IMAGINATION AFTER postcoloniality

Resumen

Postcoloniality, in its most banal framing, emerges as the study of  objects in aformerly colonized place, an empiricist, historicist enterprise to which, symptomatically enough, the question of colonialism is more or less incidental – the objects are staged as studied after the fact, thus moving the question off the table. As Gayatri Spivak might suggest, such use of the term is catachrestic, an abuse of a metaphor. For postcoloniality’s charged, inciting interventions demonstrate that even objects that predate colonialism – or, better, eurocentrism – have been profoundly molded by it: Nicholas Dirks’s study   of  the transformation of  caste in British India as a consequence of  anthropology,    the census, and other institutions; or Lata Mani’s, of sati by British colonial patriarchy and evangelism. Door-opening in this regard, apart of course from Edward Said’s Orientalism, is Partha Chatterjee’s account, in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, of anti-colonial Indian nationalism. Chatterjee does not find it an autonomous, discrete, purely oppositional discourse, as it stages itself, but one articulated within the terms of, and so overdetermined by, another: such nationalism challenges European domination politically and otherwise; however, it does so, indeed can only do so, within a eurocentric epistemological frame. Ultimately, therefore, despite its oppositional stance, anticolonial nationalism reinforces eurocentrism. It begins a critique, but cannot finish or abide by  it – the latter being the charge, responsibility, burden of postcoloniality.