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Reframing Postcolonial Studies Concepts Methodologies Scholarly Activisms David D Kim Editor All Chapter
Reframing Postcolonial Studies Concepts Methodologies Scholarly Activisms David D Kim Editor All Chapter
Reframing
Postcolonial Studies
Concepts, Methodologies, Scholarly Activisms
Editor
David D. Kim
Department of European Languages
and Transcultural Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA
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To Our Teachers and Students,
Past, Present, and Emerging
Acknowledgments
vii
Contents
ix
x Contents
11 Afterword261
Graham Huggan
Index269
Notes on Contributors
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
an Honorary Degree from Colorado College and in 2018 was given the
Zagora International Film Festival of Sub-Sahara Award for her work in
African cinema.
Graham Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial
Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His
work straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and envi-
ronmental humanities, and much of his research over the past three
decades has involved individual and collaborative attempts to cross the
disciplines (literary/cultural studies, anthropology, biology, geography,
history). His most recent published book is Colonialism, Culture, Whales:
The Cetacean Quartet (2018), and he is working on a co-written study
of modern British nature writing. Other publications include The
Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), Postcolonial
Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010, co-authored with
Helen Tiffin), and the sole-edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial
Studies (2013).
Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François is Assistant Professor of French and
Francophone Studies, and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State
University. He is the author of Poétiques de la violence et récits francophones
contemporains (Poetics of Violence and Contemporary Francophone
Narrative, 2017). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as
the PMLA, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Nouvelles
études francophones, and Lettres romanes. He has recently co-edited a spe-
cial issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, titled “Mapping
Francophone Postcolonial Theory,” and a special issue of Cultural
Dynamics on “The Minor in Question.” Jean-François is working on
a second monograph, titled Indian Ocean Creolization: Empires and
Insular Cultures. It focuses primarily on contemporary literatures and
expressive cultures from the Mascarene Archipelago.
David D. Kim is an associate professor in the Department of European
Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Parables: Memory and
Responsibility in Contemporary Germany (2017), as well as the co-editor
of Imagining Human Rights (2015), The Postcolonial World (2017),
Globalgeschichten der deutschen Literatur (2021), and Teaching German
Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2023). His digi-
tal humanities project is called WorldLiterature@UCLA. He is working
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Fig. 1.1 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image
courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) 7
Fig. 1.2 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image
courtesy of Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery) 7
Fig. 2.1 Palestine Postcard 1936 (1936) 55
Fig. 2.2 Amer Shomali, Visit Palestine (2009) 56
Fig. 2.3 Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate (2012) 58
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Youcef Zighoud, original sepia-toned, date unknown
(Wikipedia Commons) 73
Fig. 3.2 Statue of Youcef Zighoud, August 20, 1970, inauguration in
Constantine (Reproduced by permission of Ahmed Benyahia,
personal archives of Ahmed Benyahia) 74
Fig. 3.3 The war memorial of 1922, Constantine, Algeria Caption:
“Coq de la Victoire” (Photo Agence Jomone, Algiers, circa
1957, no. 105, author’s collection) 76
Fig. 3.4 Emptied plinth of the French war memorial
(Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced by permission
of Ahmed Benyahia) 86
Fig. 3.5 Zighoud Youcef statue in Constantine’s Martyr’s Cemetery,
February 2020 (Photograph by Ahmed Benyahia. Reproduced
by permission of Ahmed Benyahia) 87
Fig. 5.1 Nirveda Alleck, The Migrant’s Tale (2017) (Photograph by
Nirveda Alleck) 119
Fig. 9.1 TheExhibitionist.org website banner 234
Fig. 9.2 TheExhibitionist.org website banner 235
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
Action! On Reframing Postcolonial Patrimony
David D. Kim
D. D. Kim (*)
Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
for the field, in light of the latest postcolonial struggles. For this “concept-
work” to be effective, they need to be invested in methodological innova-
tion and open up postcolonial criticism to incisive political activism (Stoler
2016, p. 17). Without such critical and creative coordination, postcolonial
inheritance would survive mostly as a self-absorbed academic discipline
without much worldly impact. That is the reason why this volume seeks to
close the loop by taking a fresh look at the three parts of contemporary
postcolonial studies: living concepts, cross-disciplinary methodologies,
and bold intersections of scholarship and activism. The following investi-
gations examine how they have recently changed through individual and
cooperative efforts to decolonize museums and public spaces marked by
colonial signposts, to cultivate community organization and transversal
affinity in times of political, ecological, and pandemic crises, and to redress
questions of reconciliation, reparation, repatriation, or retribution in pur-
suit of “a truly universal humanism” (Shih 2008, p. 1361).
