Thinking from the Ban? Rebellious Third Worlds and Theory

2011

There have been two distinctive aspects to James Tully’s approach to the study of imperialism over the years, and both are put to work in these remarkable volumes.1 The first is his belief in two seemingly contradictory claims: (i) that imperialism is much more pervasive than usually thought (conceptually, his- torically and practically); and yet (ii) that there are many more forms of resis- tance to it than usually appreciated. The second is the way Tully places the situation of indigenous peoples at the heart of his analysis. This goes back to his groundbreaking work on Locke, and his extraordinary re-interpretation of Locke’s work in the context of early modern discourses of imperialism. But the situation of indigenous peoples also deeply informed his argument in Strange Multiplicity2—and not only in terms of the central motif of the lectures pro- vided by Haida artist Bill Reid. In that book, he sought to reveal and defend a much richer conception of legal and cultural pluralism than had hitherto been appreciated by liberal constitutionalists and their critics. Indigenous peoples are not simply a litmus test for our thinking about pluralism but represent a much deeper challenge to the way we conceptualize notions of citizenship, sovereignty, democracy and freedom in the first place—and indeed the nature of political philosophy itself.

Research Inspiration, 2016

BSTRACT The aim of this paper is to investigate into the deliberate attempts made by the colonial masters for the suppression and victimization of the colonized world. There occurs an emergence of resisting power in the mind of the colonized that in a stepwise protest leads to certain reclaiming of lost status. Different scholars paved the way for this revolution espacially, A.D.Cesaire, F.O.Fanon, Edward Said, Homi K.Bhaba and others. The militant cries of Cesaire and Fanon resonates in African postcolonial context. The perplexed discoveries related to colonial conspiracy against Asian ethno cultural legacy by Edward Said fully accelerated the scholarly class of suppressed societies. Homi K.Bhabha openly challenges the set status of the colonizer and the colonized; this wins the lost identity of all the suppressed class of the world. Therefore, they, with their scholastic efforts, exposed the colonial discourse of exploitation and cultural invasion. Their efforts paved the way for protest literature in Africa, India and in many other previously occupied nations. Rereading and reinterpreting of some colonial text in a deconstructive perspective proves physical and psychological enslaving of colonized done by colonizer. Manipulating some situated conditions like diaspora and globalization, they want to prove their pretentious goodwill for other world. The close contact of coloniser-colonised or master/slave binaries effaces the so-called essential differences amongst them. This elevates the identity of colonized to his/her self-respect and power of claiming human status. Hence, we can say that lot of struggle has been done to assert human rights in the contemporary world. But there are still numberless communities that exist under the threat of some dictatorial authorities. The ill practices of powerful people transfers from colonial masters to some other power hungry people. Even in independent nations, many sections of society are living under the crual clutches of politicians, beaurocrates and other rich class people. Post-colonialism is one of the significant aspects of contemporary literature. It aims at evaluating the implications of colonial rule across the world. Colonization not only reshaped the political map of the world, but affected the social and cultural values of many nations. During and after the end of colonization, racial and socio-cultural critics began to assess its impact on the subject communities. It founded the basis of post-colonial studies.

