in the process of represen-
tation akin to the sorts of ethical awareness subtending Derrida’s work.
Spivak shows that the two forms of sanctioned suicide for widows both
blur imitation with intention, and it is in this blurring that the women’s
voices lie hidden. First, in immolating herself on the husband’s funeral
pyre, the widow performs a sort of displaced suicide: she kills herself
by taking her husband’s place. Secondly, when conceived in relation to
the sanctioned suicide of the subject who knows his insubstantiality, the
widow’s suicide can be seen as a secondary act of mimicry. Spivak notes
that the Dharmaśāstra makes an exception here both in its permission
of women’s suicide, and in its attribution of agency to widows (who were
relegated permanently to a passive, premarital status), in order to justify
self-immolation. Yet for Spivak, this agency is fragile, given that it mani-
fests itself, as she shows, on this secondary level both in the woman’s
acting out of her husband’s phenomenality and in her taking his place
on the funeral pyre. Intention here becomes blurred with imitation,
with mimetic performance, and is as a result in itself unidentifiable and
unlocatable. The widows’ intention is only a model or a copy, in which
it is ultimately impossible to locate any individual’s authentic intention.
Agency is a lost potential here, the glimmer of a possibility, but it is also
dissolved because the supposed free choice is just an imitation of a code
created for men, to be used in other contexts.
Spivak’s identification of the blurring between intention and imitation
here clearly recalls Derrida’s understanding of iterability, expounded in
the essay “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy, as the
possibility that a statement, when repeated, can mean something dif-
ferent from originally intended. Spivak’s attention to this potential but
hidden shift of meaning in the women’s mimetic act of self-immolation
is also close to Derrida’s ethical call for an awareness of singularities that
exceed both the sovereignty of all language and the colonizer’s drive for
deterministic knowledge. Furthermore, earlier in the same essay Spivak
had already established the usefulness of Derrida’s work for this sort of
postcolonial reflection. Reading Of Grammatology, Spivak shows how
Derrida’s text uncovers the European subject’s “tendency to constitute
the Other as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that as the problem
with all logocentric and therefore also all grammatological endeavors”
(ibid.: 293). As in the colonial discourses on sati, the subaltern’s voice
slips outside the European conceptual framework. Even more, Spivak
uses Derrida to conceive the Other here not so much to denote a spe-
cific and identifiable non-European subject, but as “that inaccessible

blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text” (ibid.: 294). Derrida
does not as a result invoke “letting the other speak for himself ”, but
appeals to the “tout autre” or “quite other”, a singular, intractable pres-
ence close in conceptual terms to Levinas’s Infinity. An ethical concep-
tion of the subaltern as this “inaccessible blankness” rather than as a
specific subject position prevents the postcolonial philosopher from
over-determining her or speaking in her place, and this prevention is
privileged over the achievement of political agency. If, then, on the one
hand Spivak uses Marxism to criticize the politics of the representation
of the specific subaltern subject, she also in the same essay cites Derrida
in order to emphasize our ethical obligation towards the subaltern’s
singular intractability.
Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was later rewritten and published
again in her monumental A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), how-
ever, and it is perhaps significant that the later version is even more
self-conscious about the ethics of the theorist’s own writing. She omits
a number of sections in the later version, such as her comments near
the beginning of the discussion of the sati stressing the relationship
between information retrieval in anthropology, political science, history
and sociology on the one hand, and her own challenge to the construc-
tion of a subject position that underpins such work on the other. The
paragraph containing this assertion is absent from the version printed in
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, suggesting that she no longer wants to
make such bold claims for her strategy. This later version is clearly more
doubtful about its broader resonance and impact than the earlier text.
Furthermore, the revised version is less trenchant, and contains more
discussion, and more ambivalence, about its own practice. Here, Spivak
precedes her analysis of the Dharmaśāstra with the observation that the
colonial subject normalizes the notion of “woman” in this context and
avoids the question of psychobiography, and she goes on to ask, “what
is it to ask the question of psychobiography?” (1999: 291). The ques-
tion remains unanswered, but indicates the impossibility of telling the
subaltern woman’s biographical story, and introduces a further level of
methodological unease absent from the earlier version.
In addition, in the later version Spivak inserts a further section devel-
oping the resonance of Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend
as a signifier of the impasse or block between two incompatible posi-
tions, and the expansion of this analysis indicates a less dogmatic atti-
tude to the subaltern’s silencing. Spivak describes the aporia between the
patriarchal admiration of the women’s free will and the rhetoric of colo-
nial benevolence by quoting Lyotard at length, and stresses that these

are two perspectives between which there is no common ground, no
terms in which to negotiate. For Spivak, however, the widow’s response
lies in the space between these poles, the space left open by the differ-
end. Spivak goes on to underline the impossibility for the woman to
overcome this differend, but indicates that her analysis will end with a
reflection on “an idiomatic moment in the scripting of the female body”,
which will remain in the space of the differend, but which is nevertheless
not the same as total effacement or silence. Even if this space is one of
impossible negotiation, the terminology of space connotes a chink that
can be analysed, rather than outright effacement or ignorance.
This potential field of analysis then relates to Spivak’s discussion of
the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, a young girl who hanged her-
self at the age of sixteen or seventeen because she was involved in the
armed struggle for Indian independence, but did not want to commit
an assassination. She killed herself while menstruating, however, so
that it was clear that it was not because she was pregnant as a result of
an illicit affair, and Spivak shows how reports and accounts of the story
again gloss over her actual motivations. In the earlier version, Spivak
concludes the discussion with the stark statement: “the subaltern cannot
speak”. In the revised version, however, she admits that this was an
inadvisable remark since, of course, in its certainty it silenced the very
other whose voice she was trying to rescue. The aim was not so much to
reinforce the effacement of the subaltern’s voice, as to problematize the
endeavour to respond in her place. In the later version of the essay, then,
Spivak attempts not to stress the foreclosure of Bhaduri’s speech, but to
leave the text open enough to reveal the ambivalence of her gesture, to
allow the uncertainty of the act to emerge through the lines of her own
reading rather than to speak in the other’s place.
In this way, by the time of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak
emerges as a careful reader of herself and also of others, and although she
still shifts erratically between affiliation with Marx and Derrida, much
of the work consists in attentive readings of both political and ethical
injustice. The revised version of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is printed in
a section on “History”, and hinges, as I suggested, on careful engagement
with archives on the sati with the aim both of unearthing past forms of
political oppression and the collusion of these with unethical silencing.
In addition to the “History” section, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
also includes a chapter on “Philosophy” comprising subtle readings of
particular details in Kant, Hegel and Marx. Spivak tracks the troubled
position of the “native informant”, and again, she moves from a more
ethical critique of Kant and Hegel’s blindness to the Third World Other

to a regeneration of Marx, although this will again be based on the latent
“textualism” of his writing. First, Spivak analyses Kant’s treatment of
the concept of “man” in the three critiques, and notes that, in a passing
gesture of dismissal, Kant suggests that “the New Hollander or the man
from Tierra del Fuego cannot be the subject of speech or judgment in
the world of the Critique” (Spivak 1999: 26). This failure to conceive
the other or the “native informant” as human is exemplary of the very
forms of postcolonial exclusion against which Spivak’s work tirelessly
rails. Equally, Hegel’s aesthetics contains comments on the Bhagavad
Gita but, although Hegel’s remarks are benevolent, “they still finally point
at the mindless gift for making shapes [verstandlose Gestaltungsgabe]
and an absence of the push into history” (ibid.: 44). Spivak then goes
on to show that in fact the representation of time in the Bhagavad Gita
does follow a Hegelian model: “‘Hegel’ and the ‘Gita’ can be read as two
rather different versions of the manipulation of the question of history
in a political interest, for the apparent disclosure of the Law” (ibid.: 58).
Finally, Spivak returns to Marx and notes that despite the apparent stasis
and generalization of the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, it
does function as a useful, non-empirical figure for difference in Marx.
The rest of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason continues to track the
troubled representation of the “native informant” and stresses in par-
ticular the occlusion of the female subaltern. A section on “literature”,
made up largely of previously published essays, explores the double
subjugation of the Third World woman and, again, the textual emphasis
of the section suggests a call for ethical attention to the violence of impe-
rialist forms of representation and silencing. Spivak begins by discuss-
ing Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the figure of Bertha Mason,
the white Jamaican Creole, is described in terms that blur the border
between human and animal; indeed, Jane refers from time to time to
her desire to free women of the Third World from their ignorance
and servitude. Spivak also discusses a passage in which Mr Rochester
recounts the return to Europe from the West Indies as a divine injunc-
tion, and the site of the imperialist conquest is conceived as Hell. In
Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, however, Bertha
Mason’s humanity is left intact, and Spivak also draws out Rhys’s use of
metaphors of mirroring to argue that the text depicts the colonial subject
confronted with the image of itself as other. She notes in addition that
the colonized other of the text is less Bertha/Antoinette than the black
plantation slave Christophine, a deliberately marginalized figure, and yet
the only one capable of judging and analysing Rochester. Spivak’s next
example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a text not explicitly concerned

with imperialism, but nevertheless one where “the master alone has
a history” (ibid.: 140). Finally, Mahasweta Devi’s story “Pterodactyl,
Pirtha, and Puran Suhay” shifts the discussion to the postcolonial con-
text. Spivak argues that the work deliberately constructs the colonized
as subaltern rather than citizen, and figures the pterodactyl, which “may
be the soul of ancestors”, as an impossibility whose portrayal is also sepa-
rated structurally from the frame of the story. This deliberately mimics
the marginalization of local history by dominant colonial discourses.
Spivak’s chapter on “literature” also contains readings of three “mas-
culine” texts, including literary texts by Baudelaire, Kipling and a paper
laid before the East India Company, in order to offer further evidence
of imperialist ideology even within writing that is conceived as oppo-
sitional. These are then contrasted with exploration of J. M. Coetzee’s
Foe, in which the “native” is this time also an agent. There will not be
space here to discuss each of these readings in turn; however, Spivak’s
strategy is once again to uncover the ways in which the subaltern is
not only politically subjugated but also unethically marginalized within
literary discourse. The final section of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
revolves slightly more loosely around “culture”, and contains a discus-
sion of Frederic Jameson’s conception of postmodernism and late capi-
talism. Spivak notes that Jameson’s theory at once attempts to obliterate
the notion of a secure subject position and continues paradoxically to
rely on its presence. This contradiction emerges in part from Jameson’s
use of Derrida, since in order to decentre the subject, deconstruction too
must retain a notion of the centred subject. Spivak also invokes several
examples from the fashion industry, including Barthes’s Empire of Signs
(1983), to uncover the repeated assumption of a neutralized European
“I” that forecloses the native informant:
throughout this book, my point has been that the subject-

position of this I is historically constructed and produced so
that it can become transparent at will (even when belonging
to the indigenous postcolonial elite turned diasporic like the
present writer). (Ibid.: 343)
The culture of the native informant, however, is “always on the run”; its
constant self-singularizing eludes the European discourses that repeat-
edly but fruitlessly seek to grasp it.
The distinctiveness of much of Spivak’s work, moreover, stems from
her awareness of her own complicity with the discourses she sets out
to undermine. Constantly vigilant about her own position, Spivak

