provincializingpostcolonialism

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

On Spivak’s “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern” and Devi’s “Breast-Giver”

We revisit Spivak this week and her translation of Mahasweta Devi’s Breast-Giver: 

In Spivak's "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern", she presents three readings of Devi's "Breast-Giver" that broadly follow three "elite" approaches: a Marxist-Feminist reading, a Liberal-Feminist reading, and a Feminist theory rooted in the Woman's body. In each, what is demonstrated is the impossibility of a totalizing reading of the text via the chosen ideological or epistemological framework. In a Marxist-Feminist reading, the interpretation of Jashoda's breast-milk as commodity with use and surplus value is left incomplete, plagued by inconsistencies and the failure of the text to bring a cohesive Marxist-Feminist reading to fruition. The move from the domestic to the "domestic" sphere (248), according to Spivak, does not adhere to the move from domestic to civil, private to public, etc. and "stalls the classic Engelsian-feminist narrative" (248),  "introduces a stutter in the pre-supposition that women's work is typically non-productive of value" (249). At each instance, Devi's text is shown to resist a seamless reading according to all three "elite approaches" Spivak accesses. All are shown to be inadequate in elucidating and enunciating the subject-position of the subaltern, and ironically, precisely because of their failure, perhaps do the most to enunciate that condition of subalterity through their combined textual failure.

The question that comes to mind immediately with Spivak’s chosen reading strategy—to examine the failure of combined reading strategies—is this: the failure of allegorical readings, or of ideological frameworks to neatly encompass and explain works of literature is well established. No one, even Devi who advances a parabolic reading of her text (244), would, I assume, believe that a singular reading of any literary text is sufficient. Literature as allegory is rare, and even then, a multiplicity of allegorical readings is possible. The “realist” style of Devi’s writing is particularly resistant to a neat allegorical reading, but nevertheless, there is some validity to an attempt at one, even a cohesive one, with the keen awareness that the text will always escape its theoretical predestinations, that it will unravel any literary theory at some point. What differentiates Spivak’s reading strategy then, is that she takes these points of unraveling as her focus. The points at which dissolution of theory by text occurs are not simply acknowledged but ancillary, but rather, the object Spivak’s deconstructive reading. Hers is a “critique of strategic exclusions” (249), a honing in on the threads where the epistemological tapestry frays in order to look at what is unexpressed, what eludes recognition and thus interpretation.

A space of negative knowledge, of unknowable substance then, lies beyond the limits and boundaries of such epistemological frameworks as Marxist-Feminism, Liberal Feminism, etc. and it is through their “persistent interruptions” (249) of each other that the limits of textual interpretive frameworks are enunciated. Yet, there’s a further question that may be broached: that even in an interruptive reading that Spivak advocates in her essay, embarking on three “elite” approaches that are revealed to be inadequate in grasping textual meaning, a showing of a text that constantly interrupts hegemonic impositions of semiotic meaning, there seems also to be a limit to the kinds of limitations that are exposed. That is to say that in examining the text through a failure of pre-existing epistemological frameworks, the space of failure, of (im)possibility that opens as a site of possibility of new, unexpressed meaning, is still pre-figured as the shadowy substance of hegemonic structures. The extent to which that space of nebulous, unexpressed textual meaning escapes hegemonic interpretive frameworks is always then pre-determined in the form of a particular kind of failure—the failure, the shadow cousin, the negative reflection of cohesive theory. How Devi’s “Breast-Giver” eludes and subverts a Marxist-Feminism frame of interpretation is always an observation of failure from a Marxist-Feminist subject-position, and can only be conceptualized as that which is not, the concave complement to hegemonic discourse. The points of unraveling that the text enacts when it collides with an attempt at literary theory is then something, though not exactly paralleling the self-consolidating impulse of a psychology of Othering in colonization, one that approximates that impulse to characterize the limit of knowledge as still in the image of hegemonic knowledge and language. In the confluence of failures that forms when these three “elite approaches” convene via Spivak’s reading strategy, does there exist, still, something of a limit on the enunciation of limitations? That the only failures that can be charted or recognized are that which can be (un)marked by hegemonic discourse? Can a radically new subject-position be identified through a process that brings to crisis the Big Three systems, still utilizing hegemonic discourse, though it examines its points of failures? We return to the question, then, of can the subaltern speak, and the answer persists—no.