Critical Quarterly, 1992

The 'other' worldliness of postcolonial discourse: a critique One set of approaches to the question of postcoloniality may be identified by their claim to represent a continuation of Frantz Fanon's thinking.* As exemplary texts in this tradition, I will examine Edward Said's writings on postcoloniality (which I would distinguish from his Orientalism, whose object is the disciplinarylideological basis of imperialism, although there are aspects of this text which anticipate the later treatment of postcoloniality), Benita Parry's 'Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse', Abdul JanMohamed's Munichean Aesthetics as well as his programmatic essay, co-authored with David Lloyd, on 'minority discourse'.2 JanMohamed, in his attempt to develop a theoretical framework for reading African fiction started with Fanon's idea of a 'Manicheism' which, he said, governed colonial discourse. According to Fanon the space of colonial politics and culture was represented in terms of a Manichean division along the binary axes of whitelblack, goodlevil, primitivelcivilised, etc. While this 'primary Manicheism' was an ideological weapon of the coloniser, Fanon envisaged that the anti-colonial struggle would reciprocate the gesture in an initial necessary reversal of the terms of the binary.3 This very model depended on Fanon's sense that the colonial space was the site of an irreconcilable antagonism: 'Decolonisation is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature.'4 On the basis of this insight, JanMohamed divided up the field of 'African' fiction into two empirical categories: texts written by the colonisers, and those written by the colonised. While the former showed the workings of a Manichean logic in the techniques of representation of the colonial situation in Africa, the latter were read as exemplars of a counter-effort. The reading of individual texts then proceeds in the form of an exercise of judgment, tracing in the texts moments of complete surrender to the Manichean logic or partial or complete transcendence of it through honesty, exemplary humanism or whatever. Thus, in contrast to Joyce Cary, who turned paranoid and avoided contact with the Africans over whom he ruled, Is& Dinesen is said to have 'embraced the new society around her' wholeheartedly, which made her more 'open minded'.5 The 'other' worldliness of postcolonial discourse: a critique 75 What needs to be noted in this is the activation of a system of cultural justice, for which the 'neutral' position of a judge, equipped with the sanction of a certain constituencya certain constitutionis absolutely necessary. However, one is not objecting to the necessity of judgment as such so much as the sanctioning authority for this act of judgment. For, despite a Fanonian assertion of the uncompromising antagonism of the coloniser and colonised, JanMohamed repeatedly re-enacts the sublation of that antagonism in the transcending achievement of a justness of representation. This justice, as Homi Bhabha has pointed out, is a question of 'a form of recognition' of pre-given reality. The representation is 'measured against the "essential" or "original" in order to establish its degree of representativeness, the correctness of the image'.6 JanMohamed's recent attempt (with David Lloyd) to produce a theory of 'minority discourse' represents a slight shift away from the approach in Manichean Aesthetics. 'Minority discourse' is defined as 'a variety of minority voices engaged in retrieving texts repressed or marginalized by a society that espouses universalistic, univocal, and monologic humanisml.7 In a paradoxical turn, the authors plead for the idea of u minority discourse 'to describe and define the common denominators that link various minority cultures' on the strength of the fact that they all share an 'antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture, which seeks to marginalize them all' (MD 1). While the groups, when so assembled, would constitute an empirical majority (MD 2), the authors continue to employ the term 'minority discourse' to describe them. Thus the descriptive force of the term depends on the identification of each group in its autonomy and their subsequent assembly on a common platform without, however, seeking to alter the identifications that each group separately and in its one-to-one relation to the dominant discourse, was compelled to adopt. This is at first sight quite in keeping with the premises with which the project began. Insofar as the dominant discourse's successful marginalisation of these groups is based on the universalisation of its own ideology, the programme designed to empower the minority groups would be repeating this universalising move if it were to abstract from the shared experiences of these groups to a common identity which, in hegemonistic fashion would seem to dissolve these identities into a new and 'higher' unity. In order to avoid this, the programme would have to continue to employ in the singular the term which has a plural meaning in the context of the 'assembly' of minority cultures. The 'difference' of the assembly as reality, the possibility that it may be more than the sum of its parts, has to be repressed in order to keep intact the identity of each group which is determined by its relation to a dominant group.

