Postcolonial Theory looks to deconstruct the West, as it sees it, and this ambitious demolition project was undoubtedly the first emanation of applied postmodernism. Unlike race and gender Theories, which had already developed fairly mature lines of thought and scholarship before postmodernism took hold in cultural studies, postcolonial Theory derived directly from postmodern thought. Moreover, postcolonial Theory came about to achieve a specific purpose, decolonization: the systematic undoing of colonialism in all its manifestations and impacts.
While postmodernism saw itself as both moving beyond and dismantling the key features of modernity, postcolonialism restricts this project to issues surrounding colonialism. Prominent within postcolonial Theory, more specifically, are both the postmodern knowledge principle, which rejects objective truth in favor of cultural constructivism, and the postmodern political principle, which perceives the world as constructed from systems of power and privilege that determine what can be known. The four primary themes of postmodern thinking—the blurring of boundaries, belief in the overwhelming power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the individual and denial of the universal—are found throughout postcolonialism. Though not all postcolonial scholars are postmodern in their outlook, the key figures certainly were and are, and this approach dominates postcolonial Social Justice scholarship and activism today.1
Postcolonialism and the related Theory arose in a specific historical context: the moral and political collapse of European colonialism, which had dominated global politics for more than five centuries. European colonialism began in earnest in around the fifteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth, and it proceeded upon the assumption that the European powers had a right to expand their territories and exert their political and cultural authority over other peoples and regions. Though this sort of empire-building attitude was a standard one typical to many, if not most, cultures before the twentieth century, European colonialism was equipped with sweeping explanations, stories, and justifications of itself—or metanarratives—that proclaimed and sought to legitimize this right in its own terms. These included la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission) in French colonialism and Manifest Destiny in North America—concepts central to knowledge production and political organization from before the Enlightenment right through the Modern period.2
Then, with surprising rapidity, European colonialism faltered and collapsed in the middle of the twentieth century. Following World War II especially, decolonization efforts proceeded quickly on both the material and political levels, and, by the early 1960s, moral concerns about colonialism were prominent in both the academy and among the general public, especially on the radical left. The collapse of colonialism was therefore at the heart of the social and political milieu in which postmodernism arose, especially in the academies of Continental Europe. Eventually postcolonial Theorists established themselves by rejecting colonialist metanarratives by focusing on the discourses (ways of speaking about things) of colonialism. Postcolonialism is therefore mainly a narrowing of postmodernism to focus on one specific element of modernity—colonialism—and the tool it applies is postcolonial Theory, which is Theory adapted to that problem. The postcolonial Theorists studied the discourses of colonialism, which sought to protect the interests of the powerful and privileged, not least the so-called right to dominate other cultures that hegemonic “civilized” Western (and Christian) discourses construed as “uncivilized” and “barbaric.”
As concerns about colonialism grew through the middle part of the twentieth century, the work of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon rapidly gained influence. Fanon, who was born on Martinique under French colonial rule, is often considered foundational to postcolonial Theory. His 1952 book, Black Skins, White Masks,3 offers a powerful critique of both racism and colonialism. His 1959 work, A Dying Colonialism,4 chronicles the changes in culture and politics during the Algerian War of independence from France. Then, his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth,5 set the stage for postcolonialism and postcolonial Theory. Its thesis marked a profound change in thought on the subject. To Fanon, by 1961, colonialism represented, above all else, a systematic denial of the humanity of colonized people: so central is this theme to Fanon’s analysis that he speaks throughout of the literal erasure of people’s identity and dignity. This, he insists, colonized people must resist violently in order to maintain their mental health and self-respect. Fanon’s book was simultaneously deeply critical and openly revolutionary—attitudes that have informed postcolonialism and the more radical aspects of leftist activism ever since.
Writing in 1961, however, Fanon was hardly a postmodernist. His approach is usually understood to be modernist because—while it is profoundly skeptical and clearly both critical and radical—his criticisms draw mainly on Lenin’s Marxist critiques of capitalism, his analysis relies heavily on psychoanalytic theory, and his philosophy is essentially humanist. Nevertheless, later thinkers, including Edward Said, the father of postcolonial Theory, took inspiration from Fanon’s depiction of the psychological impacts of having one’s culture, language, and religion subordinated to another. Fanon argued that the colonialist mind-set has to be disrupted and, if possible, reversed within people who have been subjected to colonial rule and the colonialist worldview that justified it.
