Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ANIA LOOMBA
5.0 INTRODUCTION:
Ania Loomba received her B. A. (Hons), M. A. and M. Phil. degrees
from the University of Delhi, India and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex,
U.K. She researches and teaches early modern studies- postcolonial studies,
histories of race and colonialism, feminist theory and contemporary Indian
literature and society often exploring the intersections between these fields. She
has previously taught at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University
(India), the University of Tulsa and the University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign. She was Mellon Fellow at Stanford University. She has held a visiting
appointment at the University of Natal, Durban and South Africa. She is also a
faculty in Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, Womens Studies and
Asian American Studies with which her courses are regularly cross listed. Ania
Loomba currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair, Professor of English at the
University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Gender, Race, Renaissance
Drama, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. She is
also the co-editor of Post-colonial Shakespeare and Postcolonial Studies and
Beyond. She is series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University, UK) of
Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press). She is currently
working on a critical edition of Antony and Cleopatra, and co-editing a collection
of essays on South Asian Feminism. She is also working on a monograph on early
modern English contact with Asia.
Ania Loombas research focuses on Renaissance literature and
history, which she examines through the lenses of gender studies and colonial and
159
postcolonial studies. She holds a Ph. D. in English from the University of Sussex
and has awarded fellowships by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the
Center for Advanced Study, University of Illonois. Her first book, Gender, Race,
Renaissance Drama, has been widely excerpted in subsequent collections. Her
1998 release, Colonialism/postcolonialism, was recently translated into Italian,
Turkish, Korean, and Japanese languages. She has written extensively on early
modern drama and culture, Shakespeare, modern performances and adaptations of
Shakespeare, the womens movement and feminist theory and politics. Most
recently she has compiled (with Jonathan Burton) Race in Early Modern England:
A Documentary Companion, which brings together extracts from travel writings,
medical texts, statutes, dictionaries, recipes, atlases, emblem books, the Bible,
religious commentaries, pamphlets, scientific tracts and philosophical treatises.
The collection documents the range and complexity of sixteenth and seventeenth
century thinking about racial difference and argues that these materials challenge
conventional histories and theories of race. She is currently working on a book
which examines real and imagined English exchanges with Turkey, the Moluccas,
North Africa and India in the early modern period. These early global
conversations are crucial for understanding English drama and culture as well as
for rethinking the histories of race and colonialism in the present moment when
empire has again become a fashionable term. She examines the key features of the
ideologies and history of colonialism, the relationship of colonial discourse to
literature, the challenges to colonialism, surveying anti-colonial discourses and
recent developments in post-colonial theories and histories and how sexuality is
figured in the text of colonialism, and also how contemporary feminist ideas and
concepts intersect with those of post-colonialist thought. Her achievement, in
some senses, is the most considerable of all, because she works mainly in the most
prolifically minded and competitive field within English Studies, namely
Shakespeare.
160
time, race and colonialism have certainly become important Shakespearean topics
in recent years and one could not hope for a more authoritative and accessible
discussion of them than that provided by Ania Loomba. In sum up, this book
offers a case study of how to write for a wide readership without betraying the
complexity of the subject matter. Her works include:
1. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama
2. Colonialism/ Post-colonialism
3. Shakespeare: Race and Colonialism (ed)
4. Post-colonial Shakespeare (co-ed)
5. Post-colonial Studies and Beyond (co-ed)
She has written extensively on early modern drama and culture,
Shakespeare, modern performances and adaptation of Shakespeare, the womens
movement and feminist theory and politics. Most recently she has compiled, Race
in Early Modern England: a documentary companion. Examining the depiction of
cultural, religious, and ethnic difference in Shakespeares plays, Ania Loomba
considers how seventeenth century ideas differed from the later ideologies of
race that emerged during colonialism as well as from older ideas about
barbarism, blackness, and religious difference. Her analysis of Shakespeares
plays explores how his ideas of race were shaped by beliefs about colour, religion,
nationality, class, money and gender.
Postcolonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature
written in previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in
colonizing countries which deals with colonized peoples. It focuses particularly
on:
162
163
in postcolonial theories and histories, issues of sexuality and colonialism, and the
intersection of feminist and postcolonial thought, debates about globalization and
postcolonialism, and fully updated for the second edition, with an entirely new
discussion of globalization. Colonialism/Postcolonialism should be on the shelf of
every student of literature, culture or history.
In her book, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Ania Loomba
talks about the different aspects of race, gender, and religion that work together in
the play Othello. Contrasting seventeenth-century views with modern, postcolonial views, this book discusses crucial issues for our understanding and
appreciation of the plays. Shakespeare's plays contain so many fascinating and
central characters whose 'differences' are crucial to their character and their fate from Shylock and his daughter Jessica to Othello and Caliban. Ania Loomba
presents students and teachers with a lucid examination of Shakespeare's handling
of colour, religion, and 'race', and how this differs from his predecessors,
contemporaries, and, importantly, our own ways of thinking.
Unique in its focus, Post-Colonial Shakespeares examines how our
assumptions about key ideas such as 'colonization', 'race', and 'nation' derive from
the early modern English culture and looks at how such terms are themselves
embedded in "colonial" forms of knowledge. Featuring original work by some of
the leading critics within the field, this impressive volume explores the multiple
ways of reading Shakespeare in our postcolonial context. The contributors:
Andreas Bertoldi, Jerry Brotton, Jonathan Burton, Jonathan Dollimore, Terence
Hawkes, Margo Hendricks, David Johnson, Michael Neill, Avraham Oz, Nicholas
Visser, made this volume rich and readable one.
Her book, Post-colonial Studies and Beyond (an interdisciplinary
book) expands the agenda of postcolonial studies, assesses the field's past and
maps its possible futures. It considers the intellectual, political and methodological
165
practices that have shaped and which should shape postcolonial modes of thought.
The effort is to reinvent the field. Such reinvention has been happening but,
having already influenced perspectives and methods across disciplines,
postcolonial studies are becoming increasingly institutionalized. To remain useful,
it needs new directions and emphases.
The essays included here, address questions about the field's
definition, relevance and relationship to issues of modernity, translationalism, and
globalization. Can postcolonial studies produce insights that will illuminate what
is marginalized or invisible within the discourses of globalization and neoimperialism? Can it draw on its tradition of anti-colonial thought and sociocultural analysis to continue suggesting socio-economically informed models of
political mobilization and innovative critical language? Can it minimize Eurocentricism? The book contains a broad range of perspectives on these issues.
5.1 COLONIALISM/POSTCOLONIALISM:
Ania Loomba argues that colonialism reshapes often violently,
physical territories, social terrains as well as human identities. The terms:
colonialism, Imperialism, are defined in Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as:
a settlement in a new country. A body of people who settle in a new
locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent
state; the community so formed , consisting of the original settlers and their
descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state
is kept up. (2005:7)
Here she points out that the above definition neglects the people other than the
colonizers that indicate conquest and domination. She adds ahead that it locks the
166
original inhabitants and this generates the complex and traumatic relationships in
human history. She further points out that the process of forming a new
community in the new land means un-forming or re-forming the original
communities. She concludes this definition stating that the colonialism means the
conquest and control of other peoples land and goods. It is not only the expansion
of various European powers in non-European countries/areas but a recurrent and
widespread feature of human history.
