by a shift from the material specificities of colonialism to the detailing of the discourses and ideas produced by the colonial encounter’ (1997, 137). Indeed, we shall see that the baleful reliance of postcolonial polemicists on the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ proposed by postmodernism would aggravate such preoccupation with the textuality rather than the materiality of the past, and would precipitate a crisis in the activist agenda of postcolonialism. Along similar lines, Nicholas Thomas has deplored the ‘fatal impact’ paradigm implicit in Orientalism, whereby the import of settler cultures is exaggerated and ‘the capacities of colonized peoples to respond to intrusions are denied and ignored’ (1992, 279). We have already seen evidence of such ‘subaltern’ African responses, and they can be duplicated throughout the record.
But the heady mixture of Fanon, Foucault and Said, mustering the energies of two dominant discourses of the late twentieth century – postcolonialism and postmodernism – continued to develop a recriminatory and dismantling critique aimed at indicting not only Western authors who had explicitly written about empire (Kipling, Conrad and Forster come to mind), but all those who may never, or hardly ever, have written about the Eurocolonial world, yet were deemed to have unconsciously promoted or at least to have benefited from its existence, such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and George Eliot (Said, 1993).
Robert Young would later suggest that, like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, Said’s work ‘holds out the much more disturbing possibility that all Western knowledge is, directly or indirectly, a form of colonial discourse’ (1995, 160). Phrases such as ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, ‘epidemiology of representations’, ‘devices of doubt’, ‘violence of comprehension’ and ‘discourses of dismantlement’, deriving from postmodernist discourse, energised the debate, indicating a combative stance that suited the recuperative project of postcolonialism nicely. ‘Postcolonial theory and colonial discourse analysis have spread like an antibody through the disciplines of history, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies’, complained Rod Edmond (1997, 24). ‘Soon the postmodern category will include Homer’, quipped Umberto Eco (1983, ‘Postscript’). The combined forces of postmodernism and postcolonialism seemed set to rout the remaining outposts of imperialist confidence.
The main burden of these polemics is not material to the present study, but some of its import is, notably as exhibited in the persistent but self-contradictory assumption that Eurocolonial authors were both guilty of imperialist and racist perfidy, yet also (because of the perceptual grids deemed to confine such writers) cognitively incapacitated and so unable ever to perceive the ‘truth’ of their errors.
Several critics also pointed out that even where Saidean acolytes would attempt to refine and diversify his thesis, its underlying manichaeism remained unimpaired. Stephen Howe, reviewing works by Bhabha and Spivak, summed up how virtually all contributions to this minatory discourse continued to work: ‘First, monolithic, ahistorical, collective subjects are set up – the colonizer and the colonized – and then their relations are argued to be shifting and equivocal, through the deployment of deconstructive techniques and psychoanalytical procedures’ (1994, 40). The insights yielded by such procedures were always the same: ‘Imperialism is what light skins do exclusively to black skins’ (Sutherland, 1988, 996). Terry Eagleton delineated a critical industry that had become ‘a set of footnotes to Foucault…. [T]he theory is all in place, and all that remains to be done is to run yet more texts through it’ (1993, 8).
By now it was clear that while many authors might repeat the criticism that Said’s monolithic and ahistorical image of the imperial enterprise was ‘guilty of creating the very monolith [it] purported to condemn’ (Youngs, 1994, 6), few were able to resist the mesmeric attractions of Said’s neatly punitive model – as Tim Youngs, just quoted, himself fails to do in his 1994 book, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1910 (Van Wyk Smith, 1999b).
To me it became ever clearer that at the heart of this impasse or ‘crisis of representation’ (Adam and Tiffin, 1991), there lurked an unresolved disjunction between the crusading ambitions and idealism of postcolonialist critiques to reveal the ‘truth’ of, and thus to disarticulate, all imperial authority; and, conversely, the fundamentally agnostic, iconoclastic import of postmodernist ideology, according to which ‘truth’ is a chimaera, infinitely deferred, always only partially captured in language which in turn, and despite all its lesions, erasures and contingencies, holds our cognitive powers in thrall. While the discourse and project of postcolonialism is inspired by the conviction that grossly biased Eurocolonial representations of the colonial encounter and the exploitation of colonised subjects can and must be replaced by ‘true’ accounts of these nefarious processes, postmodernism proposes an equally substantive but sceptical precept that no representation is necessarily superior to another, that no subjective insight is inevitably more ‘true’ or ‘correct’ than another, and that all truth beyond the arithmetically self-evident or the fundamentals of the natural sciences is contingent on context. ‘The postmodern sensibility sees the human condition as ephemeral, discontinuous and plural,’ writes Zygmunt Bauman (1990, 501), or, more forcefully, Joel Schwartz: ‘we are mired in indeterminacy’ (1990, 35). Behind such views lies Nietzsche’s foundational insight that truth is a construction, perspectival and contingent (1887/1968), and the disruptive effect of such thinking on the idealism of postcolonialism has been much debated (Hutcheon, 1987, 1988; Harvey, 1989; Elam, 1992; Lash and Friedman, 1992; McHale, 1992; Bauman, 1993; Cahoone, 1996; Eagleton, 1996; Jenkins, 1997; Moore-Gilbert, 1997).
The scepticism and iconoclasm endemic to postmodernism may, it is assumed, be usefully recruited by a crusading postcolonialism to undermine Eurocentric and Eurocolonial confidence, and to bring to an end the Enlightenment project with its presumption that ‘the world could be controlled and rationally ordered’ (Anderson, 1995, 4). Thus the Enlightenment, with its rationalising and categorising zeal to define ‘races’ and rank them according to some hierarchy of progress or excellence, is frequently cited in postcolonial discourse as the major inspiration underlying Eurocentric racism, with the further inference that what was so opportunistically invented may just as readily be demolished. ‘Race is no more than a social construct’ is the accepted wisdom (Pagliaro, 1973; Augstein, 1996; Fredrickson, 2002); or, more bluntly, race ‘is a bogus scientific category rather than a fact of nature’ (Kidd, 2006, 18). Yet, as Lawrence Blum warns: ‘Racialized thinking is deeply imbedded in our social existence; its constructedness notwithstanding, we may not be able to change these social forms without far-ranging and currently barely imaginable changes in familiar structures’ (2002,159).
In such a context, what hopes does postmodernist scepticism hold out for a postcolonial project of recuperating lost ‘truths’? The bear-baiting apostasy of a postmodernist ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ might prove invaluable in the demolition of the bastions of Enlightenment imperialist thinking, but how can these same tenets be reconciled with assumptions that the ‘truth’ of the colonial past is wholly recoverable and may be readily ascertained?
Authors, including colonialist writers, either have a Cartesian capacity to understand and judge or condemn freely and justly the observed world, in which case they may in turn be judged by their critics, or they have no such freedom, are the victims of an imperfect human perceptual apparatus, and thus cannot be condemned. In other words, if the linguistic and cultural determinants of our conceptual world are as fixed and uncompromising as Foucault and Said would seem to maintain, certain individuals, and indeed entire cultures, are condemned by their cognitive and cultural grammars to be racist. Racism, then, would not be an unfortunate ideological aberration or delinquency that from time to time afflicts some people because of remediable socio-cultural and other negotiable factors, but would have to be conceded to be a primordial and inescapable feature of at least some, if not all, people’s conceptual worlds.
The alarming implications for a society such as mine, a country attempting to recover from centuries of racial disharmony and rampant racism, and now dedicated to the
