A postcolonial model is ironically extremely Eurocentric, with a total blindness to what came before Europeans.
This varies, of course, with the postcolonialist in question, but I wouldn’t characterize it as ironic. The modern world arose as a result of a particular (Western) imperial/colonial long event—or at least it did if postcolonialists are anything close to correct—and people living in global south are just as much the inheritors of that legacy as those living in the north. So postcolonialism certainly does take a modern perspective, not those of imperial Malinese bureaucrats, Nahua mercenaries, or for that matter Carolingian knights. But it doesn’t pretend to, any more than characteristically “northern” ideologies like liberalism do.
I have to run to class, but I can expand on this later if it’s at all unclear (which self-calibrating has taught me my writing is oftentimes.)
Expand, please. Assuming the modern world stems from a colonial long event, why would that imply that “a total blindness to what came before Europeans” is only to be expected? Or, say (if we tone down the hyperbole a little) a large degree of blindness.
A large degree of blindness is a better way to phrase things, certainly.
At the risk of tautology, post-colonialism isn’t centrally concerned with pre-colonialism, because, well, it’s post-colonialism, not pre-colonialism. It’s concerned with a very particular world, our modern world, and the interlocking parts within it.
Now, what I think Konqvistador (heh) meant—although I could of course be wrong—is that post-colonialists are always going around denouncing Europe and never the Celestial Empire or Four Regions or Triple Alliance or what have you, which were not so different than Europe in its heyday, after all, and that this reflects an obsession with Europe that belies their claims to draw attention to the colonized and their accusations that Europe sees itself as unique. This would be a mistake, but a very understandable one, because some of the implicit assumptions that postcolonialism sees itself as challenging is the idea that there are more or less independent, coherent nations stretching through history and which are in a process of, albeit at unequal rates conditioned by their internal characteristics and contact with more advanced nations, acquiring progressively greater degrees of modernity. (Like Sid Meier’s Civilization, you might say.) If something like this forms your basic model and you don’t read post-colonialists carefully (who has time to read everyone carefully?) it looks like they’re complaining about Europeans doing what everyone else has been since the dawn of agriculture, just sucking less at it.
But in fact they’re operating from a very different set of assumptions. Modernity, in this view, consists of incorporation into a (the) capitalist world-system, something that in some respects is much like the tributary empires of the past and in other respects quite different. It has its own organic logic to it, in need of differentiated parts fulfilling distinct tasks; it moves people, goods, and money around at rapid speed to create them; it fundamentally reconstitutes what goes into it. So what it means to say that the modern world arose from a colonial long event is that we’re all colonialism’s children, some much more favored than others, not that one of our dads beat the others’ up. If you like, you can say that “ironically” postcolonialism says we’re all Europeans now, in that a set of relations that first and primarily encompassed Europe now encompasses the globe, but of course this isn’t actually ironic, just an example of semantic Dutch Booking.
What you said before wasn’t unclear, by the way; I just wanted to hear more. You went in a somewhat different direction than I expected, so I’m glad I asked.
This varies, of course, with the postcolonialist in question, but I wouldn’t characterize it as ironic. The modern world arose as a result of a particular (Western) imperial/colonial long event—or at least it did if postcolonialists are anything close to correct—and people living in global south are just as much the inheritors of that legacy as those living in the north. So postcolonialism certainly does take a modern perspective, not those of imperial Malinese bureaucrats, Nahua mercenaries, or for that matter Carolingian knights. But it doesn’t pretend to, any more than characteristically “northern” ideologies like liberalism do.
I have to run to class, but I can expand on this later if it’s at all unclear (which self-calibrating has taught me my writing is oftentimes.)
Expand, please. Assuming the modern world stems from a colonial long event, why would that imply that “a total blindness to what came before Europeans” is only to be expected? Or, say (if we tone down the hyperbole a little) a large degree of blindness.
A large degree of blindness is a better way to phrase things, certainly.
At the risk of tautology, post-colonialism isn’t centrally concerned with pre-colonialism, because, well, it’s post-colonialism, not pre-colonialism. It’s concerned with a very particular world, our modern world, and the interlocking parts within it.
Now, what I think Konqvistador (heh) meant—although I could of course be wrong—is that post-colonialists are always going around denouncing Europe and never the Celestial Empire or Four Regions or Triple Alliance or what have you, which were not so different than Europe in its heyday, after all, and that this reflects an obsession with Europe that belies their claims to draw attention to the colonized and their accusations that Europe sees itself as unique. This would be a mistake, but a very understandable one, because some of the implicit assumptions that postcolonialism sees itself as challenging is the idea that there are more or less independent, coherent nations stretching through history and which are in a process of, albeit at unequal rates conditioned by their internal characteristics and contact with more advanced nations, acquiring progressively greater degrees of modernity. (Like Sid Meier’s Civilization, you might say.) If something like this forms your basic model and you don’t read post-colonialists carefully (who has time to read everyone carefully?) it looks like they’re complaining about Europeans doing what everyone else has been since the dawn of agriculture, just sucking less at it.
But in fact they’re operating from a very different set of assumptions. Modernity, in this view, consists of incorporation into a (the) capitalist world-system, something that in some respects is much like the tributary empires of the past and in other respects quite different. It has its own organic logic to it, in need of differentiated parts fulfilling distinct tasks; it moves people, goods, and money around at rapid speed to create them; it fundamentally reconstitutes what goes into it. So what it means to say that the modern world arose from a colonial long event is that we’re all colonialism’s children, some much more favored than others, not that one of our dads beat the others’ up. If you like, you can say that “ironically” postcolonialism says we’re all Europeans now, in that a set of relations that first and primarily encompassed Europe now encompasses the globe, but of course this isn’t actually ironic, just an example of semantic Dutch Booking.
What you said before wasn’t unclear, by the way; I just wanted to hear more. You went in a somewhat different direction than I expected, so I’m glad I asked.