"Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism"

This paper presents a critical survey of the use and interpretation of the work of Michel Foucault in the field of postcolonial studies. The paper uses debates about Foucault’s legacy and his contributions (or lack thereof) to postcolonialism as a means of parsing out the main lines of contestation within the field—that is, as a means of tracing the contours of the space of questioning or field of problematization, in part to foreground what has been at stake and, more to the point, what has not been at stake. Part I provides a general survey of what “Postcolonial Studies” is: what its major questions and debates have been. Part II examines the ways in which Foucault has been taken up, interpreted and used within the field, and Part III comments on what aspects of Foucault’s work have not been taken up, suggesting that this is most revealing about the state of postcolonial studies today.

2002

Post-development, the most recent radical reaction to the problems of postwar development efforts, has been the focus of both strident criticism and restrained defence in Third World Quarterly. This article shows that addressing post-development's shortcomings is more useful than dismissing or limiting its potential. By using the work of Foucault, one of post-development's theoretical departure points, a clear distinction is drawn between the operation of power in colonial and development eras. This requires a shift away from repressive views of power, ideas that a singular force directs development, and the colonisation metaphor used by some post-development writers. This article then shows that combining Foucault's notion of dispositif with his concept of normalisation is useful for understanding the operation of power in the postwar development project, and for comprehending how power operates through the World Bank. In this way a critical engagement with post-development can improve our understanding and analysis of development.

2010

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses to identify the literary, it is clear that in recent years its semiotic destinations have become ever more uncertain. Enter cultural studies, stage left" (Miklitsch et al. 284). On cue, David Lloyd argues that "cultural studies represents the fulfillment rather than the displacement of literary ...

Area, 2007

Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2006

Cultural Studies , 2021

Contrary to most postcolonial approaches that focus on modernity/coloniality, this article argues for the relevance of heterarchical theories of power. In his lectures at Collège de France, Foucault shifts from a microphysical and corpopolitical analytic of power towards a biopolitical analytic of power. This shift in Foucault's focus is analyzed through Quijano and Wallerstein's theorization of the modern/colonial world system. In doing so, this paper details the ways in which corpopolitics, biopolitics, and geopolitics operate on the micro-, meso-and macro-levels of power, respectively. Further decolonial research should give deeper consideration to heterarchical theories of power, particularly as they relate to multiple temporalities within the modern/colonial world system.

Post-colonial theory is a post-positivist/reflectivist/constitutive and non-mainstream International Relations (IR) i theory which posits a critical thinking to dominant IR theories. It is assumed to offer an alternative to the Eurocentric stance and concepts of classical International Relatios theories and carry a potential to move beyond these mainstream theories, even to restructure them. Post-colonial theoreticians, like all critical scholars, have tried to shift the classical thinking in the discipline and save it from the hegemony of Western conceptions by challenging "Western-theorizing" and "decolonizing" it. However, it is not a single theory but a set of different theories. There is an immense diversity of post-colonial theory which focus on different issues such as literature, art, music, linguistics, slavery, migration, discrimination, historiography and discusses different kinds of subjugation like racism, gender, nationalism and identity.

Almost all societies and cultures around the world are profoundly shaped by colonial and postcolonial experiences. Even though these are ubiquitous and interlinked phenomena -and in this sense globally shared -they are always cause and effect of power relations within an asymmetric world order. For far too long, (post-) colonial experiences have been analysed within a binary analytical framework dividing the world into 'the colonisers' and 'the colonised' or into 'the West and the rest'. Apart from countless doubts and criticism about its explanatory power, such a simplifying model also hid existing continuities in colonial cultures, structures, and legacies before and after independence. Fortunately, the concepts of coloniality and postcoloniality have come to the fore in different academic contexts. Furthermore, during the last decades, different understandings of (post-) coloniality have been elaborated in the historiographies of South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Without neglecting their internal differences and difficulties, we are confident that the concepts of '(post-) coloniality' can provide us with a better understanding of colonial and postcolonial experiences. Most importantly, coloniality and postcoloniality do not necessarily refer to a bounded time period, a given world region, or a specific system of S. Hall, The West and the rest: Discourse and power, in: