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    Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality
    Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality
    Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality
    Ebook398 pages8 hours

    Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality

    By David Scott

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    How can we best forge a theoretical practice that directly addresses the struggles of once-colonized countries, many of which face the collapse of both state and society in today's era of economic reform? David Scott argues that recent cultural theories aimed at "deconstructing" Western representations of the non-West have been successful to a point, but that changing realities in these countries require a new approach. In Refashioning Futures, he proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view in areas of the world where the very coherence of a secular-modern project can no longer be taken for granted.


    Through a series of linked essays on culture and politics in his native Jamaica and in Sri Lanka, the site of his long scholarly involvement, Scott examines the ways in which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized. The institutional procedures encoded in these modern postcolonial states and their legal systems come under scrutiny, as do our contemporary languages of the political. Scott demonstrates that modern concepts of political representation, community, rights, justice, obligation, and the common good do not apply universally and require reconsideration. His ultimate goal is to describe the modern colonial past in a way that enables us to appreciate more deeply the contours of our historical present and that enlarges the possibility of reshaping it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMar 8, 2022
    ISBN9781400823062
    Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality
    Author

    David Scott

    Professor David Scott, PhD, MA, Adv DipEd, BA, PGCE, is Professor of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, Institute of Education, University of London. Previously, he served as Acting Dean of Teaching and Learning, Acting Head of the Centre for Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Director of the International Institute for Education Leadership and Professor of Educational Leadership and Learning, University of Lincoln.

    Read more from David Scott

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    • 2/5
      I got rather conflicting feelings about this one.

      Story as usually starts great, but later on it almost ceases till the end, where something should-be-important but guess what it's not happens. What I'm trying to say is, the book has practically just the beginning, the end(kinda bad one), and almost nothing between (except for some bland filler) and this, more or less, plagues all of Winter Pennington's books.

      Another thing I truly dislike is that main protagonist had become cheap slut again (is it really so hard to embrace self-control a bit, try to say no and stay true to herself?). And again, rest of author's books have the same problem so probably I should've seen it coming.

      Overall I think author should stop putting so much sex into her work just for sake of sex and rather put more though into story, characters and other aspects that makes great book.

    Book preview

    Refashioning Futures - David Scott

    INTRODUCTION

    Criticism after Postcoloniality

    I honour the moment that I am trying to surpass. . . . I’m not afraid of positionalities. I am afraid of taking positionalities too seriously. (Stuart Hall, Politics, Contingency, Strategy)

    CRITICISM AND STRATEGY

    What is the demand of criticism in the postcolonial present? I mean this question in a double sense, in the sense of a double demand. On the one hand, what does our cognitive-political present demand of a practice of postcolonial criticism? And on the other, what ought postcolonial criticism’s demand on this present to be? Assuming, as I will, that the answers to these questions are not transparently self-evident and not adequately covered by the vocabularies of the cultural-political we currently inhabit, how do we begin to formulate responses to them? How, in other words, and with what conceptual resources, do we begin to extract a new yield, a new horizon of possibilities, from within the moral and epistemic contours of our postcolonial present? These are the questions that map the area of my preoccupation in this book.

    It seems unnecessary these days to belabor the point that criticism cannot operate in the manner of a General Hermeneutic, a Master Narrative, a View from Nowhere (or from Everywhere), the Panoptic of a Critical Theory. A number of critics, thinkers of varying disciplinary persuasions—among them, Zygmunt Bauman, Talal Asad, Reinhart Koselleck, John Gray, Partha Chatterjee, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stuart Hall, Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty, William Connolly, and Edward Said (to name only some of those whose work has been helpful to me in this book)—have all been reiterating this point in useful ways for a number of years.¹ In their variously conceived projects, these critics have been working with the antifoundationalist claim that the philosophical anthropologies that have sought to provide criticism with a Final Ground in relation to which its purposes are to be secured and its appeals guaranteed are in fact no more than local (European) stories backed up by the power to authorize what counts as truth and what does not. I take this historicizing and anthropologizing move to be important and endorse it insofar as it challenges the grandiosity of the Enlightenment project and the Europe made over in its normalizing image. I agree in general with the view that positions are to be read as contingent, histories as local, subjects as constructed, and knowledge as enmeshed in power. Indeed I take this move to constitute something of a new theoretical threshold—a new context of thought as such—in the sense that very little work is now needed to establish its claim and to demolish rival ones.