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

Fanon

Started delving more into the specifics of language specifically in/as postcolonial discourse, and reading Fanon’s first chapter in Black Skin, White Masks is of course par for the course: 

In "The Negro and Language", Fanon's treatment of language is one intimately embedded in a discussion of power. He begins the chapter by stating that "to speak is to exist absolutely for the other" (17), with the use of language, and more significantly, the language of the other, as an imposition of power upon the foreign speaker, a usurpation of self, a creation of a state of existence for an-Other. With reference to Bhabha, we may conceive of this use of the French language in Fanon's Antilles setting as that colonial discourse imposed upon the colonized, in a highly specific form no doubt, of the French language (though we must keep in mind the broad and multifarious modes of "discourse" that Bhabha refers to, not simply linguistic as in Fanon's writing). Nevertheless, Fanon's conception of language as power ("Mastery of language affords remarkable power" (18)) is clear, and its use as a means of advancing within the framework of colonial discourse and hierarchical power ("In any group of young men in the Antilles, the one who expresses himself well, who has mastered the language, is inordinately feared...he is almost white." (20-21)) by the Martinique man is stated unproblematically (only in the sense that it is clearly and unquestionably preserved as the language of The White Man). 

There are two areas of contention then, in Fanon's conception of language as it relates to power and the colonized-colonizer relationship. First, the notion that, contrary to Bhabha, French (as colonial discourse) is unquestionably the tool of the master with no recourse to or recognition of ambivalence and therefore possibility of subversion or difference. For Fanon, to speak in the French language is to unquestionably take on the mantle of colonial complicity, to "become Whiter", and to disavow the positionality or solidarity with the colonized. The peasant father drops the tool on the boy's feet to dissolve his amnesia, his colonial wet dream, his desire to become French, but through a greater deliverance of pain, of further micro-trauma pitting colonized subject against colonized subject with no imposition upon the colonized who first sets the wheels of imperial trauma in motion with his move to subjugate. It strikes me as deeply unjust to impose upon the colonized the burden of guilt in navigating the political complicities of language after the unsolicited trauma of colonization is imposed upon them. And yet, for Fanon, this effect emerges from an unquestioning treatment of the authority of the French language. There is the sense that, especially in his insistence on not "talking down" to patients that occurs, that French, proper French, grammatical, well-pronounced, well-manipulated French, is the tool that enables and ennobles. (There is a clear separation of "French" and "Creole" in this chapter that doesn't, it seems to me, to question linguistic flexibility and porousness sufficiently, assuming a coherence, stasis, and stability to any given, but in this case French, language.) 

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" states Audre Lorde, and yet Fanon here maintains two things: First, that the master's tools remain the master's tools with no recourse to difference or change (unlike what Bhabha maintains with his concept of hybridity in colonial discourse, a concept that allows for slippage, excess, and a parsing of the porousness of language). Second, there seems to be no move to dismantle the master's house as such. While Fanon states: "...there is no black problem. Or at any rate if there is one it concerns the whites only accidentally. It is a story that takes place in darkness, and the sun that is carried within me must shine into the smallest crannies." (29), it's a rhetorical move that seems to suggest no subversion of the "master's house", but an ignorance, accompanied by a simultaneous erection of an alternative house in the image of the master's house without calling it such. 

Fanon does not fall into the trap of advocating for an obvious alignment with and adoption of the French language as a means to advance in a colonial setting, stating rather explicitly a disparagement of the goal "to prove the existence of a black civilization to the white world at all costs" (34), and yet, there is a certain politics and hierarchy of language that Fanon implicitly advances even while he decries the violent imposition of the French language. In his description about "talking down" to patients, of the surprise expressed by the European at the Negro's grasp of the French language (35), of his description of Creole and dialect, there seems to emerge an implicit unequal relationship between French and Creole, or French and dialect. There is, in my opinion, a brevity of discussion of the possible linguistic complexity of Creole or dialect in relation to the established and unquestioned elegance of the French language. But I mention this not to champion a nationalist sentiment, or nostalgic longing for an alternative cultural origin, but rather to point out the lack of discussion, in this chapter, of the complexities of language politics that include a more thorough analysis of the "world" or "way of thinking" (25) of Creole or dialect. To describe pidgin or speaking Creole as a "talking down" is complicated by the question of who is doing the speaking and to whom. For a European attempting (butchering, perhaps) the linguistic verities of Creole in order to, mistakenly, "connect" or "communicate" with a native speaker carries a radically different connotation and implication than two Antilleans using that dialect as means of communication (a conversation that then adopts yet more complex implications depending upon the setting). 

