Post-colonial theory as farce, post-colonial theory as tragedy
On Gayatri Spivak's talk on post-coloniality in Ukraine
‘What is the endpoint envisioned by the post-colonial studies? When does a country stop being post-colonial and become normal?’ - a Ukrainian student asked Gayatri Charkavorti Spivak at a discussion organised by the Lviv Media Forum this May. The response of the scholar who embodies the post-colonial studies for some may have disappointed the student and the hosts of the event. She said that it is the US academia that is still fascinated by the post-colonial discourse, the peoples of India face more urgent tasks than ruminate about the legacy of the British colonialism - Modi’s fascicizing rule and the issues of domestic oppression are much closer to their concerns.
The dissonance between the audience and the invited speaker pervaded Gayatri Spivak's keynote and the discussion that followed. This could have been the reason why the recording of her talk was not uploaded onto the event’s Youtube channel. Currently, the post-colonial and decolonial intellectual traditions are being politically weaponised in the service of the Russian, Chinese, or Indian geopolitical ambitions, the European far right, as well by the atlanticist elite who again don the cold-war garments of the protectors of colonised freedom-fighters. Ukrainian journalists and intellectuals are happy to jump the bandwagon and discover these discourses as weapons of information warfare. Ewa Thompson, a Polish-American literary scholar of conservative political persuasion, was invited to consecrate the weapons of the ‘intellectual front’ at this event to counter-balance the Indian scholar. Ukrainian intelligentsia needed this western import as a complement to Patriot missiles and Challenger tanks, although - like Ukrainians soldiers recruited against their will - the post-colonial scholarly discourse sounded like Bengali to them. And Spivak was living evidence to that.
Her keynote speech was structured as a dialogue or rather an interview, where Spivak cited the requests of the Ukrainian hosts and commented on the texts she was given to read. She was asked to imagine a post-colonial Ukraine ('as I was asked to imagine...' was her opening statement). It is not clear whether she used this structure of request-compliance as a way to distance herself or as a way to honour 'the voice of the subaltern.' Probably both. And it did not sound flattering. The tone of tough empathy pervaded her previous engagement with Slavic studies. She carefully pointed out the moments where the hosts misunderstood her or the postcolonial theory (=her). Her usual trick was to agree wholeheartedly in abstract, but destroy the interlocutor’s point in substance - a rhetoric perfected by her elite British education, which she said she was proud of.
This was a curious spectacle on multiple layers. The Ukrainian intellectual audience is used to being treated like children, they expect their nonsense to be parroted and glorified by ostentatiously empathetic Western intellectuals. Or at least listened to with a feigned awe and carefully hidden annoyance. Spivak, of course, begs to differ, since she carved for herself a special slot among Western intellectuals. She herself has been listened to with awe and carefully hidden annoyance. So she doesn't have to play this game too carefully with Ukrainians. She stressed several times that she holds only an Indian citizenship and lives in the US on a green card - which underscores her license in criticising both the US and India. The hosts, on their part, would find it difficult to put on their symbolic cheka uniform and use their ‘Kremlin narrative’ intellectual silver bullet to brand her if they disliked what she said. She was clearly aware of this, stressing on a few occasions that she was only an academic and not a politician, and that her task is to challenge totality.
Indirectly arguing with the hosts, Spivak underlined that the post-colonial was an ironic trope for the people who pioneered this intellectual fashion. Post-colonial critique is largely a critique of pre-colonial relapses and the failures of independence a critique she hopes Ukrainian intellectuals would embrace. Her famous essay that she was asked to comment on - 'Can the subaltern speak?' - was not about criticising the British, but about criticising pre-colonial oppression. The task of a post-colonial critique, according to her, was to escape both from the temptation of pre-colonial relapses and from being 'epistemically defined' by imperial violence. She set forth the task of auto-critique and a deep understanding of the imperial powers in front of Ukrainian intellectuals, who instead had likely expected her to nourish their narcissism and emphasise the eternal guilt of Russian culture.
Ewa Thompson was there for the Ukrainians. She was happy to present her theory of the Mongol influence over the Russia psyche through millenia - a cheap orientalist trope worthy of most Eastern European post-colonial scholars. The Mongol rule supposedly instilled the attitude of servility and victimhood into Russians, therefore they are destined to live under dictators and complain about their plight. For this very reason Thomspon referred to Russia and Russians only as ‘Muscovy’ and ‘Muscovites’ to please the audience (the audience, however, would gladly hear even stronger ethnic slurs instead). On account of Ukraine, however, Thompson developed her civilisational paradigm and praised Ukrainians for being part of the Polish Rzeczpospolita. It was Lithuania and later Poland who saved Ukrainians from the Mongols, incorporated them into the European civilisation, and henceforth they lived happily until the Russians incorporated part of Ukraine (why the Cossacks and Kyiv intellectuals chose this path in the 17th century and whom they were escaping from into the tight embraces of the Moscow tsar wasn’t mentioned by Thompson). Thompson carefully avoids words ‘empire’ and ‘colonisation’ in reference to the Polish state - it is just ‘a state’ that helped Ukraine join the right civilisation. Ukrainians should be happy to choose the right post-coloniality, the benevolent one. Preferably under the tutelage of Thompson’s beloved ultraconservatives from PiS and not the liberal German servants.
