Jheel Barad's Blog: CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Hello! This blog is a response to the task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad. In this blog I am going to summarize two articles from Ania Loomba's book "Colonialism and Postcolonialism" about postcolonial studies, Conclusion: Globalization and the future of postcolonial studies and Conclusion: The future of postcolonial studies.

Globalization, Environment and Postcolonialism

What is Post- Colonial Studies?

Postcolonial studies is the critical analysis of the history, culture, Literature and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, France, Spain and other European imperial powers. Postcolonial studies have focused on the third world countries in Caribbean Islands, Asia, South America and Africa.

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Dipesh Chakrabarty finds that all his ‘reading in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty- five years’ have not prepared him for the task of analyzing the ‘planetary crisis of climate change’.

This video aptly shows how the human world is encroaching nature.

The environmental activist Vandana Shiva has exposed the connection between colonialism and the destruction of environmental diversity. She argues that growth of capitalism and today of trans- national corporations, exacerbated (make worse) the dynamic begun under colonialism which has destroyed sustainable local cultures.

Many feminist environmentalists agree that questions of ecology and human culture are intricately linked. Especially in third world countries, where saving the environment cannot be talked about while ignoring the needs of human lives and communities.

Rob Nixon further noting about the wilderness obsession of Americans celebrated in American literature as well as in natural history says-

'There is a durable tradition … of erasing the history of colonized peoples through the myth of the empty lands. … a prodigious amount of American environmental writing and criticism makes expansive gestures while remaining amnesiac towards non-American geographies that vanish over the intellectual skyline' (Nixon 2005: 236).

Nixon suggests such 'spatial amnesia' is one reason why 'postcolonial criticism' has been suspicious of earth-first 'green criticism' and therefore has not engaged with questions relating to the environment .

Such engagement is particularly necessary given the battles all over the third world between environmental activists and big multinational companies, acting in concert with the nation-state, despoiling land and destroying communities.

Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg suggest that this is the result of 'indigenous people's sense of living under ongoing colonial projects-and not just colonial legacies and from postcolonial studies' over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand'.

The displacement of indigenous communities and the theft of their land are also defining features of many spaces that have been privileged in postcolonial studies, such as South Asia and Africa, as is evident from environmental struggles there.

Ken Saro Wiwa led MOSOP, or the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, an indigenous group in southeast Nigeria, whose oil-rich homelands were targeted for drilling by multinationals, leading to their large-scale displacement and to wide-scale environmental destruction.

Shell Oil finally admitted that it had collaborated with the Nigerian military dictatorship in the execution of Saro Wiwa in 1995.

In India, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada River Movement) led widespread protests against a project, funded by multinational as well as indigenous capital, to build scores of large dams across central India. The protests highlighted not just the ecological damage but the displacement of thousands of tribal peoples all across the Narmada valley.

Chittaroopa Palit, one of the leaders of the NBA talking about her valuable lesson from this protest says,

Though international political factors, such as the character of the governments involved, the existence of able support groups in the North that play an important part, they cannot supplant the role of a mass movement struggling on the ground. Soon after the SPD government in Berlin refused a guarantee to Siemens, the German multinational, for building the dam in Maheshwar, it agreed to underwrite the company's involvement in the Tehri dam in the Himalayas and the catastrophic Three Gorges Dam in China-both just as destructive as the Narmada project; but in neither instance were there strong mass struggles on the ground.

In sharp contrast is the resistance to the plunder of the forests in Central India by iron and bauxite mining companies. The movement here is led by Maoist guerrillas who have taken control of large swathes of territory and are being hunted by the police and the army.

Roy writes that the constitution of free India 'ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalized a whole way of life'. Roy and many others have documented how the Indian State is acting in the interests of large iron and steel or bauxite and aluminum producing conglomerates, which are simultaneously national and global.

Karl Marx explained,

The enclosure of the commons was crucial to the birth of capitalism. He described the process in England: beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, the forcible usurpation of communal property occurred first 'by means of individual acts of violence and later through the Parliamentary Acts for Enclosures of the Commons. Along with slavery and colonialism, the takeover of the commons and the conversion of various forms of collective property rights into private property involved dis possessing large sections of the population, both in the colonising and colonised countries, so that wealth would be accumulated by a few. It also turned those dispossessed people into landless laborers and forced them into a cash economy; their work was thus 'commodified.

