The Pluralism of Perspectives

October 9, 2021
• Language, Colonialism

Academics and philosophers over the ages have argued about the meaning behind words. Linguists in the Metaphysical school of thought often ask the question: “on what conditions do two utterances count as utterances of the same word?”¹ In the late 19th century, proponents of historical-philological semantics argued for the “dynamic nature” and “conceptual flexibility” of word meaning and looked at language as a psychological phenomenon: words as a representation of ideas¹. But at the break of the 20th century, a new movement of ‘Structuralist Semantics’ started with Ferdinand de Saussure. This theory was grounded on three fundamental beliefs: Anti-psychologism, Anti-historicism, and Anti-localism, i.e. mental concepts, history, and locale are all irrelevant to the understanding of word meaning1. It is in rejecting these beliefs that Ania Loomba, in the essay “Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies”², analyzes the meanings of words related to colonization.

    The words “colonizing” and “colonized” go hand in hand but how they are represented depends on the context. As Ania Loomba notes, the definition of “colony” in the Oxford English Dictionary, written in the perspective of past colonizers, conveniently omits the narratives of the colonized. However, if one was to take a look at the meaning of the Hindi translation of the same word, “उपनिवेश/Upnivesh”,  a very different perspective can be found. Hindi2dictionary.com lists its meaning as “अन्य स्थान से आए हुए लोगों की बस्ती/a slum of people who have come from a different place”³ which is quite intriguing because now the meaning is from the perspective of the colonized. The depressing reality is that educational systems rarely ever utilize alternate perspectives. The fact that an online search for “Indian dictionary of English” returns no relevant texts and that Indians, as past colonial subjects, consider the OED a gold standard is evidence towards the power that colonialism still has in shaping concepts in the reader’s psyche by manipulating the meanings of words.

    Loomba argues that while expansion of territories and subjugation of indigenous communities is an age-old process, the nature of colonizing forces has also evolved over history. The ancient Greeks and Romans were involved in expanding their territories, and the Crusades established a moral/legal doctrine for the occupation of foreign lands and subjugation of ‘infidels’. But, as Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy argue in their essay on “Colonialism”⁴, it wasn’t until the 16th century that technological developments in navigation allowed colonialism to become fully capable of maintaining political sovereignty despite geographical dispersion. Loomba argues, citing Bottomore and Lenin, that the birth of capitalism alongside the expansionist policies changed the face of colonization, turning the colonizers into a powerful force representing the economic and political interests of a ‘metropole’. This started a two-way link between the ‘metropole’ and the ‘colony’, but only one side held all the cards and claimed most profits. Marx predicted that the bourgeoise would undermine local and national barriers to its own expansion⁵, but Lenin identified the export of economic burden by the colonizer and dubbed it ‘imperialism’⁶, a word that Loomba too adopts. Late-stage capitalism also gave rise to a new class of colonizers who subjugated territories without a colony, taking the form of the economic neo-imperialist America, whose policies have “[formulated] a hegemonic project for all the major capitalist states”⁷. Loomba also takes the opportunity to remind us that a system that exercised control over 84.6% of the world could not have been a monolith.

Similarly, when we look at the colonized, we must recognize that not all colonizations are the same. Loomba points out that colonized subjects “were not all oppressed in the same way or to the same extent”, connecting it to de Alva’s theory of postcoloniality and invoking a “multiplicity of [colonial] histories”. She gives us examples of how the experiences of the colonies which established their own sovereign states were different from the indigenous who over overthrew their colonizers. The experiences of the colonized are further split along the lines of other social categorizations. In some colonies, hybridity as the emergence of mixed races with assimilated cultures with novel social hierarchies became the norm (mestizos in Latin America), while in others, the experience of colonization was and remained segregated by skin color turning into a form of racial colonization prevalent even within the sovereign decolonized state (Apartheid in South Africa and slavery in America). 

Class too was another factor that distinguished the experiences of the colonized. Tribal and rural communities did not face the direct effects of colonialism in the way the urban upper/middle classes did, a trend that continued far after the decolonization. It led to the creation of an urban metropole of the indigenous bourgeoisie⁸ that colonized the tribal communities within their own state, a phenomenon that can be observed through stories like Mahasweta Devi’s “Shishu”⁹ and Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”¹⁰. Thus, historical social dynamics, influenced by geopolitical developments and cultural differences, led to the diverse experiences of colonialism. Using the word ‘colonizing’ or ‘colonized’ without context as to what such an experience entails does no justice to this diversity. 

Because of this, the “postcolonial” subject also becomes a problematic categorization, ripe with its contradictions. If we stand by what we claimed earlier about colonial subjects, postcoloniality is also not something that can exist without a context. It can only appear as an umbrella term to give a broad perspective to the social, cultural, and economic aftermath of any “categorization in which certain societies and cultures were perceived as intrinsically inferior.”¹¹ Loomba points out that it’s not clear what the ‘post’ in postcolonial entails. Decolonization was neither one-step nor global but a staggered process over a considerable period in history. She further argues that if the effects of past colonization can still be felt in a multitude of ways through racial and class-based colonization, modern neo-colonialism, or the economic dependence of decolonized states on their colonizer, is there really any ‘post’-colonial subject? If that is the case, it becomes all the more important to clarify what is meant by postcolonial in the context of the discourse. Thus, ‘colonizing’, ‘colonized’, and ‘postcolonial’ subjects cannot be treated as homogenous categories. 

While many thinkers argue that such poststructuralist ideas of the multiplicity of histories run the risks of being “politically impotent”¹² and incapable of action that brings social change, the alternative runs a greater risk of silencing selective narratives, most often of those who are already marginalized, creating a homogenizing force that can only lead to change in favor of the ones in power. The “mythical portrait of the colonized” in Alfred Memmi’s 1965 book¹³ is a stark example of how colonization itself is, at its root, a homogenizing process that prerequisites the construction of a collective devalued ‘Other’ (the colonized) that embodies the absence of civilized, humane values and represents everything that the colonizer is not. It is this flattening and dehumanization that fueled the colonizers’ exploitative streak and prevented introspection or a moral critique of the system. If we accept this same homogenization in exchange for ‘action’, our actions can only perpetuate all the harms that colonialism represents. And that, in my opinion, is a compromise we should not be willing to accept.

References:

1.    Gasparri, L. & Marconi, D. Word Meaning. in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Zalta, E. N.) (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019).

2.    Loomba, A. Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2002).

3.    Hindi2dictionary.com. (Upnivesh) उपनिवेश meaning in hindi | Matlab | Definition. http://www.hindi2dictionary.com/%E0%A4%89%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B5%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B6-meaning-hindi.html (2021).

4.    Kohn, M. & Reddy, K. Colonialism. in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Zalta, E. N.) (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017).

5.    Marx, K. et al. The Communist Manifesto. 214 (1848).

6.    Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. (Resistance Books, 1999).

7.    Sakellaropoulos, S. & Sotiris, P. American Foreign Policy as Modern Imperialism: From Armed Humanitarianism to Preemptive War. Sci. Soc. 72, 208–235 (2008).

8.    Alavi, H. The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh. New Left Rev. 59–81 (1972).

9.    Mahasweta Devi & Bhattacharjee, N. K. Bitter Soil. (Seagull Books, 1998).

10.    Ghosh, A. The hungry tide. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006).

11.    Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. & Tiffin, H. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. (Routledge, 2013). doi:10.4324/978023777855.

12.    Heyes, C. Identity Politics. in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Zalta, E. N.) (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020).

13.    Memmi, A. The Colonizer and the Colonized. (Beacon Press, 1991).