Historicizing Curriculum Knowledge Translation on a Global Landscape, 2021

In this chapter I weave a tapestry of theoretical threads that combine postcolonial, decolonial and psychoanalytical concerns and that (to a great extent) inform the work of the "Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures" arts/research collective, of which I am a part. The thread-insights are intentionally organized in a non-linear way, requesting from the reader the labor of contextualization and re-contextualization as an effort of co-weaving reciprocity. The weaving interlaces threads in the works of David Scott, Leela Ghandi, Ashis Nandy, Ananya Roy, Ilan Kapoor, Michalinos Zembylas, Nick Mitchel, Gayatri Spivak and Denise Ferreira da Silva, with Carl Mika's work being woven across all threads. The patterns that are woven in this process attempt to visibilize problematic normalized affective and intellectual economies focused on mastery, progress and universality at work in different attempts to critique and transform the world through human agency and imagination. They highlight the limits of modern-colonial frames of desire and intelligibility in terms of wording-the-world to control it, and the onto-epistemic difficulties of wanting, hoping and imagining something genuinely different from the parameters of reality, existence and desirability that one has inherited. The conclusion of this chapter outlines selected aspects of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective and the collective's modest attempts to issue an invitation for horizons of hope to be set beyond what is imaginable within "the house modernity built". David Scott's thread In 'Refashioning futures: Criticism after postcoloniality', David Scott (1999) presents an empathetic critique of representational and epistemological claims that have been emphasized in postcolonial theory as foundational for justice-to-come (see also Andreotti 2014). In his critique, he focuses on the 'essentialism versus non-essentialism debate', drawing attention to how it reinforces a circular intellectual economy of competition for a position of epistemic privilege. He shows that the unexamined terms of intelligibility normalized in this intellectual economy severely constrain what can be imagined, asked, wanted or talked about in the actual debate. He illustrates this by showing how anti-essentialist modes of critique attempt to expose the naivety of essentialist positions using an 'epistemological law' (p. 9) that declares that cultures are heterogeneous, subjectivities are inscripted in language, identities are fluid, community borders are constructed, and so on. This strategy of delegitimisation and dismissal of essentialism, according to Scott, is used to establish epistemological superiority by historicizing answers to questions that are left unexamined. Scott explains: The anti-essentialists are not interested in what constellation of historically constituted demands may have produced the supposedly 'essentialist' formulations. They are not interested in determining what the strategic task at hand was or what the epistemic and ideological material conditions were that formed the discursive

Imagining & Remembering the Other and Constructing Israelite Identities in the Early Second Temple Period

Social text, 1992

Studies in Social and Political Thought, 2011

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1995

To the Editor: No alleged effect of colonization evokes greater moral indignation or fretful nostalgia than fragmentation. Colonialism breaks things. It shatters an imagined wholeness. Colonialism's will to power creates binaries where a unified field and healthy singularity of cultural purpose once existed. The self of the colonizer explodes a native cultural solidarity, producing the spiritual confusion, psychic wounding, and economic exploitation of a new and dominated other. Coloniza tion imposes evil, fear, and ignorance on the innocent native landscape. What might be termed neo-colonial studies (Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, for example) teaches that colonial rupture is the social, psychological, cultural, and economic equivalent of a paradigm shift, inaugurating a new regime of knowledge. Words and relations on either side of the colonial rupture are incommensurate. Neo-colonial studies, thus, dictates that the project of decolonization is erro neously, or at least naively, conceived if its goal is (as Amilcar Cabral pro poses) to return to the source or to recuperate native wholeness. Cabral writes, "A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if . . . they return to the upward paths of their own culture" (Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral [New York Monthly Review, 1973] 43). If the model of a paradigm shift is accepted, such a happy return is at best problematic. Emancipation from colonial domination never entails, or even suggests, fulfillment of the beautiful poetic dream implied by Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. The return to one's "native" land is a paradig matic impossibility. What then is to be made of the outbreak of supposed freedom-the decolo nizing moment-which carries a force similar in effect to the rupture of colo nization? Answers are legion, and they are complex. The answer that seems most theoretically interesting (and, I believe, most accurate) is that when the obvious chains and shackles are removed, fragmentation reveals its essential uselessness as an explanatory model. The great gift of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is his creative limning of this revelation. Achebe persuasively and subtly suggests that native, pastoral, folk, innocent, utopian, productive wholeness is never the ur-condition of anything that can reasonably be called culture. The things that fall apart in Achebe's fictions are already well on their way to toppling when the colonizers

This class is an advanced introduction to the broad topic of coloniality and decoloniality. It is an interdisciplinary class in nature, with a heavy focus on historical, theoretical, sociological and anthropological readings. The class starts with an introduction of some key concepts on coloniality and decoloniality, such as the colonial and the post-colonial and the de-colonial, as well as the meaning and the nature of the colonial structure and the centrality of race in the colonial project. The class is divided into four parts. The first part is examining some examples from different historical waves of colonialisms such as the colonialism of the "new" world, and the scramble for Africa, with a brief examination of some selected cases. The second part is the study of some of the key approaches to study colonialism and imperialism, such as the Marxist approaches, post-colonial theory, indigenous perspectives, the black radical tradition and sociological approaches. The third part is an examination of the key types of colonialisms such as settler-colonialism, and imperialisms/new imperialism, as well as some of the key problematics in the field as the relationship between the state and the colonial project and the gendered nature of colonialism and imperialism. The class concludes with the study of decoloniality as a theoretical approach and as a praxis.

Decolonial Subversions , 2023