After the Postcolony

In Political Theories of Decolonization, Kohn and McBride look to what they call ‘the problem of foundations’ in postcolonialism. For them, it is possible to talk about a tranche of theory and intellectual output that has emerged specifically in response to colonialism despite the disparities in space and time that often divide such work. This set of texts can be broadly identified as ‘postcolonial political thought’ and it is, the authors argue, a uniquely useful source for understanding contemporary political questions because the ‘political problems of decolonization continue to haunt regimes today’. ¹ The book centres on the ‘problem of foundations’: if you are aiming to make a distinctive break from previous thinking, on what do you base your new thinking? This has been much examined in relation to the postcolonial state, where the authors identify three types of strategies: the recourse to a precolonial identity, religion or the indigenous relationship to the land. ² In all cases, new stories or narratives are told to replace and resist those that have been told by the coloniser, and, in all cases, nationalism has played a highly significant role.

To achieve their central aim of demonstrating what the intellectual history of decolonisation offers to political theorists, Kohn and McBride undertake an examination of a range of anti-colonial texts. Leopold Senghor’s negritude is assessed against the historical background of Wilsonian hypocrisy and French attempts to implement assimilationist policies in Senegal. If Senghor’s negritude was mainly political, Césaire’s was mainly cultural: the impact of French surrealist thought is stressed, as is the basis of negritude in a French colonial policy that linked the value of human beings to their distance from ‘blackness’. This is contained nicely in Fanon’s aphorism that the white man creates the Negro, but the Negro creates negritude. The authors outline the common critiques of negritude but argue that foundations ‘are moments within history’, and that the ‘measure of a foundation needs to be whether it is a story that provides space for imagination and then action’. ³

The Iranian intellectuals discussed, Jalal Al-e Ahmed and Ali Shariati, were both clearly concerned with the question of foundations. Ahmed’s concept of Gharbzadegi – variously translated as Westoxification, West-itis, Occidentosis and West-Struck-ness – was a critique of Western hegemony, the West itself and the psychological propensity for intellectuals in Iran to imitate their masters. In this respect, he encapsulated a stream of anti-colonial political thought that has run from Latin American dependency theory (cultural and economic) to Caribbean and African negritude, African-American literature and culture, pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism, and an array of other forms in other areas. Kohn and McBride point out correctly that Ali Shariati’s critique of the West echoed in many ways the critique that was emerging from Europe’s own Frankfurt School: Shariati had cited with approval Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. ⁴ Similarities between these two perspectives are striking and too often ignored.

Ho Chi Minh and Frantz Fanon had similar concerns, but they are separated here by their desire to change the people and not simply the government by in some way institutionalising the values of revolutionary struggle into a sustainable order. For Ho, a mix of Confucian traditions and Rousseau were combined to form a theory of revolutionary nationalism. Fanon might be read as a revolutionary nationalist too, but he was emphatic that the revolution had to bring about individuation and not the blurred collectivity that colonisation had imposed on the masses. Fanon’s well-known criticisms of the early postcolonial state are cited by the authors, who go on to examine the state of exception through Kenya’s Ngugi and Mbembe, and the decolonisation of land through movements like the Zapatistas and intellectuals like Mariátegui, Cabral and Marcos.

Kohn and McBride have admirable aims and the sweep of their study is impressive. The resulting work provides a useful and well-reasoned introduction to a range of intellectuals from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. It is perfect for students and others who are beginning to study decolonisation, and it provides an engaging introduction to postcolonial political theory. The prose style is steady and uncomplicated. There are omissions – most prominently, a lack of Arab thinkers – but the aim has not been to create an encyclopaedia.

At times, the book does read like one. Biographical sketches and historical background occupy a substantial section of each chapter, and some of the book’s key discussions are distinctly undertheorised, despite the mentioning of such names as Agamben and Arendt. Take, for instance, the conclusion of the book. Recognising that foundational strategies are complicated and can entail a return to an imagined past and/or a leap into a mythical future, the authors note that ‘[b]oth strategies entail certain dangers’ but add:

Yet this instability in this case is an opening, an opportunity to break from the past and create a new form of politics in the future, … The project of decolonization is too multifaceted to have only one answer and too overarching to approach with anything less than very big ideas. A concise program would soon be revealed as irrelevant. A reorganization of structures of power is necessarily ambitious. ⁵

We might agree that there is no ‘one answer’ to decolonisation, but the emphasis on ‘very big ideas’ that are ‘ambitious’ seems less obvious. Clearly, at the initial point of challenging the coloniser – the early days of a national liberation movement – the pattern is for large-scale analyses, heady visions of the future and rousing rhetoric. But if postcolonial experience teaches us anything, it seems to be that these ‘very big ideas’ can be damaging as well as liberating, opening up avenues for new autocrats to march to power and allowing not for a ‘reorganization of structures of power’ but precisely the opposite: the maintenance of a network of power relationships that continue to be disastrous for populations who are now told that they are officially free.

