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Introduction: Teaching Post-Colonial Literatures in the Age of Empire
By Linda Dittmar and Pepi Leistyna

Are colonialism and imperialism over and done with? On its face this would seem to be the case, at least as measured by the United Nations' membership roll call. From Martinique to Angola, Tasmania to Lebanon, Cambodia or Zanzibar, previously colonized countries throughout Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe are now independent. After all, past colonies now fly their own flags, have their own economies, civic institutions, military and police, postal services and, when they can afford it, their own national airline. They also have their own borders and border wars, their own economic troubles, their own classes and ethnic tensions (and sometimes wars), and their own gender inequities, just like us. Indeed, when national flags billow in the breeze and national anthems are blared with gusto, how can one doubt the rhetoric of independence? As many now claim, our world has entered a new, post-colonial mode of national self-determination.

This notion of newness, underscored by the "post" of "post-colonial," has a distinctly optimistic ring to it, suggesting that a qualitatively different era has begun, while global geo-politics and economics argue the opposite. Once we pause to consider the wars and depredations now in process worldwide, mostly led or exploited by the United States, it is hard to argue that we have in fact moved into a new era. The external trappings of colonization may have changed—the military hardware, the verbiage, the deceptions, the funding, the media, and the ways outsiders extract wealth. But the wars, exploitation, governing institutions, and cultural hegemony that made European empires and their colonizing arms possible up to and through their heyday in the nineteenth century persist, even if in new forms. While the old stereotype of men in khaki, boots, and topi hats has given way to that of men in flak jackets, helmets, and camouflage ochre, with the supple swagger sticks of bygone days now replaced by metal strapped to belts and hoisted on shoulders, the same realities persist: the national product that is controlled by outsiders, the local populations that are kept in misery, the military arm that enforces all this, and the foggy ideology that aligns the interests of the privileged few among the colonized with those of the colonizer while suppressing the discontent of the masses.

In this sense, the "war on terrorism," covert operations, and global flows of capital, labor, and culture have effectively become coercive forms of colonization. The modes of control are being newly configured, administered, and labeled so as to distance nation-states from the direct acquisition and management of territories, as seen in Britain's giving up its control of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) for example, France its rule in Senegal, or the United States its hold over the Philippines. But these are surface changes. In practice, the economic gains and power relations that originally defined empires and their colonizing arms persist, even if in new forms. They are to be found in corporate multinational transactions, in the control by outsiders of precious natural resources (notably oil and gas), in the globalized flow of "human resources" (i.e. workers), and, most violently, in the military operations that enforce and guarantee such powers.

This continuity between the old forms of imperialism and colonialism and new ones becomes clearer once one pauses to consider what these concepts mean. Specifically, in our (the editors') use, "empire" refers to the control of the physical and human resources of given territories by external forces, while "colony" stresses the settlement of such territories by outsiders—that is, settlements by outsiders on lands held by the "empire." In this sense "empires" extract while "colonies" involve a residential commitment to interacting with that territory and its people. Though colonial settlement is always, inevitably, implicated in extractive, exploitative agendas, it also recognizes the need for long-term intentional investment, including the development of a civic infrastructure. In this sense, the building of an electric power dam, the training of workers for outsourced labor, or support for educational and cultural institutions that disseminate the values of the colonizer and prepare local people for the colonizing workplace are all part of this process.

Seen in these terms it seems obvious that we are entering a new era, where how we think about global economics, politics, and cultural power is undergoing rapid inter-related changes. The global economy—a product of the last five hundred years of intervention and imperialist expansion—has now entered a new phase made possible by innovative technologies, transnational institutions, and the logic of neoliberalism. At issue now is no longer the direct concentration of control in the authority of the nation-state, as happened classically in India, for example, where control passed from the East India Company to the British government. Rather, at issue is the diffusion of control, shifting imperialist power away from nation-states and investing it instead in emerging forms of globalization. This new organization of power is indeed new, while the aggregate substance of its effects is not. What is new here is a transfer of powers and methods more than a change in consequences. Obsessed with privatization, deregulation, and restructuring, we now see elite private powers at once using the state to protect their corporate interests and, at the same time, disregarding the state in their push to dismantle many of the rights and protections that have been achieved internationally by social democracies, organized labor, and grassroots activists.

