borderlands e-journal www.borderlands.net.au VOLUME 12 NUMBER 1, 2013 BOOK REVIEW Postcolonial Theories Jenni Ramone Postcolonial Theories: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Stephen Joyce Curtin University Jenni Ramone s Postcolonial Theories (2011) is a thought-provoking and refreshingly nuanced polyphonic introduction to postcolonial theory. The text considers, in detail, often divergent and conflicting theoretical engagements with many colonialist assumptions about colonialism and the colonised other. We encounter key Postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Trinh Minh-hah, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. It is nicely illustrated throughout the text that postcolonial theorists are critical of the unreflective imposition of any totalizing form of order or system on the other and Ramone herself admirably resists a totalizing perspective in the writing of this book, with readers being encouraged to make their own judgements. The inclusion of an annotated bibliography further facilitates the development of the reading process beyond this excellent introductory text. I shall begin this short review of Jenni Ramone s Postcolonial Theories (2011) by affirming that it is a very well-written, detailed, nuanced, necessarily polyphonic introduction to Postcolonialism focussing on key Postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Trinh Minh-ha, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Ramone divides the text into five sections, she provides a short introduction and the sections that follow are entitled The Emergence of Postcolonial Thinking; Postcolonial Theories; Reading Postcolonial Literature and Postcolonial Futures. She also provides an extensive annotated bibliography. 1
Ramone helpfully opens the book with a succinct definition of what Postcolonial studies attempts to do; she states that Postcolonial literature and theory react to colonial encounters, and the primary function of both is to critique the assumptions and representations on which colonialism is based (Ramone, p. 1). The text is focussed, then, upon often-divergent critical literary and theoretical engagements with many colonialist assumptions about colonialism and the colonized. To be reductive, Ramone nicely illustrates throughout her text that postcolonialist theorists are critical of the unreflective colonial imposition of any totalizing form of order or system on the colonized other. To consider one such key form of colonial order, Ramone informs us that: The colonial project which operated in earnest between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century attempted to justify occupation and control of distant territories on the assumption of Western European cultural, intellectual, and even evolutionary superiority colonial discourse maintained that the colonized were primitive, infantile peoples in desperate need of the enlightenment that the colonizers could provide. (Ramone, p. 4) What can be seen from this is that a colonial perspective accepts as reality what Postcolonial theorist, Edward Said, would see as the problematic and arbitrary imposition of an imaginary, over-simplified, rigid binary opposition. This binary allows for the paternal, caring colonizer in Rudyard Kipling s terms, burdened by the weight of human enlightenment, to speak for the supposed colonized primitive infant. Said, in the introduction to his influential text Orientalism (1978), a text discussed in detail by Ramone, mentions the writer Gustave Flaubert s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan who never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He (Flaubert) spoke for and represented her (Said, p. 6). Said s choice of Flaubert was also significant, to take up another key postcolonial theme explored by Ramone, because Flaubert s literary works are seen as part of the Western literary canon that is deemed to represent universal, apolitical, transcendental ideas which are the product of genius (Said, p.13); ideas that can, then, it is assumed, again speak for both the colonized and lest it be forgotten the colonizer. Ramone carefully examines such canonical texts as Shakespeare s The Tempest, where Caliban is spoken for by the colonizing Prospero and Bronte s Jane Eyre, in which Rochester s Jamaican wife Bertha Mason is, according to Gayatri Spivak s reading of the novel, a subaltern denied a voice. She is, as Ramone relates Spivak s view secluded in the marginal space of an attic room, and the marginal textual space of rumour, silence, darkness and the indistinguishable grunts of bestial existence (Ramone, p. 172). Ramone shows that Postcolonial theorists, writers and film-makers reject such totalizing perspectives which reduce the other to silence or incoherent indistinguishable grunts, and we are provided with examples of writers, like Aime Cesaire, Jean Rhys and Peter Carey, 2
who have answered back via a critical counter-text (Ramone, p.169). Peter Carey s Jack Maggs, Ramone tells us, reworks Dickens Great Expectations and presents the hero s mother, Ma Britten as an abortionist and uncaring maternal figure, which shows Britain had neglected its parental responsibility to Australia Ma Britten s provision of abortion drugs reveals the dirt, the danger and deception lurking in the backstreets of Imperial London (Ramone, p.178). Carey thus shows what Edward Said would deem the West s underground self (Said 1978, p. 3), a self which it does not itself see, but clearly the critical colonized other can and subsequently chooses to exercise their critical voice. This critical counter text or as the famous novelist Salman Rushdie dubs this, The empire writing back to the centre (Ramone, p. 65) would be quite unexpected, since the colonial word is presumably the ultimate authoritative word, certain of itself and expecting unequivocal, deferential and grateful acceptance. As was mentioned earlier, such certainty (and certainty in general) is seen as problematic in postcolonial context because, as Ramone asserts: One of the principles of postcolonial thinking is to resist certainties and instead ask questions: certainties tend to be based on the dominant view and this inevitably excludes the views of many others affected by postcolonial history. This book responds to the need to be aware of multiple voices and to resist the temptation to find clear and certain answers in style as well as content: case studies are combined in order to convey the extremely diverse range of postcolonial writers, thinkers, and contexts, but also to place the reader in the open, questioning mindset required by postcolonial theories. (Ramone, p. 4) Though Ramone could be thought to be targeting colonial thought here, certainty is not, of course, solely the province of colonialism; as Ramone shows, it equally applies to some postcolonial thinkers who make use of their own rigid binaries because they seek quite rightly, if the negative stereotype of colonialism is to be accepted to separate their perspective from colonialism. Discussing the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha we are told, for example, that: While both Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilroy develop their work in the context of material reality in concrete social contexts, Bhabha responds to and extends theoretical concepts from a more abstract position. Bhabha uses Derrida and Freud, Frederic Jameson and Jacques Lacan, and has been criticised for doing so by some who see this as employing western thinkers and European theoretical models in a way that potentially re-colonises the post colonial within western systems of thought, rather than rejecting those positions in favour of the development of a new theoretical model. It is perhaps important to point out straight away that Derrida in particular was committed to exploding Eurocentric systems of thought in philosophy. (Ramone, p. 116) 3
