The term white savior, sometimes combined with savior complex to write white savior complex, refers to a white person who provides help to non-white people in a self-serving manner. The role is considered a modern-day version of what is expressed in the poem "The White Man's Burden" (1899) by Rudyard Kipling. The term has been associated with Africa, and certain characters in film and television have been critiqued as white savior figures. Writer Teju Cole combined the term with "industrial complex" (derived from military–industrial complex and similarly applied elsewhere) to coin "White Savior Industrial Complex".
Association with Africa
Africa has a history of slavery and of colonization. Damian Zane of BBC News
said due to the history, Africans find the "white savior" attitude to
help them "deeply patronising and offensive". Zane said, "Some argue
that aid can be counter-productive, as it means African countries will
continue to rely on outside help." Bhakti Shringarpure, writing for The Guardian,
said, "Westerners trying to help poor, suffering countries have often
been accused of having a 'white saviour complex': a term tied up in
colonial history where Europeans descended to 'civilise' the African
continent." The Washington Post's Karen Attiah said the white savior framework in Africa "follows the venerable tradition" of the novella Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad and that the tradition included the film Machine Gun Preacher (2011), the public relations campaign related to the documentary Kony 2012 (2012), and the writings of journalist Nicholas Kristof.
Actor and producer Louise Linton wrote a memoir about her gap year in Zambia, In Congo's Shadow, and wrote an article for The Telegraph, "How my dream gap year in Africa turned into a nightmare", to promote the book. Michael Schaub of Los Angeles Times
said, "The reaction to Linton's article was swift and negative,
accusing her of using clichés and misrepresentations... Several people
have described Linton's memoir as a 'white savior' fantasy." Zambians and other Africans negatively criticized the article on social media. Attiah said the popular Instagram account "BarbieSavior" was inspired by the backlash to Linton's words. Special Broadcasting Service's Amal Awad said the Instagram account parodied "a reckless trend" of voluntourism
(volunteering and touring) in which "'white saviours' use the less
fortunate like props in their social media profiles". Awad said the
interest in volunteering encouraged a business model that leverages a
country's existing social issues and charges tourists for volunteering
to be a "saviour".
Baaz, Gondola, Marijnen, and Verweijen, writing in Foreign Affairs, were critical of the "white savior complex" in the 2014 documentary Virunga, which features the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Virunga National Park and the conservation work of its park rangers.
They said, "The movie features endless footage of a park guard hugging
and playing with the gorillas, evoking the notion of the 'noble savage'
who is close to nature, honest and naive, and dependent on the white man
for his salvation. Rarely do we see the Congolese exercising political
agency, even though there are numerous civil society activists in the
region, often working at great personal risk."
For decades, the British charity Comic Relief
sent white celebrities to African countries to have filmed their
emotional reactions to impoverished conditions as part of asking the
public for money. In 2020, they suspended the practice after criticism
that it perpetuated white-savior stereotypes. One of the key critics was British Labour Party politician David Lammy, who in 2019 criticized the charity for "white savior" media in its African campaign. Reuters
reported, "Lammy, who is of Guyanese descent, said online photos...
evoked negative stereotypes about Africa and its reliance on Western
white people for help." The charity and its presenter Stacey Dooley initially argued against the criticism. The Uganda-based
campaign group No White Saviors said of the controversy, "There are
levels to the white savior complex. You can mean well, do some good
along the way and actively be perpetuating the (white savior complex)." NBC News
said No White Saviors "tries to raise awareness about the negative
impact many 'mainly white' aid workers have had on 'black and brown
communities in the name of charity or mission work,'" highlighting
instances of the role such as Renee Bach, a white US citizen who lacked
medical qualifications. Under her charity's care in Uganda, over one
hundred children died.
Appearance in film
In film, the white savior is a cinematic trope in which a white character rescues people of color
from their plight. The white savior is portrayed as messianic and often
learns something about themselves in the process of rescuing. The trope reflects how media represents race relations by racializing concepts like morality as identifiable with white people over nonwhite people. White saviors are often male and are sometimes out of place in their own society until they lead minorities or foreigners. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness
labels the stories as fantasies that "are essentially grandiose,
exhibitionistic, and narcissistic". Types of stories include white
travels to "exotic" Asian locations, white defense against racism in the
American South, or white protagonists having "racially diverse" helpers.
Appearance in television
Stephanie Greco Larson, writing in Media & Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment, said Diff'rent Strokes (1978–1986) and Webster
(1983–1987) were "shows in which white families adopt black children"
and represented versions of "the white man's burden theme on
television".
Robin R. Means Coleman said, "In these comedies, Black children are
rescued from their dysfunctional families or communities by Whites." In particular, Diff'rent Strokes featured the white millionaire character Philip Drummond. Film historian Donald Bogle said, "The millionaire Drummond becomes a great white father figure,
able to provide the material comforts (as well as the subliminal
emotional ones) and the cultural milieu that the Black community
supposedly could never hope to match." Dustin Tahmahkera writes that
Coleman labeled Drummond a "white savior" type who uses "his
representational power to save the day by determining a conflict
resolution that appeases all parties" including the indigenous
representative Longwalker in the episode "Burial Ground". Tahmahkera
also said a 1985 episode of Punky Brewster
featured the girl protagonist telling a ghost story about her alter-ego
Princess Moon helping "ancient Indians [who] suddenly appear... as cave
dwellers who need a white savior... to defeat an evil spirit and help
keep their Last of the Dogmen-like secret existence intact."
