Limits of Postcolonialism

Ramachandra notes a couple of limitations in recent post-colonial discussion. One is the blindness to the influence of Christianity. Christianity is “naively identified with Europe and the United states,” and thus missionaries, their achievements, and their disciples, are considered “mere pawns in the hands of colonial administrators.” Ramachandra notes the irony: This is precisely the “Orientalist stance in reverse, the division of the world into Christian West and exotic east.

More fundamentally, postcolonial theory is stuck between aligning “with humanist notions of an autonomous, sovereign subject,” which risks “subsuming heterogeneous identities and histories into an abstract essentialism” or, on the other hand, “embracing a post-structuralist antihumanism and do denying any universal moral platform from which to contest the material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter.” That is, they must either embrace the colonizers metaphysics of the subject, or give up any ground for criticizing the colonizers.

Some recognize the dilemma: “Gayatri Spivak has suggested a ‘strategic essentialism” that rejects the idea of an essential human nature but adopts “an essentialist stance toward the colonized self” in order to pursue “emancipatory practice.” The schizophrenia is glaring. Others, like Said, contest the post-structural attack on essentialism “because of his commitment to a universal human solidarity,” which he recognizes developed and became universal in the colonizing West.