I will leave it to the reader to consider the detail Ramone supplies concerning Fanon, Bhabha and Gilroy s work, suffice it to say that what she illustrates in the passage above is that, for her, postcolonial theory should not be systematized and some theorists not unlike Derridean bricoleurs will happily make use of the colonial other s discourse to suit their theoretical or literary purposes. Postcolonial theorists like Bhabha whose focus Ramone informs us (Ramone, p. 43), is on the concept of hybridity are, then, prepared to cross boundaries and disturb supposedly settled binary oppositions, showing that the other, even the colonizing other, can have useful ideas if considered carefully and critically. Further to this, in a chapter of the book entitled The Post Colonial Moment, where the partitioning of India by the British in 1947 is discussed at length in mostly justifiably negative and emotive terms, Ramone may surprise the reader by also considering the positives of partitioning via the work of Urvashi Butalia who states: From a feminist perspective, the new emphasis on women s activity and work in the public sphere necessitated by the rebuilding work following Partition meant a relaxing of the ordinary family roles. Instead of getting married, many women were required to work, in social work, for example (Ramone pp. 68-69). Of course, by mentioning the positives of partitioning Ramone is not then declaring that it was the right thing to do; since, as we have seen, Postcolonial theory absolutely resists absolutes (irony intended), it was neither absolutely right nor absolutely wrong. Like a reader of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, we are presented with ideas that do not fit neatly into categories, which then, following Ramone s claim above about the role of postcolonial theory, places the reader in the open, questioning mindset (Ramone, p.4). It could also be maintained that Postcolonial thought is intent upon drawing attention to the actual complexity of partitioning, a complexity that again cannot fit into a category representing supposed certainty like, for example, a monologic, objective historical narrative accepted by colonialist thought. Ramone makes just this exact point when she considers whether a definitive history is viable: Perhaps one reason for the need to retain a sceptical distance from history is made clearer by a closer examination of the very violent events that together make up the history (the multiple histories) of Partition. Partition violence was so brutal and cruel that it would be naïve to assume that there is one perspective from which those events can be rationalized or explained in a historical account. (Ramone, p. 73) For Ramone, then, a rational perspective is seen from a postcolonial perspective, not as authoritative, but rather, as we have seen colonial discourse characterised the other, as naïve and simplistic. Ramone shows that she is not herself naïve and is aware of complexity, when she draws the reader s attention to the notion that the Western thought is not monolithic and that it has not only been critiqued by 4
Derrida, but as her discussion of the theorist Lela Ghandi s work illustrates (Ramone, p. 116), also by enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Marxist theory. Though as Ramone also shows, both Kantian theory and Marxism are not without their problems from a postcolonial point of view, mainly because their theoretical perspectives attempt to systematize human thought and concepts of reality. Ramone shows throughout her book that postcolonial theorists prefer multiple, non-hierarchical narrative strategies. Ramone discusses favourably, for example, Paul Gilroy s Deleuzean rhizomatic view of culture (Ramone, p.121) which lacks linearity and a hierarchical structure; we are informed that the film-maker Trinh Minh-ha makes use of a range of techniques which evade realism, foregrounding the presence of the film itself, and of the cinematography and editing choices made (Ramone, p. 96) showing the authoritative text to be a construct. In the final chapter, the effect of digital technologies is discussed positively because online text can be mediated and negotiated and contributed to by readers (Ramone, p. 199). Such technologies and multifarious representational strategies allow for the expression of many, often contradictory voices. What has hopefully been made clear to the reader throughout this review is that Postcolonial theory not unlike poststructuralism and postmodernism, as Ramone notes (Ramone, p. 51) is resistant to any form of closure. In his essay Epic and Novel, the Russian literary theorist and thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, echoes the category defying impulse of postcolonial theories when he states: An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing socio-historical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the last word All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical on a man. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 37) If closure is imposed by postcolonial theories, it is seen as provisional and thus open to change. This is, in fact, in keeping with the requirements of the Transitions Series, of which this text is a part. In the general editors preface it is claimed that The authors in the series share the common understanding that, now more than ever, critical thought is both in a state of transition and can best be defined by developing for the student reader an understanding of this protean quality (Ramone, p. x). It is difficult to assess whether the reader can ever actually understand postcolonial theory. Given its polyphonic, asystematic, protean form, Ramone does though succeed admirably in presenting what can only in terms of the oxymoronic principle of uncertainty ever be a tentative exposition of the postcolonial theoretical and literary flux 5
Stephen Joyce completed a PhD in Communication Studies at Murdoch University in 2001. His thesis, entitled Mikhail Bakhtin s Living Word: Neither First Nor Final, develops a critical dialogue with the theories of Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Bertolt Brecht. He has been a lecturer in mass communication at Curtin University since 2003. References Bakhtin, M 1981, The dialogic imagination: four essays by M.M. Bakhtin (trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist), University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. Ramone, J 2011, Postcolonial theories, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York. Said, E 1985, Introduction, Orientalism (1978), Penguin, Harmondsworth. borderlands ejournal 2013 6