Code-switching then, presents itself as a complicated site of analysis for language politics, which, in my experience, also brings up implications for class and education. To switch between languages (French and Creole), or in my personal experience (English and Singlish), is to exercise an acquired linguistic skill tied intrinsically to the privilege of access to education and thereby lanes of socio-economic mobility. Spivak's discussion of a lack of structural frameworks or epistemological frameworks that are able to enact the crucial process of recognition can perhaps then be figured, in this case, as an epistemological framework manifested as a linguistic system. The English (or the French) of academia, of socio-economic mobility, of comparative power, does, then, the work of obfuscation and devaluation for subjects that lie beyond its authorial knowledge. The Singlish-speaking auntie at the wet market may traffic in four distinct languages at once, but there is no systematic maneuver that can digest or interpret that action. 

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

More on Said and Bhabha as a Solution: “Orientalism Now”

In "Orientalism Now", Said maps the knowledge framework of Orientalism as it appears to him in the contemporaneous moment. Within the chapter, he makes a significant theoretical gesture that splits Orientalism in two—“latent Orientalism” and “manifest Orientalism”, with the former defined as “an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, and the latter “the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth” (206). This conceptual splitting is what enables Said to resolve, perhaps unsatisfactorily and only partially, one of the theoretical impasses that he comes to in the two previous chapters when he describes Orientalism as a coherent body of knowledge that seems to disallow internal discrepancy or abide any potential for change from within. The “latent Orientalism” that Said describes is a body of “essential ideas”, and one that “could not really be violated by anyone’s discoveries, nor did it seem ever to be revaluated completely” (205), whereas that of “manifest Orientalism”, which accounts for differences between Orientalists or other scholars, writers, and administrators of the “Orient”, is where “change [that] occurs in knowledge of the Orient” is found. While this bifurcation resolves the conceptual problem of accounting for discrepancies and individual scholarly dissension within Orientalism (posing these differences as “less important than their Orientalist consensus” (209), that is, the obfuscating and consolidating force of latent Orientalism), the question of whether “latent Orientalism” is thereby static and unchanging, and how “manifest Orientalism” ultimately shifts the quality of consensus of “manifest Orientalism”, is still unexplained. In short, a satisfactory theory of change is still unaccounted for, and “manifest Orientalism” thereby falls, insistently, into a static trap.

Said locates the agent of change in his theory as the individual scholar. Speaking of Massignon, who he maintains does not transcend the ideas of other French Orientalist, he states: “we must allow…that the refinements, the personal style, the individual genius, may firstly supersede the political restraints operating impersonally through tradition and through national ambience” (271), ultimately contributing scholarship which shifts the discursive horizon of the field, establishing “a new stability” (273). Whether this “new stability” is found within “latent” or “manifest” Orientalism, however, remains unclear. But, what is important to note at this point in the chapter is that Said clearly establishes that both Orientalisms that he speaks of are discursive or imaginative fields. Any suggestion of a positivist Orient is denied, and he presents both Orientalisms as representations that do not map onto a geographic actuality. He states clearly that “the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth”, which is itself a representation.” (272)

This clarification counters the post-structuralist critique of Said as assuming a positivist Orient from which representation is judged or derived. Said is shown to abide by the belief in the discursive reality (as the only “reality”) of Orientalism, and yet, this new theoretical framework complicates a crucial criticism of Said’s: that Orientalism is a “mis-representation”. For if there is no true representation of the “Orient” or any geographic equivalent, then the corollary is that there cannot be grounds for a “mis-representation” to occur. Some alternative justification, perhaps on the grounds of power or ethics, which Said hints at, must form the new basis of this judgment then.

Even with the establishment of the field of Orientalism (both latent and manifest) as discursive, Said leaves, still, the question and mechanics of change, as mentioned above, unanswered. How does “manifest Orientalism” enact that shifting within “latent Orientalism”? Through what means does an individual scholar register their difference within the domineering knowledge system of Orientalism?

