Читать книгу Decolonizing Childhoods - Liebel Manfred - Страница 10

3

Postcolonial theories from the Global South

The peculiar object of postcolonial studies is not a natural entity, like an elephant, or even a social subject regarded as sharing the cultural world of the observer, but one formed as a colonial object, an inferior and alien ‘Other’ to be studied by a superior and central ‘Self’. Since the ‘elephant’ can speak, the problem is not just to represent it but to create conditions that would enable it to represent itself. (Fernando Coronil, ‘Elephants in the Americas? Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization’, 2008: 413)

Introduction

In order to gain an idea of ‘postcolonial childhoods’, it is commonplace to resort to thought currents, studies and theories, which, after the end of the colonial rule, deal with its aftermath and the continuing forms of dependence and oppression, and claim alternatives from the perspective of colonial and postcolonial subjects. They are known by multiple names: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Philosophy of Liberation, Ethnophilosophy, Sage Philosophy, Coloniality of Power, Coloniality of Knowledge, De-Coloniality/Decolonization, Epistemology of the South, Southern Theory or Ubuntu, and shall be subsumed here under the term postcolonial theory. Until now, these theories have not extensively taken children and childhoods into consideration. Nevertheless, they can be used and are taken up in this book in order to better understand children in their respective living contexts and their potentials for action, and to place childhoods more precisely in their historical and geopolitical contexts. In this chapter, I will first outline the basic ideas of postcolonial theory and then present some of the most important contributions from Africa and Latin America.

Basic ideas of postcolonial theory

The term postcolonial refers to present geopolitical constellations in which former colonies existed and to former colonial states themselves. It even has relevance for states that were never directly involved in colonialism, yet are influenced by the effects of colonial thought and imagination. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1992), from the Caribbean, proposes a two dimensional understanding of the term postcolonial. The first, temporary dimension means the time after the formation of the nation states from the colonies, which could thus be regarded as overcoming enduring state of affairs. The second dimension is the critique of a theoretical system, which can also persist in nation states. It is important to note that ‘there are long-term effects of colonialism, which still have an effect today, and which must be addressed if one wants to understand the postcolonial present and its corresponding problems’ (Kerner, 2012: 9). These problems include poverty and authoritarianism, as well as Eurocentric and racist mentalities, which are found in various facets of politics and society – in the Global South as well as in the Global North.

Aside from rather minor differences in detail, the binding factor of various postcolonial ideas and theories is that they all question the supposed superiority and exemplary character of ‘Western’ development concepts and strategies. They bring attention to the fact that the supposed achievements of the European modern age are the result of conquest, oppression and exploitation, which have been accompanied by racist devaluation and discrimination of people from different geographical parts of the world (and a different skin colour), which proceed in postcolonial constellations.¹ The widespread claim that the emergence and development of modernity was an autonomous European endeavour is firmly scrutinized.² With this in mind, the view stemming from modernization theory, purporting that non-Western societies represent merely the prehistory of Western modernity – and the West represents the model for the development of ‘traditional’ societies – is also questioned.³

The critique on this understanding of modernity relates particularly to the idea that its underlying rationality, and the claim to ‘truth’ which follows, is somehow the only possible way that human life can proceed and improve. The critique is made that this way of seeing the world – and categorizing societies and modes of life as developed or underdeveloped – is based on abstract distinctions and hierarchies, like the distinction between body and soul, emotion and rationality, or nature and culture (see Prout, 2005: 83–111). Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta (2013: 38) speaks to one of the most momentous distinctions, when he writes:

Europe consolidated a vision in order to make its aspiration for expansion possible, which, metaphorically speaking, divorced humankind from nature. Without taking humans into account, nature was defined as a fixed component of this vision, and the fact that humans are an integral part of nature was ignored. Hence, the path was opened to controlling, exploiting and manipulation of nature.

It also opened the path for the occupation and exploitation of world regions, which were considered ‘bare nature’, their members classified as ‘wild’, often not even recognized as human beings. Today, this exploitation continues in an unequal world order, where, although former colonies have become formally independent states, their dependence has simply taken on new, less obvious forms, or the (usually ‘white’) former colonial elites continue to oppress and discriminate against the population.⁴ Since the mid-20th century the magic word development has maintained this status.

