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The death penalty here seems to have no other purpose than death. Achille Mbembe

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucida- tion, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different pos- tulates, to point out faulty reasoning, etc.

Michel Foucault

Those interested in postcolonial societies, just as those interested in the workings of power anywhere, will undoubtedly find suggestive ideas in Achille Mbembe’s “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” for in a few pages he imaginatively casts a wide net that covers vast historical and theoretical terrains.’ His article explores issues of power in relation to postcoloniality as a general phenomenon. The notion of

“The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” Public Culture 4/2 (Spring 1992): 1-30. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to Lessie Jo Frazier, Jennifer Jenkins, and Julie Skurski, with whom I discussed Mbembe’s text and shaped my response to it, to Lemuel Johnson, whose insightful comments refined my argument, and to Fred Cooper, Bruce Mannheim, and Rafael Siinchez, who helped me smooth some rough edges. I am responsible for the argument advanced here and for the roughness that remains.

Public Culture 89 Vol. 5, No. 1: Fall 1992

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“postcolony,” for him, “simply refers to the specific identity of a given his- torical trajectory, that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization” (2). His discussion links a number of separate incidents, pre- sented as a string of brief vignettes and examples, together with a series of general propositions. While his focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa and most of the cases come from Cameroon and Togo, his examples are used to illus- trate a generic “postcolony” whose forms of power - or commandement as an all-embracing regime of authority - constitute the main subject of the article. His claim is to have caught a new view not only of regimes of power in postcolonial societies but of power itself.

I recognize that Mbembe’s essay may be valued precisely for its mode of vision, for the abandon with which it explores the murky terrain where desire and power intersect in societies formed by the clash of conflicting de- signs, and for its ability to illuminate a vast territory through the refractions of multiple examples and propositions. In my view, however, there is a connection between its perspective and its vision; the article’s image of the postcolony overshadows its insights and raises questions concerning its standpoint. Thus, while I find value in his effort to explore the informal field of relations which binds together rulers and ruled through shared con- ventions of quotidian vulgarity and ceremonial grandeur, I remain uncon- vinced by his approach and by his argument.

This discussion of Mbembe’s article reflects the importance I attach to its subject matter as well as my concern that this text instantiates a mystify- ing current of social analysis that draws on certain postmodern theoretical postulates and stylistic conventions currently in vogue. Thus my response addresses his argument as much as the intellectual wave it rides on. Paying respect to Mbembe’s provocative contribution to the study of postcoloniality by giving close attention to his text, I have sought to engage our differences constructively, not polemically, in the spirit celebrated by Foucault with re- spect to the “work of reciprocal elucidation.” To facilitate this discussion, I examine first Mbembe’ s illustrations of postcoloniality ; second, his propo- sitions concerning its character; and third, the image of the postcolony that emerges from his work. I conclude by outlining some propositions for the study of postcoloniality, vulgarity, and power.

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ILLUSTRATIONS OF . . .

Mbembe’s examples are taken from the media and from scholarly works, and refer to a variety of situations which in one way or another illus- trate the postcolonial commandement: the use of grotesque bodily political metaphors by the Togolese, Cameroonians and Congolese; an instance in which the Kenyan police beat a man from Busia for failing to salute the flag; the public execution of two men in Cameroon accused of petty crimes; the disciplining of a Kenyan teacher who wore a beard against the government’s strictures; the ceremonial transfer of office in Cameroon; the lure of Western commodities among Cameroonians; the funeral ceremony of a public officer in Cameroon, and so forth. The information we are given about these illustrations does not extend much beyond the quotes cited from journalistic or scholarly accounts. Although Mbernbe interprets these ac- counts with remarkable imagination, he treats them as if they were self- contained and self-evident units, and thus as if we did not need to know much of anything about their contexts and circumstances or about the soci- eties whose character they purportedly illustrate. Journalistic stories seem to be treated as sources of accurate information, not as interventions in cultural and political processes which must themselves be situated and decon- structed. Novels are invoked to lend support to Mbembe’s view of the post- colony, without respect for the difference between literary and social-sci- ence representational conventions and their related, but different, truth claims. Texts seem to float as transparent representations or sources of truth, not as elements in a wider discourse of power involving other partici- pants. Abstracted from their social circulation, their significance seems to lie lacked inside themselves, ready to be unlocked by an authorial gesture from outside.