To be sure, the force of “reconstructive intellectual labor” has been
transforming the field since the very beginning (Gilroy 1993, p. 45).2
With gripping references to Négritude intellectuals, other African, African
American, Indian, Australian, Canadian, and Caribbean writers, as well as
West European thinkers, the first generation of critics gave rise during the
1980s and early 1990s to postcolonial theory, which changed the aca-
demic landscape primarily in anglophone countries.3 The impetus behind
a second, more global postcolonial wave a decade later was again this inde-
fatigable sense of self-reflexivity, as more and more academics and activists,
discontent with “Europe” as “the sovereign, theoretical subject of all his-
tories,” shifted their focus from conceptual dichotomies, political imposi-
tions, and literary analyses to ambivalent translations, subversive
displacements, and material reconsiderations (Chakrabarty 1992, p. 1).4
After the field had become established first in departments of English, his-
tory, and comparative literature at North American, British, Indian, and
Australian universities, this subsequent wave reshuffled the field beyond its
concentric constellation by applying conceptual, methodological, and his-
torical findings to other cultural, disciplinary, linguistic, and national con-
texts, and by interrogating theoretical formulations with historical inquiries
into different places of alterity. In addition to scrutinizing analytic terms
whose “insight” was not deemed to travel “well across adjacent disciplines
and scholarly fields,” scholars, students, artists, and activists worked more
deliberately on non-Western, Indigenous, early modern, and minor
European ways of knowing (Scott 2005, p. 389). Their collective action,
4 D. D. KIM
initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and
eventually ‘to rule,’ indicates), to set something into motion (which is the
original meaning of the Latin agere)” (Arendt 1958, p. 177).9 Although
Arendt falls short of specifying how this beginning owes itself to what
precedes it, it is useful here for conceptualizing how the lessons of past
colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial activities are being reframed in cur-
rently transformative debates and community-based organizations. A
combination of old and new action works up and down generational lines
to revitalize resilient, forward-looking initiatives in reparative justice.
Reframing Postcolonial Studies consists of carefully selected case studies
that shed light on this action. Written by scholars of different generations,
the eleven chapters show how, under contemporary historical conditions,
preceding models of creativity, scholarship, and activism offer indispens-
able points of orientation as well as frustrating limits. They interrogate
how current intellectual endeavors are informed by individual and
community-based actions outside of the academy and they demonstrate to
what extent conceptual, methodological, and activist concerns are pivotal
for contemporary postcolonial interventions. As far as I know, Reframing
Postcolonial Studies is the first volume whose rationale is formulated in
such explicitly intergenerational, future-oriented terms.10 The tripartite
organization of this volume is applicable to any scholarly topic or academic
discipline, so long it seeks to intervene in the world, but as the contribu-
tors make clear in their individual and mutually resonating case studies,
conceptual vigilance, methodological deliberation, and scholarly activism
acquire new strengths when different generations come together to reflect
on their conjoined inheritance and legacy and take action in pursuit of a
more reassuring future. Instead of being content with the truism that
every generation wrestles with its inheritance and heritage, this compen-
dium illuminates without trying to be comprehensive how foundational
concepts, hybrid methodologies, and scholarly activisms are subjected to
renewed scrutiny in the latest communication between postcolonial
scholar-citizens.
