Rethinking the colonial encounter with Bakhtin (and contra Foucault)

ABSTRACT

The limitations of employing a Foucauldian framework for studying the colonial encounter are discussed and an alternative approach drawing on the work of the Bakhtin Circle is proposed. The origins of the Foucauldian approach in postcolonial studies is traced back to the emergence of Stalinist critiques of ‘bourgeois orientalism’ at the beginning of the Cold War, which proposed a dualistic model of closed discourses of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘Soviet’ orientalism. The Bakhtinian approach developed in opposition to Stalinist attempts to ‘monologise’ the critical approaches developed in the USSR, questioning the idea of closed discourses and stressing modes of engagement between different social groups and ideological positions. The second part of the article provides a case study of the emergence on Indo-European philology, which is often presented as a clear example of Western Orientalism. It is shown that this movement developed as a result of collaboration between European philologists and Indian high-caste pandits. It is shown that various agendas were pursued within philology, and that a number of different critical intersections emerged over time. It is suggested that a Bakhtinian approach, suitably revised and developed, provides a superior starting point for understanding these phenomena.

KEYWORDS:

• Foucault
• Bakhtin
• philology
• orientalism
• USSR

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Craig Brandist is Professor of Cultural Theory and Intellectual History and Director of the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is the author of numerous works on Soviet culture and intellectual history including The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (2002); Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR: 1917–1938 (2010, 2011) and The Dimensions of Hegemony: Language, Culture and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (2015, 2016). He is currently working, with Peter Thomas, on a book about Antonio Gramsci’s time in the USSR in 1922–25, based on archival research, and pursing research about early Soviet oriental studies.

Notes

1 On the history of this combination see Burke and Prochaska (2007); on the inflated and undertheorized aspects of Foucault’s notion of discourse see Norris (2015, 204).

2 In this article Voloshinov develops Karl Bühler’s ideas about the concrete meaning of the sign being conditioned by its place within the speech act. On this see Brandist (2004).

3 Said scarcely mentions Bakhtin, and explicitly resists using the term ‘dialogic’ as a result of the ‘recent cult of Bakhtin’ in his conversations with Raymond Williams (Williams 1990, 181–2). His dismissive tone is perhaps in response to the way Bakhtin was adopted, and in some significant ways distorted, by certain US liberal humanists as a counterweight to more engaged forms of theory in the 1980s. A number of commentators have nevertheless noted the affinity of the work of Said and Bakhtin, not least Brennan (1992).

4 For accessible overviews of Konrad’s career see, in English, Croskey (1991) and, in Russian, Alpatov (1991).

5 As I have shown elsewhere (Brandist 2011), Bakhtin’s approach draws heavily on the palaeontology of plots and genres in the work of Aleksandr Veselovskii, and developed in the 1920s and 1930s by followers of Nikolai Marr such as Izrailʹ Frank-Kamenetskii and Olʹga Freidenberg.

6 Interestingly ‘hybridity’ was posited by many Russian scholars of Bakhtin’s time to describe rather than subvert the identity of the subjects of the Russian Empire itself (Gerasimov, Glebov, and Mogilner, 2016).

7 The term ‘rectification’ is employed here in the sense of the conversion of alternating to direct current.

8 Most significant in this area are Irschick’s (1994) consideration of the dialogic nature of colonial rule in south India, while Urban (2001) makes effective use of Bakhtin’s ideas about carnival in his study of the Kartabhaja sect in Bengal.

9 Ahmed (2018, 125) notes that ‘Colonial law thus revealed its raison d’être: not just to establish private property or any particular mode of production, but also to concentrate juridical power within the state’. As Pashukanis ([1924] 1980) showed, however, the establishment of the capitalist mode of production required precisely this ‘concentration of juridical power’.

10 It is notable that Ahmed (2018) provides no consideration of the Bengal Renaissance in his predominantly Foucauldian discussion of the entanglement of colonialism and philology.

11 Tilak derived this argument from Boston University President and professor of systematic theology William F. Warren (1885).

12 See, for instance, Stcherbatsky (1932).

13 I have discussed the similarities with Bakhtin’s ideas about carnival elsewhere (Brandist, 2017).

14 For a discussion see Ganalanian (1985).

15 For a stimulating discussion of this see Mulhern (1995).