The Idea of Emancipation after Postcolonial Theory

Critical Horizons, 2001

The concept of emancipation has an increasingly ambivalent status in postcolonial criticism. Under the influence of poststructuralism, the idea that the subaltern subject might overcome colonial relations of cultural domination through acts of self-representation has been thrown into disrepute. If there is to be emancipation, according to this view, it will not come through the recovery of an authentic speaking subject, but through strategies of ‘strategic essentialism’. Here it is argued that this postructuralist approach leaves the subaltern in a politically pre carious position and should be exchanged for the kind of hermeneutic approach that makes possible a genuine politics of recognition.

Capital & Class, 2019

This volume shows that organised emancipatory politics, in part or mainly reinforced by arms, is still very much alive in a range of postcolonial states. By 'emancipatory politics' we mean political activities that aim to end exploitation and enhance participatory democracy through which leadership can be held to account on a daily as well as periodic basis, in the workplace and beyond. Whether it be India, Nepal, the Philippines, Peru or Columbia, long-standing armed movements aiming to seize and transform state power are still burning and working for a different future. In Euro-American debate it is easy to forget those movements – some of which have a more than forty-year history – of the Maoists in India or Nepal, FARC in Columbia, or the Communist Party of the Philippines. We focus here on movements that are still very much active as well as on movements of Marxist emancipatory change that achieved state power – the Mozambican case of Frelimo and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua – whose experiences shed an important critical light on those that are still in active struggle. These cases have been chosen to illustrate a range of reasons for embarking on and sustaining armed struggle. We show that questions of ideological, political and economic organization strongly influence the specifically military aspects of these movements. Most are adaptations of Mao's Chinese revolutionary movement and its tenets, but some refer to other revolutionary traditions. The selection is not meant to be comprehensive, but to focus on the reasons for and history of movements of this kind, highlighting the limitations that this mobilisation and its ties to Maoist teachings have placed on their emancipatory politics.

Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom, 2016

This book makes an important contribution to studies of Black women’s history and identity in Britain, by exposing the anxieties about race, gender and sex that lie beneath British liberal racial projects in both colonial Caribbean and contemporary postcolonial Britain. This book traces the powerful discourses and embodied practices through which Black Caribbean women have been imagined and produced as subjects of British liberal rule and modern freedom. It argues that in seeking to escape liberalism’s gendered and racialised governmentalities, Black women’s everyday self-making practices construct decolonising and feminising epistemologies of freedom. These, in turn, repeatedly interrogate the colonial logics of liberalism and Britishness. Genealogically structured, the book begins with the narratives of freedom and identity presented by Black British Caribbean women. It then analyses critical moments of crisis in British racial rule at home and abroad in which gender and Caribbean women figure as points of concern. Post-war Caribbean immigration to the UK, decolonisation of the British Caribbean and the post-emancipation reconstruction of the British Caribbean loom large in these considerations. In doing all of this, the author unravels the colonial legacies that continue to underwrite contemporary British multicultural anxieties. This thought-provoking work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cultural history, politics, feminism, race and postcoloniality.

2019

Written for seminar in 'IR as Political Theory.' Graded A+. Unpublished, unrevised from submitted work.

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2002

Book chapter, 2021

This chapter critically views top-down social and political advocacy as a vehicle used or encouraged by the powerful to unwittingly depoliticize any effort by the poor to emancipate themselves. Thus, established advocacy outside the locale of those it seeks to emancipate, becomes 'an erroneous' helping hand, which keeps the poor in their 'place' while an oppressive status quo remains untouched. Using Marxist terminology, advocacy on behalf of the poor without them being principal actors for their own emancipation, becomes the opium of the poor. For this reason, this paper argues that an emancipatory perspective does not spare non-state actors and agencies such as individuals or faith-based organisations that seem 'innocent' because, without deferring to the leading role of those they seek to help, their advocacy is inherently topdown and works well within an established order. By offering top-down intervention to the poor, advocacy groups occlude the incentive for agency on the part of the poor. In the effort of unmasking the hypocrisy of 'advocacy generosity', this chapter looks at the thinking and politics of the shack-dwellers' movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, near Durban, South Africa. This movement demonstrates that if the goal of political, social and economic activism is to emancipate the poor in society, then the poor should be integral participants in such activism and advocacy, rather than merely represented by others.

On Education. Journal for Research and Debate

2013