Fig. 1.1 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter One (Image courtesy of
Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)
Fig. 1.2 Still image from We Live in Silence Chapter Seven (Image courtesy of
Kudzanai Chiurai and Goodman Gallery)
Western Europe and North America? To what extent did it overcome the
flawed process of curatorial censorship all too often carried out in the
name of postcolonial reconciliation or liberal democratic civility?
I do not want to dwell much longer on this case study, but in order to
drive home the overarching framework of the volume, it seems instructive
to compare Chiurai’s action with a fitting example from the preceding
generation. Such a comparison underscores how a younger generation
reframes what has been examined before in conceptual, methodological,
and activist terms. It also demonstrates why the contemporary world in its
cultural, environmental, economic, or political specificity is impossible to
understand without a deep postcolonial reference. These issues will be
examined closely in the following chapters.
First, the comparison. In the essay titled “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls
of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’” and published in 1992, Anne McClintock
famously took issue with the term “post-colonial” and its cognates, shortly
after the field had established itself in the US academy. Her critique
focused on three conceptual coordinates—time, space, and gender—and
their inextricable connections in postcolonial studies, but she began by
observing that “the term ‘post-colonialism’” was profoundly Eurocentric
because it consigned in a sequential manner “the cultures of peoples
beyond colonialism to prepositional time,” namely the post in postcolo-
nialism (McClintock 1992, pp. 85, 86). The distinct temporality of a non-
European community was defined again in relation to, and in succession
of, European colonial history, although there was so much knowledge,
history, and experience preceding and following the colonial period. The
term “post-colonialism” set up another false “binary opposition”
(McClintock 1992, p. 85). In other words, to divide “the colonial” and
“the post-colonial” in this grammatological way was to blur the necessary
differentiation between colonizer and colonized, and between those who
benefited from colonial rule and those who were its lasting victims. These
two conceptual simplifications, McClintock argued, led to the wrong
impression that the “post-colonial” somehow captured the “multiplicity”
of historical conditions under which different countries around the globe
were struggling to deal with their colonial past, but in actuality their
responses varied widely from one polity to another: from ambivalence,
denial, and silence to naiveté, resistance, and shame (McClintock 1992,
p. 86). Such divergent attitudes could not be reduced to a single tempo-
ral prefix.
12 D. D. KIM
McClintock went on to say that the same criticism held true for the
term “de-colonization” and she singled out Zimbabwe among several for-
merly colonized countries (McClintock 1992, p. 88). She wrote:
In Zimbabwe, after a seven-year civil war of such ferocity that at the height
of the war 500 people were killed every month and 40 per cent of the coun-
try’s budget was spent on the military, the Lancaster House Agreement
choreographed by Britain in 1979 ensured that one third of Zimbabwe’s
arable land (12 million hectares) was to remain in white hands, a minute
fraction of the population. In other words, while Zimbabwe gained formal
political independence in 1980 (holding the chair of the 103-nation Non-
Aligned Movement from 1986–1989), it has, economically, undergone only
partial decolonization. (McClintock 1992, pp. 88–89)
alike seek to correct this protracted history by calling out past crimes
against colonial subjects and by exposing present forms of exploitation as
results of a continuing pattern in socioeconomic and political disparities
both within and between countries of the Global North and the Global
South. In such passionate demands for a different present and a better
future, both the past and the present are accorded intense reflection,
whereas the future receives far less speculative attention. The postcolonial
optic is by definition sensitive to recognition, reconciliation, repatriation,
retribution, or reparation and any hasty orientation toward the future risks
inflicting further pain on victims past and present.
Still, there are good reasons for being more deliberate about the future,
as the contemporary political situation makes this task necessary. Jini Kim
Watson and Gary Wilder touch upon this important point in The
Postcolonial Contemporary (2018). After making a persuasive argument in
support of the need to continue evaluating the present in postcolonial
terms, they describe what they see as the latest development—the “new”—
in the field. They write:
some of which have been available, as Kim Watson and Wilder point out,
since the 1970s.
