Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues

Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues

The traditions of thought associated with postcolonialism and decoloniality are long-standing and diverse. Postcolonialism emerged as an intellectual movement consolidating and developing around the ideas of Edward W Said, Homi K Bhabha, and Gayatri C Spivak. While much work in the area of postcolonial studies has directly addressed issues of the material, of the socio-economic, there has also been a tendency for it to remain firmly in the realm of the cultural. In contrast, the modernity/coloniality school emerged from the work of, among others, the sociologists Anibal Quijano and María Lugones, and the philosopher and semiotician, Walter D Mignolo. It was strongly linked to world-systems theory from the outset as well as to scholarly work in development and underdevelopment theory and the Frankfurt School critical social theory tradition.

As well as a disciplinary difference, there is also a difference in geographical 'origin' and remit; that is, the geographical locations from where the scholars within the particular fields hail and the geographical focus of their studies. Postcolonialism emerged as a consequence of the work of diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia and, for the most part, refers back to those locations and their imperial interlocutors (Europe and the West). Decoloniality similarly emerged from the work of diasporic scholars from South America and, for the most part, refers back to those locations and their imperial interlocutors- again, primarily to Europe although addressing a much longer time frame. Whereas postcolonialism refers mainly to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, decoloniality starts with the earlier European incursions upon the lands that came to be known as the Americas from the fifteenth century onwards.

Postcolonial and decolonial arguments have been most successful in their challenge to the insularity of historical narratives and historiographical traditions emanating from Europe. This has been particularly so in the context of demonstrating the parochial character of arguments about the endogenous European origins of modernity in favour of arguments that suggest the necessity of considering the emergence of the modern world in the broader histories of colonialism, empire, and enslavement. However, there has been little work, thus far, bringing together the various trajectories of these fields. This piece-necessarily selective and incomplete-is one contribution to this larger project of what I call 'connected sociologies'. In it, I examine the traditions of postcolonialism and decolonial thinking and discuss their radical potential in unsettling and reconstituting standard processes of knowledge production.

Edward Said's Orientalism, not only presented a thorough-going critique of the arcane discipline of Oriental Studies, but opened up the question of the production of knowledge from a global perspective. While he was not the first to address such a question, his positioning of it in the context of interrogating the Orient/Occident divide was novel. He unsettled the terrain of any argument concerned with the 'universal' by demonstrating how the idea of the universal was based both on an analytic bifurcation of the world and an elision of that bifurcation. This double displacement removed the 'other' from the production of an effective history of modernity. History became the product of the West in its actions upon others. At the same time, it displaced those actions in the idea that modernity was endogenous to the West and therefore removed the very question of the 'other' in History. In so doing, it also naturalized and justified the West's material domination of the 'other' and in this way suggested the complicity between Orientalism as scholarly discourse and as imperial institution. It was no accident then, as Said suggests, that the movements for decolonization from the early twentieth century onwards should provoke a fundamental crisis within Orientalist thought; a crisis that fractures the complacent rendering of the 'other' as passive and docile and which challenges the assumptive conceptual framework underpinning such depictions.

It is this challenge to dominant conceptual frameworks that has become central to the broader project of Postcolonial Studies and is one that is developed at length within the work of Homi Bhabha. His essays-collated in The Location of Culture-cover a number of themes, but coalesce around a dual engagement with social ethics and subject formation on the one hand, and (the representation of) contemporary inequalities and their historical conditions, on the other; as well, of course, as the relationships between these aspects, which is perhaps best captured in Bhabha's words that 'we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live'. Postcolonial theory, according to Bhabha, is no longer (if it ever was) simply about the establishment of separatist trajectories or parallel interpretations, but should be seen instead as 'an attempt to interrupt the Western discourses of modernity through ... displacing, interrogative subaltern or postslavery narratives and the critical-theoretical perspectives they engender'. The issue is more about re-inscribing 'other' cultural traditions into narratives of modernity and thus transforming those narratives-both in historical terms and theoretical ones-rather than simply renaming or re-evaluating the content of these other 'inheritances'.

For Bhabha, then, there is no singular event of modernity and there are no moderns (that is, those who have lived through modernity); rather, modernity 'is about the historical construction of a specific position of historical enunciation and address' and much can be learnt through examining the spatial contours given by theorists to the time of modernity. The insistent location of modernity in the French and industrial revolutions, for example, reveals the 'eurocentricity of Foucault's theory of cultural difference'; a eurocentricity that is made more apparent when we address the case of Haiti, among others. By interrupting the passage of modernity, the assumed temporal action of modernity, what is revealed is the particular staging of modernity. By bearing witness to different pasts one is not a passive observer but is able to turn from interrogating the past to initiating new dialogues about that past and thus bringing into being new histories and from those new histories, new presents and new futures. Postcolonial critical discourse at its best, Bhabha suggests, 'contests modernity through the establishment of other historical sites, other forms of enunciation', and, in so doing, rearticulates understandings of modernity and the political possibilities associated with it.

