Against the 'Decolonial Turn': Problems in Contemporary Readings of C.L.R. James

Paper delivered 15 July 2019, ACLALS Conference (Association of Commonwealth Language and Literatures)

Today’s metropolitan academy has made much of a supposed new ‘decolonial turn’ at the same time as the future of its apparent predecessor, postcolonial theory, is under a cloud. Postcolonial theory does not seem to have adequately addressed the litany of critiques from theorists such as Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Arif Dirlik, Terry Eagleton, Neil Lazarus, Vivek Chibber, and many others. Common among all the critics I have just made is a call for a return to Marxist political economy and philosophy, which can better explain, and provide a political programme to solve, the problems facing what is alternately called the ‘Third World’, the ‘developing’ world, the ‘formerly colonised’ world, the ‘postcolonial’ world, the ‘Global South’, etc. Benita Parry critiqued theories of ‘colonialism’ in postcolonial studies for becoming singularly focused on “the exorbitation of discourse and a related incuriosity about the enabling socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis”. Neil Lazarus threatened to rewrite the entire field of postcolonial studies in the view of world-systems theory a la Immanuel Wallerstein, Fredric Jameson and the Marxist theorists and historians of imperialism. He lamented the area’s theoretical preoccupation with reductive readings of a limited pool of texts using relatively simple concepts such as ‘hybridity’, ‘master narratives’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘diaspora’, and letting things explain themselves, while neglecting the role of class in the postcolonial world. Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek were even more trenchant. For them, postcolonial studies precisely did not talk about class because the field itself was an argument for class mobility, for academics outside the European metropole to be included within it and supported by it.

Postcolonial criticism lives on, but has not significantly drifted from the themes for which it has been criticised. It still, as Terry Eagleton argues, ‘inflates the significance of cultural factors in human affairs’. It is a brand of ‘culturalism’ – which since the 1970s has gradually become the dominant mode of thinking in academic study, and it is culturalism that I define myself and my own position against. This talk, then, is chiefly about how culturalism in one particular mode has been able to sustain itself. It ignores the increasing velocity of criticism by redefining thinkers as precedents or precursors to itself, grafting itself onto new disciplines or areas of study, creating new discourses that merely repeat or superficially revise the theoretical tropes of previous iterations. Ironically, considering postcolonial theory in particular made much of the supposed ‘European’ penchant for thinking in binary oppositions, culturalism has encouraged thinking in the most simplistic binaries of all: universality/particularity, dominant/marginalised, power/resistance, strong/weak, abstraction/culture, with the latter terms in each pair favoured.

What has been labelled by sociologist Jeffrey Alexander as the ‘cultural turn’ produced interesting work in its inception, but has been nothing short of theoretically devastating for the social sciences and humanities. With the influence of poststructuralism and postmodernism, culture became redefined in infinitely malleable terms as signifiers, symbols, language, meaning. But that inadequate definition has slowly fallen away with the sudden demise of the postmodernist way of speaking – which, in keeping with my argument, merely forwards its theoretical antecedents in new guises. Culture in academic study has reverted back to a definition more in line with the 1930s anthropology of Franz Boas. Culture is pluralised and rendered static in our ahistorical times. Each ‘culture’ is incommensurable with any other, and unable to be understood by any other. Some culturalists believe that culture and thus worldview is determined by language, the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ that was part of the same era of anthropological study as Franz Boas. In other words, our theoretical understanding of the world has retreated to discredited ideas that are 90 years old.