I concur with this historical assessment in a broad sense, but it presents
several problems, which are difficult to ignore. All of them boil down to a
fuzzy notion of generation, which perpetuates the old-new or past-present
binary without being any more instructive about the future. Kim Watson
and Wilder spell out in optimistic terms that their focus on “the postcolo-
nial contemporary” both as “a proposition” and as “a question” probes
the nature of “relations between past, present, and future” (Kim Watson
and Wilder 2018, pp. 1–2). They explain that postcolonial violence calls
for a “new” set of critical tools with which scholars and activists are able to
interrogate past “colonial conditions of knowledge production, their
ongoing legacies in postcolonial periods, and their power to produce and
reproduce systems of inequality within and between nations, societies,
continents” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 3). However, they do not
specify how the future figures as an essentially utopian, political, moral, or
ethical category in reconsidering “conventional notions of past and pres-
ent and their relation” (Kim Watson and Wilder 2018, p. 10). The future
quietly disappears from their view. I also take issue with the claim that
border-crossing, subversive concerns are what define such “new” critics
and activists in postcolonial studies. It implies that the immediately pre-
ceding generation has focused mostly on national and international issues
without paying much attention to anti-capitalist, bottom-up, democratic,
transnational movements at scales below and above the nation. That is not
the case. Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996), Paul Gilroy’s The
Black Atlantic (1993), Sheng Hu’s From Opium War to the May 4th
Movement (1991), and Benita Parry’s essay “Resistance Theory/
Theorizing Resistance; or, Two Cheers for Nativism” (1994) were very
different examples of influential works that pursued during the 1990s
scholarly and community-based approaches to resistance and solidarity.
Graham Huggan is right to point out in this regard that Marxist revolu-
tionary vocabularies such as “‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘decolonization’”
have “never disappeared from the postcolonial lexicon in the first place,”
although critics such as Lazarus and Parry “want to reinstate” them
(Huggan 2013, p. 4). A more nuanced and less polemical portrayal of the
field shows that the concepts, theories, and strategies of past liberation
movements “are continually renegotiated in a complex revisionist process
that allows the relationship between past and present … to be productively
reassessed” (Huggan 2013, p. 4). Analogously, there are plenty of
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTION! ON REFRAMING POSTCOLONIAL PATRIMONY 21
scholars, students, and activists today who work very much at local and
national scales. Although there appears to be a clearly discernible trend in
one way or another, such an observation presupposes a particular habitus
within the discipline and is itself a symptom of institutional filiation.
Huggan’s elucidation leads me to my next comparison. With The
Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013), Huggan has showcased
how the negotiation between revolution and revisionism informs many
contributions to contemporary postcolonial studies. Yet, this anthology,
too, pays little attention to the future. In fact, Huggan gives a few reasons
for this predisposition. He writes that the future is only subject to “predic-
tions and assessments,” which, in turn, attest to “the continuing signifi-
cance of the past” (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Most of his conceptual and
ideological emphases in the introductory chapter link the past and the
present, but the future is registered only as a “speculative or hypothetical”
template, which is ultimately impossible to decipher in scholarly verifiable
terms (Huggan 2013, p. 22). Huggan also contends that emancipatory
mobilizations are hopeful only to a limited extent. As revolutions have
repeatedly shown in modern history, they are prone to violence and war
and bring as much suffering as progress. These are certainly legitimate
concerns, but I argue that, if we are to close the loop between criticism
and activism as necessarily interlinked parts of the postcolonial, there will
need to be a bolder, sustained discussion about our continuously changing
relationship with postcolonial patrimony and our conviction to shape the
future through “anticipatory,” “world-improving” action (Bloch 1995,
pp. 11, 92). Action, hope, and resilience are exhausting frames of mind in
an era of illiberal austerity democracy, but let us be inspired, as Said sug-
gests, by the creative role we play as critics, writers, artists, and activists in
calling out all related forms of oppression and in re-envisioning a very
different postcolonial world.
