Books: The war of the words

Sukhdev Sandhu regrets that the rediscovery of ex-colonial writers and peoples has led to vanity and verbiage; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Harvard University Press, pounds 15.99, 448pp

Almost completely forgotten today, James Anthony Froude was one of the most famous historians of the 19th century. A brilliant speaker whose lecture tours attracted huge audiences, a prolific journalist and writer whose books, like those of his friend Thomas Carlyle, sold tens of thousands of copies, he rose to become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.

Froude's work celebrated the buccaneering hardiness of English seamen and eulogised the Elizabethan age's commercial enterprise, its pioneering individualism. His upbeat rhetoric struck a chord with audiences basking in the knowledge that maps were painted ever pinker; that with every passing decade the Empire grew bigger, broader, faster. He also produced accounts of his voyages including, in 1888, a typically forthright volume entitled The English in the West Indies, which expressed his disgust about the islands becoming "nigger warrens" and lapsing into barbarism.

The book was read with horror by a Trinidadian schoolmaster called John Jacob Thomas. He had spent most of his life in rickety classrooms trying to teach restless agricultural workers in return for little glory and less pay. He had taught himself Greek, Latin, French and Spanish. More unusually, and without linguistic training, he learned Creole and, in 1869, produced a groundbreaking book on the language.

Now, 20 years later, bedridden by rheumatism, with no institutional support and precious few resources to hand, he wrote a devastating critique of the professor's scholarship. He labelled Froude a "negrophobic political hobgoblin" and accused him of methodological slackness (conversing chiefly with the Anglo-West Indian communities, from whose balcony windows he would gaze down on the sable throngs), lechery (lionising black women, while claiming black men were truculent layabouts), and gross political naivety (he ridiculed Froude's assertion that West Indian negroes enjoyed "no distinction of colour" under British rule).

Thomas died shortly after Froudacity was published in 1889. It attracted scant attention and has long been forgotten. Today, it can be seen to anticipate the rise of postcolonial studies across the world. Yet Thomas's wit, his lucidity and his venom put to shame the tenured radicals who have followed in his wake.

What is postcolonialism? The term has most valency within the arts, especially literature. This is unsurprising, perhaps, since English Literature as a discipline first developed neither in London nor Oxbridge but in India, where - according to Thomas Macaulay's 1835 Indian Education Minute - the use of the English language and rote-learning techniques would produce subjects "Indian in blood and in colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, academics specialising in postcolonialism rediscovered colonial authors. They also highlighted classics such as Robinson Crusoe and Heart of Darkness, which they felt misrepresented native peoples. Announcing that, at long last, the empire was "writing back", they exposed the strategies of Third World authors who, like Caliban in The Tempest, creolised standard English to use it as a weapon of insurgency: "You taught me language; and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse".

Recently, however, postcolonialism has become keener on philosophical than literary questions. Heavily indebted to deconstruction, critics have not only questioned whether the terms which colonial officials used to describe the peoples they encountered corresponded to any reality, but have even denied the existence of any "objective" reality at all. The world is text, they claim, and the language with which we describe it irrevocably shot through with our prejudices and desires. It follows that colonial subjects are not foreign or "other" people. They do not exist independently of us - they are remixed versions of ourselves.

One of the most noted exponents of postcolonial theory is Calcutta-born Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She first came to attention as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, which introduced deconstruction to the English-speaking world. Blessed with upper-class self-possession and a prose style so dense that most people will find it hard to understand, yet alone disagree with, her, she has engirdled the academic world for two decades. Spivak has now gathered redrafted versions of her most celebrated essays in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. She dedicates it to Derrida's acolyte at Yale (and, in his youth, a Nazi collaborator), Paul de Man.

The volume reveals Spivak's oeuvre - and, inadvertently, postcolonial theory itself - in all its naked inglory. It reprints her infamous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", in which she uses sati - the custom whereby Hindu widows immolated themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres - as an example of how colonial women have always been caught between, and silenced by, native patriarchy on one hand and "foreign masculist-imperialist ideology" on the other. The Hindu widow, Spivak claims, has no "subject- position" from which she can speak. This stance rehashes deconstruction's obsession with the impossibility of representing the real world. More importantly, how does it help historians trying to bring to light people banished from official history? Spivak's answer is that we should be more self-reflexive, and foreground the privileges that inform our pronouncements on the colonial world. In practice, however, this just leads to narcissistic self-absorption.

Spivak is eager to redeem the reputations of Hegel and Marx, whom some critics have attacked for declaring that, respectively, Africa and India lacked histories. It is hard to see why as, like many literary types, she thinks of Marx as a "peculiar critical phenomenon" rather than a political ideologue. And any thrust towards social reform that Spivak might hope to engender is retarded by her wretched prose ("The task of the teacher of literary reading is placed in the aporia, of an uncoercive rearrangement of the will as student and teacher shuttle between freedom-from and freedom- to").

A dash of feminism, a few sprigs of Marxism, all smothered in past-its- sell-by-date deconstruction: Spivak's book tells its audience nothing about literature, and less about life. Humourless and joyless, it is typical of the wind-bagging, intellectually derivative and politically gaseous drool that distinguishes postcolonial scholarship. The idea that the subsidised banalities embodied by this book constitute any kind of committed activism is enraging. It would make J J Thomas, who died of tuberculosis, uncelebrated and virtually penniless, weep with shame

Sukhdev Sandhu is a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford