The Past in the Present: New Work in Postcolonial and Imperial Studies

There are many ways in which to measure the "success" of new modes of academic and intellectual inquiry in the humanities and the humanities-inflected social sciences. Institutional visibility might be the simplest and most pronounced evidence, as for instance when universities define their faculty appointments in terms that invoke a critical paradigm (say departments of English search for professors in postcolonial theory or studies). Polemical debates precipitated by the challenging questions posed, and answers provided, by the new approach in question are another way of registering revisionary critical energies: do established scholars in various fields feel the need to defend existing protocols, to recognize that normative ways of doing disciplinary work are being shown to be limited or even mistaken? Along the same lines, since so much of our understanding of a discipline is derived from a sense of the debates that exemplify its most lively intellectual energies, the power of new modes of inquiry might be gauged from the way in which they enable changes in the everyday practices of the discipline, or of subfields within disciplines (as when historians of eighteenth-century Great Britain recognize that the domestic economy, culture, and society of the nation cannot be studied in isolation from its commercial and colonial adventures overseas). Finally, perhaps the greatest measure of the power of any analytical mode is its incorporation into, or rather normalization as, the mainstream forms of academic practice—for example, when close reading is understood as the sine qua non of literary criticism.

Similarly, we can read evidence of the state of colonial and postcolonial studies in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices. Departments of literary studies—those that deal with the literatures of the modern European imperial nations—are now home to faculty whose work either directly considers the cultures of colonialism or engages with the foundational genealogy of contentious debates about the power of colonialism to craft the culture of both colonizers and those colonized. While departments of history have been much slower to encourage parallel methodological developments, there is no shortage of historians of early modern and modern empire, including those whose forms of postcolonial critique are typified by the work of the Subaltern Studies collective. While few departments of philosophy actively explore the connections between modern European philosophers and the ideological formations of empire, such work is often performed by students of comparative literature. In anthropology, critical anthropologists, especially those who have reflected upon the history of colonial ethnography, often define the intellectual issues at the core of their discipline. None of this has happened seamlessly, of course; the recent history of colonial and postcolonial studies is as contested as any, and its revisionary energies and ambitions have been, and continue to be, resisted both within and without the university.

From the moment of its advent in the academy as a set of historical concerns and theoretical meditations, most notably in the work of Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, colonial and postcolonial studies were internally contested fields in the making, constituted as much by debates within as by dialogues with other models of historical and cultural enquiry. As with other intellectual formations, such as feminism or cultural materialism, that originated in the critique of existent power relations, the political engagement and efficacy of postcolonial modes of thought became the subject of postcolonial critique. As is well known, postcolonial critics argued that the very temporality suggested by the term...