The lack of historical density and social specificity is particularly trou- blesome in the case of examples concerning state violence which take place within domains marked by terror, symbolic displacement, and deliberate misinformation. While I assume that Mbembe has additional means to eval- uate the fuller significance of his specific sources and examples in the African context, he does not share his expertise with readers. For instance, he refers to two men executed by the state in Douala as “malefactors” (1 6) “charged with minor crimes” (20) on the basis of an account from La Gazette. Perhaps this information is accurate, but in light of my knowledge of Latin America, where the state in collusion with the media often trans-

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mutes political dissidents into petty criminals (as well as petty criminals into “subversives”),2 I would want to know more about the execution of these “malefactors” before accepting it as an example of the “baroque character of the postcolony” in the following terms:

its eccentric and grotesque art of representation, its taste for the theatrical and its violent pursuit of wrongdoing to the point of shamelessness. Obscenity here re- sides in a mode of expression that might seem macabre were it not that it is an integral part of the stylistics of power. (21)

This example brings to my mind some rather mundane questions. What is the perspective and social location of La Gazette? What were these men’s crimes and what was their significance for this community and for the state at this time? Do the events reported reflect a change in the forms and mean- ing of criminality in the area and/or in the modes of exercising state author- ity? Who was the audience for this event and why did it celebrate the execu- tion with what Mbembe calls “wild applause” (21)? How meaningful is his use of the “narrative structure” that Foucault employed in his discussion of regicide, parricide, and Damiens’s punishment, as if these situations were similar to those that characterize the punishment of ordinary crimes in post- colonial societies? If the issue is not so much the different reasons of pun- ishment, but the contrasting logics of reasons, why not compare punish- ment for similar crimes in both societies? I am aware that these are old- fashioned, and in certain circles, rather unfashionable historical and ethno- graphic questions about context and voice, but without addressing these and similar concerns I cannot see these violent deaths as examples of the banal- ity of power in the postcolony or accept that they lend support to a concep- tion of postcoloniality as a situation where “the death penalty seems to have no other purpose than death” (20).

This example leads to a complementary illustration of postcolonial bod- ily discipline. “In the postcolony, the primary objective of the right to pun- ish (represented here by the execution of the condemned) is however not to

For instance, after the 1988 Amparo massacre in Venezuela, in which fourteen peas- ants were killed by the government, the two surviving peasants (Wollmer Pinilla and Jose August0 Arias) have been transmuted from innocent fishermen into dangerous guerrillas and back again several times over the course of three years by various state agencies and by the media (Coronil and Skurski 1991; for a recent decision in which they were declared to be guerrillas once again by a martial court, see Bolivar 1992).

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create useful individuals or to increase their productive efficiency. This is well illustrated by the misadventures of a teacher ... ” (18). Yet, from Mbembe’s discussion it is not clear to me what the case of the teacher illus- trates. We know that this teacher was disciplined in connection with events whose significance, as Mbembe correctly notes, clearly goes beyond in- strumental considerations of utility or productivity. The District Commissioner visiting the “trouble-tom congregation” of an independent Pentecostal church in Gitothua asked for opinions concerning “problems facing the Church.” After the teacher in question voiced his opinion, the Commissioner, “fuming in anger, spotted him and called him to the front, asking him his name and occupation” (18). Mbembe concludes the discus- sion of this case (after mentioning the teacher’s ongoing trouble with the authorities on account of his re-grown beard) with the following generaliza- tion:

Postcolonial convicts are, then, of a different kind. Authorities can requisition their bodies and make them join in the displays and ceremonies of the comman- dement, requiring them to sing or dance or wriggle their bodies about in the sun (19).

Mbembe uses this example to place postcolonial convicts and state discipline in a radically separate world from their counterparts in both colonial and metropolitan contexts, and to present a view of the exercise of power in the postcolony - by common people as much as by the the state - as self- consuming and ultimately pointless.

Yet could we surmise that the teacher’s punishment is related to his opinions concerning a “trouble-tom congregation,” and that just as his hav- ing a beard may have been part of his larger cultural politics, so was the state’s mode of punishment? If this were the case, the significance of this event could be more adequately ascertained by relating it to a larger field of political and cultural contestation. Then one could also ask: how different is this transcoding between political and bodily discipline from similar dis- placements in other societies, say, from proceedings against bearded or long-haired men whose opinions or looks also made the powers-that-be “fume with anger” in the United States and strike with seemingly arbitrary force on occasion during the sixties?

