Post-colonialism

Chapter 9

Post-colonialism

By Christine Sylvester

Introduction: post-colonial thinking comes to International Relations      

Former colonies face International Relations      

Revising history, filling gaps

Becoming postcolonial

Conclusions: post-colonialism in International Relations  

Reader's Guide

This chapter considers a new stream of analysis that brings colonial, postcolonial, and the current era of post-colonial history into International Relations (IR). It does so through the presentation and analysis of everyday people and their experiences in countries that were once colonies, and through theories that respond to European and North American versions of history that focus on great power states and their interactions. Drawing on the humanities fields of social history, literary studies, philosophy, and psycho­analysis for inspiration, post-colonial analysis endeav­ours to fill the many gaps in Eurocentric constructions of the world so that people and ideas associated with former colonies can be visible, audible, and influential today. Its recent theories of hybrid identity and post­colonial epochal trends in the international system also address hierarchies of inter-state and transna­tional relations that still prevail in globalized IR and that provide opportunities for people to combine into new political and identity groupings.

What is Postcolonialism?

Postcolonialism is the study of the legacy of the era of European, and sometimes American, direct global domination, which ended roughly in the mid-20th century, and the residual political, socio-economic, and psychological effects of that colonial history...

Introduction: post-colonial thinking conies to International Relations

Post-colonialism is a relatively new approach to the study of International Relations (IR). It entered the field only in the 1990s, slightly later than feminist and post­structuralist approaches (see Ch. 18). As in the case of those theories, the timing of the post-colonial entree to IR relates to the failure of the field to predict some of the major events of the twentieth century, such as the struggles to decolonize and, later, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the end of the cold war. Until the 1990s, IR relied on just a few key theories, mainly realism (Ch. 6), liberalism (Ch. 7), and Marxism (Ch. 8). These were not attuned to what has been termed ‘people power’, the efforts of ordinary people to end colonial rule or cold war divisions that kept East and West Berliners apart. With IR weakened by the inadequacies of its reigning theories, approaches that had been denied legitimacy were able to gain influ­ence in the field. The new entrants stretched the field by refusing the idea that nation-states are always the key actors in IR—great powers in particular—and empha­sizing the many locations and relations that could be considered as IR. Post-colonial analysis is one of these new entrants.

The main contributions of post-colonial analysis have been threefold: to bring historical relations of colonial powers with colonies into the study of IR; to provide views and theories of those relations from the perspectives of colonized peoples rather than from the perspectives of great powers alone; and to encourage the use of novels, poetry, diaries, and testimonials as sources of valuable information on the nature of colo­nialism and post-colonialism. There is also a fourth contribution of post-colonialism: when we remove the hyphen, the changed form indicates that the global

era of our time is postcolonial. The use of the term ‘postcolonial’ signifies lingering colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender despite the winding down of the formal colonial period, and the tendency of IR (and many people in the West) to pay more attention to the foreign policies of the USA and European countries than to those of most former colonies, such as Zambia, Botswana, Jamaica, Bangladesh, the Philippines, or Bolivia. The chapter traces the development of post- colonial thought and ends by using the more current term, postcolonial studies, to refer to the present era. ‘Post-colonial’ is used throughout this chapter to refer to the analysis of colonialism and anti-colonialism. ‘Postcolonial’ is used to indicate a turn since the 1990s towards analysing the current era of IR as the post- colonial era. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, it is more common today to see the unhyphenated terms used to think about and theorize the many ways that some colonial conditions of the past interact with today’s international relations of global­ization, war, empire, migration, and identity politics.

Key Points

Post-colonialism is a new approach in IR that provides a bottom-up rather than state-down approach to the study of international relations.

Among other more traditional sources, it uses fiction and personal testimonials as sources of information about colonial and post-colonial people and situations relevant to international relations.

It is broad enough to include specific colonial and post-colonial relations as well as the notion that our era in international relations is 'postcolonial'.

Former colonies face International Relations

International Relations has not traditionally been interested in investigating relations of dominance and subordination in the world. The field developed around the study of sovereign states and their interac­tions. Colonies, by definition, were not independent and sovereign, and many had to struggle violently or non-violently to cut the reins of their colonial power and gain sovereign independence. They then faced the

challenge of fulfilling the responsibilities of duly con­stituted states to protect national populations, oversee economic development, and provide social services such as education. The later the colonization and inde­pendence occurred, the greater the struggles and chal­lenges of post-colonial governance. Colonial overlords of earlier eras became less powerful as time went on, but they were also unwilling to give up the colonies that gave them some prestige and considerable economic advantage. The poorest countries of the world today were recent colonies, and many wars and conditions of civil unrest and underdevelopment overshadow them. Yet IR, with its long-standing preoccupation with rela­tions of great powers, did not have the interest or the tools to broaden its scope to groups, cultures, move­ments, knowledges, locations, and relations that would encompass the peoples of former colonies. Implicitly, the worldview of IR was European and North American. To include relations of gender, race, culture, inequality, exploitation, and colonialization as international rela­tions, the field had to develop an interest in historical relations of states and groups, instead of burying those in quick background sketches in their research.

