Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory? (with R. Stam)

Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory? Robert Stam, Ella Shohat

New Literary History, Volume 43, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 371-390 (Article)

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/483026

New Literary History, 2012, 43: 371–390

Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory?

Robert Stam and Ella Shohat

In the following, we dialogue with the Robert Young and Dipesh Chakrabarty essays, while also grafting them onto our own concerns.* We will address two broad issues broached by both essays, that is,

the “whence”—where does postcolonial theory come from?—and the “whither”—where is it going? Throughout, we argue for a decentered, multidirectional narrative for the circulation of ideas in order to better chart the past itineraries and future possibilities of the postcolonial.

Robert Young deftly refutes the postcolonial-theory-has-lost-its-groove argument by shifting focus from its prematurely celebrated demise to an anatomy of the desire for its death. In the face of this unseemly dance macabre around a putative corpse, Young points to the Lazarus-like res-urrection of the cadaver. As long as colonialism “remains” in the form of vestigial practices and habits of thought rooted in colonial power structures, Young argues, postcolonial critique will contest that legacy: not as an orthodox catechism of answers, but rather as an ever-shifting constellation of questions.

Young’s own essay demonstrates postcolonial theory’s jiujitsu-like capacity to transform critique into renewal. From the early “internal” interrogations by Anne McClintock and Ella Shohat to the later “external” criticisms of Aijaz Ahmad or Arif Dirlik, the criticisms have triggered both rebuttals and course corrections. To name just a few of the critiques, they include censure for: (1) the elision of class (sometimes linked ad hominem to the elite status of the theorists themselves); (2) a tendency to subjectivize political struggles by reducing them to intrapsychic tensions, a critique addressed to Bhabha’s poststructuralist recasting of Fanon; (3) an avoidance, noted by Marxists, of political economy in a global-ized age where neoliberal economics drives many of the cultural shifts registered by the theory; (4) an obsessive antibinarism that ignores the intractable binarism of colonialism itself (a critique made by phenom-enologically oriented Fanonians); (5) a haughty superciliousness (noted by Ann du Cille) toward fields such as “ethnic studies,” which shared many axioms with postcolonial critique and helped open up institutional space for postcolonial studies, yet which were dismissed as essentialist; (6) a tendency to focus on faded European empires while ignoring the

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actually existing U.S. neoimperialism that surged into the vacuum left by the receding empires; (7) a Commonwealth-centrism which, while valid in its own terms, sometimes quietly assumes the British-Indian relation as paradigmatic, while neglecting vast regions such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the indigenous “fourth world” (including that within India itself); (8) a lack of historical precision (noted by his-torians such as Frederick Cooper), linked to a vertiginous rhetoric of slippage that allowed little concrete sense of time or place except when the theoretical helicopter “landed” on a random historical example; (9) the inordinate privileging of themes of hybridity, diaspora, and elite cosmopolitanism, to the detriment of refugees and displaced persons and the racialized division of international labor; and (10) a failure to articulate postcolonial theory in relation to ecology and climate change.

Some of these criticisms are patently unfair when applied to a mul-tifaceted intellectual formation, some apply only to particular versions of postcolonial theory, and some betray a hostility to theory per se. In terms of alleged lacunae, Young and Chakrabarty foreground some of the very issues presumed elided. Young evokes the human remains of colonialism embodied in an “invisible tricontinental diaspora,” while Chakrabarty addresses ecology, climate change, and some horrific indices of social oppression—a billion people without proper drinking water, European detention centers for “illegal immigrants,” and so forth. The “outside” Marxist critique of postcolonial theory, meanwhile, forgets that Marxism is also “inside” postcolonial theory, in Young’s work (for example, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction) and in the work of Gayatri Spivak and the subaltern studies group generally, to take only two obvious examples. Many of the criticisms are premised on the chi-merical demand that every writer-scholar address all the issues within one fell textual swoop. In any case, the criticisms themselves arguably form part of the postcolonial field as the site of what Young calls “the necessary mode of perpetual autocritique” (22).

The Whence: Postcolonial Genealogies

Where did postcolonial theory come from? When did it begin? In the long view, postcolonial theory must be seen as part of a long anticolonial dureé. Here we welcome Young’s salute to the primordial importance of Iberia and the Convivencia. In our view, the various “questions”—the Jewish, Muslim, “Indian,” Black, and African questions—have been interwoven for centuries. Their linked trajectories can be traced, as we argued in Unthinking Eurocentrism, back to the events associated with

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the cataclysmic moment summoned up by the various “1492s”—that is, the conquest of the “new” world, the expulsion of the Moors, and the Inquisition. Although one can argue about the depth of the Convivencia, clearly Muslims and Jews lived in a densely textured cultural intimacy.1 A swelling corpus has documented the long history of cultural continu-ity and political alliance between Muslim and Jew.2 Key philosophical, literary, grammatical, and medical texts within Judaism were written in Arabic and in dialogue with Islamic writings, while Sephardi synagogues were built in the Moorish style. The Star of David hexagram adorned the façades of the Testour mosque in Tunisia, as well as Moroccan coins and the Moroccan flag.3

Al-Andalus has become a trope for past and contemporary utopias and dystopias. If Al-Andalus provided the model for a tolerant multicultur-alism avant la lettre, the victorious Spain of the Reconquista provided a template for ethno-religious cleansing and the creation of racial states. The ground for colonialist racism was prepared by the limpieza de sangre, by the expulsion edicts against Jews and Muslims, by the Portuguese ex-pansion into West Africa, and by the transatlantic slave trade. Christian demonology about Muslims and Jews thus set the tone for racialized colonialism, equipping the conquistadores with a ready-made conceptual apparatus to be extended to the Americas. Vespucci’s travel accounts drew on the stock of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim imagery to characterize the indigenous peoples as infidels and devil worshipers.4 The conquest of the Indians in the West, for Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara, prolonged the struggle against the Muslim infidels in the East.5 Within the transoceanic circulation of tropes, the frightening figure of the cannibal, first elaborated in relation to the Caribs and Tupi, was transferred to Africans. A partial congruency ties the phantasmatic im-agery projected onto both the internal non-Christian “enemy” and the external indigenous American and African “savage,” all subjected to a “blood libel” that portrayed them as “blood drinkers” and “cannibals.”

