Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? (2011)

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Postcolonial Studies:A Political Invention of Tradition?

Jean-FranoisBayart

Translation by Andrew Brown, revised by Janet Roitman

Over the past few years, and perhaps even the past few months, in the wake of the unrest that hit the French suburbs in 2005, the terms postcolonial and postcoloniality have become common currency in intellectual and political debate. Scholarly and academic circles are no longer immune to the controversy that these terms have triggered.1 However, these words have not been fully explained indeed, even the simple question of their spelling remains unclear. Should we write postcolonial or postcolonial? It all depends, says Akhil Gupta: postcolonial to describe what comes chronologically after col-onization, and postcolonial when we need to think the postcolonial as all that proceeds from the fact of the colonial situation, regardless of temporality.2 When is the postcolonial deemed to have started? When Third World intellec-tuals arrived in the universities of the developed world, says Arif Dirlik wryly, hardly less ironic than Kwame Anthony Appiah: Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively

PublicCulture 23:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2010-016

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

This article owes much to my exchange of ideas with Romain Bertrand, who also kindly read and commented on the first draft, and to the remarks and suggestions of Mohamed Tozy and Peter Geschiere. I am, however, solely responsible for any errors, approximations, and questionable judg-ments that it contains. My thoughts are indebted to the Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Gov-ernance program conducted by the Fonds danalyse des socits politiques with the assistance of the Research Department of the French Development Agency in 2005 6.

1. See Marie- Claude Smouts, ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les postcolonial studies dans le dbat franais (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007).

2. Akhil Gupta, Une thorie sans limites, in Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 218. Out of consideration for the reader, I will not observe this convention in the rest of this article.

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small, Western- style, Western- trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.3

But we can provide a more inclusive definition of the postcolonial, character-izing it, as does Georges Balandier, as a situation which is actually shared by all our contemporaries a definition that tends to identify it with globalization: We are all, in different ways, in a postcolonial situation.4 This postcolonial situation would thus be a total social fact, like the colonial situation invoked by Balandier in his seminal article of 1951; it is a situation that substantiates the importance of the colonial period in the process of globalization undergone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 It is in this second sense that the comprador intelligentsia originating in the Third World and Western- style, now with white disciples in its train sees the colonial situation and its reproduction as the origin and cause of contemporary social relations, whether of class, gender, or community membership both in the former colonies and in the former metro-politan centers. Thus French historians have over the past few years focused on deciphering their society through the prism of the colonial legacy by attributing the widely recognized social divide ( fracture sociale) to a colonial divide ( fracture coloniale) and by postulating a continuity that underlies modes of rep-resentation and behavior from the colonial era to the contemporary period. The imaginary figures of Arab and African immigrants to France have been their first objects of analysis, and now they leap on the issue of the suburbs (banlieues). They are tempted to simultaneously reread the history of the republic, or even the revolution, in terms of colonization, which so they claim immediately under-mined the purported universalism of both these phenomena, being consubstantial with them and paving the way for Nazi totalitarianism or its Vichy accomplices.6

3. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149, quoted in Jacques Pouchepadass, Le projet critique des postcolonial studies entre hier et demain, in Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 187 88.

4. Georges Balandier, preface to Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 24.5. Jean- Franois Bayart, Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalisa-

tion (Paris: Fayard, 2004), translated by Andrew Brown as Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007), chap. 4; Georges Balandier, La situation coloniale: Approche thorique, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 44 79.

6. See, e.g., Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et ltat colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Grandmaison, La rpublique impriale: Politique et racisme dtat (Paris: Fayard, 2009); and Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture colo-niale: La socit franaise au prisme de lhritage colonial (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005). Social divide was a term Jacques Chirac used during his 2002 presidential campaign.

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Activists, in their turn, have appropriated these interpretations to mobilize as Natives of the Republic (Indignes de la rpublique) in the suburbs a move-ment of people who are deemed to be first and foremost the children of their for-merly colonized parents (or grandparents) and whose actions are a consequence of this.7

A River with Many Tributaries

This political and intellectual sensibility claims a kinship with the approach and assumptions of postcolonial studies, which have flourished in Australian, British, and North American universities since 1990 and which originated in different sources.

Postcolonial studies, moreover, are inseparable from a number of social move-ments through which have been proclaimed, urbi et orbi, the agency and the empowerment of groups or categories that have recognized themselves as oppressed, such as women, homosexuals, transsexuals, and ethnic minorities, even if this means attacking their metropolitan tendencies, as does Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.8

It follows that there is neither any postcolonial theory nor any precise definition of the term postcolonial or postcolonial. Postcolonial studies is heterogeneous, including from the viewpoint of the critique of postcolonial reason, as two of its principal heralds, Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, explain convincingly: the former radically rejects the epistemic violence of the West; the latter concludes his major book Provincializing Europe by indicating that it cannot be a matter of throwing out Western thought, a gift to us all, and that it should be spoken of only in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude.9 This intellectual configuration, writes the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe (who is generally seen as part of this movement, though he does not entirely claim it), is characterized by its heterogeneity and is a fragmented thinking which constitutes its strength, but also its weakness.10 In particular, postcolonial studies involves a certain ambigu-

7. Sadri Khiari, Pour une politique de la racaille: Immigr- e- s, indignes et jeunes de banlieue (Paris: Textuel, 2006); Khiari, La contre- rvolution coloniale en France: De de Gaulle Sarkozy (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009). See also Achille Mbembe, La rpublique dsoeuvre: La France lre postcoloniale, Le Dbat, no. 137 (2005): 159 75.

8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 255.

10. Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur, and Jean- Louis Schlegel, Quest- ce que la pense postcoloniale? Entretien avec Achille Mbembe, Esprit, December 2006, 117.

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ity. On the one hand, it has an epistemological aim to [lay] bare both the violence inherent to a particular idea of reason and the gap which, in colonial conditions, separates European ethical thinking from its practical, political, and symbolic decisions. This aim is meant to inspire the social sciences in the deconstruction of its constitutive categories. On the other hand, postcolonial studies assumes a normative, philosophical, and even prophetic scope, insisting on the humanity to come, the humanity that must arise once the colonial figures of inhumanity and racial difference have been abolished. But the key thing is not to blind oneself to the desire for critical universalism of at least one sector of postcolonial studies, while many people are tempted to see it as a form of nativist thought either to instrumentalize it in their struggles or to discredit it from an academic standpoint. This universalism stems from the experience of the diaspora, whether Indian, African, or Caribbean, but also from intercontinental intellectual exchanges over which Western universities no longer have a monopoly although undoubtedly some of them are the main institutions of postcolonial studies. And yet neither postcolonial studies itself nor scholarly critique of it have managed to erase an initial ambiguity. In the works of its theorists, the desire for universalism often turns into a discourse of identity, and the status (philosophical or scholarly) of its texts frequently remains uncertain, which makes them difficult to comment on or to use.

There is thus an ambiguity and heterogeneity in postcolonial studies. And when we gauge the extent to which it has fragmented, when we swim down this river with many tributaries, we may well start to think that in reality it exists mainly as a result of the accusation its proponents hurl at the culprits who have the gall not to be among their number.11 The university prisons will soon be full, as postcolonial studies have now taken all situations of dominance through the ages as its province, without fear of anachronism or absurdity.

The new development is that postcolonial studies is now flourishing in France at least if we are to believe the virulent claim that France is reluctant to face the questions it raises, and if we accept my idea that it exists only in the pos-ture of denunciation! In conferences around the world, in French newspapers and radio broadcasts, there is a widespread opinion that French academics reject this approach out of provincialism, out of conservatism, out of a refusal to look the French colonial past in the face, or, worse, out of a shameful compromise with the racialist imaginaire (imaginary) that it is claimed is constitutive of the republic. Why not instigate proceedings to ensure a fair trial? And the primary

11. Mongin, Lempereur, and Schlegel, Quest- ce que la pense postcoloniale? 125.


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condition of fairness would be to specify the accusation and the status, or even the identity, of the accused. Faithful to its habits, postcolonial studies essentializes France a France that may exist only in its imagination and whose heterogene-ity and inner conflicts should be recalled. Is it French society that is being put on trial? If so, the suburbs, full of natives, are part of it. Or is it the French political class that is on trial? But if so, it does not speak with a unanimous voice. Or is it the French university system that is on trial? A system that has never been a haven of theoretical harmony. Is the latter being criticized for not taking into consid-eration the epistemological critique that postcolonial studies purveys, as well as its presumed ability to decenter the questionnaire of the humanities, to set up other questions and other forms of knowledge at the very heart of academia?12 Has French academia failed to detect the colonial continuities in peoples imagi-nations and behavior?13 Or has it failed to take up the hope for a new critical and polycentric humanism? Or is French academia quite simply reluctant to speak a new global pidgin, thereby contributing to the image of a France marginalized on the international scene, timidly wrapped up in its specific concept of the cultural exception, confined to an altermondialiste (alter-globalist) siege mentality? Or is it staying aloof from the civic rituals of affliction that now substitute for real engagement and where, to packed houses, people put on performances of its all the fault of Voltaire, General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Jules Ferry, Ren Bous-quet, or Jacques Massu. This isnt always clear and should not in any case prevent us from asking whether French scholars might have good reasons not to appropri-ate a current of thought that is all the rage across the Atlantic or the English Chan-nel, without its heuristic virtues necessarily having been demonstrated.

Weve Done Our Bit!

Overall, the accusation is rather like accusing an adult who contracted a primary infection as a child for not becoming tubercular in later life. After all, as the proponents of postcolonial studies freely admit, these studies owe much not only to French theory but also, and above all, to the intellectual, literary, artistic, and political trends that seized on the colonial question in France in the 1950s. Several names come immediately to mind: Aim Csaire and his Discourse on Colo-nialism, Lopold Sdar Senghor and the Oeuvres potiques, Albert Memmi and his Portrait of the Colonized, and Frantz Fanon and his Wretched of the Earth

12. Mongin, Lempereur, and Schlegel, Quest- ce que la pense postcoloniale? 125.13. Marie- Claude Smouts, Le postcolonial pour quoi faire? in Smouts, La situation postcolo-

niale, 25n2.

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and Black Skin, White Masks, not to mention the virulent prefaces that Jean- Paul Sartre wrote for these last two authors.

On the one hand, the essential questions of postcolonial studies are already found in the works of these writers. It is difficult to express more violence toward colonialism than these founding fathers did by advocating or legitimizing armed struggle and terrorism which, in the context of the Algerian war, was no mere figure of style. If we read Sartres preface to The Wretched of the Earth let alone the essay itself Spivak comes off as a bit of a bridesmaid! Those French who, like Molires Monsieur Jourdain in Le bourgeois gentilhomme, practiced postcolonial studies without knowing it, were forced to confront political and ethical dilemmas that were much harder and more painful than those that now haunt their heirs who are not particularly anxious to decide whether or not to act as clandestine agents for Hamas or al- Qaeda.

On the other hand, the authors of French literature who were critical of colo-nialism had a virtually worldwide audience:14 Ashis Nandy, for example, intro-duced Fanon into India, and Ali Shariati, one of the main ideologues of the Ira-nian revolution of 1979, learned about Fanons thought in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne and popularized it within Islamo- leftist circles. Edward Said himself acknowledged his debt to Raymond Schwab, the author of The Oriental Renais-sance. The problem thus splits in half. We first need to ascertain the qualitative contribution of postcolonial studies: what does it contribute that is distinct from the work done by French predecessors? Next we need to decide whether this vein has continued in France (possibly in a different form) or whether and under what conditions it has terminated.

The originality of postcolonial studies lies in the way the connection was made between the critique of colonialism and the critique of other forms of domina-tion, especially with respect to the question of gender borrowing heavily, yet again, from French writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, who nevertheless had not really integrated the parameter of empire into their thinking, as Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out, and whose conception of the subject and of representation, allegedly disembodied and Western- centered, has not found favor with Spivak.15 The link was not completely absent in the works

14. I am deliberately using the term French literature following the example of Salman Rushdie, who sees himself as part of English literature, that is, literature in the English language, and definitely not as part of Commonwealth literature.

15. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson


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and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271 313; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason.

16. Simone Weil, Oeuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Gallimard, Quarto, 1999), 430 31. 17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Travail sur lAlgrie (octobre 1841), in Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard,

1991), 1:712 13.18. Jean- Paul Sartre, From One China to Another, in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans.

Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (New York: Routledge, 2001), 19.19. Mongin, Lempereur, and Schlegel, Quest- ce que la pense postcoloniale? 119.

of Fanon and Octave Mannoni, or even Sartre. Nonetheless, postcolonial studies benefited from the tremendous theoretical germination that took place in France in the 1960s and the way its seeds were then sown in America. Duly noted.

Conversely, the causal relation between the colonial situation and totalitarian-ism had been mooted by Hannah Arendt, whose work was popular in the circles around Raymond Aron, at the heart of the French academic establishment. Simi-larly, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote in the aftermath of the Second World War that Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European con-tinent, and more generally to the white- raced countries, of the methods of colonial conquest and domination.16 Actually, the matre penser (mentor) of the liberal Right in France, Alexis de Tocqueville, who legitimized the ravaging of Alge-ria, had from the start sensed the possible relationship between colonial violence and the establishment of a despotic regime in mainland France.17 So, from this point of view, postcolonial studies is really rather superfluous. As for the critique of the orientalist gaze, it is already fiercely present in the marvellous preface that Sartre wrote to a volume of photographs taken by Henri Cartier- Bresson in China: The idea of what is Chinese recedes and pales: it is no longer any more than a convenient label [appellation commode]. What remain are human beings who resemble each other in that they are human beings living presences of flesh and blood, who have not yet been given their appellation contrle. We must be grateful to Cartier- Bresson for his nominalism.18

More important, if not more recently, postcolonial thinking has reminded us with welcome alacrity that race constitutes . . . the wild area of European human-ism, its beast.19 This charge already lay at the center of Sartres and Fanons denunciation of colonialism, but there has been a tendency, over time, to think that it has become anachronistic. The disastrous speech given by Nicolas Sarkozy at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar on July 26, 2007 such a travesty in its content that one wonders whether the presidents acte manqu (subcon-sciously deliberate mistake) did not inadvertently show that postcolonial studies was right all along unfortunately confirmed this intuition that racial violence

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continues to underlie the representation of Africa and that the well of fantasies is decidedly inexhaustible in this respect.20

Should we acknowledge that postcolonial studies can be credited with hav-ing rehabilitated the study of colonial situations, which Balandiers article had noted in 1951, showing them to have the character of a total social fact, but which were then, so it is claimed, neglected by political scientists, historians, and anthropologists, as even someone who despises postcolonial studies, Fred-erick Cooper, puts it?21 Things are more complicated. In the discreet fields of the French university system and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) research laboratories, historical research on Empire has continued to the general indifference of public opinion, the political class, the media, and, admit-tedly, other specialties of the discipline. The resurgence, with the new millen-nium, of the colonial question in public debate in France owes much to contingent circumstances: the encounter among practices of memory that mark the contem-porary moment of globalization, the need to renew the discourse and mobilization of activists disaffected by urban social movements toward the Socialist Party, the sensitivities of a stratum of junior parliamentarians in the National Assembly, and the instrumentalization of the past for the purposes of legitimization on the part of some African states, especially Algeria.22 The sudden popularity of post-colonial studies in some circles at the interface between activism and academia is partly to be explained by this sudden piece of good luck. But this popularity is an effect and not a cause of the revival in colonial studies. It should not overshadow the permanent presence in France, ever since decolonization, of a way of thinking that is close to, yet independent of, the sensibilities of postcolo-nial studies or the contribution of a new generation of historians who continue to analyze colonial situations in the tradition of their illustrious predecessors (Jean Suret- Canale, Charles- Andr Julien, and Charles- Robert Ageron) while recasting the themes and approaches of their discipline. Nor should it ignore the contribu-tion of political sociologists who, since the 1970s, have assiduously investigated the colonial and postcolonial state in Africa and Asia.

