After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements Edited by Gyan Prakash

AFTER COLONIALISM Copyright 1995 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data After colonialism : imperial histories and postcolonial displacements / edited by Gyan Prakash. p. cm. — (Princeton studies in culture/power/history) Includes index. eISBN 1-4008-0636-4 1. Colonies—History. 2. Imperialism—History. I. Prakash, Gyan, 1952– . II. Series. JV105.A35 1994 325′.32—dc20 94-21310 CIP The following essays have been published previously in slightly different form: Homi K. Bhabha, “In a Spirit of Calm Violence,” as “By Bread Alone,” in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), reprinted with permission; Steven Feierman, “Africa in History: The End of Universal Narratives,” as “African History and World History,” in Africa and the Disciplines, ed. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved; J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience; A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Post- colonialism,’ and ‘Mestizaje,’” as “Colonialism and Post-Colonialism as (Latin) American Mirages,” Colonial Latin American Review 1, nos. 1–2 (1992): 3–23; and Edward Said, “Secular Intrepretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodology of Imperialism,” reprinted by permission from his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993), copyright 1993 by Edward W. Said. ThisbookhasbeencomposedinGalliard Contents Prefacevii Introduction:AfterColonialism3 Gyan Prakash PARTONE:COLONIALISMANDTHEDISCIPLINES Chapter 1. Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, andtheMethodologyofImperialism21 Edward Said Chapter2.AfricainHistory:TheEndofUniversalNarratives40 Steven Feierman Chapter3.Haiti,History,andtheGods66 Joan Dayan Chapter 4. Why Not Tourist Art? Significant Silences inNativeAmericanMuseumRepresentations98 Ruth B. Phillips PARTTWO:COLONIALISMANDCULTURAL DIFFERENCE Chapter 5. The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and theOriginsofNationalisminDiderotandHerder129 Anthony Pagden Chapter 6. Retribution and Remorse: The Interaction between the Administration and the Protestant Mission in Early ColonialFormosa153 Leonard Blussé Chapter 7. Coping with (Civil) Death: The Christian Convert’s RightsofPassageinColonialIndia183 Gauri Viswanathan Chapter 8. Exclusion and Solidarity: Labor Zionism and ArabWorkersinPalestine,1897–1929211 Zachary Lockman vi CONTENTS Chapter 9. The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of “Colonialism,” “Postcolonialism,” and “Mestizaje” 241 J. Jorge Klor de Alva PARTTHREE:COLONIALDISCOURSEANDITS DISPLACEMENTS Chapter 10. Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth-Century Peru 279 Irene Silverblatt Chapter 11. Ethnographic Travesties: Colonial Realism, French Feminism, and the Case of Elissa Rhaïs 299 Emily Apter Chapter12.InaSpiritofCalmViolence326 Homi K. Bhabha NotesontheContibutors345 Index347 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 va- riety 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 top- ics 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, anthro- pology, literature—and discussions often crossed disciplinary boundaries to explore issues of evidence, knowability, methods, and possibili- ties of other forms of knowledge and agency. This volume represents a selection from the two years of wide-rang- ing 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 depart- ment 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 con- vergences and differences in interpretations and methods, and offered viii PREFACE 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 fortu- nate 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 endur- ing 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 underdevel- oped. 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 re- pressed knowledges and subjects, the colonial categories were never instituted without their dislocation and transformation. The writ of ra- tionality and order was always overwritten by its denial in the colonies, the pieties of progress always violated irreverently in practice, the asser- tion of the universality of Western ideals always qualified drastically. Par- adoxes 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 transla- tion between incommensurable cultures and positions. The establish- ment 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 di- vide was reordered. Placed against the background of colonialism’s functioning as a form of relocation and renegotiation of oppositions and boundaries, the colo- 4 GYAN PRAKASH nial aftermath does not appear as a narrative framed by the hierarchical knowledges and subjects instituted by Western domination. There is an- other 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 metropol- itan culture speaks to the marginalized in the language

Load more