After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements

__________________ Preface __________________

IN RECENT YEARS, the study of colonialism has witnessed a resurgence of scholarly interest and attracted a great deal of valuable research and rethinking across several disciplines. With a view to advance the study and reconsideration of the colonial experience and its effects, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, organized a series of seminars and colloquia over two years (1990–92) on the theme, Imperialism, Colonialism, and the Colonial Aftermath. The Center appointed visiting fellows and invited scholars, representing a variety of disciplines and approaches, to present their research at its weekly seminars, colloquia, and luncheon discussions. The fellows and their areas of research ranged from India, North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to Europe and North America. The topics were similarly varied and extended from ancient to modern imperialism; from medical history to vodou to race and slavery to literary genres to museums to urbanization. Interpretive approaches encompassed the analysis of political economy, social history, literary analysis, and cultural criticism. Papers were drawn from different disciplines—history, anthropology, literature—and discussions often crossed disciplinary boundaries to explore issues of evidence, knowability, methods, and possibilities of other forms of knowledge and agency.

This volume represents a selection from the two years of wide-ranging and stimulating presentations. Its objective is to display a range of approaches currently employed to offer a fresh understanding of modern colonial history and reflect on the forms of identities and knowledges it produced. Many papers could not be included because they were either committed elsewhere for publication or did not fit the themes of this volume. But the present selection owes a great deal to the work of other fellows and papers not included here, as it does to the discussions that started on Friday mornings at the seminar, spilled over to the lunches, and continued into and surfaced in the next gathering.

All the participants, including the regulars from the history department and other departments at Princeton, deserve thanks for making the two years invigorating and productively contentious. But, most of all, thanks are due to Natalie Zemon Davis, the director of the Davis Center. It was her intelligence, enthusiasm, and inspiring leadership that provided the essential continuity from one week to the next. She kept discussions focused on important issues, reminded the seminar of convergences and differences in interpretations and methods, and offered constructive criticisms. Natalie’s characteristic leadership put its stamp on discussions, and the participants waited with anticipation for her summaries at the end of Friday seminars. The volume has benefited a great deal from her leadership during those two years, and I was fortunate to receive her advice in fulfilling my editorial responsibilities.

I am grateful to Kari Hoover, the secretary of the Davis Center, who cheerfully handled various chores related to the preparation of this volume, and to Random House for allowing us to reprint Edward Said’s essay, which was presented originally at the Davis Center and published in his Culture and Imperialism. I am also grateful to my editor, Mary Murrell, at Princeton University Press, who saw potential in this volume and whose support and insights were invaluable.

AFTER COLONIALISM

_________________________________ INTRODUCTION _________________________________

After Colonialism

GYAN PRAKASH

MODERN COLONIALISM, it is now widely recognized, instituted enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges—the colonizer and the colonized, the Occidental and the Oriental, the civilized and the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, the developed and the underdeveloped. The scholarship in different disciplines has made us all too aware that such dichotomies reduced complex differences and interactions to the binary (self/other) logic of colonial power. But if the colonial rulers enacted their authority by constituting the native as their inverse image, then surely the native exercised a pressure on the identification of the colonizer. I refer here not to the dialectic but to the dissemination of the self and the other that ensued as the identity and authority of the colonizer were instituted in the language and the figure of the native. Compelled to mix with, work upon, and express their authority in repressed knowledges and subjects, the colonial categories were never instituted without their dislocation and transformation. The writ of rationality and order was always overwritten by its denial in the colonies, the pieties of progress always violated irreverently in practice, the assertion of the universality of Western ideals always qualified drastically. Paradoxes and ironies abounded, as did the justification of the gap between rhetoric and practice on the grounds of expediency and the exceptional circumstances of the colonies. These contortions of the discourse were endemic to colonialism not because of the colonizer’s bad faith but due to the functioning of colonial power as a form of transaction and translation between incommensurable cultures and positions. The establishment of colonial power in the figure of the native, therefore, was also a displacement and relocation of colonial oppositions. For as the authority of the civilized was articulated in the speech of the uncivilized, colonial oppositions were crossed and hybridized. It is on this liminal site of mixtures and crossings produced by the exercise of colonial power that boundaries were redrawn and the colonizer/colonized divide was reordered.