The cultural turn, of course, has throughout its ascendancy relied on social constructivism in its different forms as its overarching ontology and epistemology. This paradigm has allowed the theoretical denaturalisation of both ideological and actually-existing reality, as it redefines what exists in terms of language: how things are thought and defined. Through this, ideological reality supervenes over actually-existing reality to bring forth for us a relativist universe of competing definitions of reality without foundation or means of verifiability. This has produced a great litany of what one of constructivism’s proponents, Sally Haslanger, usefully for me describes as ‘debunking’ approaches to thinking about ideas and the world. The theory thus presupposes what it seeks to reveal: that idea X is socially constructed, which means that idea X is arbitrary, which means that idea X should be discarded. ‘Debunking’ approaches have stretched this basic movement to gradually deny the unicity of human nature, the universalities in human understanding, the idea of cross-cultural fertilisation and translatability, and finally, the idea that an external reality that we are all able to perceive in some way actually exists. It supposedly reveals that what we think are common projections of that world are coming from a particular ‘standpoint’ or ‘voice’.

Now, this is not to say that such ‘debunking’ is not reflective of some of what I myself have already said. After all, Marxists engage in such a movement when they describe the ‘critique of ideology’, which social constructivism basically borrows from. I have just reflected criticisms of postcolonial theory as having stemmed from a particular class position, for example, hence why they do not mention class in any serious or rigorous manner. But what a materialist critique of ideology approach has that a naïve ‘debunking’ approach does not is the anchoring of such a critique in the material world.  It describes and evaluates with reference to real structures, processes and schematics as opposed to things that, and we should be honest with ourselves here, are hypothesised notions about the way others think and represent the world, such as symbologies, subjectivities and the ethereality of ‘standpoints’ or ‘voices’. In an ironic sense, postmodernism encouraged academics to be austere about such notions, with the threat of ‘essentialism’ lurking behind every claim to a definitive substance in these areas. But now that postmodernist vocabulary has performed a disappearing act, this discourse has given up such austerities.  

As poststructuralism and postmodernism has broken down, so too has postcolonial studies, but the idealism of ‘debunking’ that underwrites it has not changed. It is the same idealism that powers much of ‘critical race theory’ and now, the new ‘decolonial theory’ that has emerged from Latin America, introduced by scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Anibal Quijano. The latter approach, as far as I can see, is now being taken up by a global cadre of scholars and is assuming the mantle left unattended by postcolonial theory’s apparent departure from centre-stage, yet I am unsure that many who work in this field are working from a consistent body of ideas and concepts. Decolonial theory scholars have done a lot of work canonising their influences and inspirations, but it is unclear how any of these supposed ‘influences’ have truly shaped the final product we have before us today. They have gone so far as to claim the work of C.L.R. James as not just an inspiration, but in fact, rather hubristically in my view, as the historical moment their theoretical approach began. Walter Mignolo, one of decolonial theory’s founders, describes C.L.R. James as the first in “a long tradition of decolonial thought”. This is because they read C.L.R. James not as a Marxist first and foremost, which all his writings were influenced by, but as a generic critic of colonialism. In any case, this anachronistic redefinition of James’ work is reflective of what I have said is culturalism’s conversion of everything that pre-existed it into something that can be consumed within its own image, its own simplistic narrative of intellectual history. I am using the contemporary treatment of C.L.R James by this group and groups adjacent to it as an ironic exemplar for why culturalism, a mode of thought that has progressively lost its foundations, is condemned to perform such infinite instances of shapeshifting and the continual ‘rebirth’ of timeworn ideas.

Decolonial theory is at pains with itself to repudiate the postcolonial theory that pre-existed it, while at the same time worsening all the serious problems the latter faced. The common refrain used by proponents of decolonial theory is that ‘”decoloniality” is not “postcoloniality”’. Walter Mignolo’s problem with postcolonial studies is, again, stated in rather hubristic tones. He says, without a trace of irony: “The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy”. The term ‘de-linking’ is made with reference to the Third Worldist Marxism of Samir Amin but bears no conceptual relationship. It is defined, like colonialism itself, in epistemic terms. The main punchline of decolonial theory is to produce an ‘epistemic shift’ – to shift to ‘other’ principles of knowledge and understanding – that is, against those of ‘Western civilisation’ – a monolith that Mignolo uses unapologetically, such as in his book Local Histories/Global Designs. This epistemic shift, supposedly, will bring about ‘other’ forms of economy, politics and ethics while conveniently avoiding the difficult labour of political struggle. Decolonial theory’s reduction of the entire course of history and its future to a battle of epistemology, of minds, of knowledges – produces a degree of idealistic entrapment postcolonial studies could only have dreamed of. Yet we have been here before. Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘discourse’, defined as narratives that form a ‘will to truth’ or contribute to a ‘regime of truth’, is a constitutive feature of postcolonial studies itself, and with that comes Foucault’s setting up of the battle between dominant discourses and so-called ‘marginalised knowledges’. In short, decolonial theory is doing nothing postcolonial studies, and indeed postmodernism, has not already canvassed.

