Stuart Hall

The Post-Colonial Question: “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit” (1996)

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? [Critics us as Ella Shohat, 1992 argue] that the Post-

Colonial is politically ambivalent because it blurs the clear-cut distinctions between colonisers and colonised hitherto associated with the paradigms of ‘colonialism’, ‘neo-colonislism’ and ‘Third Worldism’ which it aims to supplant. 242

[Others like Arif Dirlik, 1994) finds the concept ‘celebratory’ of the so-called end of colonialism – but adds two substantial critiques of his own. 243

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? The first is that the post-colonial is a post-structuralist,

post-foundationalist discourse, deployed mainly by displaced Third World intellectuals making good prestige ‘Ivy League’ American Universities and deploying the fashionable language of the linguistic and cultural ‘turn’ to ‘rephrase’ Marxism, returning it ‘to another First World language with universalistic epistemological pretentions’. 243

Lurking within the first of Dirlik’s arguments is the refrain which is common to all these recent critics: namely, the ‘ubiquitous academic marketability’ of the term ‘post-colonial’ and the prominent position in its deployment of ‘academic intellectuals’ of the Third World origin… [acting as] pace-setters in cultural criticism’. 243

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? A certain nostalgia runs through some of these

arguments for the return to a clear-cut politics of binary oppositions, where clear ‘lines can be drawn in the sand’ between goodies and baddies. 244

But isn’t the ubiquitous, soul-searching, lesson of our times the fact that political binaries do not (do not any longer? Did they ever? Either stabilise the field of political antagonism in any permanent way or render it transparently intelligible? 244

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? And are we not all, in different ways, and through

different conceptual spaces (of which then post-colonial is definitively one), desperately trying to understand what making an ethical political choice and taking a political position is a necessary open and contingent political field is like, what sort of ‘politics’ it add up to? 244

What the concept may help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence or post-colonisation moment. 246

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? It may also help us (though here its value is more

gestural) to identify what are the new relations and dispoistions of power which are emerging in the new conjuncture. 245

Indeed, one of the principal values of the term ‘post-colonial’ has been to direct our attention to the many ways in which colonisation was never simply external to the societies of the imperial metropolies. 246

It was always inscribed deeply within them –as it became indelibly inscribed in the culturers of the colonised. 246

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? This was a process whose negative effects provided the

foundation of anti-colonial political mobilisation, and provoked the attempt to recover and alternative set of cultural origins not contaminated by the colonising experience. 246

However, in terms of any absolute return to a pure set of uncontaminated origins, the long-term historical and cultural effects of the ‘transculturation’ which characterised the colonising experience proved, in my view, to be irreversible. 246-[247

It is obliging us to re-read the very binary form in which the colonial encounter has for so long itself been represented. 246

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’?

It obliges us to re-read the binaries as forms of transculturation, of cultural translation, destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever. 247

[post-colonial] re-reads ‘colonisation’ as part of an essentially transnational an trancultural ‘global’ process –and it produces a decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation-centered imperial grand narratives. 247

Its theoretical value [of the post-colonial] therefore lies precisely in its refusal of this ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ perspective. 247

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? ‘Global’ here does not mean universal, but it is not

nation –or society-specific either. 247

It is about how the lateral and transitive cross-relations […] of the diasporic supplement and simultaneously dis-place the centre-periphery, and the global/local reciprocally re-organise an re-shape one another. 247

[…] the post-colonial signals the proliferation of

histories and temporalities, the intrusion of difference and specificity into the generalizing an Eumrocentric post-Enlightenment grand narratives, the multiplicity of lateral and decentred cultural connections, movements and migrations which make up the world today, often bypassing the old metropolitan centres. 248

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? The notion that only the multi-cultural cities of the First

World are ‘disapora-ised’ is a fantasy which can only be sustained by those who have lived the hybridised spaces of a Third World, so-called. 250

[…] the ‘post-colonial’ [is] a distinctive theoretical paradigm, and marks decisively how radically and unalterably different – that is to say, how incontrovertibly postcolonial – is the world and the relations being described. 257

And, indeed, to the reader’s astonishment, this is also acknowledge: ‘post-coloniality represents a response to genuine need, the need to overcome a crisis of understanding produced by the inability of old categories to account for the world. 257

Stuart Hall: When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? One reason [why] the discourses of the ‘post-colonial’

have emerged, and been (often silently) articulated against the particular, political, historical and theoretical effects of the collapse of a certain kind of economic, teleological and, in the end reductionist Marxism. 258

[The critics say that] The post-colonial critics are, in effect, unwitting spokespersons for the new global capitalist order. 259

This is a conclusion to a long and detailed argument of such stunning (and one is obliged to say, banal) reductionism, a functionalism of a kind which one thought had disappeared from scholarly debate as a serious explanation of anything, that it reads like an echo from a distant, primeval era. 259