We find Young’s engagement with these issues heartening because we have long argued that any in-depth study of coloniality/postcoloniality must go at least as far back as the Reconquista.6 The events summed up in the date 1492 suggest that the history of nineteenth-century European imperial discourses, including Said’s highlighting of post-Enlightenment Orientalism, could be narrated differently, in terms of the twinned beginnings of both colonial and Orientalist discourse. Columbus, in this sense, was the ur-Orientalist, not simply in literally fantasizing his arrival in the Oriental “land of the great Khan,” but also in globalizing Iberian Orientalist discourses by linking the indias occidentales and the indias orientales.


The various discursive positions for and against conquest, slavery, racism, and imperialism, meanwhile, have been “available” for a long time; contemporary debates are reformatted versions of those earlier debates. The contending positions were present in germ in debates about conquest and transatlantic slavery dating back five hundred years. These debates were argued in a religious/political idiom in the sixteenth century, when Sepúlveda and de las Casas debated whether Indians had souls and therefore enjoyed “derechos humanos.” Colonialism itself has always generated its own critiques, whether by the dominant culture’s own renegades and dissidents or by the indigenous and African colonized who fought conquest and enslavement. When Diderot in the eighteenth century called for African insurrection against European colonialists, he can be seen as an anticolonialist avant la lettre. Present-day debates are at times quite literally embedded in earlier quarrels. Debates about indigenous land rights in the Americas go back to the Conquest and to Enlightenment theories about property (John Locke). Debates about multicultural identity politics go back to the various Republican revolu-tions carried out by propertied white men. In France, both right and left invoke “Enlightenment values” to articulate their views of “identity politics,” whether seen as a praiseworthy expansion of Jacobin equality or as a particularist departure from revolutionary “universality.” In the United States, both liberals and conservatives invoke, in opposite ways, the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence; Obama appeals to the “more perfect union” of the Preamble, while Tea Party Republicans interpret the Constitution as endorsing Christianity and right-wing libertarianism. When David Cameron asserts that “multi-culturalism has failed,” he does so in the name of a return to “robust liberalism” and “Western values.” Past and present reverberate together; old debates anticipate and haunt the present, lending new names to old quarrels, now rearticulated within altered idioms and paradigms.

We are also heartened by Young’s foregrounding of indigeneity, a subject that has engaged us for over two decades, as we have tried to link postcolonial concerns with Native American/indigenous critique.7 Postcolonial theory, as Young points out, has generally given scant atten-tion to the indigenous question. It is not simply a matter of adding the indigene to the roll call of the oppressed; it is also a matter of unpack-ing the doxa that led to the marginalizing of indigeneity. Young’s point that the indigenous issue troubles certain assumptions of postcolonial discourse calls for amplification. What postcolonial topoi are thrown in doubt by indigenous critique? First, indigenous thinkers often see their situation as colonial rather than postcolonial, or as at once colonial, postcolonial, and paracolonial. Second, while postcolonial theory cel-ebrates a cosmopolitan “travelling theory,” indigenous discourse often


valorizes a rooted rather than a cosmopolitan existence. Third, while postcolonial theory revels in “blurring borders,” indigenous communities seek to affirm borders by demarcating land against encroaching squat-ters, nation-states, and corporations. Fourth, while Derridean-inspired postcolonial theory contests “myths of origin,” indigenous communities try to reconstruct their original languages and their original myths for the sake of their own survival. Fifth. While postcolonialism highlights the inventedness of nations and “denaturalizes the natural,” while enclos-ing “nature” within protective scare quotes. Indigenous thinkers insist of love of a land regarded as sacred. In ecological terms, “indigenous multinaturalism” (Eduardo Viveires de Castro) challenges both the rhetorical antinaturalism of the “posts” but also the primordial othering that separated nature from culture, and animals from human beings, a topic alluded to in Chakrabarty’s essay.8

The postcolonial privileging of “hybridity” is especially fraught for indigenous peoples. On the one hand, indigenous nations have been hybrid for millennia. Native nations were trading and borrowing with one another long before Columbus, a process only accelerated and complicated by the Conquest. Nor were indigenous peoples primitive and adverse to technology. Setting aside the monumental achievements of the Aztec, the Maya, and the Inca civilizations, the indigenous ap-propriation of European technique began as early as 1503, shortly after Europeans’ arrival, when the Captain Paulmier de Gonneville brought the young Carijó Indian Essomerica from Brazil to France to study munitions technology to help his nation in its struggles.9 Essomericq in this sense anticipated by five centuries the 1920s Brazilian modernists’ exaltation of the “high-tech Indian” (the “indio tecnizado”), a coinage which presciently foreshadowed present-day Amazonian Kayapo and Xavante filmmakers wielding computers and digital cameras and post-ing videos on YouTube. On the other hand, “hybridity” has often served to disempower indigenous peoples of mixed heritage, dismissed as not “real Indians” deserving of rights.