This lack of historical specificity casts doubts on the significance Mbembe attributes to other examples. For instance, the lure of medals and

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decorations, as well as the desire for particular kinds of metropolitan com- modities among some postcolonial people, for him illustrates how “in the postcolony, magnificence and the desire to shine are not the prerogative of only those who command. The people also want to be honoured, to shine, and to take part in celebrations” (26). While Mbembe recognizes that plea- sure and fashion are “historical phenomena” as well as “institutions and sites of power” (27), I fail to see how he has historicized them or treated them as loci of power. It may be true that “Cameroonians love slick gaber- dine suits, Christian Dior outfits, Yamamoto blouses, shoes of crocodile skin” (quoted by Mbembe: 27). Yet, precisely because desires for these goods are as much the product of history as the goods themselves, we ought to be attentive to their historical constitution, lest we explain them as the result of the idiosyncratic “desire for majesty” (26) of an entire people.

Thus further questions again come to mind: Where does this “desire for majesty” come from, who possesses it, and why does it express itself as a desire for particular commodities? How is the longing for prestige com- modities affected by the social trajectories of different categories of people in postcolonial as well as in metropolitan societies? How is the Cameroonians’ love of Christian Dior outfits different from the desire for the same object in the metropole or from the longing for “a New Look dress” by a working-class woman in England (Steedman 1987)? Why is it so often assumed that the desire for commodities that authenticate metropolitan discriminating taste confirms only postcolonial misplaced de- sire for taste? Since I am concerned with how an imagined structure of de- sire is often used to stereotype subaltern peoples, and with the role of com- modities as markers of distinction and makers of identity in Latin America?

For example, during the 1973-80 Venezuelan oil boom, gold Rolex watches ceased to be clear markers of elite status, as upper-level managers and bureaucrats came to own them as a result of commissions or bribes; these watches became a typical “gift” from foreign corporations and marked the nouveau riche and the slick intermediary. On the other hand, during the 1989 riots in Venezuela in response to austerity measures, people first looted grocery stores, and later clothes and appliance stores; luxury stores were not a typical target of their attack. The same phenomenon occurred in Los Angeles, where, ac- cording to Jen Nessel, it was primarily stores like Payless and not Ferragamo that were looted. “It looks like people hit the places where they resent spending their money every day: the grocery stores, liquor stores, discount clothing and shoe stores, gas stations and 7-Elevens” (1992: 747). One cannot read the structure of everyday desire directly from the pattern of objects looted during violent confrontations, but perhaps the objects that people

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I would like to learn why the lure of metropolitan prestige commodities in Cameroon is an expression of a supposed “desire to shine and be honoured” (27).

The discussion of the play of the grotesque and of bodily imagery in the postcolony raises as well questions of form, positionality, and agency. From historical and anthropological studies, we know that the body is ev- erywhere a source of symbolic production and that social groups use bodily imagery to challenge, confirm, or play with existing social hierarchies. Mbembe acknowledges that the symbolism of the body and of its activities is a universal and not just an African “ingredient in the production of power.” He adds,

That is why I must now insist on another aspect of my argument. I would go further: the obsession with orifices has to be seen as due to the fact that in the postcolony the cornmandement is constantly engaged in projecting an image both of itself and of the world - a fantasy that it presents to its subject as a truth that is beyond dispute, a truth that has to be instilled into them in order that they acquire a habit of discipline and obedience (1 1).

Would it be too pedestrian to relate the discussion of this alleged post- colonial “obsession with orifices” to violent experiences of colonial and postcolonial domination as an ongoing historical process? (“Penetration” is a common image in this context.) Wouldn’t the images that postcolonial so- cieties produce of themselves and of the world bring into play memories of the violence of conquest and colonization with the everyday violence of neocolonial subjection? If this were the case, decoding bodily and sexual imagery would involve examining it in relation to specific forms of imperial domination, reorganization of domestic relations, languages of sexuality, and idioms of power of particular societies, including metropolitan ones. If “the postcolony is a world of anxious virility - hostile to continence, fru- gality and sobriety” (13), how does this structure of feeling relate to, and differ from, the apprehensive hyper-masculinization of politics of imperial powers “standing firm,” and unwilling to “pull out” when threatened by “unruly natives”? Just think of the sexual and gendered semiotics of the confrontations between France and Algeria, the U.S. and Vietnam; Bush and Hussein, Thatcher and Galtieri. And does this conception of the post-

take on these occasions may help us think about assumptions concerning what subaltern people generally desire.

