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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [3], (3) Lines: 12 to 27 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [3], (3) woodruff d. smith Colonialism and the Culture of Respectability In recent years a new generation of scholars has taken up the subject of German colonialism. Their work has been distinguished by the adoption of a varietyofnovelinterpretiveapproachesandresearchdirections .Thecontributions to this volume testify to the sophistication and vigor of their work, which is heavily influenced by the methods and aims of poststructuralist criticism, by cultural analysis, and by gender and postcolonial studies. A large proportion of the people currently doing German colonial history (indeed, a large proportion of the people doing colonial history in general) are not, formally at least, historians at all, but rather scholars in the various fields that make up culture studies. They have particularly emphasized the importance in historical explanation of constructed understandings, imaginings, and fantasies. This is all to the good. It is particularly appropriate for comprehending modern imperialism, and perhaps especially German imperialism, because it allows us to get at the constructed, imagined character of that phenomenon in a way that older approaches were never really able to do. Nevertheless, there seems to be a reluctance in recent work on German colonialism to apply cultural , linguistic, and gender criticism as radically as might be desirable. New directions are taken and new insights are revealed with regard to the specifics of particular events or situations – the roles, for example, of colonialist women and biological scientists in the development of a racialist ideology in the German colonies, which Lora Wildenthal and Pascal Grosse have explicated brilliantly .1 But there seems to be less willingness to challenge, or at least to interrogate , the framing concepts within which nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism has been explained for the last few decades. By this I do not mean that one should aim at eliminating all framing concepts through deconstruction , as some poststructuralist critics of historicism have suggested. Rather, it is desirable to be more critical of the ones to which we regularly refer as the backdrops or contexts of our interpretations. Two sets of such conventional concepts in need of criticism and alternatives stand out. One is the “master narrative” of history since the sixteenth 3 smith 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [4], (4) Lines: 27 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [4], (4) century as the story of socioeconomic modernization, with industrialization as the leading character, which privileges certain sets of changes as the core of causation and presumes that others (changes in colonialism, for example) are primarily to be explained as products of the core. The modernization narrative has come under close scrutiny in recent years, but it still tends to be assumed fairly uncritically by many people studying colonialism from a cultural-studies standpoint.2 The second framing concept, often presented as a subnarrative of the first, is the story of the development of the bourgeoisie, bourgeois society and culture, and bourgeois liberalism as products of and concomitants to modernization. Here as well, the ambiguities that have always made this subnarrative problematical have been discussed very forcefully in recent years, but it, too, still informs the background to many cultural studies of imperialism.3 It is not that these framing concepts are wrong. It is rather that they are incomplete , that they were created in order to answer questions that were rather different from the ones many scholars are asking today and, most important, that they contain within themselves presumptions about what is significant and what is not, about what causes what, that are simply that: presumptions. We need to construct alternative framing concepts, at the very least in order to elicit convincing defenses of the conventional ones and perhaps also to develop a more satisfactory understanding of the past. It seems to me that the study of modern imperialism would be an excellent workshop in which to create such alternatives.4 I have recently been working in another, although not distant, field. In this essay I present – in the barest of outlines – an alternative framing concept...

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