characterizes her theory not as a source of knowledge but as a form
of anxious self-reflexivity, the offering up of a set of propositions and
their immediate questioning or withdrawal. She critiques the assumed
opposition between positivism or essentialism and Theory, and suggests
that this very division makes of Theory an artificially distinct category
in which, again, “the position of the investigator remains unquestioned”
(ibid.: 283). “Theory”, with a capital T signifying a grand narrative or
master discourse, is undermined in favour of Spivak’s own “implausible
and impertinent readings”, her “obtuse angling” constantly in dispute
with itself. Spivak also peppers her work with autobiographical reflec-
tions, partly in order to confess the limitations of her vision, her poten-
tial partiality or blindness, although it is significant that even these are
usually fleeting and often ironic or self-contradictory. Spivak wants both
to emphasize that her discourse is necessarily subjective or incomplete,
and to avoid falling into the trap of narcissism by altering or indeed
quickly retracting her autobiographical voice before it hardens into an
established, identitarian subject position. Equally, her constant revision
and rewriting of her work suggests that she does not conceive her argu-
ments to be finite and immutable. Her prose is frequently criticized for
its convolutions, but Spivak’s difficulty stems from her ability constantly
to refine, explore and interrogate her own arguments, and her desire to
present her standpoints as part of an evolution, an internal debate. All
these features of the writing perform an ethical resistance to mastery
and an openness to the alterities that the critic cannot capture.
The success of Spivak’s writing strategy remains nevertheless a sub-
ject of some controversy. In White Mythologies (1990), Young discusses
Spivak’s interrogation of Western discourses on the Third World and
notes her vigilance towards the ways in which her own discourse risks
perpetuating the structures she criticizes, but he asserts at the same time
that she does retain a classical Marxist position. Conversely, however,
Eagleton laments that Spivak spends so much time examining the bad
faith of her own writing that she fails properly to address the political
mechanics of colonial oppression. In addition, Parry famously objects
that Spivak exaggerates the importance of the work of the postcolonial
female intellectual, and that her endless critiques of the Western insti-
tution still leave no space for the voice of the subaltern. Ultimately,
and in spite of herself, “Spivak in her own writings severely restricts
(eliminates?) the space in which the colonized can be written back into
society” (Parry 2004: 23). Furthermore, with perhaps more nuance,
Hallward criticizes Spivak’s concept of the subaltern for positing her
voice as singular and inaccessible, and for failing to think through

the means by which she might consolidate her identity and voice. For
Hallward, “the subaltern, in other words, is the theoretically untouch-
able, the altogether-beyond-relation: the attempt to ‘relate’ to the sub-
altern defines what Spivak will quite appropriately name an ‘impossible
ethical singularity’” (2001: 30).
Against Young, then, these critics imply that Spivak’s self-conscious
ethics backfires, and that her deconstructive conception of the intracta-
ble subaltern is politically ineffective. Yet Spivak herself ultimately levels
many of the same objections at Derrida’s work, and while her appendix
to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason suggests that there are ways in which
Derridean thought might turn out to be useful for marginalized cultural
groups, “the possibility of these connections remains dubious as long
as the ‘setting-to-work’ mode remains caught within the descriptive
and/or formalizing practices of the academic or disciplinary calculus”
(Spivak 1999: 429). It would seem that Spivak persists in wanting to
combine the use of deconstructive ethics, learned from Derrida, with
a more pragmatic, empirical and economic objective. Her fluctuating
attitude to the work of Derrida is in turn mirrored by an idiosyncratic
engagement with Marx, whereby she by turns applauds the systematic
analysis of global praxis and opens up the Marxian text to reveal its
hidden slippages, its ambivalences and its resistance to determinism.
It is difficult to resolve Spivak’s eclectic engagements with Marx
and Derrida and to extract from her work an overarching or at least a
dominant approach to postcolonialism. Where her provocation, or for
some her difficulty, lies is in her unusually sensitive writing and reading
strategies. Her eclecticism and her self-conscious anxiety do not offer
a single model of critique but precisely warn against the adoption of
the sort of dogmatic, determinist discourse that occludes the subalter-
nity to which it claims to attend. Postcolonial theory must avoid either
assimilating or excluding the others it examines, and it must reveal its
situatedness, rather than claiming the transparency and neutrality of
the Western discourses that Spivak denounces. As Michael Syrotinski
points out, Spivak’s engagement with materialism in Derrida and Marx
also seeks to undermine facile oppositions between empirical practice
and “textualism”, and offers a compelling example of the necessity of a
careful “labour of reading” applied to both (Syrotinski 2007: 59). Cer-
tainly, Spivak’s acuity is most apparent in her readings of other think-
ers, writers and critics, and what her work recommends is this form
of ethical, attentive reading as a means of understanding all the facets
of postcolonial oppression, including the political and the economic.
Spivak at times seems to privilege politics over ethics, and at others it is

ethics that comes before politics, but it is in her readings that it becomes
clear how attention to the workings, and blindnesses, of ideological dis-
course is relevant to an understanding of particular instances of political
oppression. Her writing does not call for the sorts of immediate political
action found in Fanon, Sartre or Gandhi, but it does suggest that atten-
tive reading can offer insight into specific moments of both ethical and
political violation.
V. Y. Mudimbe
The work of Valentin Yves (Vumbi Yoka) Mudimbe evolves out of a very
different context from that of Spivak, since Mudimbe engages specifically
with the discipline of African studies and, although well known in this
domain, is less frequently associated with postcolonialism. Mubimbe
himself was born in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC), although he went to live in a Benedictine monastery in
Rwanda at the age of 9, before studying linguistics in Besançon, France
and in Louvain, Belgium. Although he taught in DRC between 1973 and
1982, he subsequently moved to the United States in part to escape the
regime of Mobutu, and he is now a professor at Duke University. In many
ways Mudimbe’s philosophical work can be seen as related to Said’s Ori-
entalism in that his thinking centres on a critique of the parallel concepts
of “Africanism” – the production of knowledge about Africa – and the
dangers of allowing that knowledge to be corrupted by forms of ideol-
ogy that efface the African other. Mudimbe is treated here alongside
Spivak, however, because his work similarly revolves around questions
of representation, and combines a critical engagement with Marxism
with an ethical denunciation of “the history of the same”, informed
this time by Foucault, as well as by Sartre, Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss,
and, more obliquely, Derrida. His philosophical works shift regularly
between discussion of colonial systems, anthropological methods, reli-
gious practice and ideology, and philosophy; the critique of Africanism
in this sense incorporates both a call for political freedom and a desire to
discover ethical forms of African knowledge released from the shackles
of “the Same”. In his more political moments Mudimbe is nevertheless
highly wary of unmediated forms of empiricism, since he conceives
these as potentially reductive, while at the same time his call for an ethi-
cal awareness of the difficulty of knowing and specifying Africa shies
away from excessive textualism and upholds the necessity of seeking
real forms of African authenticity. The eclecticism of his work, and the

convolutions of his intellectual trajectory, are perhaps best summed up
by his own comment at the opening of Parables and Fables: “here I was,
so to speak, the margin of margins: black, Catholic, African, yet agnostic;
intellectually Marxist, disposed toward psychoanalysis, yet a specialist
in Indo-European philology and philosophy” (1991: x).
Mudimbe writes in both English and French, and has published both
novels and philosophical works, but his most famous text is perhaps
The Invention of Africa, published in 1988. Like Mudimbe’s subsequent
works Parables and Fables and The Idea of Africa (1994), The Invention
of Africa seeks to survey and analyse the practice of African philosophy
or “gnosis”, a term proposed by the author to refer to “a structured,
common, and conventional knowledge, but one strictly under the con-
trol of specific procedures for its use as well as transmission” (1988:
ix). Like Said, Spivak and the Subaltern Studies Collective, Mudimbe
draws on Foucault to theorize the ways in which power structures are
subtended by, as well as actively propagating, the conception or indeed
the creation of the other by the West, and he also stresses with Foucault
that the structures under analysis are diverse and discontinuous. Again
like Spivak, Mudimbe asks who is producing knowledge about Africa,
and to what extent the discourses shaping that knowledge assimilate the
other into a framework governed by Western assumptions and expec-
tations. Unlike Spivak, however, whose “subaltern” remains a singular,
intractable figure, Mudimbe holds on to a belief in the possibility of
an alternative knowledge, even if, as we shall see, it is not always clear
that his writing can access this dreamed authenticity. Mudimbe’s fragile
vision of African authenticity will nevertheless provide the basis for a
new political and ethical philosophy that recognizes as well as criticizes
the European currents on which it is founded.
The Invention of Africa opens with a systematic and clearly
Foucauldian analysis of the political and ethical violence inherent in
the project of colonialism. Mudimbe argues that etymologically the
term colonialism derives from the Latin “colĕre”, meaning to cultivate
or design, and that the concept has at its root the notion of organization
or arrangement. This process of organization has three facets to it: “the
procedures of acquiring, distributing, and exploiting lands in colonies;
the policies of domesticating natives; and the manner of managing
ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production”
(ibid.: 2). In other words, these three facets include the political domi-
nation of the territory, the (unethical) direction of the local people’s
identity and mentality, and the seizing of economic control. Mudimbe
goes on to comment on Marxist analyses of the ways in which overseas

territories are restructured and subjected to the colonizer’s economic
model, although it will emerge that he conceives the Marxist reading
itself as excessively generalized and adrift from the specific experiences
of individual African communities. Nevertheless, here Mudimbe maps
this conception of the colonizer’s economic control onto the ideologi-
cal creation of a whole gamut of oppositions, such as that between the
traditional and the modern, or between the oral and the written, all of
which serve to undermine the local culture. Furthermore, it is not only
the colonial apparatus itself but a broader set of representations and
hypotheses that separate and hypostatize cultures according to a domi-
nant and Western set of values. African tourist art is just one example
for Mudimbe of the ways in which, to use distinctly Levinasian terms,
“alterity is a negative category of the Same” (ibid.: 12). And even worse,
the practice of anthropology is similarly criticized for an “ethnocen-
trism” linked both to the specific epistēmē defining the discipline and to
various moral or behavioural attitudes exhibited by anthropologists.
Mudimbe’s next section explores in more detail the methodology of
Africanist critique. Here, he develops his engagement with Foucault,
and he notes that for the latter, after an epistemological shift at the
end of the eighteenth century, three paradigms come to structure the
production of knowledge: “function and norm, conflict and rule, signi-
fication and system” (ibid.: 26). The movement towards the latter term
in each couple brings at the same time both an understanding of the
plurality of individual codes, and a new unity over and above these
within the human sciences. Analysis conducted on the basis of norm,
rule and system privileges the enclosure and internal coherence of the
code analysed, and this is used to assume a greater generality. This shift
coincides with the invention of the concept of “Man” as a subject who
knows, and the consequence is that “stories about Others, as well as
commentaries on their differences, are but elements in the history of the
Same and its knowledge” (ibid.: 28). In addition, Mudimbe shows how,
rather than charting the “archaeology” of Western knowledge, Lévi-
Strauss explores the “primitives” and “savages” that the West endeavours
to caricature, and the upshot of his work is that “the usefulness of a
discourse on others goes beyond the gospel of otherness: there is not
a normative human culture” (ibid.: 33). Foucault tracks “the history of
the Same” while Lévi-Strauss rails against its universalizing gestures,
but both lament its blindness. According to Mudimbe, however, both
Foucault and Lévi-Strauss are themselves unable to extract themselves
from the history they denounce. Mudimbe seeks rather a methodology
faithful to African epistemology: he seeks to retrieve an African order