Placed against the background of colonialism’s functioning as a form of relocation and renegotiation of oppositions and boundaries, the colonial aftermath does not appear as a narrative framed by the hierarchical knowledges and subjects instituted by Western domination. There is another story in that Western domination that, in fact, surfaces precisely at the point where the encounter with cultural difference is organized into the colonizer/colonized polarity, where the historicist notion of history gathers people without history into its fold, and where the metropolitan culture speaks to the marginalized in the language of its supremacist myths. There emerges in these constitutive processes of colonial power an estrangement and displacement of colonial constructions. Consider, for example, the civilizing mission in Africa performed in the establishment of tribes as traditional sources of power and authority; or the British role as the unconscious tool of history in India acted out in the archaic Mughal rituals emptied of their traditional meanings; or the doctrine of liberty and freedom elaborated in the exploitation of black slaves in the Americas. In these performances, as the myths of the civilizing mission and historical progress find perverse expressions in caricatures of indigenous traditions and racist stereotyping and exploitation of blacks, the colonial reality appears in its estranged representation.

In these performances the artful lie of colonialism emerges as its alienated and artless truth: the paradoxes reveal a fundamental instability and division in the functioning of colonial power. This perspective of colonialism’s functioning offers another vision of the aftermath of colonial conquest. Societies and knowledges come into view only after having been worked over by colonialism, but the texture of their transformation exhibits fissures covered over flimsily by colonial categories. After all, the mission to spread civic virtue with military power, or propagate the text of the Rights of Man in the context of slave and indentured labor, could not but introduce rifts and tensions in the structure of Western power. This tenuousness of colonial power bears testimony to the pressure exercised silently by the subordinated and enables another view of colonial change. The fragile alignment of discrepant histories and knowledges after colonialism emerges with possibilities for a post-colonial realignment. In this realignment there appears another form of after colonialism—one that seizes on colonialism’s contingent arrangement of values and social identification and rearranges them to reveal sources of knowledge and agency simmering beneath the calm surface of colonial history and historiography.

It is this dynamic and double sense of the colonial aftermath that animates this volume of essays. While individual contributions are written from a range of perspectives and address specific concerns of different disciplinary fields, they can be read to question the leaden understanding of colonialism as History: history with a clear trajectory originating in the early modern European expansions and ending with the postwar anticolonial nationalism and decolonization. This view is complicit with Western domination, but offers itself nonetheless as a clear lens through which we can understand colonialism. It sequesters colonialism tightly in the airless container of History, and casts postcoloniality as a new beginning, one in which certain old modes of domination may persist and acquire new forms of sustenance but one that marks the end of an era. To pry open the reading of colonialism from this prison-house of historicism requires more than the concept of neocolonialism. For at stake is not simply the issue as to whether or not former colonies have become free from domination, but also the question as to how the history of colonialism and colonialism’s disciplining of history can be shaken loose from the domination of categories and ideas it produced—colonizer and colonized; white, black, and brown; civilized and uncivilized; modern and archaic; cultural identity; tribe and nation.

Such categories and ideas have not gone unchallenged. The history of scholarship on colonialism abounds with examples of the questioning of the idea of history as History, the interrogation of the concepts of race and tribe. Scholars have frequently noted and highlighted the contradictions and impasses in the exercise of colonial power, and there exist many descriptions of how the colonized resisted the imposition of the civilizing mission as History. More recently, Orientalism, the Oriental, the native, the nation-state, and other such categories have been subjected to close scrutiny to reveal their location in the colonial discourse of power. Burdened with the weight of power, these categories have been shown to owe their origin and life to another time; if they survive into the present, they do so as forms of a past whose time has passed—they are history.

It would be wrong, and arrogant, to understate the importance of such previous critiques of colonial history. Indeed, it would be contrary to the spirit of this volume to deny the troubled life of colonialism in scholarship. Yet it should be recognized that while there are many examples of critiques of liberal historiography and of its complicity with imperialism, the revision of the discipline from the place of otherness is yet to occur.¹ We have several accounts of the resistance of the colonized, but few treatments of their resistance as theoretical events; there exist fine descriptions of the people without history, but their conceptions are frequently treated as myths and ethnohistories left for anthropologists to decode and interpret; and while there are scrupulous accounts of Western domination, we have yet to fully recognize another history of agency and knowledge alive in the dead weight of the colonial past.