Luxemburg’s ideas which are important even today are- she alerts us to the deep historical connection between trade and colonialism. She reminds us that accumulation is a constant process rather than a past event.

Amitav Ghosh’s recent book, The River of Smoke offers a deeply compelling fictional account of this process by looking at the opium trade and wars in China.

David Harvey redefining Primitive accumulation points out that-

All the features of primitive accumulation that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present with capitalism's historical geography until now. Displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat has accelerated in countries such as Mexico and India in the last three decades, many formerly common property resources, such as water, have been privatized (often at World Bank insistence) alternative (indigenous and even, in the case of the United States, petty commodity) forms of production and consumption have been suppressed. Nationalized industries have been privatized. Family farming has been taken over by agribusiness. And slavery has not disappeared (particularly in the sex trade).

Water, land and air or 'the environmental commons' are now battlegrounds in many areas of the world.

Swapna Bannerjee-Guha argues that accumulation by dispossession is at the very heart of neoliberal development, concluding that it involves not just dispossession from land but 'losing rights over nature, livelihood practices, related knowledge,even culture-all that capital needs to appropriate for its expansion and increasing profit'. Such dispossession is widespread in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but it is also evident in Europe and North America.

Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva asking who is the most vulnerable to dispossession, note that

the question [is one] that Harvey does not even consider, one that he also seems to see as already asked and answered by the subprime mortgages themselves and their securitization, which is: what is it about blackness and Latinidad that turns one's house (roof, protection, and aspiration) and shelter into a death trap?... How could anyone expect to profit from unpayable loans without debtors who were already marked by their racial/cultural difference ensuring that at least some among them would not be able to pay? This is precisely what makes 'high-risk' securities profitable.

Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that historians had previously assumed that the environment changed so slowly as to be a negligible factor in human history, we have now reached 'a tipping point' where it is clear that human beings have become 'geological agents' in a much more drastic and immediately palpable way.

He gave the word Anthropocene which denotes the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

He conceded that-

Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California).

In a response, Ian Baucom observes that a 'new universalism: the universalism of species thinking'. He rightly suggests that concern with our plantory condition must be less distanced, less empyrean and less stratospheric; having caught that catastrophic glimpse from above' we need not ask 'postcolonial studies to abandon recorded history' but to engage with key moments that help us understand 'this unfolding of catastrophes'.

For this, Baucom proposes that we return to

the history of the commonwealth... to that sixteenth and seventeenth century moment in which the political was separated out from the natural and set in conceptual opposition to it. And we need to do so not only in order to discover in this moment the deep origins of the Anthropocene, but as importantly, to find in our habits of critique, in our interpretative strategies, the ability to imagine a counter concept of the commons and of the commonwealth through which we might be able to find a way out of the anthropogenic catastrophe gathering around us.

As Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman note,

'no other critical practice has foregrounded the links between cultural forms and geopolitics to the degree that postcolonial studies has over the past four decades'.

But postcolonial studies must engage more deeply in historical work in order to amplify these connections between culture and geopolitics; moreover, a narrow presentism obscures our view of the world we live in and postcolonial studies needs to understand pre-colonial histories precisely in order to approach the present with even greater sophistication).

Extending the time-frame of our self-understanding' as Baucom puts it, should lead, not to despair, which he detects in Chakrabarty's analysis, but to a deeper commitment to ‘enhancing conditions under which not just human life, but life itself can continue through the deep future of the planet'.

In the conclusion of the article Ania Loomba indicates new directions of post- colonial studies. The four areas: the environment; the history and present of indigenous peoples and societies; premodern histories and cultures; and the ongoing colonization of territories, labor and peoples by global capitalism. All of these demand fresh thinking about colonial history, the shape of freedom, racial hierarchies, gender dynamics, and community.

Many commentators have suggested that postcolonial studies should not be thought of as a discrete field so much as an approach that has been honed by work on colonial dynamics and legacies in several disciplines; nevertheless, it is also a formation within the academy, shaped largely within English departments.

SOME EXAMPLE OF ECOCRITICISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM

These examples explain in detail how globalization is affecting the environment and the new field of postcolonialism is emerging.

Real incidents

Girnar Ropeway Project, Junagadh

(Photo clicked by me)