of knowledge that doubts the value of schemata such as that of “norm,
rule and system”.
While criticizing Foucault, however, Mudimbe nevertheless uses his
concept of “archaeology” to offer a critique in the rest of the work of
various epistemological structures that posit the African as inferior or
other. The first of these is missionary discourse, which promotes the
spiritual transformation of Africans. Mudimbe asserts that missionary
discourse served a crucial role in backing up the expropriation and
exploitation of conquered lands with its ideology of civilization and
spiritual conversion. Africans are depicted according to a variety of
models: they are seen as poor and pagan, or as savages, but their cul-
ture is always inferior to the great ideals of Christianity. Even Placide
F. Tempels, who lived among the Luba Katanga people in Central
Africa for more then ten years, doubts myths of African backwardness
while nevertheless promoting a Christian policy for the improvement
of African natives. Subsequent philosophers such as Alexis Kagame
refine Tempels’s study of Bantu philosophy and stress that the latter
is “an organized and rational construction”, and both conceive Afri-
can culture as “an original alterity” to be assessed independently (ibid.:
151). Nevertheless, this school of African philosophy, paradoxically for
Mudimbe, emerges from a Western epistemological grid. Mudimbe also
comments on the negritude movement, and suggests that although it
seeks to establish the sorts of African authenticity that he supports, in
the end Sartre’s argument that negritude must be part of a dialectic and
surpass itself makes sense. Similarly, Mudimbe affirms that Senghor’s
provisional use both of notions of African tradition, and of Marxist
revolution, can be defended precisely because he conceives neither as
a permanent system that would ossify into the history of the Same.
Mudimbe is sensitive to the ambiguities of certain forms of African
knowledge, then, and the chapter on the West Indian observer and
commentator E. W. Blyden notes the curious intermingling of colonial
ideology with African nativist views. However, the history of knowledge
about Africa that Mudimbe tracks in The Invention of Africa constantly
reveals gaps and blanks, biases and hasty assumptions. He finishes by
wondering whether “the discourses of African gnosis do not obscure a
fundamental reality, their own chose du texte, the primordial African
discourse in all its variety and multiplicity” (ibid.: 186). This obscured
“chose du texte” names the authenticity that lingers elusively behind
the textual artifice.
Mudimbe’s critique of the political exploitation and ethical silencing
of the African other rests on a deep-seated anxiety about the concept

of the subject, an anxiety that he theorizes explicitly in Parables and
Fables. Mudimbe reads Sartre’s reworking of Descartes, and shows how
Sartre’s concept of self-consciousness severs the Cartesian ego’s apparent
mastery and self-presence. For Sartre, being is a tension between the
in-itself, the brute materiality of existence, and the for-itself, or reflex-
ive consciousness. One understands oneself only as an other, or under
the gaze of the other. In addition, Mudimbe cites Rousseau’s statement
in his Confessions that “in truth, I am not ‘me’ but the weakest most
humble of others” (Mudimbe 1991: xiv). Lévi-Strauss in turn allows
Rousseau’s thinking to inform his conception of ethnology as a con-
frontation with the stranger that puts the ethnologist’s very self into
question. Mudimbe then notes how in his Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss
reveals how “the master-meaning is always discreet, invisible, beyond
the apparent rationality and the logical constructs of the visible surface”
(ibid.: xvi). Anthropology or ethnology will always be circling around
this hidden, elusive and unconscious meaning that escapes the secure
framework of the anthropologist’s knowledge. In this way, although
Sartre presents consciousness as other to itself, Lévi-Strauss goes fur-
ther, according to Mudimbe, in that he theorizes an unconscious claim
to uncover “hidden forms”, as well as showing how myths perform a
search for “discreet, unconscious, containing structures” (ibid.: xvii).
Lévi-Strauss also throws into question the position of the anthropologist
in relation to the other he analyses. Uneasy about the Western frames of
reference to which he adheres here, Mudimbe nevertheless uses these
thinkers to argue that the contemplation of African cultures requires a
fundamental rethinking of the way in which the subject conceives itself
in relation to the other.
Like The Invention of Africa, Parables and Fables sifts through a
number of forms of African knowledge or “gnosis” in order to pick
out the difficulties associated with certain philosophical approaches. In
the course of his analyses Mudimbe distinguishes three methodologi-
cal groups: anthropological philosophy, which also includes linguistic
philosophy; speculative and critical philosophy, which comprises also
metaphilosophy; and, finally, Marxist projects. There will not be space
here to explore all the thinkers analysed by Mudimbe, but it is worth
noting nevertheless his ambivalence towards Marxism. Although he
identifies himself as a Marxist intellectual in the extract from Parables
and Fables cited above, he is also deeply sceptical of its universalizing
tendencies and suggests that the generalization of the Marxist model
is another example of the “history of the same”. Mudimbe’s politics
may be Marxist, but he also perceives in the application of Marxism

to Africa an unethical lack of attention to specific African cultural dif-
ferences. Mudimbe examines the use of Marx in the work of Deleuze
and Guattari, for example, and suggests that although in Anti-Oedipus
they seek to undermine imperialist forms of history, “they make a
move toward a possible universal historicization of individualities by
distinguishing types of interpretation of socioeconomic disharmonies”
(ibid.: 71). In addition, in a chapter on “Anthropology and Marxist
Discourse”, Mudimbe offers a critique of Peter Rigby’s Persistent Pas-
toralists (1983), the upshot of which is a further critique of the Marx-
ist method. Mudimbe reads in detail Rigby’s study of the Ilparakuyo
people of East Africa, but argues that Rigby conceives the future of the
Ilparakuyo precisely according to the dreams of the rational, Marx-
ist social scientist. More broadly, figures such as Senghor and, indeed,
Mudimbe himself, promoted the “dubious acculturation of Marxism in
Africa”, but the problem was that they thought in the 1960s that “Africa
was an absolutely virgin terrain on which we could experiment and
succeed in organizing socialist societies” (ibid.: 184). Marxists tend to
overlook the question of the specific epistemological roots of their own
discourse.
Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa continues this critique of the creation of
Africa as a product of the West, and includes further comments both on
the political successes of Marxism and on its obfuscation of the African
other. This volume also includes examination of myths of Africa reach-
ing as far back as Philostratus’s story of Hercules among the pygmies
of Libya, and Mudimbe exposes here the association between pygmies
and backwardness or straightforward stupidity. Equally, Robert Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1989) portrays the “savage” as a faceless
victim, while dictionaries of the sixteenth century baldly use the term
“Aethiops” to name any dark-skinned person. Mudimbe then notes a
change around the 1950s, after which the African becomes an empirical
fact to be observed and studied by the anthropologist, although again the
tendency remains even now to impose various totalizing models (such
as that of Marxism) on the unfamiliar other. Furthermore, museum
collections of “primitivist” art similarly serve to appropriate African
cultures to suit the imagination of the West. Ironically, even local dis-
courses on Africa, an extreme example of which might be Mobutuism,
turn on “figures and images, analogies and resemblances in figurative
constructions that simulate reality rather than signifying or representing
it” (Mudimbe 1994: 145). Almost all the forms of knowledge discussed
in Mudimbe’s text are ultimately fictions that serve only to silence the
subjugated African.

One of the dangers of Mudimbe’s form of criticism, like that of Spivak,
is that it can be turned back on itself and denounced for its own failure to
attend to the subjugated others it seeks to rescue. D. A. Masolo character-
izes Mudimbe’s work as deconstructive in its stated resistance to philo-
sophical mastery or totalization, but he goes on to object that “although
Mudimbe makes an important contribution to the debate on the creation
of knowledge, he lamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious
circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance” (Masolo 1994: 179). This
means that Mubimbe may successfully offer a multitude of examples of
invented or ideological Africanist representation; he does not offer a
constructive alternative. His readings, from this point of view, mask an
inability to redefine African culture authentically and on its own terms.
Certainly it is true that Mudimbe spends rather more time unravelling
the loopholes and identifying the blindspots of existing discourses than
he does constructing a concrete image of African identity to replace these
deceptive images. Again, like Spivak, his major achievement is perhaps
his perceptive engagement with the philosophical archive, and not the
creation of a positivist vision of African subjectivity.
However, Masolo’s critique also rests on a partial misreading of
Mudimbe’s use of deconstruction, since the latter’s deconstructive
project still champions a belief in African authenticity, and in this search
for an independent, African order of knowledge he certainly reaches
beyond the forms of questioning proposed for example by Derrida. This
authenticity is provocative, moreover, precisely because it is not figured
in Mudimbe’s thought or in his novels as an identifiable essence, but as a
horizon towards which the writer aspires even if he will remain unable
to reach it. Indeed, the Africa of Mudimbe’s novels is a site of conflict as
well as of uncertainty, and he never has recourse to reassuring, nostalgic
images of an original homeland or tradition. The Rift, for example, is the
story of an African intellectual in Paris on a quest for African knowledge
who struggles to find himself between competing discourses of African
history, and whose disoriented condition borders on schizophrenia. Just
as Spivak seeks a form of subaltern agency while underlining the other’s
necessary singularity or intractability, Mudimbe upholds a notion of
specific African knowledge while persisting in depicting that know-
ledge as fragmentary, conflictual and elusive. This elusive but specific
knowledge is at the same time what both Marxism and deconstructive
ethics ignore.
Finally, Mudimbe is another thinker who questions not only political
and economic conditions associated with colonialism and its aftermath,
but also the ethics of reading, writing and theorizing about the other.