Larson said, "Inner-city schools have been the site of white
man's burden dramas on television for decades" with TV series featuring
white savior teachers. Larson identified the following series with such
teachers: Room 222 (1969–1974), Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979), The White Shadow (1978–1981), and Boston Public (2000–2004). Larson said while Room 222 and Boston Public
also had black teachers that "challenge the assumption that blacks are
inherently inferior... these shows continue to avoid laying blame on
social institutions for the status of blacks by showing the success of
the individual black teachers."
The TV series Iron Fist (2017–2018) features Finn Jones as the superhero Iron Fist. Both the originating comic book character and the TV series actor are white. Prior to the series airing The New York Times
reported that the casting had received criticism for not changing the
character to be Asian-American. The newspaper quoted arguments put
forward by Keith Chow, editor-in-chief of The Nerds of Color pop
culture blog, "If you’re going to have all these trappings of
Orientalism on top of a white savior trope, why not upend both of those
things by casting an Asian-American to play the role?" Jones denied that
Iron Fist would be a white savior figure and said that the series would
address critics' concerns.
"White Savior Industrial Complex"
Writer Teju Cole, who coined the term "White Savior Industrial Complex"
Writer Teju Cole coined the term "White Savior Industrial Complex" following the release of the documentary Kony 2012 in March 2012, extrapolating the term in a seven-part response on Twitter. He later wrote an article for The Atlantic about the term.
From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest
growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality.
The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
This world exists simply to satisfy the needs--including, importantly, the sentimental needs--of white people and Oprah.
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is
about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5
million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.
I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a
wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
Cole's response became a viral phenomenon, and The Guardian's Bhakti Shringarpure reflected on the supportive Internet response to the Kony 2012
political campaign, "With the prevalence of campaigns, apps and games
calling on us to help without really putting ourselves out, it seems
that the white saviour idea is still alive and well – but now, the mode
is digital." Heather Laine Talley, writing in Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance,
said of the response to Cole coining the term, "The very idea of the
white savior industrial complex was met with both celebration and rage.
Cole was alternately described as a truth teller and as a racist."
Talley summarized Cole's response to his critics, "Ultimately, Cole
implores Western (white) do-gooders to rethink doing good in two ways.
First, own up to the motives that drive philanthropic interventions, so
that personal catharsis does not subsume the real need of others.
Second, consider the structural underpinnings and historical legacies
that together sustain the very infrastructure of the problems that
captivate our activist hearts."
Tim Engles, writing in Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education,
concurred with Cole's assessment, "The lack of real-world efficacy of
their efforts, and the apparent unwillingness of most to go any further
than such limited and self-aggrandizing steps, suggests that mere
validation of white racial privilege was indeed the most significant
outcome."
In essence, Cole's concept of the "White Savior Industrial
Complex" refers explicitly to the damaging effects of white saviors who
prioritize a "big emotional experience" achieved through minor acts of
charity or activism over tackling larger issues like systematic
oppression and corruption that plague many nations around the world –
notably, issues that are often directly caused or perpetuated by the
United States.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism,
focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of
colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power.
Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and
theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions. On a
simple level, through anthropological study, it may seek to build a better understanding of colonial life—based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators—from the point of view of the colonized people. On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with studies of contemporary history, and may also draw examples from anthropology, historiography, political science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and Christian thought.
At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view underlying that system. However, postcolonialism
(i.e., postcolonial studies) generally represents an ideological
response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods.
Purpose and basic concepts
As an epistemology (i.e., a study of knowledge, its nature, and verifiability), ethics (moral philosophy),
and as a political science (i.e., in its concern with affairs of the
citizenry), the field of postcolonialism addresses the matters that
constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives from:
the colonizer's generation of cultural knowledge about the colonized people; and
how that Western cultural knowledge was applied to subjugate a
non-European people into a colony of the European mother country, which,
after initial invasion, was effected by means of the cultural
identities of 'colonizer' and 'colonized'.
Postcolonialism is aimed at disempowering such theories (intellectual
and linguistic, social and economic) by means of which colonialists
"perceive," "understand," and "know" the world. Postcolonial theory thus
establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples
to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and thus produce cultural
discourses of philosophy, language, society, and economy, balancing the
imbalanced us-and-them binary power-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.
Colonialist discourse
In La Réforme intellectuelle et morale
(1871), the Orientalist Joseph-Ernest Renan, advocated imperial
stewardship for civilizing the non–Western peoples of the world.
Colonialism
was presented as "the extension of civilization," which ideologically
justified the self-ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the
Western world over the non-Western world. This concept was espoused by Joseph-Ernest Renan in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), whereby imperial stewardship
was thought to affect the intellectual and moral reformation of the
coloured peoples of the lesser cultures of the world. That such a
divinely established, natural harmony among the human races of the world
would be possible, because everyone has an assigned cultural identity, a social place, and an economic role within an imperial colony. Thus:
The regeneration of the inferior or
degenerate races, by the superior races is part of the providential
order of things for humanity.... Regere imperio populos is our
vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries, which,
like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers
who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like
those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be
in his right role. 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.
— La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), by Joseph-Ernest Renan
From the mid- to the late-nineteenth century, such racialist
group-identity language was the cultural common-currency justifying
geopolitical competition amongst the European and American empires and
meant to protect their over-extended economies. Especially in the
colonization of the Far East and in the late-nineteenth century Scramble for Africa,
the representation of a homogeneous European identity justified
colonization. Hence, Belgium and Britain, and France and Germany
proffered theories of national superiority that justified colonialism as
delivering the light of civilization to unenlightened peoples. Notably,
la mission civilisatrice,
the self-ascribed 'civilizing mission' of the French Empire, proposed
that some races and cultures have a higher purpose in life, whereby the
more powerful, more developed, and more civilized races have the right
to colonize other peoples, in service to the noble idea of
"civilization" and its economic benefits.