    However, it seems to me that the force of the antifoundationalist claim is considerably undermined (if not completely discredited) when it is taken to authorize a simple anti-essentialism according to which hitherto existing strategies of criticism are found out, admonished, and dismissed for their epistemological naïveté. Much of what goes under the name of postmodernism in contemporary cultural theory turns on this effort to demonstrate the essentialism of an adversary as though the assumption of an essence by itself were cognitively, morally, and politically unsupportable. Something very curious is at work here. In their zeal for their own version of epistemological purity, the anti-essentialists show themselves unable to put away or suppress their own desire for mastery, for certainty, for the command of an essential meaning. It were as though, as Stuart Hall has put it, if they go on thinking about Heidegger and Derrida long enough [they] will come to a moment when all will be transparent, and ... will hold.² In effect, then, what starts out being a welcome humbling of certain hegemonic regimes of Truth turns out to be little more than the adoption of an updated counter-design procedure, a counter-rationalism, a counter-claim to the right way for criticism to carry on. My own view is that if criticism cannot be understood as knowing omnisciently in advance of any cognitive-political contingency or historical conjuncture what demand it has to meet, what its tasks are supposed to be, what target ought to make a claim on its attention, and what questions ought to constitute its apparatus and animate its preoccupations, then its theoretical claim has to be a somewhat differently formulated one. And one way of reformulating the claim of criticism so as to answer the antifoundationalist critique of the Enlightenment without at the same time reinscribing a new rationalism is to understand criticism as a strategic practice. I am, of course, well aware that thinking of criticism in relation to a notion of strategy is not itself a novel proposition. But the view of this relation that I shall advance here is not the more familiar one of a strategic essentialism. On this view, simplifying somewhat, there are occasions of political conjuncture in which essentialisms are appropriate—indeed perhaps even required—and there are others in which they are not.³ I have a different view, and in what follows I spell out what I will want to mean by the relation between strategy and criticism in this book.

    R. G. Collingwood is helpful for what I am after here. Readers of Collingwood’s An Autobiography—the story of his thought, as he described it—will recall the central chapter in which he outlined what he called a logic of question and answer. This logic, Collingwood argued, was in fact nothing new; it really only restated a classical principle, namely:

    the principle that a body of knowledge consists not of propositions, statements, judgments, or whatever name logicians use in order to designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts is asserted: for knowledge means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but of these together with the questions they are meant to answer; and that a logic in which the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic.⁴

    On this view, then, to understand any proposition it is first necessary to identify the question to which the proposition may be regarded as an answer. And in consequence, as Collingwood goes on to argue,

    you cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant to be an answer.⁵

    As Collingwood elaborated it, this is an important principle for any practice of historical or philosophical (and I might add, anthropological) understanding. Contrary to the rationalist view (as prevalent among contemporary anti-essentialist postmodernists as among the essentialists they attack), you cannot simply read off the error of a proposition without the prior labor of reconstructing the question to which it aims to respond. This is because propositions are never answers to self-evident or perennial questions—for Collingwood there are no such things—and therefore you cannot assume in advance that you know the question in relation to which the text constitutes itself as an answer.

    Collingwood’s logic of question and answer has perhaps not received the attention it deserves.⁶ One thinker who has made much of it, however, is Quentin Skinner. It is from Collingwood, Skinner writes in the course of responding to a number of his own critics, that he has derived his most fundamental assumptions as an intellectual historian. This is the assumption that the history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently changed.⁷ Reading Collingwood through the language philosophy of J. L. Austin, Skinner argues that in order to understand a proposition, you have to understand it not merely in its internal logical status but as a move in an argument. You have, therefore, to grasp why it was put forward in the way that it was in the first place, and to do this you have to recapture the presuppositions and purposes that went into making it. I am claiming, Skinner says, that any act of communication always constitutes the taking up of some determinate position in relation to some pre-existing conversation or argument. It follows that, if we wish to understand what has been said, we shall have to be able to identify what exact position has been taken up. ... I have expressed this contention in terms of Austin’s claim that we need to be able to understand what the speaker or writer may have been doing in saying what was said. But it is I think a fascinating though unnoticed feature of Austin’s analysis that it can in turn be viewed as an exemplification of what Collingwood called the ‘logic of question and answer.’ ⁸