It would be unfair to suggest that Kohn and McBride are unaware of this. Much of their book is concerned with recognising difficulties in situations like these. But there is a tendency – after their assessment of negritude, for example – to simply override criticisms with the dictat that it is so difficult to repel the colonial machine that anything useful in the struggle would best be supported. As such, some of the stinging criticisms of the path taken by postcolonial leaders from thinkers heavily involved in national liberation struggles – Walter Rodney, Edward Said, C.L.R. James, Basil Davidson – are underplayed. The fact that many postcolonial thinkers saw themselves as internationalists in some way and were part of a transnational network is indeed interesting but, after a promising introduction, little is delivered in the way of substantiating this point, even though it would appear to directly contradict the basic premises of a specifically nationalist foundationalism. Disappointingly, the analysis of fiction and theatre is limited solely to Ngugi, even as the authors accept that cultural production is fundamental to any foundational strategy. The lack of a firm distinction between purely theoretical works and literary ones has an unfortunate levelling-down effect: Ngugi is treated as mostly a purely didactic writer, while al-Afghani’s distinctive irony is ignored. And is it really true to say that the work of Fanon, Ngugi, Shariati, Césaire and Cabral is submerged or forgotten? It is probably more accurate to describe them all as being as close to canonical in postcolonial studies as one can be. (For example, all of them were given detailed treatment in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism almost two decades ago.) ⁶ The authors are correct that these intellectual voices are too often ignored in much political theory – in which it usually appears that imperialism never happened at all – but is the best strategy for countering this very real problem simply to state that these thinkers existed and that we should be using the texts they produced?

Rahul Rao begins his book Third World Protest, also published by Oxford University Press, with the observation that contemporary social movements exhibit an ambivalent attitude towards state sovereignty, which is both defended as a barrier against external exploitation and attacked as legitimating human rights abuses. This leads him to his central task: an analytical reassessment of the political boundaries of Third World states, and a normative call for a more ‘nuanced and creative approach to Third World sovereignty that takes into account the dispersed nature of threats to human rights in the Third World’. ⁷ Like Kohn and McBride, Rao is also concerned with the construction of postcolonial community and perceived weaknesses in current speculative political theory. In response, he imaginatively constructs his book around the dichotomy in normative International Relations theory between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. Third World Protest brings in more empirical detail than is usually expected in this type of study and includes an examination of postcolonial fiction, whose writers are argued to ‘have long been aware of the structural constraints within which Third World societies are entrapped’. ⁸

In the chapter on ‘The Dark Sides of Cosmopolitanism’, Rao demonstrates the ways in which Western coercion in the Third World is legitimated by the language of liberal cosmopolitanism, which – as Costas Douzinas has pointed out – has long contained both emancipatory and exploitative potential. Liberal cosmopolitanism not only legitimates territorial hegemony, primarily that of the US, observes Rao; it also provides a cover for capitalist social relations through the linking of human rights and dominant neoliberal economic discourses by the US and some European states. Assessing the critical literature on loan conditionality, he notes that interventionist and damaging economic policy is legitimated in much the same way – but he then cites Ngaire Woods on the complicity of agents in the Third World who maintain the consent required for such hegemony to be successful.

While Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have long taken a radical position here, arguing for a substantial global redistribution of resources based on an international application of Rawls’ difference principle, Rao argues that they rely on an unreasonable and utopic degree of voluntarism, expressing a vision that ‘does not seem to entail radical revision of [existing] institutions or the incentive structures within which they operate’. ⁹ For Rao, utopians are wrong to dismiss institutional cosmopolitanism, but cosmopolitans like Archibugi and Held are themselves problematic for their lack of understanding of the historical and sociological conditions under which the objectives of institutional cosmopolitanism can be achieved. If this type of normative theorising is to reach its potential, it must grapple, he argues, with the question of what a non-imperial institutional cosmopolitanism would look like.