Postcolonial identity
Postcolonial
theory holds that decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity
that is based on cultural interactions between different identities
(cultural, national, and ethnic as well as gender and class based) which
are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society.[citation needed] In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyzes the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the colonizer;
how such cultural resistance complicated the establishment of a
colonial society; how the colonizers developed their postcolonial
identity; and how neocolonialism actively employs the 'us-and-them' binary social relation to view the non-Western world as inhabited by 'the other'.
The neocolonial discourse of geopolitical homogeneity relegating the decolonized peoples, their cultures, and their countries, to an imaginary place, such as "the Third World,"
an over-inclusive term that usually comprises continents and seas, i.e.
Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. The postcolonial critique
analyzes the self-justifying discourse of neocolonialism and the
functions (philosophic and political) of its over-inclusive terms, to
establish the factual and cultural inaccuracy of homogeneous concepts,
such as the "Arabs," the "First World," "Christendom," and the "Ummah,"
actually comprise heterogeneous peoples, cultures, and geography, and
that accurate descriptions of the world's peoples, places, and things
require nuanced and accurate terms.
Difficulty of definition
As a term in contemporary history, postcolonialism
occasionally is applied, temporally, to denote the immediate time after
the period during which imperial powers retreated from their colonial
territories. Such is believed to be a problematic application of the
term, as the immediate, historical, political time is not included in
the categories of critical
identity-discourse, which deals with over-inclusive terms of cultural
representation, which are abrogated and replaced by postcolonial
criticism. As such, the terms postcolonial and postcolonialism denote aspects of the subject matter that indicate that the decolonized world is an intellectual space "of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and of liminalities."
As in most critical theory-based research, the lack of clarity in the
definition of the subject matter coupled with an open claim to
normativity makes criticism of postcolonial discourse problematic,
reasserting its dogmatic or ideological status.
In Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996), Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins clarify the denotational functions, among which:
The term post-colonialism—according
to a too-rigid etymology—is frequently misunderstood as a temporal
concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time
following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country
breaks away from its governance by another state. Not a naïve teleological sequence, which supersedes colonialism, post-colonialism
is, rather, an engagement with, and contestation of, colonialism's
discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies... A theory of
post-colonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely
chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just
the discursive experience of imperialism.
The term post-colonialism is also applied to denote the Mother Country's neocolonial control of the decolonized country, affected by the legalistic
continuation of the economic, cultural, and linguistic power
relationships that controlled the colonial politics of knowledge (i.e.,
the generation, production, and distribution of knowledge) about the
colonized peoples of the non-Western world. The cultural and religious assumptions of colonialist logic remain
active practices in contemporary society and are the basis of the Mother
Country's neocolonial attitude towards her former colonial subjects—an
economical source of labour and raw materials.
Notable theoreticians and theories
Frantz Fanon and subjugation
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), psychiatrist and philosopherFrantz Fanon analyzes and medically describes the nature of colonialism as essentially destructive. Its societal effects—the imposition of a subjugating colonial identity—is
harmful to the mental health of the native peoples who were subjugated
into colonies. Fanon writes that the ideological essence of colonialism
is the systematic denial of "all attributes of humanity" of the
colonized people. Such dehumanization is achieved with physical and mental violence, by which the colonist means to inculcate a servile mentality upon the natives.
For Fanon, the natives must violently resist colonial subjugation.
Hence, Fanon describes violent resistance to colonialism as a mentally
cathartic practise, which purges colonial servility from the native psyche, and restores self-respect to the subjugated. Thus, Fanon actively supported and participated in the Algerian Revolution (1954–62) for independence from France as a member and representative of the Front de Libération Nationale.
As postcolonial praxis,
Fanon's mental-health analyses of colonialism and imperialism, and the
supporting economic theories, were partly derived from the essay "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916), wherein Vladimir Lenin described colonial imperialism as an advanced form of capitalism,
desperate for growth at all costs, and so requires more and more human
exploitation to ensure continually consistent profit-for-investment.
Another key book that predates postcolonial theories is Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks.
In this book, Fanon discusses the logic of colonial rule from the
perspective of the existential experience of racialized subjectivity.
Fanon treats colonialism as a total project which rules every
aspect of colonized peoples and their reality. Fanon reflects on
colonialism, language, and racism and asserts that to speak a language
is to adopt a civilization and to participate in the world of that
language. His ideas show the influence of French and German philosophy,
since existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics claim that
language, subjectivity, and reality are interrelated. However, the
colonial situation presents a paradox: when colonial beings are forced
to adopt and speak an imposed language which is not their own, they
adopt and participate in the world and civilization of the colonized.
This language results from centuries of colonial domination which is
aimed at eliminating other expressive forms in order to reflect the
world of the colonizer. As a consequence, when colonial beings speak as
the colonized, they participate in their own oppression and the very
structures of alienation are reflected in all aspects of their adopted
language.
Edward Said and orientalism
Cultural criticEdward Said is considered by E. San Juan, Jr. as "the originator and inspiring patron-saint of postcolonial theory and discourse" due to his interpretation of the theory of orientalism explained in his 1978 book, Orientalism. To describe the us-and-them "binary social relation" with which Western Europe intellectually divided the world—into the "Occident" and the "Orient"—Said developed the denotations and connotations of the term orientalism
(an art-history term for Western depictions and the study of the
Orient). Said's concept (which he also termed "orientalism") is that the
cultural representations generated with the us-and-them binary relation
are social constructs,
which are mutually constitutive and cannot exist independent of each
other, because each exists on account of and for the other.