I admit that, as co-editors of The Postcolonial World (2017), Jyotsna
Singh and I likewise fail to address this blind spot. This expansive collec-
tion is similar to The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies in the sense
that the main focus rests on a past-present dialectic and its potential for
“imagining a range of affective communities that re-think hierarchies of
difference,” and for “re-figuring modes of knowledge production in a
range of explorations—in the material, textual, visual, and digital worlds”
(Singh 2017, p. 26). Both volumes make clear that reconfiguring cur-
rently available modes of interpretation entails remembrance, retrospec-
tion, and reparation, but feelings and thoughts regarding the future hover
22 D. D. KIM
pertaining to this horizon, although her reasons are different from his. She
thinks that any future-oriented vocabulary is already predetermined by
“an imperial enterprise,” which equates future with “progress” (Azoulay
2019, p. 55). Since “rehearsal, reversal, rewinding, repairing, renewing,
reacquiring, redistributing, readjusting, reallocating” are long overdue
processes, she conceptualizes the notion of “potential history” in strictly
retrospective, reparative terms (Azoulay 2019, p. 56). This explains why,
when she appeals to a future more in line with her vision of the world, she
resorts to the language of “imagination.”
Imagine a strike not as an attempt to improve one’s salary alone but rather
as a strike against the very raison d’être of these institutions … Imagine
experts in the world of art admitting that the entire project of artistic salva-
tion to which they pledged allegiance is insane and that it could not have
existed without exercising various forms of violence, attributing spectacular
prices to pieces that should not have been acquired in the first place.
(Azoulay 2019, pp. 159–160)
Azoulay’s distrust regarding the future makes sense alongside the duress
of imperialism she seems to sense everywhere, but neither the act of imagi-
nation in an individual protest nor the collective activism of artists, cura-
tors, and scholars within the context of a museum or in another public
sphere is as hypothetical or as radical as she portrays it to be. As my exami-
nation of Chiurai’s installation has shown, and this becomes clear time and
again in the following pages, imagining this sort of future is already here
and now. Azoulay’s intervention in the ongoing process of imperialism
polarizes the past in contradistinction from the future and this version of
potential history seems to be grounded less in historical accuracy than in
rhetorical persuasion.
Chapter Summaries
In Chapter Two, which opens the first section of the book on concepts,
Bill Ashcroft helps us reframe postcolonial studies at a conceptual level,
although the other vectors of change—methodology and activism—are
never lost from sight. He is the co-author of volumes that have established
the conceptual foundation of postcolonial studies, and here he discusses
how our interpretation of postcolonial narratives changes, once it is linked
to Ernst Bloch’s critical notion of utopia (Ashcroft 2017; Ashcroft et al.
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTION! ON REFRAMING POSTCOLONIAL PATRIMONY 25
1989; Ashcroft et al. 1998; Ashcroft et al. 2013). His essay is titled
“Unlocking the Future: Utopia and Postcolonial Literatures” and it illus-
trates the prominence of future thinking in postcolonial creative produc-
tion, as well as the usefulness of utopian theory for postcolonial criticism
today. According to Ashcroft, a persistent failing in postcolonial criticism
has been the tendency to reduce resistance to a simple dynamic of opposi-
tion. By demonstrating the importance of future in postcolonial analysis,
he explains how a writer’s engagement with imperial power is potentially
transformative. While grounding himself in the long-standing aesthetic
and theoretical discourse on utopianism whose beginning is traceable to
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Ashcroft refers to Bloch’s notion of Vor-
Schein—or “anticipatory illumination”—as a means to imagine Heimat as
opposed to nation as a concrete place of sociopolitical relations. Thus,
postcolonial utopianism looks beyond the nation and its inheritance of
colonial structures. Its localization emphasizes the link between cultural
memory and varying visions of the future. It recalibrates the linearity of
time with a messier trajectory in which the cultural past is imprinted onto
an intimate and politically reactivated future. As Ashcroft claims, these
relationships are crucial for postcolonial studies because they consider the
incomplete process of decolonization even after national independence.