Ania Loomba points out the changed picture of modern European
colonialism that enriched the different kinds of colonial practices which altered the
whole globe. The modern colonialism developed in addition with extracting
tribute, goods and wealth from conquered countries, a new and complex
relationship and engendered a flow of human and natural resources between
colonized and colonial countries to grow profit for them. Loomba adds ahead that
European colonialism has applied a variety of techniques and patterns of
domination as well as it produced the economic imbalance, necessarily for the
growth of European capitalism and industry. She differentiates the concept
imperialism from colonialism in following words:
we can distinguish between colonization as the takeover of territory,
appropriation of material resources, exploitation of labour and interference
with political and cultural structures of another territory or nation, and
imperialism as a global system. (2005:11)
Here she states that colonialism seems to limit certain locality that is surpassed in
imperialism. Thereafter, Loomba focuses the term post-colonialism that applies
two senses: temporal, as in coming after, and, ideological, as in supplanting. The
post-colonialism doesnt mark the demise of colonialism.
167
economic, social, cultural and historical factors, and therefore, in practice, it works
quite differently in various parts of the world.
Ania Loomba argues that the tensions about power and subjectivity
have become central to the study of colonialism. The concept of colonial discourse
is introduced to re-order the study of colonialism. Said has introduced Orientalism
as to inaugurate a new kind of study of colonialism. She argues about colonial
discourse which may help the readers to understand social happenings and their
relationship with the discourse. According to her, discourse analysis makes it
possible to trace connections between the visible and the hidden, the dominant and
the marginalized, ideas and institutions. It also allows us to see how power works
through language, literature, culture and the institutions which regulate our daily
lives. Loomba states that colonial discourse studies today are not restricted to
delineating the workings of power- they have tried to locate and theorize
oppositions, resistances and revolts on the part of the colonized. Colonial
discourse studies present a distorted picture of colonial rule in which central
168
effects are inflated at the expense of economic and political institutions. She adds
further that colonial discourse studies erase any distinction between the material
and ideological, because they simply concentrate on the latter.
Loomba points out that the concept of discourse is used to mean to
uncover the interrelation between the ideological and material rather than to
collapse them into each other. The representation of colonial discourse is observed
in literary studies, art, history, films, media and cultural studies too. Loomba
strongly argues that there is no consensus or homogeneity within colonial
discourse analysis which is the site of much debate and controversy precisely
because it has drawn from a wide range of intellectual and political histories and
affiliations. According to Loomba, colonialism reshaped existing structures of
human knowledge as no branch of learning was left untouched by the colonial
experience. She further observes that colonialism expanded the contact between
Europeans and non-Europeans, generating the flood of images and ideas on an
unprecedented scale. She further points out that literary texts do not simply reflect
dominant ideologies, but encode the tensions, complexities and nuances within
colonial cultures. The literary discourse is an important means of appropriating,
inverting or challenging dominant means of representation and colonial ideologies.
She adds ahead that the literature (discourse) can be important in devaluating and
controlling colonial subjects. The literary texts or discourses have become more
widely recognized as materials that are essential for historical study of that
particular country or location. Loomba argues that the meanings that are given to
texts are of dominant critical views that were later on included within educational
systems.
Loomba observes that many recent books on post-colonial
literature consider literatures written in English, or widely available in translation,
or those that have made the best-seller lists in Europe and United States. So she
169
170
by
the
interdisciplinary,
cross-cultural
nature
of
5.2 FEMINISM:
Ania Loomba states that if the nation is an imagined community,
that imagining is profoundly gendered. The nation-state or its guiding principles
are often imagined (a colossal statue of the Motherland at Stalingrad) itself is
imagined as a woman. Sometimes the spirit of dilemma as an entire culture is
sought to be expressed via a female figure (Malintzin story). She argues further
that as national emblems, women are usually cast as mothers or wives, and are
called upon to literally and figuratively reproduce the nation. Loomba points out
that, anti-colonial or nationalist movements have used the image of the nation-asmother to create their own lineage, and also to limit and control the activity of
women within the imagined community. They have also literally exhorted women
171
to produce sons who may live and die for the nation. She believes that the
identification of women as national mothers stems from a wider association of
nation with the family. The nation is cast as a home, its leaders and icons assume
parental roles (father and mother) and fellow-citizens are brothers and sisters. The
image of nation as mother marshals and undercuts female power.
