Virtual Roundtable Reflections on Memory, Empire, and Nation

Ab Imperio, 1/2004 89 Andreas LANGENOHL In my comments on the questions raised by the editors, I would like to concentrate on a categorical decision underlying this set of questions that seems to be of crucial importance: the distinction between “national” and “imperial” memory. In particular, I intend to critique the assumption that imperial memory or historiography can really be an alternative to national modes of representing the past. Also I shall include into these considerations some remarks on the important question concerning the relationship between post-imperial historiography and collective memory. Thinking about empire and its relation to representing the past or as being represented as past, one must not neglect postcolonial literary and historical criticism that formed in reaction to attempts in the former colonies turned nation-states to come up with national histories as legitimating narratives for the new national-collective subject 90 Заочный круглый стол / Virtual Roundtable and its political elites.1 As I shall argue, postcolonial criticism, although its principles cannot be fully applied to the successor states of the Soviet Union, highlights some fundamental issues in connection with memory in post-imperial spaces. With India and other former colonies of the British Empire becoming independent states since the 1940’s, the education and research institutions of these new nation-states attempted to develop national histories that would fulfil the function historiography has played in the European nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries: to represent the past as a teleological development toward a final product, the nation-state.2 This project was set out to serve the former colonies in achieving full sovereignty also on a cultural level; and it is this attempt at formation of a homogenous national-collective identity via representations of the past that postcolonial criticism is aiming at, which is why it cannot be neglected in the present discussion. Some examples of this debate must suffice here. Since the late 1970’s, the so-called “Subaltern Studies Group” which consisted of Indian and British historians has been arguing that post-independence Indian historywriting , in its attempt to set itself off from imperial British historiography, none the less reproduces on a categorical level the same fallacies that had characterised the latter. In particular, this concerned the methodical focus on the history of elites and the attempt to reconstruct Indian history as history of the Indian nation. Ranajit Guha, who can be regarded as the spokesman of this group at that time, holds that Indian history instead challenges the notion of the nation: “It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution – it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.”3 The task that Indian society and history confronts social scientists with is to 1 Cf. for an overview Helen Tiffin and IanAdams (Eds.). Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Calgary, 1990; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley (Eds.). Postcolonial Criticism. London, New York, 1997; David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Eds.). Relocating Postcolonialism. Oxford et al., 2002 2 Partha Chatterjee. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, 1993. 3 Ranajit Guha. On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India // Vinayak Chaturvedi (Ed.). Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London & New York, 2000. P. 6. Ab Imperio, 1/2004 91 “recognize the contradictions within indigenous reality rather than merely deploying that reality against Western categories”.4 From a postcolonialist point of view, therefore, it appears as utterly misleading to contrast national with imperial representations of the past. Due to this critique, the imperial impact on the colonies perpetuates itself into the postcolonial period precisely through categories like “national idea” or “national independence” that were set out to delineate the final emancipation from imperial tutelage in the first place. National framings of the past, be it in historiography, symbolic policy or public debate, cannot simply be regarded as expressions of the will to emancipate oneself from imperial domination...