Notably, "the West" created the cultural concept of "the East,"
which according to Said allowed the Europeans to suppress the peoples of
the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and of Asia in general, from
expressing and representing themselves as discrete peoples and cultures.
Orientalism thus conflated and reduced the non-Western world into the
homogeneous cultural entity known as "the East." Therefore, in service
to the colonial type of imperialism, the us-and-them Orientalist
paradigm allowed European scholars to represent the Oriental World as
inferior and backward, irrational and wild, as opposed to a Western
Europe that was superior and progressive, rational and civil—the
opposite of the Oriental Other.
Reviewing Said's Orientalism (1978), A. Madhavan
(1993) says that "Said's passionate thesis in that book, now an 'almost
canonical study', represented Orientalism as a 'style of thought' based
on the antinomy of East and West in their world-views, and also as a
'corporate institution' for dealing with the Orient."
In concordance with philosopher Michel Foucault, Said established that power and knowledge
are the inseparable components of the intellectual binary relationship
with which Occidentals claim "knowledge of the Orient." That the applied
power of such cultural knowledge allowed Europeans to rename,
re-define, and thereby control Oriental peoples, places, and things,
into imperial colonies. The power-knowledge binary relation is conceptually essential to identify and understand colonialism in general, and European colonialism in particular. Hence,
To the extent that Western scholars
were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought
and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be
animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by them or as a kind
of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist's
grander interpretive activity.
— Orientalism (1978), p. 208.
Nonetheless, critics of the homogeneous "Occident–Orient" binary
social relation, say that Orientalism is of limited descriptive
capability and practical application, and propose instead that there are
variants of Orientalism that apply to Africa and to Latin America. Said
response was that the European West applied Orientalism as a homogeneous form of The Other, in order to facilitate the formation of the cohesive, collective European cultural identity denoted by the term "The West."
With this described binary logic, the West generally constructs
the Orient subconsciously as its alter ego. Therefore, descriptions of
the Orient by the Occident lack material attributes, grounded within the
land. This inventive or imaginative interpretation subscribes female
characteristics to the Orient and plays into fantasies that are inherent
within the West's alter ego. It should be understood that this process
draws creativity, amounting an entire domain and discourse.
In Orientalism (p. 6), Said mentions the production of
"philology [the study of the history of languages], lexicography
[dictionary making], history, biology, political and economic theory,
novel-writing and lyric poetry." Therefore, there is an entire industry
that exploits the Orient for its own subjective purposes that lack a
native and intimate understanding. Such industries become
institutionalized and eventually become a resource for manifest
Orientalism or a compilation of misinformation about the Orient.
The ideology of Empire was hardly
ever a brute jingoism; rather, it made subtle use of reason and
recruited science and history to serve its ends.
— Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of Orient (1994), p. 6
These subjective fields of academia now synthesize the political
resources and think-tanks that are so common in the West today.
Orientalism is self-perpetuating to the extent that it becomes
normalized within common discourse, making people say things that are
latent, impulsive, or not fully conscious of its own self.
Gayatri Spivak and the subaltern
In establishing the Postcolonial definition of the term subaltern, the philosopher and theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cautioned against assigning an over-broad connotation. She argues:
... subaltern is not just a
classy word for "oppressed", for The Other, for somebody who's not
getting a piece of the pie... In postcolonial terms, everything that has
limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern....
Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting
and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against
minority on the university campus; they don't need the word
'subaltern'... They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination
are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie,
and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse.
They should not call themselves subaltern.
Engaging the voice of the Subaltern: the philosopher and theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, at Goldsmith College.
Essentialism denotes the perceptual dangers inherent to
reviving subaltern voices in ways that might (over) simplify the
cultural identity of heterogeneous social groups and, thereby, create
stereotyped representations of the different identities of the people
who compose a given social group. Strategic essentialism, on the
other hand, denotes a temporary, essential group-identity used in the
praxis of discourse among peoples. Furthermore, essentialism can
occasionally be applied—by the so-described people—to facilitate the
subaltern's communication in being heeded, heard, and understood,
because strategic essentialism (a fixed and established subaltern
identity) is more readily grasped, and accepted, by the popular
majority, in the course of inter-group discourse. The important
distinction, between the terms, is that strategic essentialism does not
ignore the diversity of identities (cultural and ethnic) in a social
group, but that, in its practical function, strategic essentialism
temporarily minimizes inter-group diversity to pragmatically support the
essential group-identity.
Spivak developed and applied Foucault's term epistemic violence
to describe the destruction of non-Western ways of perceiving the world
and the resultant dominance of the Western ways of perceiving the
world. Conceptually, epistemic violence specifically relates to women,
whereby the "Subaltern [woman] must always be caught in translation,
never [allowed to be] truly expressing herself," because the colonial
power's destruction of her culture pushed to the social margins her
non–Western ways of perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world.
