Aufregend, aufregend, wenn man einem ‘Call for Papers’ – nee, in meinem Fall wohl eher einem ‘call for work in progress’ – zum ersten Mal folgt. Nachstehende Absätze sind jedenfalls heute Abend dort eingegangen. Aber ganz unabhängig davon, wie die Rückmeldung ausfällt [Nachtrag 9. April: positiv!], hab’ ich nun immerhin in knapp 300 Worten zumindest einen groben schriftlichen Einstieg in meine Magisterarbeit gefunden. [Wurde ja auch mal Zeit.]

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Resistance textualised: On the limits of postcolonial scholarship

If there is one allegation provoking continued discontent among scholars of postcolonial theory, it is Kwame Antony Appiah’s charge that ever since its establishment in the university system, its formation into a distinctive “academic genre” (Wehrs) has resulted in the formation of an academic comprador class self-absorbed in the maintenance of its own “definition industry” (Huggan).

Frank Schulze-Engler’s call for a “methodological cosmopolitanism”, formulated at last year’s GNEL/ASNEL conference, belongs to the recent attempts to contest this reputed complicity with late or global capitalism. Yet methodological or not – parallel to similar proposals, such fine theoretical adjustments ignore the importance of focusing analysis on the structural consequences of postcolonial theory’s translocation into academia – its double disciplinisation: Postcolonial theory’s integration into the university system is as much an assertion as it entails constraints on its critical power and discoursive reach. Thus, despite the consolidation of its own intellectual space, for Edward Said “the depressing truth is that its deterrent power has not been effective”.

A fundamental reason for this lack of outreach is, I am convinced, our discipline’s almost exclusive concern with the colonial past – more accurately: with the colonial past “only to the extent that […] much of the world still lives in the violent disruptions of its wake” (Young). Benita Parry is right to fault postcolonial scholars for providing only “retrospects on empire” which pass over current forms of oppression, domination and exploitation, or, if they do address them, concentrate on aestheticized, i.e. literary, assessments of the present. Both here and in future-oriented cosmopolitan projects, “filters of socio-scientific objectification” (Habermas) have been lamentably absent and resulted in an awkward, paradoxical ‘complicity-despite-resistance’.

To counter this, I argue for a postcolonial “history of the present” (Foucault) which translocates to and derives itself from disciplines more closely established around the gravitational centres of globalisation: decolonisation studies, the political sciences, and economics.