    It seems to me that this principle of question and answer (and especially Skinner’s formulation of it in terms of moves and positions in an argument) can profitably be extended to what I should like to call a strategic practice of criticism. Whereas in Collingwood’s and Skinner’s conception of it, this question/answer principle was to be applied to reading the past with a view perhaps to understanding the present, a strategic practice of criticism is concerned more with reading the present with a view to determining whether (and how) to continue with it in the future. By this I mean that a practice of strategic criticism is concerned with determining at any conjuncture what conceptual moves among the many available options will have the most purchase, the best yield. On this view, a critic has not only to be concerned with whether or not the statements that might be made are logically adequate answers to the questions that can be shown to underlie them (the burden of Collingwood’s preoccupation), but with whether or not these questions themselves continue, in the conjuncture at hand, to constitute questions worth having answers to. If, for Skinner, an existing proposition has to be understood as a move in an ongoing argument, I mean to urge that criticism must understand itself self-consciously as a practice of entering an historically constituted field of ongoing moral argument, of gauging that argument’s tenor, of calculating the stakes (what might stand and what might fall as a result of a particular move), of ascertaining the potential allies and possible adversaries, of determining the lines and play of forces (what might count and what might not as a possible intervention), and so on. This is the problem of strategy for criticism. A strategy, as Carl von Clausewitz argued in his discussion of war, is the use of engagements in a field of agonistic forces, in a field of conflict.⁹

    It is only by understanding criticism in this way that we can determine the contingent demand of—and on—criticism in any conjuncture. These conjunctures are in effect problem-spaces; that is to say, they are conceptual-ideological ensembles, discursive formations, or language games that are generative of objects, and therefore of questions. And these problem-spaces are necessarily historical inasmuch as they alter as their (epistemic-ideological) conditions of existence change. Thus although there may well be a logical complimentarity, a cognitive corelativity (in Collingwood’s sense), between question and answer, as the problem-space changes this complex as a whole may come to lack critical purchase. In other words, the problem-space in which a question has emerged as a question demanding an answer may have altered, thereby altering the critical (if not necessarily the logical) status of that question—leaving it recognizably coherent but largely academic. For what has happened in such an instance is that a new problem-space has emerged constituting a new set of demands on criticism.

    Part of my argument here is the Kuhnian one regarding the emergence and consolidation of a paradigm of normal science.¹⁰ These are problem-spaces in which the objects have all but become self-evident so that the questions through which they were called into being in the first place have faded from view. They are no longer simply available on the surface of the text. They are embedded precisely because they have become taken for granted. And what replaces a debate over appropriate questions is a debate over adequate answers to a question that is now, effectively, in the background. The problem-space has now, so to speak, reached a threshold. It has become a normal discursive-space; it has become normalized. The theoretical apparatus by means of which answers are generated is rapidly accepted and is simply applied without further thought given to the domain of questions that constitute the problem-space; so much so that once the game is known it is possible to anticipate in advance the moves that are to be made in an argument. This is clearly so, for instance, in the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate. Within this space new knowledge is produced, but it is only possible to go on producing knowledge that has assumed a regularity, a stable shape. This is where the problem of strategy becomes crucial. My point is that a strategic practice of criticism will ask whether the moment of normalization of a paradigm is not also the moment when it is necessary to reconstruct and reinterrogate the ground of questions themselves through which it was brought into being in the first place; to ask whether the critical yield of the normal problem-space continues to be what it was when it first emerged; and, if not, to ask what set of questions is emerging in the new problem-space that might reconfigure and so expand the conceptual terrain in which an object is located.

