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 21st 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.
