Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (review)

Eight essays make up this probing book, which is born of an intellectual unease about the ways in which colonial histories have all too often been homogenized and reduced to a dualistic narrative of domination and oppression. Together, the essays deliver a compelling corrective, a hard-hitting appeal to historians, cultural analysts and literary critics working in the broad field of colonial and postcolonial studies to attend to historical specificities, to complicate and enhance our understanding of colonialism in the modern era and to be wary of one-size-fits-all abstractions such as alterity, identity, postmodernism and globalization. In their place, Cooper very persuasively calls for a historical practice that sensitively fosters a grasp of "the situations and conjunctures that enable and disable representations" (149).

In his introduction, Cooper cautions against ahistorical history, singling out four areas: the epochal fallacy, whereby complex historical phenomena are pressed into convenient straitjackets (modernity, postmodernity, for example); doing history backward, a process in which we anachronistically confuse analytical categories of the present with the "native" mindsets of the past; "story plucking," which allows us to hop from, say, the Americas in the sixteenth century to the colonial politics of the Third French Republic, as though imperial conditions were immutably fixed; and "leapfrogging legacies", a move which, in the case of Africa, conflates events in the 1920s and 1990s, with no reference to the progressive optimism of the 1950s.

Cooper's scepticism throws up a range of targets. For example, he takes issue, however sensitively, with the psychologizing version of colonialism to be found in Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, their approaches not equating to detailed social analysis. He argues that Fanon's apocalyptic discourse according to which "the last shall be first and the first last" does not amount to historical analysis per se. We might put a counter-argument, namely that Fanon's aim as a militant persuader was to work polemically rather than to dot the "i"s and cross the "t"s in any history of colonial rule. Yet the thrust of his prophecy connects with one of Cooper's own conclusions, namely that the power of empire, while self-evidently needing to be acknowledged and documented, was never monolithic. Although stressing that empire-making was fundamental to nineteenth-century European history, Cooper works assiduously to relativize and nuance our understanding of empire, reminding us that the imperial culture which modern Eurocentric scholarship tends to foreground (most prominently British and French colonization in Africa) outlived very old imperial polities such as the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottomans by barely three or four decades.

Cooper's demonstration of how political fissures within empire itself seriously undermined imperial rule is key to his argument: the highly informative case study provided in Chapter 7 of workerist contestation in French West Africa immediately after the Second World War shows how the discursive repackaging of empire (reflected in De Gaulle's talk in June 1946 of "assembling all the forces of la patrie and the French Union" and uniting "all the Empire and all of France" [153]) and the extension of citizens' rights that went with this were adeptly exploited by local labour leaders. Central to Cooper's thesis is that, whereas in 1946 the French were deploying a rhetoric of equality aimed at securing economic and social progress throughout la plus grande France and thereby countering talk of autonomy, a decade later it was precisely such autonomy that France, unable to sustain the economic cost of the new rights agenda, desperately sought to foster. In Cooper's formulation, the French government could not face "the burden of an empire of citizens" (228).

Cooper opposes forms of historical flattening that fail to engage with particular conjunctures: the translation of European history since the eighteenth century, for example, as a seamless post-Enlightenment era of rationality prompts Cooper to counter that nineteenth-century Europe, far from consistently embracing secular rationalism, saw an upsurge in spiritualism and new...