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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 103 3. For Kosellek, in any given epoch there exists a historically specific relation between present and future that determines its sense of historical temporality as well, therefore, as the kinds of his- torical narratives that it produces. Reinhart Kosellek, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 4. Here I build directly on the insights about reified objects, emancipatory potentiality, and his- torical temporality in the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch. of colonial emancipation itself rather than the revolutionary and national forms through which it was pursued at a particular historical moment. In other words, it reproduces a historically specific logic of decolonization that naturalized the relationship between colonial emancipation and national liberation. It is not clear that a constitutive understanding of colonial modernity requires a tragic understanding of colonial politics. Why should the options for thinking about postcoloniality be limited to choices between romance or tragedy, revolu- tion or impasse, emancipation or negotiation, salvation or impossibility? Such restrictive oppositions make it difficult to remember or recognize within decoloni- zation those movements or voices that struggled to institute forms of nonnational colonial emancipation. This framework obscures alternative histories of decolo- nization that challenged precisely the anticolonial nationalism whose ongoing relevance Scott rightly questions. Sharing Scott’s commitment to move beyond the historiography of revolutionary nationalism, this essay examines the kind of histories that his argument implicitly discounts: histories of colonial overcoming that are at the same time histories of negotiation with colonial modernity. Such discounted histories, I suggest, do in fact speak to the political demands of our postcolonial present. This essay also endorses Scott’s claim that historical temporality should be a central concern of postcolonial scholarship. But it develops a different under- standing of the provocative notion of “futures past” that Scott adapts from the historian Reinhart Kosellek.3 For Scott, revolutionary anticolonialism’s dream of national sovereignty became a historically superseded and politically obsolete future past when it failed to secure political freedom for colonized peoples. Such a past future, he contends, can no longer meaningfully animate emancipatory projects in our radically transformed conditions. I am less concerned with future arrangements whose promise faded away after they were imperfectly implemented or with futures that corresponded to a world that no longer exists and to hopes that are no longer possible. Instead, my interest lies in futures that were once imagined but never came to be, alternative futures that might have been and whose not yet realized emancipatory possibilities may now be recognized and reawakened as durable and vital legacies.4