To think deeply about indigeneity is also necessarily to think in ways that transcend the nation-state: first, because many indigenous com-munities came into existence before the emergence of modern nation-states; second, because the national identity of colonial-settler states in the Americas was constituted in relation to the “Indian,” whether as the enemy to be massacred and displaced, or as the recuperated symbol of national difference from Europe; third, because the dispossession of indigenous communities was partially the product of expansionism by nation-states; fourth, because many native communities have actively rejected the very concept of the nation-state, not because they could not achieve it, but because they did not want it; fifth, because the present-day


boundaries of many indigenous communities actually exceed the borders of nation-states (for example, the Yanomami in Brazil and Venezuela); and sixth, because many indigenous peoples, due to multiple disloca-tions, no longer live only on their original land base but are dispersed regionally and transnationally. The Quechua, for example, not only inhabit Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia; they are also dispersed into North America and Europe.

The Western response to the indigenous civilizations of the Americas reveals a general pattern of “vanishing” indigenous cultural and intel-lectual agency. The “Indians,” as the direct and indirect producers of resistant knowledge, were central to the Renaissance and the Enlight-enment, periods when European culture, in Bakhtin’s words, lost its “sealed-off and self-sufficient character,” becoming “conscious of itself as only one among other cultures.”10 Questions about the status and social systems of the misnamed “Indian” were disputed by Spanish jurists (Sepúlveda, Francisco de Vitoria), French humanists (Montaigne), British economists (Smith) and empiricists (Locke), American statesmen (Jef-ferson, Franklin), German philosophers (Hegel), and Brazilian writers (from Pêro Vaz de Caminha to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), as well as by indigenous thinkers themselves. The figure of the Indian got caught up in controversies about religion, property, sovereignty, and culture. Indeed, no in-depth analysis of modernity can bypass the indigenous peoples of the Americas, whether negatively, as the “victims of progress,” or positively, as the catalysts for Western thinking and artistic production, discernible in the work of Thomas More, Jean de Léry, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Melville, Marx and Engels, Oswald de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, and countless others.

In Race in Translation: Cultures Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic, we speak of the “Red Atlantic.” While “Black Atlantic” evokes the Middle Passage and the diasporization of Africans, “Red Atlantic” registers the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans. The settler colonial-ism that dispossessed the “Red” and the racial slavery that exploited the “Black” were the twin machines of racial supremacy. At the same time, European and Euro-American thinkers deployed “the Indian” as inspiration for social critique and utopian desire. The emergence into European consciousness of the indigene triggered an epistemological excitement that generated both the dystopian imagery of Hobbes’s nasty and brutish savage and the utopian imagery of an egalitarian social system. Montaigne was provoked into writing “Des Cannibales” by his meeting with three Brazilian Tupinambá in 1562, at the court of King Charles IX, where the Tupinambá asked provocative questions about French society. They wondered, for example, why some people ate well


and others ate barely at all and why the starving did not strangle the well-fed. With a few irreverent queries, the Tupinambá demolished the prestige of the hereditary monarchy and the class system. In a sense, they were theorizing prerevolutionary France as much as Montaigne was theorizing pre- and post-Conquest America.

The idea that the image of the free Indian lifestyle helped spread revolutionary ideas in Europe and North America was not a fantasy only of French philosophers. In 1937, the conservative Brazilian jurist/historian Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco argued in The Brazilian Indian and the French Revolution that the theory of natural goodness, developed by the European Enlightenment but inspired by what he saw as false ideas about the Brazilian Indian, helped foment the French Revolution.11 The Franco-Brazilian-indigenous dialogue has been ongoing for five hundred years, leaving traces even in what is loosely defined as “French Theory.” Lévi-Strauss’s work in Brazil in the 1930s, which generated such concepts as la pensée sauvage and bricolage, was very much inspired by Jean de Lery’s sympathetic protoethnographic account of life among the Tupinambá. The Franco-Indigenous philosophical dialogue has been prolonged by Certeau’s writings about Jean de Léry, by Rene Girard’s use of Tupinambá cannibalism as the key to the scapegoat rituals informing all religions, and by Gilles Deleuze, who wrote in What is Philosophy? that the “philospher becomes Indian, and never stops becoming so—perhaps ‘so that’ the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else and tears himself away from his own agony.”12

The motif of the Indian as “exemplar of liberty” also pervaded the discursive atmosphere of the American Revolution and of Brazilian anticolonial nationalism. The American Founding Fathers were avid readers of the philo-indigenous French philosophes, but they also “read,” as it were, the Native Americans themselves. While entirely capable of exoticism and even exterminationism, the Founding Fathers had a more direct experience of Native Americans than did the French philosophers. They had diplomatic exchanges with them, traded with them, learned their languages, and were influenced by their political thought, even if—a crucial point—they ultimately massacred and dispossessed them. Like pro-independence nationalists in Brazil, American revolutionaries brandished the Indian as an icon of national difference vis-à-vis Europe, whence the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) symbolism of the eagle’s quiver of arrows (representing the thirteen states) on the dollar bill and the Indian statue gracing the Capitol building.13

A recurrent leitmotif in the writings of the Enlightenment philoso-phers and the Founding Fathers was the idea that Indian societies never submitted themselves to any laws or coercive power. Marx and Engels later picked up on this theme in their readings of Lewis Henry Morgan’s


Ancient Society, in which Morgan lauded the profoundly democratic or-ganization of the Iroquois League. For Marx and Engels, the Iroquois meshed a communal economic system with a democratic political orga-nization, thus offering a model of economic equality achieved without state domination, in a society devoid of nobles, kings, soldiers, and police and where all, including the women, were free and equal. Although the Marxist term “primitive communism” evokes a long-vanished communitas, this “utopia” was an actually existing society located between Canada and the United States. The Brazilian modernists of the 1920s picked up on the cues offered by Montaigne and Marx. The European-indigene encounter, for Oswald de Andrade, deeply shaped the movement of ideas: “To know that on the other side of the world had been glimpsed a kind of human being, knowing neither sin nor redemption, theology nor in-ferno, produced not only utopian dreams . . . but also a general shock in the consciousness and culture of Europe.”14 In his 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” de Andrade sketched out this utopian lineage as follows: “Fili-ation. The contact with Caraiba Brazil. . . . The Natural Man. Rousseau. From the French revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the Surrealist revolution, to the technicized barbarian of Keyserling.”15

