Postcolonial Studies

Materialist postcolonial scholars understand colonialism to be a territorial expression of political-economic expansionism. Its foundations in domination, appropriation, and exploitation place the colonizer and colonized populations in a fundamentally antagonistic relationship that Fanon famously described as "Manichean." Deconstructionists tend instead to understand colonialism as a cultural, epistemological, or psychological condition, and they perceive its political dimension as a "will to power" that operates autonomously of material determinants. In general, deconstructionists regard Fanon's Manicheanism as a binary opposition that requires breaking down. Accordingly, they interpret colonial dynamics as ambivalent, indeterminate, or negotiated.

All practitioners share an understanding that colonies played a constitutive role in the emergence and development of metropolitan Europe. These global dependencies have been studied in all spheres of human activity: cultural, economic, subject-formation. Ann Laura Stoler and others have developed Foucault's ideas of power/knowledge, discourse, and governmentality. This Foucauldian wing analyzes the production and regulation of colonial identities through modes of government, sexuality and gender, and educational systems. Colonial discourse analysis is concerned with knowledge production by various agencies of empire about colonized "others" (travel writers, missionaries, administrators, merchants, ethnographers, and so forth). Some practitioners emphasize the "epistemic violence" performed by these discourses; others emphasize their self-deconstructive qualities. Marxist studies have instead used concepts of ideology to explore the relations between imperialist ideologies and material practices, and consider the ways in which imperialist activities have denied and distorted indigenous social, cognitive, and cultural structures. Deconstructionists reason in spatial terms: space confers a single homogeneous political, social, ideological, and cultural identity upon its occupants (the West, Europe, Africa). Materialists criticize this approach for being monolithic, and explore instead the dynamic social-economic processes and diverse human agencies that, for them, operate within certain spaces.