Postcolonial approaches oppose persisting worldwide asymmetrical power structures. They are concerned, on the one hand, with material aspects and, on the other, with mental aspects, without completely isolating one from the other. The material aspects focus on unequal economic and political relationships, and how these affect the lives of people in the Global South. The mental aspects can be seen through the dominance of particular ways of thinking and forms of knowledge, which minimize or outshine the already existing wealth of knowledge in the Global South in a form of ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988; de Sousa Santos, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2007b). In other words, postcolonial approaches claim to point out independent and adamant alternatives with respect to knowledge and practical life, based on the recollection of colonialism and the experiences of postcolonial subjects. These suggested alternatives are not limited to the revitalization of cultural traditions, nor the evocation of alleged origins. Rather, they proceed with the hope of demonstrating a ‘trans-modern’ and ‘intercultural’ perspective. This perspective attempts to reach beyond the segregating and absolutist thought pattern of Western modernity, without negating it (see Dussel, 1980). Postcolonial approaches are associated with anticolonial resistance but always emphasize ‘the diversity and heterogeneity of the “we” and that of the enemy. The postcolonial analysis therefore ranges from multicentrism to the decentering of every center’ (Kwan, 2014: 5). If it represents an oppositional position or desire, says Ania Loomba, ‘than it has the effect of collapsing various locations so that the specificities of all of them are blurred’ (Loomba, 2005: 20).

The book Orientalism, first published in 1978, by Palestinian literary scholar Edward W. Said (1978, 1985) is considered one of the fundamental works of postcolonial theory.⁵ In the text, Said explains how, through the creation of an entire academic discipline called Orientalism, Europeans create a world of the ‘Other’; this ‘Orient’ becomes the projection screen for the West’s own fears, desires, and feelings of superiority. This generated image has little to do with the real-life worlds of the people living in this region; however, it served European colonial powers well, and today provides the US ‘imperium’ with a means to validate its own superiority and legitimize continued political and military interventions. ‘Othering’ is a postcolonial concept introduced by Said, which gained meaning in this context. It implies that people and ways of life which appear to be different to the ‘normal’, prevailing lifestyle become exoticized and are thereby ostracized. They are made the object of measures seeking normalization and control.⁶

As a follow-up to Edward Said’s Orientalism critique, the literary scholar Walter Mignolo, born in Argentina, introduced the term ‘postoccidentalism’ from the South American perspective, which refers to the fact that the Spanish Kingdom once named its ‘American’ colonies Indias Occidentales (Mignolo, 2000; 2005). In a project that Mignolo calls ‘de-colonial’, an effort is made to break down discursive forms of postcolonial dependence. Hegemonic, Eurocentric and modernist thought patterns are to be replaced using a critical approach, which takes ‘colonial wounds’ (for example, the manifold, harmful and destructive effects of colonialism) seriously and, from there, imagines a different, horizontal and diverse world, or ‘pluriversum’ instead of the Western dominated ‘universum’. In the words of the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018: 29): ‘a vision of a world where many worlds fit in’.

Yet, in what way are such critical approaches expressed in the form of postcolonial theories connected to social movements, and how can they become a force for movement and change? With her famous question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, which she formulated as early as the 1980s, Indian literary scholar Gayatri Spivak appealed against the widespread assumption that the living situation and thoughts of postcolonial subjects were brought to light by simply ‘giving them a voice’ or speaking in their name – as their intellectual or modern advocates (Spivak, 1988).⁷ In doing so, her aim was not to doubt that these subjects could express themselves. Rather, she wanted to underline that for the subaltern, as result of being subject to existing power structures and ‘epistemic violence’, it is not readily possible to make heterogeneous concerns visible or heard. Under the given circumstances, Spivak argues, the subaltern cannot succeed in being heard, nor can they exercise influence as complex people (see also Spivak, 1990; 1999; 2004; Morris, 2010; Smith, 2010).