In June of the year 1600, the Afro–Iberian woman Francisca de Figueroa requested from the King of Spain
his permission for her to emigrate from Europe to New Spain, and
reunite with her daughter, Juana de Figueroa. As a subaltern woman,
Francisca repressed her native African language, and spoke her request
in Peninsular Spanish, the official language of Colonial Latin America. As a subaltern woman, she applied to her voice the Spanish cultural filters of sexism, Christian monotheism, and servile language, in addressing her colonial master:
I, Francisca de Figueroa, mulatta
in colour, declare that I have, in the city of Cartagena, a daughter
named Juana de Figueroa; and she has written, to call for me, in order
to help me. I will take with me, in my company, a daughter of mine, her
sister, named María, of the said colour; and for this, I must write to
Our Lord the King to petition that he favour me with a licence, so that
I, and my said daughter, can go and reside in the said city of
Cartagena. For this, I will give an account of what is put down in this
report; and of how I, Francisca de Figueroa, am a woman of sound body,
and mulatta in colour.… And my daughter María is twenty-years-old, and
of the said colour, and of medium size. Once given, I attest to this. I
beg your Lordship to approve and order it done. I ask for justice in
this.
[On the twenty-first day of the month of June 1600, Your Majesty's Lords
Presidents and Official Judges of this House of Contract Employment
order that the account she offers be received, and that testimony for
the purpose she requests given.]
— Afro–Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero–Atlantic World: 1550–1812 (2009)
Moreover, Spivak further cautioned against ignoring subaltern peoples
as "cultural Others", and said that the West could progress—beyond the
colonial perspective—by means of introspective self-criticism of the
basic ideas and investigative methods that establish a culturally
superior West studying the culturally inferior non–Western peoples. Hence, the integration of the subaltern voice to the intellectual spaces of social studies
is problematic, because of the unrealistic opposition to the idea of
studying "Others"; Spivak rejected such an anti-intellectual stance by
social scientists, and about them said that "to refuse to represent a
cultural Other is salving your conscience…allowing you not to do any
homework." Moreover, postcolonial studies also reject the colonial cultural depiction of subaltern peoples as hollow mimics
of the European colonists and their Western ways; and rejects the
depiction of subaltern peoples as the passive recipient-vessels of the
imperial and colonial power of the Mother Country. Consequent to
Foucault's philosophic model of the binary relationship of power and
knowledge, scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective, proposed that anti-colonial resistance always counters every exercise of colonial power.
Homi K. Bhabha and hybridity
In The Location of Culture (1994), theoretician Homi K. Bhabha argues that viewing the human world as composed of separate and unequal cultures, rather than as an integral human world, perpetuates the belief in the existence of imaginary peoples and places—"Christendom" and the "Islamic World", "First World," "Second World," and the "Third World." To counter such linguistic and sociological reductionism, postcolonial praxis establishes the philosophic value of hybrid intellectual spaces, wherein ambiguity abrogates truth and authenticity; thereby, hybridity is the philosophic condition that most substantively challenges the ideological validity of colonialism.
Santiniketan artists did not
believe that to be indigenous one has to be historicist either in theme
or in style, and similarly to be modern one has to adopt a particular
trans-national formal language or technique. Modernism was to them
neither a style nor a form of internationalism. It was critical
re-engagement with the foundational aspects of art necessitated by
changes in one's unique historical position.
In the post-colonial history of art, this marked the departure from Eurocentric unilateral idea of modernism to alternative context sensitive modernisms.
The brief survey of the individual
works of the core Santiniketan artists and the thought perspectives they
open up makes clear that though there were various contact points in
the work they were not bound by a continuity of style but buy a
community of ideas. Which they not only shared but also interpreted and
carried forward. Thus they do not represent a school but a movement.
Several terms including Paul Gilroy's counterculture of modernity and Tani E. Barlow's Colonial modernity
have been used to describe the kind of alternative modernity that
emerged in non-European contexts. Professor Gall argues that 'Contextual
Modernism' is a more suited term because "the colonial in colonial modernity
does not accommodate the refusal of many in colonized situations to
internalize inferiority. Santiniketan's artist teachers' refusal of
subordination incorporated a counter vision of modernity, which sought
to correct the racial and cultural essentialism that drove and
characterized imperial Western modernity and modernism. Those European
modernities, projected through a triumphant British colonial power,
provoked nationalist responses, equally problematic when they
incorporated similar essentialisms."
Dipesh Chakrabarty
In Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty charts the subaltern history of the Indian struggle for independence, and counters Eurocentric,
Western scholarship about non-Western peoples and cultures, by
proposing that Western Europe simply be considered as culturally equal
to the other cultures of the world; that is, as "one region among many"
in human geography.
Derek Gregory and the colonial present
Derek Gregory
argues the long trajectory through history of British and American
colonization is an ongoing process still happening today. In The Colonial Present, Gregory traces connections between the geopolitics of events happening in modern-day Afghanistan, Palestine,
and Iraq and links it back to the us-and-them binary relation between
the Western and Eastern world. Building upon the ideas of the other and
Said's work on orientalism, Gregory critiques the economic policy,
military apparatus, and transnational corporations as vehicles driving
present-day colonialism. Emphasizing ideas of discussing ideas around
colonialism in the present tense, Gregory utilizes modern events such as
the September 11 attacks to tell spatial stories around the colonial behavior happening due to the War on Terror.
Amar Acheraiou and Classical influences
Acheraiou argues that colonialism was a capitalist
venture moved by appropriation and plundering of foreign lands and was
supported by military force and a discourse that legitimized violence in
the name of progress and a universal civilizing mission. This discourse
is complex and multi-faceted. It was elaborated in the 19th century by
colonial ideologues such as Joseph-Ernest Renan and Arthur de Gobineau, but its roots reach far back in history.
In Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literature and the Legacy of Classical Writers,
Acheraiou discusses the history of colonialist discourse and traces its
spirit to ancient Greece, including Europe's claim to racial supremacy
and right to rule over non-Europeans harboured by Renan and other
19th-century colonial ideologues. He argues that modern colonial
representations of the colonized as "inferior," "stagnant," and
"degenerate" were borrowed from Greek and Latin authors like Lysias (440–380 BC), Isocrates (436–338 BC), Plato (427–327 BC), Aristotle (384–322 BC), Cicero (106–43 BC), and Sallust
(86–34 BC), who all considered their racial others—the Persians,
Scythians, Egyptians as "backward," "inferior," and "effeminate."
Among these ancient writers Aristotle
is the one who articulated more thoroughly these ancient racial
assumptions, which served as a source of inspiration for modern
colonists. In The Politics,
he established a racial classification and ranked the Greeks superior
to the rest. He considered them as an ideal race to rule over Asian and
other 'barbarian' peoples, for they knew how to blend the spirit of the
European "war-like races" with Asiatic "intelligence" and "competence."
Ancient Rome was a source of admiration in Europe since the enlightenment. In France, Voltaire
(1694-1778) was one of the most fervent admirers of Rome. He regarded
highly the Roman republican values of rationality, democracy, order and
justice. In early-18th century Britain, it was poets and politicians
like Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Glover (1712 –1785) who were vocal advocates of these ancient republican values.
It was in the mid-18th century that ancient Greece became a
source of admiration among the French and British. This enthusiasm
gained prominence in the late-eighteenth century. It was spurred by
German Hellenist scholars and English romantic poets, who regarded
ancient Greece as the matrix of Western civilization and a model of
beauty and democracy. These included: Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), and Goethe (1749–1832), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and John Keats (1795–1821).
In the 19th century, when Europe began to expand across the globe
and establish colonies, ancient Greece and Rome were used as a source
of empowerment and justification to Western civilizing mission. At this
period, many French and British imperial ideologues identified strongly
with the ancient empires and invoked ancient Greece and Rome to justify
the colonial civilizing project. They urged European colonizers to
emulate these "ideal" classical conquerors, whom they regarded as
"universal instructors."
For Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805–1859), an ardent and influential advocate of la "Grande France,"
the classical empires were model conquerors to imitate. He advised the
French colonists in Algeria to follow the ancient imperial example. In 1841, he stated:
[W]hat
matters most when we want to set up and develop a colony is to make
sure that those who arrive in it are as less estranged as possible, that
these newcomers meet a perfect image of their homeland....the thousand
colonies that the Greeks founded on the Mediterranean coasts were all
exact copies of the Greek cities on which they had been modelled. The
Romans established in almost all parts of the globe known to them
municipalities which were no more than miniature Romes. Among modern
colonizers, the English did the same. Who can prevent us from emulating
these European peoples?.
The Greeks and Romans were deemed exemplary conquerors and "heuristic teachers," whose lessons were invaluable for modern colonists ideologues. John-Robert Seeley (1834-1895), a history professor at Cambridge and proponent of imperialism stated in a rhetoric which echoed that of Renan
that the role of the British Empire was 'similar to that of Rome, in
which we hold the position of not merely of ruling but of an educating
and civilizing race."
The incorporation of ancient concepts and racial and cultural
assumptions into modern imperial ideology bolstered colonial claims to
supremacy and right to colonize non-Europeans. Because of these numerous
ramifications between ancient representations and modern colonial
rhetoric, 19th century's colonialist discourse acquires a
"multi-layered" or "palimpsestic" structure.
It forms a "historical, ideological and narcissistic continuum," in
which modern theories of domination feed upon and blend with "ancient
myths of supremacy and grandeur."
Postcolonial literary study
As a literary theory,
postcolonialism deals with the literatures produced by the peoples who
once were colonized by the European imperial powers (e.g. Britain,
France, and Spain) and the literatures of the decolonized countries
engaged in contemporary, postcolonial arrangements (e.g. Organisation internationale de la Francophonie and the Commonwealth of Nations) with their former mother countries.
Postcolonial literary criticism comprehends the literatures
written by the colonizer and the colonized, wherein the subject matter
includes portraits of the colonized peoples and their lives as imperial
subjects. In Dutch literature, the Indies Literature includes the
colonial and postcolonial genres, which examine and analyze the
formation of a postcolonial identity, and the postcolonial culture
produced by the diaspora of the Indo-European peoples, the Eurasian folk who originated from Indonesia; the peoples who were the colony of the Dutch East Indies; in the literature, the notable author is Tjalie Robinson.
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J. M. Coetzee depicts the unfair and inhuman situation of people dominated by settlers.
To perpetuate and facilitate control of the colonial enterprise,
some colonized people, especially from among the subaltern peoples of
the British Empire, were sent to attend university in the Imperial
Motherland; they were to become the native-born, but Europeanised,
ruling class of colonial satraps. Yet, after decolonization, their
bicultural educations originated postcolonial criticism of empire and
colonialism, and of the representations of the colonist and the
colonized. In the late 20th century, after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the constituent Soviet Socialist Republics
became the literary subjects of postcolonial criticism, wherein the
writers dealt with the legacies (cultural, social, economic) of the Russification of their peoples, countries, and cultures in service to Greater Russia.
Postcolonial literary study is in two categories:
the study of postcolonial nations; and
the study of the nations who continue forging a postcolonial national identity.
The first category of literature presents and analyzes the internal
challenges inherent to determining an ethnic identity in a decolonized
nation.
