Imperial Trauma: The Powerlessness of the Powerful: Part 3: Introduction: Further Trauma?

Introduction: Further Trauma?

With this third installment, "Imperial Trauma" concludes, but may not actually end. This symposium began by questioning the dominant paradigm in postcolonial studies, or at least two of the field's main assumptions. Many thousands of books, articles, and dissertations presuppose (1) that the only trauma of imperialism is the kind inflicted by a Western metropolis on a subaltern culture of the East or South and (2) that imperial power, though it should be resisted, is overwhelming. To test this model, Susan Stephens, for example, documented in these pages the humiliations that priests of Egypt inflicted on their Greek overlords. The Ptolemies could rule in Egypt only by permitting a militarily inferior nation to co-opt them culturally. Most articles in this symposium have made roughly parallel contributions, showing how the power of great empires can be a matter of deceptive advertising, successful public relations; and how, in the processes of conquest and governance, the agents of empire can be touched as traumatically as the peoples that they have conquered. An alternative means of testing the premises of postcolonial studies is to reach beyond the European empires that form the core subjects of the discipline. In this third installment of our symposium are articles on Chinese, Japanese, Mughal, Ottoman, and Arab imperialism. Studies of the pre-Columbian, ancient Near Eastern, and Mongol empires, among others, could profitably have appeared in this context. There is still much material to reassess.

Common Knowledge therefore extends a time-unlimited invitation to submit articles under the rubric of "Imperial Trauma." Essays on the topic may be published for as long as valuable contributions continue to arrive.

One good reason for continuing: we have not yet made the case, to everyone's satisfaction, that irenic scholarship and "feel-good history" (as Pankaj Mishra calls it) have nothing in common. Mishra has objected twice, during the course of this symposium, to a book of William Dalrymple's that Mishra sees as an example of feel-good historiography.¹ Dalrymple's statistics about intermarriage and love affairs between Britons and Mughals permit the British to feel better about their ancestors' intentions and attitudes in early modern India. I expect that a study of "white Mughals" undertaken by an Indian Muslim might have been received differently (and Mishra himself has written with a sympathetic insight into Kipling that members of English departments in the West might hesitate to express). The question is one of credentials: who may say what about the past in the context of whose suffering?

To anyone who shares Mishra's doubts, I would suggest reading Israel Yuval's demonstration of irenic historiography in this issue of Common Knowledge. Yuval is an Israeli and an avowed Zionist, but his paper identifies a foundational principle of Zionism—that the Romans exiled the Jews wholesale from the Land of Israel—as a myth. One can only hope, as Yuval says in concluding, that a Palestinian historian will respond in kind about foundational principles of Palestinian nationalism. If so, I imagine, neither historian will "feel good." (That each will feel threatened is more likely.) But each will have contributed, both professionally and as human beings, to rendering the humanities humane.