Table Of ContentBourdieu and Postcolonial Studies
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 19
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines
Series Editors
Graham Huggan, University of Leeds
Andrew Thompson, University of Exeter
Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for
postcolonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance
in colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English
literary/cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of
disciplinary knowledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial
critique. Edited by leading scholars, the series aims to be a seminal
contribution to the field, spanning the traditional range of disciplines
represented in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged. It
will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the relationship
between the transnational/cultural, the global and the postcolonial.
Bourdieu
and Postcolonial Studies
Raphael Dalleo
Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies
Liverpool University Press
First published 2016 by
Liverpool University Press
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Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2016 Liverpool University Press
The right of Raphael Dalleo to be identified as the editor of this book has been
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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Contents
Contents
Permissions vi
Introduction 1
1 Graham Huggan, Writing at the Margins: Postcolonialism,
Exoticism and the Politics of Cultural Value
(from The Postcolonial Exotic) 17
2 Chris Bongie, Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the Popularity of
Postcolonial Literature (from Friends and Enemies) 53
3 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Authorship Revisited
(from Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace) 80
4 Roxanna Curto, Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria 102
5 Michael Niblett, Style as Habitus: World Literature,
Decolonization and Caribbean Voices 119
6 Caroline Davis, Playing the Game? The Publication of
Oswald Mtshali 137
7 Stefan Helgesson, Fields in Formation: English Studies and
National Literature in South Africa (with a Brazilian Comparison) 159
8 Kris Singh, Archived Relationships: Pierre Bourdieu and Writers
of the Caribbean Diaspora 175
9 Nicole Simek, Irony in the Dungeon: Anamnesis and Emancipation 191
About the contributors 209
Index 212
v
Permissions
Chapter 1 was originally published in Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic:
Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 1–33. It is reprinted here
with the permission of the author and Routledge.
Chapter 2 is an excerpt from chapter 6 of Chris Bongie’s Friends and Enemies:
The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2008. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author and
Liverpool University Press.
Chapter 3 contains material from chapter 2 of Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial
Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
It is reprinted here with the permission of the author and Palgrave Macmillan.
vi
Introduction
Raphael Dalleo
Introduction
Postcolonial studies looks forward to a future to be achieved—‘history has
not yet arrived at the post-imperial era’ (Young 27)—and at the same time
can seem dated, too oriented towards colonial structures of the past to offer
insight into a rapidly changing neoliberal present. Already by the early 1990s,
Ella Shohat’s ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’ (1992) was making the argument
that the postcolonial framework was unable to account for the renewed
imperialism represented by the Gulf War, while Arif Dirlik’s ‘The Postcolonial
Aura’ (1994) charged that ‘postcolonial critics […] have had little to say about
[imperialism’s] contemporary figurations’ (356), namely ‘the emergence of
what has been described variously as global capitalism, flexible production,
late capitalism, and so on’ (330). Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious
(2011) updates this criticism, that ‘developments in the first decade of our new
century—above all the US-led and -sponsored invasion and occupation of Iraq
and the sorry misadventure in Afghanistan—have exposed the contradictions
of this established postcolonialist understanding to stark and unforgiving
light’ (15). While postcolonialism can thus seem unable to keep up with
the times, Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies makes the case that the field has
begun to substantially change during the twenty-first century. One of the
most important developments during this period has been the emergence
of sociological approaches to postcolonial studies engaging with the work
of Pierre Bourdieu that offer an opportunity to redefine postcolonialism’s
potential for intervention and critique.