Spivak has little respect for Huntington (‘that terrible man - what’s his name?’) and knows a tad more about Mongols, whose descendants left a legislative language that, according to Spivak, Indians still use with gratitude. On numerous occasions she repeated that Ukrainians are 'epistemically defined' by the imperial violence both by Russia and by the West. The imperial definition by the Kremlin is difference, otherness, which Ukrainian intellectuals embrace as a badge of honour. She quotes Hobsbawm on nation-states as a disastrous predicament - at the annoyance of Thompson for whom national independence is the ultimate task of decolonisation. Spivak also recalls the provenance of her surname from a Jewish family near Kyiv, who allegedly bought a Slavic name to avoid pogroms. This is a careful call for an auto-critique of the Ukrainian intellectuals - thinly veiled though. This is finally something she could agree with Thompson, a radical Polish nationalist. The intellectuals’ task would be to protect diversity from the imperially imposed homogeneity. She defines Ukraine as also epistemologically conditioned by western imperialism to be 'brave warriors' with all the luggage of masculinity and hierarchies, and cautions against the illusion of the benevolent US-NATO imperialism. Thompson, in this context, is the living embodiment of this epistemic definition - it may be derived from her civilisational view that Ukrainians’ place is the ‘foederati’ of Europe - the ‘good’ barbarian warriors who defend the benevolent empire against the bad barbarians from the East. The declarations of the Polish government to round up and send Ukrainian migrants to fight the Russians illustrate this quite aptly.
Being epistemically defined on both sides, however, doesn't make Ukraine a global subaltern for Spivak. In fact, Spivak is mostly interested in the internal subalternity within Ukraine - and here she refers to Roma as the primary subaltern (because she works with Roma organisations I suppose). She quotes one of the texts sent to her by the hosts as telling her that Roma join the Ukrainian army and thus liberate themselves. She seemed to take this at a face value - although there is no evidence of the impact of forced conscription on Roma’s human rights in Ukraine. Otherwise, however, Ukraine seems to have become a privileged interlocutor of the West, and Spivak asked the Ukrainian intellectuals to have a word with IMF and other international organisations so that they pay attention to indigenous languages. She stressed on numerous occasions that the audience wouldn't understand her speaking in Bengali while she's delivering the talk in English - a reference to the ambivalent role of English as an imperial language that recently gained an official status in Ukraine (which Russian never had since 1991).
Her reference to women as the subaltern was limited to a quote from Oksana Zabuzhko, another honorary invitee of the event, and her book glorifying the Ukrainian mid-war far right militias (who would likely not have spared Spivak's relatives despite their bought name) along with a quote from Yevghenia Bosh, whom she described as the first female prime minister in the world (kind of...) and a Ukrainian communist (a reference sent to her by a Ukrainian communist historian). I'm not even sure it is legal to publish such stuff in Ukrainian nowadays due to the laws that define a strict list of heroes and villains in historiography. Zabuzhko writes about heroes, Bosh was a villain by definition.
One of the most memorable phrases of Spivak was an inversion of (a Marxian correction of) Hegel as applied to Zelensky: first as farce, then as tragedy. I'm not sure what exactly she meant, but I find it as very apt description of the situation in Ukraine. She repeated twice that she admires Zelensky, although this might have been tongue-in-cheek. She compared his to the political theatre of Gandhi, who is far from a hero for her. At the same time, she said that the subaltern can speak - their voice is their vote in the elections. This series of enigmatic remarks culminated by the most mysterious of all: Spivak asserted that Ukraine will never follow the hapless path of India and African postcolonial countries mired in patrimonialism (she sometimes confused this Weberian term with ‘patrilinial’). Ukraine has famously been and still is one of the paradigmatic cases of Neo-patrimonialism.
In short, Spivak’s intervention was a true master-class in thinking along the post-colonial discourse without equating it to XIX c ethnonationalism or worse (as Ewa Thompson seems to be increasingly doing inspired by the Polish radical right). The spectacle of an Indian-raised Western educated intellectual guru quoting a communist to an audience of Eastern European ethnonationalists in a voluntary service to the 'Western values' is precious. Too bad the debase - full of conceptual tensions - was at times based on historical inaccuracies to say the least.