As for the legacy of the anticolonial thought of the 1950s, it is surprising that those who denigrate French provincialism willingly pass over in silence the cir-

20. Achille Mbembe, Lintarissable puits aux fantasmes, in LAfrique de Sarkozy: Un dni dhistoire, ed. Jean- Pierre Chrtien (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 91.

21. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2005), 53 54.

22. Romain Bertrand, Mmoires dempire: La controverse autour du fait colonial (Bellecombe- en- Bauges, France: Croquant, 2006).


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cle of authors and creative artists who, to a greater or lesser extent, have kept alive both in France and outside it the flame of a thinking that is critical of the imperial situation in a very postcolonial spirit.

At the same time, the diagnosis that French academia failed to take into account work done in subaltern studies, cultural studies, or postcolonial studies seems totally wrong, for factual reasons.23 As early as the 1980s, and tirelessly throughout the 1990s, the authors representing these currents were invited, at least to Paris, by research centers at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales, the Centre dtudes et de recherches internationales at the Institut dtudes poli-tique de Paris, and the cole normale suprieure and were widely quoted and discussed. If the graft did not take, this is not for lack of knowledge but for other reasons that are not necessarily shameful or due to hostile bias. It may simply reflect a different configuration of the scholarly field invested by other critical traditions inspired by Marxism, Foucault, and Bourdieu or simply by a different historiographical trend. This is a difference that postcolonial studies should endorse with good grace if it wishes to remain faithful to its initial inspiration, unless it is to set itself up as a new avatar of academic Atlanticism.

In these circumstances, it is not overly controversial or malicious to see also, in the sudden promotion of postcolonial studies in France and the stigmatization of French backwardness, a set of rather problematic issues: a niche strategy on the part of scholars after a share of the academic market; a form of flirtation halfway between Americanophile snobbery and French masochism; a way of reinventing the figure (a very French figure, after all) of the intellectual committed to the struggle for justice, the intellectuel engag (public intellectual); a manifestation of the conformism of the migrant found in French or French- speaking scholars expatriated to the United States and in thrall to the zeitgeist or to the need to give ideological hostages to their host institutions; a marketing technique on the part of publishers who release (too late) translations of the classics of postcolonial studies in an attempt to surf on the political passions of the moment; a way for African academics, anxious to turn over a new leaf by freeing themselves from their alma mater, to move on from the colonial past; or simply one example among others of the French- bashing that is de rigueur in our neoliberal age. Still, let us hear out the accusation with good grace and take up anew the examination of postcolonial studies to ensure it is relevant to the understanding of colonialism and its conse-quences or, more broadly, of the global world in which we live and from which

23. Romain Bertrand, Faire parler les subalternes ou le mythe du dvoilement, in Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 277.

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colonialism to some extent proceeds. This is what we must now consider from the strict point of view of the social sciences, leaving aside for the moment the hope for a critical postcolonial humanism, a hope that is invigorating but, at least at the onset, irrelevant. However, it appears that assessing the heuristic character or, conversely, the sterility of postcolonial investigations involves an examination of how it is adapted in France by its epigones. Where Indian subalternists attacked the epistemic dependence of the Third World and perhaps especially nationalism and nationalist historiography as avatars of colonialism, and where cultural stud-ies in North America extend the postmodern interpretation of globalization, the French proponents of post colonial studies tend to restrict it to a very Franco- French critique of the republic, of the genesis of citizenship and of the colonial legacy. Thus they remain tied to the blueprint of a national narrative, even if they do invert it. If Mbembe is correct to speak of cultural insularity and narcissism in connection with France, it is not clear that the new audience for postcolonial studies in France is any great help in that regard, given the way things are going.24 Any reconsideration of postcolonial studies must start with the original rather than the copy and first focus on what it has to tell us about the historicity of colonial-ism as such, about the historicity of our relation with colonialism in our so- called global world, and about the historicity of globalization itself.

Can We Think Colonialism despite Postcolonial Studies?

When read in the original, postcolonial studies has some advantage from this point of view and is useful. It encourages us not to let go of the phenomenon of colonialism despite its increasing distance from us. It feeds into the epistemologi-cal critique of the different forms of historicism (Chakrabarty) and mimicry (Homi Bhabha) that underlie the fashionable academic or political discourses on development, transition, reform. It characterizes colonial situations in terms of hegemony or lack of hegemony, as the ups and downs of a substantial argu-ment dictate. It helps to deconstruct portmanteau words and expressions, such as civil society, which is ahistorical by philosophical definition. It encourages us to rescue history from the nation and thus supports the parallel revision of the nationalist and teleological historiographies of the falls of the Ottoman, Haps-burg, Russian, and colonial empires scholarship that has made much progress in recent years.25 It reminds us that the nation- state is inseparable from Empire

24. Mongin, Lempereur, and Schlegel, Quest- ce que la pense postcoloniale? 121.25. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).


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26. Dionigi Albera and Mohamed Tozy, La Mditerrane des anthropologues: Fractures, filia-tions, contiguts (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2005), 25.

27. Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason.

and that the question of hegemony in the colonies, something it has debated, is inseparable from that of imperial hegemony in the metropolis, including in terms of relations of gender, class, or ethnic and religious identification.

But we must recognize that, for all its usefulness, postcolonial studies is largely unnecessary. Most of the issues it has explored had been explored previously or were simultaneously being investigated by other theories, which often managed to avoid the pitfalls into which postcolonial studies fell. Such convergences do not in the least rule postcolonial studies out of court, but they should somewhat devalue its current intellectual capital.

Postcolonial studies is questionable; it leads the study of colonial or postcolo-nial situations to a dead end, with the risk of a real scholarly regression in relation to the achievements of the past thirty years. It has not yet led to the more modest posture that has been adopted by anthropologists from both shores of the Medi-terranean, conscious of their need to put behind them the excesses of the frenzied critique of Mediterraneanism and scholarly nativism and able to take up their heritages, including that of colonial knowledge.26 The main failing that can be laid at the door of postcolonial studies is its adherence to the extreme forms of the cultural turn of the 1980s. Spivak had, however, cautioned against the limitations of the culturalist problematics of the fight against social exclusion and inequality and advocated for the deconstruction of Western conceptualizations of representation.27 But, paradoxically, this author has contributed a fair bit to that very same culturalist slide! Postcolonial studies does not address practices (which would be documented by fieldwork and archival research) as much as it attends to discourses and representations on the basis of which it waxes eloquent or makes often exaggerated overgeneralizations. Thus it gets trapped in the catastrophic concept of identity and reifies a postcolonial condition onto which it confers a quasi- ontological status in accordance with a kind of tropical or diasporic Calvin-ism: colonialism and slavery are the predestined fate of natives (and their master). In so doing, postcolonial studies leaves the field of scientific scholarship in the strict sense but still remains in thrall to its initial premises. In France, it contrib-utes, for instance, to ethnicizing the social and political issue of the suburbs and to posing a problem exclusively in terms of racism even though it also involves class struggle. And it does so at the risk of setting up a self- fulfilling prophecy. In Africa, it does not help the problem of slavery to free itself from the level of

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28. Ibrahima Thioub, Lhistoire vue dAfrique: Enjeux et perspectives, in Chrtien, LAfrique de Sarkozy, chap. 5; Jean- Franois Bayart, Les chemins de traverse de lhgmonie coloniale en Afrique de lOuest francophone, Politique africaine 105 (2007): 201 40.