Loomba argues the logic behind women education in following
words:
As mothers to the nation, real women are granted limited agency. The
arguments for womens education in metropolitan as well as colonial
contexts rely on the logic that educated women will make better wives and
mothers. At the same time, educated women have to be taught not to
overstep their bounds and usurp authority from men. (2005:182)
The idea, woman is constructed in opposition to the specter of the Memsahib who
neglects her home and husband. The image fuses together older brahminical
notions of female self-sacrifice and devotion with the Victorian ideal of the
enlightened mother, devoted exclusively to the domestic sphere.
Ania Loomba argues further that many critics have pointed the
reform of womens position as a major concern within nationalist discourses. She
adds ahead that even though the female power, energy and sexuality haunt
nationalist discourses, women themselves disappear from these discourses about
them. We learn little about how they felt or responded from colonial or nationalist
records. Recently, there is little attempt to locate them as subjects within the
colonial struggle. She points out that Gayatri Chakravortys essay, Can the
Subaltern Speak? helped to express strongly about widow immolation within
postcolonial theory. Women are not just a symbolic space but real targets of
172
literary pushed to the margins of the civilized world. But not all margins are
equally removed from the centre: Skin colour and female behaviour come together
in establishing a cultural hierarchy with white Europe at the apex and black Africa
at the bottom. Colonial sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual,
often exploited inequities of class, gender, age, race and power. She goes a step
ahead and states that the fear of cultural and racial pollution prompts the most
hysterical dogmas about racial difference and sexual behaviours because it
suggests the instability of race as a category. So sexuality is a means for the
maintenance or erosion of racial difference. In patriarchal society, women are split
subjects who watch themselves being watched by men. Loomba comments some
women and non-Europeans who are responsible for their own subordination in
following words:
The analogy between the subordination of women and colonial subjects,
sometimes promoted by women and non-Europeans themselves, runs the
risk of erasing the specificity of colonial and patriarchal ideologies, besides
tending to homogenize both women and non-Europeans. (2005:138)
Here Loomba points out that Africans and women are commonly regarded as more
community-minded in their outlook than Europeans and men. She observes the
fact that black and colonized women suffer from both from racial and gendered
forms of oppression simultaneously.
Ania Loomba expects that black post-colonial feminists and women
activists must lead to challenge this complex positioning of women. They could
try to remove the colour prejudices within white feminism and the genderblindness of anti-racist or anti-colonial movements. Loomba further views that if
colonial power is repeatedly expressed as a white mans possession of black
women and men, colonial fears centre around the rape of white women by black
men. She expects ahead that women of colour have also had to challenge the
174
domestic space for cultural purity. She also points out that the native resistance of
colonized men to defend their self-esteem is deeply oppressive of women. The
colonialism has introduced the new forms of patriarchal domination in colonized
lands giving subordination to women. The feminist criticism has emphasized the
patriarchal structures within which the memsahib (lady) was trapped at home and
abroad and has highlighted the differences between female and male in various
parts of the colonial world. She also observes that the European colonialism often
justified its civilizing mission by claiming that it was rescuing native women
from oppressive patriarchal domination.
Ania Loomba argues the white womens hidden intensions in
representing their mute sisters as:
While white women played important roles in the abolition of slavery and
in initiating colonial reform, even those progressive roles were often
premised on the idea of a racial hierarchy. Within colonial spaces, white
women participated with varying degrees of alienation and enthusiasm in
imperial projects; as teachers, missionaries, nurses, and the help-mates of
colonial men, their roles varied both structurally and ideologically.
(2005:144)
Here Loomba comments the selfish attitude of the white women who initiated
colonial reform for colonized women.