It can seem in hindsight as if the neglect of colonial history and social relations as international relations required remarkable stubbornness or blindness. From the end of the Second World War onwards, consider­able activity in international relations revolved around decolonization (moving to end colonial rule). More than sixty colonies achieved independence as states and members of the United Nations by the mid-1960s, fifty in Africa alone. The timing of that wave of inde­pendence coincided with the cold war, when the two superpowers competed for ideological, economic, and technological dominance. Some new states became bat­tlegrounds in the cold war (Vietnam, Korea) and oth­ers posed the prospect of new allies for the superpowers if modernized quickly—and armed militarily—so that they could withstand the blandishments of the oppos­ing bloc (see Ch. 3).

That order of priorities was symptomatic of the hierarchies of power and knowledge in the world, and entirely unacceptable to radical leaders in Cuba, China, and Indonesia, who believed that former colonies should carve out their own destinies. In 1955, twenty- nine mostly Asian and African countries created the beginnings of a post-colonial, non-aligned, Third World bloc of international relations at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Although more favourable to socialism than capitalism, the bloc sought to draw resources from each superpower, rather than choose a side in the cold war. All foreign aid would then be put in the service of plans and policies set by the new states themselves, not by the superpowers and their agen­das. That trend intensified at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, held in Havana, Cuba, with 500 delegates from independent and decolonizing states of Tatin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. One of the

main speakers was Che Guevara, the militant theorist and practitioner of national liberation through armec. struggle. He used the occasion to expound his theory erf guerrilla warfare as the best method for the remaining colonies to employ in their struggles for independence from recalcitrant Europeans. He also advocated popu­lar armed struggles wherever corrupt Latin American regimes were propped up by a neo-colonial USA, whose only concern in the region was to keep anti­communist and pro-business leaders in power at all costs. The models for the Third World were China and Cuba; the latter was where guerrilla warfare had driven the corrupt regime of Battista out of Cuba in the 1950s and had facilitated Fidel Castro’s rise to power 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

Influenced strongly by cold war foreign policies of the West, International Relations was largely complicit in the American effort to isolate tricontinental think­ers as dangerous pro-communist, anti-American agita­tors. Even the far more moderate Bandung Conference had drawn the attention of students of IR only by introducing the non-aligned movement and popular­izing the concept of a Third World, positioned stra­tegically between, yet drawing resources from, the First World West and the Second World Soviet bloc. By contrast, post-colonial studies remembers that the Tricontinental Conference gave birth to the short-lived journal Tricontinental, which was one of the first out­lets for works by thinkers who were influential in Third World politics and would become the backbone of early post-colonial thinking—people like Frantz Fanon and Ho Chi Minh. The journal contributors were from dif­ferent continents, cultures, and experiences, and yet they commonly wrote about the dominance of Euro- American politics, history, and power in ways that distorted or erased other knowledge from the history books. The determination of some of these thinkers to turn the violent methods perpetrated on their societies against intransigent colonists themselves reflected fury at the automatic subordination that their countries, peoples, and ideas experienced in colonial, and then also in post-colonial, cold war international relations.

Frantz Fanon is one of the early analysts who advocated the violent overthrow of colonialism and dominance-subordination relations in new states. A psychologist trained in Martinique and France, Fanon experienced a level of racism during and fol­lowing medical training that impelled him to resign from a prominent position in the Caribbean to join the Algerian anti-colonial struggle against France. Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1963) initiated an ongoing discussion in fledg­ling post-colonial studies about mechanisms of colonial control. Unlike the emphasis in IR on objective power relations (which would point out that France is more powerful than its colony of Algeria in military, eco­nomic, and cultural terms), the stress in Fanon’s work is on the power of colonial discourses to colonize the minds of all involved. This meant that European colo­nizers would see their exercise of dominating power as justified, and colonized societies would come to accept and internalize the diminished and subordinate statuses imposed on them. The vehicle of such status differentiation is not the force of the gun but the force of language—words, racial epithets, and daily insults thrown at people. Fanon drew on works of anti-colonial poets and writers as he discussed the importance of building a national consciousness that does not mimic European ways (see Box 10.1).

The Wretched of the Earth details the steps by which violence becomes the only tool that can drive out those insulting messages and free the colonized to achieve self-defined identity and national conscious­ness. Yet that freedom often remains elusive even after independence, as local elites—native intellec­tuals—play the class and power cards they acquired from Europe and work only for their own interests. The struggle for national consciousness, therefore, is complex culturally and politically, and extends long past the immediate post-colonial moment of a coun­try. Yet whose national consciousness Fanon is talk­ing about is an open question, for it is the men in his accounts who are posed as the natural’ ringleaders of resistance. Fanon praises women for their role in nationalist struggles, but he gives them a back seat to the men, who plan the actions and later assume posi­tions of national power.

As these early writings came out, the field of IR, as Arlene Tickner (2003: 296) puts it, carried on its ‘lack of correspondence between standard IR terminology, categories, and theories, and third world realities’. Focused on established state relations and the organi­zations these had created, IR approached the phenom­enon of new states in the 1960s and 1970s not through the work of Third World intellectuals, but often through an analyses of radical North-South politics that were emerging in international relations. That politics came in several forms. A voting bloc known as the Group of 77 formed in the United Nations to encourage Third World solidarity in raising or responding to issues. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to take control of natural resources like oil that were valued by the West. Demands were also made in the United Nations for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that would be more favourable to the circumstances of post-colonial societies, offering preferential terms of trade, aid, and resource allocation in a system where all states would be equal partners in global economic governance. Wars and conflicts that engaged the cold war protagonists put the spotlight on countries of South East Asia and Central America, and on foreign aid issues. We might say that IR research­ers began paying more attention to post-colonial states in the 1970s, but did so by narrowly framing research around threats posed to an established world order managed by developed states.