It is in this respect that the present volume can be read differently from previous critiques: it provides material to move beyond marking the contradictions and impasses in the history of colonialism, to proceed further than the description of the construction of power-laden categories. The essays enable us to return to the history of colonialism without rehearsing the naturalization of colonialism as History. By this I mean a project of understanding that delves into the history of colonialism not only to document its record of domination but also to track the failures, silences, displacements, and transformations produced by its functioning; not only to chronicle the functioning of Western dominance and resistances to it, but to mark those (subaltern) positions and knowledges that could not be properly recognized and named, only normalized, by colonial discourses. Quite simply, the essays in this volume should be read to revisit the historical record, to push at the edges, to unsettle the calmness with which colonial categories and knowledges were instituted as the facts of history. This is to shake colonialism loose from the stillness of the past; it is to throw open for realignment the conflictual, discrepant, and even violent processes that formed the precipitous basis of colonial power.

Something of this sense of the realignment of the colonial record can be observed in Gandhi’s text, Hind Swaraj.² Written in 1908 as he traveled from London to South Africa by sea, this text is a severe indictment of modern civilization. Attacking, with a certain recklessness, lawyers, doctors, parliaments, machinery, railways, and mills for having created illusions of freedom in an unhindered pursuit of material satisfaction, Gandhi projects nonviolent self-control over passion, greed, and hatred as the basis for India’s freedom. The specific content of his criticisms is less relevant than the mode in which the creed of a nonmodern and nonviolent Indian struggle for freedom is crafted out of a violent denunciation of the modern civilization. There is more to this mode, however, than the irony that the philosophy of nonviolence is overwritten by a language bristling with violent criticism. Indeed, the ironic juxtaposition of violence and nonviolence highlights how an encounter with colonialism could produce a program for the dislocation of its violence. Thus, as the Hind Swaraj directs its bitter, violent criticism at the British rule in India, the violence of colonialism emerges as the central truth of the modern capitalist civilization, not its peripheral and unnecessary sideshow. Unlike other nationalists, who spoke of the Un-British rule in India and demanded, in Gandhi’s words, English rule without the Englishman,³ he sees colonization as the alienated local image of the modern English nation: Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.⁴ After offering this biting criticism of the modern civilization and parliamentary government (which is compared to a sterile woman and a prostitute), Gandhi turns to India’s ancient village communities as an alternative model, but he does not do so as a nativist. Indeed, this notion of premodern India as a collection of village communities was derived from colonial sociology, most notably from Henry Maine (who is cited as an authority in the text). Gandhi’s concept of a nonmodern civilization drew on Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Ruskin, who are also cited as authorities.⁵ Again, the content of his vision is not the issue here, but the fact that it emerged from a rereading of the colonial archive. It was by rescuing the premodern from its assigned space as history, from its designation as colonialism’s self-confirming other, and by inserting it in the same time as the modern that Gandhi was able to formulate his concept of the nonmodern. By such a reinterpretation of the premodern as the nonmodern, by realigning categories aligned by colonialism, Gandhi was able to produce a postcolonial text that made the violent critique of the colonial discourse speak with nonviolent meanings.

In a different location and with an acute phenomenological imagination, Fanon’s memorable essays also tug insistently at the seams of the fabric of colonial truths. Consider this remarkable passage in his essay The Fact of Blackness, which forms part of that extraordinary analysis of colonial identities, Black Skin, White Masks:

‘Understand, my dear boy, color prejudice is something I find utterly foreign.… But of course, come in, sir, there is no color prejudice among us.… Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves.… It is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we are.… I had a Senegalese buddy in the army who was really clever.…’

Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?

‘A Martinican, a native of our old colonies.’

Where shall I hide?

‘Look at the nigger! … Mama, a Negro! … Hell, he’s getting mad.… Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we.…’

My body was given back to me sprawled out, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.⁶

I have quoted this passage at length because it stages a stunning displacement of the Rights of Man. But it does so not as a form of unmasking, not to reveal the reality lurking under the myth of the colonial discourse; its ambition is greater, and its effect more devastating. Fanon represents racism as the phantasmic truth of colonialism in which the disavowal of racial difference produces a racist double-speak: But of course, come in, sir, there is no color prejudice among us.… Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves.… It is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we are. The rationality of this fantasy is articulated in the delirium of The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean; look, a nigger, it’s cold; and the meaningfulness of the racist fantasy is expressed in the broken nonsense of the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold. Caught in between reality and fantasy, rationality and delirium, originary colonial identities take shape in the uncertain moment of the fearful gaze: Look at the nigger! … Mama, a Negro!