What characterizes this shift away from explicit state control to new forms of imperialist power and colonization, notably corporate and multinational, is a qualitative change in the power of the private sector. With fifty-one of the planet's one hundred largest economies now corporations which transcend government regulation, institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization now enjoy supranational status. As such, they enjoy fiscal imperialist and colonial control without necessarily needing to enforce that control militarily. Instead, in "calm" zones, economic exigencies do it for them, aided as needed by covert operations that topple unfriendly governments. When the United States does get marshaled militarily as a nation, it does so to bring into line recalcitrant countries, as evident in Iraq, where the "war on terrorism" protects and promotes the needs of private corporate entities.

The fate of children and youths under this new (but also not-so-new) order illustrates its brutal effects. Of the 6.3 billion people that currently live on this planet, almost half of them are under the age of twenty-five, and half of the world's one billion poor are children. Victims of the residue of the dehumanizing history of colonial rule, sustained racism, and patriarchy, and now the mandates of deregulation and structural adjustments, 11 million children under the age of five die annually because of malnutrition, dirty water, disease, poor housing, and forced migrations. Hundreds of millions of youth around the world are not getting formal education, and millions are trapped in the sex trade and sweatshops or caught in military conflicts where they are often forced into fighting someone else's economic and ideological wars. Nowadays, these tragedies are often aligned with the depredations of the private sector, not necessarily the nation-state, though nation-states obviously sanction them through their inaction.

Still, it is important to remember that neoliberal and neoconservative versions of globalization are not the only form of global relations imaginable. There is a radical difference between the top-down economic globalization described above, where the goal is to ensure access to cheap labor and raw materials in order to maximize profits, and what is referred to as "globalization from below," where new global justice movements challenge the hegemony of corporate rule and expose governments' complicity in it. Striving to ensure that the interests of the people and diverse cultures are recognized and realized, this challenge involves efforts to democratize global technologies, environmental resources, and information, media, and financial systems. The multi-interest coalitions that have sprung up—including human rights, environmental, indigenous, faith, student, and consumer groups, along with trade unionists, feminists, anti-sweatshop activists, anarchists, and anti-war protesters—all attest to these efforts. Confronting economic, political, technological, and cultural oppression, such transnational collective action is helping people understand and fight to transform ways corporate globalism is currently organizing societies.

Such high hopes buoyed emerging nations during the initial period of modern decolonization. As Vijay Prashad reminds us in an editorial written for the Nation in June 2007, on the occasion of Ghana's fiftieth anniversary of independence as the first sub-Saharan African nation to become free of its colonizers, the wave of independence movements, stretching from 1947, when India and Pakistan won their independence, to the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974, was animated by passionate hopes for what he calls "a new global dispensation." These hopes were articulated powerfully in the 1955 meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, of twenty-nine non-aligned newly formed nations gathered to chart collaborative prospects for a revitalized Third World. "For them," he writes, "the Third World was not a place; it was a project. Galvanized by mass movements and by the failures of capitalist maldevelopment, leaders in the darker nations looked to one another for an alternative agenda…They wanted to have a voice and power on the world stage."¹

Franz Fanon's understanding of the transition from traditional colonialism to a new, still- to-be-charted era was more grimly realistic and thus more combative than the utopian aspirations of the Bandung gathering, in that Fanon foresaw the bitter struggles that will inevitably accompany the prolonged stretch of internal decolonization that is to follow formal independence. In this sense independence is a process that shapes possibility, not an achievement; emerging nations stand a continuing risk of being co-opted. The same point was made early on by Nadine Gordimer in her novel, A Guest of Honor, where she depicts post-liberation struggles in an unnamed African country with pained skepticism. That the publication of this novel in 1971 roughly coincided with the "discovery" of Fanon's writings in the English speaking world encapsulates a certain unrest and incipient doubts regarding the pitfalls of liberatory post-colonial agendas. Other writers and filmmakers have also explored this concern, perhaps most often as known in North-American classrooms through the work of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and the Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane. At issue for these and other artists is not only what became of the newly independent colonial world, but what it could have become.²