Whether agendas for Third World countries were being forged by superpowers and academics of IR living in the West, or by leaders and intellectuals from post- colonial societies, the direction of knowledge was from the top down. Society might be spoken about in their various missives, but everyday lives were not explored in ways that could yield fuller pictures of colonial experiences and post-colonial proclivities. Bottom-up initiatives were not the order of the day; vanguard poli­tics was. Also, the notables associated with early post- colonial thinking and with responses to it in Europe and North America were predominantly men, who assumed that post-colonial states needed what men at the top needed or could arrange. It was only when post-colonial studies developed as a named academic field in the 1980s that the early writings and activi­ties of anti-colonial thinkers could be put into a larger context of local resistance, disruption, and opportu­nities created by empire-building; reciprocal flows of knowledge and culture to and from colonies; and the lives and politics of everyday people in post-colonial settings, particularly women’s lives. Until then, both IR and anti-colonial thinking focused on states rather than on people, and both were influenced by ideologi­cal currents in the cold war period.

Key Points

IR showed some Interest in colonial and post-colonial relations, but only from the perspective of great power interests.

The cold war period saw great powers competing over influence in newly independent countries.

Unwilling to choose between Western and Soviet bloc patronage, some post-colonial state regimes met at conferences and formed the non-aligned movement to create a Third World bloc.

The Third World was able to show some power over the great powers through OPEC and by demanding an NIEO.

But the agendas of and for the Third World did not take into account the lives of average people in post-colonial settings.

Revising history, filling gaps

Post-colonialism as an academic field was also heavily influenced by research trends in India, where a group of historians were developing social histories that they referred to as subaltern studies. Not content to study India through the eyes of its former colonial power or local leaders, these scholars started studying the his­tory and culture of people at the lowest levels of Indian society, the subalterns. That term was coined in the early twentieth century by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to denote groups so subordinated and even despised in their national societies that they had been cast out from nationalist activities and all national his­tories, local and international (see Ch. 8). The subaltern studies group endeavoured to turn around the position of the subaltern in knowledge, from being the lowest in a chain of influence starting with colonial powers and ending with the post-colonial state and its leaders to being the most relevant for building the kind of knowl­edge that could respond to tales of colonial power, glory, and individual or national (European) heroism. The subaltern studies group, which included Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Spivak, also had an

activist interest in reversing the marginal and oppres­sive conditions of lower-class existence. Like feminist analysts who dared to begin their study of international relations with the lives of women rather than elite men or states (see Enloe 1989), subaltern analysis focused on people who up to that point were seen—if seen at all—as victims of history or quaint examples of local culture. The key question for these scholars was: what does history and contemporary life look like when it starts from subaltern points of view, from the bottom up instead of from the top down? It was a question that would soon be taken up and refined in post-colonial contexts far from South Asia.

To try to answer it was to enter uncultivated ter­rain. There were scant or no historical ‘data’ on subal­tern people. The subaltern studies group had to think of ways of working with neglected groups and learning about their lives. One avenue was to analyse colonial and post-colonial fictional literatures, travelogues, and diaries. These portrayed the fabric of ordinary life under colonization as well as the changes brought about by nationalist rejections of colonialism and post-colonial state efforts to build national identity. Post-colonial lit­erary analysis became a central methodology of post- colonial studies. Graeme Turner (1993:1), an Australian scholar, argued that local stories are ‘ultimately pro­duced by the culture; thus, they generate meanings, take on significances, and assume forms that are artic­ulations of the values, beliefs—the ideology—of the culture’. Chenjerai Hove, a Zimbabwean poet and nov­elist whose fiction, Bones, won a Commonwealth prize, puts this another way: ‘I don’t want to keep fiction and reality apart. Human beings are very complex animals. Our decisions, feelings and experiences are determined by our wishes, legends and the past. I believe . . . that people themselves are bits of imagination. We are invented. We are invented by other people’ (Hove 1994:15). We invent ourselves, too, in ways that can mimic what we read, view, and hear, or that resist portrayal by others. The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986: 16) writes: ‘how people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other human beings.’

One of the most influential post-colonialist writers, Edward Said, used imaginative literatures extensively in his writings. In fact, it has been argued that the field might have remained focused on anti-colonial militancy and Marxist approaches to subaltern studies in India and elsewhere had Said not introduced a key cultural component into the discussions. Said (1935-2003) was a Christian Palestinian by birth, but his family moved to Cairo from Jerusalem when the first Arab-Israeli war began, and then moved about between Jerusalem, Cairo, and other Middle East locations. Said settled in the USA for university and PhD training, and rose to the position of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, which he held at his death. He is best known for his work on Orientalism and a book by that name published in 1978 that became so prominent that some credit it, and not subaltern studies, with the begin­ning of post-colonial studies. Orientalism considers the ways that the Middle East and Asia are represented in Western novels, biographies, and artworks. Commonly, these depict places lost in times past, inclined towards despotic rule, and prone to ‘odd’ cultural rituals that can be both pleasurable and symptomatic of weak­ness. The Orient was invented as a place that Western men could praise as gentle, sensuous, and alluringly feminine, where men and women would luxuriate and indulge themselves in modes considered degenerate by European mores. For instance, it was commonly noted that Oriental women covered their faces but wore flimsy apparel and mesmerized men with sexualized dances that held the promise of uncomplicated heterosexual pleasure. The men appeared sapped by the culture of pleasure and easy to conquer; or they appeared irratio­nally cruel. That Orient was a powerfully pictured but vague location that the Westerner believed he could control and enjoy, penetrate and possess, and hide in to escape Victorian morality.