29. Cooper, Colonialism in Question.30. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empire, droits et citoyennet, de 212 1946, Annales:

Histoire, sciences sociales 63 (2008): 515 16.

nationalist discourse, which obscures the servile social relations internal to sub- Saharan societies and reduces the legacy of the slave trade to an unambiguous denunciation of the West.28

The origin of this shift lies in two methodological errors: first, the dehistori-cizing of colonialism, which is reified, and, second, the dehistoricizing of con-tinuities and discontinuities or, more precisely, the links and the concatenation between the colonial moment and the postcolonial moment.

TheReificationoftheColonial

When it comes to the analysis of colonialism, postcolonial studies exaggerates its specificity in relation to other imperial forms and thus fails to understand its his-toricity by oversimplifying the way that it is singularized. It is now demonstrated that colonial empires were in some respects empires just like any others, and so they should be read in terms of the classic investigations that have led to the decoding of the latter.29 Moreover, colonial situations have evolved in very differ-ent ways, and yet postcolonial studies merges them by not distinguishing settle-ment colonies and slaving colonies from other kinds of colonies, even though these realities are at the heart of its concerns. People are not colonized, and there-fore postcolonized, in the same way in the Caribbean as they are in India not to mention the historical contingencies that soon explode these big classificatory categories, possession by possession, or the canonical contrast between a con-quering state, violent by nature and necessity, and a colonial State in the strict sense, which manifest the ethical imperatives of bureaucratic rationalization and economic intensification constitutive of a second occupation. We should also remember, following Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, that, after the Sec-ond World War, the French Union included no fewer than six separate legal enti-ties, irreducible to a binary structure of the type metropolis/colony.30 However, this lack of legal uniformity in the French Union was central to the postcolonial condition of those called, rather too hastily, the new French. Similarly, there are hardly any anthropologists or historians left who still believe in a generic defini-tion of slavery, a conceptual distinction that appears to leave the proponents of postcolonial studies quite unmoved.


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Postcolonial studies also shows a marked lack of interest in a variety of colonial or paracolonial situations, a consideration of which would have enriched its prob-lematic. It generally ignores the liberal and financial imperialism that was central to British history, as has been demonstrated by Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins including the experiences of the white colonies and the postcolonial situations of the dominions and the Latin American nation- states subjected to the hegemony of free trade;31 the Japanese colonial empire (1895 1945); Ottoman protocolonialism in some of its Arab provinces or even in Anatolia (but not in the Balkans); the colonial status of European territories such as Cyprus (from 1878, or, if one wants to be more precise, from 1914 to 1960) and the Dodecanese (from 1912 to 1947); the emergence of Indian colonialism within the British Empire or even maybe of Scottish or Irish colonialism in Quebec; and the assertion of new postcolonial forms of colonialism among African or Asian states. Postcolonial studies simultaneously spares itself the effort of making any precise or restrictive definition of the colonial, for which scaling would have had heuristic value.32 Witness Moses I. Finleys attempt to limit the concept to situations of non native settlement dependent on a metropolis and engaging in coercive appropriation of land; by this standard, the partition of Africa was not colonial in nature, even if Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Angola, and Algeria were real colonies, since they were settlement territories; and the Venetian Empire does not deserve this description either, despite the bureaucratic dependence of its provinces on the Serenissima, because it was based neither on settlement nor on agrarian extor-tion.33 It is thanks to this semantic carelessness that postcolonial studies can now claim to be relevant to situations whose colonial character is at the very least debatable as in the case of Zionism or else is quite absurd and can now set itself up as a metadiscourse with a universal vocation.

Nor can postcolonial studies be bothered to develop anything like a more pre-cise sociology of colonial domination. The actors in the latter were many and var-ied and often contradicted one another, impelled as they were by disparate inter-ests, values, and projects. Postcolonial studies do not realize, either, that colonial empires were moral spaces swayed by conflicts, if not wars, of subjectification or ethics. The colonial task saw itself as a moral conquest that would promote an

31. Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688 2000 (London: Longman, 1993).

32. Jacques Revel, Jeux dchelles: La micro- analyse lexprience (Paris: cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales, Gallimard, and Seuil, 1996).

33. Moses I. Finley, Colonies an Attempt at a Typology, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 26 (1976): 167 88.

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ethical administration.34 And it benefited from the collaboration of many of its subjects. Indeed, it would be politically legitimate, but historically anachronistic, to reduce this collaboration to betrayal or alienation, as Sartre does in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth.

This support for colonization on the part of the colonized is independent of the colonial project itself. It proceeds from a historicity that cannot be reduced entirely to the colonial project itself and draws on longer temporalities (dures) than its own. Thus the demand for dignity, central to nationalist movements in West Africa and recurrent in the social movements of immigrants in France, draws simultaneously on the centuries- old repertoires of honor, on their refor-mulation during the colonial period in the form of a working- class, military, or educational ethos, and on the ideology of the civilizing mission itself.35 This ambiguity, inherent in the colonial situation and its memory, is also found in the ways that the orientalism stigmatized by Said was developed. One of the major modes of colonial government was the invention of tradition, especially, but not exclusively, when it proceeded by co- opting former elites within the framework of indirect administration.36 Western scholars and local literati were combined to coproduce a perfect Tradition that nationalist movements then appropriated.37 The prosperity of Aryanism in South Asia and Iran, and of ethnic culturalism in sub- Saharan Africa, illustrates the vigor of these processes of ideological innova-tion and subjectification.

Basically, postcolonial studies is trapped in a contradiction noted by Cooper in 1994.38 Because it sees the subalterns as full actors, aware of their autonomy, it should also acknowledge the ability of these actors either to reverse the colonial domination that founds their subordination or to appropriate its modernity its political modernity in particular, in the form of the nation- state. The concept of appropriation must then be taken in its fully Marxist sense, as in the first Cri-

34. Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in South- East Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Romain Bertrand, tat colonial, noblesse et nationalisme Java: La tradition parfaite (Paris: Karthala, 2005).

35. John Iliffe, Honour in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).36. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1983).37. I borrow the expression perfect Tradition from the subtitle of Bertrand, tat colonial,

noblesse et nationalisme Java. See also Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowl-edge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauri-tania, 1880 1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Oxford, U.K.: James Currey, 2000).

38. Frederick Cooper, Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History, Ameri-can Historical Review 99 (1994): 1545.


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39. Karl Marx, Nationalkonomie und Philosophie, in Die Frhschriften, translated Gregor Benton in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 3rd MS, Private Property and Labour, www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm#s1 (accessed January 11, 2011).

40. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 212 (translation modified). See also Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 132, 144.

41. Romain Bertrand, Politiques du moment colonial: Historicits indignes et rapports verna-culaires au politique en situation coloniale, Questions de recherche 26 (2008): 12 15; Georges Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de lAfrique noire (Sociology of Black Africa) (Paris: Presses Univer-sitaires de France, 1955), 33, 62.

tique of Political Economy: the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man, this appropriation of human reality, which implies its transformation.39

Curiously enough, postcolonial studies reduces the action of subalterns to a ritual of affliction in the service of a morbid cult of redemptive suffering or, in the manner of the functionalist (and imperial) anthropology of Max Gluckman, see it as a mere ritual of rebellion ultimately reinforcing colonial and postcolonial domination. But the mimicry of the colonized that it denounces can just as eas-ily be read in terms of Gabriel Tarde and Deleuze:

The actualization of the virtual . . . always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation. Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any imitation of a pre- existing possibility.40

It should be remembered here echoing the reservations of Romain Bertrand vis- - vis the problematics that limit appropriation to a derivation of the colonial state and confine the agency of natives to a reactive register that the concept of appropriation designates perfectly well the positive and creative character of native investment in the colonial scene without assuming that their initiative (to employ the term used by Balandier in his Sociology of Black Africa) is limited to their interaction, whether of conflict or collaboration, with the foreign occupier or that their practice of the colonial state is limited to colonial reason.41 In other words, we must admit that the institution of the colonial State proceeds in part from the autonomous action of the colonized and from the historicity of the occu-pied societies, regardless of the actions, the plans, and the knowledge- power of the colonizer. The irreducibility of the colonized societies to the colonial situ-

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ation is, of course, defined in an elsewhere, off camera.42 But it is also found in the relation between societies and the colonial state. And it is in this autonomy of the social, including in its relation to the colonial state, that the historicity of the postcolonial state comes into being.