Other liberatory thinkers—anti-colonial, anti-racist, and activist—engaged powerfully with such issues alongside Fanon. C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Aime Cesaire, and Albert Memi were revolutionaries who, influenced by Marxist and neo-Marxist theories and psychoanalysis, fought (and continue to fight) against a long history of global colonialism and white supremacy. They understood that economics and politics are important forces in enforcing unequal relations of power in society, but they also recognized the power of culture and the central role of ideology in maintaining systems of oppression by controlling the psyche of people and public opinion. For these activists all cultural terrain is worth fighting over. If it weren't, colonizers, fascists, and neoconservatives alike would not immediately go after schools, media, and other public spheres that produce and disseminate knowledge. Without doubt, the independent and therefore potentially recalcitrant spirit signaled originally by the Bandung conference of non-aligned nations was and would continue to be seen as a threat to Western hegemony in general and to the United States' interests in particular. World history over the last seventy years, during but also after the Cold War, provides ample proof of that.

For these thinkers and activists the lines of battle are drawn clearly. For them the politics of difference articulated above are at the core of a global, comprehensive struggle that includes issues of nationalism, hybridity, ethnicity and indigeneity, feminism, language, the body, history, place, education, production and consumption, neoliberalism and globalization. Further, insofar as their thinking involves a cultural as well as geopolitical and economic terrain, it also shapes the understanding behind the courses discussed in this issue of Radical Teacher. These articles necessarily concern specific teaching situations, in specific contexts, and therefore mostly focus on the challenge of teaching materials that are likely to be alien to students, and sometimes difficult as well. However, implicit in this effort is students' need to collectively understand and assess 1) how new modes of transnational control and exploitation function; 2) our own position within such processes as citizens of empires (notably the United States); and 3) our practices as educators who are leading students into the present era and the future beyond it.

In approaching these tasks, what struck us, the editors of this special cluster on Teaching Post-Colonial Literatures in the Age of Empire, was the extent to which the proposals and drafts that our "Call for Papers" elicited focused on cultural artifacts, especially literature, as a way of reflecting on current colonizing processes and the imperialist drives that sustain them. Authors did address ways teaching can respond to the three goals (or challenges) noted above, but the teaching practices under discussion concerned mainly cultural analysis. This focus has the double benefit of engaging students' empathic identification via literature and visual culture while teaching them to see through the ideology that propels the West's efforts to sustain its hegemony. At the same time, such an exclusive focus on cultural discourse has the drawback of missing the needed contextual analysis of the economic, political, sociological, psychological, and sometimes even military steps empires have taken to enforce this hegemony and benefit from it.

In this respect, the present Radical Teacher issue mirrors what is currently labeled in the academy "post-colonial studies"—that is, the study of emergent autonomies and new forms of repression mainly through the medium of cultural, especially literary representation. As a shelf of randomly assembled recent books and textbooks in this field would attest, to date the emphasis in work that calls itself "post-colonial" has been on culture and literature, notably from theoretical perspectives. It is as if there are two separate tracks for this one inquiry, one that uses the vocabulary of "globalization" and favors factual discussion, especially from a social science perspective, and a "post-colonial" one that taps people's imagination and empathy in order to engage them in political thought. Each is important, but the two are yet to actualize their complementary potentials. It is not accidental that this turn to the humanities as a way of reflecting on the massive neo-colonization our world is undergoing exists in dialogue with the political thinkers named above and with the related liberatory politics coming from a range of anti-racist, feminist, multicultural, and sex-liberationist perspectives, activist as well as theoretical. This coinciding reflects an awareness of the interconnectedness of such struggles as participants in what we call above "globalization from below." One of the initiating influences in this regard was Edward Said's path-breaking analysis of "orientalism." It provided and continues to provide literary and cultural critics with a model of inquiry that can be used fruitfully in a range of courses that demystify the supposedly "apolitical" claims of art and culture. Joining in this effort are also writers like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Ngugi Na Thiong'o, Derek Walcott, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Taken together, their inquiry into the ways cultural artifacts nourish ideology sharpens our awareness of how power relations can construct and circulate what passes for knowledge.³ Their work teaches us to question and therefore unmask ways in which oppression gets internalized, but it also teaches us the power of resistance that is lodged in such critical thought, as seen for example in Chinua Achebe's reading of Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (1977).⁴