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colony as a world of anxious virility mean that women are subsumed within or totally engulfed by masculinist ideologies? Don’t they too engender his- tory as active subjects, inflect their own accents on the languages of power and supply imagery of their own? Beyond the domains narrowly identified with women, what are we to make of their presence in the higher levels of the state - as ministers, as allies of male figures (Eva Perh), or as national leaders (Indira Gandhi, Corazh Aquino, Violeta Chamorro)?

The unconstrained flight from fragmentary examples to vast generaliza- tions about the postcolony hinders the understanding of commonalities among postcolonial societies as well as of differences distinguishing them. Mbembe offers a brief newspaper quote which refers to the end of Ramadan in a Muslim community in Cameroon (“For thirty days, members of the community had been deprived of many things from dawn till dusk. They re- frained from drinking, eating, smoking, sexual relations, and anything that goes against the Muslim faith and law”) to support his idea that, “Because the postcolony is characterized, above all, by scarcity the metaphor of food ‘lends itself to the wide angle lens of both imagery and efficacy’” (26). In one quick move, from a journalist’s notion of religious fasting as “deprivation” to a scholarly observation concerning food imagery (cited above), we move to the hypostatization of “scarcity” as an omnipresent characteristic of the postcolony. As in other cases, Mbembe approaches an interesting issue but quickly leaps to sweeping assertions.

. . , POSTCOLONIALITY . . . Matching the fragmentary character of Mbembe’s string of examples,

his theoretical argument brings forth one spectacular topic after another in an overflowing stream of propositions. The reader moves quickly from the role of bureaucratic excess to the functions of the grotesque, from the fetish character of the state to the zombification of rulers and ruled, from the luxu- riousness of power to the simulacrum as its specific pragmatics, from the violence of power to powerlessness as quintessential postcolonial violence.

This stream of suggestive but unelaborated propositions seems to relate to his central argument: in postcolonial societies the banality of power - its arbitrariness, predictability, vulgarity - binds rulers and ruled in a con- vivial web of social relations. While Bahktin located the grotesque among the plebeian, Mbembe places it within both the rulers and the ruled. According to him, “the real inversion takes place when, in their desire for

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splendour, the masses join in madness and clothe themselves in the flashy rags of power so as to reproduce its epistemology; and when, too, power, in its own violent quest for grandeur and prestige, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing [dklinquance] its main mode of existence” (29). This shift, ac- cording to Mbembe, allows him not only to understand the specific charac- ter and aesthetics of power in the postcolony, but also to break away from Western binary oppositions and dual conceptions of power itself. While I am sympathetic to this project, it seems to me that his discussion reproduces a dichotomy between the masses and power, for the powerless masses have only flashy rags of power (perhaps the simulacra of power or the simulacra of a simulacrum), and power is separate from them (perhaps as a synonym for the state or the rulers). It is also based on the assumption that vulgarity properly belongs to the masses and that power (the state) instrumentally makes it its own “in its quest for prestige.”

After claiming to have overcome dualities, Mbembe offers a reconcep- tualization of the “postcolonial mode of domination.” For him, the post- colonial mode of domination is “as much a regime of constraints as a prac- tice of conviviality and a stylistic of connivance - marked by innate cau- tion, constant compromises, small tokens of fealty, and a precipitance to denunciate those who are labelled ‘subversive”’ (21). Still, here con- straints/conviviality do not seem very different from coercion/consent, or regimelpractice from structurefaction. Thus, this mode of domination is de- fined in terms of polarities, although they are so mixed and internalized that some of their elements have even become innate. Of course, it could be ar- gued that by being so mixed they cease to be dualities - that in the post- colony, constraints are convivial and conviviality constrains - but this mixing of underspecified categories is no substitute for theoretical elabora- tion.

We obtain a better sense of Mbembe’s notion of the postcolonial mode of domination when he compares it with colonial domination. Coloniality “was a way of disciplining bodies with the aim of making better use of them - docility and productivity going hand in hand” (1 8). In contrast, “in the postcolony, the primary objective of the right to punish (represented here by the excecution of the condemned) is however not to create useful individuals or to increase their productive efficiency” (1 8). The dramatization of state power serves to create bonds of intimacy with the people - “the intimacy of tyranny” (21).