Although his case studies are principally literary and reflect his preference
for literature in postcolonial theory, the range of postcolonial writers he
examines across different continents and generations points to the undi-
minished role that future plays in every form of resistance to colonial rule
and post-independence injustice.
In Chapter Three, “On the Wings of the Gallic Cockerel: Ahmed
Benyahia and the Provenance of an Algerian Public Sculpture,” Susan
Slyomovics follows suit with a fascinating essay on the “statuomania” in
French Algeria. This term, she observes, originates in reference to the vast
number of statues, war memorials, and monuments in this colony begin-
ning in 1830. What she uncovers is an eye-opening historical, geopolitical,
and affective provenance between Algeria and France based on their post-
colonial afterlives. The historical backdrop against which she tracks the
history of a particular statue is “the ‘repatriation’ of cultural and historical
treasures [stolen] from French Algeria.” According to Slyomovics, this
conceptualization is misleading because it quietly condones the illegal
removal of looted objects from their places of origin. At the center of her
investigation is the 1972 statue commemorating the Algerian war hero
and martyr Youcef Zighoud (1921–1956). Sculpted by artist Ahmed
26 D. D. KIM
Benyahia for Algeria’s third largest city of Constantine, the statue’s cre-
ation, emplacement, disappearance, and reappearance recount multiple
efforts in post-independent Algeria to decolonize public space. Here,
research into postcolonial provenance goes beyond the physical location
of art and the question of legal ownership. It encompasses artist and object
biographies, artwork creativity, entangled or shared senses of heritage, as
well as a global circulation of aesthetic symbols in the making of monu-
ments to glorify the French and Algerian nation-states. Slyomovics pur-
sues this interdisciplinary work on the basis of a stunning video interview
of Benyahia available on YouTube and documenting Algeria’s “Generation
independence, Jil al-istiqlal.” Her study is exemplary of “a protean
archive,” which is neither clearly “bounded” nor successfully “policed,”
but consists of displacements, gaps, projections, and cross-references,
which are crucial for postcolonial research in the twenty-first century
(Stoler 2018, p. 49).
In Chapter Four, titled “Bibliodiversity: Denationalizing and
Defrancophonizing Francophonie,” Dominic Thomas examines the close
association between language and identity in postcolonial France where
the past does not prove to be past after all. He begins with the astute
observation that President Emmanuel Macron belongs to the first genera-
tion of French citizens born after the end of French colonialism, and that
this historical marker has been used as an all too facile indicator for France’s
ability to move on and leave behind its colonial past. As Thomas shows,
though, there is more to the story. Language policy served historically to
bolster the nation’s overseas colonial ambitions and, in the postcolonial
era, the same action, guideline, and protocol have curiously re-emerged
under the aegis of francophonie. Now, it marks Macron’s renewed pro-
gram for “a happy future” in the relationship between France and its for-
mer colonies. In response, critics have highlighted how diplomatic soft
power initiatives continue to prioritize neocolonial ties. Critical of this
narrow conceptualization of francophonie, they are calling for a greater
bibliodiversity in reference to such a cultural, linguistic, and political con-
cept. They are collectively channeling efforts in reframing the symbiotic
linkage between French as language and France as nation. They are advo-
cating for the denationalization, defrancophonization, and decolonizing
of francophonie. This latest critical and creative activism underscores the
rigid association between national language and cultural identity in post-
colonial France. Last but not least, Thomas sheds light on a dangerous
cooptation by the Far Right of French foreign policy in public discourse.