The problem of the internalization of power structures by the repressed subjects themselves had already been mentioned at the beginning of the 20th century by Afro-American writer and sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois ([1903]1996). In his work, he referred to the lasting effects of racism in the USA following the abolition of slavery. To illustrate the exclusion of black people from the world of white people, Du Bois imagined a picture of an ‘enormous veil’, which black people were not permitted to step in front of. He considered the formation of a ‘double consciousness’, the feeling of, ‘only ever seeing oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s own soul on a world-scale, left merely with mockery and pity’ (DuBois [1903]1996: 194; see Morris, 2015).

A half-century later, Frantz Fanon, a medical practitioner from Martinique, who was active in the 1950s and 1960s in the Algerian struggle for liberation, described quite similarly the mental effects of everyday racism. In his first book, Black Skins, White Masks ([1952]1986) first published in 1952, he investigated daily life in the French-Caribbean colonies and the living conditions of black immigrants in France.⁸ He characterized the basic situation of black people in the French colonial world as alienated, as blacks being trapped in their own blackness. This became a noteworthy issue, as whites generally saw themselves as superior to blacks and thus based all their interactions and aspirations on this idea. This, in turn, led to the internalization of one’s own inferiority. The associated ‘division’ of consciousness resulted in blacks constantly fighting against their own image and behaving differently towards white people than towards other black people. Based on his own experiences, Fanon spoke of one’s self-representation as an object, the feeling of defencelessness and frustration, the feeling of being dissected and fixated, walled-in and loathed. This led to feelings of shame and self-contempt. Blacks and whites alike could only work against this alienation by refusing to allow themselves to be locked in the ‘substantialized tower of the past’.

Although Fanon’s diagnosis was related to colonial contexts, it nevertheless proved to be relevant for addressing postcolonial self-images and relationships and it has been referred to time and again, for example in Paul Gilroy’s equally influential text, The Black Atlantic (1993). Gilroy sees the image of the Black Atlantic, which he uses to symbolize the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath, as characterized by moments of movement, resettlement, repression and helplessness. Accordingly, he characterizes the identities that arise in this environment as fluid and in movement, as opposed to fixed and rigid – called by him routes, rather than roots. A widespread topos in postcolonial thoughts includes such a rejection of closed, rigid concepts of personal and collective identities that emphasize blending and cultural impurity. Feelings of inner-conflict and alienation, which play an important role in DuBois’ and Fanon’s works, become, at times, secondary to the emphasis on the potential of cultural hybridization. This is especially true for the works of Indian literary scholar Homi K. Bhabha.

In his book The Location of Culture, first published in 1994, Bhabha argues against understanding culture as a unified entity, and therefore cultural borders as something pre-existing or given. Instead, he sees in them fields for negotiating differences. In the act of interpretive appropriation, he claims, displacements and, thus, ambivalences are produced. Bhabha speaks of an ‘intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code’ (Bhabha, 1994: 37). Here, he sees the formation of a new type of ‘international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity’ (Bhabha, 1994: 38; italics in original). He understands hybridity as an unintended consequence of colonial power, which yields capacity for action and the potential for subversion. Thus, ‘the display of hybridity – its peculiar “replication” – terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery’ (Bhabha, 1994: 115; italics in original). Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity is not simply to be understood in terms of cultural intermixture. Rather, he explicitly refers to a hierarchical and asymmetrical power constellation. Nevertheless, how far Bhabha’s invoked practices of mimicry and hybridity can succeed in damaging or even overriding postcolonial power constellations? Bhabha is criticized, justifiably so, for a limited understanding of cultural artefacts in terms of human relationships, leaving out the material and structural aspects of postcolonial inequality and class-related power relations, like anticolonial resistance, which is articulated time and again through uprisings and liberation movements (see, for example, Parry, 2004).⁹

In the following sections of this chapter, I will look specifically at Africa and Latin America, and will appreciate some of the contributions to postcolonial theory that have arisen in these continents.

