Spectres haunting: Postcommunism and postcolonialism

Abstract

In this essay, I attempt to take stock of recent suggestions that the literatures and cultures of the former Soviet bloc countries be considered “postcolonial”. I begin by asking what is intended by this suggestion. While it is necessary to recognize that the Russian imperium and the Soviet order that succeeded it were clearly colonial in character, there are some good reasons to wonder whether the assimilation of “post-Soviet” criticism to “the postcolonial” is a good idea. Concerning postcolonial studies itself, I argue that the enterprise has hitherto been animated by a species of third worldism that has retarded understanding of the contemporary world-system; in particular, the postcolonialist idea of “the west” as the super-agent of domination in the modern global order strikes me as being deeply misconceived. On the “post-Soviet” side of the ledger, I worry both about a premature (if understandable) anti-Marxism and a tendency to insist precisely on that narrative of “the west” that postcolonial studies, in its indispensable critique of Eurocentrism, has managed to dislodge.

Keywords:

• post-Soviet criticism
• postcolonial studies
• the “west”
• third worldism
• capitalist world-system

Notes

1. This is an argument that I have made at greater length in The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).

2. The Rosales Saga is made up of The Pretenders, Tree (published as a novel in 1978, but originally serialized a decade earlier), My Brother, My Executioner, Mass and Po-on (Dusk).

3. The latter derives, of course, from the experience of Soviet overlordship, and constitutes a categorical and ahistorical response to an historically specific development. Two points might be made here in passing, although a much longer discussion would be warranted. First, that in many respects Soviet imperialism represented an extension of the Tsarist imperialism that it succeeded. Millions of people were crushed under its wheels, impoverished and dispossessed if not actually liquidated. The circumstances to which they were condemned were certainly no less harsh than those under which colonial subjects elsewhere in the world were labouring. In many ways, indeed, the forms of rule encountered in these contemporary modes of dictatorship (communist and colonial-capitalist) resembled one another closely. Second, that one needs to be careful in drawing historical “lessons” from these experiences. For it would surely be tendentious to argue that the historical experience of dictatorship in the Soviet era is sufficient to discredit communism once and for all, and in principle, unless one also argued that the historical experience of dictatorship in the colonial era (or “the American century”) is sufficient to discredit capitalism once and for all, and in principle. Selective advocacy of the first of these propositions only bespeaks the logic of the Cold War, and of “western” triumphalism.

4. The term is Eric Hobsbawm’s. See The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

5. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (2004); Tsvetan Todorov, The New World Disorder: Reflections of a European (2005).

6. Habermas was responding to the then-US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, who had infamously castigated France and Germany as “old Europe”, praising instead the “new Europe” of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, among others, whose leaders supported – or at least refrained from publicly disavowing – the American-led offensive.

7. See, respectively, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam; Dipesh Chakrabarty; Rey Chow; Walter D. Mignolo. All four texts are representative, in their distinct ways, of postcolonialist “third worldism”.