This questioning has a particular resonance in the context of African
studies since, as Mudimbe shows, the African is conventionally per-
ceived to be incapable of philosophy and consigned to the status of a
savage. It is all the more urgent, then, that the philosopher should locate
authentically African forms of knowledge, although the impact of colo-
nialism on Africa is such that the native is never free from its intellectual
influence even after the termination of its political grasp. Christopher
Miller’s study Theories of Africans (1990) explores how the very practice
of theorizing has been conceived as the exclusive domain of the West-
erner, who applies his own structures of knowledge to the African “void”
or “blank”. Mudimbe’s recommendation for a specifically African epis-
temology in this way directly answers back to a particularly pernicious
set of Africanist stereotypes, even if he remains anxious about how to
create this authentic knowledge. In addition, it is perhaps also relevant
that Miller goes on to explain that ethics, in the sense of an openness
towards the intractable other, is (erroneously) seen to be at odds with
any more concrete notion of “ethnos”, or an African specificity. Western
Marxist thinking promotes an ethics of liberation while glossing over
ethnic specificity, and deconstructive ethical thinking promotes atten-
tion to infinite otherness while excluding particular others. Mudimbe’s
work both rescues the African from the myth of philosophical inepti-
tude, then, and goes some way to promoting what Miller conceives as a
necessary interplay between ethics and ethnicity in African studies. This
precarious combination, as in Spivak’s work, is the result of profound
self-consciousness and vigilant attention to the conditions and precepts
of postcolonial philosophy, and it is not always clear that Mudimbe is
able to follow through his celebration of the specific. His awareness of
the multiple requirements of postcolonial African philosophy, includ-
ing political and ethical requirements, and the need to conceive both
a specific African ethnos alongside an understanding of its ineffability,
nevertheless offers a challenge to postcolonial thinking and exposes the
limits of its habitual Marxist and deconstructive paradigms.
Achille Mbembe
The work of Achille Mbembe clearly emerges out of an engagement

with Mudimbe and, once again, can be seen ostensibly as both a politi-
cal and an ethical project. Mbembe was born in Cameroon in 1957,
studied history at the Sorbonne and, having worked in various insti-
tutions in the United States, is now a senior researcher at the Wits

Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg. His most
famous work, On the Postcolony, was published in English in 2001, and
is distinctive among the postcolonial studies discussed here for its focus
specifically on political regimes in Africa, after independence, as well as
under colonialism. This text theorizes contemporary forms of oppres-
sion and exploitation in Africa and offers insight into the troubling
and persistent force of neocolonialism. Like the work of Spivak and
Mudimbe, Mbembe’s writing is diverse and eclectic as a result of its
engagements both with Marxism and with Derridean deconstruction.
His thinking is highly innovative, however, because at the same time
it reaches beyond both in its vibrant, almost demonic vision of the
injustices of the African postcolony. Recalling Mudimbe, Mbembe’s
study opens with a critique of prevailing images of the African native
as sub-human and, in typically colourful style, the author rails against
the “invention” of Africa by the imperialist visions of the West. In order
to elucidate his critique, however, Mbembe first dismisses “an outdated
Marxist tradition” in favour of a psychoanalytic critique of the con-
struction of the African as Other, only then to lament the absence of a
framework with which to conceptualize economic exploitation in the
African postcolony (Mbembe 2001: 5). Mbembe’s approach promises to
fluctuate, then, between reflection on processes of representation and
exegesis of the structures of economic oppression. Moving away from
Mudimbe’s call for an African order of knowledge, however, Mbembe’s
study of the entangled forces of tyranny in postcolonial Africa offers a
vision of resistance that operates only within the repetition or simula-
tion of the ritualistic discourse of power. There is no authentic African
subjectivity in Mbembe’s vision, only the suppressed laughter gener-
ated by mimicry of a discourse whose oppressiveness is persistent and
unrelenting.
The first section of On the Postcolony analyses structures of “com-
mandement” or governance in Africa and explores the development of
these structures in the move from a colonial to a postcolonial regime.
Mbembe argues that state sovereignty in the colony rested on the infla-
tion of the right to conquest together with the diminution of the right
to debate and discussion. Equally, Mbembe uses Derrida’s understand-
ing of the violence of the law to argue that colonial sovereignty was
self-creating and self-perpetuating. Founded on an initial order of vio-
lence, the colonial power then executes a second order, “to give this
order meaning, to justify its necessity and universalizing mission – in
short, to help produce an imaginary capacity converting the founding
violence into authorizing authority” (ibid.: 25). A third order follows

that assures the maintenance, the spread and the permanence of the
colonial regime. Mbembe uses Derrida here to envisage law as circular
or self-generating, and its very self-ratifying structure constitutes an act
of ethical violence towards the other. Mbembe then takes as a specific
example the notion of the indigénat, which refers to the specific admin-
istrative system applied to natives in French colonies before 1945 that
rested on the creation of a generalized, subordinated category subjected
to particular constraints and punishments. The practical mechanics of
colonial law, for example the exclusion of the African from citizenship,
were in this way fuelled by an unethical homogenization and subjuga-
tion of native others. This again stems from the empty, self-fulfilling
drive to control, direct and exploit.
This tyrannical form of state sovereignty was, moreover, appropri-
ated by Africans after decolonization. African traders came to occupy
positions as middlemen between colonial firms and consumers and,
together with a stratum of well-off planters, finished by perpetuating
the old hierarchies after independence. In addition, the new states
were formed in such a way as to deny individuals rights as citizens, and
Mbembe argues that a structural problem was created because “the act
of establishing colonial sovereign authority was never a contract since,
strictly speaking, it involved no reciprocity of legally codified obliga-
tions between the state, powerholders, society, and individuals” (ibid.:
42). Public affairs quickly became confused with the use of unbridled
violence, because the structures of authority were, as in the colonial
model described above, conceived as given. Mbembe goes on to explore
the chaotic economic structures of the new regimes, and observes that
by the 1970s “the bulk of national wealth was, for all practical purposes,
part of the ‘eminent domain’ of a tyrant acting as a mercenary with state
funds and the national treasury” (ibid.: 50). One of the consequences
of the economic structural points explored by Mbembe is that African
nations are unable to fit into the international division of capital. A
stratified labour market, and in some cases the dissolution of the public
sector, has also led to deepening poverty. This structure of economic
hierarchy and inequality stems, once again, from the violence and cir-
cularity of state sovereignty learned during the colonial period.
Mbembe’s next section examines what he terms the structure of
entanglement that perpetuates the violence of postcolonial African
regimes. This entanglement names not only the coercion exercised on
individuals, but also “a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture,
and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised
and rationalized” (ibid.: 66). At the centre of this cluster is the notion of

“private indirect government” and the weakening of state structures, of
any notion of “public good”. Society is run by coercion, hardly any sector
is free from venality and corruption, and a crisis in the taxation system
means that there is no longer a necessary bond between the ruler and
the ruled. If the principle of taxation rests on the notion that both the
state and its citizens mutually owe something to one another, Mbembe
observes that in certain African contexts poorly defined borders and
the use of taxes to fund an apparatus of coercion have interrupted that
principle and have led to the dissolution of the crucial founding notion
of common good.
The most famous part of Mbembe’s analysis, however, must be his
vision of the “vulgarity”, excess and theatricality of power in the post-
colony. Mbembe takes Cameroon as an example of a state in which the
“commandement” is constantly ratified by its own rituals and institu-
tionalized “as a fetish to which the subject is bound, and in the subject’s
deployment of a talent for play, of a sense of fun, that makes him homo
ludens par excellence” (ibid.: 104). Power is manifested and disseminated
through excessive representation, through pomp and fables, as well as
through images of sexual potency. This is equally a regime obsessed with
bodily functions and orifices, and the body becomes the site on which
power is performed and inscribed. The “commandement” fantasizes
its power through images of penetration, hence the obsession with ori-
fices, and phantasms of virility serve to mime state dominance over its
subjects. At the same time, however, this excessive performance is an
empty simulacrum, whose mimicry allows for subtle shifts and hints of
subversion. Mbembe uses Bakhtin to think through the splitting of the
image of the simulacrum and its potential opening to a logic of resist-
ance, although this resistance will always itself be an empty practice, a
performance rather than an affirmation of agency and a call for change.
Mbembe argues:
People whose identities have been partly confiscated have been

able, precisely because there was this simulacrum, to glue back
together their fragmented identities. By taking over the signs
and language of officialdom, they have been able to remytholo-
gize their conceptual universe while, in the process, turning the
commandement into a sort of zombie. (Ibid.: 11)
If the people can enact passing gestures of resistance, in a manner con-

sistent with Bhabha’s theory of mimicry as a subversive performance
of at once sameness and difference, however, Mbembe stresses that the

regime will remain one governed by vacuous theatricality and carnival.
The state can be de-authorized through the repetition of its own sym-
bols of ratification, but this undermining does not alter the practice of
performance and excess on which the regime continues to rely.
Mbembe’s study goes on to develop this exploration of represen-
tation as a mask through an examination of cartoon images of the
autocrat. The text pushes the analysis of the tyranny of representation
in the postcolony perhaps furthest, however, in the chapter “Out of
the World”. Here Mbembe examines the function of annihilation and
oblivion in modern and contemporary discourse on Africa, offering a
vision of terrifying emptiness beneath the simulacra discussed above.
In a manner that recalls Spivak’s analysis of Hegel’s misapprehension of
Hindu culture, Mbembe explores the Hegelian image of Africa as “a vast
tumultuous world of drives and sensations, so tumultuous and opaque
as to be practically impossible to represent, but which words must
nevertheless grasp and anchor in pre-set certainty” (ibid.: 176). Hegel
explores an African verbal economy in which language is a discordant
cacophony adrift from referentiality, a swarm of noise and energy that
covers only a void. Mbembe notes also how Hegel’s Negro is indolent
and untrustworthy, and Hegel’s words become the arch example of colo-
nial discourse in their reduction of the African native to a facelessness
that borders on inhumanity. Like Fanon, Mbembe also comments on
Hegel’s dialectic between the master and the slave and the mutual rec-
ognition of self-consciousness, and he notes that the Negro in Hegel is
in fact deprived of this self-consciousness and consigned to the status
of an animal. Even more disturbingly, Mbembe goes on to ask what
effects this discourse leaves in the postcolony: “what death does one die
‘after the colony’?” (ibid.: 197). If the Negro was annihilated by colonial
discourse, in what form does he survive if he is living “when the time
to die has passed”? (ibid.: 201). Laughter, for Mbembe, serves as a pos-
sible response to this oblivion, but the analysis ends with a disturbing
reflection on the dislocation or dismemberment of any stable notion
of existence in the postcolony. Mbembe’s study concludes by calling for
the affirmation of free will, but the book’s immersion in the tyranny of
language as performance gives little sense of how that freedom might
be achieved.
It can easily be objected that Mbembe’s analysis in On the Postcolony
is both somewhat hyperbolic and extraordinarily generalized. The very
term “postcolony” is a somewhat abstract notion, and critics have sug-
gested that Mbembe’s study would benefit from further attention to the
historical specificity of particular regimes. Like Mudimbe, Mbembe can

also be accused of feeding off the very Western discourses he contests
in his own use of Derrida, Foucault and Bakhtin. Indeed, Mbembe
is apparently less openly self-aware than Mudimbe in his espousal of
theories and philosophies created in the West. In addition, it is perhaps
disturbing that Mbembe does not question whether the slave’s capacity
for revolt in Hegel might provide the African with a model for self-
assertion, and much of the work suggests that there is no clear road to
liberation for the dehumanized African. The deconstruction of state
power through subversive mimicry is certainly not presented as a coher-
ent strategy for change. If Mbembe deliberately sets out to undermine
conventional and facile oppositions between resistance and passivity,
the liberatory tactics he does recommend do not provide an identifiable
path to emancipation.
While it should be conceded that Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe all
hold back from offering the sorts of emancipatory vision to be found in
Fanon or Gandhi, however, this is perhaps a necessary testimony to the
perpetuation of yet more forms of oppression after decolonization. The
most militant and politicized philosophers explored in this book write
in the lead-up to independence, and the more anxious, ambivalent
and troubled work of thinkers such as Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe
suggests that the end of colonial or neocolonial oppression is neither
imminent nor easily conceived. With Spivak and Mudimbe, Mbembe
implies that postcolonial criticism requires both the denunciation of
political and economic inequality, be it in terms that are clearly Marxist
or post-Marxist, and an awareness of the tyrannical forms and struc-
tures of representation working on postcolonial societies in diverse
ways. Furthermore, if the international division of labour, or the newly
oppressive regimes apparent in some parts of postcolonial Africa, insti-
tute forms of inequality that these thinkers all vilify, the systematic and
total overthrow of such structures emerges as difficult to imagine. The
ethical critique of the violence of representation is, then, the most sig-
nificant strategy by which these thinkers construct their postcolonial
critique, and if Mbembe moves furthest from any claim to subaltern
agency or authenticity, he perhaps comes closest to communicating
the horrors of a neocolonial discourse that uses representation or
performance to back up its regime of tyranny and violence. He may
merely shake without crumbling the edifice of authority’s simulacrum,
but he also reminds us all too lucidly of the power of representation
when abused to the extreme in a world still ravaged by postcolonial
oppression.