Lazarus attributes much of postcolonialism’s limitations to its development
in ‘an institutionally specific, conjuncturally determined’ moment, when
‘after 1975, the prevailing political sentiment in the West turned sharply
against anticolonial nationalist insurgency and revolutionary anti-imperialism’
(9). In this context, the complex theoricity of what Lazarus calls ‘“post”-
theory,’ suddenly ascendant in the academy, ‘seemed to offer what the old,
1
Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies
presumptively discredited “modern” systems of thought—all of them, left,
right, and centre—evidently could not: a counter-narrative to the “new world
order” of such as Reagan and Thatcher, a different basis for counter-action’
(186). Lazarus’s narrative explains how postcolonial studies emerged as an
academic field in the 1980s with figures like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and
Homi Bhabha adapting the poststructuralist thought of Foucault, Derrida
and Lacan. We can extend this narrative by adding that by the 1990s the
field was moving in the direction of Paul Gilroy’s, Edouard Glissant’s and
Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s interest in the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, more
in line with the celebratory discourses of globalization becoming popular
during this period but still very much invested in poststructural approaches.
The poststructuralist engagements of the 1980s and early 1990s are still
sometimes thought of as the entirety of postcolonial studies.1
Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies demonstrates how, since 2000, these
approaches have been supplemented by a Bourdieu-inspired sociological
approach to postcolonialism that offers the field ‘a different basis for counter-
action’ within the neoliberal context of its own emergence. The interest in
Bourdieu is part of a larger emphasis on various forms of materialism, such
as an increased interest in archival research and book history, that have
become a counter-weight to the high theory abstractions often dominating
postcolonial studies.2 Lazarus himself, in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in
the Postcolonial World (1999), was one of the first to begin the process of
adapting Bourdieu to postcolonial contexts.3 Following from this pioneering
work, Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001) crystalized much of
the anxiety about the field’s institutionalization, inspired new work such as
that of Sarah Brouillette, Nicole Simek, Michael Niblett and Caroline Davis,
and led to surprising turns towards sociological approaches by previously
poststructuralist critics like Chris Bongie. This introduction to Bourdieu and
Postcolonial Studies suggests the reasons for Bourdieu’s relevance as well as
1 In the first edition of the Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory published in
2001, for example, postcolonialism was represented by Edward Said, Gayatri
Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, along with Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, and Ngũgĩ
wa Thiong’o. The second edition, from 2010, adds Paul Gilroy and an excerpt
from what might be thought of as the quintessential text of Deleuzian approaches
to imperialism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, but otherwise, the
anthology represents postcolonialism as it had a decade earlier.
2 Archival projects, like Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (2002), which assembles
a wealth of material on publication about readers and book circulation in India
since the nineteenth century, or the scholarship that I survey in the introduction
to Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, have helped to make the case that,
in the Bourdieusian words of Andrew van der Vlies, a book historian from South
Africa, ‘meanings are influenced by factors’ that include ‘publishing pressures, the
ruling discourses of reviewing, censorship, abridgment, educational institution-
alisation and the valorising economics of literary-prize culture’ (10).
3 Spivak also deployed Bourdieu as early as the 1990s, most overtly in her essay
‘Teaching for the Times’ (1992).
2
Introduction
why this position within the field has become such an important one, able
to offer models for political commitment that acknowledge the impossibility
of operating outside of capitalist institutions. This introduction therefore
seeks to historicize—and even point towards a sociological approach to—the
emergence of sociological approaches to postcolonial literature.
The Rise of Postcolonial Materialism
The Marxist critique from the early 1990s—articulated by Dirlik, Aijaz Ahmad
and Benita Parry, among others—positions itself as a response to what it
sees as the misdirected politics of the field, and we can see that this critique
emerges out of the same impulse that led to the turn to Bourdieu in the
2000s: the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in the academy. Dirlik’s
essay captures the idea behind the Marxist critique in its opening lines,
which paraphrase Shohat to ask ‘When exactly does the post-colonial begin?’
and then ‘supply […] an answer that is only partially facetious: when Third
World intellectuals have arrived in the First World academe’ (329). Even if
these critiques do not invoke Bourdieu or employ his methods, they open
up the discussion of how postcolonial studies as an intellectual endeavor is
embedded in institutions, and how those institutions shape the field. The
Marxist critics frame their work as responses to the inability of postcolonial
studies to sufficiently address ‘the relationship of the idea of postcolonialism
to its context in contemporary capitalism’ (331). As Dirlik’s opening reference
to the arrival of Third World intellectuals in First World academe makes
clear, the underlying concern in this critique of postcolonial studies is about
the ‘academic respectability’ the field is acquiring (330). Dirlik’s focus on
the kinds of institutions these academics inhabit—he notes Spivak’s move
to Columbia as one of his examples (330)—foreshadows the Bourdieusian
approach to understanding why certain intellectual positions come to be
consecrated. Postcolonialism for Dirlik ‘is designed to avoid making sense of
the current crisis and, in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial
intellectuals in a global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as
beneficiaries’ (353).
