The Pauper’s Gift: Postcolonial Theory and the New Democratic Dispensation
Anti-Postcolonial Critique
In the course of its checkered career, officially launched with the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s Orientalism, postcolonial studies has suffered a continuous critical onslaught against its disciplinary claims — indeed, against its very right to disciplinary existence — conducted under the symbolic aegis of the orthodox Left. The lineaments of the conflict are largely hermeneutic and concern two competing readings of modern European imperialism. One draws on a long Marxist tradition of anti-imperial critique (J. A. Hobson, Nikolay Bukharin, Rudolf Hilferding, V. I. Lenin, to name a few) to describe imperialism simply and precisely as the globalization of capital. By contrast, postcolonialism contemplates empire under a dizzying plethora of subheadings and subdisciplines, sometimes as “impossible to think” as Jorge Luis Borges’s taxonomy from “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia,” in this case, epistemological bad faith, discursive binarization, a misjudgment of dust, the mutations of cricket, the counter-mutations of polo, legality, the fallacy of curry, the census, the history of cholera, cartography, the object-ridden nineteenth-century novel, and such.1 For reason of this inchoative and antisystematic quality to its thought, postcolonialism stands charged of academic and political dilettantism: as poor history, poor literary criticism, very bad philosophy and, thereon, a form of shadow elitism, chary of collectivity, incurious about solidarity, a discourse of taste rather than of necessity, oftentimes reinforcing rather than refuting its own object of critique. “Postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory,” as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it somewhat thunderously in Empire, do not “challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule!”2 Reactionary and witless, to boot. In their weakest moments postcolonial theorists have responded to such offensive with self-damaging counteroffensive, claiming membership of an inventive avant-garde well in advance of dusty, textbook, schoolroom Marxism. In their worst moments they have capitulated to accusations of arrested development through hasty promises of remedial action, returning to lost scenes of disciplinary integrity, defending the organizational rigor and systematicity of a postcolonial politics. Their best moments, however (moments upon which the future of postcolonial theory may well be predicated), are marked by two features: first, by a defiant, creative rapprochement with their own presumed immaturity, whether academic or political, and, second, by a refusal to be severed, even so, from the history of radical anticolonialism, Western and non- Western alike.
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Notes
- This reading of Borges’s story, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” as a parable about the limits of thought is, famously, from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), xv – xxiv.
- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 138.