The second category of literature presents and analyzes the degeneration of civic and nationalist unities consequent to ethnic parochialism, usually manifested as the demagoguery of "protecting the nation," a variant of the us-and-them binary social relation. Civic and national unity degenerate when a patriarchal régime unilaterally defines what is and what is not "the national culture" of the decolonized country: the nation-state
collapses, either into communal movements, espousing grand political
goals for the postcolonial nation; or into ethnically mixed communal
movements, espousing political separatism, as occurred in decolonized Rwanda, the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; thus the postcolonial extremes against which Frantz Fanon warned in 1961.
Application
Middle East
In the essays "Overstating the Arab State" (2001) by Nazih Ayubi, and "Is Jordan Palestine?" (2003) by Raphael Israeli,
the authors deal with the psychologically-fragmented postcolonial
identity, as determined by the effects (political and social, cultural
and economic) of Western colonialism in the Middle East. As such, the
fragmented national identity remains a characteristic of such societies,
consequence of the imperially convenient, but arbitrary, colonial
boundaries (geographic and cultural) demarcated by the Europeans, with
which they ignored the tribal and clan relations that determined the
geographic borders of the Middle East countries, before the arrival of
European imperialists. Hence, the postcolonial literature about the Middle East examines and analyzes the Western discourses about identity formation, the existence and inconsistent nature of a postcolonial national-identity among the peoples of the contemporary Middle East.
"The Middle East" is the Western name for the countries of South-western Asia.
In his essay "Who Am I?: The Identity Crisis in the Middle East" (2006), P.R. Kumaraswamy says:
Most countries of the Middle East,
suffered from the fundamental problems over their national identities.
More than three-quarters of a century after the disintegration of the
Ottoman Empire, from which most of them emerged, these states have been
unable to define, project, and maintain a national identity that is both
inclusive and representative.
Independence and the end of colonialism did not end social fragmentation and war (civil and international) in the Middle East. In The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (2004), Larbi Sadiki
says that the problems of national identity in the Middle East are a
consequence of the Orientalist indifference of the European empires when
they demarcated the political borders of their colonies, which ignored
the local history and the geographic and tribal boundaries observed by
the natives, in the course of establishing the Western version of the
Middle East. In the event:
[I]n
places like Iraq and Jordan, leaders of the new sovereign states were
brought in from the outside, [and] tailored to suit colonial interests
and commitments. Likewise, most states in the Persian Gulf were handed
over to those [Europeanised colonial subjects] who could protect and
safeguard imperial interests in the post-withdrawal phase.
Moreover,
"with notable exceptions like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, most
[countries]...[have] had to [re]invent, their historical roots" after
decolonization, and, "like its colonial predecessor, postcolonial
identity owes its existence to force."
Africa
Colonialism
in 1913: the African colonies of the European empires; and the
postcolonial, 21st-century political boundaries of the decolonized
countries.
In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa (1874–1914) proved to be the tail end of mercantilist
colonialism of the European imperial powers, yet, for the Africans, the
consequences were greater than elsewhere in the colonized non–Western
world. To facilitate the colonization the European empires laid
railroads where the rivers and the land proved impassable. The Imperial
British railroad effort proved overambitious in the effort of traversing
continental Africa, yet succeeded only in connecting colonial North
Africa (Cairo) with the colonial south of Africa (Cape Town).
Upon arriving to Africa, Europeans encountered various African civilizations namely the Ashanti Empire, the Benin Empire, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Buganda Kingdom (Uganda), and the Kingdom of Kongo,
all of which were annexed by imperial powers under the belief that they
required European stewardship, as proposed and justified in the essay
"The African Character" (1830), by G. W. F. Hegel, in keeping with his philosophic opinion that cultures were stages in the course of the historical unfolding of The Absolute. Nigeria was the homeland of the Hausa people, the Yoruba people and the Igbo people; which last were among the first people to develop their history in constructing a postcolonial identity. (See: Things Fall Apart, 1958).
In postcolonial countries of Africa, Africans and non–Africans
live in a world of genders, ethnicities, classes and languages, of ages,
families, professions, religions and nations. There is a suggestion
that individualism and postcolonialism are essentially discontinuous and divergent cultural phenomena.
Asia
Map
of French Indochina from the colonial period showing its five
subdivisions: Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, Cambodia and Laos.
French Indochina was divided into five subdivisions: Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Laos. Cochinchina (southern Vietnam) was the first territory under French control; Saigon was conquered in 1859; and in 1887, the Indochinese Union (Union indochinoise) was established.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
has been developing her innovative theories about postcolonialism in
various means of expression, literature, films, and teaching. She is
best known for her documentary film Reassemblage (1982), in which she attempts to deconstruct anthropology as a "western malehegemonic ideology." In 1989, she wrote Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, in which she focuses on the acknowledgement of oral tradition.
Eastern Europe
The partitions of Poland
(1772–1918) and occupation of Eastern European countries by the Soviet
Union after the Second World War were forms of "white" colonialism, for
long overlooked by postcolonial theorists. The domination of European
empires (Prussian, Austrian, Russian, and later Soviet)
over neighboring territories (Belarus, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine), consisting
in military invasion, exploitation of human and natural resources,
devastation of culture, and efforts to re-educate local people in the
empires' language, in many ways resembled the violent conquest of
overseas territories by Western European powers, despite such factors as
geographical proximity and the missing racial difference.
Postcolonial studies in East-Central and Eastern Europe were inaugurated by Ewa M. Thompson's seminal book Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000), followed by works of Aleksander Fiut, Hanna Gosk, Violeta Kelertas, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Janusz Korek, Dariusz Skórczewski, Bogdan Ştefănescu, and Tomasz Zarycki.