Although decolonial theory claims C.L.R. James as a theoretical resource, the proponents of this theory basically imply that his work was inadequate in bringing about the desired ‘epistemic shift’. This is because decolonial theory’s referent is not ‘decolonisation’ – the reversal of administrative colonialism that has already taken place in most parts of the colonised world – but ‘decoloniality’, something much different. ‘Decoloniality’ is defined against a ‘coloniality’, sometimes called a ‘coloniality of power’. How does this ‘coloniality’ differ from ‘colonialism’? Again, the difference is made with reference to epistemic terms. Anibal Quijano defines coloniality as the “colonization of the imagination of the dominated”. This is because the Europeans stole the precolonial knowledge from non-European people that was valuable to them, while suppressing it under their administration, which everyone knows to be true. But it is still unclear from this explanation how an “epistemic shift” will happen under these circumstances, or indeed more fundamentally, what it actually is and why it is necessary beyond mere sloganeering. Quijano goes on to define coloniality in terms of the invention of ‘race’ to divide populations in the colonial period, but bizarrely uses this known fact to describe what happened both before and after colonialism in the economic sphere. Apparently, it is race and not the continual reconfigurations of the world-system of capitalism that have produced the current settings in the international division of labour.

All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the so-called “tradition” that began with thinkers like C.L.R. James. For James, such a revisionist view of history that bears no meaningful sign whatsoever of the political and economic dimensions of colonialism, together with a completely back-to-front view of the present day, simply could not be countenanced. In a 1960 lecture James gave in Trinidad, he said: ‘The twentieth century has seen such a decay and degeneration in modern society that now the idea of progress, except among the Marxists, is in decay; it is sneered at and denounced by many excellent people.’ Neil Lazarus said the following about postcolonial studies: “the category of class is seldom afforded sustained or specific attention in mainstream postcolonial criticism. […] Even on the best postcolonialist accounts, […] ‘imperialism’ is typically cast as a political dispensation and referred, in civilizational terms, to ‘the West’ rather than to capitalism.” What we now know from the multipolar arrangement of international politics is that imperialism has been in the past, and can be in the future, conducted at the behest of non-European or non-Western powers. This is because – back to Lazarus here – ‘it centrally involves the imposition of a particular mode or modes of production and specific regimes of accumulation, expropriation, exploitation in the form of the extraction of surplus value, and so on’ that are in Karl Marx’s Capital the necessary conditions for capitalism to territorially expand. The fact these criticisms were made about a book by Edward Said written 25 years ago shows not only how little this genre has moved in the face of criticism and recalibration. It also shows what African-American historian Adolph Reed Jr. says about antiracist discourses more generally: that in the 21^st century they have assumed a form that is ahistoricised and itself remains “impervious to historical circumstances”.