It follows that we can dismiss the objection that the concept of colonial state without political sovereignty would be inappropriate, except for situations of independence without decolonization, as for Latin America in the early nine-teenth century, Rhodesia during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or even Israel for some of the detractors of Zionism. In reality, the autonomy of the colonial state (and its successor) follows from the autonomy of the social, which it by no means abolishes and which it recognizes in its own way, even if this is by default or impotence. It also piggybacks on endogenous processes of state formation processes that it did not eradicate but rather reconstructed, ampli-fied, or founded, depending on the case, and through which colonial domination has sometimes crumbled. It is these conjoined, long- haul stories, of which the state is the focus, that need to be grasped, sometimes in their interaction, some-times in parallel.

AnAhistoricalSituationLeavesanAhistoricalLegacy

This brings us to a second methodological error in postcolonial studies. It pos-tulates a mechanical, unambiguous, and overdetermining reproduction of the colonial. And an ahistorical presentation of the colonial situation leaves us with an ahistorical legacy of the colonial. We are told nothing, via the intermediary of effective history (die wirkliche Historie), of the conditions for the possible transmission of this heritage, of the sociology of its universal legatees, of the changes that affect the situations of usage of certain practices or discourses that are supposed to have been exactly reproduced, of the morphological dimen-sion of certain permanent features that sometimes owe more to geography than to colonial domination; of the evaporation of aspects of the legacy within its very continuation, of the heterogeneity of the legacies of historically diverse and con-tingent colonialisms, of its ambiguity (Balandiers term), which is matched only

42. Bertrand, Politiques du moment colonial; and Bertrand, Les sciences sociales et le moment colonial: De la problmatique de la domination coloniale celle de lhgmonie imp-riale, Questions de recherche 18 (2006). It is in the same spirit that Cooper criticizes the thematics of resistance dear to the African nationalist historiography. Cooper, Conflict and Connection; Cooper, Africa and the World Economy, African Studies Review 24, nos. 2 3 (1981): 1 86.


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by that of the colonial situation itself.43 All this, curiously, is found in the writ-ings of historians and essayists who placed the plurality of space- times and the ambiguity of social phenomena at the heart of their preoccupations. The way postcolonial studies has drifted away from its initial ambitions is not unlike that of the Latin American school of dependency, which originally questioned the historicity of societies on the periphery, eventually reducing this to the historicity of the imperialist center in a grossly simplistic way.

But there is no lack of studies in France that sociologize the colonial legacy and the actual conditions of its transmission. In addition, the real question is not the (abstract and ontological) question of the relation between the postcolonial and the colonial but that of the link between the historicity of the one and the historicity of the other.

Finally, the link between the historicity of the colonial and the postcolonial cannot be abstracted from other dures, to which historians and sociologists must be attentive. Michel Samuel showed in 1978 how the condition of the black Afri-can proletariat in France was not simply part of the continuation of the colonial situation and the capitalist exploitation which that situation had fostered but also resulted from the longer- lasting split between social elders (ans sociaux) and youngsters (cadets sociaux), according to the terms of the articulation of modes of production dear to French Marxist anthropology.44 The imaginaire of African immigration to France is haunted not only by the racialist imagoes of colonial-ism or the Atlantic slave trade but also by representations of lineage or slavery that brought out the inequality characteristic of sub- Saharan societies, which was reconfigured in the colonial period.

The conclusion drawn from all this is a paradoxical one. The intuition of post-colonial studies that there is a direct, if not unbroken, line from colonial to post-colonial seems convincing. But the demonstration is false, when it is not simply absent or disturbing in the way it turns its back on the most elementary method-ological rules of the social sciences. The price to be paid for this indifference, or indeed this contempt or hostility, toward the autonomy of the academic field from political commitment is high.

So we must, in turn, raise the question of the continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial as claimed by postcolonial studies itself and ask to what extent it is not involved in the reproduction of colonial hegemony. This involves

43. Georges Balandier, Afrique ambigu (Paris: Plon, 1957). 44. Michel Samuel, Le proltariat africain noir en France (Paris: Maspero, 1978).

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particularly the reproduction of the identitarian categories arising from colonial hegemony, of colonial sociology as an administrative science of colonization and, more generally, of imperial culturalism as a major ideology of globaliza-tion over these past two centuries45 not, of course, without turning them upside down. Seen from this ironic angle, postcolonial studies appears as a great aca-demic carnival, a moment of emotional release that in no way endangers the ascendancy of the triumphant utilitarianism of rational choice theory in American and North Atlantic universities and which, in passing, allows them to co- opt the most brilliant troublemakers from the native elite, as has been wickedly pointed out by Dirlik and Appiah. We still need to identify what aspects of the colonial or postcolonial it prevents us from understanding.

For a New Road Map

If we are to wean ourselves away from nationalist ideology, as suggested by sub-altern studies, the best thing is definitely to put colonial empires back within the generic category of empires, as Cooper suggests, and not to isolate the way we analyze them from the general way historians investigate this political form, even if its definition and delimitation are in their view problematic. It then becomes a matter of understanding what it meant to think like an empire, accepting the historical ordinariness of this mode of political sovereignty; emphasizing, conversely, the lateness of the emergence of the nation- state in history; and not taking for granted the route from the one to the other, as the teleological inclina-tions of nationalist historiography would have us do.46

The real debate in a comparative historical sociology of colonization is thus the debate on the conditions of transition from empire to nation- state and espe-cially on the synergistic relationship between globalization and the nation- state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the role of incubators for the nation- state played by empires in their colonial versions and their classic con-figurations for example, the Ottoman, the Hapsburg, and the Russian- Soviet empires. The idea of the nation was contingent and often followed the collapse of the imperial framework. The fact can never be repeated enough: the nation- state arose from empire, not from the nation, and most often this bastard was not desired, except by a few perverse spirits.

45. Jean- Franois Bayart, Lillusion identitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1996); translated by Steven Ren-dall, Janet Roitman, Cynthia Schoch, and Jonathan Derrick as The Illusion of Cultural Identity (London: Hurst, 2005); Bayart, Global Subjects.

46. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, especially 200.


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None of this should deter us from separating out the uniqueness of the colonial mode from the imperial phenomenon. Several factors contributed to founding this colonial mode: the scientific racialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, capitalist globalization, the phenomena of identitarian shrink- wrapping that accompanied capitalist globalization in the guise of culturalism and nationalism, the universalization of the nation- state as a mode of political organization and sovereignty, and the power of the industrial and technological revolution and the idea of the masses that it engendered. But despite its civilizing pretensions and its outrageously coercive methods, the colonial empire could never be the Levia-than dreamed up by nationalist historiography or postcolonial studies. And this remains true even though it has often acted as a crazed demiurge, as a Gulliver unbound, as a breaker of rocks (Bula Matari, as he appears, terrifyingly, in the Congo), capable not only of penetrating the mountains and striding across rivers but also of submitting entire countries to compulsory collective vaccination with-out wondering too much about the health consequences of such campaigns, or of gathering and keeping peasants in villages while forcing them to undergo deadly and dehumanizing labor migrations.47

In its violence, it might these days be described as a weak state, whose func-tionaries and fiscal resources were insignificant in number and whose privatiza-tion comprised one of the sources of the minimum state as desired by multi lateral donors in the framework of the neoliberal programs of structural adjustment throughout the 1980s.48 Curiously, however, postcolonial studies, quite indiffer-ent to political economy, even in its more historical version, fails to mention this origin even though it could provide grist to its mill.49 So colonial government was an empire on the cheap.50 As for the grip and the systematic nature of colonial knowledge, they were quite relative. This is one reason why colonization was never able to level down the historicity characteristic of African or Asian societ-ies: the privatization of its indirect rule required the intermediation of native social and political forces whose position it often reinforced.