African contributions to postcolonial theory

As in other regions of the Global South, there have also been several strands of thought in Africa that deal with colonialism, its aftermath and today’s postcolonial constellation. They usually reflect the specific situation on this continent, but also have numerous links to the debates on the aftermath of slavery and its overcoming in the Caribbean and the United States. This connection has prompted the Cameroonian philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997a) to draw attention to the early interactions and to point out that postcolonial African philosophy is not confined to those authors who are at home in Africa.¹⁰

A striking example of the period between the Second World War and the beginning of decolonization in the 1950s is the intellectual exchange between the poets and philosophers Aimé Césaire, who came from the Caribbean, and Léopold Senghor, who led Senegal into independence and in 1960 became its first president. To both of them the anticolonial current of the Négritude, which was first understood as a cultural-political response to racism in the metropolis of Paris and the French colonies (Senghor, 1964; Césaire [1950]2000), has a long history. According to them, the blacks are distinguished by their integrative spiritual qualities, which were opposed to the rational features of Western populations, and were regarded as equal or superior. The representatives of the Négritude confronted the Eurocentric legitimations of white domination with the violent and destructive regime of their actual practice. Senghor, in particular, emphasized the practice of Africa’s own cultures with its firm social network and the communitarian way of life and production as sources of its own strength. This still happened in an idealizing and homogenizing manner. Instead of referring to Greek antiquity as in the case of Western philosophy, the representatives of the Négritude purposefully went back to African knowledge archives, especially the high civilization of Egypt, as well as the legends, myths and proverbs of African peoples.¹¹ The movement of the Négritude, which had its place in the French colonies, corresponded to the so-called Pan-Africanism in the British colonies (see Geiss, 1974).

Another early example, drawn directly from African archives of knowledge, is the Ubuntu’s current of thought, which is prevalent mainly in southern Africa (see Ndaba, 1994; Gade, 2011; Kuwali, 2014). It was a spiritual source of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and was incorporated into the transitional constitution of South Africa after apartheid had been ended. Ubuntu can be interpreted similarly to the Négritude in response to the dehumanizing experiences during the colonial period. According to Ubuntu, humanity is a quality that manifests itself in virtues such as hospitality, care, respect and community orientation. In addition, according to Ubuntu, people are not only linked to each other, but also to non-human beings. It requires the help of the ancestors to restore a lost balance in the world of being, in order to achieve justice, understood as harmony and order. At the centre of the thought current of Ubuntu there is a social practice oriented towards community and harmony, as such it can also be understood as communitarian ethics (see Metz, 2007).

Négritude and Ubuntu are different parts of thought currents that the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka (1981; 1988; 1990) critically called ethnophilosophy. Though he saw in ethnophilosophy an attempt to oppose the racist stereotypes by the ethnographic reconstruction of traditional belief systems and forms of culture and to offer them a positive alternative, it seemed to him as a naïve escape into an idealized precolonial past. He regarded the idea of closed African thought systems, their communality and their radical demarcation from Western rational thought as the mirror image of a racist-colonial tradition. On Négritude, and ethnophilosophy in general, Odera Oruka criticizes the fact that the people living in Africa supposedly attribute homogeneous African personality characteristics on a racial and tribal basis.¹² Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe, in his work Critique de la Raison Nègre (Mbembe, 2013), also warns about giving the supposedly black skin the status of a biologically based fiction in the fight against the racism of whites, and takes it as the basis of a specific kind of African reason.

In an earlier piece, which is now seen as one of the classical writings of postcolonial theory, Mbembe (2001) had already intensively discussed racism as an enduring basis for postcolonial rule. Shortly afterwards, with critical reference to the French philosopher Michel Foucault ([1969]2002), he emphasized that the European project of modernity is to be seen in a constitutive context with slavery and colonization, civilization and barbarism. According to him, the counterpart to modernity is the lack of rights of the colonized, whose life in the eyes of the conquerors was nothing but a form of animal life. It was a kind of ‘necropolitics’ aimed at ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations’ (Mbembe, 2003: 14). In the postcolonial present, this constellation continues in a modified form. The postcolonial discourse in Africa – according to Mbembe in a later published book in reference to the legacy of slavery – ‘arises from the darkness, from the depths of the hold in which Negro humanity has previously been confined to Western discourse’ (Mbembe, 2010: 79).