These problems with postcolonial studies are all exacerbated by decolonial theory in its attempt to revise history in the most simplistic narratives of civilizational ascendancy perhaps even more heady and confident than a Samuel Huntington or a Niall Ferguson, as when Walter Mignolo makes such grandiose statements as ‘During the period 1500 to 2000, one local history, that of Western civilisation, built itself as the point of arrival and owner of human history’. This inattention to detail extends to the co-optation of thinkers vastly unlike them as their own. C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobin is claimed by George Ciccariello-Maher as the central influence on his book Decolonizing Dialectics. Yet Ciccariello-Maher’s book is riddled with inaccurate reflections of James’ own text, not least of which in his position on the Haitian Revolution which is the exact opposite of James’ as fleshed out in The Black Jacobins, and this is perhaps revealing of the dilettantish way this group sees politics in view of history. Ciccariello-Maher is critical of the way James lavishes praise on Toussaint L’Ouverture, the man responsible for transforming the Haitian slave insurgency into a movement capable of usurping the French colonial administration. Indeed, in the preface to The Black Jacobins, James claims that ‘the individual leadership responsible for this unique achievement was almost entirely the work of a single man [L’Ouverture]’. This was a man who desired, regularly spoke of, and fought for ‘liberty for all the blacks’ of Haiti; however, the portrait James paints of L’Ouverture is critical and perhaps even tragic, something Ciccariello-Maher fails to appreciate. Moreover, Ciccariello-Maher attempts to canonise Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a hero of Haiti. We may recall that Dessalines was in part responsible for the betrayal and imprisonment of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and who eventually became the ruler of an independent Haiti. Dessalines proceeded to run Haiti as a labour dictatorship, essentially re-enslaving black people as they faced their destiny of either returning to the plantations or becoming soldiers, and committed genocide against the remaining French people to ensure the cementation of this dictatorship. Contrast Ciccariello-Maher’s despicable public comments that the massacre of whites after the Haitians became independent “was a good thing indeed” to James’ much more nuanced view that act of pure vengeance compounded the socioeconomic difficulties the new Haitian nation faced.

Upon further scrutiny of the use of the term ‘decolonisation’ in decolonial theory, it becomes apparent that is at best muddled with itself and at worst entirely meaningless. In Ramon Grosfoguel’s article ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, he argues that “decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.” The perspectival thinking common of the identity politics approaches that dominated the late period of the New Left can be seen here; supposedly, someone’s geographic location and ‘subalternity’ means that they are bestowed with the destiny to ‘decolonise’ knowledge, and it is never made clear what exactly that means. Yet Grosfoguel also remarks that postcolonial studies must be ‘decolonised’, as if it is in fact currently itself colonised. It is never elaborated by Grosfoguel on how or why postcolonial studies could be said to be colonised. And, in yet another sign of the absolute hubris of this theoretical approach, he remarks that the entire discipline of political economy must be ‘decolonised’ because it “conceptualize[s] capitalism as a global or world-system”. This astonishingly uninformed statement, attempting to refute a basic fact, would have come as news to C.L.R. James, who speaks repeatedly of ‘world capitalism’, its crises and counter-revolutions. Clearly he and his works are also a prime candidate for ‘decolonisation’.

Postcolonial studies will do itself no favours by getting itself involved in the conceptual confusion and soupy, overly self-satisfied prose of decolonial theory. Decolonial theory should serve as a sorry lesson on what happens when theorists become complacent and insulated from social, political and economic realities, and dismissive of hundreds of years of philosophical and political literature where not even an attempt at understanding it on its own terms has been undertaken. These people claim C.L.R. James as an influence where no meaningful link exists. In fact, postcolonial studies has a lot to learn from James. Noel Ignatiev writes in the introduction to the PM Press reprint of James’ Modern Politics lectures of 1960 that “Cultures are not products of regions isolated from each other… Everything created by human beings anywhere is and ought to be the property of human beings everywhere.” This explains James’ interests being as diverse as the Russian Revolution, anti-Stalinism, pan-Africanism and the liberation movements of the African diaspora, Yugoslavia, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Hegelian dialectic, feminism, Charlie Chaplin, Picasso, the Enlightenment, and, of course, cricket. One does not to have agree with James’ politics, but it is surely the case that without this long-run view of world history, and a keen awareness of today’s vastly different political and economic context, the legacy and relevance of colonialism cannot be fully understood.