Indeed, teaching Achebe's essay can become a litmus test in class, as students are drawn into warring camps that support or condemn his assault on Conrad as a "bloody racist." The unease Achebe's bluntness taps comes to the fore: the imperialist's guilt but also unconscious self-interest, the adherence to the dictates of the literary canon but also the imperative to question them. What is especially useful about the discussions (and sometimes heated debates) he provokes is their ability to steer us, students and teachers, not only towards thinking about the little known, colonized "other," but towards reflecting about the unknown "us" as agents in the present neo-imperialist processes under way. The colonizer's imagination—manifest in ways we write and read, interpret and debate—can itself come under scrutiny, exposing the brute imperial privileges that are routinely masked by the ideology we inhabit. In this respect the articles clustered in this issue of Radical Teacher reflect educators' growing awareness of the need to guide students towards understanding who they are themselves, as well as how they read and see the "other." Listening to subalterns "speak" for themselves, students learn to listen to themselves listening. That at this point our students themselves constitute a diverse mix of "others," heirs to a range of empowered and unempowered positions in their home countries, whether here in the United States or abroad, further complicates the matter. As they reflect critically about their own worlds, they can uncover their share in maintaining or loosening the bonds of colonial relations in the lives of others.

That post-colonialism has become a "field," with Ph.D.s, jobs, and courses to match, testifies to a hunger for this knowledge, coming as it does from both "third world" and "first world" scholars. Significantly, this "field," like all modes of knowledge, is not neutral. Its critique of power relations enacted nationally and globally exposes deep contradictions between modern societies' claims to liberal humanism, democracy, and freedom on the one hand, and their extraordinarily damaging neo-colonial behavior on the other. As such, the field of post-colonial studies threatens to destabilize broadly accepted self-congratulatory beliefs in one's national goodness. Tame though this work might seem—merely the study of abstruse literature and even more abstruse theoretical texts, and by a very few students at that—it has revolutionary implications.

It is no accident, then, that recent years have seen concerted neoconservative attacks on what could otherwise seem an obscure academic field. It is also no accident that, even as national and international "diversity" requirements are being introduced into curricula in dedicated courses and mainstreamed into traditional teaching, fierce fighting rages over the ownership of "correct" knowledge and analysis. David Horowitz's well funded Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and closely allied with Students for Academic Freedom), his "Students' Bill of Rights," and his vigorous use of the media since the early 1980s are particularly blatant examples of efforts to eradicate progressive changes to the University (and indeed K-12). Lynne Cheney's relentless nationalist campaigning for traditional American "values," most visibly during her tenure directing the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-1993), is yet another example of powerful efforts to repress progressive inquiry. The logic of such assaults is not always clear, as they at times conflate multiculturalism, post-structuralism (occasionally lumped with deconstruction), and postmodernism with post-colonialism, feminism, and Marxism. Such a haphazard lumping together of "posts" suggests fear of change, made toxic for neoconservatives because some of the named approaches do in fact question the thinking behind society's distribution of wealth and benefits and call for social change. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP)'s Committee on Academic Freedom offers a reasoned response to right-wing accusations of indoctrination (Report, June 2007), noting that at issue are not only teachers' freedom in the classroom, but freedom of research and publication. As the report states, "We would be blinking at reality if we failed to acknowledge that recent challenges to 'freedom' in the classroom are being advanced to further particular political agendas."

