Hi, my name's Tom and welcome back to
another episode of What the Theory?, my ongoing series in which I aim to provide
some accessible introductions to key theories in the humanities. Today, as per
a number of requests in comments to some of my other What the Theory? videos, we're
gonna be taking a look at postcolonialism. Now, if you've yet to check out my
video on colonialism and colonial ideology, then I would suggest watching
that before you watch this one. It's not essential, however, I will link it up in
the top corner. And, before we get going, just a quick note to say that I'm not
entirely unaware of the irony of me, white English bloke, supposing to explain
postcolonialism. However, it felt like the only way to avoid doing so would
have been to leave it out of the What the Theory? series altogether which felt
equally wrong. And so, what I've aimed to do throughout this video is to
draw upon scholarly voices and other voices of those who might have a far
more visceral understanding and experience of postcolonialism than mine
which can only ever really be academic. As always, I'll be very happy to discuss
the inconsistencies and problems with this approach down in the comments,
as well as any suggestions for any future videos you'd like to see. With
that out of the way, however, let's crack on. So, in the previous episode of What the
Theory, we were largely interested in the process through which a number of
European nations came to have military and political dominance of much of the
globe and the ideologies which supported or attempted to legitimize their doing
so. Over the second half of the 20th century, however, many then colonized
nations gained their independence from their colonial rulers, sometimes through
a peaceful handover of power yet, often, through a protracted popular
uprising. In the present day, then, that particular form of colonialism, in which
one nation rules over another, is, though not entirely absent, somewhat less common.
Nonetheless, the absence of a formal colonial system has not led to a
completely equitable geopolitics or global culture. We only need to look at
the disparity in wealth between, say, Europe and Africa or North America and
Central and South America to see that that is the case. In short, colonialism
has a clear and persistent legacy. And postcolonialism is an umbrella term
which we use to describe a set of theory and practices which seek to explore the
legacy of colonialism in the present day. And much of this does attend to the
political and economic legacies of colonialism. However, as this is What the
Theory?, today we're going to largely be focusing on the cultural legacy of
colonialism and some of the ideas and theories that have come to be used to
explore the cultural legacy of colonialism in the present day. Now,
claiming a single theorist or a single book as being the originator of an
entire field is usually a gross simplification of the truth.
However, Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism can certainly lay claim to
popularizing some of the key ideas which now sit as the foundation of
post-colonial theory. Within it, Said argued that "ideas cultures and histories
cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more
precisely their configurations of power, also being studied".
For those of you who have watched my video on Cultural Hegemony (which again I'll
link above), this idea will be familiar. It's the suggestion that, if a certain
group within a society has more political or economic power, they will
likely also have an inequitable amount of power in framing or deciding what the
culture of that society, in which both they and the more disempowered groups
within that society, live. Said thus argues that, as a consequence of many
years of colonial rule, "the West" — a term which is largely used to refer to
nations which weren't colonized — has had a significant amount more power in dictating global culture than "the East" — a term which tends to be used to
describe nations which were colonized. And, in particular, Said suggests that
what happened was that "the West" essentially took away "the East"'s ability
to represent or define itself and that, instead, "the West" came to define "the East" in a manner that was useful for its own terms. In Said's own words, "the
imaginative examination of things oriental was based more or less
exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged
centrality an oriental world emerged". The central thrust of Said's thesis here is
that, in a global culture dominated by "the West", "the East" has usually been
represented (often by "the West") as being illogical, mysterious, strange, driven by
base human passions. In contrast to this, "the West" has often been represented as
logical, cultured and, in short, the norm. In her 1988 essay Can the Subaltern
Speak?, another key text in the development of postcolonial theory,
Gayatri Spivak argues that the result of this process was "to constitute the
colonial subject as Other". Now, there are two ideas at play here in the very
foundations of postcolonial theory. The first is the idea that this notion of "the West" and "the East" or the "non-West" is a
complete fabrication. In Stuart Hall's words, it is "as much an idea as a fact of geography". But it also points to the specific manner in which
this false binary has been used. In short, to portray "the West" and, vaguely speaking, European-descendant cultures — although that's a problematic notion in and of
itself — as being the norm and usual, whereas cultures from other continents
are largely defined as being strange and other. So, this notion of the othering of
non-Western culture can already be something that we can use as a point of
analysis for cultural texts. Gautam Basu Thakur's 2016 book Postcolonial Theory
and Avatar, for example, very much utilizes this notion of "othering" in
order to provide a postcolonial critique of James Cameron's Avatar.