That picture continues to exert an exaggerated influ­ence on Western thought and international relations. The Orient of travel writings and imaginative literatures that fascinated Said is so different from the West that it cannot be incorporated into frameworks of great power international relations, even though many of the areas deemed oriental have had extensive imperial and state- building histories of their own. To Said, the perceived oddities of Oriental culture gain far more significance than would usually be the case in international rela­tions. The curiosities of the ‘Orient’ were worth crossing deserts to see, but the combination of attraction and dis­trust kept the orientalized Middle East and Asia impos­sibly distant from European and Christian moralities and logics. The journey to the Orient, therefore, would not be based on respect for the achievements and contri­butions to knowledge and international relations of an area; indeed, Said notes that Orientalists showed little interest in imaginative literatures by Oriental writers. The implicit goal, which repeats across time in politics, media, and the popular imagination, was to reaffirm cul­tural difference and render things ‘Oriental’ marginal to the West and subordinate to Western international relations. These invented representations that go back two centuries shape Western views of Arab, Muslim, and Confucian countries today, as shown by common media representations of Middle Eastern Muslims as backward and yet cunningly dangerous to the Western world (Porter 2009).

Said’s work is canonical in post-colonial studies, but it has also come in for criticism. One concern is that it represents colonized people through stories written by Western men. Said’s construction of colonial and Orientalist discourse is so beholden to Western mas­culine fantasy that it cannot accommodate the views of Western women, who were also physically present in Middle Eastern and Asian countries, and whose writ­ings can call into question the dominant masculine representations. Said also neglects women in Middle Eastern countries who defy Western images of passiv­ity and sexual availability. And, although he embraced humanism, Orientalism draws stark dividing lines between colonized and colonizer, as though the flow of knowledge and power were all in one direction only.

Research that draws on fiction is still not prominent in the field of IR. Fiction lies outside usual social sci­ence standards of correct ‘data’—that is, information gathered from factual sources that is evaluated using approved methods, such as statistical analysis of sec­ondary data on, say, indices of development in Third World countries. In addition, because IR has specialized in abstract theories and studies that focus on concepts such as the state, state system, power, markets, inter­national organizations, and foreign policy, it has not imagined ways in which daily aspects of life can shape and be shaped by international relations; what attracts the field is the extraordinary event, like war. Fiction, by contrast, can weave stories about everyday producers for international markets, consumers of international products, travellers, migrants, or refugees, employees of embassies or businesses catering to tourists. It can help researchers to understand cultural difference and how it affects international relations (see Box 10.2).

Culture is another topic that IR has had difficulty apprehending. During the cold war years, culture was synonymous with ideology, politics, and economics, rather than with literature, religious beliefs, language, and history. Afterwards, Francis Fukuyama (1989) treated countries that brought aspects of their cultures to bear on international relations as operating in the past. Samuel Huntington (1996) could identify seven or eight active culture clusters or civilizations in the world, and noted that many of these were hostile to the West. In the post-cold war era, he said, clashes between civilizations rather than states would cause the greatest problems in international relations. His ‘civilizations’

and Fukuyama’s anachronistic ‘cultures’ loomec totalities that had no internal differences of class, ra;t_ or gender, or intercultural influences that came from international migrations. Even very recently, when Robert Kagan (2003) discusses fissures in European and American international relations, his concern is with diverging ‘strategic cultures’, the sense that (all I Europeans and (all) Americans hold opposing views of the challenges facing the world.

People living in former colonies were as invisible to IR as other people in the world, except that their invisibility was born of colonial disregard and Orientalist notions. People from former colonies appeared in IR in cameo roles as exotic guerrillas, terrorists, and mass victims or mass celebrators of outcomes they did not determine through ‘normal’ democratic politics. They were peo­ple who needed to be killed or rescued, fates that sug­gested they were some ‘kind of degeneration of God’s original perfection’ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004: viii). Post-colonial scholarship in IR has helped to challenge those ‘rules’, in part by applying literary, critical, inter­pretive, and culturally oriented concerns to the study of IR. Some researchers have considered how imagi­native literatures, knowledges, and researched voices from post-colonial areas of the world could change IR theorizing (Sylvester 1994). Others have been address­ing core research topics of IR, such as security, war, and aspects of international political economy, through fieldwork with groups that have rarely, if ever, been con­sidered salient to the discipline. Bina D’Costa (2006) has interviewed women survivors of rape during the Bangladesh Independence War. Swati Parashar (2009) considers alternative ways of thinking about war and gender drawn from interviews with women militants in Kashmir and Sri Lanka. Megan MacKenzie (2009) has interviewed former women combatants in the Sierra Leone war, and others, like Katharine Moon (1997) and Christine Chin (1998), have shed light on international sender and economic relations by considering sex work­ers at Korean military bases and Malaysian domestic workers in international political economy. Not all of these researchers might think of themselves as actively engaged in post-colonial analysis as opposed to femi­nist analysis of international relations. Many of them, however, acknowledge how trying it can be—method­ologically and personally—to listen to difficult stories and painful emotions relayed by women living in post- colonial settings, whose experiences are often magnified by the poverty around them and by cultural rigidities about what women may and may not do. Veena Das ( 2007: 38) notes how elusive are the ‘languages of pain through which social sciences could gaze at, touch or become textual bodies on which this pain is written’.

