On postcolonialism

Dane Kennedy very nicely summaries the contributions of postcolonialism to history as threefold: “identities, geographies, and epistemologies.”[1] The clearest of these three factors is identities, and it’s here that we see reverberation with other historical approaches, particularly those “from below,” and with postmodernism generally. The second, geographies, addresses “the spatial assumptions or geographies that informed how most historians plied their trade.”[2] Here, among the big names is Edward Said, whose Orientalism began a dialogue about how western historians have typically imagined and thus constructed “the east” in their works. Although Said was primarily a literary scholar, with the context of postmodernism, in which historical “texts” could include novels and poetry, the spread to history was apparent.

The concern with geographies also contributed to giving a voice to the subaltern in so far as it de-emphasized the metropole and its people in favor of the native viewpoint. Finally, the emphasis on epistemologies seems to by and large be concerned with reconsidering colonialism and imperialism from historical contexts other than Enlightenment-era liberalism. Here, the subaltern scholars in particular draw on Marx, although the postmodernists are also fodder here since decontextualizating colonialism similarly requires detaching it from modernity and modernization.

The text I decided to include here as an example of postcolonial history is the collection Genocides by the Oppressed, edited by Adam Jones and Nicholas Robins. Here, the authors elaborate on the phenomenon of “subaltern genocide,” in which the formerly colonized exterminate the previous colonizers and settlers, as well as cases like Rwanda and Cambodia, in which the formerly colonized turn on their own populations, inspired by western ideas like Marxism or racial supremacy. What’s curious about this subspecialty, to me, are two things: first, that so few of the authors are themselves from postcolonial societies; and second, how the very notion of genocide as a concept, created by a European Jew (Rafael Lemkin), continues the imposition of western modes of thinking on the postcolonial world. Perhaps this can be expanded to a larger comment on postcolonial history, but I don’t really know enough about it to say for sure.

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[1] Dane Kennedy, “Postcolonialism and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Graham Huggan (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford UP, 2013), 467.

[2] Ibid, 474.