Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Theory

How empire shaped Western culture and knowledge, and how postcolonial thinkers analyse othering, hybridity, diaspora, and the question of who can speak.

Definition

Postcolonial theory is the body of cultural analysis concerned with the legacies of colonialism in knowledge, representation, and identity; race and ethnicity here name socially constructed categories of difference whose cultural production and contestation this topic examines.

Scope

This topic covers the cultural theory of race and ethnicity and the postcolonial tradition: Said's account of Orientalism, Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and mimicry, Gilroy's diasporic Black Atlantic, and Spivak's question of the subaltern. It does not cover the empirical sociology of race or migration.

Core questions

• How did colonial knowledge construct the colonised as other?
• What are hybridity, mimicry, and diaspora as cultural concepts?
• Can the subaltern speak, or only be spoken for?

Key theories

Orientalism

Said showed how Western scholarship and culture produced the Orient as an essentialised, subordinate other, binding knowledge to colonial power.

Hybridity and mimicry

Bhabha argued that colonial encounters produce hybrid, ambivalent identities and that the colonised's mimicry can unsettle colonial authority.

Diaspora and the Black Atlantic

Gilroy theorised a transnational Black Atlantic culture of double consciousness that exceeds national and ethnic absolutism.

History

Building on Fanon's earlier anticolonial writing, Said's Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial studies by linking representation to imperial power. In the 1980s and 1990s Spivak, Bhabha, and Gilroy developed concepts of the subaltern, hybridity, and diaspora that reshaped cultural theory's treatment of race and ethnicity.

Debates

Hybridity versus the risk of depoliticisation

Celebrations of hybridity and diaspora are challenged by critics who fear they dissolve material histories of racism and colonial exploitation into matters of cultural play.

Key figures

• Edward Said
• Homi Bhabha
• Paul Gilroy
• Gayatri Spivak
• Frantz Fanon

Seminal works

• said1978
• bhabha1994
• gilroy1993
• spivak1988

Frequently asked questions

What does Spivak mean by the subaltern cannot speak?

That the most marginalised colonised subjects cannot be heard within dominant frameworks of representation, so well-meaning attempts to let them speak often re-inscribe the very silencing they aim to undo.