The Postcolonial Past

When?

Historicism is the belief," says Maurice Mandelbaum, "that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within a process of development."¹ But, says Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe, when this belief was applied to "non-European peoples in the nineteenth century," it often amounted to a way of saying "not yet" to them (8). The "process of development" that had brought the colonizers to power was exclusively a European process, these peoples were told. It had a "unity" from which non-Europeans were excluded (6)—indefinitely, in practice. Today, Chakrabarty says, as we consider the situation of places such as "postcolonial India," we need to move away from the view that the present is connected to the past by "a ceaseless unfolding of unitary historical time" (15). Instead, we should see that "historical time is not integral, that it is out of joint with itself" (16). In this way, we can at least begin to (re)imagine a history that is "radically heterogeneous" (46). This special issue of MLQ is a forum for historical inquiry into the condition we now know as "postcoloniality," but it has not been assembled as an exercise in historicism, at least not of the kind that Mandelbaum means. It brings together scholars of several periods, reaching as far back as the classical period, each of whom has been asked to address questions such as: How has postcolonial studies influenced you in the work that you do in your period? What similarities and/or differences do you see between the colonialism that you study and, for instance, the colonialism of nineteenth-century India? Or between that colonialism and the postcolonialism of our own day? Is it at all meaningful, in other words, to speak of "the postcolonial past," and, if so, how?

In a certain sense, of course, these are historicist questions. One assumption that strongly informs this special issue is that colonialism, as a "phenomenon," is not unitary but diverse, a single word covering an array of historical situations. Another is that each of these situations can and should be considered "in terms of the place it occupied" in its historical setting. The scholars who appear in this issue take the specificity of the colonialism of their own periods as their starting point and then ask how it can be brought into relation with the more familiar conditions of the last century and a half. To an extent, then, these essays are framed by—though not constrained by—standard historicist imperatives. But the effect we hope for from a cumulative reading of them is not that of a narrative of "development." Historicism, as Chakrabarty says, has often implied a grand récit of "unitary historical time," whereas these essays together show that the history of colonialism is itself "radically heterogeneous," though not so heterogeneous as to prevent meaningful comparisons across and among the various colonialisms that can be subsumed into that history. This issue of MLQ is meant to open a discussion of, and to provide some first examples of, a postcolonial inquiry that is committed neither to telling an overarching story—a colonialist story, precisely—of a single, progressive "historical development" nor to splintering its story into incompatible temporal fragments. Rather, the postcolonial historiography that we think is implied by these essays, taken in the aggregate, is a comparative one. How, we have wanted to learn, in the complex coming together of "post" and "colonial," do the present and past inform one another?

It is worthwhile to raise such questions precisely because so much inquiry into the history of colonialism has been pursued in a spirit of historicism, though not always under that rubric. Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe has done something to bring the problems of historicism to the fore, but the...