Key points
• Spivak’s work draws on both Marxism and poststructuralist

ethics. Her readings of Marx tend to focus on textual slippages
and moments of ambivalence, as she explores, for example, the
indeterminacy in his notion of value. This form of reading is itself
deconstructive, and yet Spivak also criticizes the blindspots of
Derrida’s engagement with Marx.
• One of Spivak’s key concepts is the “subaltern” or native inform-
ant. Her works denounce the ways in which subaltern women in
particular have been silenced, and she shows how their voices
echo between the lines of Western philosophy and literature. Her
work is also distinctive for its self-consciousness, and she con-
stantly reminds readers of her own complicity with the imperial-
ism she sets out to undermine.
• Mudimbe’s work consists in a political and ethical critique of
“Africanism”. Mudimbe vilifies both the mechanics of the colo-
nial project and the forms of knowledge that support it. He argues
that knowledge about Africans has often incorporated them into
the “history of the Same”. He calls for a more authentic form of
African knowledge, while admitting that this authenticity is dif-
ficult to attain.
• Mbembe criticizes the way in which colonial law homogenizes
and subjugates the native, but he also denounces the violence of
African regimes in the postcolony. He reveals how these regimes
are characterized by excess, vulgarity and theatricality, and how
they also disallow resistance. His analysis is testimony to the dif-
ficulty of overcoming both colonial and postcolonial violence.

eight
Conclusion: neocolonialism and

the future of the discipline
This book has attempted to demonstrate that postcolonialism is a set

of at times overlapping and at times distinct strategies aimed at under-
mining colonialism, as well as wider forms of imperialist subjugation.
Postcolonial philosophy is a complex intermingling of political and
ethical thinking, and theorists such as Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe
show how an understanding of both empirical and discursive struc-
tures of oppression is necessary for the establishment of a critique. If
Derrida points out that ethics and politics require the deployment of
different sets of concepts (he argues that the former insists on abso-
lute openness while the latter requires the creation of norms and
rules), most of the thinkers assessed in this study engage at least to
some extent with both levels. Nevertheless, the split among readers of
postcolonial thought remains palpable. “Materialists” such as Parry
and Lazarus turn away from the “textualism” of Bhabha or Spivak,
while more “deconstructionist” thinkers such as Syrotinski or Philip
Leonard imply that the ethical reading strategies recommended by
Derrida and his followers must be embraced before political liberation
can occur. Certainly, Glissant’s work indicates that there should be a
distinct space for cultural and aesthetic postcolonial experimenta-
tion, and when the ethics of relationality is explored through literature
and art it is clear that it should not have to submit to a clear political
agenda. But I hope to have shown that, despite the hostility accom-
panying debates among postcolonial readers, postcolonial ethics and
politics remain a more or less anxious coupling detectable from Fanon
to Mbembe.

Despite the efforts of philosophers, critics and intellectuals, however,
neo-imperialist oppression remains formidable long after many col-
onies achieved independence. The need for postcolonial questioning
did not disappear with the decolonization movements of the 1950s and
1960s; indeed, contemporary power structures are perhaps all the more
pervasive because they are insidious. Glissant’s work on Martinique, for
example, demonstrates that although national liberation is becoming
less and less viable, the hierarchies and inequalities characteristic of the
colonial regime in its heyday are far from extinct in the French Over-
seas Departments and Regions today. Mbembe’s horrifying exegesis of
the African postcolony, although abstract, suggests that the drive for
power originally exhibited by the colonizer is now pushed to excess
by local leaders and tyrants in countries such as Cameroon. Moreover,
Spivak reminds us that global capitalism and the international division
of labour have entrenched the subjugation and exploitation initiated
by colonialism and, even more, this neo-imperialist economic oppres-
sion is supported by Western academics blind to the experiences of the
subaltern others to whom they claim to attend. Western thinkers rely
on technologies produced in the Third World and ignore the exploita-
tion on which the production of these technologies rests, while at the
same time risking ventriloquizing for the other in their academic work.
Lastly, commentators on postcolonial Latin America such as José Carlos
Mariátegui serve to demonstrate to critics of British and French neo-
colonialism just how long after independence the effects of imperialist
domination persist. Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian
Reality explores the ways in which Peru is still, even after emancipa-
tion in 1824, corrupted by the sin of conquest, because the bourgeoisie,
propped up by foreign investors, remains in control of banks and indus-
try. The Spanish conquistadors destroyed an abundant and progressive
Inca society, and Mariátegui insists, at least at the time of publication
in 1927, that the feudal economy that the colonialists instituted has not
been overthrown or replaced.
Neocolonialism can be seen to operate in three principal ways that
can be sketched briefly in this conclusion. First, the inaugural president
of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, vilifies the persistence of
colonial domination in the immediate aftermath of decolonization. In
Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah explains that “the essence of neo-colonialism
is that the state which is subject to it is independent and has all the
outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic
system and thus its political policy is directed from outside” (1965: ix).
African neocolonial states depend on foreign capital, but that capital is
conclusion 179
not used for the development of local initiatives and instead entrenches
the exploitation of the poor. International capital controls the world
market, at the expense of local regeneration. Furthermore, Nkrumah
argues that neocolonialism is pernicious because it executes power
without assuming responsibility; it is an insidious ideology that seeks
to serve the interests only of developed countries. “Aid”, for example,
merely increases the debt of Third World countries, and specifically
military aid also stalls rather than promotes development since sooner
or later weapons fall into the hands of the opponents of the neocolonial
regime and war perpetuates the ex-colony’s misery. The only way in
which the African ex-colonies can attempt to resist this powerful and
omnipresent force, however, is to assert African unity. Nkrumah argues
that:
it is only when artificial boundaries are broken down so as

to provide for viable economic units, and ultimately a single
African unit, that Africa will be able to develop industrially
for her own sake and ultimately for the sake of a healthy world
economy. (Ibid.: 25)
However, although Nkrumah’s vision of pan-African union, influenced

by Marxism, was politically ambitious, Young points out that his think-
ing lacked an understanding of the economic unity that might have
helped African development in the wake of colonialism. Even more,
Mudimbe notes that once he was in power Nkrumah’s rhetoric started
to ring hollow and he became something of a dictator; he certainly
failed to put his ideals into practice. It is nevertheless significant for
my current purposes that in the wake of independence neocolonial-
ism was conceived by Nkrumah as the ongoing dominance of foreign
economic power over African regeneration. Moreover, Mbembe’s study
of economics in the postcolony suggests that this foreign influence still
wields power today.
Secondly, it is noteworthy that Nkrumah’s, and later Spivak’s, concep-
tion of the power of international capital has been seen by Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri to have been transformed more recently into a new,
magisterial form of “Empire”. This “Empire”, according to Hardt and
Negri, is quite distinct from colonialism as settlement, as well as from
old forms of imperialism that still rely on a notion of state sovereignty.
This new system of Empire has emerged with the decline in the power
of the nation state and can be seen as an alternative form of sovereignty
“composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united

under a single logic of rule” (Hardt & Negri 2000: xii). Empire from
this point of view is decentred and deterritorialized: it manifests itself
as a network of power and does not originate in a single source (this is
not a name for the diffuse power held over the rest of the world by the
United States). The force of Empire transcends the borders between
nations, as well as divisions between the First, Second and Third Worlds,
and also signals the decline of factory labour in favour of “communi-
cative, cooperative, and affective labour” (ibid.: xiii). Moreover, its pro-
cesses of globalization bring new economic structures but also regulate
social life and human nature itself by means of its regime of biopower.
Although Empire names a new order of global domination, however,
it is not a monolith and its multiple branches and processes may also,
according to Hardt and Negri, trigger the invention of new democratic
forms. Empire presents itself as a broad totality outside history, but the
authors of this provocative study nevertheless argue that the movements
of “the multitude”, the poor and disenfranchised, against this apparently
transcendent system of Empire might bring alternative, more liberated
structures of organization.
For Hardt and Negri, then, the sorts of postcolonial criticism offered
by thinkers such as Bhabha engage with old forms of colonialism and
imperialism. Bhabha rails against the binary divisions that pit colonizer
against colonized, but Hardt and Negri show how the hybridities he
champions as an alternative are themselves part of this new structure
of Empire. This structure has already moved away from the divisions
that Bhabha spends his time challenging, and wields its power in a
postmodern, multifaceted but global form through institutions such
as those of international law, the United Nations (UN) and North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or through the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the
World Bank. While old forms of colonialism revolve around a notion
of difference, Hardt and Negri stress that Empire is, on the contrary,
blind to difference: “all are welcome within its boundaries, regardless
of race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth” (ibid.:
198). Having accomplished this gesture of assimilation, Empire is, in
a second movement, capable of recognizing difference, but this must
be cultural difference rather than political. This form of difference is
accepted because it can nevertheless be controlled, in a third move-
ment, by Empire’s all-encompassing embrace: “the triple imperative of
Empire is incorporate, differentiate, manage” (ibid.: 201). Furthermore,
in this new structure of Empire migration occurs on a massive scale, but
while population movements might have the potential to work against
conclusion 181
the controlling grasp of Empire, often they lead in the end to further
disenfranchisement and poverty. It is in this mobility that Hardt and
Negri detect a force for the dismantling of Empire, but the manner in
which the multitude might practically organize itself so as to challenge
the dominant sites of power remains elusive in this new, smoothed-out
order of global capital.
Hardt and Negri’s text is an extraordinarily bold endeavour to rewrite
Marxist theory for the twenty-first century, and it has been highly influ-
ential. However, it has also been criticized for its abstract jargon and its
privileging of buzzwords such as “deterritorialization” and “hybridity”
over concrete economic analysis. Slavoj Žižek comments that the notion
of “global citizenship” that Hardt and Negri offer as a force of resistance
to Empire is hopelessly impractical, since it implies literally the eradi-
cation of state borders. Certainly, if Hardt and Negri intend to update
Marxist analysis for the postmodern, post-imperialist era, their writ-
ing lacks elucidation of the sorts of workable revolutionary strategies
found in Marx or Gramsci. Although they argue that the new capital-
ism of Empire is vulnerable to attack from the forces of the multitude,
they fail to offer a properly political account of how that attack might
take place. In addition, in his review of Empire published in the New
Left Review in 2000, Gopal Balakrishnan suggests that Hardt and Negri
underplay the significant role played by the United States in the control
of global capital in their inflation of the postmodern, deterritorializa-
tion of Empire. More broadly, Hardt and Negri somewhat prematurely
diagnose the end of old power structures in their argument that the
smooth force field of Empire replaces the “striations” of imperialism, its
reliance on hierarchies of sovereignty. As Paul Gilroy (2005) has shown,
the recent rhetoric of “security” has in fact strengthened again the power
of the nation state. The text of Empire is as a result rather closer to the
abstract, postmodern creativity of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand
Plateaus than to militant Marxism, and dismisses perhaps rather swiftly
the potentially lingering effects of old forms of neo-imperialism. The
work deserves mention here, however, because it signals at least the
beginnings of a shift in the workings of imperialism beyond the confines
of the nation state.
The third approach to neocolonialism pertinent here refers to the
very discipline of postcolonial studies. It is perhaps rather strong to
denounce postcolonialism necessarily as a function of neocolonialism,
but radical Marxists such as Ahmad and Dirlik nevertheless lament
the complicity of postcolonial academics in the West with capitalism,
and vilify the postmodernist celebration of postcolonial cultures as a