Performed here is a wholescale dislocation, not demystification, of the racist discourse. It is not that a real black man emerges from Fanon’s allusion to the racist fear; instead, as we see him through the fearful eyes of the French child, the black identity appears anew, as a product of historical relations and racist anxiety, not origin. In pursuing such a strategy, Fanon neither calls for a more consistent application of European humanism (a color-blind humanity extended to everyone) nor does he uncover the real history of European colonialism; rather, his account transgresses and undermines the terms of the discourse. As Homi Bhabha writes:

It is one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a background of social and historical facts against which emerge problems of the individual or collective psyche.… It is through image and fantasy—those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious—that Fanon profoundly evokes the colonial condition.⁷

It is not that Fanon replaces history with psychoanalysis in order to place colonialism in its true register; rather, he locates psychic desire and fantasy at the heart of the rationalist discourse of history and thus foregrounds the fissured formation of the colonial society. There emerges a constitutive relationship between the order of the military barracks and the command of civic authority, between the profusion of racist fears and fantasies and the articulation of the Rights of Man, between the brute exploitation of slave labor and the development of the rational capitalist enterprise. As the French Revolution appears cross-cut by Haiti, it is not that one negates the other; instead, the confrontation and entanglement of the lofty and universalist rhetoric of equality, liberty, and fraternity with the degrading practices of slavery reveal the limits of the ideology invisible in France itself. As military might, slavery, racism, and political domination in the colonies become the medium for the articulation of the civilizing mission, there emerges another vision of colonialism, another possibility for the revision of colonial power and knowledge.

Such a theory of colonialism, or a discourse on colonial history, should be considered as an event, a significant occurrence, in the history of colonization. Gandhi and Fanon are only two well-known names among the nameless whose practices and resistance transformed colonialism’s theory of history and produced new forms of historical imagination. From Latin America to India, the colonized shifted the terrain of engagement by occupying and carving out positions placed in between the powerful command of authority and the powerless silence of the victim. Consider, for example, the conversion of the Tagalog to Christianity in seventeenth-century Philippines. As Vincent Rafael shows, the Tagalog responded to Spanish proselytization with subterfuges and subversive compliances, offering confession without sin, submission without translation.⁸ The Tagalog submitted to the Spanish missionaries, but they also hollowed out the meaning of submission; they infused the penitent-priest relationship with meanings drawn from the unequal reciprocity of debt transactions, and turned the confession of sins into an occasion for boasting and protesting their innocence. With such a strategy, the Tagalog forged positions for themselves that were partial and conditional because they brought together traditions and strategies from different registers contingently. But as partial, hybrid, and contingent as they may have been, these positions were no less radically transformative for these reasons. On the contrary, by taking perspectives and strategies out of their proper domains and combining them, the position of the penitent in relation to the priest was relocated by the Tagalog, transgressing and redrawing colonial boundaries.

Even anticolonial nationalism was compelled to transgress colonial polarities as it sought to articulate an essentialized nation. The nationalists, to be sure, believed that the colonized formed a unity; that they constituted a national essence opposed to that of the colonizers. But the production of this unity required the invocation of difference. The nationalist intellectuals spoke of unity in diversity; they claimed that the colonized formed a nation in spite of social, regional, and ethnic differences. Such assertions were not merely polemical responses to the colonial rulers who resisted the nationalist demands; instead, they underscored the necessity of the stage of difference for the performance of the nation’s unity.⁹ Thus, the demand for a modern nationhood was anchored in appeals to a lost ancient belonging, and the unity of the national subject was forged in the space of difference and conflicts.

But if nationalism achieved its authority from the transgression of boundaries, it disavowed the ambivalence of the nation’s process of emergence. It normalized and contained the space of difference that it invoked in performing the nation’s unity. Movements, perspectives, and groups that stood in between boundaries and polarities were reappropriated to advance the nation’s dominance. Take, for example, anticolonial peasant uprisings in India. As Ranajit Guha’s study shows, neither the position of the peasant subalterns nor their religious ideology and modes of resistance could be accommodated easily in the nationalist discourse. The subalterns’ social location defied the identities of nation and class, and their insurgent consciousness, religiosity, mythic visions, and notions of political community were at odds with the model of causality and rational action advanced by the nationalist elites.¹⁰ These other visions, whether articulated in subaltern insurgency or in Gandhi’s utopia of a nonmodern India, arose at the intersection of political, social, and cultural differences and sought to renegotiate a more democratic post-colonial order. The elite discourse was compelled to engage the subalterns and Gandhi; it cited peasant unrest and the ideas of nonviolence to authorize the demand for a nation-state, but it did not treat them as sources of knowledge and agency. The subalterns were regarded as incapable of articulating the demands of the nation and Gandhi was dismissed as outmoded by the disciplines of history instituted by colonialism and rearticulated by nationalism.¹¹