    Let us return to the anti-essentialists. For the anti-essentialists, as I suggested, criticism is a practice of demonstrating the epistemological naïveté of their adversaries. For them, for example, it is something like an epistemological law that cultures are not pure or homogeneous; that subjectivity is never outside the discursive practices that constitute it; that identities are never fixed or immutable; that the boundaries of communities are not given but constructed; and so on. Their adversaries—often an older generation of critics—who appear to hold contrary views, who attribute essences to culture, subjectivity, and so on, are summarily dismissed. The anti-essentialists, in other words, are not interested in what constellation of historically constituted demands may have produced the supposedly essentialist formulations. They are not interested in determining what the strategic task at hand was or what the epistemic and ideological material conditions were that formed the discursive context in which their moves were made and their positions taken. They are only interested in establishing their own epistemological superiority. In my view, the main problem with the anti-essentialists is that like all rationalists they read as though the questions to which answers are to be sought are perennial or canonical questions, as though the questions to which the essentialists they are criticizing were responding are necessarily the same as their own. In other words, the anti-essentialists fail to problematize the question/ answer field—the problem-space—as such in which their own preoccupations as a whole are inserted. As a result, they can always read off the error of their adversaries from the presents they themselves contingently inhabit. The anti-essentialists are historicists. But they historicize the answers, not the questions.

    Since it is no longer possible to endorse a single principle of political calculation and a single horizon toward which politics ought to lead— this was implicit in the radical no less than the liberal versions of the Enlightenment story of progress toward democracy and it is implicit in all versions of the political development narrative—the question of the cognitive-political resources of our various and variously interconnected moral traditions has to be rethought. Indeed, the concept of a tradition has to be crucial to such a rethinking of the political. In this book I am indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre’s way of conceiving it. For MacIntyre, a tradition is not taken in the sense of what was prior to modernity, what is untouched by reason, or what endures without conflict; these, he says, are the tediously familiar Enlightenment or Burkean uses that continue to animate moral-political discourse.¹¹ He wants us to understand a tradition in the far more productive sense of an historically extended, socially embodied argument, an argument which, as he says, is at least in part about what constitutes the goods that give point and purpose to that tradition. As such, a tradition cannot have a life without density, without conflict, without alteration, without intensity, and without instability. And criticism that explicitly locates itself within the terrain and thus the vocabulary of a tradition is criticism that enters into the moral space of such an argument simultaneously to contest/confirm it and reshape/retain it. Such a criticism, then, always has to be strategic, for it can never know in advance how and in relation to what ends its moves are to be undertaken. Moreover, note that I do not suggest that this moral space of a tradition is a homogeneous or transparently unitary one. I do suggest, however, that it is a coherent one in the sense that it is constituted through an always reshapable ensemble of stakes, concepts, practices, virtues, commitments, identities, desires, and aspirations.

    AFTER POSTCOLONIALITY

    The essays that comprise this book offer so many studies in the strategy of a postcolonial criticism at a certain historical-conceptual moment. Their labor is therefore self-consciously exploratory. They are seeking to gain a purchase on a global moment of considerable instability and uncertainty. It is a moment when hitherto established and authoritative conceptual paradigms and political projects (those defined in relation to Marxism and cultural nationalism, for instance, or various admixtures of nationalism and socialism, and so on) seem no longer adequate to the tasks of the present, and when, at the same time, new paradigms and projects have yet to assert themselves fully in the place of the old. These essays inhabit, in other words, a sort of Gramscian interregnum, a transitional moment that I shall characterize as after postcoloniality. In order to clarify what project such a criticism—after postcoloniality—takes up I need to sketch out, in the mode of the kind of strategic reading I have been advocating, something of the problem-space of two prior moments: postcoloniality itself and the anticoloniality it criticized. What was the implicit or explicit demand that each was formulated to meet? I shall foreground the analytic involved in a deliberately schematic way.

    In the late 1970s and 1980s—at a time when the new nations norm of political sovereignty established by the great anticolonial nationalist movements in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was beginning to unravel; when new forces of capitalist globalization were rearranging the local/global articulation and with it, the field of sovereignty; when Left anti-imperialist regimes were imploding; when the new international economic order of South solidarities was a rapidly retreating vision; when, in short, the liberationist Third Worldism of Bandung was in decline— a new field of cognitive-political discourse about colonialism emerged. Located geographically and institutionally in the North Atlantic academy (the United States and Britain, in particular) and driven most often by diasporic and exilic intellectuals of Third World origin, this field of theoretical discourse was concerned to reproblematize the understanding of colonialism formulated by the nationalist theorists (both liberals and Marxists) of the anticolonial struggle. Of especial concern to the new theoretical discourse was the dependence of the anticolonial nationalists on certain epistemological assumptions regarding culture, class, subjectivity, history, knowledge, and so on. This is the moment—and politicaltheoretical problem-space—of postcoloniality. And the text that played the most important part in opening it up and making it visible as a space of criticism was Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978.¹²