Ania Loomba concludes that the race, gender and sexuality do not
just provide metaphors and images for each other, but develop together in the
colonial arena. She records the roles and positions of colonized women in
following words:
Colonial women were not simply objectified in colonial discourses- their
labour fed the colonial machine. If female slaves were the backbone of
176
plantation economies, today, the third world women and women of the
colour provide the cheapest labour for sweetshops, the sex-trade, largemultinationals as well as smaller industries, and are the guinea pigs for
exploitative and dangerous experiments in health and fertility. They remain
the poorest of the poor in the post-colonial world. Such exploitation is both
a colonial legacy and outcome of specific postcolonial developments.
(2005:145)
Here Loomba tries to present the critical and pathetic situation of colonized
women giving many illustrations observed by various scholars and activists in the
field of feminism.
The relationship of women to national culture can obscure other vital
aspects of their social existence. The gendered spiritual or inner core central to the
construction of anti-colonial national identities is seen to be shaped by the shared
national past or a cultural essence which in turn becomes synonymous with a
religious or racial identity. She argues that women were regarded as crucial
markers of cultural difference in the colonies. She highlights womens lower
position in society as:
In India, Algeria, South Africa and countless other colonized countries, the
colonizers regarded womens position within the family and within
religious practices as indicative of degenerate native cultures. Reform of
womens position thus became central to colonial rule. (2005:161)
Loomba states here that nationalists objected the colonial intrusion in womens
matter and they have introduced some reforms of their own. She adds ahead that in
India, a new woman and a new family structure different than tradition or
Western version were projected as nationalist ideals.
177
Loomba points out that women were politically active, worked and
lived outside of purely domestic spaces, sometimes in positions of leadership, they
opened up new conceptual spaces for women. She adds ahead that even when they
moved into public spaces in the name of motherhood and family, they challenged
certain notions of motherhood and of femininity. Anti-colonial nationalisms
opened up spaces for women largely by legitimizing their public activity.
Womens participation in politics is easily accepted in postcolonial countries than
in metropolitan, precisely because of nationalist legacy. Many postcolonial
regimes have been outrightly repressive of womens rights, using religion as basis
on which to enforce their subordination. She argues ahead that women are objects
as well as subjects of fundamentalist discourses and also targets as well as
speakers of its most virulent rhetoric. She expects that women had to overcome
male opposition to their equal participation in the struggles for self-determination,
democracy and anti-imperialism. She believes that these movements re-shaped
womens understanding of themselves. She concludes that the global imbalances
profoundly structure feminist agendas in the postcolonial world. She also feels
happy as women have been increasing participation in the postcolonial politics,
ranging from the more established forms of political action to the new social
movements.
5.3 ON IDEOLOGY:
Ania Loomba states her frank opinions about the term, Ideology.
According to her, Ideology does not refer to political ideas alone, as it also
includes our mental frameworks, our beliefs, concepts, and ways of expressing
our relationship to the world. She states ahead that it is the most complex and
elusive term in social thought. She gives the reference of Marx and Engels (The
German Ideology 1846) who had suggested that ideology is basically a distorted or
178
179
crucial in creating consent, it is the medium through which certain ideas are
transmitted and held to be true. Gramsci views that ideologies are more than just
reflections of material reality; they are conceptions of life that are manifest in all
aspects of individual and collective existence (1971). Ania Loomba gives
reference of Louis Althusser who views that ideologies may express the interests
of social groups, but they work through and upon individual people, or subjects
(1971). The subjectivity or personhood itself formed in and through ideology.
Althusser argued that ideology has a relevant autonomy from the material base. He
further says that educational systems are important means for the dissemination of
dominant ideologies. Colonialism had not one but several ideologies, and these
ideologies were manifest in hundreds of different institutional and cultural
practices. She points out the vulnerable situation during the forcibly converting to
Christianity in following words:
What was once impossible- washing the Ethiope white- is now rendered
feasible by Christianity. But in the process, skin colour is unyoked from
moral qualities. The black queen must now be recognized as good. Colonial
plunder of goods is justified by the gift of Christianity. But if blackness can
be washed white that means whiteness is also vulnerable to pollution.