If we do not diminish the historicity of societies to their sole interaction with

47. I thank Peter Geschiere for drawing my attention to this paradox.48. Batrice Hibou, La privatisation des tats (Paris: Karthala, 1999); translated by Jonathan

Derrick as Privatizing the State (London: Hurst, 2004).49. One notable exception is Mbembe, who, in the line of work inspired by Batrice Hibou,

devotes an important chapter to indirect private government, in De la postcolonie (Paris: Karthala, 2000), chap. 2; translated by A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, and Steven Rendall as On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

50. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 157.

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the colonial state, as do some proponents of subaltern studies or of modes- of- production Marxist anthropology, we must think in nonutilitarian terms of pro-cesses and practices, abandoning a political sociology of actors, their agency, or their initiative, and the mirage of their intentional strategies. Ultimately, the problem- concept is less that of appropriation than the very fashionable concept of agency. E. P. Thompson one of the instigators, as we know, of subaltern studies specifically proposed linking the experience of repression to the opportunities for action available to the poor and excluded.51 The concept thus tends to restrict the subaltern to the interaction of the colonial situation even though subaltern studies aspired to restore the politics of the people in its autonomy. The conceptualization of colonial subjection in terms of subjectifica-tion appears to have heuristic merit from this viewpoint, provided the latter is not equated with an unambiguous discipline, as happens in so many works of neo- Foucauldian inspiration.52 Similarly, it is now impossible to continue to believe in the total nature, if not of the colonial situation, at least of its real domination. Its reign, though coercive, was fleeting and incomplete, not least because it was exercised on heterogeneous societies comprising a variety of space- times.

TheContingencyofColonialism

The historicity and the incompleteness of the colonial moment force us to focus on research areas that have not always been sufficiently explored.53 First, the con-tingency of colonialism, to which Cooper drew our attention long ago, implies that we account for modes of occupation in all their disparity, including different levels of duration and intensity, before we tackle its administrative organization and its political and legal form (colony, protectorate, dominion, concession, man-date, etc.).54 However, colonization was sometimes very brief and incomplete. There is, therefore, both a disjunction and a paradox between the power of over-determination that postcolonial studies attribute to the colonial moment, on the one hand, and the inconsistency and fragility of its historical incarnations, on the

51. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978), 280.52. Bayart, Global Subjects, chap. 4; Bayart, Illusion of Cultural Identity.53. The expression is found, for example, in the writings of Andrew Roberts, in The Colonial

Moment in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Personally, I use it in the same sense as Bertrand, espousing his desire to historicize and relativize the influence of the colonial situation as Balandier conceived it, in the form of a total social fact.

54. Cooper, Africa and the World Economy; and Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Planta-tion Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890 1925 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 56 57.


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other. Rather than stick to the study of the hard core of empires their metropo-lises, their administrative centers, their main population areas, their public poli-cies, colonial knowledge, plantations, et cetera and their potential postcolonial reproduction, we should now consider their peripheries: colonialism results from negotiations pursued by the overseas territories with the metropolis, but also from the lines of flight with which the metropolis must manage on its margins and which take the form of dissident fractions, migration, and smuggling and other types of fraudulent exchange.

Second, the colonial moment is based on building the short- or medium- term duration of the encounter and occupation into the long duration of local societies a long duration (longue dure) that transcends it and which it never manages to absorb. It should be noted also that the colonial moment, in its metro-politan aspect, refers simultaneously to the longer durations in European societies themselves for example, in the development of categories of sovereignty, creed, race, and gender, which are not invariants of Western culture, but ever- evolving historical constructions. It is indeed this superposition of times characteristic of all imperial formations that needs to be restored if we want to recognize the histo-ricity of the situations under consideration. The break represented by colonization was altogether relative, and the risk run by colonial (and postcolonial) studies is that they exaggerate its importance. The difficulty lies in understanding simulta-neously the irreducible incommensurability of the durations that constitute soci-eties in the colonial (or postcolonial) moment and the processes of formation of scales of commensurability that are inherent in imperial enterprises, irrespective of the concepts by which they are designated: hegemonic quest or hegemony, governmentality, colonial knowledge, or civilizing mission! We must take into account, on the one hand, the heterogeneity of the space- times that established empire and, on the other, the working misunderstandings that ensured inter-actions among its members.55 On the one hand, we have lines of flight from the colonial situation; on the other, we have the unprecedented centralization caused by the addition of capitalist exploitation and its productive forces to the bureau-cratic institutions of the colonial state. Today the historical and economic anthro-pology of the processes of value formation and the historical sociology of contact situations (and the actors in this contact) open up promising paths of research.56 But the task is difficult. Indeed, the interplay of commensurability and incom-

55. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).56. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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mensurability operates on different levels: for instance, on the order of the discur-sive and legal domains, of military force or police, but also in the order of belief, economic and monetary exchange, material culture, techniques of the body, and even of the senses, since the skin and the cooking of the colonized and colo-nizer are objects of desire, pleasure, or repulsion, and the smell of the native, for example, is repellent to the white person (and vice versa). Between one order and the other, there are disjunctions. Here, as we see, the diptych colonizer/colonized betrays its fundamental poverty.

ImperialHegemonicTransactions

From this twofold point of view, the operative concept becomes imperial hege-monic transaction.57 Empires should always balance the incorporation of peo-ples and territories with the differentiation that maintained the power and mean-ing of the coherence of the elite.58 They were in a position to garner the loyalty and identification of their subjects, but more often they coaxed them through con-tingent and shortsighted accommodations. An empire is thus based on co- option as much as on occupation and on support as well as submission. It is a mode of domination (Herrschaft) that generates obedience, rather than a simple regime or system of force or might (Macht). It does indeed consist in a certain gov-ernmentality, at the intersection of techniques for domination over others and techniques of the self, or in the hegemony of a consensus, as defined respec-tively by Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. The voluntary servitude that it sets up is based on the intermediation of social institutions and conformist elites and on the sharing of third languages, which serve as vehicles for intermediation. These third languages are the result not simply of discourse and knowledge but also of the imaginaire, of material culture and the techniques of the body: pai-deia and humanitas in antiquity, adab in the Ottoman Empire, tapa in Java, the gentlemanly nature of British financial imperialism, and civilization in French colonial Africa.

The advantage of seeing colonial empires as empires and therefore as noth-ing special is that we avoid the normative characterization of their constitutive hegemonic transactions and thus avoid seeing them simply as a lie, as Fanon and Sartre put it. Thanks to historians and anthropologists, we are now well aware of the institutions and social groups that carried (tragen, in Max Webers term) the

57. Bertrand, Les sciences sociales et le moment colonial, 30 34; Jean- Franois Bayart and Romain Bertrand, De quels legs colonial parle- t- on? Esprit, December 2006, 154 58.