The eminent post-colonial scholar, feminist, and liter­ary analyst Gayatri Spivak (1988) has raised the related question of whether the subaltern can even speak to social science interviewers from the West. Is it possible, she asks, for that Western researcher, or the local researcher from another class than subaltern—which includes most members of the subaltern studies group and later post- colonial analysts—to hear the subaltern without put­ting her words and experiences into familiar Western frameworks? Ironically, even well-intentioned research­ers can reinforce neo-colonial patterns of domination, exploitation, and social erasure for the very groups they seek to free of those conditions. Those who live outside the societies they study, in North America or Europe for example, can represent subalterns in post-colonial soci­eties through the lenses of privilege. They might lump together economically dispossessed people into ‘a’ subal­tern category, as if social differentiation would not char­acterize subalterns as much as other economic groups. The researcher might think she or he is being attentive to the subaltern but, in fact, it might be impossible to escape making the West and its ways of understanding others the real (though hidden) subject of a subaltern study.

Spivak raises crucially important questions about interacting across cultures and differences of class, race, gender, generation, language, and the like, and her con­cerns have elicited strong debate in post-colonial stud­ies circles. Consider the possibility, though, that the subaltern can speak and the researcher can listen under certain conditions. World-travelling is a post-colonial methodology associated with feminist scholars of Latin American background—Maria Lugones (1990),

Norma Alarcon (1990), Gloria Anzaldua (1987)—and with Christine Sylvester (1995, 2002) in International Relations. The world-traveller strives to achieve a space of mutual understanding using the tool of empathy, which is the ability to enter into the spirit of a differ­ent experience and find in it an echo of some part of oneself. World-travellers might never physically travel away from home, but they can learn to travel know­ingly within their own repertory of identities and expe­riences. It is a skill that many subalterns have already had to learn by virtue of operating in contexts where knowing the colonizer—their language, say, or cultural styles of behaviour—is crucial for making a living, buy­ing and selling goods, dealing with state bureaucracies, or journeying by bus to relatives. A post-colonial inter­viewer, by contrast, will probably be less practised in skills she does not have to hone to get through the chal­lenges of the day. She must work to recall facets of her background and self-identity that resonate with people she interacts with in post-colonial contexts. Alarcon (1990: 363) says the Western world-traveller must also ‘learn to become unintrusive, unimportant, patient to the point of tears, while at the same time open to learn­ing any possible lessons’—lessons that help her con­nect with others rather than maintain pristine distance from them. Then the subaltern can speak—and gradu­ally the words can help shape International Relations to be more inclusive of the world and well rounded in its sense of groups that have been historically neglected as participants in international relations.

Key Points

Post-colonial studies started with an interest in the lives and knowledge of people of subaltern statuses in India. With little information on subaltern life, early post-colonial writers turned to post-colonial fiction for insight.

Fiction as a data source that highlights life within particular cultures is something the field of International Relations has conventionally eschewed.

Groups in International Relations, however, have brought post-colonial fiction and culture to their work. It is very prominent in feminist International Relations.

It is important to bear in mind Gayatri Spivak's question of whether the subaltern can speak or whether the Western researcher ends up putting that speech into dominant Western frameworks.

World-travelling methods encourage researchers and subalterns to find common meeting points that bring the Western researcher closer to the subaltern world, rather than vice versa.

Becoming postcolonial

Post-colonial theorizing was taking several direc­tions by the 1990s. One steady path was literary analysis, an original interest that expanded to include Western works set in colonial situations. Joseph Conrad’s tale of Western men defeated by Africa and Africans in Heart of Darkness has been of interest, as has Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which features a Jamaican Creole woman kept in the attic by a British man whose small fortune came from marrying her, but who seeks to deny the marriage so that he can marry Jane. In that stream of post-colonial analysis, researchers ask whether the stories harbour a subtext of imperial exploitation or offer a critique of colonial­ism. In addition, such works demonstrate the limited choices women face in all societies, whether they are with Western partners or not.

A second direction takes up robust theorizing of the present moment in history. Where IR scholarship places us in the era of globalization, it is also possible to argue that the current era of international relations is postcolonial (minus the hyphen). It is a time of the present and that extends into the future; yet it is a time when colonial patterns of trade, governance, and social relations persist. Homi Bhabha’s work straddles con­cerns with the post-colonial and the postcolonial. Like Said, Bhabha has addressed how colonial discourses constructed the colonized, which we recognize as a central question of power in post-colonialism. Bhabha argues that colonialism was never fully successful in defining and restricting the lives of colonial and post- colonial subjects. Drawing more on psychoanalysis (an echo of Fanon’s approach) than on literary theory, Bhabha maintains that colonial discourse was always ambivalent about the people it colonized, portray­ing them alternately as passive and conquerable and irrational and untamed by modern moral codes. That the colonial subject cannot be pinned down leads to repeated stereotyping by the colonist to mask the ambivalence. This anxious repetition, as Bhabha calls it, is accompanied by efforts to train some ‘natives’ to aspire to European values and culture. Bhabha points out that such individuals often develop hybrid iden­tities—partly local and partly Western—whereupon colonials intensify the stereotyping in the hopes of commanding people to remain where colonialism assigned them. That breeds resistance and ‘contests]

