Colonial Becomes Postcolonial

Now about thirty years along, postcolonial scholarship has been startlingly successful at reorienting our approaches to a range of materials from the early modern period to the present day.¹ If such ways of thinking about literature, culture, and society—in spite of their obvious successes—have any liabilities, one is the implicit relation between the colonial and the postcolonial that attends the field. What should that relation be? Linearity? The colonial precedes the postcolonial in history only in the crudest sense, that the establishment of the former is a necessary condition of the latter. One critic has observed that the term postcolonial "is haunted by the very figure of linear 'development' that it sets out to dismantle. . . . [The term] re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/post-colonial."² This opposition says nothing of the possibility that the two terms overlap to a substantial degree, or that they are interdependent, or that from a certain point in the development of a colonial society they might be the same. Proximity? Perhaps we can imagine colonial and postcolonial conditions existing alongside one another, complementarily or contrapuntally, or the past succeeding the present in a feat of preposterousness. A Bolivian sociologist has written that the Aymara concept of nayrapacha, "past-as-future," signifies not the despair of an unending colonialism but a renovative insight: "a past capable of renewing the future, of reversing the lived situation: is not this aspiration currently shared by many indigenous movements everywhere that postulate the full validity of their ancestors' culture in the contemporary world?"³ Contradiction? Suppose that the post in postcolonial is a marker of opposition. A historian of modern India intends the prepositional prefix to mean both "against" and "after": "Criticism formed as an aftermath acknowledges that it inhabits the structures of Western domination that it seeks to undo."⁴ Identity? As I have suggested, we can also imagine a history in which the conceptual borders between colonial and postcolonial have come down, in which these categories actually come together as one. A historian of Latin America has remarked that the present there "seems not so much to replace the past as to superimpose itself on it."⁵

Perhaps we have learned from the first thirty years of postcolonial studies that we ought to be agnostic about such matters of definition. The present essay explores the question of how we might observe the colonial in the process of becoming the postcolonial: where the boundaries between these conditions are, what is at stake in their shading into each other, and what we can learn about each one from its outcome, its nearness, its opposite, or itself.

First, a statement of assumptions: I accept the premise that postcolonialism begins within colonialism. Political independence cannot mark the start of postcolonial thinking; it is only one of several imaginable thresholds, including discovery or encounter itself, that precipitate such thinking, which involves a thinking past the conditions of colonial society to consider how they might develop into something else under the pressure of still unrecorded events. This kind of thinking often takes place in colonial writings, especially where an empire is obliged to observe its contradictions, confront its limits, or address its critics. While most agents in a colonial scene remain impervious to postcolonial thinking, many of those who participate in such thinking are colonialists themselves, indispensable to or at least implicated in the apparatus of empire. The establishing gesture of such thinking is the enunciation of both an awareness of the colonial process and a reflection on it, a mode that is often constructional and critical at the same time. In the early Spanish empire in the Americas, the clerics Bartolomé de Las Casas and Vasco de Quiroga are among the figures who enact this gesture, leveraging Catholic doctrine, natural law, and humanist satire into astringent criticisms of colonial practice, contributing to the reconstruction of the empire on a different basis. Likewise many other colonial agents muster their criticisms when social changes put them transitorily on the outside of the enterprise: for instance, the reforms of the encomienda system and the...