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In the postcolony, an intimate tyranny links the rulers with the ruled, just as ob- scenity is only another aspect of munificence and vulgarity the very condition of state power. If subjection appears more intense than it might be, it is also be- cause the subjects of the commandement have internalized the authoritarian epis- temology to the point where they reproduce in themselves in all the minor cir- cumstances of daily life, such as social networks, cults and secret societies, culi- nary practices, leisure activities, modes of consumption, dress styles, rhetorical devices, and the political economy of the body (22).

These daily circumstances are also multiple sites or sources of identity formation which create many possibilities for action, including ludic dis- tancing from the state’s dramatization of its authority. Mbembe offers inter- esting comments concerning the role of ambiguity and fluidity in the consti- tution of postcolonial subjects and in their practice of conviviality. Yet for him these resources do not potentially expand the field of agency, they can- cel each other out. As he puts it, “relations of conviviality [are] also of pow- erlessness par excellence - from the point of view either of the masters of power or of those whom they crush” (23). The reason for this, we are told, is that these processes are “essentially magical” (23). They “in no way dis- enscribe [disinscrire] the dominated from the epistemological field of power” (23). As he had indicated earlier in the article, rulers and ruled ap- pear caught in a process of “zombification” in which “each robbed the other of their vitality and [this] has left them both impotent” (5).

In Mbembe’ s article dichotomous thinking is programmatically de- nounced, but only partially opposed in the analysis itself. Thus, polarities that are rejected in one place end up returning through the back door. In the final section he recasts a distinction between fonnal/informal and pub- lic/intimate dimensions of power, without attending to the mutual constitu- tion of these apparently separate domains. He concludes by urging re- searchers to focus on the informal and the intimate. As he says, “It is here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny in Sub- Saharan Africa have to be studied” (29). One would hope that research on this domain would help unlock the web of informal practices that so entan- gle rulers and ruled as to render them “powerless” (29). But, with power so narrowly located and diffuse, with actors so ill-defined and so impotent, with historical transformation erased, this hope too is washed away.

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. . . FROM THE EMPIRE . . .

I hope it is clear that in asking questions, seeking comparisons, and making comments about theory and argument, I do not intend to dismiss Mbembe’ s important concerns, to homogenize phenomena occurring in dif- ferent societies, or to force us to dive into the black hole of “data” in search of a stable ground. Rather, I am suggesting that historical analysis of these crucial issues should attend to what de Certeau called the “poetics of de- tails,” and explore their significance in the historical and social contexts in which they gain their vitality, rather than use underspecified cases as exam- ples that serve to construct postcoloniality as a sweeping type - one that sharply divides postcolonial from other societies and erases their consider- able heterogeneity. Since contexts are obviously not found but constructed, the practice of constructing the relevant contexts, in my view, is a funda- mental part of the work of producing both textured accounts of particular postcolonial societies and general propositions about postcoloniality. The fact that contexts are constructed does not mean that they are arbitrary. Rather, it calls attention to the need, too often denied, to include the critical examination of the conditions of possibility of social knowledge as an in- separable moment of social analysis.

Attention to the details and to the contexts of the phenomena discussed in this article would counter two tendencies that emerge, as if returning from the repressed, through the cracks of Mbembe’s analysis. First, the procliv- ity to typify colonial peoples on the basis of a few cases, which leads in this instance to the conflation of modes of power of “the postcolony” with modes of power that may be exclusive to certain societies or populations in particular historical situations. Second, the inclination to oversimplify and naturalize the historical attributes of colonized peoples, which threatens to turn, however unwittingly, historiographic types into imperial stereotypes.

Despite Mbembe’s claims to historicize phenomena and to overcome dualities, his article constructs “the postcolony” by recasting commonplace distinctions between the empire and its others. It does so, in my view, by floating atop a particular “postmodern” wave energized by its extreme op- position to “modern” cosmologies of history, society, and the subject. Flowing with this current, the text seems to accept implicitly a polarity be- tween modernity (-) and postmodernity (+), and to stay well on the side of one of its extreme poles. This current, directed against metanarratives of history, produces disjointed mininarratives which reinforce dominant

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worldviews; reacting against deteminisms, it presents free-floating events; refusing to fix identity in structural categories, it essentializes identity through difference; resisting the location of power in structures or institu- tions, it diffuses it throughout society and ultimately dissolves it. Ironically, this popular trend leaves us facing a world of disjointed elements at a time when the globalization of space - marked by integrative and exclusionary processes - makes it intellectually compelling and politically indispensable to understand how parts and whole hang together.