In his essay, Chakrabarty offers an origin story for anticolonial cri-tique that excludes indigeneity: “The nineteenth century left us with some internationalist and universalist ideologies, prominent among them Marxism and liberalism, both progenies in different ways of the Enlightenment. Anti-colonial thought was born of that lineage” (1). In short, the Enlightenment begat universalist Marxism and liberalism, which then begat anticolonialism. The author of Provincializing Europe summarizes intellectual history, surprisingly, in a Euro-diffusionist man-ner that assigns virtually all intellectual agency to “the West.” We are not suggesting that anticolonial critique learned nothing from “the West,” but only that the movement of ideas was multidirectional. Anticolonialist thought did not simply absorb European ideas; it changed those ideas, and those changes impacted Europe. Thus Fanon adopts, and trans-forms, Sartrean phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Western Marxism. In White Mythologies, Young observed that poststructuralism was intimately linked to Algerian decolonization, emerging from the dissolution of the philosophical axioms of the colonial edifice. Antico-lonialism, then, is not a mere replica of European ideas but rather a critical act of interlocution, where the Enlightenment is less originary source than arena of contestation. A shift in focus to the indigenous Americas, furthermore, throws the Euro-diffusionist metanarrative into disarray. The indigenous peoples resisted European conquest from the very beginning, without the benefit of the Enlightenment. Indigenous leaders in the Spanish Americas did not have to study in Salamanca to


oppose Spanish conquest, just as natives in North America did not have to study at the Sorbonne or Oxford to oppose the French or the British.

If, in the long view, the colonial debates go back to the Reconquista and the Conquista, in the relatively short twentieth-century view, (post)colonial critique also has multiple beginnings, locations, and trajectories. In the broad sense, it forms part of what we call the postwar “seismic shift” in scholarship that led to the (still all too partial) decolonization of thought. Central twentieth-century events—World War II, the Shoah, Third World independence movements—all simultaneously delegitimized the West as axiomatic center of reference and affirmed the rights of non-European peoples straining against the yoke of colonialism and neocolonialism. Thus, if Nazism, fascism, and the Holocaust revealed in all their horror the “internal” sickness of Europe as a site of rac-ist totalitarianism, the Third World liberation struggles revealed the “external” revolt against Western domination, provoking a crisis in the taken-for-granted narrative of European-led Progress. May ’68, in France, in this sense, was not simply a generational revolt; it was also a belated aftereffect of colonial insurgencies, much as the 1968 “movement” in the United States was partially a byproduct of the Civil Rights struggle and resistance to the colonialist war in Vietnam. If French revolts were haunted by Dien Bien Phu and the Algerian revolution, the U.S. revolts were haunted by My Lai, Havana, Selma, and Wounded Knee.

The “seismic shift” refers to the intellectual/discursive fallout of all these events, seen as catalytic for a broad decolonization of knowledge and academic culture. Disciplines in which the West was assumed to be both speaking subject and object of study were submitted to critique. Critical and even insurgent proposals were expressed in recombinatory coinages—“revisionist history,” “radical philosophy,” “symmetrical anthro-pology,” and “radical pedagogy”—that suggested a reconceptualization of canonical disciplines from the periphery. The thrust was doubly criti-cal, first of the presence of colonialist and Eurocentric perspectives and second of the absence of non-European and nonwhite faculty, students, and cultural thematics. The seismic shift impacted many disciplines, in different ways and at different times. To cite just two examples, a decolonizing economics in the form of dependency theory (and later “systems theory” and “core/periphery theory”), represented by such figures as Andre Gunder Frank, James Petras, Paulo Singer, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Samir Amin, rejected the free market-based “develop-ment” ideologies that conceived a Promethean West as catalyzing an economic “takeoff” that would recapitulate the historical sequencing of Western development. The same hierarchical world system controlled by metropolitan capitalist countries, they argued, generated both First World wealth and Third World poverty as opposite faces of the same


coin. Anthropology as a nexus of colonial power and knowledge, simi-larly, was critiqued by figures such as Roger Bastide, Pierre Clastres, Sir Jack Goody, Talal Asad, Angela Gilliam, Johannes Fabian, and Renato Rosaldo, thus generating talk of “shared” and “reverse” anthropology. Deleuzian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, within this spirit, has redefined the mission of anthropology as the “permanent and unend-ing decolonization of thought,” in a situation where the anthropologist merely “relationalizes interpretations” and where the goal is not objec-tification but subjectification.16

We would also take issue with genealogies for postcolonial theory that privilege national locations over transnational interlocutions. Dichoto-mous terms such as inside/outside, sender/receiver, and native/foreign draw overly bold lines between points of origin and points of reception within strongly demarcated national spaces. Young’s claim that “Post-colonial theory came from outside the U.S.,” for example, implies that postcolonial theory travelled to the United States from some other place of origin, but in our view postcolonial theory emerged from a convulsion that impacted the entire world. Any strictly national framing provides only a very blunt instrument for reflecting on transnational intellectual flows. The seismic shift emerged in multiple locations, due to concrete historical conditions, notably the formation and dissolution of colonial empires and the overlays of multiply diasporized cultures existing in relations of subordination and domination within many nation-states, all combined with the emergence of institutional spaces where knowl-edgeable academics could articulate the issues. While Young is right to score the exceptionalist narcissism that would treat the postcolonial as “entirely American,” no country, including the United States, should be written out of the larger narrative. If postcolonial theory did not come from America (that is, the United States), it did partially come from the Americas (that is, from the resistant thought of indigenous peoples and Afro-diasporic “minorities” in the Americas, those Skip Gates once called the “first deconstructionists”).