The subaltern sources of knowledge and agency were major historical events, yet they had no place in the fields of knowledge that grew in an incestuous relationship with colonialism. These disciplines offered a prose of counterinsurgency to comprehend and contain an insurgent reality—notions of peoples without history, and race and culture types developed to reorder and reappropriate irreducible heterogeneity into power-laden polarities. In recent years, scholarship in different disciplines has vigorously traced the relationship between the formation of authoritative knowledges and the exercise of colonial power that denied other people knowledge and agency. Edward Said’s Orientalism is a pioneering example of the growing trend in scholarly work that documents the ties between knowledge and power; and his recent Culture and Imperialism extends this work further through an exploration of the cultural relationship of power between the metropolitan West and the rest.¹² Homi Bhabha’s essays on the ambivalent, hybrid enunciation of metropolitan discourses have foregrounded the uncertain and unstable status and functioning of colonial disciplines in both its senses.¹³ Consider also the combative essays in the Subaltern Studies project that have fastened on the figure of the subaltern to lay bare the relationship between disciplinary knowledges and the colonial and elite-nationalist strategies of power.¹⁴ In literature, history, and anthropology, there has been a rapid proliferation of studies that question their disciplinary foundations; concepts and methods developed seemingly within enclosed fields of knowledge, geography, culture, history, and institutions have been shown to spill into one another.¹⁵

The disturbance of colonial categories and disciplines extends beyond scholarship. One can observe it in Tayib Salih’s novel, Season of Migration to the North, which recounts the experience of the narrator, a Western-educated Sudanese, who returns from Europe to his village on the Nile, to discover in the story of another Western-educated compatriot, that the colonized identity was a lie, a fabrication.¹⁶ In a brilliant literary reenactment of Fanon, Salih unravels the process of the racist identity-formation instituted under colonialism, upsetting notions of cultural wholeness, essences, and origin. One can witness a similar dismantling of the stable self/other construct of colonialism in the emergence of the marginal in the very bosom of the metropolitan as we hear Whisky Sisodia declare in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses: The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.¹⁷ In a different context, Toni Morrison’s Beloved achieves a startling representation of the historical meaning of the racist exploitation under slavery in North America as it remembers the lives of the survivors of slavery with the uncanny afterlife of the ghosts of racial violence from the past.¹⁸ From the irruption of the dead in the living, there arises the haunting agency and knowledge of the victims that torment the narrative of slavery recounted by history.

In these writings, assembled from widely different contexts to illustrate the range of reformulations of disciplinary knowledge, there is a reenactment of history that reproduces the old but also goes beyond it; there is an immersion and intervention into the historical record that is also profoundly transformative. These writings reinterpret identity as a process of ambivalent identification, reopen theories of enclosed histories with accounts of entangled, hierarchical engagements, and resituate historical antagonisms in the agonistic process of narrating and rememorizing. In the aftermath of decolonization, their return to the scene after colonialism breaches open categories of identity and history universalized by Western expansion and releases other sources of knowledge and agency.

It is fitting that such refashionings of history and theory emerge from that other place, the site of colonialism, because it was there that the disciplines both reached for mastery and were undone. It was in British India, for instance, as I have shown elsewhere, that scientific knowledge was placed in a position of undisputed cultural authority and where its inappropriate mixture with superstition exposed and realigned the process of its authorization.¹⁹ To return to the colonial scene, therefore, is to release histories and knowledges from their disciplining as area-studies; as imperial and overseas history; as the study of the exotic other that seals metropolitan structures from the contagion of the record of their own formation elsewhere—in fantasy and fear, in cultural difference and uneven and entangled histories, in contingency and contention.