Given the article’s mix of fragmentary examples and propositions, it is not always easy to disentangle insightful observations from mystifying gen- eralizations. Were I asked to identify the image of the “postcolony” that I see emerging from this text, I would have to say that it bears a disturbing similarity to an old imperial image of the “colony,” or rather, the “precolony” - the view of a place before Civilization arrived, where na- tives subsisted, laughed, and tussled ceaselessly to no end. Yet there is a difference. This time there is not even the hope, or threat, of their being brought into History by Western intervention. Ruled again by themselves but within the timescape of the modem world, snared in a magical circle, unable to chart new paths for their societies or to tread along the tracks set out by others, aimlessly swinging between omnipresent scarcity and ludic excess, with Western simulacra as their new native tradition, they are trapped in a historical limbo. It is as if a nostalgic imperial gaze were cast on ex-colonial societies, as if remembering them as places once ruled with ruthless excess but with productive zeal and majestic grandeur, it could now recognize in them only powerless excess and senseless simulacra. Since their toil and trouble are of no particular significance to themselves or much use to the rest of the world, their exotic blend of criminality, libidinality, and conviviality may now serve, at least, as an object of academic interest. Or, more disturbingly, it is as if this imperial image were authorized, how- ever unwittingly, by an insider’s perspective. Though Mbembe’s text is not marked by Naipaul’s bitterness or contempt, it also conjures up a self-en- closed world with no exit which too easily plays into dominant views.

This reading - which supposes the reader’s active (re/mis)construction of the text - reveals how postcolonial cultural studies, beyond considera- tions of intent, are inscribed within semantic and institutional fields satu- rated by imperial histories and imagery. In a past that now seems remote, Carpentier, Fanon, CCsaire, to give only a few examples, traveled to the metropole, struggled with ideas in vogue at the time (surrealism, existential-

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ism, Marxism, psychoanalysis), made them their own, and produced critical understandings of their native lands and humanity energized by utopian vi- sions. As if mirroring different times, and perhaps reacting to the flounder- ing of “modern” utopias, this text seems to draw on selected threads of Bataille, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, and de Certeau which weave a net having no place for utopia or engagement; postmodern enlightenment not so much dispelling Enlightenment illusions as recasting them as neomodern disillusions. It is as if at this moment of theoretical and historical disen- chantment, pessimism at the critical edges of the metropole were transmuted into nihilism at the heart of the periphery.

Still, I also feel in the text the wish to locate in “the people” a certain ca- pacity to challenge power, to trip it by laughing at it. But in a world in which everyone is laughing, this wish dissipates into a nihilistic apprehen- sion of the power of play; laughter, like death, seems to have no purpose beyond itself. With power so diluted, with no place for emancipatory agency, it is as if impatience with degrading postcolonial regimes could only give rise to a disqualifying oration about postcolonial peoples. In the end, this analysis of the banality of power in the postcolony produces a view of postcolonial power as banal. In so doing, however, it calls attention to it- self, to the standpoint from which its view is cast.

. . . AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF DECOLONIZING STANDPOINTS

I would like to conclude by outlining some suggestions concerning the study of postcoloniality based on different postulates.

I . PostcoZonialityllYnowZedge. Perhaps more than most analytical cate- gories, “postcoloniality,” like the domain it addresses, is a fluid, polysemic, and ambiguous term that derives its power from its ability to condense mul- tiple meanings and refer to different locations. At this point, rather than fix its significance through formal definitional procedures, I think it is more productive to circumscribe its meanings by using it within interesting re- search programs. For the purposes of this discussion, I see the postcolonial domain in terms of the historical trajectory of societies which have been subjected to varying forms of both colonial and neocolonial domination. Whether postcolonial societes emerged recently from the experience of col- onization or not (Mbembe’s rather underspecified criteria), is in my view less relevant than their continued subjection to metropolitan forces. Thus, although most of Latin America achieved its political independence early in

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the nineteenth century, it has remained in what many analysts consider to be a neocolonial condition; its transformation recreates colonial and depen- dency relations. I understand colonial and neocolonial relations as an or- ganic linking of international and domestic relations, not as an external im- position (for an attempt “to bring metropole and colony into a single analyti- cal field,” see Cooper and Stoler 1989; for a classic statement of the much- misunderstood dependency perspective, see Cardoso and Faletto 1979).

