The Right to Resist

Do we have a right to resist? While the question of rights and human rights has been extensively discussed and theorized in the human rights field in recent years, within postcolonial theory, resistance as a category and as a practice has been less frequently theorized and interrogated. ¹ This has often surprised me in so far as resistance is a concept that is especially prized within postcolonial theory. Indeed, postcolonial theory assumes the right to resist as a sine qua non of its political perspective—perhaps its being a right that is so universally assumed explains the lack of interrogation. Looking for and highlighting moments of resistance within colonial discourse could be said to have been one of the major tasks of colonial discourse analysis. You often feel in an analysis of a literary text from the past, or a historical incident, that there is an assumption that you have only to retrieve resistance for your job to be done. Your task: to read a text and find evidence of resistance that goes against the triumphal narrative of imperialism. Having found its expression or, at the very least, evidence of some form of agency, your task is complete. The subaltern has spoken, the subaltern has resisted. I’m not sure if anyone actually practices colonial discourse analysis any more, but we could think of Barbara Harlow’s book Resistance Literature (1987) as an important example of this mode.