Postcolonial Writing and the History of Revolution
Postcolonial Writing and the History of Revolution
- Nasser MuftiNasser MuftiUniversity of Illinois Chicago
Summary
Integral to the idea of revolution in postcolonial thought is a theory of the intellectual. The problem of the bourgeois elite—and, by extension, the bourgeois intellectual—is central to how postcolonial thought has understood the unfolding of bourgeois revolution in the colonial peripheries. This is why postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have frequently turned to Karl Marx’s aphorism about the peasantry from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Far from originating in postcolonial theory, Marx’s claims about the peasantry have a prehistory in Pan-Africanism and anticolonial thought of the mid-century (Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon). These encounters with the contradictions of bourgeois revolution in the colonies (Partha Chatterjee) are also a motif in postcolonial reflections on the failures of decolonization (V. S. Naipaul, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ama Ata Aidoo).
Keywords
Subjects
- African Literatures
- 19th Century (1800-1900)
- 20th and 21st Century (1900-present)