    The problem-space of the anticolonial project had, of course, been defined by the demand for political decolonization, the demand for the overthrow of colonial power. Its goal was the achievement of political sovereignty. In the anticolonial story, colonial power had been understood principally in the register of a social, economic, and political force blocking the path to freedom and self-determination of the colonized. The colonized had been dispossessed, materially and psychologically, and the task of the anticolonial project was the restoration of the colonized to full self-possession. In this understanding, the problem of the relationship between colonialism and knowledge consisted in the problem of the discrepancy between Europe’s (mis)representations and the reality of the colonized: the problem, in other words, of the inauthenticity of colonial knowledge. If colonial power had produced this representation/reality split (the well-known split of colonial alienation in which the colonized subject is divided from his/her authentic self, and the whole problem, derived from that split, of the national culture of the colonial intelligentsia),¹³ then the task of decolonization consisted in the demand of selfrepresentation, a process of restoring an authentic relationship between representation and reality. What the anticolonial moment demanded, therefore, was first and foremost a theory of politics, a theory of liberationist politics that would bring about this restoration. What was not theorized (or anyway, what remained undertheorized) in this space of anticoloniality—and this not because the anticolonial nationalists were simple-minded essentialists, but because it had not yet become visible as the question of moment—was the whole question of the decolonization of representation itself, the decolonization of the conceptual apparatus through which their political objectives were thought out.

    It is this register of the politics of colonialist representation that postcoloniality opened up in the late 1970s. The new question for postcoloniality turned not so much on the old idea of colonialism as a structure of material exploitation and profit (the question for anticoloniality) as on the idea of colonialism as a structure of organized authoritative knowledge (a formation, an archive) that operated discursively to produce effects of Truth about the colonized. Understood as a complex ensemble of knowledge/power, colonialist discourse constituted a will-to-truth about the colonized as part of the larger project of Europe’s will-to-mastery of the non-European world. Moreover, what counted as the Truth of the colonial space was authoritatively produced through regimes of representation— and through protocols of discursive formation—that cut across simple ideological lines such as liberal/Marxist. As a political-theoretical project, then, postcoloniality has been concerned principally with the decolonization of representation; the decolonization of the West’s theory of the non-West.¹⁴ Postcoloniality altered the question about colonialism and provided a new set of conceptual tools with which not merely to revive colonialism as a going problematic, but to reframe it in terms of the relation between colonial power and colonial knowledge. It thereby enabled a systematic reinterrogation of contemporary practices in terms of the extent to which (or the senses in which) they reproduced forms of knowledge that emerged as part of the apparatus of colonial power.

    In the almost twenty years since Orientalism was published, whole fields of canonical knowledge have been reopened for redescription through the protocols of the critique of colonialist discourse.¹⁵ Much of this work has been concerned with the thematization of the agency of the colonized, with writing back against colonialism, with the deconstruction of European cultural reason, and so on.¹⁶ It was this space of postcoloniality that many like myself, coming from various parts of the Third World, occupied as graduate students in the North Atlantic academy in the middle to late 1980s. Working in and through and across a number of disciplinary arrangements in the social sciences and the humanities—history, anthropology, literature, philosophy—we undertook to interrogate various aspects of the archive of colonialist discourse. My own earlier book, for example, Formations of Ritual, was worked out as a contribution to deepening and broadening this space.¹⁷ It sought in part to understand the relation between the contemporary anthropological description and analysis of religion and ritual in Sri Lanka and the nineteenth-century missionary discourse in which these practices first became visible to the West. The argument (one, it seems to me, still not sufficiently recognized) was that anthropological objects are not simply given in advance of anthropological projects, but are constructed in conceptual and ideological domains that themselves have histories—very often colonial histories. My point, therefore, was that unless anthropology attends in an ongoing and systematic way to the problem of the conceptual-ideological formation of the objects that constitute its discourse, it will not be able to avoid the reproduction of colonialist discourse.

