Postcolonial Studies

 Hello Everyone, I'm a student of the Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is a part of thinking activity which is given by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. In this blog I'm going to summarise Ania Loomba's two articles which are based on the postcolonial theory.

What is postcolonialism :-

Ania Loomba 

Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

 Artical :- 1

Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies .

It starts with the introduction of a global war on terror,and the US invention of Afghanistan and Iraq. It happened for the freedom from colonialism. After freedom,the New-American Empire developed and it was advocated by policy-making ,politicians and academics in the US and elsewhere. Then the question arises for domination and resistance and it is raised by Anti-Colonial movements and Postcolonial studies. It was a globalised event. 

Globalisation seems to have transformed the world so radically, many of its advocates and critics suggest, that it has rendered obsolete a critical and analytical perspective which takes the history and legacy of European colonialism as its focal point. It is meaningless to continue to define our world in relation to the dynamics of European colonialism or decolonisa- tion. Globalisation, they argue, cannot be analysed using concepts like margins and centres so central to postcolonial studies.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire argues that the con- temporary global order has produced a new form of sovereignty which should be called 'Empire' but which is best understood in contrast to European empires.

Empire argues that whereas the old imperial world was marked by com- petition between different European powers, the new order is characterised by a 'single power that overdetermined them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonialism and post imperialist'.

According to Hardt and Negri "Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project ',a project which sought to include and incorporate minorities into the mainstream rather than simply expel or exclude them.

Hardt and Negri suggest that the new Empire is better compared to the Roman Empire rather than to European colonialism, since imperial Rome also loosely incorporated its subject states rather than controlling them directly.

The dynamics of contemporary global power and how best to challenge it. Vailashini Cooppan argues, makes it difficult to accurately analyse contemporary US imperialism and its place in the contemporary world. But Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman believe that 'characterising US political and cultural power as a global dominant detracts from a more thorough examination of sites and modalities of power in the global era'; accordingly, they celebrate Empire as 'exceptionally helpful in advancing our capacity to think past the reinscription of globalisation as a centre/periphery dynamic that produces resistant margins and hege- monic cores.

The controversy about Empire is thus shaped by wider and ongoing debates about the nature and effects of globalisation.Simon Gikandi observes that globalisation is so often to have made redundant the term of Postcolonial critique, globalisation,is in fact asserted by appropriating the key terms of Postcolonial studies,such as ,'hybridity',and 'Difference '.

It is premature to argue that the images and narra- tives that denote the new global culture are connected to a global structure or that they are disconnected from earlier or older forms of iden- tity. In other words, there is no reason to suppose that the global flow in images has a homological connection to transformation in social or cultural relationships'.

There is also a connection between new writing and globalisation. They said , it is a new economic order.

Hardt and Negri suggest that the new cultural, economic and political flows offer 'new possibilities to the forces of lib- eration' (xv) because global power can then be challenged from multiple sites by its multiple subjects whom they refer to as the 'multitude'.

According to Hardt and Negri,new ideologies of difference are more flexible and Balibar actually suggests the opposite.

Balibar actually suggests the opposite. They write: Fixed and biological notions of peo- ples thus tend to dissolve into a fluid and amorphous multitude, which is of course shot through with lines of conflict and antagonism, but none that appear as fixed and eternal boundaries'.

Then there are the arguments regarding Muslims and imperialism and globalisation. There is also a description of the connection between the past Empire and the global economy.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and once Chief Economist at the World Bank, also uses the phrase 'marker fundamentalism' in his critique of globalisation as it has been imposed upon the world by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.

Joseph connects the developments to colonialism,and also suggests that ' the IMF's approach to developing countries has the feel of a colonial ruler. Then the destructive histories of modern Empires are being widely whitewashed. Then there was also a refference of NBA movement (Narmada Bachao Abhiyan) ,leader of this movement is chittaroopa palit. He also shares his experiences regarding this movement. 

Inshort, we can say that this essay is based on European empires and the journey of Postcolonial people.

Article :- 2

The  Future of Postcolonial Studies .

Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s.  It starts with ecology, which is not a new concern for many intellectuals and activists concerned with the contemporary legacies of colonialism. For decades now, the environmental activist Vandana Shiva has exposed the connection between colonialism and the destruction of environmental diversity. She argues that the growth of capitalism, and now of transnational corporations, exacerbated the dynamic begun under colonialism which has destroyed sustain-

able local cultures; these cultures were also more women-friendly, partly because women’s work was so crucially tied to producing food and fodder. Other feminist environmentalists are more sceptical of such an assessment of pre-colonial cultures, which, they point out, were also stratified and patriarchal; however, they agree that questions of ecology and human culture are intricately linked.

Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez-Alier (1997) point out, is evident in American environmentalism and its obsession with the wilderness. Rob Nixon further notes that this wilderness obsession is celebrated in American literature as well as in natural history, where ‘There is a durable tradition … of erasing the history of colonised peoples through the myth of the empty lands. … a prodigious amount of

American environmental writing and criticism makes expansive gestures while remaining amnesiac towards non-American geographies that vanish over the intellectual skyline’.

There are also references to political power on colonialism. Roy writes that the constitution of free India ‘ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands.Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life’. They are focusing on these four issues—the environment, indigeneity, colonial legacies and globalcapital can help us understand that global capitalism today has both retained and refined the dynamics of plunder and colonialism that marked its inception. Karl Marx described the process in England: beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, the forcible usurpation of communal property occurred first ‘by means of individual acts of violence’ and later through the Parliamentary Acts for Enclosures of the Commons. Many commentators have suggested that postcolonial studies should not be thought of as a discrete field so much as an approach that has been honed by work on colonial dynamics and legacies in several disciplines; nevertheless, it is also a formation within the academy, shaped largely within English departments.

She had also discussed some recent scholarship and political movements that show why the colonial past and the globalised presents are deeply interconnected.  All the world literature is very deeply connected with the Postcolonial Studies.Postcolonial critique, however we interpret the term, can be meaningful only in conversation with scholarship and activism across the globe that strives to achieve a truly postcolonial world.