This focus on attitudes, biases, and discourses fits well with postmodernism. The scholars who look at postcolonialism in a postmodern way—postcolonial Theorists—also see their work as a project geared towards overcoming certain mind-sets associated with and putatively legitimizing colonialism (rather than focusing on its practical and material effects). They draw primarily on postmodern ideas of knowledge as a construct of power that is perpetuated by discourses. The key idea in postcolonial Theory is that the West constructs itself in opposition to the East, through the way it talks. “We are rational, and they are superstitious.” “We are honest, and they are deceptive.” “We are normal, and they are exotic.” “We are advanced, and they are primitive.” “We are liberal, and they are barbaric.” The East is constructed as the foil to which the West can compare itself. The term the other or othering is used to describe this denigration of other people in order to feel superior. Said called this mind-set “Orientialism”—a move that allowed him to attach a powerful pejorative to Orientalists, meaning contemporary scholars who studied the Far East, South Asia, and especially the Middle East from other perspectives.
Said presented his new ideas in the book Orientalism, published in 1978.6 This book not only laid a foundation for the development of postcolonial Theory, but also brought the concept of applicable postmodern Theory to an American audience. Said, a Palestinian-American Theorist, drew primarily on Fanon and Foucault,7 especially the latter’s notions of “power-knowledge.” Although he ultimately had many criticisms of Foucault’s approach, he considered power-knowledge instrumental to understanding Orientalism. Of primary significance to Said were Foucault’s arguments that how we speak constructs knowledge and that powerful groups in society therefore get to direct the discourse and thus define what constitutes knowledge. For example, Said writes,
I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.8
Said argues that at the core of Orientalism lies a Western discourse, and it was this discourse that constructed the East, by imposing upon it a character that both denigrated and exoticized it. The postmodernist influence on Said would be impossible to miss, even if he hadn’t insisted that Orientialism “cannot possibly” be understood without Foucault’s ideas.
This desire to deconstruct the allegedly hegemonic West has dominated postcolonial Theory ever since: much postcolonial scholarship consists of reading Orientalism into texts. This is in part because Said’s project was a thoroughly literary endeavor—he took particular umbrage at Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness,9 an allegory that raises significant questions about both racism and colonialism. Rather than advocating a broad understanding of thematic elements of the text, Said preferred to scrutinize texts through “close reading,” in order to uncover the various ways in which Western discourses construct, perpetuate, and enforce the Orientalist binary.
In Said, we see applied postmodern discourse analysis, which reads power imbalances into interactions between dominant and marginalized (regional) cultural groups, and aims to rewrite history from the perspective of the oppressed. Such rewriting often takes the highly productive form of recovering lost voices and perspectives to give a fuller and more accurate picture of history, but it is also frequently used to rewrite history in accordance with local or political narratives or to simultaneously elevate multiple irreconcilable histories and thereby implicitly reject any claim to objective knowledge.
We also see the postmodern idea that knowledge is not found but made in the introduction to Orientalism, in which Said writes,
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, “our” Orient becomes “ours” to possess and direct.10
This, then, is not merely deconstruction, but a call to reconstruction. Postcolonial Theory encompasses a (typically radical) political agenda that the original postmodernism lacked. The prominent postcolonial feminist scholar, Linda Hutcheon, also makes this clear.11 Speaking of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, she writes, “Both have distinct political agendas and often a theory of agency that allow them to go beyond the postmodern limits of deconstructing existing orthodoxies into the realms of social and political action.”12 Like many of the critical Theorists who followed the postmodernists and sought to apply their ideas, Hutcheon advocates adapting postmodern Theory to support political activism. Explicitly activism-oriented, postcolonial Theory is thus the earliest category to arise within the applied postmodern school of thought.
Two other scholars are, with Said, held to be foundational to postcolonial Theory: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha. Like Said’s, their work is thoroughly and explicitly postmodern in both derivation and orientation but, due to a greater focus on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of language, it is linguistically and conceptually difficult to the point of obscurity. Spivak’s most significant contribution to postcolonial Theory is probably her 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”13 which focuses intensely on language and expresses concern about the role power structures play in constraining it.