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTION! ON REFRAMING POSTCOLONIAL PATRIMONY 27
Notes
1. Ernst Bloch used this term during the first half of the 1930s when he drew
upon a preceding discussion among art historians and cultural critics about
the relationship between modernism and fascism in architecture to make a
contemporary political point: “Not all people exist in the same Now”
[Nicht alle sind im selben Jetzt da] (Bloch 1962, p. 104). According to
Bloch, people lived in different presents based on different combinations
of age, social class, and geographic location. The reference to Bloch here is
not coincidental because, first, his meditation focuses on a dialectical rela-
tionship between past, present, and future and, second, Bill Ashcroft uses
1 INTRODUCTION: ACTION! ON REFRAMING POSTCOLONIAL PATRIMONY 31
his notion of utopia in the next chapter to reflect on the futurity of postco-
lonial literatures.
2. According to Benita Parry, postcolonial studies originated as early as the
1970s, but given the transdisciplinary scope of the field today, this time-
frame seems to make sense only in anglocentric terms (Parry 2012, p. 348).
For a more interdisciplinary historicization of the field, see Boehmer and
Tickel (2015).
3. To clarify this thesis, let me mention the most notable names of this gen-
eration. There is the subaltern studies group consisting of Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, and Sumit Sarkar. A far
more dispersed and eclectic group includes, among others, Edward Said,
Bill Ashcroft, Homi Bhabha, Benita Parry, Mary Louise Pratt, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, and Robert J.C. Young.
4. Graham Huggan offers a detailed and critical account of these two “waves”
of postcolonial criticism, the first one covering “the period between,
roughly, the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s,” the second one following
thereafter (Huggan 2008, pp. 10–12).
5. Edward Said’s intellectual trajectory from Orientalism (1978) to Culture
and Imperialism (1993) is paradigmatic of this disciplinary shift. For
assessments of this change within the boundaries of existing disciplines
other than English and history, see Friedrichsmeyer et al. (1998) for
German studies, Kiberd (1997) for Irish studies, Mignolo (2000) for Latin
American studies, and Lionnet and Shih (2005) for East Asian, transoce-
anic, Caribbean, and South American studies. There is also a huge library
of scholarships that explore questions of comparison and incommensura-
bility. For example, see Melas (2007).
6. For the latest discussion about “the potential exhaustion” of postcolonial-
ism, see Agnani et al. (2007).
7. Ann Laura Stoler uses this term “to capture three principal features of
colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colo-
nial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their
durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements.” She asso-
ciates the word with “durability,” “duration,” and “endurance,” all of
which underscore the importance of revealing “the occluded histories of
empire” in the present moment (Stoler 2016, pp. 7, 14). Here, the histori-
cal referent is also a lively debate among postcolonial critics during the
early 1990s on the term “postcolonial” vis-à-vis “colonial” (McClintock
1992; Shohat 1992). There is no need to revisit this discussion because
detailed summaries are available in several publications (Huggan 2013,
p. 20; Kim 2017, p. 527; Young 2016, p. 57). What I wish to point out is
that, for Ann Laura Stoler, the prefix “post” similarly serves “as a mark of
skepticism rather than assume its clarity,” the reason for this doubt being
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At the bar as prysoner holding vp his hand. 1559, 63.
[187] Ne recks. N.
[188] Respecting none saue only the queene mother. 1578.
[189] Which moued malice to foulder. 1578.
[190] Which deepe in hate, before. 1578.
[191] Th’one as well as th’other. N.
[192] They did the earle attaynt. 1578. He was soone attaint.
N.
[193] Such crimes as hidden lay before. 1578.
[194] For hydden hate. 1578. For enuy still. N.
[195] Biddes small faultes to make more bad. 1578.
[196]
——heire of Lyonell,
Of king Edward the third the second sequell. 1578.
The third king Edward’s sonne, as stories tell. N.
[216] Of the. N.
[217]
Touching the case of my cousin Roger,
(Whose ruful end euen now I did relate)
Was found in tyme an vndue atteindre. 1578.
[218] By lawe eche man of. 1578. By law each one of. N.
[219]
[247]
[248]
[402] But alway put false flatterers most in trust, 1559, 63.
In false flatterers reposinge all my trust. 1578.
[403] Embracinge sutch. 1578.
[404] Fro counsell sage I did alwayes withdrawe. 1578.
[405]