Bhabha, arguably, takes up that mantle of change that Said leaves unanswered, positing the concepts of hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry as through which difference and change is enacted. In that sense then, Said’s identification of the individual scholar as agent of change may be preserved, but in this case, it is not the genius inherent in the individual that results in change, but the very nature of language and text, the ambivalence of discourse itself, that allows for a shift to occur. Bhabha identifies mimicry as that which constitutes a simultaneous representation of difference and disavowal, a repetition and consolidation of colonial discourse’s authority and its subversion. It is that mechanism which, the individual perhaps (though Bhabha’s conception of mimicry does not seem to limit its discursive utility to the individual i.e. a collective manifestation of mimicry is possible (I’m thinking here of Spivak’s discussion of rumor in Three Women’s Texts)), may produce that “new stability” that Said speaks of. Yet here, the question of recognition remains. Though Bhabha identifies mimicry as arising from a site of ambivalence and enacting a subversion from within, the question of how this subversion is registered and recognized as such remains an issue.

** Perhaps affect theory may be a possible conceptual framework to imagine the paranoid responses of colonial discourse (from the colonizer/colonialist), and in so doing map the mechanism of textual change through a system of affects.

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

Bhabha’s Ambivalence

We’re focusing a lot on Bhabha and his articulation of “ambivalence” and “hybridity” right now. And these are my main questions, with more to come:

Bhabha defines hybridity as such In “Signs Taken for Wonders”:

“Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal….Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects.” (pp.159)

And further, “Hybridity is the name of this displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes dominant discourse to split along the axis of power to be representative, authoritative. Hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification—a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority.” (pp.162)

I’m interested in how Bhabha posits that this hybridity is recognized—the terms of its recognition (where, when, and by whom), especially since he later claims that this hybridity arising from a site of ambivalence “enables a form of subversion” and “turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention” (pp. 160). How, in particular, does this intervention occur? How does it move from recognition, to interruption of colonial discourse, and how does Bhabha see this as politically effective?

Bhabha,argues that hybridity is that which “creates a crisis for any authority based on a system of recognition” (pp.162), which is reminiscent of and complicated by Spivak’s postulated structure of recognition that systematically and existentially excludes, and is unable to recognize, much less interpret, that which she considers subaltern. Granted that the subject-position that Bhabha is speaking of, the “discriminated colonial subject” is not analogous to Spivak’s enunciation or (or inability to enunciate) the “subaltern”, though perhaps inclusive of such conditionalities, we may perhaps find the grounds for the potential of hybridity’s recognition.

Yet, the conceptual difficulty of the subaltern’s inability to speak because prevailing knowledge-power structures are not configured to enunciate their positionality, prevails in Bhabha’s argument. In Bhabha’s structure, hybridity is that site where colonial discourse approaches its limit, met with difference that cannot be accounted for by totalizing colonial knowledge. How then, is hybridity recognized as such? Who (perhaps the historian or the theorist) enacts that process of recognition, and must it therefore always be a retrospective act of reading and interpretation?

Further, if hybridity is registered as an interruption to colonial discourse, what elevates it from mere paranoia at the non-totalizing grasp of colonial systems of recognition (by the colonizer or colonialist) to a subversion and site of intervention? What prevents colonial discourse, in its inability to interpret interruptive phenomena, difference, from continuing as such?

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

Re: Said’s “Orientalism”

And this week I read more Said, and some Bhabha, and some Memmi:

Moving through the second chapter of Orientalism, "Orientalist Structures and Restructures", I'm interested in three things that Said points out in particular: first, the instrumentalizing of the Orient—as a means of affirming and confirming European identity—through Orientalism, the discussion of and shift from religiosity to secularism that the academic study of Orientalism undergoes, and the possibilities of textual representation, truthful or not, which Said elucidates towards the end of the chapter.