Spivak argues that subalterns—colonized peoples of subordinate status—have no access to speech, even while seemingly representing themselves. This, she contends, is a direct result of the way power has permeated discourse and created insurmountable barriers to communication for those existing outside of the dominant discourses. Drawing upon Said and Foucault, she developed the concept of epistemic violence within “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to describe the injury done to the colonized when their knowledge and status as knowers is marginalized by dominant discourses.
Spivak’s postmodernism is especially evident when she adopts from Derrida the deconstructive idea that there is subversive power in maintaining stereotypes within power-laden binaries, while inverting their hierarchy. She calls this “strategic essentialism.”14 Essentialism, she tells us, is a linguistic tool of domination. Colonizers justify their oppression of the subordinated group by regarding it as a monolithic “other” that can be stereotyped and disparaged. Strategic essentialism applies this same sense of monolithic group identity as an act of resistance, suspending individuality and in-group diversity within the subordinated group for the purpose of promoting common goals through a common identity. In other words, it defines a particular kind of identity politics, built around intentional double standards.
This is typical of Spivak’s Theory. Spivak relies more on Derrida than on Said and Foucault—because Foucault is too politically oriented. Because of Derrida’s focus on the ambiguity and fluidity of language and his use of deeply incomprehensible prose—which resists saying anything concrete on principle—Spivak’s work is deeply ambiguous and obscure. For example, she writes,
I find [Derrida’s] morphology much more painstaking and useful than Foucault’s and Deleuze’s immediate, substantive involvement with more “political” issues—the latter’s invitation to “become woman”—which can make their influence more dangerous for the U.S. academic as enthusiastic radical. Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads catachresis at the origin. He calls for a rewriting of the utopian structural impulse as “rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us.”15
Impenetrability and impracticality were the Theoretical fashion at the time, especially among postcolonial Theorists. Homi K. Bhabha, another noteworthy postmodern example who held much sway over the field through the 1990s, eclipses Spivak in his ability to produce nearly incomprehensible prose. Bhabha is arguably the most deconstructive of the prominent postcolonial scholars, having been influenced primarily by Lacan and Derrida. He focuses mainly on the role language plays in constructing knowledge.16
As befits one who is radically skeptical of the ability of language to convey meaning at all, Bhabha’s writing is notoriously difficult to read. In 1998, he won second place in Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest—beaten only by Judith Butler—for the sentence,
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.17
This bewildering sentence does have a meaning—a thoroughly postmodern one. Broken down, it means that racist, sexual jokes are told by colonizers initially to control a subordinate group, but that, ultimately, they are attempts by colonizers to convince themselves that their own ways of talking about things make sense because they are secretly terrified that they don’t. This particular mind-reading claim permeates Bhabha’s work and underlies his belief that the rejection of stable descriptive categories can subvert colonial dominance.18 This is, of course, entirely unfalsifiable and, when expressed as above, incomprehensible.19
Bhabha’s work is frequently criticized for being unnecessarily obscure and thus difficult to put to use in addressing postcolonial issues. Unlike other postcolonialist scholars, he also explicitly rejects the materialist, political approach to postcolonial studies, along with Marxism and nationalism. Bhabha even finds the language of the postmodern Theory he uses potentially problematic, asking, “Is the language of theory merely another power ploy of the culturally privileged Western élite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own power-knowledge equation?”20 Here he manages to cite Foucault explicitly and Derrida implicitly, while invalidating them both and, consequently, himself.
Postcolonial Theory’s most notable progenitors formed the first branch of the applied postmodern tree, as it grew from its Theoretical trunk. This postmodern focus has consequences. Theirs is not an investigation of the material realities affecting countries and people that were previously under colonial power and the aftermath of that but an analysis of attitudes, beliefs, speech, and mind-sets, which are sacralized or problematized. These they construct simplistically from assumptions that posit white Westerners (and knowledge that is understood as “white” and “Western”) as superior to Eastern, black, and brown people (and “knowledges” associated with non-Western cultures) despite that being precisely the stereotype they claim to want to fight.21
Of course, colonialist narratives existed—there is plenty of evidence of them in colonial history (European and otherwise). For example, consider this repulsive passage from 1871:
The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races, by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity…. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity, and almost no sense of honour; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race…. Let each do what he is made for, and all will be well.22
But this isn’t an attitude one encounters much today. It gradually became less and less morally tenable over the twentieth century, with the fall of colonialism and rise of the civil rights movements, and would now rightly be recognized as far-right extremism. Nevertheless, these attitudes are cited in postcolonial Theory as though their past existence produced an indelible imprint upon how people discuss and view issues today. Postcolonial Theory establishes much of its claim to importance by assuming there must be permanent problems that have been handed down to us through language constructed centuries ago.
