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Summary Postcolonialism
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Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short IntroductionIntroduction: Montage
Have you ever been the only person of your own colour or ethnicity in a large group or
gathering? It has been said that there are two kinds of white people: those who have never
found themselves in a situation where the majority of people around them are not white, and
those who have been the only white person in the room. At that moment, for the first time
perhaps, they discover what it is really like for the other people in their society, and,
metaphorically, for the rest of the world outside the west: to be from a minority, to live
as the person who is always in the margins, to be the person who never qualifies as the
norm, the person who is not authorized to speak.
This is as true for peoples as for persons. Do you feel that your own people and country are
somehow always positioned outside the mainstream? Have you ever felt that the moment you
said the word I, that I was someone else, not you? That in some obscure way, you were not
the subject of your own sentence? Do you ever feel that whenever you speak, you have
already in some sense been spoken for? Or that when you hear others speaking, that you are
only ever going to be the object of their speech? Do you sense that those speaking would
never think of trying to find out how things seem to you, from where you are? That you
live in a world of others, a world that exists for others?
How can we find a way to talk about this? That is the first question which
postcolonialism tries to answer. Since the early 1980s, postcolonialism has developed a
body of writing that attempts to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between
western and non-western people and their worlds are viewed. What does that mean? It
means turning the world upside down. It means looking from the other side of the
photograph, experiencing how differently things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin
rather than Berlin or Boston, and understanding why. It means realizing that when western
people look at the non-western world what they see is often more a mirror image of
themselves and their own assumptions than the reality of what is really there, or of how
people outside the west actually feel and perceive themselves. If you are someone who
does not identify yourself as western, or as somehow not completely western even though
you live in a western country, or someone who is part of a culture and yet excluded by its
dominant voices, inside yet outside, then postcolonialism offers you a way of seeing things
differently, a language and a politics in which your interests come first, not last.
Postcolonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same material and
cultural well-being. The reality, though, is that the world today is a world of inequality,
and much of the difference falls across the broad division between people of the west
and those of the non-west. This division between the rest and the west was made fairly
absolute in the 19th century by the expansion of the European empires, as a result of which
nine-tenths of the entire land surface of the globe was controlled by European, or European-
derived, powers. Colonial and imperial rule was legitimized by anthropological theories
which increasingly portrayed the peoples of the colonized world as inferior, childlike, or
feminine, incapable of looking after themselves (despite having done so perfectly well
for millennia) and requiring the paternal rule of the west for their own best interests
(today they are deemed to require 'development'). The basis of such anthropological
theories was the concept of race. In simple terms, the west-non-west relation was thought of
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,in terms of whites versus the non-white races. White culture was regarded (and remains)
the basis for ideas of legitimate government, law, economics, science, language, music,
art, literature - in a word, civilization.
Throughout the period of colonial rule, colonized people contested this domination
through many forms of active and passive resistance. It was only towards the end of the
19th century, however, that such resistance developed into coherent political
movements: for the peoples of most of the earth, much of the 20th century involved the
long struggle and eventual triumph against colonial rule, often at enormous cost of life
and resources. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, people struggled against the
politicians and administrators of European powers that ruled empires or the colonists
who had settled their world.
When national sovereignty had finally been achieved, each state moved from colonial to
autonomous, postcolonial status. Independence! However, in many ways this represented
only a beginning, a relatively minor move from direct to indirect rule, a shift from
colonial rule and domination to a position not so much of independence as of being in-
dependence. It is striking that despite decolonization, the major world powers did not change
substantially during the course of the 20th century. For the most part, the same (ex-)imperial
countries continue to dominate those countries that they formerly ruled as colonies. The cases
of Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq, make it clear that any country that has the nerve to resist
its former imperial masters does so at its peril. All governments of these countries that have
positioned themselves politically against western control have suffered military interventions
by the west against them.