    The cognitive-political space of postcoloniality, in other words, operated in relation to a certain demand of criticism: the demand for the decolonization of representation, the decolonization of the West’s theory of the non-West. This space of postcoloniality has profoundly altered our ways of thinking about colonialism. We now write about colonialism on the new threshold brought into being by the displacement of anticoloniality by postcoloniality. There is a real sense in which we now write in the wake of Edward Said. The point I want grasped here for the kind of strategic reading I am commending in this book is that there were at least two conditions that made possible the posing of this question of the politics of colonialist representation as a question in the first place: one was precisely the existence of the space enabled by the prior moment of anticoloniality in which the problem of the horizon of politics (i.e., nation-state sovereignty) had appeared resolved; the other was the emergence in the humanities and social sciences of practices of criticism (call them post-structuralist) concerned with the interrogation of representation as such. These latter made visible the persistence of the colonial in the heart of sovereignty (in the vocabulary of anticoloniality, these were theorized as neocolonialism and cultural imperialism) and enabled postcoloniality to problematize colonialism as a discursive formation enduring into the present.

    At the same time, however, this practice of criticism—like its affiliated practices in cultural criticism—operated through a certain suspension or deferral of the question of the political, a deferral of the question of the renewal of a theory of politics. Or, rather, postcoloniality operated by implicitly occupying the horizon of nationalist politics already defined by the anticolonial project. It is, in a sense, precisely this deferral of the question of the political that made possible a sustained interrogation of the internal structures of the cultural reason of colonialist knowledges. However, there is reason to doubt the contemporary efficacy of this strategy of criticism. This doubt is not about its internal cognitive coherence, but about, on the one hand, whether there is much more (in terms of the expansion of discursive space or the creation of new objects) that can be accomplished with it; and, on the other, whether the new global conditions (defined by the collapse of the Bandung project and, with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, of the international communist movement as well, and the rise of a revived/revised liberalism) do not urge us to rethink the target that this criticism was constructed to meet.

    This is what this book is about. With the collapse of the Bandung and socialist projects and with the new hegemony of a neoliberal globalization, it is no longer clear what overcoming Western power actually means. Moreover, with the weakening of the cognitive-political vocabularies of nation and socialism in which oppositional Third World futures were articulated, it is no longer clear how alternatives are to be thought, much less defended. In short, there is now a fundamental crisis in the Third World in which the very coherence of the secular-modern project— with its assurance of progressive social-economic development, with its dependence upon the organizational form of the nation-state, with its sense of the privilege of representative democracy and competitive elections, and so on—can no longer be taken for granted. This crisis ushers in a new problem-space and produces a new demand on postcolonial criticism.

    STUDIES/POSITIONS/ARGUMENTS

    While not constituting a monograph, the chapters—or studies, as I will call them—in this book nevertheless form an interconnected whole. Each of them can be read separately, to be sure, and in any order for that matter, but each of the book’s parts constitute a sort of thematic unity, and the three together work through the movement of what I hope is a coherent argument. Moving from a discussion of some of the rationalities that made up the colonial projects in Sri Lanka and Jamaica, through a consideration of some ways in which debates about the past have been deployed in nationalist discourses about collective identity in the present, to an interrogation of contemporary cultural-political predicaments, the studies are all centrally concerned with the problem of gaining a purchase on the postcolonial present we inhabit. Conceived in this way, the book aims to intervene in—so as to contribute in some way to altering—the existing configuration of the discursive space inhabited by postcolonial criticism.

    Part 1, Rationalities, consists of three studies. Each of these is concerned with the problem of how in the present to think colonial history critically. They are concerned with histories, in other words, of the postcolonial present. But part of the point I want to press here is that the critical demand that constitutes such presents in relation to which histories of the colonial are constructed ought not themselves to be taken as transparent or self-evident. Histories of the present, in other words, ought to be attentive not only to the shifting contours of the pasts they interrogate, but to the shifting contours of the presents they inhabit and from which they are being written. The argument of this book hangs, in fact, on what I take to be the altered character of the demand that a postcolonial criticism of the present makes on the construction of the colonial past.

    If the question that animated the nationalist/liberationist histories of the colonial turned on the question of the colonial attitude toward the colonized, or the extent of inclusion/exclusion practiced by colonial power, the question that animates the new demand is a different one, namely, what are the conceptual and institutional dimensions of our modernity? This question seeks to explore the new concepts—and the institutions based on these concepts—that colonial/Western power inscribed into the social terrain and to inquire into the nature of the transformations and reorganizations that were effected by this new form of power. Specifically, I want to urge that we seek to understand the colonial in such a way as to bring into focus the inscription of

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