genealogies of “origin” that lead to claims for culture supremacy and historical priority’ (1994: 157). It then becomes difficult for the West to maintain that it is entirely different from, and above, the former colo­nial areas of the world. As the challenging title of a book by Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests, those once said to be subordinated to Western knowledge can gain the power to turn the game around and begin Provincializing Europe (2000). An example from international relations could be the emergence of a powerful OPEC, most members of which are former colonies that gained control of oil production in their countries and now sell it to a petrochemical-depen- dent West on their own terms. Bhabha (1994) also has ideas that relate to the world-travelling methodol­ogy of politics described earlier. He talks of dissemi- Nations that occur when people with hybrid identities and cultures become diasporic, travelling physically from South to North to live, thereby undercutting an idea closely associated with international relations that nations are coherent, fixed, and territorial loca­tions of identity and power. Ideas also travel through the various channels of the information revolution, intersecting directly or via film, fashion, books, art, and the like. So many hyphenations emerge that it can be difficult to conceive of one majority identity that could dominate any other anywhere (Balibar 1995). Simultaneously disruptive and empowering processes propel us into ‘Third Spaces’, which Bhabha says are neither colonial nor post-colonial—and are not nec­essarily Third World. They are, rather, postcolonial dissemiNations.

By focusing on the contemporary period, a shift occurs that is bigger than the minor change in spell­ing from post-colonial to postcolonial (see Box 10.3). Instead of identifying people by the territorial place they once occupied in a colonially imagined hierar­chy, the physical movement of peoples and informa­tion across the globe means that no group is confined to one location or ruled over, as during the colonial era. A global South exists in various forms within and across former colonial powers, and in former colonies associated with the southern hemisphere, as people migrate north and cultures interpenetrate. Yet, minus the hyphen, postcolonialism also denotes a time in history that is still beholden in important ways to colonial-style hierarchies. Think of the early twenty- first-century wars that feature powerful Western states unleashing profound military technologies on starkly poorer countries, like Afghanistan and Iraq. Older imperial ventures were often led by European militaries, and those of today gain a similar influence over local politics, which raises the spectre of a demo­cratic empire advancing on states and populations that ‘need to be controlled’ (Hardt and Negri 2000). There are push backs to imperialism too, most recently by fundamentalist religious movements and local resis­tance to them. All of this contradictory social activ­ity complicates international relations and challenges International Relations to develop theories and meth­odologies that tap into complex currents of our time (Barkawi 2005).

Postcolonial thinking has other signposts. It expands the spatial reach of the post-colonial to regions of the world that have vastly differing tem­poral relationships with colonialism. Some colonized countries were politically independent by the early 1800s (the USA, Canada, and much of Latin America), and other countries experienced colonialism from the 1800s on (Australia, New Zealand, most of Africa and Asia); in the case of Australia and Canada, strong ties to the mother country are still celebrated rather than rejected. It is also important to bear in mind that some countries were not colonized by the West: Japan colonized Korea. Postcolonial perspectives con­sider within-country conflicts with indigenous groups over land and rights, and lingering colonial situations that do not entirely make sense within a post-colonial tradition, such as British Northern Ireland and Hong Kong where contemporary livelihoods, cityscapes, and lifestyles are rooted in and yet surpass the era of British oversight.

Postcolonial analysis as a way of studying inter­national relations has been recognized in books by scholars of IR (Ling 2002; Sylvester 2013; Barkawi and Stanski 2013; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004) and in journals like Alternatives, Feminist International Journal of Politics, Borderlands, and Millennium. Along with the most famous of the postcolonial writ­ers discussed earlier, the still emerging study of inter­national relations as postcolonial relations draws on other leading thinkers. Arjun Appadurai (1996), a social-cultural anthropologist, has converted global­ization into postcolonial language and processes. He writes about five types of cultural flows of imagination: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finance- scapes, and ideoscapes, all of which operate globally and beyond the absolute control of states; perhaps they will replace states in the future. Chandra Mohanty (1988) usefully warns Western feminists not to talk about Third World women as the Third World woman, a one-size-fits-all image that can inhibit transnational feminist linkages. Ien Ang (1995: 57) declares herself a feminist but she does not want to be part of a Western- identified project to create ‘a natural political destina­tion for all women, no matter how multicultural’. All these postcolonial thinkers have had an influence on International Relations scholarship, particularly on poststructuralist agendas and feminist International Relations (Ch. 18).

Key points

Some post-colonial work builds theory that follows up and expands ideas on colonization and resistance developed by anti-colonial intellectuals like Frantz Fanon.

Edward Said is an important influence on theory-building through his analysis of Orientalism.

Homi Bhabha, another important figure in the field, argues that colonials constructed the Orient from their own

fantasies and desires but could not capture or control hybrid colonial identities and dissemiNations.

Contemporary theorists remove the hyphen from the term post-colonial to indicate that the current era is postcolonial and has continuities and discontinuities with colonialism.

