European Racial Triangulation

Anca Parvulescu

Two directions have become discernible in postcolonial theory in the last decade, both of which are reflective of attempts to reorient a field perceived to be in crisis. On the one hand, some scholars have called for the field's reconfiguration. As this argument goes, postcolonial theory has run its course in relation to the historical moment of decolonization, and it proves inadequate or insufficient in relation to our global moment. On the other hand, scholars have called for an expansion of postcolonial theory's reach, beyond its original (and much-debated) anchoring in the postcoloniality of South Asia, into Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, China, the Caucasus, and Europe. This chapter constitutes a reflection on this second impulse. What happens to postcolonial theory when it accepts its status as "traveling theory," to borrow Edward Said's phrase? Particularly, what happens to postcolonial theory when the "postcolonial" is conjoined with that which it was initially supposed to decenter, "Europe"? How does postcolonial theory look like once it travels not to the postcolonies in East Europe, where it should have traveled a long time ago, but to the former colonial West European metropolis? If the word "postcolonial" designates various forms of resistance and agentive transformation in the aftermath of colonialism and neocolonialism and if "Europe" is almost synonymous with colonialism, is "postcolonial Europe" an oxymoronic formulation, with potentially regressive overtones? On its journeys to Europe, as Said might wonder, does postcolonial theory risk ossification and domestication or is it likely to be reinvigorated?

John McLeod acknowledges that "in speaking of postcolonial London I am in danger of recentralizing the Western metropolis" (2004, 14). He is responding to other postcolonial theorists, like Gayatri C. Spivak, who consider the study of postcolonial migration, on which the idea of "postcolonial London" is premised, to be Eurocentric. McLeod warns, however, that the postcoloniality of London is not commensurate with that of a former colony. What the term "postcolonial London" names, for McLeod, is the effect decolonization had and continues to have on the former colonial metropolis. Both colony and colonial metropolis have been transformed by decolonization, albeit in radically different ways. The two are postcolonial, therefore, in radically different ways. McLeod proposes that the task for the postcolonial critic who acknowledges that the European metropolis has never been immune to the cultural exchanges that shadowed colonial capitalist exploitation is to trace various sites of ensuing transculturation (McLeod 2014).

In case one might be tempted to consider such transculturation to be a recent development, one would do well to revisit the globalizing rhetoric of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto:

[The bourgeoisie] draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what is called civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. (Marx and Engels 1986, 228)

As the "most barbarian nations" are compelled to enter the empire of capitalism, they "adopt" cultural forms traveling from colonial centers. Aamir Mufti reads these statements for their unacknowledged underside: "What they [Marx and Engels] could not fully conceive of, but a conception of which is nevertheless compatible with the contingency that they ascribe to modern 'civilization', is the possibility that this attempt to create 'a world after its own image' transforms the original itself" (1998, 113). Capitalist colonial exchange impacted not only "the most barbarian nations" but also "what is called civilization."

Today, in addition to the study of decolonization in its longue durée, in the former colony and in the former colonial metropolis, postcolonial theory needs to identify and analyze the neocolonial dimensions of neoliberalism, flexible capitalism writ global. Neoliberalism's global reach does not render the postcolonial core/periphery distinction anachronistic, as it is often argued, only insufficient. In addition to focusing on the ex-colonies of former empires, European as well as non-European, today's postcolonial theory also attends to peripheries and semi-peripheries of neocolonial centers that do not coincide with (nor function in the same way as) the old colonial metropolises. The challenge for the field is thus to bring into focus the...