It is typical for Africa that leaders of the liberation movements understood themselves also as political philosophers or writers, and that their political programmes, similar to Senghor, have been laid down in writings for the period after independence. In this context, mention may be made of Amilcar Cabral (Cape Verde), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) or Nelson Mandela (South Africa). Most of them were influenced at times by Marxist ideas, but they always sought to establish a form of ‘African socialism’ in their own way, which takes up African traditions and connects them with forms of state and society that are understood as modern. In the Pan-African movement, with Nkrumah as main protagonist (see Nkrumah, 1964; Lundt and Marx, 2016), the national boundaries that the colonial powers had left had been struggled. Today the efforts for an African socialism have been almost entirely replaced by the orientation of the African power elites to the capitalist world market.¹³

The first anticolonial concepts and theories were passed on in various aspects by authors who were not satisfied with the revival of the precolonial past, but who also attempted to decipher the current situation in the African countries as a conglomerate of colonial and precolonial influences. After independence, postcolonial thinking in Africa developed mainly in the context of political philosophy, supported by thinkers who were temporarily employed at European or North American universities, but eventually went back to the universities of their African homelands. They represent different positions, but agree that the decolonization must include a decolonization of mentality and thought, also called ‘conceptual decolonization’ by the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu (1996). In the introduction to a critical reader on Postcolonial African Philosophy, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997b: 4) characterizes this challenge by saying:

The simple and important factor that drives the field and the contemporary practice of African/a Philosophy has to do with the brutal encounter of the African world with European modernity – an encounter epitomized in the colonial phenomena.

Insofar as political philosophy is postcolonial, it attempts to arrive at normative positions without surrendering to Eurocentrically impregnated universalism. The Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (2015: 121–2) emphasizes the need to deconstruct the development ideology of the West:

We have adopted the term ‘development’. If we accept this concept, we are lost. It is a substitute for other concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’. The underlying philosophy of ‘development’ is that of the superiority of modern Western civilization. Development is the successor to those ideologies that define the ultimate truth of humanity in their lifestyle – whether it be religion, culture, science or technology. As such, it also has the right, indeed the duty, to spread, if necessary by force. It is a conversion mission.¹⁴

Kwasi Wiredu (1996: 5) is somewhat more reserved. He distinguishes ‘cultural universals’ from ‘cultural particulars’, which can apply only within a (local-speaking) context, as they are language dependent. The task of conceptual decolonization is to examine colonial ways of thinking critically and thus to override reflexively the consequences of the mental domination of colonialism. The decolonization of thought is also the concern of some African writers, such as the Kenyan theatrical author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986), who oppose the dominance of the colonial languages by writing their works in African languages.

Wiredu also points out that the reference to African knowledge archives, such as consented practices of political decision making, was collapsed, delegitimized or modified according to the interests of the colonizers during the colonial period. One can therefore not simply return to the ‘origins’. According to him, their critical reconstruction is inherent in the potential for self-assurance and the historization of political thought. At the same time, however, they are at risk of ignoring the traditional hierarchies, exclusions and forms of oppression, and of legitimating their influence in actual African societies as an African way of life. Such a variant of self-assertion is often based on a dichotomy between Africa and Europe. To overcome this, the philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1994), from Benin, considers it important to distinguish between ‘endogenous’ and ‘indigenous’ knowledge. According to him, indigenous knowledge is, first of all, unchecked, traditional knowledge, which often contradicts the knowledge of modern sciences. As endogenous knowledge, on the other hand, he describes the practices, concepts and experiences that can be used to solve contemporary problems.

Most philosophers who want to postulate their thinking in the postcolonial context and contribute to conceptual decolonization assume that political decision making in African cultures has been dialogue- and consensus-oriented and that these have been asserted in the everyday practice of the people, but are in competition with imported ideas and practices of state organization.¹⁵