Thakur argues that, though broadly speaking the film is anti-colonialism,
through its placement of the human being as the protagonist of the film, it
"reproduces a narrative of European privilege and subject-production". In short,
Thakur argues that, by placing the (albeit eventually-relenting) colonizer as the
protagonist of the film, it reinforces the centrality of the West in
conversation surrounding colonialism, demoting the film's allegorical
representation of the non-West to the role of the strange and the other.
However, for the purposes of today's video, I think it is useful for us to have
some other suggestions of what we might be looking out for when we're seeking to
analyze a cultural text through the prism of postcolonial theory. So, in his
book Beginning Theory, Peter Barry very usefully lays out four
characteristics which he sees as being things which recur throughout
postcolonial analyses. Number One: "an awareness of representations of the
non-European as exotic or immoral Other". Number Two: an interest in the role of
language in supporting or subverting that power dynamic. Number Three: "an
emphasis on identity as doubled, hybrid or unstable" and Number Four: "a stress on
'cross-cultural' interactions". The first of these very clearly suggests that,
following Said and Spivak's ideas, when undertaking a critique through
postcolonial theory, we should always be looking for whether the cultural text
we are analyzing is supporting or contesting this notion that the West is
central and normal and the non West other. The second seeks to foreground the
role of language in supporting or contesting that same power dynamic. See,
under colonialism, many colonized nations were forced to take the language of
their colonizer as an official language, using it for education say and also for
the codification of law. So this second characteristic of postcolonial analysis
asks us to consider how language might be supporting or contesting that
colonial legacy. The third is really complex and fascinating and stems from
the ideas of Homi Bhabha who's really interested in how colonialism can be
perceived as a mixing-up of cultures, that of the colonizer and that of the
indigenous people that lived there previously and were colonized. And how
this mixed identity that many people who lived in colonized nations
had, what the effects of that might be upon both individual identity and
communal identity. And the fourth, in my experience at least, largely manifests as
what we call a "cultural materialist" inquiry. Cultural materialism is
something I'm planning on making a video on soon. And what it essentially asks us
to do, is to consider how the creative process itself might be considered
perhaps an echo or a complete subversion of those colonial power dynamics. For
instance, when a non-western piece of culture is adapted into a Hollywood
movie, who has agency in that creative process and where is the money flowing
to? Now, my initial instinct when looking for a cultural text to analyze so that we
had an example in this video of how these ideas can be used, was to take
a look at a cultural text which, through the lens of
postcolonial theory, we might view as somewhat problematic (in a similar manner to Thakur did with Avatar). However, many cultural texts can, themselves, be read as
critiques of contemporary culture through the lens of postcolonial theory.
And taking a look at one of these texts allows us to have a slightly more
positive analysis of a piece of culture. And so, I wanted to draw upon a recent
cultural text which seems to have many of the concerns of postcolonialism very
much at its forefront, and that is Marvel's
2018 box-office smash hit Black Panther. So, for the remainder of this video, what
we're gonna do is take some of these ideas surrounding postcolonial theory
that we've been looking at, and use them as the starting point for a discussion
around Black Panther. So, without giving a complete rundown of the plot, because
that's not entirely necessary here, Black Panther takes as its protagonist T'Challa,
who, as well as being the king of the african nation of Wakanda, is also a
superhero. But it's Wakanda itself, and its use as the basis of a postcolonial critique of the contemporary world, that I'm mostly going
to focus on discussing today. See, Wakanda is a resource-rich nation which
is far technologically superior to any other in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of Earth. And, as Dwayne Wong (Omowale) argues in an article for
The Huffington Post, this allows us to imagine what might have been if European
nations had not stripped Africa of its resources and what might have been
achieved if African nations had been allowed to develop on their own terms. In
addition to this, positioning Wakanda as being far more technologically-advanced
and wealthy even, say, than the United States, flips the real world on its head and
allows us to explore a world in which a non-Western nation held more power
within the global culture. In relation to Barry's first characteristic of
postcolonial analysis, then, what this does is to decenter Western hegemony by
placing a fictional nation based very much in African tribal traditions at
the center of geopolitics. Furthermore, in Wakanda's initial deceit to the rest
of the world, in which it presents itself as an impoverished pre-industrial nation,
Black Panther directly plays upon Western perceptions of Africa as a
continent as being intrinsically unable to develop and maintain its own wealth.