The real social changes that rendered the attitudes in the above paragraph almost universally objectionable weren’t predicated on postmodern analysis, or postmodern in orientation. They preceded those developments and proceeded from and functioned by means of universal and individual liberalism. This form of liberalism holds that science, reason, and human rights are the property of every individual and do not belong exclusively to any set of people—whether they be men or white Westerners or anyone else. Postmodern postcolonial approaches differ radically from this liberal approach and are often criticized for perpetuating Orientalist binaries, rather than seeking to overcome them.
A (Western) colonial mind-set says: “Westerners are rational and scientific while Asians are irrational and superstitious. Therefore, Europeans must rule Asia for its own good.”
A liberal mind-set says: “All humans have the capacity to be rational and scientific, but individuals will vary widely. Therefore, all humans must have all opportunities and freedoms.”
A postmodern mind-set says: “The West has constructed the idea that rationality and science are good in order to perpetuate its own power and marginalize nonrational, nonscientific forms of knowledge production from elsewhere.”
So, while the liberal mind-set rejects the arrogant colonial claim that reason and science belong to white Westerners, the postmodern one accepts it, but regards reason and science themselves as just one way of knowing and as oppressive—an oppression they attempt to redress by applying the core tenets of postmodernism. The applied postmodern mind-set on colonialism is similar to the postmodern mind-set, but adds an activist conclusion.
An applied postmodern mind-set says: “The West has constructed the idea that rationality and science are good in order to perpetuate its own power and marginalize nonrational, nonscientific forms of knowledge production from elsewhere. Therefore, we must now devalue white, Western ways of knowing for belonging to white Westerners and promote Eastern ones (in order to equalize the power imbalance).”
This practice is frequently referred to as decolonizing and seeking research justice.
While, initially, postcolonial Theory scholarship mostly took the form of literary criticism and the discursive analysis of writing about colonialism—and was frequently couched in highly obscure postmodern Theoretical language—the field gradually expanded and simplified. By the early 2000s, the concept of decolonizing everything had begun to dominate scholarship and activism, and new scholars were using and developing the concepts in different ways, with more actionable elements. They retained the postmodern principles and themes and extended the focus beyond ideas and speech about literal colonialism to perceived attitudes of superiority towards people of certain identity statuses. These included displaced indigenous groups and people from racial or ethnic minorities who could be considered in some way subaltern, diasporic, or hybrid, or whose non-Western beliefs, cultures, or customs had been devalued. The aims of postcolonial Theory also became more concrete: focusing less on disrupting discourses they saw as colonialist in the fairly pessimistic way typical of postmodernism and more on taking active steps to decolonize these, using the militant Social Justice approach that has taken hold since 2010. This has mainly occurred via various decolonize movements, which can be taken as the product of more recent Theorists having reified the assumptions of postcolonial Theory and put them into action.
What it means to decolonize a thing that is not literally colonized varies considerably. It can refer simply to including scholars of all nationalities and races: this is the primary focus of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students (NUS) campaigns, “Why is My Curriculum White?” (2015) and #LiberateMyDegree (2016).23 Such campaigns focus on reducing reliance on white scholars from former colonizing powers and replacing them with scholars of color from formerly colonized regions. However, we also see a drive for a diversity of “knowledges” and epistemologies—ways of deciding what is true—under Theory often described as “(other) ways of knowing.” This comes with a strong inclination to critique, problematize, and disparage knowledge understood as Western.
This can take the form of reading physical spaces as though they were “texts” in need of deconstruction—an example of how postmodern Theory blurs boundaries and focuses on the power of “language.” The 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement, which began at the University of Cape Town in 2015 as an effort to remove a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes and later spread to other universities, including Oxford, provides a good example. As a British businessman and politician in southern Africa, Rhodes had been responsible for much of the legal framework of South African apartheid, and therefore it is perfectly reasonable to object to depictions that paint him in a solely favorable light. However, the rhetoric around this movement went far beyond objecting to the exploitative and illiberal practices of apartheid and colonialism. At Oxford, for instance, demands for symbolic changes, such as the removal of “offensive” colonialist statuary and imagery, were wrapped up with other activist demands.24 This included yet another push to increase representation of ethnic and racial minorities who agree with Theory on campus and increased focus on what was studied in the curriculum and how it was being studied.