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third languages of colonization and their life conduct (Lebensfhrung). Coloni-zation relied on cultural, political, and administrative intermediaries in the frame-work of indirect rule and in the army, hospitals, schools, businesses, plantations, Christian missions, and the Islamic brotherhoods. And, it is worth repeating, this involved the bodies of protagonists as much as their speech. It was a matter of desire and fear, of pleasure and suffering as much as reason, knowledge, and cal-culation. In its way, postcolonial studies says all this, but remains confined to the order of discourse on the body rather than its real practices, as is consistent with the approach of cultural studies, and fails to understand the ambiguity of what the great historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown, calls styles of social exchange, with their elements of moral, material, and physical aesthetic.59 Furthermore, it reduces the historicity of the colonized society to its interaction with the colonial state, without noting what it conceals or noting the dialogical relation of the colo-nial field with independent social durations. One can thus justifiably say that the ideas of development and nationalism, and indeed the representation of immi-gration in the Western world, are derivatives of colonial hegemony and contribute to its reproduction.60 However, these ideas of development and nationalism also refer to a prior moral economy of prosperity, justice, inequality, and power, which informs them and establishes the autonomy of the colonial state (and its memory) vis- - vis the colonial situation. To analyze these configurations, we cannot stick to the static and binary vision of a tte- - tte reified in its very essence between colonizer and colonized, as a more or less dramatic (and always ahistorical) zero- sum game, in the indulgent manner of postcolonial studies. Better to take into con-sideration the processes, or sometimes the real social movements, through which imperial hegemonic transactions are negotiated diachronically: for example, the emergence of the brotherhood- based Republic of Senegal through a compromise between the colonial authorities and the Mourid social revolution in the early twentieth century and the political integration of former captives that it enabled. Any continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial arises not from begging the ontological principle but from a demonstration that brings out the concrete links treated by effective history. Of course, these links are even more complex than we have thus far indicated. The colonial situation is many- leveled and does

59. Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.

60. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).

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not cover the totality of the societies that it subjects, but it is also dependent on other colonial or imperial situations, concomitant or anterior. Where postcolonial studies see colonialism as one- dimensional, restricting it to an exclusive relation-ship between the colonized and the colonizer and the colonizers metropolis, what prevails is actually a clearly multidimensional situation. Colonial empires first experienced an internal traffic of people, ideas, beliefs, policies, and property, on a transcontinental and intercontinental scale. Their metropolitan functionaries had no monopoly on these administrative peregrinations that were one of the marks of imperial distinction and competence and for which some territories Algeria for the French, India for the British were more or less obligatory points of passage. Native traders and executives also moved from one possession to another in the course of their lives and careers, and certain colonies or towns set themselves up as preferred channels of recruitment. From the nineteenth century on, the colonial authorities were even obsessed by the danger incarnated in their eyes by float-ing populations and interlopers (the former empires or merchant companies of the mercantilist age, they were multi- national and multi- ethnic or even, at least in the case of the Ottoman Empire, multi- confessional). It is therefore wrong to compare empires to wheels whose radii lead to the center, so that the periph-ery can communicate only with the center or via its intermediary.61 In addition, the peripheries of the imperial provinces or the provinces on the peripheries of empires were often border zones where political sovereignties, cultural influences, markets, and populaces all overlapped.

Ultimately, the European, American, Russian- Soviet, and Japanese, or indeed Ottoman, colonial empires were veritable echo chambers. Ideologies, administra-tive models, religious beliefs, goods, techniques of the body, people of science and faith, functionaries, and merchants constantly explored their spaces, from one territory to another, and also from one empire to another, against a background of national rivalries, economic competition, police cooperation, racial commu-nion, and even comparative colonial policy or pancolonialism, of which the International Colonial Institute, founded in Brussels in 1894 on the initiative of the Frenchman Joseph Chailley- Bert, was the first major institution, before the debate was carried in a more aggressive and polemical way into the heart of the worldwide associative movement, the Congress of Versailles, the League of Nations, the International Labour Office, and the United Nations. Colonialism was a global machine, instead of a series of national monads in the nets of which

61. Alexander Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 4.


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postcolonial natives remained trapped. Curiously, postcolonial studies, a prisoner of the national narrative of the colonial situation and its offspring, barely raises the question of this first multilateral system of modern globalization.

Moreover, the Western and Japanese imperialism of the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries had to deal with other empires that existed before it or that it helped to create. Again, the advantage of showing that the colonial version of imperial-ism was commonplace lies in the demonstration that it is always a combination of diverse elements. Such was the case with the galaxy of Greek cities, in symbiosis with Achaemenid Asia Minor, then the Roman Empire, faced with the Hellenic and Persian worlds. This was also the kind of configuration from which emerged the Russian Empire or the Chinese Qing dynasty, on the margin of successive Mongol empires.62 As for the East India Company, it carved out its mercantile empire at the interface of the British Crown and the Mogul Empire. In particu-lar, imperialism proceeds by the concatenation of one historical formation with another, and the problematic of the colonial legacy, which obsesses postcolonial studies, must reflect this diachronic complexity better than it has managed thus far. The Ottoman Empire was an heir of Byzantium, but so was the republican empire of Venice. France, the United Kingdom, and Italy superimposed their sov-ereignty or dominion on those of the Ottoman Empire in Algeria and Tunisia; in Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and the Dodecanese; and then in the Mashreq. Paris, Lon-don, and Pretoria shared out German possessions in Africa after the First World War. Imperial projects drew sustenance from European imperial expansion in Asia and Africa, along with Oman in the Indian Ocean or Samory and his state in West Africa, and the Ottoman Empire borrowed the colonial European model so as to rationalize its rule in Iraq, Libya, and the Sudan. The Russian and later Soviet Empire annexed provinces of the Ottoman and Qajar empires. The Euro-pean colonial empires were able, here and there, to outsource the administration of their sovereignty not just to local authorities under the system of indirect rule but rather to actual sub- imperialisms, like that of India in the Indian Ocean an India, in other words, that was both colonizer and colonized. They were also faced with the autonomy and dynamism of trading interests and diasporic networks that came to hunt on their lands or circumvented their propensity to control the move-ment of goods and people: for example, Portugal was confronted by the power of Brazilian traders on the Angolan coast; Great Britain and the Netherlands, by the mobility of Yemenis from both sides of the Indian Ocean; and France, the United

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Kingdom, and Portugal, by the establishment of the Syro- Lebanese and Greeks south of the Sahara.

These effects of concatenation significantly complicate both the colonial and the postcolonial moments. The legacy social, economic, political, and mne-monic of colonization is thus a tangled skein. To unravel this, it is not the pro-ponents of postcolonial studies but those of connected history who can provide a convincing answer, even if their favorite subject is the mercantilist modern age rather than the colonial or postcolonial moment.

If we now move on from the problem of connection to address that of leg-acy, in the Weberian sense of the term,63 the most convincing way of bringing out the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial and the postcolo-nial seems ultimately to have been that of comparative historical sociology. This approach is particularly well suited to trace the singular itineraries of practices, interests, or social groups: for example, that of the Greek Orthodox or Jewish Dodecanese communities who fled from poverty and Ottoman imperial domina-tion, then Italian colonialism, settling in southern Africa and Katanga; that of soap in Rhodesia; or that of clothes in India.64 Comparative social history can also involve identifying, across time, the procedures and scenarios of the production of social and political inequality so as to conceptualize a whole variety of concepts, such as primitive accumulation, passive revolution, social revolution, con-servative modernization, and the molecular process of reciprocal assimilation of segments of the elite.65 Historical sociology also considers political sequences, for example, in terms of the centralization of the state, in the way that Tocqueville did in The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, or the concatenation of the Islamic, Ottoman, colonial, nationalist, and neoliberal thematics of reform in a country like Tunisia.66 But the comparative historical sociology of politics derives most of its strength from its commerce with history, anthropology, and political economy.

63. See Stephen Kalberg, Max Webers Comparative- Historical Sociology (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1994), in particular 159 92.

64. Benjamin Rubbers, Faire fortune en Afrique: Anthropologie des derniers colons du Katanga (Paris: Karthala, 2009); Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consump-tion, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996).

