Rethinking a Problematic Constellation: Postcolonialism and its Germanic Contexts (Pramoedya Ananta Toer/Multatuli)

It often has been remarked that the field of postcolonial studies has been dominated by scholars whose home base is in English literary history,¹ and that this situation is undesirable. A focus on other, non-British colonialisms, so the argument goes, is needed. But why? Such a focus could be productive for an understanding of the history and contemporary socio-political dynamics of parts of the postcolonial world outside of the Commonwealth and, to some extent, also of the former colonial powers that once dominated them. From a global perspective, for example, relatively little is known about the history and culture of Indonesia, particularly if one compares it with, for instance, its "bigger brother" India. This has no doubt something to do with the fact that English never played a very prominent role in Indonesia or the Dutch Indies. The desire to rectify such an imbalance should in itself legitimate a call for a broader focus for postcolonial studies. But there are other good reasons for introducing a comparative component. In the colonial era, a critical attitude toward a competing power often helped legitimate a national colonial policy. There may be something disingenuous about this "critique" of colonialism; it may not always be very informed, it may be dominated by nationalistic or racist concerns, but at times it may also refer to existing abusive practices. If this is the case, such a critique is useful for those interested in a critique of the historical practices of colonialism in all its shapes. But the phenomenon of competing colonial powers allows for yet another form of criticism. A colonial power may censor its own citizens in their criticism of colonial practice, but it also may allow the circulation of writings criticizing the colonial policies of another, competing power. In fact, this may have been the reason for the international popularity of one of the texts that I will discuss, the novel Max Havelaar by the nineteenth-century Dutch realist Multatuli.

In addition to its focus on the Commonwealth, there is another problematic aspect of postcolonial studies that is also widely acknowledged by its practitioners, but at the same time has remained to a large extent unresolved. It has been said that postcoloniality is the construction of "a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery."² Is that really so, or do we, as Western intellectuals, simply privilege the literature of those who, at least to some extent, are familiar with metropolitan societies themselves, because we think that any other type of literature is too sentimental, too primitive in its ideological alliances, or, in other words, not good literature? And if there exists another postcolonial literature, not written in English or primarily oriented toward Western standards, how can such a literature contribute to a more complex understanding of the postcolonial condition or even to a rethinking of some of postcolonial theory's basic assumptions?

The following essay attempts to deal in a productive way with the challenges posed by the two self-critiques mentioned above, both of which are articulated within contemporary postcolonial studies, and seeks to develop alternative strategies. I will make the argument that there are indeed good reasons to look at the Germanic contexts of colonial and postcolonial literature. There certainly seems to be a need for such research. In postcolonial studies, there has been a call for the "provincialization" of Europe.³ In the first place, such a call refers to the attempt to break with the explicit or implicit Eurocentric focus of postcolonial research. But that is not necessarily its only programmatic consequence. It can be argued that a provincializing of Europe is only possible if we are aware of the homogenizing function of a Eurocentric perspective and pay more attention to differences existing within Europe. Understood in either sense, however, the concomitant agenda is not entirely unproblematic. A call for more awareness of the local and temporal particularities of colonial thinking should not be used, for instance, to exempt some European nations from Europe...