Neil Lazarus The Postcolonial UnconsciousThe Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.

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Previous article FreeBook ReviewNeil Lazarus The Postcolonial Unconscious The Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.Christopher TaylorChristopher TaylorUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWe’re talking about capitalism now. We’re talking about Marx. Call it a 2008 kind of thing. Since the Great Recession tipped off, wrecking economies, intensifying the implementation of draconian austerity measures, and inciting countervailing social movements around the world, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have assumed a posture of critical self-reflexivity. How could the epistemic and methodological regimes established through the 1980s and 1990s have proven so inadequate to getting a critical grip on our collective reality? So we’re talking about capitalism, we’re talking about Marx, and the question is no longer why we’ve started talking about them now so much as how it came about that we ever stopped. A guilty question, to be sure, and guilt finds its scapegoat. Postcolonial studies has served admirably in this capacity, enjoying a new lease on life for the way it can be made to emblematize where we all went wrong. It gets dusted off and reanimated only to be cast out into the desert, taking with it our collective guilt for reading Derrida and inhibiting the realization of full communism.Neil Lazarus puts it bluntly in his introduction to The Postcolonial Unconscious: “‘Postcolonial criticism’…is constitutively anti-Marxist” (12). The anti-Marxist orientation of postcolonial studies is hardly an accident, Lazarus suggests in his overview of the field’s formation. Rather, postcolonial studies was a product of its time, prey to intellectual fashions (i.e., poststructuralism) that were themselves little more than the cultural logic of a revanchist capitalist imperialism. As he puts it, “The emergent field breathed the air of the reassertion of imperial dominance in the 1970s” (9), a reassertion of dominance premised on the collapse of both First and Third World projects for popular emancipation in the inaugural years of our long neoliberal moment. Postcolonial studies amounts to a disciplinary memorialization of a dream not deferred but defeated: “The decisive defeat of liberationist ideologies…was fundamental to the emergent field, whose subsequent consolidation, during the 1980s and early 1990s, might then be seen, at least in part, as a function of its articulation of a complex intellectual response to this defeat” (9). Political defeats happen, of course. The problem for Lazarus is that postcolonial studies converted a conjunctural defeat of emancipatory dreams into an ideological and epistemological norm: the failure of anticolonial projects for human liberation was taken as indexing the illusory quality of the modern philosophical narratives that sustained them. At its worst, then, postcolonial studies is not merely “anti-Marxist.” It is functional for capitalist imperialism: “in its prevailing and consolidated aspect at least, [postcolonial studies] has been premised on a distinctive and conjuncturally determined set of assumptions, concepts, theories, and methods that have not only not been adequate to their putative object—the ‘postcolonial world’—but have served fairly systematically to mystify it” (17).If postcolonial studies was consolidated at a moment when it was widely felt that “Marxism [had] been obliterated as an enabling political horizon” (14), The Postcolonial Unconscious writes through a moment when a program for anti-imperial and anticapitalist liberation has been pushed, by crises of accumulation and ongoing imperial aggression, back into view. What then does a postcolonial literary criticism, unafraid of words beginning with “M” like “Marx” and “materialist,” look like in practice? Lazarus shows us in his first and best chapter, “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.” Lazarus’s framing of the chapter is simple but effective and, I think, entirely correct. On one hand, Lazarus maintains that postcolonial literary studies has been characterized by a dramatic restriction of the canon of postcolonial literature to a few select text texts. (In one sharp aside, Lazarus quips that “there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie” [22].) On the other hand, postcolonial reading practices have tended to dramatically reduce the thematic, ideological, and formal properties of those canonical texts that do get read. In effect, a handful of predigested literary texts serve postcolonial critics as staging grounds for theoretical arguments that are already accepted—theoretical arguments that are saturated with a “constitutive anti-Marxism,” an “undifferentiating disavowal of all forms of nationalism,” an “hostility to dialectics,” and even a refusal of “an antagonistic or struggle-based model of politics” (21). For Lazarus, the simplest way of flanking postcolonial studies’ united theoretical front is to read more and to read with a more capacious set of concerns in mind. That is the work of the chapter, for which the list becomes a favored rhetorical device: Lazarus overwhelms the field with his extremely wide knowledge of postcolonial literatures from pretty much everywhere. Moreover, by expanding the bibliographic scope of postcolonial literary inquiry, Lazarus intends to pluralize the conceptual topoi of the field. The wider the canon, the more provincial does a critical fixation on (Lazarus’s privileged examples) hybrid subjects and diasporic subjectivity appear. As Lazarus suggests, “the ‘world’ has to date typically been more adequately registered, and rendered, in ‘postcolonial’ literature than in postcolonial criticism” (36); thus, to read more widely is to note the “gap” that obtains between the typical postcolonial criticism and the postcolonial world as represented by postcolonial writers. The “gap” closes as the canon expands and, refreshingly, Lazarus poses literary writing as normalizing and expanding the epistemic reach of theory. To that end, Lazarus suggests reorganizing our critical approaches to postcolonial literature