Postcolonialism: the Emperor's New Clothes ?
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399600500307 |
| Published date | 01 September 1996 |
| Date | 01 September 1996 |
| Author | Jeannine Purdy |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
405-
POSTCOLONIALISM:
THE
EMPEROR’S
NEW
CLOTHES ?
JEANNINE
PURDY
ORE
THAN
30
years
ago,
Jean-Paul
Sartre
wrote
in
his
preface
to
Frantz
Fanon’s
The
Wretched
of the
Earth,
’In
the
colonies
the
truth
1
stood
naked,
but
the
citizens
of
the
mother
country
preferred
it
with
clothes
on:
the
native
had
to
love
them,
something
in
the
way
mothers
are
loved’
(Sartre,
1961/1990:
7).
The
naked
truth
of
colonialism
was
exposed
in
Fanon’s
powerful
evocation
of
’a
world
cut
in
two’;
a
world
divided
between
the colonizers
and
the
wretched
of
the
earth -
the
colonized.
And
according
to
Fanon,
in
such
a
world,
’The
dividing
line,
the
frontiers
are
shown
by
bar-
racks
and
police
stations’
(Fanon,
1961/1990:
29).
Police
stations,
as
sites
of
legal
violence,
were
regarded
as
crucial
to
the
maintenance
of
the
divided
world
of
a
colonial
regime.
Fanon’s
project,
however,
cannot
be
simply
assimilated
with
more
recent
critiques
of
law,
such
as
Austin
Sarat
and
Thomas
Kearns’s
’A
Journey
through
Forgetting:
Toward
a
Jurisprudence
of
Violence’
(1991).
Unlike
the
’ubiquity
of
law’s
violence’
posited
by
Sarat
and
Kearns
(p.
211),
Fanon
was
concerned
to
show
that
the
function
of,
and
the
attitudes
towards
law
and
its
violence,
varied
according
to
which
side
of
the
colonial
divide
one
stood
on.’
If
one
stood
on
the
side
of
the
colonizers,
the
educational
system,
whether
lay
or
clerical,
the
structure
of
moral
reflexes
passed
down
from
father
to
son,
the
exemplary
honesty
of
workers
who
are
given
a
medal
after
fifty
years
of
good
and
loyal
service,
and
the
affection
which
springs
from
harmonious
relations
and
good
behaviour -
all
these
aesthetic
406
expressions
of
respect
for
the
established
order
serve
to
create
around
the
exploited
person
an
atmosphere
of
submission
and
of
inhibition
which
lightens
the
task
of policing
considerably.
(Fanon,
1961/1990:
29;
emphasis
added)
More
than
30
years
ago
Fanon
showed
us
that
the
violent
law
that
was
known
to
the
colonized
was
not
the
same
law
that
was
known
to
others.
But
what
if,
even
after
the
work
of
Fanon
and
others
like
him,
the
coloniz-
ers
wanted
no
less
than
they
did
in
the
past
to
be
loved?
Whatever
the
varia-
tions
between
the
theorists
of
’postcoloniality’,
because
postcolonialism
facilitates
a
view
of
the
world
as
fundamentally
altered,
it
enables
the
colon-
izers
once
more
to
demand
the
love
of
’the
native’
as
they
proclaim
their
progress
beyond
the
colonial
(McClintock,
1994).
While
it
is
undoubtedly
true
that
postcolonial’
studies
is
a
’far
from
unified
field’
(Williams
and
Chris-
man,
1994:
5),
it
is
my
contention
that
within
the
play
of
colonial
discourse
analysis,
psychoanalysis,
deconstruction,
feminism
and
’other
forms
of
Marxism’
which
constitute
the
postcolonial
terrain
(p.
5)2
what
may
have
been
intended
to
do
no
more
than
give
recognition
to
the
changing
circumstances
of
colonialism
(alluded
to
later)
has
perhaps
proved
far
more
’dangerous’
than
intended
(Edmond,
1995;
Robinson,
1993).
Like
the
word
itself,
postcolonial
analyses
often
in
effect
go
far
beyond
being
supplementary
to
analyses
of
colonialism,
such
as
Fanon’s,
and
issues
of
class
and
violence
have
been
dimin-
ished.3
3
AFTER
COLONIALISM?
Francis
Snyder
and
Douglas
Hay
indicate
something
of the
academic
pro-
clivity
to
divide
and
categorize
on
the
basis
of
what
they
describe
as
the
’main
fault
lines’
of
time
and
space.
They
note
the
entrenched
divisions
found
in
aca-
demic
reasoning
’between
past
and
present,
on
the
one
hand,
and
between
First
World
and
Third
World,
on
the
other’
(1987: 4).
Peter
Fitzpatrick
(1992)
elaborates
upon
something
of
the
constitutive
nature
of
such
posited
div-
isions,
with
reference
to
notions
of
’us’
and
’them’,
and
how
these
are
integral
to
our
legal
systems
and
sense
of
’civilization’.
Edward
Said
also
trenchantly
comments
upon
the
divisions
colonizers
made
between
themselves
and
their
rivals.
He
notes,
’The
pattern
is,
alas,
always
the
same:
critics
of
colonialism
...
attack
abuses
in
places
and
by
powers
that
do
not
greatly
touch
them’
(1993: 250).
When
European
nations
dominated,
’European
intellectuals
were
prone
to
attack
the
abuses
of
rival
empires,
while
either
mitigating
or
excus-
ing
the
practices
of
their
own....
Doctrines
of
cultural
exceptionalism
are
altogether
too
abundant’
(p.
291).
We
find
the
tendency
in
our
reasoning
to
create
divisions
between
’us’
and
’them’,
the
civilized
and
the
savage,
now
and
then.
Snyder
and
Hay
indicate
how
such
reasoning
can
limit
our
understanding.
Fitzpatrick
and
Said
sound
more
dire
warnings:
Fitzpatrick
indicates
its
connection
with
racism;
Said
with
imperialism.
It
is
my
contention
that
the
categories
which
divide
the
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