To elaborate, in the introduction to Decolonising the University, volume editors Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu explain that decolonization can refer to the study of colonialism both in its material manifestations and through discourses, and it can also offer alternative ways of thinking.25 This is a form of standpoint theory—the belief that knowledge comes from the lived experience of different identity groups, who are differently positioned in society and thus see different aspects of it.26 For decolonial scholars, both “Eurocentric forms of knowledge” and “the epistemological authority assigned uniquely to the Western university as the privileged site of knowledge production”27 are problems, and “the point is not simply to deconstruct such understandings, but to transform them.”28 In other words, by using activism to achieve a symbolic “textual” aim, affecting the statuary on campus, decolonization activists also attempted to bolster their ranks, while “reforming” education to rely more explicitly on their applications of Theory.
Thus, two focal points of postcolonial Theory are evident in the effort to decolonize everything: national origin and race.29 Bhambra and colleagues, for instance, influenced by Said, see knowledge as situated geographically: “The content of university knowledge remains principally governed by the West for the West.”30 For the Theorist Kehinde Andrews, critical race Theory is more influential, and knowledge is more closely related to skin color: “The neglect of Black knowledge by society is no accident but a direct result of racism.” We must, Andrews tells us, “forever leave behind the idea that knowledge can be produced value free. Our politics shape our understanding of the world and the pretence of neutrality ironically makes our endeavours less valid.”31
Note the assertion that “value free” and “neutral” knowledge is impossible to obtain and must be abandoned forever. Theory holds that objective knowledge—that which is true for everyone, regardless of their identity—is unobtainable, because knowledge is always bound up with cultural values. This is the postmodern knowledge principle. For Theory, the knowledge that is currently most valued is intrinsically white and Western, and it interprets this as an injustice—no matter how reliably that knowledge was produced. This is the postmodern political principle. This common belief is represented by the word “universal” in the “Aims” of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford, which sought to: “remedy the highly selective narrative of traditional academia—which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge—by integrating subjugated and local epistemologies … [and creating] a more intellectually rigorous, complete academy.”32
Throughout even the most recent applications of Theory, then, we see radical skepticism that knowledge can be objectively, universally, or neutrally true. This leads to a belief that rigor and completeness come not from good methodology, skepticism, and evidence, but from identity-based “standpoints” and multiple “ways of knowing.”33 That such an approach doesn’t tend to work is considered unimportant because it is deemed to be more just. That is, this belief proceeds from an ought that is not necessarily concerned about what is.
This view is used to advocate and engage in historical revisionism—rewriting history, often in the service of a political agenda—by accusing rigorous methods of being “positivist” and thus biased. As Dalia Gebrial puts it in Decolonising the University:
The public’s sense of what history is remains influenced by positivist tendencies, whereby the role of the historian is to simply “reveal” facts about pasts that are worth revealing, in a process removed from power. This epistemological insistence on history as a positivist endeavour functions as a useful tool of coloniality in the institution, as it effaces the power relations that underpin what the “production of history” has thus far looked like.34
The complaint here is, effectively, that history cannot be trusted because it is “written by the winners.” While there is some truth beneath that concern, most rigorous, empirical historians attempt to mitigate the tendency of history to be written from the bias of the writer by seeking disconfirming evidence of their claims, to help them get at the truth—which they, unlike Theorists, believe exists. For example, medieval war historians often advise naive readers of accounts of battles to divide the number of soldiers claimed to have been present by ten to get a more realistic figure. This tendency to massively overstate numbers (probably to make the story more exciting) was discovered by empirical historians seeking out records of soldiers’ pay. Similarly, empirical feminist scholars have used legal and financial records to reveal that women played a much more active role in society, law, and business than had long been assumed. Our knowledge of history is skewed by the biased records that survive, but the way to mitigate this is to investigate such claims empirically and reveal the falsity of biased narratives, rather than include a greater range of biases and declare some of them immune to criticism.