commodification of otherness. Ahmad perceives postcolonial theory
as a “marketplace of ideas” adrift from real political and economic
questions of inequality and oppression (Ahmad 1992: 70). For Dirlik,
postcolonialism is “a discourse that seeks to constitute the world in the
self-image of intellectuals who view themselves (or have come to view
themselves) as postcolonial intellectuals” (1994: 339) and, like Ahmad,
Dirlik goes on to argue that the focus on culture obfuscates specific
material conditions. Both commentators believe that postcolonial intel-
lectuals’ lack of attention to global capitalism means that they obfus-
cate the oppressive structures they set out to critique. Huggan’s more
nuanced study The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) emphasizes that this sort
of criticism might apply to some, but certainly not all, postcolonial
thinkers and, indeed, we have already seen that Spivak is highly aware
of the potential complicity of academic study with the international
division of labour. For Huggan, the danger lies rather in the broader,
global commodification of cultural difference. Postcolonialism tips over
into a sort of neocolonial exoticism, then, not merely when its propo-
nents draw on culture and theory, but when its consumers fail to read
postcolonial texts properly. In Huggan’s terms, this is:
when creative writers like Salman Rushdie are seen, despite

their cosmopolitan background, as representatives of Third
World countries; when literary works like Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart (1958) are gleaned, despite their fictional
status, for the anthropological information they provide; when
academic concepts like postcolonialism are turned, despite
their historicist pretensions, into watchwords for the fashion-
able study of cultural otherness. (2001: vii)
An exoticism complicit with neocolonialism occurs precisely through

the misinformed and careless treatment of literary texts.
These sorts of observations paint a rather pessimistic view of the
discipline, and the problems associated with Hardt and Negri’s work,
together with Huggan’s denunciation of the phenomenon of cultural
commodification, suggest that there remains a failure among intellectu-
als to engage with the structures and mechanics of postcolonial inequal-
ity as it manifests itself in the present. The process of decolonization
produced militants such as Fanon and Gandhi, but more recent calls for
liberation and equality lack that precision of focus perhaps because the
forces of oppression are now rather more insidious, diffuse and difficult
to pin down. The aporias of Derrida’s thinking around colonialism and
conclusion 183
ethnocentrism testify to a struggle between different forms of critique,
and the eclecticism of Spivak or Mudimbe equally betrays a restless-
ness and an anxiety concerning the tools necessary for emancipation
and change. The return to a form of humanism in many thinkers is
compelling, but it also signals a reliance on old categories rather than
the invention of a new idiom. Political science may well be equipped
to pinpoint the workings and effects of globalization, but postcolonial
philosophy continues to struggle to come up with broader conceptual
models of resistance to postcolonial and neocolonial domination.
Finally, however, despite the uneasiness that persists in the discipline
of postcolonial studies, what many thinkers writing after decoloniza-
tion share is a commitment to careful reading and writing. Unlike the
consumers to whom Huggan refers, the philosophers explored here are
rigorous readers, attentive to the ways in which colonial power is played
out in the production, diffusion and consumption of texts. It is perhaps
not the role of postcolonial philosophers to herald new political regimes,
then, but rather to use their reading strategies to undermine the violent,
masterful and ethnocentric modes of thinking that lie at the founda-
tions of imperialist and neo-imperialist ideology. These discourses of
postcolonial violence enact both political and ethical injustice, and
although resistance to such injustice may be conceived in neo-Marxist,
deconstructive, Levinasian or even humanist terms, the philosophical
and discursive core of that injustice must be denounced. Said, Bhabha
and Spivak, for example, are united in their careful exegeses of the blind-
nesses and errors of the colonial discourses they read and, although their
approaches differ, their critique relies on this attention to the ways in
which colonial knowledge is created in language and disseminated in
texts. In addition, postcolonial philosophy offers new modes of writing
that are vigilant towards the potential assumptions and biases of the
critic. To a greater or lesser extent, all the postcolonial thinkers explored
here learn from their own subtle reading strategies and engender on
that basis an alternative mode of theorizing that resists temptations of
mastery and assimilation. From Said and the Subaltern Studies Collec-
tive through to Derrida and Spivak, postcolonial philosophers express
in their writing a lucidity, and at times an acute anxiety, in relation
to their own project that stems from an unprecedented awareness of
the ethics of theorizing itself. This anxiety may rightly be conceived to
impede direct political action, and should perhaps be surpassed in the
future by a more affirmative mode of discourse, but at the time of writ-
ing it nevertheless testifies to a new openness in philosophical language
appropriate to the demands of postcolonialism.

Key points
• Nkrumah conceived neocolonialism as the ongoing dominance

of foreign economic power over African regeneration.
• For Hardt and Negri, the old imperialism has been replaced by
“Empire”: a diffuse network of power operating beyond the bor-
ders of the nation state. “Empire” is linked to the economic and
political forces of globalization and is propagated through organi-
zations such as the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and the UN.
• Critics such as Dirlik suggest that postcolonial studies itself as a
discipline is complicit with neocolonialism. Huggan argues more
specifically that postcolonial studies have created a new “exotic”
that celebrates literatures from the colonies and ex-colonies but
that elides their historical specificities.
• The future of postcolonial studies remains uncertain, but the anx-
iety now inherent in the discipline in itself reflects a useful vigi-
lance with regard to processes of representation, to the challenges
of reading and writing about cultural difference in the current
postcolonial context.
conclusion 185
Questions for discussion and revision
one Introduction
1. What is the difference between colonialism and imperialism?

2. What is the difference between postcolonialism and postcoloniality?
3. In what ways was Marx ambivalent in his attitude to colonialism?
4. How does Marx’s theory of ideology inform more recent forms of post-
colonial thought?
5. How is Gramsci’s notion of hegemony distinct from Marx’s concept of ideol-
ogy?
6. Define the Levinasian concepts of Totality and Infinity.
7. What aspects of Levinas’s thought can be used to offer a critique of colonial-
ism?
8. How does Levinas conceive the relation between politics and ethics?
two Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to

arms
1. How does Fanon configure the relation between black and white in Black
Skin, White Masks?
2. How does Fanon use and critique psychoanalytic models in his analysis of
colonialism?
3. Analyse Fanon’s use of the term “negro”.
4. In what sense is Fanon’s thought ethical?
5. What does it mean if the colonial structure is “Manichaean”?
6. How does Fanon respond to the politics of nationalism?
7. How does Sartre conceive the role of negritude?
8. How does Sartre position the colonizer in relation to the colonized?

three Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi,
Nandy and the Subaltern Studies Collective
1. Why does Gandhi vilify modern civilization?

2. How does Gandhi define Indian civilization?
3. What do you understand by the term “satyagraha”?
4. What does Gandhi mean by “Swaraj”?
5. How does Nandy understand the psychology of colonialism?
6. How does Nandy use Gandhi’s thought?
7. What were the main objectives of the Subaltern Studies Collective?
8. Why does Chatterjee conceive the Indian nation as ambivalent?
four Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism
1. How does Foucault theorize the position of the minorities or marginalized

subjects in both Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish?
2. How does Foucault conceive the effect of power on the construction of the
individual subject?
3. What criticisms were levelled against Foucault’s conceptions of power and
subjectivity?
4. How does Said define Orientalism?
5. How was Said’s Orientalism criticized?
6. How does Said’s approach differ in Culture and Imperialism and in Oriental-
ism?
7. What does Said mean by the term “contrapuntal”?
8. What are the basic tenets of Said’s humanism?
five Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics
1. What examples does Derrida offer of the ethnocentrism of Western philoso-

phy?
2. How does Derrida conceive the relation between language and colonial-
ism?
3. How does Derrida conceive the relation between the universal, the specific
and the singular?
4. What is the relation between politics and ethics in Derrida’s thought?
5. How does Bhabha conceive the role of theory?
6. What does Bhabha mean by the “Third Space”?
7. How does Bhabha explore the notion of ambivalence in colonial dis-
course?
8. In what ways is Bhabha’s recent writing on minority rights more politicized
than the former work?
questions for discussion and revision 187

six Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to
place
1. How does Khatibi describe his “pensée autre” of the Maghreb?

2. In what ways does Khatibi draw on both poststructuralism and Marxism?
3. What does Khatibi perceive as the effects of bilingualism?
4. How is Khatibi’s thought at once ethical and political?
5. What is the difference between “history” and “History” in Glissant’s think-
ing?
6. What are the diverse features that make up the notion of “Antillanité”?
7. What does Glissant conceive as the ultimate aim of Caribbean Discourse?
8. Describe the form of cultural production recommended in The Politics of
Relation.
seven Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe
1. How does Spivak read Marx?

2. How does Spivak criticize existing accounts of the Hindu immolation of
widows?
3. In what ways does Spivak draw on Derrida?
4. Examine the importance of gender in Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial
Reason.
5. What sorts of African “gnosis” does Mudimbe vilify?
6. What, for Mudimbe, is the best way to offer resistance to the deluded dis-
courses of Africanism?
7. How does Mbembe theorize the operation of power in the postcolony?
8. What, for Mbembe, are the available forms of postcolonial resistance?
eight Conclusion
1. How is neocolonialism defined by Nkrumah, by Hardt and Negri, and by

Huggan?
2. How might postcolonialism divorce itself from neocolonialism?
3. What does postcolonialism tell us about the power of representation?
4. Can postcolonial ethics and politics be reconciled?