First, the instrumentalizing of the Orient through Orientalism as a means of consolidating European identity and sense of self. Said explains that the notion of a self-serving study of the Orient has its roots in a restored Romanticized notion of "the regeneration of Europe by Asia" (115), an impulse that presumes the Oriental ability to restore a defeated Europe weighed down by "the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture" (115). Yet, he deviates quickly from this simplistic utilitarian European use of the Orient by citing Flaubert's self-conscious satirizing of and thereby awareness of such an idea's "insidious hubris" (115). Shoring up of the European identity via Orientalism then, falls to a more subconscious, and less outwardly purposeful directive. I locate it in Said's elaboration of the movement of academic Orientalism into "historical confrontation, sympathy, classification" (120), three of the four currents in eighteenth century thought that Said identifies as that which modern Orientalism depends on for its intellectual and institutional structures. The comparative tendency in "historical confrontation", the identificatory impulse in "sympathy", and finally, the assimilative effect of "classification", I read, as enactors of an obfuscation of the centrality of European thought and positionality. The instrumentalization of the Orient manifests then as a conceptualizing and re-conceptualizing of the Orient (as concept, if we assume Said's separation of the Orient as actuality and the Orient as sphere of knowledge) as a space which nonetheless takes the West as its stable ground of referential thought and comparison. This obscuring of Western positionality is a direction that Said also associates with the move from a religious to secular rhetoric, something that I will attempt to parse in the next paragraph. With this point however, what I'm interested in tracing is how this impulse of self-consolidation by the West via Orientalism relates to notions of humanism, and later manifestations of "world literature". In so far as we may consider the conception of an Orient as simulacrum of the West under the false veneer of universalism, how then do we read contemporary impulses and proclivities for narratives of difference?

The shift from Christian theology to secularism that Said traces in the evolution of Orientalism and its trajectory is put forth most directly in his thesis that "the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis...can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such discplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized subtitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism." That is, the process of secularism that Orientalism undergoes merely imbues it with the superficial impression of objectivity, ala Enlightenment thought, but conceptually, nevertheless relies on a grounding in religious, specifically Christian, subjectivity. Again, this implicitly points to the distinction that Said makes in earlier parts of Orientalism between Orientalism as a body of knowledge—in this case, presenting itself as objective knowledge while in fact, complicit in a prior, biased perspective—and the actual Orient. In this chapter he stresses this separation of material actuality and conceptual knowledge again, stating that the project of Orientalism renders a situation where "Objective structure (designation of Orient) and subjective restructure (representation of Orient by Orientalist) become interchangeable." (129) when in fact, the sentence implies,

The separation between the Orient as actual reality and Orientalism as representation is made clear at this point. What complicates Said's stance further however, is that when he begins to discuss textual representations of the Orient in Orientalism, a further claim is made: that not only is Orientalism a representation of the Orient, therefore separate, but that it is an inaccurate one. Therefore, the conceptual logic from which Said makes his argument and explicates Orientalism has the following implications: A. Orientalism is a representation of the Orient and separate from the actuality of the Orient it self. B. It is an inaccurate representation of the Orient itself, its material reality. C. There therefore is the possibility of an accurate representation of the Orient in text. D. That on some level, textual representation is able to encompass or reflect a material reality truthfully. E. That then, this relation between text and material reality is unilateral—material reality should inform textual representation. There are several passages where Said's attitude towards the relation between text and material reality is made clear. He describes the process of knowledge in Orientalism, that "Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon." (127) Here, the function of knowledge and textual production is explication and rendering visible what is already there. Text is not productive, merely instrumental in making explicit what already exists.

Yet, perhaps the accusation may be lobbed that this sentence is more representative of modern Orientalism's view of knowledge-text than Said's own. Further on in the chapter however, Said makes a statement that seems to adhere to this conception of how text relates to material reality, decrying that "Oriental biography" is presented as—"and the paradox is immediately apparent—as if it were the truthful narrative of a natural life." (146). There are two implicit claims here: 1. That there is a "natural life", an actuality. 2. That there can exist a truthful narrative of it, a textual representation that faithfully encompasses or represents it. Similarly, what Said expresses objection to in the practice of Orientalisaism later is that "knowledge of man was poetically transfiguring only if it had been previously severed from raw actuality (as Sacy had necessarily severed his Arabic fragments from their actuality) and then put into a doxological straightjacket." (147) "Raw actuality", it seems, as a condition of materiality, exists apart from textual representation, and that more than that, there is a manner in which it can be represented in text that is accurate or, to use Said’s words, “truthful”.