65. See, e.g., Jean- Franois Bayart, Ltat en Afrique. La politique du ventre (Paris: Fayard, 2006), translated by Nancy Harper, Christopher Harrison, Elizabeth Harris, and Stephen Ellis as The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2009).

66. Batrice Hibou, La force de lobissance: Economie politique de la rpression en Tunisie (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2006), translated by Andrew Brown as The Force of Obedience: Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2011).


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It seems surreal to continue to talk of the colonial legacy in the case of Africa, or of the relationship between Africa and its former colonial metropolises, or indeed the presence of the empire in the bosom of the republic, without, for instance, taking into account the work done by Jane Guyer on the Atlantic economy and its historical system of value formation.67 When compared with the breakthroughs that the social sciences have made over the past few years, the morose repetitive meanderings of postcolonial studies are sterile.

Hegemony,Coercion,Extraversion

The central preoccupation of postcolonial studies is the hegemony of the West, both at the level of the episteme and in terms of political or economic domination, considered together with the autonomy of subalterns with respect to this hege-mony. As we have seen, subaltern studies immediately took this as its object, and now the reproduction of discursive and identity- based categories of colonialism characterizes much current work in postcolonial studies. And yet neither trend managed to solve the problems it has raised because it has failed to clarify the theoretical questions of the relations between extraversion and coercion, on the one hand, and hegemony and the reproduction of hegemony, on the other. It is clear that the colonial moment was a moment of cultural extraversion and that it rested on the intensive use of coercion. But this coercion is not contradictory with the emergence of hegemony, and the extraversion of colonized societies cannot be reduced to the relation between the colonized and the colonial situation or the mere logic of alienation or mimicry.

Physical coercion can be a vector of hegemony and not just a compensation for, or an avowal of, its failings, as a simplistic reading of Gramsci might lead us to believe. In Africa, the intensive use of the whip seems to have played a large part in fabricating hegemony and the exercise of legitimate domination, rather than the mere imposition of a state of force.68 From this point of view, the way that post-colonial studies interpret the disciplinary institutions of the colonial situation the plantations, the prisons, forced labor, conscription, sport, corporal punish-ment, even torture is too one- way and thus too impoverished, even though Chakrabarty comes close to formulating matters correctly when he insists on the undemocratic foundations of democracy on which the modern Western state

67. Jane Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

68. Jean- Franois Bayart, Hgmonie et coercition en Afrique subsaharienne: La politique de la chicotte, Politique africaine 110 (2008): 123 52.

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69. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 44. 70. Mamadou Diouf, The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of the Origi-

naires of the Four Communes (Senegal): A Nineteenth- Century Globalization Project, Develop-ment and Change 29 (1998): 671 96.

71. Terence O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890 1970: The Beni Ngoma (London: Heinemann, 1975).

(and its overseas offshoots) prides itself. He rightly says that this coercion is both originary/foundational (that is, historic) as well as pandemic and quotidian.69 But this is precisely the point: domination and hegemony were established through this violence: thanks to it, and not in spite of it. In the Four Communes of Senegal, the indigenous civility that provided one of the cultural repertories of inter-mediation and compromise between the colonial state and the Sufi brotherhoods was thus forged in a slave society: here, conscription was the mode of access to French citizenship.70 Everywhere in Africa, public health gave birth to veritable medical fraternities between whites and blacks and was met with the support of patients in the African subcontinent, at the same time as it implemented coercive vaccination campaigns that left a traumatic mark on the social imaginaire and to which the AIDS pandemic is sometimes attributed. In the British Empire, as is well known, cricket stirred up considerable enthusiasm even though it was one of the pillars of the segregationist society. Empire for empire, the category of race, lying at the basis of social inequality and relegation, was negotiated day after day, as well as imposed and shared. And it fostered and sustained alliances between the whites and different native social groups, such as the Moors of Senegambia or the Mauritanian desert (against the blacks) or the Tutsis of the Great Lakes (against the Hutus), alliances inherited by postcolonial states. Finally, discussions about potential independence on the basis of a new third language (that of the nation and development) were undertaken via the repression of nationalist move-ments, for instance in Kenya and Malaysia. Coercion was indeed a component in the imperial hegemonic transaction, not a substitute for it.

Likewise, cultural extraversion, of which the colonial movement was a major vehicle, does not contradict the historicity of colonized societies and provides them with a repertoire of subjectification that is all the more seductive in that it precedes, transcends, and envelops colonial reason, instead of being a mere ema-nation of it. Cultural extraversion can even on occasion contradict the colonial movement. For example, it was not uncommon that Africans appropriated West-ern material culture or techniques of the body, such as clothing and military drills, against the wishes and desires of the colonial authorities and Christian missions, following considerations that had little to do with the European presence.71 Dog-


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matically, we can see in this paradox the pinnacle of alienation. Sociologically and historically, this still needs to be proven and leaves untouched one undeniable fact: hegemony, which is doubtless, by philosophical definition, a system of alien-ation, makes capital out of extraversion, and not just in situations of dependence, since Rome thought of itself in Greek. Postcolonial studies prides itself on being able to read the hearts and minds of native peoples. Maybe. But when it comes to their intimate lives, or even their intimate Enemy, as Ashis Nandy puts it in the title of his book, postcolonial studies does not emerge from the dependentist and nationalist dogma from which it claimed to have broken free.72

Conclusion

The Copernican revolution that postcolonial studies hoped to bring about still lies ahead. If we wish to understand the historicity proper to different societies by emancipating ourselves from the historicism of the Western episteme and never has this task been more imperative we need first to liberate our problem-atics from the colonial interaction to which postcolonial studies persists in con-signing them. Colonization was a moment of connection violent, iniquitous, and traumatic. Nonetheless, it did not annul the moral and political economy of the societies that it subjected, nor did it totally absorb it. So the yardstick of our arguments should not be the systematic nature of the colonial system, or even that of the void that its plenum never managed to control, which leads to insistence on practices of resistance, flight, hijacking, and subversion, to which decidedly unsubmissive natives have resorted. Instead, we need to set out from the positivity of historic societies and thus show how they came through the colo-nial moment and brought about the autonomy of the colonial state and its potential hegemony with regard to the colonial situation. In other words, the colonial state owes its epithet (anecdotal and in any case contingent) only to the period that saw it emerge and not to its essence. In fact, it is defined largely by dimensions other than that of the interaction between the colonized and the colonizer.

Once the colonial moment has become historical, it inhabits the consciousness of those who have survived it or were born after it had faded away. But the rela-tion that both the former and the latter have with the colonial moment is a relation of enunciation and not of determination. We remain the prisoners of the his-toricism we denounce when we affirm that postcolonials belong to the colony,

72. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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instead of seeing the representation of the colony as the effect of its polemical appropriation by postcolonials. In France, the Natives of the Republic invented the colony out of their nightmares, and also out of their dreams in other words, from their struggle against exclusion, social injustice, and ordinary racism. This myth of postcolonial nationhood, which has its equivalents in India and Latin America, is politically legitimate. But it tells us nothing about what the colonial moment really was.

The myth of the colony would be, for the suburbs, what the myth of the Cathars was for the south of France: a political invention of tradition an invention that is historically inept. And the danger for postcolonial studies is that of becoming an alterconservatisme (alter-conservatism),73 persisting in consigning native peoples to a fantasized colonial condition, when Csaire appealed to the right to history rather than to the duty of memory.74 It is the unamiable role of the social sci-ences to remind us of this fact.

73. I have borrowed this expression from Jean- Pierre Chrtien, in LAfrique de Sarkozy, 26. 74. Following the Caribbean writer Daniel Maximin quoting Aim Csaire in LExpress (Paris),

May 7, 2009, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/daniel-maximin-hair-c-est-encore-dependre _823480.html

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Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? (2011)

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