The alternative sources of knowledge and agency released by the return to the cracks of colonial disciplines are heterogeneous: they cannot be classified into some global postcolonial other. This is because post-colonial knowledge takes shape at the specific and local points of disciplinary failures; it arises at certain conjunctures and affiliates with particular traditions of thought. Therefore, while returns to the interpellation of different regions, cultures, and histories undo colonial disciplining, they do not use the heterogeneous colonial sites to fabricate a homogeneous account of colonial history. Thus, as scholars, activists, and intellectuals have fastened on the tensions, anxieties, and intermixtures in colonial discourses to split apart the categories of identity and history associated with racism and western domination, the new sources of knowledge that they have offered remain contextual and contingent. This is true from Fanon’s destabilization of colonial identities to Toni Morrison’s exploration of the memory of the racist violence of slavery in the constitution of the contemporary North American identities. This is not to say that such texts are insular and nativist. Far from it. Migrancy, hybridity, and imbrication mark Gandhi’s nonmodern utopia as much as they appear in Salman Rushdie’s novels. But they remain particular and partial knowledges located in contingent constellations of the local and the extralocal, and cannot be emblematized as instances of a global other.

It is in this spirit of releasing heterogeneous sources of knowledge and agency from the grip of the disciplines of colonialism that this volume resists disciplinary boundaries and geographical enclosures. The contributions range from literary studies to historical accounts and from Latin America to India. They cross historical analysis of texts with textual examination of historical records, and they situate metropolitan cultural practices in engagements with nonmetropolitan locations. Interdisciplinarity here means exploring and realigning disciplinary boundaries. This may frustrate conventional expectations of analysis and evidence, but the historical analysis of disciplines cannot but disorient disciplinary expectations shaped in the history of colonialism. It is this difficult and disorienting task that the essays in this volume perform. Organized in three thematic sections with overlapping concerns, they open received knowledges to historical examination from different angles and with a variety of approaches, repeatedly broaching and breaching the colonial archive and exploring other sources of knowledge and agency.

The opening section turns the marginalized and the silenced in modern disciplines into the stirring presence that disturbs the colonial constitution of knowledge. Edward Said’s wide-ranging essay on the institution of comparative literature highlights the discipline’s hidden geographical notation, its fleeting reference to empire. He pinpoints precisely this incidental notation to reveal its central function in the constitution of metropolitan culture. Thus, in his acute reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the passing reference to the distant slave-plantation of Antigua becomes the critical basis for the representation of the intimacy and grace of Mansfield Park. To disclose such intimacy of empire and culture, Said argues, we must reread the cultural archive not univocally but contrapuntally, reading Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill alongside Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. Similarly, Steven Feierman’s essay focuses on the disturbing presence of Africa in historiography to highlight the provinciality of the universalizing concepts of world history. Showing that historiographical schemes based on such ideas as civilization, material life, and commodities run up against processes that cannot be assimilated, he makes a case for multiple narratives faithful to historical interconnections and discrepant histories.

Joan Dayan’s essay on the history and the historiography of the Haitian revolution also focuses on the troubling legends, traditions, and figures from which historians have sought to seal the revolution. She rereads the practice of vodou, the legends of Dessalines’ resurrection and his possession by the Black Virgin, to offer another view of the revolution that breaks from the homogeneity of what can be and has been said about it. The Haitian revolution is reopened to the world of vodou, but the French meaning attributed to the revolution by history and historiography is not simply reversed. In fact, rather like Dessalines’ strategy of blackening that eliminated the stain of color from racial identification and remarked it with economic and political signs, Dayan’s rereading of the revolution displaces the black/white polarity with uncontainable hybridity. Similarly, Ruth Phillips’ study finds that the silence of the North American museums on native American tourist art speaks the unspeakable. There emerges a pulsating history of the native Americans’ encounter and negotiation with Western economic and artistic systems that, though unequal, could not be contained in the stillness of the premodern/modern dichotomy upon which colonial power was founded. In producing objects that looked too white, the native Americans, she suggests, threatened the colonial notions of identity. Thus, their white objects had to be classified as tourist art and disciplined out of museums.

The next section moves from foregrounding the disturbing presence of difference in disciplinary knowledge to an analysis of strategies to contain the anxieties it produced. For Diderot and Herder, as Anthony Pagden’s account shows, colonization was an anxious encounter with cultural difference: colonial conquests revealed the universal values of reason and free agency (Diderot) to be particular and contingent; or they undermined the natural separation of cultures (Herder). Diderot and Herder contained this threatening encounter, however, by regarding colonialism as an effacement of cultural difference. This became possible when difference was conceived as diversity, according to which each culture was an atomistic whole with separate origins and essences. Such a notion of difference as diversity opposed colonization, but Diderot’s expansive vision of universal values nourished by miscegenated societies and Herder’s restrictive view of an atomistic separation of cultures were two sides of the same coin; neither of them could renegotiate the cultural difference that assailed the European self but was displaced and dichotomized as the non-Western other in colonial discourse.