In addition to criticizing empirical scholarship, decolonial narratives frequently attack rationality, which postcolonial scholars see as a Western way of thinking. For example, the 2018 essay, “Decolonising Philosophy,” which appears in the book Decolonising the University, begins,
it will be difficult to contest the idea that, generally speaking, philosophy as a field or a discipline in modern Western universities remains a bastion of Eurocentrism, whiteness in general, and white heteronormative male structural privilege and superiority in particular.35
They relate the worth of philosophical concepts to their authors’ gender, race, sexuality, and geography—in the typical style of standpoint theory. Ironically, the authors do this by introducing Foucault’s idea of “power-knowledge,” despite the evidence that Foucault was, in fact, a white Western man, whose influence has been most strongly felt in the West.
Foucault’s concept of knowledge and the way in which it is used to deconstruct categories accepted as real is influential on this entire line of Theoretical thought. It appears, for example, in this description of the mission of decolonization:
Any serious effort to decolonise philosophy cannot be satisfied with simply adding new areas to an existing arrangement of power/knowledge, leaving the Eurocentric norms that define the field as a whole in place, or reproducing such norms themselves. For example, when engaging in non-European philosophies it is important to avoid reproducing problematic conceptions of time, space and subjectivity that are embedded in the Eurocentric definition of European philosophy and its many avatars.36
That is, it is not enough to add other philosophical approaches to the field one wishes to decolonize. Postcolonial Theorists insist European philosophy must be entirely rejected—even to the point of deconstructing time and space as Western constructs. (As we shall see, this sort of claim is also found in queer Theory, which operates on very similar postmodern terms, derived from Michel Foucault.)
Within this matured postcolonial Theory, all four of the postmodern themes are evident—the blurring of boundaries, the power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the universal and individual in favor of group identity. These themes are explicitly central to the postcolonial Theory mind-set and decolonize movement. We can find them all in this statement of the purpose of decolonizing philosophy:
Philosophy seems to have a special place among discourses in the liberal arts because it focuses on the roots of the university at large: reason. This includes providing criteria for identifying and demarcating the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences, as well as for distinguishing reason from faith, secularism from religion, and the “primitive” and the ancient from the modern. These are central columns in the edifice that sustains modern Western rationality and the modern Western university. The modern Western research university and liberal arts therefore owe much of their basic conceptual infrastructure to philosophical formulations of rationality, universalism, subjectivity, the relationship between the subject and object, truth and method—all of which become relevant targets of critical analysis in the decolonial turn.37
This is a textbook example of applied postmodernism, and it is, of course, actionable. The action it advocates is often referred to as “research justice.”
Research justice acts upon a belief that science, reason, empiricism, objectivity, universality, and subjectivity have been overvalued as ways of obtaining knowledge while emotion, experience, traditional narratives and customs, and spiritual beliefs have been undervalued. Therefore, a more complete and just system of knowledge production would value the latter at least as much as the former—in fact, more, because of the long reign of science and reason in the West. The 2015 book, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change, edited by Andrew Jolivette, is a key text here. Jolivette, professor and former department chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, defines the aims of this method in his introduction:
“[R]esearch justice” is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that aims to transform structural inequalities in research…. It is built around a vision of equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge, including the cultural, spiritual, and experiential, with the goal of greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change.38
This is activism. It seeks not only to revolutionize understandings of knowledge and rigor in university curricula—not necessarily to improve them—but also to influence public policies away from evidenced and reasoned work and towards the emotional, religious, cultural, and traditional, with an emphasis on lived experience. It seeks to challenge the core understanding of “scholarly research” as the gathering of empirical data for analysis, in order to better understand social issues. This theme comes across most strongly in the 2004 book, Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Contexts: Critical Personal Narratives,39 which focuses on indigenous studies and is edited by Kagendo Mutua, professor of special education at the University of Alabama, and Beth Blue Swadener, Professor of Culture, Society and Education / Justice and Social Inquiry at the University of Arizona. Citing Homi Bhabha, the editors introduce the essays by claiming,
These works stand at the center of the “beginning of the presencing” of a disharmonious, restive, unharnessable (hence unessentializable) knowledge that is produced at the ex-centric site of neo/post/colonial resistance, “which can never allow the national (read: colonial/western) history to look itself narcissistically in the eye.”40 (emphasis in original)
This means that the authors of the essays within this volume are not obliged to make sense, produce reasoned arguments, avoid logical contradiction, or provide any evidence for their claims. The normal expectations of scholarly “research” do not apply when pursuing research justice. This is alarming, and it is justified Theoretically. In the words of professor of indigenous education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, Linda Tuhiwai Smith,
[F]rom the vantage point of the colonised, a position from which I write and choose to privilege, the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself “research” is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.41
It is unclear how this attitude is likely to help people in the “indigenous world,” which, barring the decolonization of time, also happens to have entered the twenty-first century.
Ultimately, “research justice” amounts to judging scholarly productions not by their rigor or quality but by the identity of their producer and privileging those understood by postcolonial theory as marginalized as long as they are advocating knowledge production methods and conclusions that conform to those of postcolonial theory. This is an understandable move for postmodernists, who deny that there can be any objective criteria of rigor or quality, only those that have been privileged and those that have been marginalized. But in science (including social science) there is an objective criterion of quality, namely, correspondence to reality. Some scientific theories work and others don’t. It is hard to see how scientific theories that don’t correspond with reality and consequently don’t work can benefit marginalized people, or anyone.
The attitude that rigorous, evidence-based research and reasoned, non-contradictory arguments belong to the West while experiential, irrational, and contradictory “knowledge” belongs to colonized or displaced indigenous people is of course not universally accepted by colonized and indigenous scholars. Many of them continue to produce empirical and materialist analyses of economic, political, and legal issues in various settings. These scholars criticize the postmodern approach to postcolonialism. Perhaps the most outstanding critic is the Indian postcolonial scholar Meera Nanda. She argues that, by assigning science and reason to the West and traditional, spiritual, experiential beliefs to India, postmodern scholars perpetuate Orientalism and make it very difficult to address the many real issues that can best be tackled using science and reason. In these critics’ view, she observes, “modern science is as much a local tradition of the West, as the indigenous knowledge of the non-Western subaltern is a local knowledge of his culture.”42 Thus, criticizing traditional knowledge using science is understood from within postcolonial Theory to be, as Nanda puts it,
the stuff of “Orientalist” Enlightenment, a colonial modernity which privileges a Western conception of reason and modernity over non-Western ways of knowing and being. We postcolonial hybrids are supposed to have seen through the claims of “universality” and “progress” of science (the scare quotes are obligatory). We no longer believe in the “binaries” between science and non-science, or truth and customary beliefs, but see them both as a little bit of each. This condition of permanent hybridity thus does not put any pressure to resolve any contradiction … : Let a thousand contradictions bloom!43
Nanda recognizes that the Theoretical approach to postcolonialism maintains the problem of Orientalism by attempting to erect the same categories and simply reverse the power structures (the same very Derridean trick intentionally employed by Spivak). While colonialism constructs the East as a foil to the West, postcolonial Theory intentionally constructs the East in nobly oppressed opposition to the West (while liberalism says that people are people, wherever they live). For Nanda, this postmodern approach, with its focus on nonclass identities, hinders the technological and social progress that would benefit the poorer people of India and thus is much more in keeping with conservative attitudes than progressive ones.44 Furthermore, Nanda maintains that it is demeaning to Indian people to assign irrational and superstitious knowledge to them and to assume that science is a tradition that belongs to the West, rather than a uniquely human development that is difficult to achieve, but extremely beneficial to all societies.45
Indeed. The postmodern position that Western society is dominated by discourses of science and reason is not supported by the evidence that most of us still value our group narratives, cultures, and beliefs and know little of science. Attacks on science from the religious right and the postmodern left are strong influences on society that always have to be struggled against.
As an applied postmodern Theory, postcolonial Theory is of considerable real-world concern and poses threats to society that the original postmodernism did not. The drives to decolonize everything from hair46 to English literature curricula,47 to tear down paintings and smash statues, and to erase history while opening up revisionist discussions of it, are particularly alarming. When Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling become nothing more than symbols of racist imperialism and their achievements and writings are too tainted to be acknowledged, we lose not only the potential for any nuanced discussion of history and progress but also the positive contributions of the men themselves.