In recent years, in the wake of a substantial new body of historic, archaeological, and geographic research by "New Historians" of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (as well as by journalists and NGOs and disseminated via journalistic media, list-servs, and blogs), neocon sights have turned to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as object of special vigilance. The much publicized tenure battles of Norman Finklestein at De Paul University and Nadia Abu El-Haj at Columbia, together with the vociferous opposition to Jimmy Carter's visit at Brandeis University and pressure on publishers (e.g. Pluto Press) to cancel publication commitments, are just the more visible cases. Beyond them are less visible efforts to silence academic work that questions the current neo-colonialist projects in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Significantly, the attacks on post-colonial studies in general and on progressive scholarship about Israel/Palestine in particular are not, finally, targeted at just that one narrowly defined field. Rather, they participate in broader efforts to repress progressive education, efforts extending over the last forty years (and indeed earlier, during the Cold War and other eras). That is, the AAUP Report cited above is responding to years of faculty reporting in-class harassment around issues of ideology, politics, and free speech across a spectrum of political and ideological concerns. Clearly such harassment reflects a sense that any focus on power relations, including representations of the colonizer and the colonized, of ways dominant and subordinated knowledge are produced and circulated, of how oppression gets internalized, and of the power of organizing and resistance, threatens to unsettle the status quo. It is no accident, then, that Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights (2003, crafted by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), quotes selectively from archaic AAUP Statements on academic freedom (1940, 1967, and minimally 1970), without an update to the most recent one we quote above.

For us, readers and writers of this issue of Radical Teacher, the concerns that come up above can use further thought. Most immediately, what do words like "empire" and "colonialism" mean, with or without that dubious "post," now that we have dispensed with those men in khaki and the vast network of governing bureaucracies in charge of the extracting and profiteering relations they used to facilitate? Though our editorial introduction provides a working definition of these terms, a sharper analysis, aided by the social sciences, will usefully anchor the humanistic perspectives included here in material knowledge. That is, if colonialism and empire are in fact part of current reality, albeit in new forms and contrary to myriad symbols and assertions of autonomy and self-sustenance, how do we get to understand that and, as teachers, respond to it?

At issue is students' exposure, critique, and repositioning of their personal politics, in this instance through the mediation of literature and cultural studies, as an overt political project where critical thinking contributes to social transformation. Applying this awareness to our classroom practices at all levels is particularly urgent if we are to remain in step with the evolution (rather than abolition) of colonizing relations whose current shift to virtual terrains makes them insidiously invisible. That is, if our skepticism about the "post" of post-colonialism is on the mark, we need to develop a critical pedagogy that will situate the odd "post-colonial" culture course our students may take (or even just an occasional encounter with such materials) within a more comprehensive understanding of the structural, economic, and political changes our world is undergoing in tandem with a more active engagement in these changes.

For all the theoretical difficulty of the philosophical arm of post-colonial thought and the apparent "strangeness" (in the sense of "foreign" or "alien") of unfamiliar peoples and cultures, the thinking involved in the teaching described here is adaptable to teaching at all levels, including K-12. After all, teaching students to reflect critically on how their thinking relates to lived life via works of the imagination—stories!— is a familiar undertaking, even if it requires different pedagogies for different learners. Further, while the articles assembled here focus specifically on the critical teaching of literature and culture in academic settings, where this work is occurring at present most deliberately, the models they provide are applicable to diverse settings and diverse age groups. At issue is not simply how to select materials for a given course – for example, a course that engages colonial realities – but ways one might define and pursue the goals of that selection and pedagogy. The challenge is not only to make the "other" known so as to feel empathy for that "other," which is a top-down position for many of our students, but also how to move towards a transformative politics that transcend the "us" versus "them" division, a politics rooted in understanding the economic, social, and political realities that join "their" and "our" lives.

Notes

¹Though one can take issue with Prashad's glossing over internal obstacles to this utopian ideal, given his unproblematic reference to the creation of India and Pakistan without mentioning the horrors of the Partition, his attribution of the demise of postcolonial ideals to an "assassination" by advanced global capitalism is on the mark.

²In A Man of the People (1966), for example, which satirizes local political power, Achebe also alludes to the insidious presence of foreign interests and their agents. Sembene's films repeatedly interrogate deleterious Western intervention and hegemony.

³Note also the influence of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault in this connection.

⁴"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'." Second Chancellor's Lecture at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, 1975. First Published in the Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977). Also in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism. 3rd edition. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. London: W.W. Norton, 1988 (251-261).