Conclusions: post-colonialism in International Relations

Post-colonialism/postcolonialism did not start as a branch of IR, or even as a companion to it. Its alterna­tive histories, subaltern explorations, and theoretical moves from post-colonial to postcolonial thinking have been shaped through borrowings from many academic disciplines, from literary studies to social history to French philosophy to psychoanalysis. It has not, however, drawn on or been shaped by the field of IR; nor, until fairly recently, has it been taken into that discipline as a subfield of its knowledge. The neglect of topics now identified as postcolonial reveals the field’s shallow interest historically in politics outside great power states. Great powers held colonies, but those colonies were not studied as centres of power and agency unless they caused difficulties for indi­vidual great powers. The histories, peoples, and cul­tures of what are known as Third World countries (or countries of the South or underdeveloped countries) were all but invisible to International Relations until the 1980s. Post-colonial/postcolonial studies has pro­vided ways to fill large gaps in IR knowledge and has put the state in its place as one of many sites of politics and relations in the field. In those tasks it has been joined by feminist analysis and poststructuralism, assisted by a post-cold war human rights agenda and diasporic movements that reverse the usual direction taken during the colonial period (North to South).

Postcolonialism highlights the international rela­tions of colonial actions in the Third World, the continu­ities of that past and the present, and the ways ordinary people can be involved in and shape transnational flows of knowledge, culture, identity, and imagination in the future. And it does so with a mission that still includes the liberation of subaltern statuses in today’s world­time, a phenomenon that would surely be the ultimate

answer to discourses and deeds that uphold global relations of dominance and subordination. Engaging and persuasive when not overly complex and notori­ously difficult to read, postcolonialism nonetheless has many critics. They charge, among other things, that most of the analysis looks back at colonialism rather than forward, attacks the West instead of also attacking poor governance in Third World states today, and is so preoccupied with language and identity that it leaves questions of whether the subaltern can eat for Western agencies of development to resolve (Sylvester 1999). That is to say, postcolonialism can seem esoteric, too literary, and strangely devoid of urgency to help those it defends abstractly. Indeed, in Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Gayatri Spivak rejects aspects of post­colonialism as a form of reason that has been preoc­cupied with past issues and post-colonial nationalisms. It is time, she thinks, to focus more practically on con­temporary issues, such as domination by World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies. She is also sensitive to the failure of so many Third World states to improve life for women, peasants, and working-class citizens, a point she shares with analysts like Robert Young, Arif Dirlik, and Aijaz Ahmad.

But all subfields or streams of thinking in International Relations are constantly critiqued. The strength of the field today is that it has given room to newer concerns about daily international relations rather than remaining focused on heroic or tragic episodes alone. By insisting that states and people who have spent time in colonial circumstances have much to contribute to knowledge and contemporary history, postcolonial analysis does a great service for International Relations. It responds to a field that has had its own history of myopic imperial sight.

Case Study 1 

The Arab Spring: postcolonial struggles

To clarify the proposition that international relations today is postcolonial, consider the Arab Spring. In January 2011, protests and armed struggles flared against sitting governments across the Middle East and Northern Africa. They started in Tunisia, engulfed Egypt and Libya, and spread to Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. The events of the Arab Spring feature long subdued populations turn­ing against similarly autocratic government leaders, among them: Zine al-Abideen Ben AM, 'president for life' of Tunisia for twenty- four years; Hosni Mubarak, ruler of Egypt for twenty-nine years; and Muammar Qaddafi, Libya's head for an astonishing forty-two years. These were not the original leaders of post-colonial states, nor important figures in historic anti-colonial struggles. Mubarak was the fourth president of an independent Egypt. Tunisia was freed as a French protectorate by 1934, while Libya exited Italian and Turkish colonial rule in 1912, and Egypt was officially free of Britain in 1922. Colonial governments did meddle in the region over the ensuing years, with Britain and France (with Israel) occu­pying the Suez Canal in 1956, and Western interests bolstering autocrats as long as they maintained stable, pro-West policies. Those cosy relationships, which often included military aid used

to quell local discontent, have been called neo-colonial, impe­rial, or cases of arrested post-coloniality. In each case, aspects of remaining colonial practice render post-colonial independence hollow for everyday people.

The Arab Spring signals the start of a late decolonization effort carried out by ordinary citizens of autocratic states. In Tunisia and Egypt, mass protests have brought down leaders, while in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, citizens have waged armed struggles with gov­ernment forces. In each location, people have said they were tired of fearing their leaders and of suffering 'economic insecu­rity, institutionalized corruption, nepotistic hiring practices or a predatory police state' (Khalil 2011:123). Although the uprisings appeared suddenly and were not anticipated by IR, local activ­ists had been busy using cellphones and Internet-based social networks as tools of political mobilization. Through strength in numbers, Egyptians and citizens elsewhere gained the political confidence to force governments down. Yet it is a mark of the postcolonial era that such struggles do not necessarily end when a leader is ousted. Arab Spring countries are undergoing difficult political transitions. Syrians still battle the military might of the state. In Egypt, mass protests erupted against the first elected civilian president, Mohammed Morsi, five months after his mid- 2012 electoral victory, after he declared that key decisions in the transition could not be reviewed by the country's highest court. The Egyptian military removed Morsi after only one year in power and installed a 'transitional' government of its choice. At issue in our postcolonial era is not formal independence from colonial overlords. At issue is how attitudes and tools of colonial rule taken up by post-colonial leaders can be changed. International military interventions for regime change, which install the for­mal trappings of democracy or provide economic aid to rebuild a country, can be less effective in promoting true decolonization than bottom-up efforts by local people, the ones who are sys­tematically overlooked in most abstract IR theories.

