◆ Thinking activity on
Post colonialism Today
-Bill Ashcroft
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This is the talk of post colonialism by Bill Ashcroft. Bill Ashcroft is an Emeritus Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts. A founding exponent of post-colonial theory, co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically the field of post-colonial studies. He is author and co-author of twenty one books, variously translated into five languages, Including Post-Colonial Transformation (Routledge 2001), Post-Colonial Futures (Continuum 2001); Caliban's Voice (Routledge 2008) Intimate Horizons (ATF 2009) and Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (Routledge 2016). He is the author of over 200 chapters and papers, and he is on the editorial boards of ten international journals.
●What is post colonialism :-
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical-theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power.
Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, through anthropological study, it may seek to build a better understanding of colonial life based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators from the point of view of the colonized people. On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with studies of contemporary history, and may also draw examples from anthropology, historiography, political science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and Christian thought. There is also post colonial ways if reading.
Period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism. Postcolonialism signals a possible future of overcoming colonialism, yet new forms of domination or subordination can come in the wake of such changes, including new forms of global empire. Postcolonialism should not be confused with the claim that the world we live in now is actually devoid of colonialism.
●About The Book "On Post Colonial Future" by Bill Ashcroft :-
In this groundbreaking work, Bill Ashcroft extends the arguments posed in The Empire Writes Back to investigate the transformative effects of postcolonial resistance and the continuing relevance of colonial struggle. He demonstrates the remarkable capacity for change and adaptation emanating from postcolonial cultures both in everyday life and in the intellectual spheres of literature, history and philosophy. The transformations of postcolonial literary study have not been limited to a simple rewriting of the canon but have also affected the ways in which all literature can be read and have led to a more profound understanding of the network of cultural practices that influence creative writing.
●Theory of Post-colonialism :-
Postcolonial theory (or often post‐colonial theory) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies and those societies' responses. The study of the controlling power of representation in colonized societies began in the 1950s with the work of Frantz Fanon and reached a climax in the late 1970s with Edward Said's Orientalism. This study led to the development of the colonialist discourse theory in the work of critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The term “postcolonial” per se was first used in literary studies by The Empire Writes Back in 1989 to refer to cultural interactions within colonial societies. Postcolonial theory accompanied the rise of globalization theory in the 1990s, which used the language of postcolonial theory in studies of cultural globalization in particular. Countries colonized by the English.
Post colonials is above all a way of reading. So it's reading practice that draws attention to the profound and continuing effects of colonization upon literary production on anthropological accounts historical records and scientific and administrative writing. But above all it is a reading of post-colonnial literature.
●Utopianism in postcolonial literature :-
In this new book, Bill Ashcroft sets out that there is no utopian tradition beyond the Western and Christian cultures. Analyzing a wide array of literatures from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Pacific islands, Australia, New Zealand, and from Chicano people, Ashcroft examines utopianism in the Blochian sense (as the hope impulse) in postcolonial contexts. His major argument is that if, as Bloch would have it, utopianism is inherent to all creative pursuits--and perhaps especially literature--postcolonial utopianism distinguishes itself with a particular brand of future-thinking or "anticipatory consciousness" that both engages with and goes beyond the imperial order. Responding to scholars that would see postcolonialism as simply anti-colonialism, Ashcroft demonstrates how postcolonial literatures outline not only the path to resistance but also the future of an enfranchised nation and thereby transcend what he characterizes as the disappointment with the immediate postcolonial nation.
The book is composed of ten short chapters not including the introduction and conclusion. The first three chapters serve to outline his theoretical framework, mostly focusing on Bloch but also addressing the relationship between ideology and utopia in Karl Mannheim and, later, Paul Ricoeur. The rest of the book is dedicated to analyses of multiple texts in different postcolonial contexts. In the first chapter, Ashcroft examines the utopianism at the heart of the imperial project, drawing a concrete connection between travel writing and the journey that is the structural foundation to the utopian narrative (beginning with More's Utopia [1516]). He argues that imperialist utopianism is paradoxical in its desire to both find utopia (the "desert island," the tropical paradise) and create a utopia (via its civilizing mission). As such, he concludes that imperialist utopianism represents the "prehistory against which postcolonial utopianism has established itself. Ashcroft's analysis of imperialist utopianism allows him to set up the crucial distinction between "achieved utopias" such as the colonized nation and which, according to him, immediately become dystopias, and utopianism in the sense of "anticipatory consciousness," the drive toward a better future always hovering on the horizon. In this sense, postcolonial utopianism seeks not to represent a closed, definite utopia but rather a vision which "is located in the act of transformation of coercive power, a certain kind of praxis rather than a specific mode of representation".