When it is applied to ex-colonial nations that occupy a subordinate posi- tion in the international system, postcoloniality appears as something of a euphemism, one that at once reveals and disguises contemporary forms of imperialism. As a euphemism, it makes it easier to study present forms of power within ex-colonial societies as if they were the exclusive result of a colonial past, and not also of a neocolonial present. But as a term associated with poststructuralism, postcoloniality conjures up a body of theory which may help overcome teleological narratives and illuminate the workings of power in social and cultural spaces reorganized by the circulation of ideas, peoples, and goods throughout an increasingly interconnected globe. This perspective need not be limited to subordinate nation-states (the so-called Third World): but could also be applied to sharply marginalized subna- tional groups, such as native peoples in the Americas (sometimes referred to as the Fourth World), or to the metropolitan centers themselves, as they are increasingly populated and transformed by the presence of postcolonial peoples (old “First World” nations are being redefined as multiracial soci- eties; their major urban centers, such as New York, London, and Los Angeles, are often referred to as Third World cities).

Postcoloniality could thus be seen situationally, in terms of what Frankenberg and Mani, drawing on Gramscian conjuncturalism and femi- nist positionality, call a “rigorous politics of location” (1991). As they say, “There are ... moments and spaces in which subjects are ‘driven to grasp’ their positioning and subjecthood as ‘postcolonial’; yet there are other con- texts in which, to apply the term as the organizing principle of one’s analy- sis is precisely to ‘fail to grasp the specificity’ of the location or the mo- ment” (1 99 1 2 5 ) . The perspective I propose would welcome complementary undertakings - for instance, the study of ex-colonial nations that have achieved substantial levels of economic growth and occupy not subordinate,

4For an insightful discussion of the origins and ideological bias of this term, see Pletch 1981.

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but relatively dominant positions in the international system (of course, the criteria of relative subordination or dominance would have to be specified). Thus, the United States (independent since 1776) and Singapore (self-gov- erning since 1959) may be regarded as postcolonial societies whose “national” transformation reflects different colonial experiences and linkages between domestic and international factors.

Definitional discussions of postcoloniality may be productive if we ap- proach them within problem-centered research projects. For example, Klor de Alva, crediting the influence on his work of poststructuralist perspec- tives, has recently argued that colonialism and postcolonialism are (Latin) American mirages, that these terms, as commonly understood today, prop- erly apply in Latin America only to marginal populations of indigenes, not to the major non-Indian core that has constituted, beginning in the sixteenth century, the largely European and Christian societies on the American tem- tory (1992). I differ from him, for I feel his arguments suppose too clear a separation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in America, too restricted a conception of colonialism (derived from an idealized image of the effectiveness of modern northern European colonial experiences), and an uncritical acceptance of dominant uses of these terms. However, his historically grounded argument cannot help but advance discussion in this field.

If poststructural and postmodern approaches promise to cast new light on a field obscured by the narrow determinisms and dualities associated with modern historical metanarratives, they also threaten to treat ex-colonial peoples as bounded units, cut off from their historical contexts. A discon- certing effect of these approaches, despite their claims to have destabilized imperial histories, is the way they often allow the insidious reproduction of an imperial viewpoint based on Anglo-American and northern European ex- periences. At this conjuncture, I suggest we construct a decentered and in- clusive perspective that would overcome Occidentalism and permit the study of a wide range of colonial and postcolonial regimes and situations.5

By “Occidentalism” I mean not the reverse of Orientalism, but “the ensemble of rep- resentational strategies engaged in the production of conceptions of the world that, a) sep- arates its components into bounded units; b) disaggregates their relational histories; c ) turns difference into hierarchy; d) naturalizes these representations; and, therefore, e) inter- venes, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of existing asymmetrical power rela- tions” (Coronil 1992).

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2. PowerlContext. If it is true that power today cannot be analyzed ex- clusively within the boundaries of nation-states, this is especially the case in postcolonial nations, for they are traversed through and through by the ten- sion between their formal sovereignty and their effective subjection. Their governing states and dominant classes are at once dominant and dominated. They frequently stand in an ambiguous social position, represented both as defenders of national tradition from aggressive imperial forces, and as inter- nal agents and emulators of metropolitan civilization, and thus undergo a doubling of identity that fractures relations of authority (Bhabha 1985; Chatterjee 1986; Skurski and Coronil 1992). In part because of this tension, postcolonial nations are torn by the increasing internationalization of mar- kets and communications that characterizes the contemporary period. Along with the globalization of space, the reconfiguration of national space is be- ing redrawn everywhere, often along lines that polarize domestic classes, transform the basis of their loyalties and interests, and erode established regimes of domination. These processes are particularly disruptive in post- colonial societies whose economies are reorganized by the internationaliza- tion of the market. The effort to relate domains associated with gender, sex- uality, (re)production and politics must take into account the global condi- tions within which people in postcolonial societies make their history.