Yet the story is not wholly negative. The winning of independence from colonial rule
remains an extraordinary achievement. And if power remains limited, the balance of
power is slowly changing. For one thing, along with this shift from formal to informal
empire, the western countries require ever more additional labour power at home, which they
fulfil through immigration. As a result of immigration, the clear division between the west
and the rest in ethnic terms at least no longer operates absolutely. This is not to say that
the president of the United States has ever been an African-American woman, or that
Britain has elected an Asian Muslim as prime minister. Power remains carefully
controlled. How many faces of power can you think of that are brown? The ones, that is, that
appear on the front pages of the newspapers, where the everyday politics of world power are
reported. Cultures are changing though: white Protestant America is being hispanized.
Hispanic and black America have become the dynamic motors of much live western
culture that operates beyond the graveyard culture of the heritage industry. Today, for many
of the youth of Europe, Cuban culture rules, energizing and electrifying with its vibrant son
and salsa. More generally, in terms of broad consensus, the dominance of western culture, on
which much of the division between western and non-western peoples was assumed to rest in
colonial times, has been dissolved into a more generous system of cultural respect and a
tolerance for differences. Some of the limits of that respect will be explored in later sections
of this book.
For now, what is important is that postcolonialism involves first of all the argument that
the nations of the three non-western continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are largely
in a situation of subordination to Europe and North America, and in a position of
economic inequality. Postcolonialism names a politics and philosophy of activism that
contests that disparity, and so continues in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the
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, past. It asserts not just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to
access resources and material well-being, but also the dynamic power of their cultures,
cultures that are now intervening in and transforming the societies of the west.
Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the elaboration of theoretical
structures that contest the previous dominant western ways of seeing things. A simple
analogy would be with feminism, which has involved a comparable kind of project: there was
a time when any book you might read, any speech you might hear, any film that you saw, was
always told from the point of view of the male. The woman was there, but she was always an
object, never a subject. From what you would read, or the films you would see, the woman
was always the one who was looked at. She was never the observing eye. For centuries it was
assumed that women were less intelligent than men and that they did not merit the same
degree of education. They were not allowed a vote in the political system. By the same token,
any kind of knowledge developed by women was regarded as non-serious, trivial, gossip, or
alternatively as knowledge that had been discredited by science, such as superstition or
traditional practices of childbirth or healing. All these attitudes were part of a larger
system in which women were dominated, exploited, and physically abused by men.
Slowly, but increasingly, from the end of the 18th century, feminists began to contest
this situation. The more they contested it, the more it became increasingly obvious that
these attitudes extended into the whole of the culture: social relations, politics, law,
medicine, the « arts, popular and academic knowledges.
As a politics and a practice, feminism has not involved a single system of thought, inspired
by a single founder, as was the case with Marxism or psychoanalysis. It has rather been a
collective work, developed by different women in different directions: its projects have been
directed at a whole range of phenomena of injustice, from domestic violence to law and
language to philosophy. Feminists have also had to contend with the fact that relations
between women themselves are not equal and can in certain respects duplicate the same kinds
of power hierarchies that exist between women and men. Yet at the same time, broadly
speaking feminism has been a collective movement in which women from many
different walks of life have worked towards common goals, namely the emancipation
and empowerment of women, the right to make decisions that affect their own lives, and
the right to have equal access to the law, to education, to medicine, to the workplace, in
the process changing those institutions themselves so that they no longer continue to
represent only male interests and perspectives.
In a comparable way, postcolonial theory involves a conceptual reorientation towards
the perspectives of knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the west. It is
concerned with developing the driving ideas of a political practice morally committed to
transforming the conditions of exploitation and poverty in which large sections of the
world's population live out their daily lives. Some of this theoretical work has gained a
reputation for obscurity and for involving complex ideas that ordinary people are not able to
understand. When faced with the authority of theory produced by academics, people often
assume that their own difficulties of comprehension arise from a deficiency in themselves.
This is unfortunate, since many of these ideas were never produced by |academics in the first
place and can be understood relatively easily once the actual situations that they describe are
understood. For this reason, this book seeks to introduce postcolonialism in a way not
attempted before: rather than explaining it top down, that is elaborating the theory in abstract
terms and then giving a few examples, it seeks to follow the larger politics of postcolonialism
which are fundamentally populist and affirm the worth of ordinary people and their cultures.
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