As Native American, Black, Chicano/a, and Euro-American radicals assumed roles as teachers, they developed new programs and courses incorporating the histories, theories, and perspectives of those who had traditionally been marginalized by patriarchal Eurocentric elites. Profes-sors began to integrate race, class, gender, nation, sexuality, and empire into their pedagogy and scholarship. Beginning in the late 1960s Fanon and Memmi were widely read in the American academe (even more than in France), thanks to the enthusiasm of the Black Panthers and to the Black Marxism of figures like Walter Rodney, Charles Hamilton, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, Manning Marable, and many others,


along with the more radical wings of “Ethnic Studies” (a coalitionary project comprising Native American Studies, African-American Studies, Latino Studies, Asian-American Studies, and so forth). Nor were any of these projects, although located in North America, merely “American.” Activists calling for “Third World Studies” saw Native American struggles as linked to native struggles elsewhere; the black liberation movement saw itself as linked to decolonization in Africa; Latino movements saw themselves as linked to Latin America, and so forth, while all the move-ments formed part of the struggle against U.S. militaristic imperialism.

What sometimes gets lost in discussions of postcolonial theory is the dappled variety of the actual scholarly work—what might be awkwardly called the “transnational decolonizing corpus”—generated by the seis-mic shift. The broader corpus includes work by hundreds of scholars in many countries and practiced under diverse rubrics—systems and core-periphery theory, Black Marxism, border theory, subaltern studies (in its international variants), the modernity/coloniality project, criti-cal race theory, transnational feminism, diaspora studies, antiracist and anti-Orientalist media critique, critical whiteness studies, “minor” Fran-cophone studies, social-movement analysis, radical pedagogy, dialogical anthropology, counter-Enlightenment philosophy, alterglobalization theory, to name just a few of many adversarial formations. Despite ten-sions between and within the diverse modes of critique, what all these fields have in common is a critical engagement with the interrelated historical legacies of colonial and racial oppression. While one could possibly subordinate all these formations to the broad term “postcolonial” and see the others as “subfields,” it is also important to let their distinct voices and emphases be heard apart from that amalgamating rubric.

Some genealogies of postcolonial theory, moreover, are overly an-chored in a “great man” view of intellectual history. In the intellectual equivalent of “trickle down economics,” the grand ideas of the maîtres à penser trickle down to the peasants and workers laboring in the aca-demic fields and factories of the postcolonial. In this sense, we prefer the term “postcolonial critique” to “postcolonial theory,” since the latter term risks implying that all those not versed in theory “need not apply” to the club. We are very sympathetic, in this sense, to Young’s more hospitable and nonfinalizing formulation that sees postcolonial theory as a “body of perspectives and practices” that “has never involved a singular theoretical formation, but rather an interrelated set of critical and counterintuitive perspectives, a complex network of paronymous concepts and heterogenous practices that have been developed out of traditions of resistance to global historical trajectory of imperialism and colonialism” (20). In line with this formulation, it is perhaps time to


pivot away from a vertical emphasis on auratic intellectuals—whereby epigonic scholars line up to declare fealty to academic nobles through obsequious citation, as if we were living in a neoscholastic age—to a more horizontal emphasis on critical fields. In other words, we should emphasize the collective aspect of these schools of thought as part of what might be called the “intellectual commons.”

Crediting Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for catalyzing the epis-temological leap that made possible the move from the anticolonial to the postcolonial, Chakrabarty then lauds the “deeper turning towards the human” evidenced by Bhabha’s turn: one that “appreciated differ-ence as a philosophical question and at the same time repudiated its essentialization by identity politics,” a move that was “channeled not through identity politics but through difference-philosophies” (4). While Chakrabarty’s praise for the timely interventions of Spivak and Bhabha is completely legitimate, we wonder why the stigmatized diacritical opposite to the valorized “difference philosophies” has to be “identity politics.” Here Chakrabarty erects a false dichotomy that one would have thought superceded. On many levels, the politics of identity and difference phi-losophies have been, as it were, mutually invaginated, with many shared vocabularies and concerns. We have all learned from poststructuralism that identities are not fixed entities expressing a “natural” difference; they emerge from a fluid set of historically diverse experiences, within overlapping, polycentric circles of identification. That identity and ex-perience are mediated, narrated, constructed, caught up in the spiral of representation does not mean, however, that historical oppressions based on identity have come to an end. What Spivak famously called “strategic essentialism” and what Hall referred to as “the fictional necessity of ar-bitrary closures,” and “putting a period to the sentence,” were attempts to resolve this dilemma. Such formulations allowed for communities of identification, even if those communities were multiple, discontinuous, and partly imaginary.17 While postcolonial theory rejected essentialist articulations of identity and biologistic and transhistorical determinations of gender, race, and sexual identity, as political agents we felt compelled to support demands implicitly premised on categories elsewhere rejected as essentialist, leading to a paradoxical situation in which theory decon-structed totalizing myths while activism nourished them.

Chakrabarty’s text manifests the disregard of a certain left, shared with most of the right, toward identity politics, a disregard voiced by such writers as Walter Benn Michaels, Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc Wacquant, and Slavoj Žižek. We have a fairly good idea why the right hates identity politics; it is too black, too foreign, too Muslim, too activist. But it is not so clear why some on the postcolonial left also dislike identity politics.