3. VuZgarity/Inversion/PoZitics. In postcolonial societies where unstable social hierarchies have been formed by a violent history of conquest, colo- nial domination, and neocolonial subjection, idioms and imagery of the re- fined and the vulgar, the high and the low, form part of a complex semantic field characterized by the multivocal and shifting character of elements along different hierarchical scales. Terms are saturated with hybrid meanings whose dominant accents depend on circumstance and intentionality. For in- stance, within postcolonial societies, the local elite is at once “high” from the perspective of the postcolonial nation, where it often appears bathed in the light of metropolitan civilization, and “low” from the perspective of the empire, which associates it with the backward and primitive. The subaltern classes are generally “low,” but the location and valorization of their lowli- ness shifts. From the perspective of mass-based nationalism, popular sec- tors may move upwards, if they are identified as sources of national virtue; from an imperial perspective, they may move downwards, if they are seen

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as the embodiment of “savagery.”6 When postcolonial nations are con- fronted by imperial force, dominant and subaltern sectors may be positioned at the same level and share idioms of identification and cooperation. Just think of how descamisados (shirtless ones, common people) and military leaders in Argentina, adversaries in many contexts during the brutal military dictatorship, formed a “united people” during the Malvinas/Falkland war.

Inversions take multiple forms because hierarchies are multiply consti- tuted. As Roberto da Matta has shown in relation to Brazil, carnivals are more complicated affairs than Bakhtin’s optimistic view of them; they are at once a locus of inversion, a licensed release, and a contestatory practice that models utopian visions (1991). The polarities that Bakhtin attributed to what he depicted as relatively stable hierarchical systems must be further theo- rized and seen in operation in more complex social and semantic fields. There is nothing intrinsic to vulgarity, for vulgarity is a relational phe- nomenon; the politics and aesthetics of vulgarity cannot be understood out- side the historically constituted ensemble of social relations within which vulgarity gains significance.

4 . Categoriedthe BodylBanality. In postcolonial societies built around relatively unstable foundations, high and low are subjected to the quotidian play of social comment, critique, and stabilization, often through recourse to grotesque bodily imagery. If the body is everywhere good to think with, it is because it is formed by history and may be used to image it. “Thinking the body is thinking social topography and vice versa” (Stallybrass and White 1986:192). The body, as a battlefield of history, is also its semantic field; historical aggression bleeds into symbolic transgression. The entan- glement between metropole and colony is also a clash between categories. Historical violence is inseparable from representational violence. Rigidity and flexibility, excess and lack, originality and banality, are terms that de- scribe intertwined layers of the same unstable postcolonial terrain. Yet, like

An imperial perspective may be assumed by the local elite, or by the popular sectors themselves. For example, meanings associated with “the people” (el pueblo) shifted in the course of the 1989 popular insurrection in Venezuela against the government’s austerity program. During the early phase of looting, many saw el pueblo as the legitimate de- fender of popular rights; by the end of the riots many of the poor voiced an elite view of the riots as the expression of popular “savagery” and of el pueblo as “wild” (Coronil and Skurski 1991). A similar shift in public images of the protesters can be seen in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, as peaceful “anger” became violent “rage” (Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1992: T-4). There too the popular sectors were seen as either emancipatory or de- structive during various phases (Kelley 1992; Davis 1992).

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other evaluative notions often used to describe postcolonial societies, they are not only relative, but political categories. They imply standards of “normality” which often conceal hegemonic assumptions concerning the proper, the beautiful, and the rational. Decolonization, like (neo)colonization, is also a struggle over categories.

5 . Practices of PowerlPractices of Academia. If on some postcolonial terrains practices of conviviality mark daily life and link rulers and ruled, the meanings and uses of these practices must be found in the larger play of power taking shape on these terrains, not in essentialized attributes of ab- stract peoples. Saturated as they are by distinctive histories, idioms of power can be understood by examining their use in the context of their so- cial topographies, lest we interpret what they mean without listening to what they say. Perhaps this practice of listening may support practices of decol- onization outside and within academia.

Fernando Coronil teaches anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Magical State: Oil Money, Democracy and Capitalism in Venezuela, University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.

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