The threat that cultural difference posed to Dutch colonialism burst forcefully upon Formosa where, as Leonard Blussé’s account details, the missionary project ended in a slaughter of the local population. As the drive to convert the Formosans required that they recognize the authority of Christianity, the binary logic of colonialism forced the missionaries to choose either the indigenization of the gospel or its coercive imposition. In the savage slaughter unleashed by the Dutch, colonialism revealed its truth in the violent suppression of the contagion of difference. As we move from seventeenth-century Formosa to nineteenth-century India, conversion once again exposes colonialism’s confrontation with cultural difference. Gauri Viswanathan’s study carefully traces the complicity of conversion and colonialism that produced a silencing of the converted. Analyzing court cases dealing with the denial of the civic rights of Hindu converts by their communities, Viswanathan documents the priority that the British accorded to the legislated identity as Hindus over the converts’ adopted identity. In this process, as the private sphere of belief was rewritten in the public language of social identity and customary practices, the truth of the liberal doctrine of free individuality appeared in its disavowal and displacement. This left no room for the expression of the colonized’s experience of conversion, for private, autonomous subjectivity: they could not speak.

Zachary Lockman’s sober analysis of labor-Zionism’s history in Palestine also broaches the question of the breach opened and closed in colonial discourse as it confronted the disturbing presence of the Arab workers. Their presence could be literally thought out of existence, as it was in the slogan, A land without a people for a people without land. The process of emptying the land, however, was complex and contentious; it was accomplished only when the socialist-Zionists, faced with the task of negotiating the relationship between socialism and nationalism, between class and culture, gave in to a colonialist solution. Arab workers became simply the Arabs in discourse, laying the basis for decades of a still-unresolved conflict. J. Jorge Klor de Alva’s provocative essay also presents Latin America as an area where indigenous inhabitants are yet to experience decolonization. His account shows that, because colonialism organized cultural difference in the colonizer/colonized polarity, there arose an ideology of nativism that was used by the Europeanized mestizos to proclaim national independence in the nineteenth century as decolonization when, in fact, they were never colonized. Indeed, the mestizos used, and continue to do so, the ideology of nativism to establish their rule on behalf of the native Americans, who remain the only group yet to experience decolonization. Similarly, the European immigrants in North America, he suggests, employed the nativist ideology to kill or effectively marginalize the local population and establish themselves as natives ranged against British colonialism.

This volume concludes with three essays that sketch forms of knowledge and agency that emerge from the displacements produced by the very functioning of the colonial discourse. Irene Silverblatt describes how an Indian identity appeared in sixteenth-century Peru first in a movement that asked the Andeans to return their huacas (sacred place, deity). This return to the colonial binary of the Spanish/Indian, repeated in the seventeenth century, unraveled it through an inappropriate mixture of categories taken out of their appropriate contexts. Thus, as Indianness was articulated in the return to the past, in the restaging of old bonds in new contexts, Andean symbols and rituals acquired another signification that ran counter to the christianizing mission. Heretics and witches became the normalized forms in which the colonial panic encountered subaltern agency and knowledge produced in the functioning of colonial categories.

Emily Apter’s essay moves from the concept of return to the notion of parodic repetition to chart the displacement of colonial norms. This parodic repetition occurs in the writings and readings of Elissa Rhaïs’s novels as they invoke and reinvoke Orientalist stereotypes, thereby draining them of meanings that these are expected to articulate. Thus, the figure of the Oriental woman appears as a masquerade, as an identity staged before and for Western eyes. The real, as a result, is travestied as a colonial image-making split between fantasy and reality. Sketched here is an undoing of colonial realism that produced a collision of realisms, opening the possibility for the recognition of alternative agency and identity in the functioning of colonial categories.

