en del er skeptisk til den postkolonialismen som nå brer seg. samtidig blir den av mange også sett på som forlengelsen av radikal tenking på venstresiden. det siste er feil! her er en litt lengre analyse av tre sentale skrifter innen den postkoloniale tenking, gjort fra et stødig radikalt perspektiv med utgangspunkt i undertrykkelse og klasse. god lese for de som tar seg tid.
avslutningen:
What this amounts to saying is that postcolonial theory should not be described as a theory that systematically dismantles master narratives. Instead, it should be taken as functioning with its own preferred narrative — a distinct unease with class and organized politics, whether as an analytical category or as a form of political engagement. This anxiety with class also sits well with the general intellectual climate in which postcolonial theory has developed and flourished. As Aijaz Ahmad observed in his intervention two decades ago, the field came into its own precisely when working-class movements around the world fell into a steady retreat and a general pessimism set in about class politics. During the years in which postcolonial theory has flourished, the sense of despair very quickly morphed into a general hostility to class which has not only pervaded cultural studies but has extended to most every nook and cranny of the academy. This at least partially explains why the rather blatant antipathy to women’s class agency and the pessimism regarding resistance have largely escaped scrutiny in the field.
While there could be other sources for this antipathy to class politics, in Spivak’s case it also seems to emanate from a genuine theoretical confusion. Upon several occasions, she has expressed an understanding of subalterneity that precludes class struggle as a real option in the Global South. One of the defining aspects of the proletariat in the South, she contends, is that it is inserted into politics in a manner fundamentally different from that in the advanced West. In the West, the working class matures into class politics largely through “its training in consumerism,” whereas “the urban proletariat in comprador countries [] must not be systematically trained in the ideology of consumerism (parading as the philosophy of a classless society) that, against all odds,
prepares the ground for resistance.”
48 In fact, in the sprawling export-processing zones and subcontracting arrangements typical of economic development in these parts of the world, the suppression of workers’ wages means that “the training [] in consumerism is almost snapped.”
49 Hence, what makes a politics organized around class interests so unrealistic in the Global South is that the working class does not get properly trained in it, and what makes that training so rare is that its source is not available to them — an immersion in the ideology and practice of consumerism.
It’s curious that critics have hardly paid any attention to the strange assertion of consumerism being a training ground for, or the fount of, class politics. We are to believe that the simple experience of work — the subordination to the employer’s authority, long hours, brutal pace of labor, physical intimidation, exposure to injury, insecurity — that all of
this is not what impels labor to organize. It is not the daily degradation and humiliation or the experience of grinding poverty that is behind class politics. It is, rather, the participation in consumer
ism. Now, Spivak has to know that there is a pivotal and venerable distinction between consumption and consumerism. Whereas the former refers to the quotidian act of physical reproduction by workers, the latter points to an ideological formation in which the internalization of goods is turned into an end for itself. The central importance of consumerism has been noted by many social theorists since Marx, most notably members of the Frankfurt School — but only as a development that
impedes class consciousness and secures the working class ever more firmly to the mast of capitalism. In redescribing it as the training ground for capitalism, Spivak exhibits confusion on multiple levels. She obscures what is and has been the real source of working-class resistance in capitalism — the experience of oppression and exploitation in the class relation—and at the same time sanctifies as the real source of such politics what is in fact one of the main obstacles to it.
Regardless of the reasons, a dismissal of women’s class agency is evident in these texts, and it has profound implications for postcolonial theory’s political claims. Our reading confirms the observation made by other critics: that postcolonial theory has not so much enriched the critique of a globalizing capitalism as it has weakened the resources to resist it. While there is no question that the subaltern class’s political agenda must be an expansive one in this era, the struggle against capital is surely at its core. But no such struggle can be waged without a clear conception of what counts as resistance — how to distinguish between strategies that question the dominant order and those that accept its terms — and how to organize to make that resistance more effective. Women’s collective agency around their gender and class interests have to be indispensable parts of deepening that resistance. It is remarkable that in these essays, which are foundational to the development of postcolonial theory, such concerns are either denigrated or dismissed altogether. What is even more striking is that in all the commentary that they have generated, these maneuvers have either gone unnoticed or have been set aside as being of minor consequence. Both of these facts are redolent of not just the direction that the theory has taken, but also of the larger intellectual culture of the field.
This paper focuses on some of the foundational texts in the field by Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha to examine how they analyze the place of resistance in gender relations.
catalyst-journal.com
www.brookings.edu
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