●Borders and Bordering in post colonialism :-
When considering the postcolonial, it is important to keep in mind its historical trajectory in terms of how certain discourses of western self-understanding have reconciled the humanist and universalist elements of modernity with systematic oppression and exploitation. This is the subjugation involved in knowledge production about conquered peoples and their lands – about the bordering of postcolonial communities and peoples through the idea of the nation-state.
The impact on early ethnography, cartography and cosmology cannot be overestimated, leading to a focus on nations as naturally enclosed territorial units and the state as their guardians. But it is also the inauguration of the ‘Subject’ itself, as Spivak argues.
The emergence of the modern subject with a claim to knowledge who was guided by Enlightenment principles of reason and science, but also by the ‘urge to shut the other out into the opacity of the unknown alien, to be excluded or reduced to the status of a beast of burden and treated accordingly’.
As Butler argues, power relations and hierarchies are affected by different temporal conceptions, where a linear and progressive understanding of time (and borders) facilitates the representation of some collectives as modern – as actors that advance history – while others are stuck in the past.
Hence, it is difficult to talk about narratives of borders apart from the imaginary logic of international relations (IR) theory in which the organising principle of state sovereignty has resulted in the loss of sovereignty for others – other states, other communities and other individuals.
This implies that the traces of the colonial state have not withered away as sovereignty in the postcolonial world has often remained provisional and partial, and at times even despotic and viciously violent.
As Jean and John Comaroff write:
Identity struggles, ranging from altercations over resources to genocide, seem immanent almost everywhere as selfhood is immersed existentially, metonymically into claims of collective essence, of innate substance and primordial sentiment, that nestle within or transect the polity. In short, homogeneity as a “national fantasy” is giving way to a recognition of the irreducibility of difference.
●Post Colonialism in international relations :-
Postcolonialism examines how societies, governments and peoples in the formerly colonised regions of the world experience international relations. The use of ‘post’ by postcolonial scholars by no means suggests that the effects or impacts of colonial rule are now long gone. Rather, it highlights the impact that colonial and imperial histories still have in shaping a colonial way of thinking about the world and how Western forms of knowledge and power marginalise the non-Western world. Postcolonialism is not only interested in understanding the world as it is, but also as it ought to be. It is concerned with the disparities in global power and wealth accumulation and why some states and groups exercise so much power over others. By raising issues such as this, postcolonialism asks different questions to the other theories of IR and allows for not just alternative readings of history but also alternative perspectives on contemporary events and issues.
To wind up, we can say that, Postcolonialism interrogates a world order dominated by major state actors and their domineering interests and ways of looking at the world. It challenges notions that have taken hold about the way states act or behave and what motivates them. It forces us to ask tough questions about how and why a hierarchical international order has emerged and it further challenges mainstream IR’s core assumptions about concepts such as power and how it operates. Postcolonialism forces us to reckon with the everyday injustices and oppressions that can reveal themselves in the starkest terms through a particular moment of crisis. Whether it has to do with the threat of nuclear weapons or the deaths of workers in factories churning out goods for Western markets, postcolonialism asks us to analyse these issues from the perspectives of those who lack power. While postcolonialism shares some common ground with other critical theories in this regard, it also offers a distinctive approach. It brings together a deep concern with histories of colonialism and imperialism, how these are carried through to the present – and how inequalities and oppressions embedded in race, class and gender relations on a global scale matter for our understanding of international relations. By paying close attention to how these aspects of the global play out in specific contexts, postcolonialism gives us an important and alternative conceptual lens that provides us with a different set of theoretical tools to unpack the complexities of this world.
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