Postcolonialism

Postcolonial theory is the body of currents that, from the 1970s–80s onward, critically analyzed the cultural, psychic, and epistemic effects of colonialism — not only during colonial rule but in its persistence after formal independence. Its object is not primarily the political economy of empire (studied by other traditions) but discourse: the representations, knowledges, and structures of subjectivity that made colonialism thinkable, sayable, and durable. This article traces its precursors — Du Bois and Fanon — and the trio that consolidated the field: Said, Spivak, and Bhabha. ...

Achille Mbembe Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages. ...

Aimé Césaire Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique — 17 April 2008, Fort-de-France) was a poet, playwright, and politician, one of the founding voices of twentieth-century anticolonial thought. A student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1935 cohort), it was there, in the vibrant milieu of black students from the French colonies, that he helped forge — alongside the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guianese Léon-Gontran Damas — the Négritude movement. Later elected mayor of Fort-de-France (1945–2001) and a deputy in the French National Assembly, he was one of the architects of the 1946 law that turned Martinique into an overseas department — a decision he would later reassess critically. He was also Frantz Fanon’s teacher at the Lycée Schœlcher. ...

Édouard Glissant Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928, Sainte-Marie, Martinique — 3 February 2011, Paris) was a poet, novelist, essayist, and philosopher, one of the major figures of Caribbean thought and of French-language postcolonial theory. A pupil at the Lycée Schœlcher, where Aimé Césaire was among his teachers, he went on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnography at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. He received the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde. His entire body of work — spanning poetry, fiction, and philosophy — turns on a single intuition: that identity is grounded not in a single root but in an ever-open relation with the other. Against the philosophies of purity and origin, Glissant thought the Caribbean — land of the plantation, of uprooting and forced mixture — as the laboratory of a humanity to come. ...

Edward Said Edward Wadie Said (1935–2003) was a Palestinian-American literary critic and cultural theorist. He was born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate to a Palestinian Christian family, raised between Jerusalem and Cairo, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and taught comparative literature at Columbia University from 1963 until his death. His book Orientalism (1978) is regarded as the founding text of postcolonial studies: there, drawing on Foucault (discourse/power) and Gramsci (hegemony), Said argues that “the Orient” is not a neutral region of the world but a construction of Western discourse that produces its object and legitimises colonial domination. Said was also a leading public intellectual: a member of the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991, an advocate of the Palestinian cause, and an influential model of the “exilic intellectual” and dissenter. ...

Frantz Fanon Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony). A psychiatrist, essayist, and political militant, he is the most influential figure of African and Caribbean anticolonial philosophy. Trained in medicine and psychiatry in France (Lyon), he served as chief of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953. Confronted with the atrocities of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) and became one of the principal intellectual voices of the anticolonial cause. He died of leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961, aged 36, days after the publication of Les damnés de la terre. ...

Gayatri Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942, Calcutta) is an Indian theorist and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. Her English translation of De la grammatologie (1976) made Derrida available to the Anglophone world and marked the beginning of one of the most influential — and resolutely non-synthetic — bodies of work in contemporary theory. Spivak combines deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial critique. She was associated with the Subaltern Studies Group, a collective of South Asian historians who, drawing on Gramsci and Ranajit Guha, proposed to rewrite colonial and national history from the standpoint of the subaltern classes. Her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) became a canonical reference of the field. In later works, Spivak extended her reflection to globalisation, pedagogy, and world literature. ...

Homi Bhabha Homi Kharshedji Bhabha (b. 1949, Bombay — now Mumbai) is an Indian theorist of culture and literature, raised within the Parsi community of his native city and educated in Bombay and at Oxford. He holds the Anne F. Rothenberg Professorship of English and American Literature at Harvard and is, alongside Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, one of the figures who consolidated postcolonial theory as an academic field. His landmark work, The Location of Culture (1994), collects essays that shifted the focus of colonial critique: from the denunciation of domination to the analysis of the ambivalence that runs through every relation between colonizer and colonized. Writing at the crossroads of Derridean deconstruction, the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Freud, and Fanon’s colonial clinic, Bhabha seeks to show that colonial power is never as coherent or as secure as it imagines itself to be. ...