The Postcolonial Laura

Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) and the late medieval and early modern thinkers who follow on his heels create a rift in time that has marked the boundary between modernity and what is not so much another period of time as another quality of time: "The Middle Ages."¹ In creating this Middle Time as a temporal wilderness ripe for modernist colonization, Petrarch somehow manages to occupy at once all the possible spaces we might discover for colonial relations: he is at once colonizer and colonized, empire builder and rebellious native, crowned poet laureate and slave of Love. He is the paradoxical subaltern who speaks, and speaks, and speaks. Thus he is also no subaltern at all. Petrarch's received position as "the first modern scholar and man of letters" argues strongly that when modernity arrives, it is already postcolonial—and the modern European self that incarnates it is already fragmented and divided against itself along all-too-familiar lines of domination and subjugation—long before the great age of conquest begins.² Hybridity is the precondition, not the result, of colonization.

A growing body of excellent work has begun to explore how "postcolonialism" might work in times and eras outside those that have been at the center of most postcolonial study to date.³ Such efforts are extremely important, particularly because they deepen our understanding of the relations between colonizer and colonized and alert us to the multiple modalities and disguises that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful can assume. If there is neocolonialism, there is also paleocolonialism, and inquiries such as those undertaken in this special issue of MLQ and several related collections can only advance the ultimate reason for any academic study of inequities of power, whatever label we may give them: they may help liberate both colonizer and colonized from habits of mind that enslave them both.

My own interest in the "postcolonial past" comes from a somewhat different direction. As a medievalist, I am interested in how such habits of mind also infest our approaches to the medieval past. That is, I am interested in how habits of domination and exploitation (and attendant binaries) also inform our construction of a medieval past and, in particular, my own work as an academic medievalist. Those intellectual moves that create the Middle Ages as a period of time defined always in its relation to modernity are intimately bound up with those ideas that make modern European colonization not just doable but thinkable. In a previous study I advanced the idea of "temporal colonization," the colonization of one period of time by another—specifically, the colonization of the European Middle Ages by assorted European modernities (see n. 1). There are dangers, I acknowledge, in an approach that broadens "colonization" not just to earlier times but to time itself. The chief danger, as I see it, is that "diluting" terms such as colonial or postcolonial risks simply casting any inquiry and its object of study into a relation of colonial exploitation, whether we are looking at the Middle Ages, the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century, or fruit flies.

Nevertheless, I think that the risk is worth taking, for, starting in the fourteenth century, there is a remarkable coincidence of early European colonization in time and early European colonization in geography. An important key to understanding early modern colonialism and its aftermath lies, precisely, in those intellectual moves—especially in a particular massaging of history—that created the Middle Ages. Historical and geographic colonization are two sides of the same coin; we cannot understand one without understanding the other. As I suggested at the beginning, the key figure in this connection is Petrarch. As European conquerors deny the coevalness of the cultures they encounter, so, too, Petrarch's signal contribution is to deny his coevalness with himself. As Europeans declare that native history somehow "stops" with their arrival on the scene, so that true history can begin, so, too, early modern European thinkers following...