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  • Predicting the Past
  • Deepika Bahri (bio)

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.

"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

As a point of departure, I take as axiomatic Barbara Fuchs and David J. Baker's injunction "to place postcolonial studies in relation to" its others. These others may be spatially or temporally so, although the prefix post vectors such a reassessment toward the temporal, while spatial others have often been plotted on a temporal graph. It is time, in other words, to look at postcolonial times and the "hybrid temporalities" of colonialism. But even if we accept the proposition that "if there is neocolonialism, there is also paleocolonialism," as John Dagenais submits, the problem is that we do not know where to begin with our reckoning of the past. Begin one must, but where? Not, as it turns out, at the beginning, but right where one is at the moment. Thus we generate our own "histories of the present." We all have stories about the past, stories that let us live not so much with the past as with ourselves in the present. So which stories did postcolonial studies choose, and why? Or indeed, which stories chose postcolonialism?

As various critics have noticed, the quintessentially hybrid, the exiled, the dislocated and multilocated—that is, the "postcolonials" of metropolitan definition—have stepped nimbly into the breaches and flows of the new economic and cultural order, occasioning and creating a theory often perceived as the discursive expression of what Guillermo Gómez-Peña, in a semiludic gesture, has dubbed the "new world border."1 [End Page 481] Indeed, one might go further. Postcolonialism might even be thought of as the discursive order of the new world disorder being orchestrated by new economic and financial regimes. In fact, Arif Dirlik suggests, "postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism."2 I will pause here because Dirlik's observations are exemplary in what they reveal about postcolonial studies in the First World academy. Although Dirlik chooses to confuse the messengers with their message—"the postcolonial theorist as a component of postcolonial theory," as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan puts it3 —although he insists on taking the question "When does the postcolonial begin?" to mean who started it, as Fuchs and Baker note in their introduction, although he selectively isolates a highly visible starring part of the field as representative of the whole field, although he ungenerously singles out South Asian critics for their intellectual opportunism, although he is thus willfully blind to the role of critics from Canada and Australia in the rise of postcolonial studies, although he romanticizes the Third World as a repository of ideological diversity, he nevertheless puts his finger on several crucial and disturbing characteristics of the dominant strain in postcolonial studies: to wit, its presentism, its deliberate crafting in the crucible of First World academic needs, and its constitution by what it cannot or often does not directly name: global capitalism. Among other posts, the term postcolonial too betrays our struggle to move away into the future while remaining pegged to the post of the present. The tragedy of this tethered movement is pithily captured in Seamus Heaney's poem "On His Work in the English Tongue":

Post-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the end Not past a thing. Not understanding or telling Or forgiveness.4

The temporal orbit of this movement is the endless day of modernity, which Fuchs and Baker note is at the center of postcolonial inquiry. We might examine the etymological development of the term modern and observe that it is related to modo, just now, and formed on the analogy [End Page 482] of hodie, today. Those who argue for an inclusion of the United States in the colonial experience, or for a backdating of colonialism, do so within a framework of early modernity, early today, in other words. With trademark trenchancy, Dirlik argues in "The Past as Legacy and Project" that the past is "a plaything at...

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