Bayart 2011 Postcolonial Studies a Political Invention of Tradition

8/13/2019 Bayart 2011 Postcolonial Studies a Political Invention of Tradition

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Postcolonial Studies:

A Political Invention of Tradition?

Jean-Franois Bayart

Translation by Andrew Brown, revised by Janet Roitman

Over the past few years, and perhaps even the past fewmonths, in the wake of the unrest that hit the French suburbs in 2005, the terms

postcolonialandpostcolonialityhave become common currency in intellectualand political debate. Scholarly and academic circles are no longer immune tothe controversy that these terms have triggered.1However, these words have notbeen fully explained indeed, even the simple question of their spelling remainsunclear. Should we write postcolonial or post-colonial? It all depends, saysAkhil Gupta: postcolonial to describe what comes chronologically after col-onization, and post-colonial when we need to think the postcolonial as allthat proceeds from the fact of the colonial situation, regardless of temporality.2When 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 conditionof what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively

Public Culture23:1 doi10.1215/08992363-2010-016

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

This article owes much to my exchange of ideas with Romain Bertrand, who also kindly readand commented on the first draft, and to the remarks and suggestions of Mohamed Tozy and PeterGeschiere. 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 theResearch Department of the French Development Agency in 2005 6.

1. See Marie-Claude Smouts, ed.,La situation postcoloniale: Les postcolonial studies dans ledbat 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 ofconsideration for the reader, I will not observe this convention in the rest of this ar ticle.


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small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediatethe 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 situationwhich is actually shared byall our contemporaries a definition that tends to identify it with globalizationWe are all, in different ways, in a postcolonial situation.4This postcoloniasituation would thus be a total social fact, like the colonial situation invokedby Balandier in his seminal article of 1951; it is a situation that substantiates theimportance of the colonial period in the process of globalization undergone in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries.5It is in this second sense that the compradorintelligentsia originating in the Third World and Western-style, now withwhite disciples in its train sees the colonial situation and its reproduction asthe origin and cause of contemporary social relations, whether of class, genderor community membership both in the former colonies and in the former metro-politan centers. Thus French historians have over the past few years focused ondeciphering their society through the prism of the colonial legacy by attributingthe 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. Theimaginary figures of Arab and African immigrants to France have been their firsobjects 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 therevolution, in terms of colonization, which so they claim immediately undermined the purported universalism of both these phenomena, being consubstantia

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 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149, quoted in Jacques Pouchepadass, Le projet critique des

postcolonial studiesentre 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 ofGlobalization(Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007), chap. 4; Georges Balandier, La situation colonialeApproche thorique, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie11 (1951): 44 79.

6. See, e.g., Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et ltat colonia

(Paris: Fayard, 2005); Grandmaison, La rpublique impriale: Polit ique et racisme dtat(ParisFayard, 2009); and Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds.,La fracture coloniale: La socit franaise au prisme de lhritage colonial(Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005). Sociadivide 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 asNatives 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 consequenceof this.7

A River with Many Tributaries

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

Postcolonial studies, moreover, are inseparable from a number of social move-ments through which have been proclaimed, urbi et orbi, the agency and theempowerment 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 GayatriChakravorty Spivak.8

It follows that there is neither any postcolonial theory nor any precise definitionof the termpostcolonialorpost-colonial. Postcolonial studies is heterogeneous,including from the viewpoint of the critique of postcolonial reason, as two ofits principal heralds, Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, explain convincingly: theformer radically rejects the epistemic violence of the West; the latter concludeshis major book Provincializing Europeby indicating that it cannot be a matterof throwing out Western thought, a gift to us all, and that it should be spoken

