Critique and the Ambivalence of Colonial Modernity: Towards a Postcolonial Genealogical Critique
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Date
2025-02-24
Authors
Nobowati, Zeinab
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation develops conceptual and methodological tools from a variety of traditions, especially that of critical theory and Michel Foucault’s thought specifically, that can serve the development of a postcolonial genealogical critique, that is, a critique that rethinks the relationship between colonial history and the present and problematizes the postcolonial political order and its hold on our subjectivities. I think about Foucault’s philosophical tools as a method of analysis that is both conditioned by its colonial context and at the same time enables a certain critical interrogation of those very conditions.The first part of the dissertation develops and proposes genealogical postcolonial critique as a method for studying the normative ambivalence of colonial modernity, i.e., the entanglement of enlightenment and violence. Genealogical critique, a philosophical method of critique based on studying the history of the present and developed mainly by Nietzsche and Foucault, is an especially apt method for postcolonial critique, but I suggest that it needs to be modified due to its Eurocentric bias. The third chapter discusses the transformative work of postcolonial genealogical critique by highlighting its epistemological and affective work, as well as its practical implications for the pathologies of collective memories.
The last two chapters articulate the possibilities of ethical and feminist self-transformation in postcolonial times by drawing inspiration from Foucault’s work on ethical self-practices. The fourth chapter reflects on the effects of the afterlives of colonialism in relation to the ethical self and explores the relationship between critique, ethical self-practices, and internalized oppression through an engagement with Foucault alongside Franz Fanon and Audre Lorde. The last chapter builds upon my work in the previous chapters to discuss the relevance of postcolonial genealogical critique for the study of the gendered afterlives of colonialism. More specifically, I focus on the study of gendered ideologies in post-revolutionary Iran and show how the historical lens of genealogy allows us to situate the development of gendered ideologies in the global context of colonial modernity and recognize the relationality between local political formations and transnational relations of power.