WESTERN theories do not imagine that other ways of seeing/knowing exist.
Everything non-Western can at best be viewed as ethnic studies or post-colonial criticism
‘Ethnic studies’ are sometimes referred to as ‘minority studies’. This has an obvious historical relationship with ‘post-colonial criticism’ in that Euro-American imperialism and colonisation in the last four centuries have been directed at recognisable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American and Philipino, among others.
‘Ethnic studies’ concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups, either marginalised or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture.
‘Post-colonial criticism’ investigates the relationships between colonisers and the colonised in the period post-colonisation. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection, ‘ethnic studies’ and post-colonial criticism’ have significant differences in their history and ideas.
‘Ethnic studies’ has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the US and Britain.
In the works of W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to theorise the position of African-Americans within dominant white culture through his concept of ‘double consciousness’, a dual identity including both ‘American and ‘negro’.
Dubois and theorists after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both creates identity and reveals itself in culture.
Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe – have made significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority culture.
Ethnic or minority literary theory emphasises the relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt racial oppression.
More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been historically marginalised by dominant cultures.
Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of post-colonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of explicitly ‘post-colonial criticism’ in the West.
Said argues the concept of ‘the Orient’ was produced by the ‘imaginative geography’ of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonisation and domination of non-Western societies.
‘Post-colonial’ theory reverses the historical centre/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the dichotomies – centre/margin, white/black and coloniser/colonised – by which colonial practices are justified.
The work of Gayatri Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial ‘other’ and the relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity.
‘Post-colonial criticism’ pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalised literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse.
‘Post-colonial criticism’ offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the ‘imaginative geography’ of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilised and uncivilised, First and Third Worlds.
In this respect, ‘post-colonial criticism’ is activist and adversarial in its basic aims.
Post-colonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples – their wealth, labour and culture – in the development of modern European nation states. While ‘post-colonial criticism’ emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalisation of culture, including the neo-colonialism of multi-national capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of inquiry.
The problem that this theory of literature confronts is one of legitimacy and revolutionary status.
On the face of it, it is revolutionary, promising to turn the oppressor’s tables; but you do not achieve the noble desire by employing the same whiteman’s opaque discourse.
You need to have consumed quantum volumes of English language to understand Homi Bhabha and his fellow post-colonial theorists.
One wonders why the abstraction?
They speak of the ‘other’, ‘otherising’, ‘the subaltern’, ‘subliminal’, ‘the third space’ and ‘hybridity’, among a host of other impenetrables.
One wonders why spend your entire lifetime trying to justify inclusivity and oneness with your erstwhile coloniser when you can retain your own identity and keep it as is without dying to relate it to someone else’s?
Besides, why cheated by the lie that post-colonial means colonialism is dead?
What is post about colonialism when we are still reeling under the effects of colonial-capital jaws?
Our own fellow African misleading us that colonialism is over when in fact it has metamorphosed into something much more vicious, threatening our sure extinction!
Can’t you see globalisation and its colossal tentacles?
Can’t you feel the clutches of dependency tentacles?
The day-to-day social and economic sanctions!
The naked poverty!
The overt and covert interferences in the political systems of Africa!
Meanwhile, your own Africans are busy negotiation with their oppressors for a third space!
What nonsense is this?
Africa is in flames and you are busy telling your kinsmen that colonialism ended some decades ago!
Are we not forced to question your loyalty and say on whose side are you?
Whose agenda are you peddling?
Now you can understand why post-colonial criticism is post-colonial nonsense.
A wild goose chase!
Much ado about nothing!
This intellectualism arrogates all agency to borderland personalities such as Said, Bhabha, Spivak and others who seek to negotiate the zone between the capitalist-comprador nationalism of neo-colonised nation-states and the cosmopolitan ‘high culture’ circuit of academic celebrities.
With the focus on contrapuntal flux, hybrid positionalities and directionless ambivalence, the post-colonial intellectuals’ sophisticated and bookish opposition to global capital can only serve as a vehicle for soothing the anguish of the oppressed and promising a utopia of ‘cultural compassion’.