(2005:99)
Here Loomba points out that Christianity became the source of getting status or
position in the society. So many non-Christians were attracted towards conversion
to Christianity. Ania Loomba argues that ideologies of racial difference were
intensified by their incorporation into the discourse of science, which intensified
the supposed connection between the biological features of each group and its
psychological and social attributes. The ideologies of race and the social structures
created by them facilitate capitalist production.
180
points out the significance of colour and other attributes in identifying racial
identity as:
While colour is taken to be prime signifier of racial identity, the latter is
actually shaped by perceptions of religious, ethnic, linguistic, national,
sexual and class differences. Race as a concept receives its meanings
contextually, and in relation to other social groupings and hierarchies, such
as gender and class. (2005:105)
Here as like other critics Loomba suggests that racial hierarchies are the magic
formula which allow Capitalism to expand and find all the labour power it needs,
and yet pay even lower wages, and allow even fewer freedoms than are given to
the white working classes.
Loomba argues that for the Negro racial identity overrides every
other aspect of existence. The black person attempts to cope by adopting white
masks that will somehow make the fact of his blackness vanish. Loomba calls this
a precarious process. Thus black skin/white masks reflect the miserable
schizophrenia of the colonizeds identity. She further points out that every child
reflects the oedipal complex approach of the family. She adds ahead that
colonialism is described as an oedipal scene of forbidden desire. Here she refers
the opinion of Bhabha who says that colonial identities are always oscillating,
never perfectly achieved. Loomba points out that the split between black skin
and white masks is differentially experienced in various colonial and
postcolonial societies. Loomba argues that experience and constructedness
need not be thought of as polar opposites. The process of acting is not outside the
process by which identities are formed, but equally action and consciousness
are not attributes of some static inner force but of our changing selves.
183
5.5 HYBRIDITY:
Ania Loomba expresses her views and opinions in regard with the
term hybridity in her scholarly writing. She records that postcolonial studies
have been preoccupied with the issues of hybridity- with the in-betweenness,
diasporas, mobility and cross-overs of ideas and identities generated by
colonialism. She even observes the widely divergent ways of thinking about these
issues. She gives reference of Robert Youngs idea about the term hybrid:
hybrid is technically a cross between two different species and that
therefore the term hybridization evokes both the botanical notion of interspecies grafting and the vocabulary of the Victorian extreme right which
regarded different races as different species. (1995:10)
Here Loomba points out the colonial deliberate policy with striking contradictions
as colonialism needs both to civilize its others and to fix them into perpetual
otherness.
Ania Loomba refers Macaulays idea about to create Europeanized
natives: A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
opinion, in morals and in intellect (1972). Here she states that colonial hybridity is
a strategy premised on cultural purity, and aimed at stabilizing the status quo. She
adds ahead that the anti-colonial movements and individuals often drew upon
Western ideas and vocabularies to challenge colonial rule and hybridized what
they borrowed by juxtaposing it with indigenous ideas, reading it through their
own interpretative lens; even using it to assert cultural alterity or insist on an
unbridgeable difference between colonizer and colonized seems to conflict or
clash with their aims and objectives. She points out that Caribbean and Latin
American activists started hybridity as an anti-colonial strategy. Ania Loomba
refers Cuban writers R. S. Retamar, Paul Gilroy regarding the term hybridity: The
184
intellectual and political cross-fertilization that resulted from the black diasporas
or the movements of black people not only as commodities but engaged in various
struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citizenship. The hybridity provides
a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity and historical
memory. Loomba expects new conceptual tools to analyze these newly generated
complex identities. Here the term ethnicity has been used to indicate biologically
and culturally stable identities which is controversial to hybridity. She argues that
Bhabhas concept of hybridity is both influential and controversial in post-colonial
studies. Bhabha suggests that liminality and hybridity are necessary attributes of
the colonial condition. Referring to Fanon and Terry Collits, Loomba states that
the image of black skin/white masks suggests not a hybridity but a violated
authenticity. Loomba further points out that hybridity seem to be a characteristic
of Bhabhas inner life, but not of his positioning.