Guide to further reading
one Introduction
There are several introductions to postcolonialism that might complement the

present study. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (1993), edited by Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman, contains many key essays. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grif-
fiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989) is one of the first introductions
to postcolonial literature, followed by Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature (1995). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004),
edited by Neil Lazarus, updates some of this earlier work. Ania Loomba’s Colonial-
ism/Postcolonialism (1998) is an introduction to postcolonial culture and thought,
and Ato Quayson’s Postcolonialism (2000) offers an interesting take on the practice
endorsed by the discipline of postcolonial studies. Robert Young’s comprehensive
Postcolonialism (2001) is a long and highly detailed exploration of colonial history
and postcolonial thought. Young’s book includes the best introduction to Marx’s
views on colonialism, and the slim volume by Marx and Engels On Colonialism
(1960) presents a series of extracts in which the philosophers comment on coloni-
alism. A lucid introduction to Levinas in general is Colin Davis’s Levinas (1996).
Howard Caygill’s Levinas and the Political (2002) provides a detailed summary of
his engagement with National Socialism and totalitarianism.
two Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism and the call to

arms
The two important works by Fanon are Black Skin, White Masks (1968) and The
Wretched of the Earth (1967). The best guide to Fanon’s work is Nigel Gibson, Frantz
Fanon (2003). David Macey’s biography Frantz Fanon (2000) helps to situate his
work in the context of his career and political activism. Ato Sekyi-Oto’s book Fanon’s
further reading 189

Dialectic of Experience (1996) offers a detailed reading of the philosophical under-
pinnings of his work, and Lewis Gordon, D. Sharpley-Whiting and R. T. White’s
edited collection Fanon (1996) includes essays on a variety of aspects of his thought.
Sartre’s Orphée noir (1948b) presents his views on negritude, and the volume Colo-
nialism and Neocolonialism (2001) offers a useful survey of Sartre’s writing on colo-
nialism. Young’s White Mythologies (1990) situates Sartre in relation to the broader
history of colonialism and postcolonialism in twentieth-century thought.
three Decolonization, community, nationalism: Gandhi,

Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies Collective
A useful selection of Gandhi’s writing can be found in The Essential Gandhi (1962),
and his An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1982)
together with Hind Swaraj (1997) also clarify his intellectual development and key
ideas. Dennis Dalton’s Mahatma Gandhi (1993) explores Gandhi’s life and work,
and Bhikhu Parekh’s Gandhi’s Political Philosophy (1989) concentrates specifically
on his thought. Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy (1983) is the principal text for
study used here. Nandy has tended to be under-studied, but Young’s Postcolonialism
contains some commentary on his work. For more information on the Subaltern
Studies Group, the best place to start is the journal Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha
and Gayatri Spivak’s volume Selected Subaltern Studies (1988) provides a useful
overview, and Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony (1997) and Chakrabarty’s Pro-
vincializing Europe (2000) expand on the journal’s mission.
four Foucault and Said: colonial discourse and Orientalism
Relevant works by Michel Foucault include Madness and Civilisation (2001a), The
Archaeology of Knowledge (2001b), Disclipline and Punish (1991) and Power/Know-
ledge (1980). Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (1995) is the
only full volume devoted to the links between Foucault’s thought and questions of
colonialism. Edward Said’s volumes Orientalism (1995) and Culture and Imperial-
ism (1993) are his most frequently cited interventions into postcolonialism. Most
introductions to postcolonialism contain detailed commentary on Said, but good
examples include Young’s White Mythologies and Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial
Theory (1997). There is also a useful collection edited by Michael Sprinker entitled
Edward Said (1992). Bryan Turner’s Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism
(1994) develops Said’s thinking in the context of globalization.
five Derrida and Bhabha: self, other and postcolonial ethics
Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) outlines his critique of ethnocentrism, while The

Monolingualism of the Other (1998) contains specific commentary on colonialism
in Algeria. Young has signalled the importance of postcolonialism to Derridean

deconstruction in White Mythologies and in the essay “Deconstruction and the Post-
colonial” (2000). Michael Syrotinski’s Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (2007)
contains exposition not only of Derrida’s relation with postcolonialism but also that
of deconstruction more broadly, as does Philip Leonard’s Nationality between Post-
structuralism and Postcolonial Theory (2005). Homi Bhabha’s key work is the volume
The Location of Culture (1994). An example of his recent writing on rights is “On
Writing Rights” (2003). Criticism of Bhabha is abundant, but good examples are
again Young’s White Mythologies and Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory. Young’s
Colonial Desire (1995) is an intriguing study of the notion of hybridity, used by
Bhabha. David Huddart’s Homi K. Bhabha (2005) is a useful summary of Bhabha’s
thought, also containing discussion of the recent work on minority rights.
six Khatibi and Glissant: postcolonial ethics and the return to

place
Khatibi’s work is not widely translated, but Maghreb pluriel (1983) is the key volume
for an understanding of his thinking on postcolonialism. There is also little criticism
of Khatibi in English, but Réda Bensmaïa’s Experimental Nations, or, The Invention
of the Maghreb (2003) contains a chapter on Khatibi and multilingualism. Walter
Mignolo champions Khatibi in Local Histories, Global Designs (2000). Glissant’s
Caribbean Discourse (1989) and The Poetics of Relation (1997c) are key theoretical
texts by Glissant available in English. Celia Britton’s Edouard Glissant and Post-
colonial Theory (1999) offers a sophisticated reading of his novels as well as his
theory, and J. Michael Dash provides an overview in Edouard Glissant (1995). Chris
Bongie’s Islands and Exiles (1998) situates him in relation to Caribbean and Creole
culture more broadly, and Peter Hallward offers a provocative critique of Glissant
in Absolutely Postcolonial (2001).
seven Ethics with politics? Spivak, Mudimbe, Mbembe
Spivak is a prolific writer, but a lot of her thinking is condensed in the volume A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). The famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
(1988) is also a useful place to start, and The Spivak Reader (1996c) contains many
key essays. Young’s White Mythologies and Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory con-
tain intelligent readings of Spivak, and more critical viewpoints can be found in
Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies (2004) and in Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992).
Mark Sanders’s Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2006) is a clear, synoptic introduc-
tion.
Key works by Mudimbe include The Invention of Africa (1988) and Parables and
Fables (1991). The best reading of Mudimbe can be found in Syrotinski’s Singular
Performances (2002). Mbembe’s important text is On the Postcolony (2001), and
there is a chapter on Mbeme in Syrotinski’s Deconstruction and the Postcolonial.
further reading 191

eight Conclusion: neocolonialism and the future of the
discipline
The key work by Kwame Nkrumah on neocolonialism is Neo-colonialism (1965).

Young’s Postcolonialism also contains summary of Nkrumah’s career. Hardt and
Negri’s provocative volume is Empire (2000), followed up by Multitude (2004). Both
are long, detailed explorations of the authors’ controversial theory. Arif Dirlik’s The
Postcolonial Aura (1997) offers a critique of the neocolonialism of postcolonial stud-
ies, and Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) explores the marketing
of postcolonial literature. Another provocative article on the commercialization
of postcolonial studies is Chris Bongie’s “Exiles on Main Stream” (2003). David
Scott’s Refashioning Futures (1999) is a more general exploration of the future of
postcolonial thought.

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Index
aesthetics 140, 142, 148, 149, 160 political 46

Africa psychoanalytic 26–7, 52, 117
colonialism in 54, 152 Alloula, M. 96
neocolonialism in 180, 185 Althusser, L. 13–14, 81
postcolonial 171–7, 179 Anderson, B. 72, 116
representations of 91, 164–77 androcentrism 95–6
and sexuality 117 anthropology 85, 102–3, 158, 166, 168
and slavery 137 antillanité 138–40, 150, 188
African–American Black Power Move- Arabs 86, 89, 94, 128–35, 149
ment 26 archaeology 76–81, 166, 190
African identity and heritage 41, 43–7, 93, Austen, J. 93–4, 96
136, 164–77
Africanism 164, 177, 188 Baroque art 144–5
African rhythm 46 Barthes, R. 132, 135, 161
agency Baudelaire, C. 144
female 64, 156, 157 Bennington, G. 111
and the masses/the subaltern 39, 69, Berber 128
70, 137, 138, 147, 170, 176 Berque, J. 130–31, 149
native 122–3 Bhabha, H. 14, 22, 27, 32, 35, 57, 68–9, 90,
political 12, 14, 39, 116, 122, 151, 158 98–9, 103, 113–25, 126, 149, 151, 152,
and the subject 82, 94, 103 174, 178, 181, 184, 190–91
ahimsa 62, 72 Bhagavad Gita 57, 60, 61, 160
Ahmad, A. 6, 15, 88, 90, 182, 183, 191 bilingualism 22, 127, 128, 130–35, 136,
Algeria 3, 25–8, 35–8, 41–55, 94, 98–100, 141, 149, 188
103–7, 112, 125, 131, 144, 151, 190 biopower 79, 181
Algerian War of Independence 25, 94, Boer War 58
100, 103 Bongie, C. 4, 148, 191
alienation bourgeoisie 6, 8–10, 14, 38, 40, 48, 52, 55,
and the black man 26–30 61, 71
and the colonizer 44, 49 Britton, C. 27, 149, 191
and the Jew 105, 107, 125 Brontë, C. 160
and language 50, 104, 128, 132, 135
and Orientalism 87 Cabral, A. 40
index 199
calligraphy 128, 131, 133–4 Dirlik, A. 15, 182, 183, 185, 192
Camus, A. 43, 94, 97 dispossession 50, 105–7, 138, 147
Capécia, M. 32
capitalism Eagleton, T. 10, 162
and colonialism 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, East India Company 7, 8, 71, 156, 161
24, 54, 70 equal rights 123
European 44 exoticism 88–9, 136, 183
global 153, 155, 179, 182, 183 exoticization 5
and modern civilization 55, 59, 60 exploitation 3, 4, 6–15, 24, 44, 48, 49, 60,
and postmodernism 161, 182 63, 69, 74, 84, 98–9, 137, 152, 154,
struggle against 11, 27, 60 167, 172, 179–80
Caribbean 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 91, 126, 127, Egypt 85–7
135–50, 151, 188, 191 ethnicity 81, 171
Caygill, H. 18, 189 ethnocentrism 22, 81, 98, 100–107, 110,
Césaire, A. 15, 33, 94, 136–9 113, 115, 125, 130, 157, 166, 184,
Chakrabarty, D. 68–70, 190 187, 190
chaos-monde 146–7, 150
Chateaubriand 87–8 Fanon, F. 14, 23, 25–35, 77, 112, 151, 164,
Chatterjee, P. 54, 55, 57, 68, 69, 71–3, 94, 183, 186, 189–90
187, 190 and Bhabha 116, 118, 121, 123, 124
Chow, R. 104 and Gandhi 54–7, 61, 63, 64, 68, 74
Coetzee, J. M. 161 and Glissant 139, 144
colonial discourse 14, 22, 76–97, 107, and Khatibi 129
113–25, 135, 157, 161, 175, 184, 187 and Mbembe 175, 176, 178
colonial ideology 24–6, 36–7, 40, 65–6, and Nandy 65–6
100, 101 and Said 84, 94, 96, 97, 98
Conrad, J. 92–4, 97 and Sartre 35–53
créolité 139–41 femininity 67, 88
Critchley, S. 108, 111–12 Flaubert, G. 85, 87–9
Forster, E. M. 94, 118
Dash, J. M. 147
Deleuze, G. 82, 143, 155, 156, 169, 182 Foucault, M. 14–15, 71, 76–83, 84–6,
Derrida, J. 98–113, 178, 183, 184, 187, 89–92, 95, 97, 98, 116, 124, 126, 128,
188, 190–91 130, 152, 155, 156, 164–7, 176, 187,
and Bhabha 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 190
124–5 Fuss, D. 27
and Foucault 82–3
and Glissant 135–6, 143, 148, 149 Gandhi, L. 70
and Khatibi 126–8, 130, 133 Gandhi, M. 54–64, 98, 112, 164, 176, 183,
and Levinas 20–23 187, 190
and Mbembe 176–7 and Nandy 65–8
and Sartre 50–51 and the Subaltern Studies Collective
and Spivak 151–5, 157, 159, 161–5, 69–72, 74
170, 173 gender 32, 96, 122, 127, 152, 181, 188
Devi, M. 161 Gilroy, P. 182
dialectic 27, 28, 32, 34, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, Glissant, E. 22, 126–7, 135–50, 151, 178,
52, 64, 146, 153, 167, 125 179, 199, 191
Diaspora 22, 106 Gramsci, A. 11–14, 85, 182, 186
Djebar, A. 96 Guattari, F. 143, 155, 156, 169, 182
deconstruction 22, 52, 100, 103, 108, 112, Guha, R. 12, 68–71, 80, 95, 122, 123, 190
115, 121, 127, 130, 149, 151, 161,
170–72, 176, 178, 191 Haddour, A. 103
departmentalization 138 Hall, S. 11–12
Descartes, R. 83, 168 Hallward, P. 147–8, 162–3, 191