Theory applied

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Box 10.1 

Frantz Fanon, a call to repudiate European ways

'The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, pru­dent, and resolute. We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships from the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet mur­der men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so- called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. And yet it may be said that Europe has been successful in as much as everything that she has attempted has succeeded. Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardor, cynicism, and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever further! Every one of her movements has burst the bounds of space and thought.

Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness. She has only shown herself parsimonious and niggardly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe? That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings human­ity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind. Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.' (Fanon 1963:311-12)

Box 10.2 New postcolonial literature

Recent postcolonial theorizing presents more nuanced and updated aspects of societies operating in a globalized time. Power is multifaceted and it flows in a number of directions for and against societies of the Third World. Some of it continues to draw on postcolonial imaginative literatures. Indeed, there is now a large stable of writers whose works take the broad sweeps of colonial to post-colonial moments as occasions needing exploration, texture, and daily lives to understand. Among the most firmly established and lauded fiction writers, who have mostly resided in former colonies, are Arundhati Roy, Chinua Achebe, Yvonne Vera, Jean Rhys, Aime Cesaire, Ngugi waThiong'o, and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Other post-colonial writ­ers live in the West and are known to write about hyphenated

lives that exist between the cultures of their birth or their par­ents' birth in post-colonial places and circumstances of their present lives in the West. The many distinguished novelists and poets in this second group include Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi. Although literary scholars study their works, as one might expect, some social science-based academics do too. The anthropologist Veena Das (2007: 39) is one of those, and for her, 'some realities need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended'. In her study of the violence accompanying women's displacement during the partition period in South Asia, Das presents scenes that use the words of fiction to help her define the research she needs to do.

Box 10.3 

Anne McClintock on problems raised by the term 'post-colonialism'

'Can most of the world's countries be said, in any meaningful or theoretically rigorous sense, to share a single "common past", or a single common "condition", called the "post-colonial con­dition", or "post-coloniality"? The histories of African coloniza­tion are certainly, in part, the histories of the collisions between European and Arab empires, and the myriad African lineage states and cultures. Can these countries now best be under­stood as shaped exclusively around the "common" experience of European colonization? Indeed, many contemporary African, Latin American, Caribbean and Asian cultures, while profoundly affected by colonization, are not necessarily primarily preoc­cupied with their erstwhile contact with Europe. On the other hand, the term "post-colonialism" is, in many cases, prema­turely celebratory. Ireland may, at a pinch, be "post-colonial”, but for the inhabitants of British-occupied Northern Ireland, not to mention the Palestinian inhabitants of the Israeli Occupied Territories and the West Bank, there may be nothing "post" about colonialism at all . . . [and] no "post-colonial" state any­where has granted women and men equal access to the rights and resources of the nation-state . . . Rather, a proliferation of historically nuanced theories and strategies is called for, which may enable us to engage more effectively in the politics of affili­ation ... [or] face being becalmed in an historically empty space in which our sole direction is found by gazing back, spellbound at the epoch behind us, in the perpetual present marked only as a "post".' (McClintock 1992:4, 8, 13)

                            

Questions

What is post-colonial analysis?

How does post-colonial analysis differ from postcolonial analysis?

How has International Relations studied colonies and the colonial era in the past?

Frantz Fanon and Edward Said are both important thinkers in the post-colonial/ postcolonial field. Why?

How is post-colonial thinking tied to the idea of the subaltern?

Do you think the subaltern can speak or that Westerners are always overdubbing them with their preoccupations?

What do you think of Homi Bhabha's ideas on hybrid identity in a postcolonial era? Is your identity hybrid? How?

Can one use post-colonial/postcolonial analysis to understand terrorism?

What are some of the continuities and discontinuities in the world between the colonial period and the present?

Why do feminists and poststructuralists in international relations find post-colonial/ postcolonial thinking so useful?

Further Reading 

Barkawi, T. (2005), Globalization and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). A postcolonial approach to the study of international war.

Chan, S. (2009), The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism (London: Zed Books). Argues that fusing different strands of Western, Eastern, religious, and philosophical thought is required to understand and move forward amidst the many changes and uncertainties of contemporary international relations.

Fanon, F. (1963), Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press). A riveting theory of colonial and anti-colonial violence and the social attitudes on which each is based.

Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books). Argues that contemporary international relations is characterized by new networks of forms of power, communication, postcolonial empire, and war.

Krishna, S. (2009), Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty- First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Compares and contrasts economic globalization with postcolonialism as a stream of thinking and politics that opposes inequalities.

Loomba, A. (2005), Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge). This

introduction to postcolonial thinkers places their ideas in a wider network that makes it impossible to think in either/or terms about the West and the non-West.

Said, E. (1978), Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin). One of the key texts in post-colonial studies.

Sylvester, C. (2006), 'Bare Life as a Development/Postcolonial Problematic', The Geographical Journal, 172(1): 66-77. Notes differences between international development and postcolonial analyses, and draws on postcolonial fiction as one way to discover mutuality.

Young, R. J. C. (2003), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). An innovative introduction that starts with subaltern experiences and then talks about theories.

Online Resource Centre

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