And, moving on to Barry's second characteristic of postcolonial analysis,
we can also see that language plays a key role here. On the suggestion of John
Kani who plays T'Challa's father T'Chaka, filmmakers utilized the real South
African language of isiXhosa as the language of Wakanda. This is important
because, as John Eligon reports in the New York Times, "isiXhosa is very much
associated with the South African fight against white colonizers. [...] It was Xhosa
people who engaged in a century of fighting against European colonial
invaders in the Frontier Wars. More recently, some of the country's most
prominent anti-apartheid crusaders were Xhosa, including Nelson Mandela". Language is thus here used in order to carry real-world histories of resistance to
colonialism into Black Panther's text. In relationship to Barry's third
characteristic of postcolonial analysis, we can see that, within Black Panther, the
idea of identity as being hybrid or unstable is central to the conversations
and arguments which happen surrounding Wakandan foreign policy. See, T'Challa
initially very much supports the continuation of Wakanda hiding away from
the world and looking after its own citizens whereas Killmonger, one of the
villains of the film, argues that Wakanda has a moral
obligation to equip oppressed people of African descent around the world with
vibranium to help them overthrow their oppressors. Killmonger and, eventually,
T'Challa, therefore exhibit elements of a pan-African worldview. Pan-Africanism
being the notion that there should exist a global solidarity between all people
of African descent whether still living on the continent itself or part of the
diaspora. And, implicit in this worldview is the
notion that identity can be hybrid or dualistic; that one can be
living in America, say, but also retain an element of that African identity. Finally,
considering Barry's fourth characteristic of postcolonial theory —
that idea of exploring cross-cultural collaboration — we have to see that Black
Panther is intrinsically such a collaboration. Marvel Studios (and Disney
which owns it) are American companies and in Black Panther they are drawing
heavily upon cultural fragments from nations within Africa. Now, there is a
long history of such collaborations being highly problematic: see, for example,
the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the 2017 adaptation of the Japanese manga
Ghost in the Shell. However, to draw admittedly on the opinion of only one
person, Nteranya Arnold Sanginga commented on the release of the film
that "I among many others have also appreciated the manner in which the
movie has included a range of Africans. Blurring the idea of what it means to be
African and participate in such an installation". The fact, here, that the film
was used as a platform for the talent of African creatives and those within the
diaspora, goes some way to ensuring that the film does not solely take cultural
fragments from Africa in order to line the pockets of westerners. I'm sure there
are many opposing opinions to many of the observations that I've drawn upon
about Black Panther, almost definitely by people far more qualified to make them.
And, please, if you have your own thoughts on the film then it'd be really
interesting to have a discussion about it down in the comments. However, what I
hope you'll be able to see is how we can use the ideas of postcolonial theory to
analyze and start conversations about cultural texts whether, as in the case of
Black Panther, they seem to very much forward some of these ideas within the
cultural text itself or whether, as in the case of Avatar, they seem to
reinforce that colonial legacy. Thank you very much for watching this video, I hope you've enjoyed watching it as much as I've enjoyed making it. I'm currently
lining up my next What the Theory? video which I think will either be
Aesthetics, Poetics or Cultural Materialism. If you have any strong
thoughts on which I should do next, then do let me know down below. And, if you'd
like to see future videos, then please do consider subscribing.
That said though, thank you very much once again for watching and have a great
week!