These Marxist approaches differ from the approaches inspired by Bourdieu
in seeing consecration as a straightforward process by which capital rewards
intellectual movements that are not ideologically threatening and that
reinforce the status quo. Dirlik describes postcolonialism as ‘appealing because
it disguises the power relations that shape a seemingly shapeless world and
contributes to a conceptualization of that world that both consolidates and
subverts possibilities of resistance’ (356). This statement does not name to
whom or what this intellectual approach appeals. Whereas for Bourdieu,
intellectual fields have their own rules and forms of capital related to but
distinct from economic and political fields, for Dirlik, postcolonial studies
is consecrated as part of the larger process of capitalism’s ‘control from the
3
Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies
inside through the creation of classes amenable to incorporation or alliance
with global capital’ (354). The acceptance of postcolonial studies by a capitalist
academia appears as a mode of containment, if not outright manipulation, of
liberationist anticolonial energies. Postcolonial intellectuals can thus only be
either cynical collaborators or unwitting dupes, ‘Third World intellectual[s]
who ha[ve] been completely reworked by the language of First World cultural
criticism’ (334). This critique of postcolonialism, claiming a space of autonomy
while still participating in the postcolonial debate, becomes itself one of the
privileged positions in the field, with essays by Dirlik, Ahmad and Parry widely
cited and anthologized in postcolonial studies readers.4
Postcolonial studies during this period was therefore characterized by
anxiety about the field’s institutionalization and the extent to which the
proliferation of postcolonial studies programs, courses, university positions
and anthologies undermines the field’s self-conception of marginality and
critique. In this context, books like Beyond Postcolonial Theory (2000), The
Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (2000), Relocating Postcolonialism (2002),
and Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005), as well as essays like ‘Postcolonialism
and Its Discontents’ (1997), were all published between 1997 and 2005. These
titles indicate the field’s sense of identity crisis. In 2000, meanwhile, the
publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire suggested that rather than postco-
lonialism, what we might call ‘Empire studies’ offered a more promising
way of adapting ideas about globalization to a politically radical critique of
international inequalities. Only a year after Empire’s appearance, however,
just as postcolonial studies seemed inescapably coopted and exhausted, the
most influential work of postcolonial criticism since Dirlik, Ahmad and Parry’s
challenge to the field was published: Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic.
Table 1 gives some sense of Huggan’s place in the field.
Looking at the number of citations of various works of postcolonial theory
and criticism offers a sense of the field and how it has changed over time.
The first story that emerges from these figures is of the dramatic fragmen-
tation of postcolonial studies. The staggering number of citations for Said,
Spivak, and Bhabha shows just how synonymous with the field those three
critics have been. The early 1990s Marxist critique of postcolonial studies,
represented in the work of Dirlik, Ahmad, and Parry, reaches nowhere near
the level of citation of the work of Said, Spivak and Bhabha but, along with
huge numbers of citations for books by Mary Louise Pratt, Robert Young
and Anne McClintock, still demonstrates a general consensus about what
constitutes the mainstream of postcolonial studies in this time period. When
we move past 1995, however, there is nothing like this kind of consolidation
4 Dirlik, Ahmad and Parry all have essays included in the 2006 edition of The
Post-Colonial Studies Reader edited by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin as well as in
Padmini Mongia’s Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (2009). Postcolonialisms
(2005), edited by Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair, includes Dirlik’s ‘The Postcolonial
Aura.’
4