The possibility of “truthful” textual representation, of which Orientalism as a body of textual knowledge is the paramount counterexample, is interesting to consider in view of Said’s discussion of literary forms then, as well as the distinction that he makes between British and French Orientalism and Orientalist texts. Because in so far as we see a “truthful” textual representation as inherently linked to the material actuality of the geographic space of the Orient, we then expect that contact with the landscape, the material existence of the geographical Orient, as essential in the process of “truthfully” transposing the material to the textual. Yet, in the section “Oriental Residence and Scholarship”, Said presents a mélange of Orientalists who, despite contact and residence in the geographic, material Orient, simply produce and reproduce texts that corroborate and consolidate existing Orientalist views. The difference that Said identifies between British and French Orientalist texts is one that takes into account material realities, the disjoint between “British realities and French fantasies”. The French Orient is one based on imagination, research in the library and the museum that are then resolutely clung onto even when scholars and writers enter the material, geographic space of the Orient. British Orientalism, Said claims in contrast, is one irrevocably shaped and constantly aware of the political and “combative awareness” of relations between the Orient and Europe due to a history of, and contemporary situations of territorial conquest. Yet, both get it wrong. The material, or increased familiarity and experience with the material, seems then insufficient for a “truthful” textual representation of the Orient. There then must exist something else, beyond the experience of the actual, material Orient, that contributes to “truthful” depiction (if we assume this to be possible). Said’s standing assumptions thus cause an impasse—where the issue lies with the standing assumption of how language and text is related to materiality, and in turn, the possibility of a “truthful” textual account of reality.

However, if we choose to continue Said’s logic—that textual representation can “truthfully” depict reality, and that its function is restricted illustration and not production, the question that we are then led to is: how? How is a “truthful” textual representation of reality constructed? What enables it? (It is not, as we have seen, merely the observation of and residence in the material, for many an Orientalist situated in the geographical Orient have produced works that Said considers part of the Orientalist canon.)

My guess, is that it involves the positionality of the colonized. Writing not just from a point of geographical proximity, but also appropriate positionality. Language will enter to complicate this, as will issues of relative positionalities among the colonized.

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

Orientalism (I) — Edward Said

An administrative update: after haranguing the bureaucratic powers that be at university, this modest reading project has been formally submitted and approved as an independent research and reading course. Which simply means that I am now even more obliged to constantly write, read, and synthesize all of my thoughts on postcolonialism and Southeast Asia. 

Regardless, we begin with Said’s Orientalism, and this week’s reading response, derived from the first chapter is as follows:

Reading through Said's Orientalism, or at least it's introduction, what I was trying most of all to do was establish a definition, or Said's definition of what this field was, and if it could be best described as a field (and what then? A field of knowledge? of academic study more specifically?). He seems to suggest that Orientalism is more far-reaching than that, and encompasses not simply an accrual of facts, but a dispersed system of knowledge that is rooted in and a product of an "uneven exchange with various kinds of power" (12). What, however, I can't (yet—perhaps this is mentioned in later chapters) seem to grasp, or what I'm interested in then, is the relationship between Orientalism as a system of knowledge in the way Said defines it in the introduction, and the lived, material reality of peoples in the, broadly speaking, geographic space of the "Orient". That question comes up because Said seems to imply that there is an underlying "true" Orient that seems unscathed by Orientalism as a knowledge-producing entity or system, or at least, he doesn't mention it yet. I'm skipping ahead from the introduction, but in the section of "The Scope of Orientalism", Said mentioned that Orientalism uses "representative figures, or tropes", and that they are to "the actual Orient—or Islam, which is [his] main concern here—as stylized costumes are to characters in a play" (71). And while I understand the sentiment and agree that the stereotypes that Said speaks of are unlikely to fully represent real peoples, what I'm interested in, to carry Said's stage metaphor yet further, is the contact between costume and character, how costume makes, shapes and moulds the person bearing it, if it does—in other words, a question of shades of influence, the contact between Orientalism and the "actual Orient" as Said puts it.

It's something that I think relates to the notion of "hybridity" that Bhabha speaks of in The Commitment to Theory. This was particularly challenging to parse, but what I'm interested in is this space of negotiation that Bhabha describes, one in which theory functions and constructs: “The language of critique is effective...to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of ‘translation’: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object is new, neither the one nor the Other.” (10)

How can we see this space of hybridity in relation to the contact, or lack thereof, that Said hints at in Orientalism? I'm thinking also of post-structuralist notions of subject-formation from Foucault, and the productive ability of language, which Bhabha also argues for. In addition, with the definitional bounds of Orientalism, set out by Said, in mind, how do we conceive of "postcolonialism" or "postcolonial studies", in a similar or different way, as a form of knowledge and/or redress? What are the bounds of such a field—academic, intellectual, or otherwise?

