- The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory
In recent years, the Enlightenment—that bastion of unabashed, celebratory European exceptionalism—has been given a makeover. Postcolonial critics, long content to casually condemn the Enlightenment, can now be counted among the architects of its reinvention. Books such as David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Wither’s Geography and Enlightenment, Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment against Empire, Pamela Cheek’s Sexual Antipodes, Nick Nesbitt’s Universal Emancipation, and Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History are at the forefront of this Enlightenment redux.1 They have begun to recover the Enlightenment, both as an age of widespread anticolonial critique (the strength of which, many of these scholars argue, was not seen again until the twentieth century) and as a period, movement, and project particularly ripe for the application of postcolonial methodologies of critique. Postcolonial Enlightenment embraces these ends and expands on them by asking not only what postcolonial theory can do for the Enlightenment but also what the Enlightenment can do for postcolonial theory. The book envisions a productive dialogue between eighteenth-century studies and postcolonial theory and imagines the Enlightenment as promising grounds for such an encounter. And, to a large extent, it is. The book’s eight essays thoroughly pursue the joint ends laid out by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa in their introduction: “to determine the usefulness of postcolonial theory for reading the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century, and to explore the insights that alternative views of the historical and philosophical phenomenon of Enlightenment may offer to postcolonial theory” (3).
The former aim first and foremost translates into a reorientation of the Enlightenment as a field of study. Apart from the book’s first section, “Subjects and Sovereignty,” the essays veer decidedly away from the period’s major philosophical texts in favor of a cultural studies approach. The Enlightenment registers less as a philosophical movement than as ground zero for modern European imperialism. Some essays, such as those by Srinivas Aravamudan and Siraj Ahmed, focus explicitly on early imperial ventures—here the Virginia and Bermuda companies and the East India Company, respectively. Even though most of the other essays forego such detailed excursions into imperial history, they nonetheless assume empire building as the historical backdrop for their analyses. Additionally, more than half the essays focus on questions of race and human classification. The emphasis on race and empire reflects recent trends in eighteenth-century scholarship and, in doing so, the extent to which postcolonial theory has shaped eighteenth-century studies in the past two decades.
Several answers are also provided for the second question, what can the Enlightenment do for postcolonial studies? One plea that runs throughout the book is for postcolonial theorists to simply stop ignoring the eighteenth century (in general) and the Enlightenment (in particular). “The role of the Enlightenment,” Carey and Festa write, “has been surprisingly neglected” in postcolonial theory. When mentioned at all by postcolonial theorists, the Enlightenment has been subject to “ad hoc” critiques, “with haphazard attention to the diversity of texts and contexts that shaped the period and its thought” (2). Carey and Festa thus request not only the attention of postcolonial theorists but also a historical rigor often absent from postcolonial engagements with the eighteenth century. In this vein, they later describe Dipesh Chakrabarty and Amitav Ghosh’s correspondence on Provincializing Europe as “reminding us not to put the theoretical cart before the historical horse” (13). This cautionary reminder gestures toward the book’s most salient critiques of postcolonial theory. First, forged through a simultaneous engagement with the decolonizing/postcolonial present and with nineteenth-century imperialism, postcolonial theory makes claims that are not always applicable to other [End Page 658] periods. As Carey and Festa rightly protest, “At times concepts drawn from postcolonial theory are parachuted into analyses of eighteenth-century texts without sufficient recognition of the perils of anachronism” (23). Second—and nobody can say they weren’t warned about this one—postcolonial theory consists largely of...