More egregiously still, postcolonial Theory, with its disparagement of science and reason as provincial Western ways of knowing, not only threatens the foundations of advanced contemporary societies but also impedes the progress of developing ones. Since many developing countries would benefit from technological infrastructure, which could ameliorate some of the world’s most significant causes of human suffering—malaria, water shortages, poor sanitation in remote rural areas, and the like—this claim is not only factually wrong, morally vacant, and patronizing; it is also negligent and dangerous.
Great practical harm is also done by postcolonialism’s cultural relativism, which is found in both its scholarship and activism. It believes that the West, having trampled other cultures and enforced alien moral frameworks on them, must now cease to criticize, or in some cases help more directly, any aspect of those cultures. This results in great ethical inconsistency in human rights activism, with serious real-world consequences. For example, when feminists from Saudi Arabia, secular liberals from Pakistan, and LGBT rights activists from Uganda have attempted to raise the support of the English-speaking world by using hashtags in English on social media to draw attention to human rights abuses, they have received little response from the applied postmodern scholars and activists who might otherwise be assumed to be in their corners. This may seem baffling or hypocritical, but it makes sense within a theoretical framework that does not operate according to universal principles of human rights but believes in binary systems of power, which allow only for the Western oppressor and Eastern (or globally Southern) oppressed. This results in two common claims:
First, postcolonial Theory insists that getting a non-Western culture to accept that there are human rights abuses taking place locally requires colonizing that culture with Western notions of human rights and their violation. This is verboten, because it reinforces the power dynamic that postcolonial Theory exists to dismantle.
Second, postcolonial Theory frequently claims that any human rights abuses occurring in previously colonized countries are the legacy of colonialism and its analysis stops there. This obviously makes such abuses difficult to address in their own contexts and with their own stated motivations, which are often connected to non-Western religious and cultural beliefs. For instance, the widespread abuse of women, secularists, and LGBT in strict Islamist cultures is not taken as a feature of authoritarian interpretations of Islam—as the Islamists themselves claim—but interpreted as a result of Western colonialism and imperialism, which perverted that culture and caused it to become abusive. This is a direct hindrance to the very secularization campaigns that could help ameliorate those problems.
This arises from first assuming the cause of a phenomenon and then looking for evidence of that cause. Since they look at oppression only in terms of colonialism, colonialism is all these scholars and activists are equipped to find. As a result, not only do they hamstring their ability to understand—and therefore ameliorate—the problems they are seeking to solve, but they also tend to make them worse. This commonly results in a marked tendency to neglect the rights of women and of sexual and religious minorities, unless they are threatened by white Westerners. This goes against achieving social justice—but it’s integral to the ideology called Social Justice.
Because they view knowledge and ethics as cultural constructs perpetuated in language, postcolonial Theorists can be extremely difficult to discuss disagreements with. Evidenced and reasoned arguments are understood Theoretically as Western constructs and are therefore considered invalid or even oppressive. Those who disagree with postcolonial Theory are seen as confirming the Theory and as defending racist, colonialist, or imperialist attitudes for their own benefit and to shut out the viewpoints of others.
Furthermore, this scholarship, which proceeds on the assumption that there are power imbalances to be discovered if language and interactions are deconstructed, cannot help but “find” increasing examples of “othering,” “Orientalism,” and “appropriation” in ever more tendentious ways. This is not a bug, but a feature. It is what the critical approach in Theory means. There is always more to interpret and more to deconstruct, and, with enough motivation and creativity, anything can be problematized. Intense sensitivity to language and the reading of power imbalances into all interactions that involve an individual with a marginalized identity and a white Westerner are common to all forms of applied postmodern Social Justice scholarship.
This problem should not be underestimated. We can only learn from the realities of colonialism and its aftermath by studying them rigorously. Those postcolonial scholars and activists who deny the attainability of objective reality and seek to revise history along Theoretical lines are not doing this. Neither are those who reject logical reasoning, evidence-based research, science, and medicine, nor those who argue that space and time themselves are Western constructs, nor those who write incomprehensible, obfuscatory prose and deny that language can have meaning anyway.
These scholars, whose influence far outweighs their numbers, generally trained or work in elite Western academia and operate according to a densely theoretical framework that originated in France and proliferated in the United States and the United Kingdom. Their work is of very little practical relevance to people living in previously colonized countries, who are trying to deal with the political and economic aftermath. There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.51