[provincializingpostcolonialism]

“What is this unnecessary digital space about Southeast Asia and Postcolonialism?” you ask. I don’t know, I’m trying to figure it out too.

I’m Isabelle and I’m coming up to the end of my fourth (and final) year at the University of Chicago. I’m an English major and for the majority of my university career I’ve been reading 17th century British poetry (I hold John Donne responsible), until about a year and a half/two years ago, when I began taking classes in gender studies, postcolonial studies, and strangely enough, sociology. It’s been an intellectual 180 since then, and a decolonizing of my education so to speak. I’ve tried my best to read as deeply and critically as I can when it comes to postcolonial studies, but of course, there’s a lot more to know, grasp, dissect, reform, etc. 

What I’ve noticed though, going through key postcolonial thinkers and literature in class, was an absence, and one that, I admit, I have a personal stake in—one involving Southeast Asia, and more specifically, Singapore. 

Coming from a country so marked, in many ways defined, by our colonial (British, if you were curious about the particular brand of imperialism) past, and from a region that has been multiply-colonized: Malaya, Singapore, Brunei, and Burma (British), Indonesia (Dutch), Philippines (Spain, and arguably, the US), Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (French), it was jarring at times to be in the analytical mode of postcolonial studies and have this region be conspicuously absent, in a classroom setting, in any of our figurations and conversations. 

In 2008, the Journal for Postcolonial Studies devoted an issue to this absence. Titled “Southeast Asia’s absence in postcolonial studies”, it contained an introduction by Professor Chua Beng Huat, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore. His article began: 

Southeast Asia, one of the most colonized regions in the world, is conspicuously absent in the expanding archive of Postcolonial Studies. This is partly due to the negligence of the many practicing Postcolonial Studies practitioners, including editors of anthologies. It is, however, more significantly a consequence of the preoccupation of Southeast Asian scholars who were otherwise occupied with the more imminent issues that face the Southeast Asian nations that have been caught up with the Cold War and the post independence economic developments. 

He argues that scholars have been far more devoted to disciplines of imminent, even existential, urgency. Post-independent experiments in democracy, processes of violent decolonization, and the looming question of how to build a nation may perhaps have left the postcolonial perspective in the dust, scholars and statesmen (often one and the same) drawn towards more urgent tasks of crafting cohesive state narrative, of infrastructure-planning, of nation-building. 

So why now? Why revive, or more accurately (re)-introduce (there are many talented scholars already working in this field, just simply not as many as those on South Asian and Middle Eastern perspectives) postcolonial studies in a Southeast Asian context? There’s a turn, or perhaps my turn, to an ethical element of critical analysis here, and I suppose it betrays some of my personal beliefs on the humanistic potentialities of literary theory/critical theory—that is, it’s ability to alter notions, pathways, processes of self-conception. It’s a personal stake as a post-colonial subject, and an idealistic one, but I suppose that isn’t the worst place to begin. 

The title of this digital space is taken from Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book, “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”. He makes a complex and compelling argument throughout the more than 300 page book about time, history and Europe as the unsaid and assumed site of modernity with which “non-Europe” is figured, and which I won’t attempt to explain here. But the impulse with this space is similar—a re-figuring of unsaid, assumed frameworks and sites of knowledge, this time, of South Asia and its place in Postcolonial studies. How do we begin to see a multiplicity in postcolonialist perspectives, or, am I asking the wrong questions already? 

Are there, perhaps, no poles or primary sites of knowledge in postcolonialism, simply multiple trading posts, of which the one I am concerned with is perhaps simply less developed? What then structures its perspective? What inherent biases or perspectives does postcolonialism hold or operate on as a system of knowledge? If there is a site of knowledge that undergirds postcolonial studies, is it nevertheless, despite our vehement refusal, Europe? 

So perhaps, the name of this space is misleading. For the project here is less clear-cut and purposeful, and with a clear idea of what postcolonialism and postcolonial studies already is, than it is exploratory. I’m as yet unclear of what postcolonialism constitutes and how we may begin to see it (as an aggregation of knowledge? of knowable facts? of a paradigm?), what kind of beast, so to speak, we are handling. 

But I suppose we begin nonetheless, to trace its contours and map its origins, and finally, figure how Southeast Asia (and dear Singapore) fits into all of this.