Hardt, M. 180–82 Martinique 25, 27, 135–50, 179
Hassoun, J. 135 marvellous realism 145
Hegel, G. W. F. 32, 47, 49, 52, 101, 130, Marx, K. 6–15, 56, 59, 66, 69–71, 88, 130,
146, 159–60, 175–6 152–60, 163, 177, 186, 188–9
Heidegger, M. 16, 17, 20, 109 Marxism 6–15, 23, 24, 152, 177, 180, 182
Hinduism 55, 57, 60–63, 156, 175, 188, and Fanon 38, 52
190 and Khatibi 130
Huggan, G. 5, 183–5, 188 and Mbembe 172
humanism 27, 35, 48, 54, 63–4, 84, 95, 97, and Spivak 158
112, 117, 124, 123, 131, 184, 187 and the Subaltern Studies Collective
human rights 123–4, 140 75
hybridity 68, 119, 122, 125, 182, 191 masculinity 66–7
Masolo, D. A. 170
ideological state apparatus 13 Mbembe, A. 151, 152, 171–7, 178, 179,
ideology 2, 3, 6–15, 74–7, 80–81, 93, 138, 180, 188, 191
161, 164, 167, 180, 186 Meddeb, A. 131–3
India 3, 7–8, 12, 14, 24, 54–75, 76, 88, 91, Memmi, A. 49, 63
93–8, 119, 156, 159, 161, 187 metaphysics 16, 17, 20, 22, 52, 98, 99,
industrialization 3, 8, 60 103, 104, 108, 110, 125, 129, 130,
Islam 22, 58, 84, 87, 89, 95, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 149
133, 134, 134, 149, 151 métissage 140, 144, 145, 147
Israel 21, 22, 89 migration 144, 146, 181
Miller, C. 171
James, C. L. R. 137 mimicry 41, 118, 119, 157, 172, 174, 176
Jews 21, 22, 28, 30, 105–7 mission civilisatrice 9, 54, 87
Judaism 22, 105–7 Moore-Gilbert, B. 122, 190, 191
Morocco 41, 127–35
Khatibi, A. 22, 103, 126–35, 136, 141, 144, Mudimbe, V. Y. 23, 151, 152, 164–71,
149, 150, 188, 191 172, 175–8, 180, 184, 188, 191
Kipling, R. 67, 93–4, 97, 118, 161
Koran 127–8, 131, 134 Naipaul, V. S. 118
Nandy, A. 54, 57, 64–8, 69, 74, 89, 96,
Lacan, J. 14, 27, 114, 117, 119, 132 187, 190
Lamartine, A. de 87–8 National Liberation Front 25
Latin America 3, 119, 145, 179 National Socialism 6, 15, 16, 112, 189
Lazarus, N. 6, 15, 27, 178, 189 Negri, A. 180–82
Levinas, E. 6, 15–23, 24, 28, 35, 140, 184, negritude 28, 33, 34, 64, 136, 167, 186,
186, 189 190
and Derrida 99, 101, 108–13, 125, 126, Sartre on 43–52
158 Nehru, J. 73
and Khatibi 131, 133, 135 Nerval, G. de 88
and Glissant 140 non-violence 55, 56–9, 62
and Mudimbe 166 North Africa 94, 96, 129
and passive resistance 61–2, 64
and Said 77 ontology 16, 17, 20, 28, 35, 43, 95, 109,
Lévi-Strauss, C. 22, 44, 101, 102, 125, 164, 131
166, 168 opacity 145, 147, 149
logocentrism 101, 104, 113, 115, 130 Ortiz, F. 140
Louverture, T. 137 Orwell, G. 67, 118
Macey, D. 26–7, 189 Palestine 22, 84, 95

Maghreb 126–35, 188, 191 Parry, B. 6, 23, 34, 103, 121, 162, 178
Mannoni, O. 31 passive resistance 56, 61, 62, 74
Mariátegui, J. C. 179 Patrick, M. 111
index 201
Paz, O. 119 South Africa 26, 58
peasantry 12, 14, 39, 40, 48, 68–9, 73 sovereignty 16–18, 20, 22, 104, 105, 112,
Perse, S. J. 144 123, 125, 157, 172, 173, 179, 180, 182
poststructuralism 23, 48, 95, 103, 113, Spivak, G. 6, 12, 23, 151–64, 165, 170,
188, 191 171, 172, 176–80, 183–4, 188, 190,
poetics of relation 137, 140, 141, 142, 191
144–9 and Derrida 103, 104
proletariat 6, 8–11, 14, 38 and Foucault 82, 83
and the Subaltern Studies Collective
Quayson, A. 4, 189 73–4
Stoler, L. A. 81
race 12, 16, 33, 44–5, 47, 51, 63, 65, 81, subaltern 12, 76, 68–75, 82, 94–5, 136–7,
118, 181 147, 151, 152, 155, 165, 170, 177, 179
Rhys, J. 160 and Spivak 157–63
Rich, A. 123 Subaltern Studies Collective 54, 57,
Rimbaud, A. 144 68–75, 76, 77, 90, 98, 152, 156, 184,
Rosello, M. 21 187, 190
Rousseau, j. J. 22, 101, 164, 168 surplus value 7, 9, 15, 154
Rowlatt Bills 58 swadeshi 63, 70
Swaraj 55, 56, 58, 60, 62–4, 72, 187, 190
Said, E. 19, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83–97, 98, 151, Syrotinski, M. 163, 178, 191
184, 187, 190
and Bhabha 114, 118, 124, 125 Taylor, C. 123
and Mudimbe 164, 165 Thiong’o, N. W. 65
Salih, T. 94 Todorov, T. 135
San Juan Jr, E. 14–15 totalitarianism 15, 16, 23, 24, 28, 67, 99,
Sartre, J-P. 14, 25, 28, 43–53, 54, 63, 65, 110, 112, 140, 189
66, 77, 84, 97, 98, 105, 112, 124, 151, transculturation 3, 140
164, 186, 189–90
and Fanon 30, 32, 38 use value 153
and Mudimbe 167–8
sati 156–9 Vichy 100, 105
satyagraha 58, 61, 62, 64, 74, 187 virility 34, 66, 174
Scott, D. 105
Segalen, V. 128, 132, 144 Young, R. 6, 8, 9, 29, 64, 82, 91, 103, 121,
Senghor, L. S. 33, 43, 167, 169 162–3, 180, 189, 190, 191, 192
sexuality 67, 74, 78, 80–81, 96, 97
Shelley, M. 160–61 Žižek, S. 182

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understanding postcolonialism

Understanding Movements in Modern Thought

This series provides short, accessible and lively introductions to the

Understanding Empiricism Understanding Postcolonialism

Forthcoming titles include

Understanding Feminism Understanding Pragmatism

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

First published in 2009 by Acumen

Acumen Publishing Limited

ISBN: 978-1-84465-160-3 (hardback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Typeset in Minion Pro.

Postcolonialism is a broad and constantly changing movement that has

Marxism and ideology

Marx refers directly to colonialism somewhat sporadically through-

compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bour-

Nevertheless, if capitalism also brings with it this drive towards col-

Levinas never directly confronts the question of colonialism and its

man no longer finds himself confronted with a world of ideas

• Postcolonialism consists of the multiple political, economic, cul-

Fanon and Sartre: colonial Manichaeism

Frantz Fanon is undoubtedly one of the most significant and influ-

fanon and sartre 25

the “post-colonial” Fanon is in many ways an inverted image of

Celia Britton explores the rather less neutral reactions of a range of

fanon and sartre 27

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

fanon and sartre 29

fanon and sartre 31

fanon and sartre 33

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

fanon and sartre 35

In addition to this new unity, Fanon champions spontaneity as opposed

fanon and sartre 37

In a self-consciously Marxist tone, Fanon affirms that the revolution is

it is neither the act of owning factories, not estates, nor a

In the chapter “Spontaneity: Strength and Weakness”, Fanon develops

fanon and sartre 39

fanon and sartre 41

One of the most celebrated philosophers of twentieth-century France,

fanon and sartre 43

The black man is the victim, as a black man, as a colonized

It is only by showing black identity to be other than that which the

fanon and sartre 45

I wanted to be typically Negro, – it was no longer possible. I

Sartre’s conception of negritude as just a stage in the dialectic was for

fanon and sartre 47

fanon and sartre 49

fanon and sartre 51

• Fanon’s work has both psychoanalytic and political dimensions.

fanon and sartre 53

Decolonization, community, nationalism:

If Fanon and Sartre’s writing on colonial Manichaeism, emergent

decolonization, community, nationalism 55

Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1869 at Porbandar, Gujarat,

decolonization, community, nationalism 57

decolonization, community, nationalism 59

more and more, as they realize that amid differences of creed

decolonization, community, nationalism 61

decolonization, community, nationalism 63