THE IDEA OF EMANCIPATION AFTER POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Abstract

Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, this essay argues the traditions of “history from below”, subaltern studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory’s capacity to diagnose domination and ties theory too closely to the self-understandings of its subjects. Distinguishing appropriately between agency and freedom and between desire and interests can revivify the idea of emancipation. A universal interest in freedom from domination can be defended on this basis without discounting the self-understandings and actual desires of people. This argument points the way to a division of labour between emancipatory political theory, which analyses public institutions in the name of the universal interest in freedom, and emancipatory politics, which begins from people’s actual desires in order to build support for institutional change.

• Agency
• Domination
• Feminism
• Freedom
• Mahmood, Saba
• Postcolonial Theory

Notes

1 I will use “emancipation” and “liberation” interchangeably throughout to refer to the project of eliminating systematic domination or oppression; freedom is its goal.

2 Recent attempts to reassert freedom as the goal of the Left have drawn inspiration from the neo-republican political theory of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, among others (Lovett and Pettit 2009; Pettit 1997; Skinner 1998). Scholars have traced the historical continuity between republican opposition to domination and the rise of the nineteenth-century Left (Claeys 1989; Gourevitch 2015; Leopold 2007; Roberts 2017). Simultaneously, the contemporary political concerns of the Left are being rearticulated in terms of freedom from domination (Einspahr 2010; Gourevitch 2016; Halldenius 2010; Shapiro 2016; Watkins 2015).

3 There are major disagreements between (a) empiricists like Thompson, for whom one must only attend carefully to the right sources, (b) structuralists like Guha, for whom only a rigorous protocol of reading the absences in the official records will do and (c) poststructuralists like Spivak, for whom the subaltern's voice is eternally deferred in any system of signs. These become meaningful differences, however, only after the choice is made to pursue popular or subaltern cultures of resistance.

4 Having a reason to want something is not the same as wanting it, and does not preclude having other reasons for not wanting the same thing. Thus, having an interest in being free from domination may conflict with and be outweighed by other interests. We will explore some of these intricacies further on.

5 Chatterjee’s critique of Chibber’s interpretation is worth considering, though (Warren 2017, chap. 1).

6 Something Chatterjee affirms (Warren 2017, 43).

7 Foucault himself, when questioned, averred that liberation from domination is “the political or historical condition for a practice of freedom”, what he called ethics or the care of the self (1997, 283).