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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 102 receded into the past, Scott wonders, what is the political utility of producing more stories of colonialism that focus on overcoming and emancipation? He argues that the emancipatory hopes of a superseded anticolonalism are no longer adequate to illuminate the political impasses of our postcolonial predicament. Scott therefore calls on scholars to confront the disjuncture between the outmoded histories we continue to write, the altered problem space in which we live, and the postrevolu- tionary futures that we can now realistically anticipate. By developing these issues through an insightful reading of The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’s great histori- cal epic of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Scott establishes the Caribbean as the paradigmatic space of colonial modernity.1 This radical challenge to postcolonial studies by one of the field’s most influen- tial practitioners demands our attention, not least because of its incisive formula- tion and far-reaching analytic implications. It also resonates with other calls by important critics to revise the stories we tell about anticolonialism.2 Thinking along with Scott, however, I would like to suggest that it is possible to accept his critique of revolutionary anticolonialism without concluding, as he does, that all stories of colonial emancipation must be replaced with stories of impossible alter- natives and tragic dilemmas. Scott persuasively argues that traditional dreams of total revolution, politi- cal emancipation, and national sovereignty are ineffective antidotes to a form of power that can only be negotiated, and not overcome through acts of autono- mous agency and heroic resistance. This perspective leads him to gather together these distinct phenomena under the single rubric of “Romantic anticolonialism.” But once a chain of equivalence is established among colonial overcoming, anti- colonial revolution, political emancipation, and national sovereignty, it becomes impossible to challenge any one of these positions without also automatically dis- counting the others. The general possibilities of colonial overcoming and political emancipation are thereby reduced to a limited revolutionary nationalism. And because Scott understands the latter to have lost its political purchase today, he figures all histories of emancipation as Romantic. He thereby affirms, however inadvertently, the central assumption of the anticolonialism that is the object of his criticism — namely, that colonialism can be overcome and postcolonial free- dom secured only through a revolutionary nationalism whose objective is formal territorial sovereignty. Scott’s account thus rejects as outdated the very prospect 1. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 2. See Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 239 – 73; and Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).