Post-Colonial Conservatism

Postcolonial studies is the intellectual fashion of our times. Its influences can be found from ‘The Squad’ to the oft ridiculed phenomena of left-wing ‘campus politics’. Post-colonialism aims to study the identity of subjects in postcolonial conditions, along with examining the discourse of these subjects emphasizing their voices over ones found in the west. Examples of this can be found within the logic behind ‘decolonising’ the curriculum at universities. The forgotten aspect of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford university in 2016 was its aims to decolonise, rather then a simply to remove that darned Statue. To decolonise here, means to emphasise and include intellectual traditions and modes of discourse found outside the western academy.

There’s something tricky to be found within the left wing postcolonial discourse though. The theoretical foundations of social democratic theory, socialist theory, Marxist theory and so on are to be found in the west. To attempt to apply these concepts to postcolonial peoples can be viewed as a kind of recolonisation process under the post-colonial schema. It doesn’t allow for the authentic postcolonial subjects to be heard and imposes a western conception of the left onto the these subjects. To get around this, we often see attempts at ethnocultural tailored versions of these theories applied within the postcolonial world. The contradiction is not solved by this. It’s merely aesthetic, not substantive. None of the grand theory changes. The only change is emphasis on how/where it is to be and style. Marx’s face switched to that of Thomas Sankara. Moreover, the left struggles with the postcolonial emphasis of the construction of a strong national identity of postcolonial states, from which peoples can understand themselves in the first person plural “We”, “Us” and ‘Our”. You can see this conflict found within left-wing discourse around race. “People of colour”, when looked through a postcolonial lens, can seem like a bizarre form of erasure. It’s a phrase that can rob people of the histories of their traditional localities by coalescing different ethnicities into a whole. The violence done by, and to, these various ethnic groups is erased for the purposes of a particular political left wing goals. The history of conflict between peoples in this newly constructed collective whole is ignored or minimized, spoken about only in the western context of ways in anti-blackness or anti-Arabness show themselves. The actual history whether found in the fact there were many Arab peoples that sold slaves along with the rest of European peoples is ignored. The racial animus towards Arabs from black Africans exhibited in the Zanzibar revolution is ignored. All of this allowed to be obfuscated by a politics that emphasises race, skin colour difference, yet ignores the different ethnocultural histories of the varying particular peoples.

Curiously, there is more of an overlap with conservative thinking in postcolonial project. The conservative has a saddening tendency to reject intellectualism. It’s understandable. The relationship between the right and the academy has been one of antagonism in the west for many decades. Nonetheless, postcolonial studies offers a unique way of thinking about conservatism more broadly. One of the major concerns of postcolonial thinkers is the ‘epistemic violence’ done to postcolonial subjects. The modes of thought, traditions and ethnocultural symbols that were harmed, distorted and otherwise brutalised by the history of colonialism. Any project that focuses on the revival and the sustainability of these fonts of cultural knowledge is, by definition a conservative project. It’s possible to even understand this as a reactionary project. The project of enforcing or incentivising the destruction and replacement of these modes of being is not a conservative one. It is a universalist one. The unfortunate truth for the left is that postcolonialism cannot stand together with a meaningful universalist project. In the left’s imposition of universal values that are found within its western egalitarian matrix, it finds itself in further opposition to post-colonial thinking. Western conceptions of liberty, fairness and togetherness are not these values only form, nor are the values in conflict between western ideologies the only values that are important. These values always bare themselves from the realm of the particular, never universally, in response to particular conditions and particular problems. By disposition, conservatives are averse to loss. The loss of traditions, cultures, stories, architecture and modes of living is a loss for us all. That is to say, conservatives meaningfully values diversity insofar as the conservative’s own traditions, culture and so on are not collateral damage.

Conservatives should relearn this a discourse of particularity. Since the late 1970s, the bread and butter of conservative thinking has been a fusion between free market liberalism and social conservatism. It’s debatable to what degree this coalition has succeeded, but one fault that has occurred is the way in which liberal universalism has extended into conservative thinking. In an overreaction to histrionic forms of moral relativism, western conservatives have abandoned a central heuristic. Namely, the idea that tradition is a local bank of knowledge more reliable than the ideology of the time. Traditions are always found in the particular, In ignoring this when it comes to the 3rd world, we extended the logic of universalism towards our our own nations. We allow for the destruction of knowledge we would otherwise never have access to. A knowledge born in a different particular. The universalist logic that allows for the deracination of localities in postcolonial nations allows it in our own.

The post-colonialism moment as an intellectual trend will soon to come to its end. Every intellectual fad will. Ten years ago, the fad was to talk about everything in terms of semiotics. Who knows what will be next. All this being said, conservatives should look to Post-Colonialism and see within it a project that reflects their own.