Ania Loomba opines that the hybridity of both a colonizer and
colonized can be understood only by tracing the vicissitudes of colonial discourse,
or the mutations in European culture. And so we cannot appreciate the specific
nature of diverse hybridities if we do not attend to the nuances of each of the
cultures that come together or clash during the colonial encounter. Here she gives
a useful reference of Arif Dirlik who suggests that conditions of in-betweenness
and hybridity cannot be understood without reference to the ideological and
institutional structures in which they are housed (1994:342). Ania loomba believes
that the migration of people is perhaps the definitive (experience) characteristic of
the twentieth century. She adds ahead that the experience of diaspora is also
marked by class and gender divides. And so it is important to recall that large
numbers of people in the Third World have not physically moved, and have to
speak from where they are, is also often an equally ideologically or politically and
emotionally fractured space.
185
Ania loomba refers Benita Parry who suggests that current theories
of hybridity work to downplay the bitter tension and the clash between the
colonizers and the colonized and therefore misrepresent the dynamics of anticolonial struggle (1987:27-58). She argues further that Nationalist Struggles and
Pan-Nationalist Movements were fuelled by the alienation and the anger of the
colonized and so cannot be understood within the parameters of current theories of
hybridity. Loomba agrees that the colonialist categories of knowledge had the
power to make us see and experience ourselves as other. She adds ahead that this
kind of knowledge is internal, not external, and it is crucial to the process of
colonial subject formation. She states further that it cannot simply be erased or
shrugged off as a kind of false consciousness. She takes the reference of Hall who
refuses to choose between difference and hybridity and tries to keep alive a
sense of difference which is not pure otherness. Finally, Loomba concludes with
her thought:
The task, then, is not simply to pit the themes of migrancy, exile and
hybridity against rootedness, nation and authenticity, but to locate and
evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valences, as well as their
intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality.
(2005:153)
Here Loomba focuses the need of clear understanding of the different but some
more equal in meaning terms in the colonial and postcolonial background. She
tries to explain the term hybridity referring many critics and scholars. Her
convincing style is noteworthy that asks us to go through different illustrations that
are relevant to the term- hybridity.
186
5.6 NATIONALISM/PAN-NATIONALISM:
Ania Loomba talks about Nationalism and Pan-nationalism.
According to her, it is difficult to generalize about nationalism because none of the
factors, responsible for forging national consciousness- language, territory, a
shared past, religion, race, customs- are applicable in every instance. She further
expects that though the nationalism in each case is unique, we need to make
linkages between different histories of the nation, and look for general patterns.
She refers Anderson who defines the nation as an imagined community, born
with the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism (1983). Loomba states that
newspapers, novels and other new forms of communication were the channels for
creating a shared culture, interests and vocabularies within the nation. She believes
Andersons point, that language is much more fundamental in developing national
consciousness.
Loomba argues that Nationalism is a derivative discourse, a
calibanistic model of revolt which is dependent upon the colonizers gift of
language/ideas. She adds ahead that the anti-colonial nationalism all over Asia and
Africa was not modeled upon simple imitation but also by defining its difference
from Western notions of liberty, freedom and human dignity. She states that
Nationalism engages in a complex process of contesting as well as appropriating
colonialist versions of the past. Nationalist invites us to disregard anti-colonialism
and radical potential of Nationalism, to include all the people, the ordinary folk,
to celebrate diversity and speak for the entire imagined community. Loomba
asserts that the power of nationalism, its continuing appeal, lies precisely in its
ability to speak successfully on behalf of all the people. According to Loomba, in
Metropolitan nations as well as the Third World ones, the difficulty of creating
national cultures that might preserve, indeed nourish, internal differences has
emerged as a major issue in our time.
187
188
divides are considered. Finally she considers the place of postcolonial studies in
the context of globalization.
191
192