Postcolonial scholarship has been integral to the exercise of opening out and questioning the implied assumptions of the dominant discourses by way of which we attempt to make sense of the worlds we inhabit. It has further provided the basis from which to reclaim, as Spivak argues, 'a series of regulative political concepts, the supposedly authoritative narrative of whose production was written elsewhere'. The task, following Spivak, is less about the uncovering of philosophical ground than in 'reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding' itself; thus, I would suggest, accepting the possibility, in times of the postcolonial, of a critical realignment of colonial power and knowledge through a methodology of 'connected sociologies'. Spivak does this by addressing Western efforts to problematize the subject and, in the process, questions how the Third World subject is represented in Western discourse.

In 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', Spivak offers an analysis of the relationship between Western discourses and the possibility of speaking of (or for) the subaltern (woman). She assesses the intellectual and political contributions of French post-structuralist theory and finds it wanting in terms of its failures in addressing the implications of imperialism in discussions of power and epistemic violence more generally. She suggests that for all that is good and innovative in what has been written there is still a problem to the extent that the question of ideology is ignored, as is the post-structuralist theorist's own implication in intellectual and economic history. To work with 'a self-contained version of the West', she argues, 'is to ignore its production by the imperialist project'. This is not to suggest that the history of imperialism is the only history of the West, but to address more explicitly the question of how what is currently dominant and hegemonic came to be so. The silence of scholars such as Deleuze and Foucault on the (epistemic) violence of imperialism would matter less, she suggests, if they did not choose to speak on Third World issues. Too often, she argues, European philosophers have masqueraded as absent non-representers who seemingly allow, unproblematically, the oppressed to speak for themselves without considering the economic and intellectual privilege this involves.

Two

The theoretical distinction 'modernity/coloniality' was articulated by Anibal Quijano as 'Colonialidad y modernidad-racionalidad' and was first printed in English in two thousand seven. Here, he argues that, with the conquest of the lands that we now call Latin America, 'began the constitution of a new world order, culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet'. This coloniality of power, expressed through political and economic spheres, Quijano continues, was strongly associated with a coloniality of knowledge (or of imagination), articulated as modernity/rationality. This was predicated on a belief that knowledge, in a similar way to property, ought to be considered 'as a relation between one individual and something else', not as an intersubjective relation for the purpose of something. The individuated form of knowledge production has as its correlate the 'radical absence of the "other" and a denial of 'the idea of the social totality'. This enables Europeans, both individually and collectively, to affirm their sense of self at the same time as making invisible the colonial order that provides the context for their 'self-realization.

As Quijano states, the emergence of the idea of Europe is an admission of identity in that it emerges through a process of differentiation from other cultures. Yet there is little reflection within European social and political thought on how those other cultures constitute the ground of European self-realization (in both senses). Rather, most discussions of Europe are oriented towards endogenous explanations of who Europeans are and what Europe is. Against this dominant conception, Quijano argues that the modernity that Europe takes as the context for its own being is, in fact, so deeply imbricated in the structures of European colonial domination over the rest of the world that it is impossible to separate the two: hence, modernity/coloniality.

María Lugones builds on Quijano's coloniality of power by arguing for modernity/coloniality to be understood as simultaneously shaped through specific articulations of race, gender, and sexuality. This is not to provide a raced or gendered (alternative) reading of the paradigm of modernity/coloniality, but rather to re-read modernity/coloniality from a consciousness of race, gender, and sexuality and to examine the emergence and development of those categories within this context. Lugones argues that not only did colonization invent the colonized, it also disrupted the social patterns, gender relations and cosmological understandings of the communities and societies it invaded. In doing so, it rearticulated particular European understandings of gender and sex from a bifurcation between male and female to a racialized understanding of the same embedded within a logic of colonial difference. This further overlay and sought to erase the varied conceptualizations of gender, sex, and sexuality that pre-existed the European colonial/modern gender system. This system organizes the world into homogenous, separable categories arranged through hierarchical dichotomies and categorial logics which, in the process, erase colonized women from most areas of social life. As Lugones argues, for example, to suggest that 'woman' and 'black' are homogenous, separable categories, 'then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence'.

Mignolo develops Quijano's earlier theoretical work and, in particular, further elaborates his conception of modernity/coloniality in the context of the work of epistemic decolonization necessary to undo the damage wrought by both modernity and by understanding modernity/coloniality only as modernity. The decolonization of knowledge, he suggests, occurs in acknowledging the sources and geo-political locations of knowledge while at the same time affirming those modes and practices of knowledge that have been denied by the dominance of particular forms. He is not arguing simply for a geo-politics of location as central to any academic endeavour, but rather a consideration of what that geo-politics enables to be known and how it is to be known. The key issue for Mignolo is not only that epistemology is not ahistorical, but also, and perhaps more importantly,

that epistemology 'has to be geographical in its historicity'. Mignolo's project of 'de-linking' points to the need to change the terms (concepts) as well as the content (histories) of the conversations on modernity/coloniality. He argues for a decolonial epistemic shift that enables the histories and thought of other places to be understood as prior to European incursions and to be used as the basis of developing connected histories of encounters through those incursions. In the process, he argues also for the epistemic delinking from 'the rhetoric of modernity' to involve rethinking 'the emancipating ideals of modernity in the perspective of coloniality'.