Usually, they dismiss it as “essentialist,” “binarist,” “Manichean,” and if they are French (right or left), they call it “identitaire,” “commmuni-tairiste,” and “Anglo-Saxon.” In France, François Durpaire points out, it is “always easy to say that one is not opposed to blacks or Arabs, but only to ‘black communitarianism’ and ‘Arab communitarianism.’”18 In other words, the actual people discriminated against on the basis of their visible or audible difference disappear into the mists of stigmatized abstractions. While it is easy to mock a caricatural “identity politics”—the right does it all the time—millions of people, such as blacks and Latinos in American cities, immigrant “racaille” in the banlieues of France, favela “marginais” in Brazil—are daily profiled, brutalized, and even killed for what is projected as their identity. The right forbids us to speak of race because to speak of race is to be racist; a certain left, meanwhile, warns us not to speak of identity politics because it is essentialist and philosophically unsophisticated, thus disarming us in the struggle against identity-based oppressions.

Chakrabarty’s homage to “difference philosophies” also calls attention to a subtle difference between the two essays. Young suggests that we should retire the expression “the Other”—as the modern form of the “primitive” and a “remainder” that conflates a category drawn from the philosophy of consciousness with the history of colonial contact. Quoting Gabriela Basterra on the “other separated from the self by an untra-versable distance,” Young argues, correctly in our view, that we should abandon the category altogether as an obstacle to emancipatory thought. Chakrabarty, meanwhile, praises the very “difference-philosophies” that erected the category of “the other” in the first place. While we recognize the crucial intellectual role of difference philosophies, we would argue that there are many paths to postcolonial critique. Looking back at postwar intellectual history, what is perhaps most dispiriting is the failure of many of the difference philosophers to theorize race and coloniality. Most of the major poststructuralist thinkers were progressive in their politics, but apart from Étienne Balibar, Bruno Latour, the Foucault of the “racial state,” and to a certain extent Derrida, most of the maîtres left unexamined the racial/imperial architectonics of France itself. Build-ing on a Foucauldian metaphor, Ann Stoler has written provocatively about French theory’s “colonial aphasia,” an impaired condition that interrupts connections through “disabled histories” and severed links in pathways of association.19 Little of France’s “high-powered theoreti-cal energy across the disciplines (so incisive about political culture, to-talitarianisms, state structures and class),” she writes, “was aimed at the racialized foundations of the French state.”20 A theory of “difference” animated theoretical movements from semiotics to poststructuralism,


yet any appeal to racialized and gendered difference was dismissed as “differentialist.” Both Bourdieu and Derrida, Stoller writes, “divorced their sharp critiques of scholastic knowledge from the racial milieus of French empire that they knew intimately and on the ground.”21 Cultural difference, in sum, was “deferred.” Might it be symptomatic, in this sense, that the veritable explosion, especially since the 2005 banlieue rebellions, of French adversary scholarship concerning (post)colonial-ism, racism, Islamophobia, and the “indigenes de la Republique,” rarely takes “difference philosophy” as its inspiration or point of departure?

The Whither: Postcolonial Indigeneity

Our projections concerning the futures of postcolonial studies reso-nate both with the indigenous theme addressed by Young and with the ecological theme addressed by Chakrabarty. Here too the “Indian” has not vanished, and indigeneity still troubles postcolonial theory. The ques-tion of intellectual property rights exemplifies the historical “morphing” that takes us from Columbus to the CEOs of contemporary corporations. The word “patents” referred in sixteenth-century Europe to the official royal letters (litterae patents) by which sovereigns conferred privileges, rights, and land titles on various members of the nobility, for example, the capitanias in Brazil granted by the Portuguese king. In the “Age of Discovery,” these “letters” became associated with the literal conquest of territory; five hundred years later, they are associated with transna-tional corporations’ conquest of economic rights in the Global South, whose biodiversity is very much linked to the cultural knowledges of indigenous peoples.

The colonizing powers, after “enclosing” communal land within Eu-rope itself, enclosed and appropriated communally held indigenous land under the pretext that the native peoples had no “title” to the land. Just as rights were distributed according to a racialized schema in the colonial past, today in the postcolonial present the question of “copyrights” has become indissociable from the corporate appropriation of indigenous resources. The very idea of “title” has become linked to conceptions of contracts between individual actors or corporations, an individual-ist conception of intellectual property rights completely alien to many indigenous peoples. Unlike pirates and conquistadores, transnational corporations no longer seize only gold and silver; rather, they declare themselves “entitled” or “empatented” to exploit traditional communal forms of knowledge such as rainforest herbal remedies, for example, which they then market at high cost to the world at large, including even


to the indigenous descendants of the people who originally developed the remedies.

The Amazon, in this sense, forms the epicenter of the conflicts emerging from the crisis of capitalist productivism and the domination of nature. The process initiated in 1492 reaches its triste tropical finale as globalizing capitalism strains against the limits of planetary ecology, while coming into naked conflict with the indigenous peoples occupying the land. The era of neoliberalism and the weakened nation-state has increasingly brought direct confrontations pitting transnational corpora-tions against indigenous groups defending their rights, in a new “contact zone” (Pratt) where land, biodiversity, and copyright are all at stake. As the planet reaps the bitter fruits of instrumental reason, the way of life of those who were always there, of those who never went away, opens up a new conflictual horizon of the politically possible. Biodiversity and sociodiversity, hegemonic biopower and indigenous sovereignty, the local and the global, all become interlinked, unstable, and interactive.

