Abstract
Postcolonial studies have often based their critiques of colonialism on critiques of modernity. As a result, they tend to limit their purview to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Postcolonial Moves challenges these conventional limits by questioning prevailing assumptions about periodization. We take inspiration in our own critique of modernity’s role in postcolonial studies from R. Radhakrishan’s “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World.” For Radhakrishan, postmodern studies disavow their links to the modern in order to avoid grappling with the enduring effects of colonial histories.1 Similarly, postcolonial studies claim distance from premodern histories so as to deny the relevance of premodern dynamics of conquest and settlement to subsequent expansionist projects. Indeed, postcolonial critics question the very existence of colonialism in the absence of modernity. We argue here for a reconceptualization of colonial temporality such that postcolonial studies can enter into new kinds of historical dialogue.
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Notes
R. Radhakrishan, “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World,” in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Kahn and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 37–70, at 44.
This could be said of much of the body of Freud’s work, but see especially, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1950).
On the links between categories of “the primitive” and Freud’s “id,” see Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
On the ways in which the body in pain grounds—makes material—belief in cultural abstractions, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), 117ff.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139–70, citation at 254;
David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17;
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (London: Routledge, 1995);
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1983);
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. See also
Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literatures, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–66, especially 51.
Sara Suleri, “Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Post-Colonial Condition,” Critical Inquiry 18, (1992): 756–69, at 759.
Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-)Colonialism?” Textual Practice, 5 (1991): 399–414, at 408, 412.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London:Verso, 1983), 136.
Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 11, 17, 170.
For example Jacqueline Kaye, “Islamic Imperialism and the Creation of Some Ideas of ‘Europe,’” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 1: 59–71.
Deepika Bahri, “Coming to Terms with the ‘Postcolonial,’” in Between the Lines: South Asians and Post-Coloniality, ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 137–64, at 140–1.
Bill Ashcroft, “The Rhizome of Post-Colonial Discourse,” in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Essex: Longman, 1999), 111–25, at 114.
David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA, 116 (2001): 111–28, at 112–13.
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:Verso, 1997), 57–61.
Vilashini Cooppan, “W(h)ither Post-colonial Studies? Towards the Transnational Study of Race and Nation,” in Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, ed. Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 1–35, at 34–5.
Cited in summary in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial MiddleAges (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 1–17, at 17: n. 25.
For example Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence africaine, 1955);
The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
V. Bada, “Cross-Cultural Dialogues with Greek Classics: Walcott’s ‘The Odyssey’ and Soyinka’s ‘The Bacchae of Euripides,’” Ariel, 31.3 (2000): 7–28.
Brian Stock, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History, 5 (1973–74): 527–47, at 543.
Kathleen Biddick, “Coming out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 35–52; Michael Bernard-Donals, “The Manichean Problem in Post-Colonial Criticism: Or, Why the Subaltern Cannot Speak,” in Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies, ed. David Metzger (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 41–63;
Kathleen Davis, “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 105–22; Bruce Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum, 77 (2002): 1195–227.
Fradenburg and Freccero, “Pleasures of History,” in Premodern Sexualities (NewYork: Routledge, 1996), xvii–xviii.
See also David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of the Early Modernists,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–202.
Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1999);
Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998);
Imtiaz H. Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000);
Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Spenser’s Faeryland and ‘The Curious Genealogy of India,’” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 177–92.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 336–57, at 336.
For the standard view on the question of Welsh “discovery” of America, see Richard Deacon, Madoc and the Discovery of America (NewYork: G. Braziller, 1967).
Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” 1–6; Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999); Ashcroft, “The Rhizome,” 117–18.
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© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
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Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (2003). Introduction: Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_1
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