Postcolonialism and Ethics

Postcolonialism and Ethics

It has been argued that, despite its institutional variation, colonialism typically displays three characteristics: domination, exploitation, and cultural imposition. Much work on colonialism within contemporary political theory and ethics has focused on the extent to which its exploitative character has had lasting effects on present-day distributions of benefits and burdens. A different perspective is taken by writers working within the postcolonial tradition, which, taking its lead from literary studies, emphasizes a variety of topics relating to the cultural effects of colonization. Postcolonialism does not simply seek to tell the story of what happened after decolonization, but seeks a critical perspective on its ongoing, problematic legacy: as Young writes, “Postcolonial critique focuses on forces of oppression and coercive domination that operate in the contemporary world: the politics of anticolonialism and neo-colonialism, race, gender, nationalism, class and ethnicities define its terrain” (2001: 11). A key theme here is that there is more to achieving liberation through decolonization than the formal decoupling of state apparatuses: as Diana Brydon writes, “Postcolonialism matters because decolonization is far from complete and colonial mentalities, including the inequalities they nurture, die hard” (Kohn and McBride 2011: 8). A sense of the diversity of work in this field can

be gained from Stephen Slemon’s description of some its associated perspectives: It has been used as a way of ordering a critique of totalizing forms of Western historicism; as a portmanteau term for a retooled notion of “class,” as a subset of both postmodernism and poststructuralism; as the name for a condition of nativist longing in post-independence national groupings; as a cultural marker of nonresidency for a Third World intellectual cadre; as the inevitable underside of a fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist power; as an oppositional form of “reading practice”; and … as the name for a category of “literary” activity which sprang from a new and welcome political energy going on within what used to be called “Commonwealth” literary studies (quoted in Ashcroft et al. 2007: 169–70). Giving a general characterization of such varied approaches is not easy. Indeed, much postcolonial writing seeks to challenge the way in which the history of colonization and decolonization has been related and categorized by European writers, rather than by members of nonEuropean and non-Western communities who themselves experienced the injustice of colonization. From the perspective of writers such as Edward Said, the production and control of knowledge itself constitutes an exercise of power (Said 1978), meaning that an analysis of the domination characteristic of colonialism must seek to take account of the cultural meanings which attach themselves to our attempts to understand both past and present. What this suggests is that a literature on the ethics of colonialism written by Western academics with little regard to the voices of those who have suffered domination runs the risk not only of misunderstanding the nature, but of compounding the effects, of historical injustice. The ethical implications of this for those working within Western traditions are twofold. First, engagement with non-Western writing can help to improve understanding of the rights and wrongs of colonialism, and also of the broader questions of global justice and multicultural citizenship: by deepening our understanding of the cultural lives of others, but also by challenging our own moral principles and assumptions, particularly in relation to the primacy of liberal democracy and moral universalism (see AFRICAN ETHICS). Kohn and McBride, for example, have recently drawn extensively on the work of a wide range of postcolonial writers, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jalal al-e Ahmad, Amílcar Cabral, and José Mariátegui, largely neglected in Western political thought, to reflect on the nature of political change and the foundation of new regimes, with a stated aim of challenging colonial power and perceptions by setting up a clash between liberal democratic and postcolonial ideological positions (Kohn and McBride 2011: 13). Second, it may be that such an engagement is not only helpful for thinking about colonial wrongdoing, but forms a constitutive part of a proper rectificatory response. If one understands the wrongs of colonialism not just in terms of economic exploitation and physical violence, but also in relation to the establishment of ongoing forms of cultural imposition and domination, then there are powerful reasons for seeking to include non-Western voices in academic writing on colonization and decolonization