“First contact” is still occurring, but this time the “Indians” come armed not with bows and arrows but rather with computers, digital cameras, and websites. Corporate rationality, at the height of its arrogance but also at the end of its rope, meets articulate, cyber savvy indigeneity. Ya-nomami leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, whose group was devastated by an induced epidemic, claims that “white people design their words in visible form because their thinking is full of forgetfulness.” In an essay provocatively entitled “Discovering White People”—Yanomami offers his own version of the “dialectic of Enlightenment.” In language redolent of forest commons in Europe, he writes “whites used to live like us in the forest, . . . but once they created tools, machines, cars and planes, they became euphoric and said: ‘We are the only people to be so ingenious, only we know how to produce machines and merchandise.’ That is when they lost all wisdom. First they damaged their own land, before going off to work in other lands in order to endlessly create their merchandise. And they never stopped to ask: ‘If we destroy the earth, will we be able to create another one?’”22

Indigenous critique incarnates a temporal paradox: it is very tradi-tional and ancient and, at the same time, very radical and new. Not only does it challenge the logics of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the nation-state; it also questions the productivism of Marxism, the nomad-ism of postmodernism, and the constructivism of poststructuralism. We see this paradox of maximum radicality and maximum traditionality in the dialogue between the thinkers of indigeneity and the advocates of radical pedagogy. In Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande, a professor of Peruvian-Quechua origins teaching at Connecticut College, dialogues with the


advocates of “critical pedagogy,” a radical left movement influenced by the economics of Marx and the pedagogics of Paulo Freire. While giving the radicals immense credit, she finds them wanting from an indigenous perspective. The left speaks of “democracy,” she points out, but from an indigenous perspective, democracy has often been a weapon of mass disempowerment. Marxists speak of “revolution,” but Latin American revolutions have dispossessed Miskitus, Sumus, Ramas, and Quechua. Radical pedagogy lambasts colonialism, yet remains informed by individu-alism, anthropocentrism, and stagist progressivism, epistemic biases that worsen the ecological crisis. Students are encouraged to be “indepen-dent” (implying an individualist suspicion of collaboration), successful (that is, competitive), and antitraditional. Thus, far-left thought does not go far enough; Marxism is anticapitalist (yet shares many of capitalism’s deep cultural assumptions), and critical pedagogy is transformational (but devalues intergenerational knowledge). Grande seeks to engage with all these currents, while literally “indigenizing” them.23

We can also see the relevance of indigeneity to the questions Chakrab-arty raises about ecology and climate change. Now that climate change threatens to reduce us to bare forked animals biding the pelting of merciless storms, we can begin to see links between the crises (and utopias) of indigeneity and those of the West. We would make the link by appealing to what has become an increasingly popular topos or locus amenus within left-critical thought—the idea of “the commons.” At once archly old-fashioned and hypercontemporary, the metaphor of the “commons” has appealingly multiple resonances. It simultane-ously evokes ancient patterns of communal land ownership—the poet Shelley’s “equal participation of the commonage of nature”—and the contemporary digital commons of the creative software movements. The notion of commonly held land forms a social norm shared by diverse social formations ranging from thirteenth-century England of the “Great Charter of the Forest” (insightfully analyzed by Peter Linebaugh) to the longstanding social systems of indigenous peoples. The term evokes a cornucopia of sociopolitical projects and references—the “common wealth,” the “common people,” Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” Marx’s “primitive communism,” the Paris Commune, and “Creative Commons.” As a theory, the commons vests property in the community and emphasizes the collective dimension of ownership. It goes back to the shared fields, grazing lands, and forests of Europe as well to the communally held sacred land of indigenous peoples. The term evokes “communism,” but without that term’s Stalinist baggage, and “social-ism,” without the social-democratic blandness that so easily turns it into capitalism-with-a-human-face.


Currently proliferating in the writing of figures as diverse as Naomi Klein, Slavoj Žižek, Vandana Shiva, Elinor Ostrom, David Graeber, Peter Linebaugh, Bruno Latour, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri, the term “the commons” reflects a growing tendency, since the 1990s, to counterpose the co-optive nostrums of privatizing neoliberalism against the haunt-ing utopia of the commons. It surfaces in Chakrabarty’s text via Bruno Latour’s invocation of a “progressive composition of a common world.” The commons evokes resistance to “enclosure” in all its forms, whether in its early protocapitalist form of fencing in commonly shared land in Europe, or in its colonial “rosy dawn” form of appropriating the officially declared terra nullius of indigenous peoples, or in its contemporary forms of judicial restraints such as “patent” and “intellectual property” as means to police the ownership of ideas. Contemporary enclosure forms a direct threat not only to indigenous people—threatened with the loss of their land, streams, forests, biodiversity, and even knowledge—but also to the ecological sustenance of the planet generally. In the wake of the fall of communism, and the crisis of capitalism, the “commons” evokes the planetary struggle to reclaim the common good.

The Western Left has increasingly recognized that the social move-ments in Latin America, from Zapatismo in Mexico and the PT in Brazil on to the indigenous movements in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, now form the cutting edge of social change. In the wake of indigenous activism and the UN declaration of indigenous rights, Ecuador and Bolivia have begun to inscribe indigenous rights and even the “right of Nature not to be harmed” into their constitutions, and Bolivia now has a “Ministry of Decolonization.” While classical Marxism is anticapital-ist yet ultimately productivist, the Andean movements are often more radically anticapitalist in their assertion that “mother earth” should not be commodified. This culturally instilled refusal of commodification was one idée-force that helped enable the Bolivian movement to prevent the corporate privatization of water. Activists speak of communal forms of politics and of what Arturo Escobar calls “the political activation of relational ontologies.” In Escobar’s account, the activists call for (1) substantive rather than formal democracy, (2) “biocentric” sustainable development, and (3) interculturality in polyethnic societies. The goal is to move beyond capitalism, liberalism, statism, monoculturalism, productivism, Puritanism, and the ideology of “growth.”24

For many indigenous societies, “culture” implies a norm of egalitarian economic arrangements, ecological balance, and consensus governance. Thus, indigenous culture and economic globalization confront each other in the form of very real battles fought in the name of “biodiversity,” communal “intellectual property rights,” and the noncommodification of


nature. Culture and economics become deeply enmeshed, as ancestral traditions of communal property and collective decision making meld with a rejection of instrumental/productivist attitudes toward nature. Indigenous resistance thus passes through culture, as the Andean Left wins victories against the transnational corporations by mobilizing the cultural memory of the ayllus, or the chronotopic space-time of indig-enous sovereignty.