Homi Bhabha brings together several of the volume’s principal concerns as he locates subaltern agency in the interstices of colonialism’s disciplinary knowledge and in the ambivalent functioning of its disciplines. He begins with Michel Foucault’s account of the rise of history and anthropology in The Order of Things which, Bhabha argues, reenacts the indeterminate and disturbing eruption of the colonies in the nineteenth-century emergence of disciplines. Bhabha then moves to the 1857 rebellion in India to locate a similar outbreak of subaltern agency that also seizes and shifts the terrain of disciplinary engagement. His purpose is to outline an agency that is not individualistic, deterministic, and homogeneous but partial, contingent, and ambivalent; not prior to and subsumed by the social but intersubjective and emergent as an effect of enactment and articulation. He outlines this form of agency in the indeterminacy of meaning unleashed by rumors about the circulation of chapatis (unleavened flat bread) during the rebellion. This indeterminacy not only caused panic in the colonizers but also circulated the contagion of ambivalence in the sensible, serial narrative of historians. As the Indian chapati’s symbolic meaning was turned inside out and became a sign of an English panic, there arose an agency in between the sahib and the sepoy, interposed between history and its repetition in fear and fantasy.

Once again, we are brought to a notion of an after colonialism, a reinscriptive colonial aftermath, which arises neither inside nor outside colonial norms but in the interstitial space cracked open by the uncertain process of their normalization. It is there that this collection of essays finds its place and explores another history.

NOTES

1. The argument here is analagous to that of Dipesh Chakrabarty, who writes that insofar as the academic discourse of history—that is, ‘history’ as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university—is concerned, ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the one we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on (Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts, Representations 37 [Winter 1992]: 1).

2. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navjivan, 1938).

3. Ibid., 30.

4. Ibid., 38.

5. Ibid., 105.

6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, with a foreword by Homi Bhabha (London and Sydney: Pluto, 1986), 113–14.

7. Homi Bhabha, foreword to Black Skin, White Masks, xii–xiii.

8. Confession, Conversion, and Reciprocity in Early Tagalog Colonial Society, in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 85.

9. On the narration of nation in the interstitial space of social and cultural difference, see Homi Bhabha, DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–322.

10. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

11. On this point, see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).

12. Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978); and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

13. See his Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, October 28 (1984): 125–33; Sly Civility, October 34 (1985): 71–80; and The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism, in Literature, Politics, and Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al. (London, 1986), 148–72.

14. See, for example, Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), particularly Ranajit Guha’s The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, 45–84; Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; and idem, Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

15. Some examples are: Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Ithaca Press and Humanities Press, 1973); Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture.

16. Tayib Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980).

17. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1988), 337.

18. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1981). See also Bhabha’s reading of the novel in his essay in this volume.

19. Gyan Prakash, Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India, Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 153–78. This essay was originally presented at the Davis Center seminar.

_________________________________ Part One _________________________________

COLONIALISM AND THE DISCIPLINES

_________________________________ CHAPTER 1 _________________________________

Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism

EDWARD SAID

FROM LONG BEFORE World War Two until the early 1970s, the main tradition of comparative-literature studies in Europe and the United States was heavily dominated by a style of scholarship that has now almost disappeared. The main feature of this older style was that it was scholarship principally, and not what we have come to call criticism. No one today is trained as were Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, two of the greatest German comparatists who found refuge in the United States as a result of fascism: this is as much a quantitative as a qualitative fact. Whereas today’s comparatist will present his or her qualifications in Romanticism between 1795 and 1830 in France, England, and Germany, yesterday’s comparatist was more likely, first, to have studied an earlier period; second, to have done a long apprenticeship with various philological and scholarly experts in various universities in various fields over many years; third, to have a secure grounding in all or most of the classical languages, the early European vernaculars, and their literatures. The early-twentieth-century comparatist was a philolog who, as Francis Fergusson put it in a review of Auerbach’s Mimesis, was so learned and had so much stamina as to make our most intransigent ‘scholars’—those who pretend with the straightest faces to scientific rigor and exhaustiveness—[appear to be] timid and relaxed.¹

Behind such scholars was an even longer tradition of humanistic learning that derived from that efflorescence of secular anthropology—which included a revolution in the philological disciplines—we associate with the late eighteenth century and with such figures as Vico, Herder, Rousseau, and the brothers Schlegel. And underlying their work was the belief that mankind formed a marvelous, almost symphonic whole whose progress and formations, again as a whole, could be studied exclusively as a concerted and secular historical experience, not as an exemplification of the divine. Because man has made history, there was a special hermeneutical way of studying history that differed in intent as well as method from the natural sciences. These great Enlightenment insights became widespread, and were accepted in Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and, subsequently, England.

It is not a vulgarization of history to remark that a major reason why such a view of human culture became current in Europe