according to the following rubrics: “Mode of production and class relations,” “Land and environment,” “State and nation,” and “Structures of feeling” (35).Yet what is so striking about this productive line of approach, one that intends to reposition postcolonial studies in the horizon of Marx, is the extent to which its methodological architecture is almost entirely detachable from Marxist theory. To be sure, Raymond Williams looms large in Lazarus’s account, primarily as a theorist of cartographies of modernist canonicity. And Marxist-sounding terms like “mode of production” dot the chapter. Yet these terms are never fulsomely defined; we get a couple of paragraphs on Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development and a citation of Jameson. Indeed, the thrust of the chapter is primarily descriptive: it notes moments when Mahasweti Devi narrates class relations, or Lao She describes work. This might seem radical, if you follow Lazarus in the claim that the materiality of social relations are all but evacuated from postcolonial criticism, but it is important to recall that Marx did not and Marxists do not hold a monopoly on discussions of economic processes or relations. The description—or critical redescription—of class relations does not amount to a theoretical or political project. A kind of sociological positivism, one that takes literature as its case or dataset, stands in as a materialist enterprise.Where Lazarus’s Marxism is underspecified, his postcolonial studies is hyperspecified. Lazarus approaches postcolonial criticism as an object all but frozen in time, something that more or less happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and so as a field susceptible to delimitation to a narrow corpus. Indeed, where Lazarus’s range of literary reference is almost outrageously expansive, the theoretical canon that he treats consists of five or six writers. He offers one chapter on the Frederic Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad debate, another on Frantz Fanon and his recent biography from David Macey, another on the problem of postcolonial representation featuring V. Y. Mudimbe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said, and a final chapter simply titled “The Battle over Edward Said.” Perhaps this narrow focus makes sense, given his investment in working through the field’s unconscious, its overdetermining discursive, epistemic, and symbolic order. But it also leads him to overburden particular texts and polemics with a significance they might no longer bear. For instance, despite the drubbing his work receives across several chapters, I don’t think we can take Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) as centering postcolonial studies’ theoretical or methodological orientations anymore. What concerns me here is less the critical adequacy of Lazarus’s assessment of Bhabha’s work—an assessment with which I am largely in agreement—than the political and theoretical desires that motivate this particular rehearsal of postcolonial studies at this particular disciplinary and historical conjuncture. Had Lazarus defined the field more in the terms developed by Gayatri Spivak, for instance, his object of critique would have fallen apart. After all, Spivak has offered a career’s worth of critiques of hasty celebrations of hybridized subjectivity, the (self-)positioning of the postcolonial migrant intellectual in the Western academy, and the willingness of some postcolonial critics to jettison considerations of political economy. And she has offered these critiques in the name of a certain version of Marx.To be clear, I am not suggesting that Lazarus should have centered his book on Spivak—or on anyone at all for that matter. Indeed, we need to resist the tendency today to view postcolonial studies as a field that quickly blossomed and just as quickly withered, that it was something that happened in the early 1990s. The diminishing value of a brand isn’t equivalent to the diminution of a field. If there is no one marketable (or hirable) center of postcolonial studies today, no one brand name, it is just as true that a thousand flowers have bloomed since the field’s formation, and some of them are (and were) red. Lazarus cannot mark this heterogeneity as constitutive of the field, however, for to mark the primacy of (or even simply nonallergic relation to) Marxism within certain iterations of postcolonial studies is to necessitate rewriting “Marxist” critiques of postcolonial studies as disputes between competing versions of Marxism, rather than as a clash between mutually exorbitant theoretical formations. To put the quarrel in those terms, however, would require clarifying the particular content and method of the materialist analysis that Lazarus opposes to normative postcolonial criticism. It would require stating the political and theoretical protocols of the Marxism that organizes Lazarus’s criticism of an anti-Marxist postcolonial theory, not simply defining the former through the negation of the latter.My ultimate concern is not so much that Lazarus freezes postcolonial studies in time so much as that he freezes Marxism with it; and that, indeed, he freezes postcolonial studies in order to freeze Marxism. Consider his critical historicization of the field. For Lazarus, postcolonial studies misread the moment of its own emergence by posing the collapse of the Bandung project as having effected a singular mutation in human history, one that decisively displaced the emancipatory idioms of postcolonial modernity. Against this “pomo-poststructuralist” claim (25), Lazarus insists upon historical continuity, arguing that “developments” in the era of US global hegemony “have demonstrably rejoined the twenty-first century to a long and as yet unbroken history, wrongly supposed by postcolonial theory to have come to a close circa 1975” (15). He shows us what such temporal framing means in his reading of the Jameson-Ahmad debate in the chapter “Frederic Jameson on ‘Third-World Literature’: A Defence.” Lazarus neatly unfolds the trajectory of the debate, ultimately and compellingly arguing, “The critique mutates from a Marxist critique of ‘Third-Worldism’”—Ahmad’s original position—“into a ‘Third-Worldist’ critique of Marxism”—the opportunistic position assumed by anti-Marxist strands of postcolonial criticism (99). What troubles me, however, is the way in which Lazarus converts this intellectual-historical narration of field formation into a resource for field reformation. Scholars are enjoined to encounter Jameson’s text in a kind of simulated temporal suspension or, rather, a temporal regression: “Scholars should therefore seize the opportunity today to reread it, as though for the first time” (107). But what could it even mean to attempt to rejuvenate and seek rejuvenation from an essay written before the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a moment prior to the wholesale financialization of the globe, at a moment when the term partially motivating the dispute—the “Third World”—actually had mooring in a concrete geopolitical formation?Indeed, Lazarus recognizes—but only to disavow—the possible discontinuity between the moment through which Jameson wrote and the contemporary moment in which we are called upon to encounter him anew. We can see this recognition in the proliferation of terms that accompanies his suggestion that we return to Jameson’s national allegory thesis “in order to keep pace with, to be accountable to, modern and contemporary writings from the ‘postcolonial’ world, the ‘Third World,’ the ‘backward zones of capital’—whatever term one chooses to apply here” (107). Yet by suggesting that the choice of terms is immaterial, Lazarus collapses the specific historical conjunctures marked by the “Third World” and the “postcolonial” world into a common, elongated, evolving present. It is as if the only thing that changed between the Bandung moment and our postcolonial present is that intellectuals learned to stop desiring human emancipation. When the intellectual’s desire is recalibrated the continuities will reveal themselves. And so it is that Lazarus endorses this return to Jameson in order to reactivate “Third-worldness…as a regulative ideal,” an ideal “born of anticolonialist and anti-imperialist struggle” (106). In returning to anticolonial Marxism, Lazarus winds up at Kant; that is, he proffers a Marxism disburdened of the need to think political possibility through the concrete historical present because history here is subsumed into the intellectual’s ethical idealism.Thus, although I share with Lazarus the sense that postcolonial studies was not entirely hospitable to Marxism, and that plenty of postcolonial critics could not recognize class struggle if they were standing on a barricade in the banlieu, my worry is that Marxist critiques of postcolonial studies such as Lazarus’s are premised on an antihistoricist rejection of what postcolonial studies both symptomatized and, in part, diagnosed. Lazarus wants to see historical continuity from the anticolonial epoch to our own. He insists, on one hand, that US imperial adventurism is continuous with the colonial and imperial rule of decades past; on the other, he insists on the persistence of struggles against this imperial rule, going so far as to close his chapter on Fanon with Che’s slogan, “La lucha continúa” (182). From the perspective of capital or the militaristic state, the decades between 1975 and today might (and this is a big might) be seen as continuous. But the perspective of Marxism, like the perspective of postcolonial studies, is not isomorphic with that of the state or of capital. And from the vantage of these two perspectives, albeit in different ways, the decades following the collapse of the Bandung project and the rise of neoliberal globalization did mark a massive discontinuity in the time of liberation. This, because the collapse of the Bandung project was concomitant with the decimation of the collective subject of global emancipation—the collective subject, that is, whose perspective determines the theoretical and political optic of any Marxism that is not a left Weberianism in disguise. This is to say, then, that postcolonial studies did not “mystify,” as Lazarus has it, the functioning of capital or the foundations of a global project for human emancipation. Rather, it transcribed into the realm of cultural theory a fact lamented well enough by Marxists at the time: the erstwhile collective subjects of emancipation had been repressed, imprisoned, starved, indebted, and simply killed out of existence. In this reading, postcolonial studies was not flatly “anti-Marxist.” More accurately, it too was querying Marxism’s primary and perennial problem: Where is the emancipatory subject? That postcolonial studies basically answered “nowhere,” regardless of whether the affective valence of this response was celebratory or melancholic, strikes me as a fairly materialist assessment of the situation. Who, after all, remembers the 1980s or early 1990s as a time of subaltern revolt, as a time when the struggle continued?Ultimately, The Postcolonial Unconscious is provocative, but only provocative, precisely because it fails to encounter postcolonial theory as an important provocation to Marxist critical practice—as, say, Jameson allows dialectical criticism to be provoked by structuralism and poststructuralism in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Social Symbolic Act (1981) and, indeed, throughout his career. In eschewing a dialectical approach to postcolonial studies’ historical and disciplinary emergence, Lazarus confuses what Hegel would call a “monochrome formalism” with a robust historical materialism. That is, Lazarus acts as if Marxist literary criticism—and, perhaps, Marxism as such—can emerge unaltered through the postcolonial moment, as if critical frames elaborated in the age of three worlds can be formalistically applied to our present, as if Marxism can think the same way today as it did in 1975 or 1986. But the world turns, and it is important that, as we return to Marx, we let Marxism turn with it. Otherwise, the desire to resume a materialist project will simply be idealist, and the necessity of seeing where we went wrong will yield empty scapegoating. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 4May 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679355 Views: 1805Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.