Ireland
If by colonization we
mean the conquest of one society by another more powerful society on its
way to acquiring a vast empire, the settlement of the conquered
territory by way of population transfers
from the conquering one, the systematic denigration of the culture of
the earlier inhabitants, the dismantling of their social institutions
and the imposition of new institutions designed to consolidate the
recently arrived settler
community’s power over the ‘natives’ while keeping that settler
community in its turn dependent on the ‘motherland’, then Ireland may be
considered one of the earliest and most thoroughly colonized regions of
the British Empire.
Joe Cleary, Postcolonial writing in Ireland (2012)
Ireland
experienced centuries of English/British colonialism between the 16th
and 20th centuries before most of Ireland achieved independence (as the Irish Free State) in 1922; a part of the island, Northern Ireland, remains under British rule. Many scholars have drawn parallels between:
the economic, cultural and social subjugation of Ireland, and the experiences of the colonized regions of the world
the partition of Ireland by an outside power, analogous to the partitioning of the other nations by colonial powers
the post-independence struggle of the southern part of Ireland (which became Ireland/Éire in 1937 and the Republic of Ireland
in 1949) to establish economic independence and its own identity in the
world, and the similar struggles of other post-colonial nations. Ireland's membership of and support for the European Union has often been framed as an attempt to break away from the United Kingdom's economic orbit.
Others have disputed Ireland's status as a true "post-colonial" nation, due to its European location, its White racial composition (although that has been disputed) and its current status as a high-income nation.
In 2003, Clare Carroll wrote in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory that "the "colonizing activities" of Raleigh, Gilbert, and Drake
in Ireland can be read as a "rehearsal" for their later exploits in the
Americas, and argues that the English Elizabethans represent the Irish
as being more alien than the contemporary European representations of
Native Americans."
Rachel Seoighe wrote in 2017, "Ashis Nandy describes how colonisation impacts on the native’s interior life: the meaning of the Irish language
was bound up with loss of self in socio-cultural and political life.
The purportedly wild and uncivilised Irish language itself was held
responsible for the ‘backwardness’ of the people. Holding tight to your
own language was thought to bring death, exile and poverty. These ideas
and sentiments are recognised by Seamus Deane in his analysis of recorded memories and testimony of the Great Famine in the 1840s.
The recorded narratives of people who starved, emigrated and died
during this period reflect an understanding of the Irish language as
complicit in the devastation of the economy and society. It was
perceived as a weakness of a people expelled from modernity:
their native language prevented them from casting off ‘tradition’ and
‘backwardness’ and entering the ‘civilised’ world, where English was the
language of modernity, progress and survival."
The Troubles (1969–1998), a period of ethno-religious conflict in Northern Ireland between Irish Catholics (largely descended from the indigenous Irish) and the Ulster Protestants (largely descended from British settlers who arrived with the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster and later) has been described as a post-colonial conflict. In Jacobin, Daniel Finn criticised journalism which portrayed the conflict as one of "ancient hatred", ignoring the imperial context.
Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs)
Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) implemented by the World Bank and IMF are viewed by some postcolonialists as the modern procedure of colonization.
Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) calls for trade liberalization,
privatization of banks, health care, and educational institutions.
These implementations minimized government's role, paved pathways for
companies to enter Africa for its resources. Limited to production and
exportation of cash crops, many African nations acquired more debt, and
were left stranded in a position where acquiring more loan and
continuing to pay high interest became an endless cycle.
The Dictionary of Human Geography uses the definition of
colonialism as "enduring relationship of domination and mode of
dispossession, usually (or at least initially) between an indigenous (or
enslaved) majority and a minority of interlopers (colonizers), who are
convinced of their own superiority, pursue their own interests, and
exercise power through a mixture of coercion, persuasion, conflict and
collaboration." This definition suggests that the SAPs implemented by the Washington Consensus is indeed an act of colonization.
Criticism
Undermining of universal values
Indian Marxist scholar Vivek Chibber has critiqued some foundational logics of postcolonial theory in his book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Drawing on Aijaz Ahmad's earlier critique of Said's Orientalism and Sumit Sarkar's critique of the Subaltern Studies scholars,
Chibber focuses on and refutes the principal historical claims made by
the Subaltern Studies scholars; claims that are representative of the
whole of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory, he argues,
essentializes cultures, painting them as fixed and static categories.
Moreover, it presents the difference between East and West
as unbridgeable, hence denying people's "universal aspirations" and
"universal interests." He also criticized the postcolonial tendency to
characterize all of Enlightenment values as Eurocentric. According to him, the theory will be remembered "for its revival of cultural essentialism and its acting as an endorsement of orientalism, rather than being an antidote to it."
Fixation on national identity
The concentration of postcolonial studies upon the subject of national identity
has determined it is essential to the creation and establishment of a
stable nation and country in the aftermath of decolonization; yet
indicates that either an indeterminate or an ambiguous national identity
has tended to limit the social, cultural, and economic progress of a
decolonized people. In Overstating the Arab State (2001) by Nazih
Ayubi, Moroccan scholar Bin 'Abd al-'Ali proposed that the existence of
"a pathological obsession with...identity" is a cultural theme common
to the contemporary academic field Middle Eastern Studies.
Nevertheless, Kumaraswamy and Sadiki say that such a common
sociological problem—that of an indeterminate national identity—among
the countries of the Middle East is an important aspect that must be
accounted in order to have an understanding of the politics of the
contemporary Middle East.
In the event, Ayubi asks if what 'Bin Abd al–'Ali sociologically
described as an obsession with national identity might be explained by
"the absence of a championing social class?"
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
has criticized postcolonialism calling it "the invention of some rich
guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top
Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals."