But lest we read any of this as preparing the ground for a defence of communitarianism, Rao immediately moves on to describe the dark sides of the alternative theory that has gained much of its legitimacy as a defence against cosmopolitan neo-imperialism but which, he argues, has justified arbitrary and illegitimate uses of authority in the name of state-building and anti-imperialism. In the words of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere in 1978: ‘blackness is a licence to kill Africans’. Rao looks at early postcolonial Third World international solidarity and identifies elements of both solidarity and individualistic nationalism in these actions, but he argues in a sustained and tenable critique of Mohammed Ayoob that both tendencies operated to buttress the position of state elites in the Third World countries. In a brief but brilliant section, the classical pluralist position (Third World states as sentinels against neo-imperialism) is described as having missed ‘the extraordinarily bifurcated nature of the experience, for non-Western political communities, of entering the society of states as states’, which marked a departure not only for other established practices of non-statist international relations but also from the particular forms, for these communities, of their own political subjectivity. ¹⁰ The creation of ‘international society’ was therefore a moment in which one view of political organisation became dominant over others, and the ‘entry of Third World states into international society was an extraordinarily ambiguous moment for each of the new entrants’. ¹¹

In the second part of Third World Protest, Rao shifts levels of analysis from theory to the literature and social movements that have grappled with the dilemma he has outlined. For Joyce, Tagore, Said and Fanon – all intellectuals associated with national liberation movements – there was always a dichotomous, and perhaps ironic, attachment to the very idea of national liberation, which seemed at once as confining as it could be liberating. Tagore’s The Home and the World ¹² is read as an exploration of the opposition between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, neither of which is really given a stamp of approval; Stephen Dedalus’s conversations with Davin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ¹³ are given similar treatment. Edward Said, who drew on Dedalus in his 1993 Reith lectures ¹⁴ , is seen to have an oeuvre which is marked by this same central tension: expressing a literal rootless cosmopolitanism even while insisting on national self-determination for the Palestinians. And the way the Zapatistas in Mexico and queer activists in the Third World negotiate these inconsistencies and dual positions is given a very fruitful and complex exploration.

This is a perspicacious and wonderfully engaging book, a rare example of theory that is readable without having been simplified. Rao takes us on a journey through a number of theoretical positions and convincingly shows, using empirical evidence within a kind of historical sociological framework, the deficiencies in both communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. The critiques of Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge, Mohammed Ayoob, Hedley Bull and Peter Tatchell are carefully calibrated and deserve serious attention. Rao is at his best when he is grappling with the consequences of various normative positions and expressing dissatisfaction with all of them, all the while suggesting (at times explicitly) the sense of personal engagement that Edward Said said was necessary for any discussion on a topic as important and deeply rooted in places and people today as imperialism. As merely a critique of the communitarian–cosmopolitan divide from an anti-imperialist or Third Worldist perspective, the book would have been highly successful – but Rao goes much beyond this. His willingness to bring fiction and social movements like the Zapatistas into his analysis brings about a methodological pluralism that adds oceans of depth to the largely austere space that is international normative theory. A theoretically realist position means that he is constantly testing hypothetical positions against their implications for the real world, with highly useful and innovative results.

Some sections feel a little underdeveloped: there is only the briefest theorisation of how (and why) fiction should be read in international normative theory, and the result is that Joyce and Tagore are read in interesting but at times thin ways. Do we do violence to literary texts by involving them in political analysis? There is substantial academic literature on this topic – from Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and Joseph Slaughter’s work on the novel and human rights discourse to the work of Neil Lazarus, Timothy Brennan and Barbara Harlow ¹⁵ – that would have enriched the discussion. But this should not detract from the brilliance of Rao’s method of building international normative theory from the experiences, movements and literatures of Third World populations. Perhaps most importantly, his insistence that we need to be critical of both home and the world opens up space for a positive ambivalence in a field that has long resisted such thinking. Where the concerns of these two books converge, at most points Rao’s methodological advantage has allowed him to inform his thinking with a greater degree of nuance, sensitivity and depth – his book, although it was published earlier, gives the impression of being a later development. Both books together represent a progression in political theory around postcolonialism, and it is to be hoped that scholars working in international political and normative theory will begin to address the questions these authors have raised in a systematic and serious way.