Coming full circle, we would link the commons as conceived by indigenous Red Atlantic cultures to the theory and praxis of the com-mons within the West itself. The two enclosures—of the commons in the west of the indigenous world—are metaphorically and metonymi-cally linked. The same class that enclosed land in Europe also enclosed indigenous land outside of Europe. The privatization of the English commons preceded that of the Irish commons, which preceded that of the indigenous commons. Henry George’s cry that “we must make land common property” in Progress and Poverty (1979) echoed the cries of native American leaders such as Tecumseh, who argued in 1810 that there was only one way “to check and stop this evil [of landgrabs]—for all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land [which] belongs to all for the use of each.”25

In the present day, we can see an analogy between Andean struggles over the natural commons (for example, water) and the various “Reclaim the Streets” and “Occupy” struggles over the commons (including the right to conduct protests in public parks). What interests us is not the projective moral qualities of the romanticized Indian individual—the “noble savage”—but rather the embodied and articulated political model of indigenous consensus societies. As a situated utterance, the conversation changes with the historically shaped challenges and ideo-logical needs, as different features of what we call “the discourse of radical indigeneity” come to the fore in different epochs: the critique of monarchy during the Renaissance (Montaigne), the idea of “Indian freedom” during the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Paine), the critique of bourgeois property relations in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels), the valorization of feminism (Paula Gunn Allen) and societies without coercion in the twentieth century (Pierre Clastres, Marshall Sahlins, David Graeber), and the protest against ecological devastation and transnational exploitation of biodiversity in the twenty-first century.

Viveiros de Castro’s work poses a provocative question: what does an-thropology owe intellectually to the peoples that it studies? The “most interesting concepts, problems, entities and agents introduced by an-thropological theory,” he suggests, “find their source in the imaginative power of the societies (or peoples, or collectives) that the anthropolo-


gists propose to explain.”26 He reports on a symposium in Manchester, England, where an audience member (who turned out to be Stuart Hall) remarked about his talk on “Indian philosophy” that “your Indians seem to have studied in Paris.” By his own account, de Castro responded to Hall’s boutade with a boutade of his own: “No, in fact exactly the opposite occurred: the Parisians went to study with the Indians.”27 We have tried to show here that Europeans have been “studying with the Indians” ever since sailor/merchants from Normandy were welcomed as strangers on Tupi-Brazilian shores. Over the five centuries since Columbus and Ca-bral, the unending (and uneven) interchange between European and indigenous thought has lent support to such varied progressive causes as Jacobin and socialist revolutions, confederation and the separation of powers, class, gender, and sexual equality, communal property, ecol-ogy, antiproductivism, and alterglobalization. While many Eurocentric commentators see Indians as vanished and “behind the times,” one can also see them as “ahead of the curve.” What is clear is that indigenous people and their nonindigenous interlocutors have posed probing questions about culture, property, power, energy, wealth, and equality, throwing up challenges to the nostrums of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. It is time we took those challenges seriously.

New York University

NOTES

Portions of this essay elaborate on arguments made in our book Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2012). Other por-tions elaborate on points made in a 2005 presentation, entitled “Tupi or not Tupi a Tupi Theorist,” for the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory. Other portions elaborate points made in a 2009 presentation by Robert Stam, entitled “The Red Atlantic: Tupi Theory and the Franco-Brazilian-Indigenous Dialogue.” We would like to thank both the School of Criticism and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for providing enriching opportunities to work out some of the ideas expressed in this essay.1 On the hyphen in the “Judeo-Muslim” and the “Arab-Jew,” see Ella Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims,” MER 178 (1992): 25–29; and “Taboo Memories and Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine and Arab-Jews,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), 131–56. 2 See, for example, Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009).3 See Domenico Losurdo, A Linguagem do Império, trans. Jaime A. Clasen (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2010).4 See Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1988).5 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cam-bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).


6 It should also, ideally, incorporate the Crusades’ demonization of the infidel as part of the process by which Europe constituted itself as an imaginary “continent” through opposition to an Islam which had arrived at the very gates of Vienna. 7 For example, in Shohat’s “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 99–113 and Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multicultralsim and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).8 See Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 463–84.9 Jack D. Forbes argues that native people from the Americas might have traveled to Europe before Columbus. See Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007).10 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982), 370. 11 Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, O Indio Brasileiro e a Revolucao Francesa: As Origens Brasileiras de Teoria da Bondade Natural (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2002).12 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 109.13 See Donald Grinde, Jr. and Bruce Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991).14 Quoted in Benedito Nunes, Oswald Cannibal (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979), 73. 15 Nunes, Oswald, 34.16 See the collection of interviews in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ed. Renato Sztutman (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2008), 79.17 On Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” see Elizabeth Grosz, “Criticism, Feminism and the Institution: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Thesis Eleven, no. 10/11 (1985): 175–89; reprinted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–17. On what Stuart Hall referred to as “the fictional necessity of arbitrary closures,” see Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1987), 45.18 François Durpaire, France blanche, colère noire (Paris: O. Jacob, 2006), 13.19 See Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 121–56.20 Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,” 141.21 Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,”131.22 Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, “Discovering White People,” in Povos Indigenas No Brasil 1996–2000 (São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiantal, 2000).23 Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).24 Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads: Between Alternative Modernizations, Postliberalism, and Postdevelopment,” Lecture at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York Univ., October 29, 2009.25 Quoted in Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2008), 246.26 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Métaphysiques Cannibales: Lignes d’Anthropologie Post-Structurale (Paris: PUF, 2009), 5.27 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Etnologia Brasileira,” in O Que Ler na Ciencia Social Brasileira (1970–1995), ed. Sergio Miceli (São Paulo: Anpocs, 2002), 152.

Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory? (with R. Stam)

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