of only in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude.9This intellectual configuration,writes the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe (who is generally seen as partof this movement, though he does not entirely claim it), is characterized by itsheterogeneity and is a fragmented thinking which constitutes its strength, butalso its weakness.10In 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 lrepostcoloniale,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 Chakrabar ty, 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 violenceinherent to a particular idea of reason and the gap which, in colonial conditionsseparates European ethical thinking from its practical, political, and symbolicdecisions. This aim is meant to inspire the social sciences in the deconstructionof its constitutive categories. On the other hand, postcolonial studies assumes anormative, philosophical, and even prophetic scope, insisting on the humanity tocome, the humanity that must arise once the colonial figures of inhumanity andracial difference have been abolished. But the key thing is not to blind oneself tothe 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 toinstrumentalize it in their struggles or to discredit it from an academic standpointThis universalism stems from the experience of the diaspora, whether IndianAfrican, or Caribbean, but also from intercontinental intellectual exchanges overwhich Western universities no longer have a monopoly although undoubtedlysome of them are the main institutions of postcolonial studies. And yet neitherpostcolonial studies itself nor scholarly critique of it have managed to erase aninitial ambiguity. In the works of its theorists, the desire for universalism oftenturns into a discourse of identity, and the status (philosophical or scholarly) of itstexts frequently remains uncertain, which makes them difficult to comment onor to use.

There is thus an ambiguity and heterogeneity in postcolonial studies. Andwhen we gauge the extent to which it has fragmented, when we swim down thisriver with many tributaries, we may well start to think that in reality it existsmainly 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, aspostcolonial studies have now taken all situations of dominance through the agesas 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 facethe 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 andradio broadcasts, there is a widespread opinion that French academics reject thisapproach out of provincialism, out of conservatism, out of a refusal to look theFrench colonial past in the face, or, worse, out of a shameful compromise with

the racialist imaginaire(imaginary) that it is claimed is constitutive of therepublic. 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 theidentity, of the accused. Faithful to its habits, postcolonial studies essentializesFrance 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 ontrial? If so, the suburbs, full of natives, are part of it. Or is it the French politicalclass that is on trial? But if so, it does not speak with a unanimous voice. Or is itthe French university system that is on trial? A system that has never been a havenof theoretical harmony. Is the latter being criticized for not taking into consid-eration the epistemological critique that postcolonial studies purveys, as well asits presumed ability to decenter the questionnaire of the humanities, to set upother questions and other forms of knowledge at the very heart of academia?12Has French academia failed to detect the colonial continuities in peoples imagi-nations and behavior?13Or has it failed to take up the hope for a new critical andpolycentric humanism? Or is French academia quite simply reluctant to speak anew global pidgin, thereby contributing to the image of a France marginalized onthe international scene, timidly wrapped up in its specific concept of the culturalexception, confined to an altermondialiste(alter-globalist) siege mentality? Oris it staying aloof from the civic rituals of affliction that now substitute for realengagement and where, to packed houses, people put on performances of its allthe 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 preventus from asking whether French scholars might have good reasons notto 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 primaryinfection as a child for not becoming tubercular in later life. After all, as theproponents of postcolonial studies freely admit, these studies owe much not onlyto French theory but also, and above all, to the intellectual, literary, artistic, andpolitical trends that seized on the colonial question in France in the 1950s. Severalnames come immediately to mind: Aim Csaire and his Discourse on Colo-nialism, Lopold Sdar Senghor and the Oeuvres potiques, Albert Memmi andhis 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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andBlack Skin, White Masks, not to mention the virulent prefaces that Jean-PauSartre wrote for these last two authors.

On the one hand, the essential questions of postcolonial studies are alreadyfound in the works of these writers. It is difficult to express more violence towardcolonialism than these founding fathers did by advocating or legitimizing armedstruggle and terrorism which, in the context of the Algerian war, was no merefigure of style. If we read Sartres preface to The Wretched of the Earth lealone the essay itself Spivak comes off as a bit of a bridesmaid! Those Frenchwho, like Molires Monsieur Jourdain inLe bourgeois gentilhomme, practicedpostcolonial studies without knowing it, were forced to confront political andethical dilemmas that were much harder and more painful than those that nowhaunt their heirs who are not particularly anxious to decide whether or not toact 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, introduced 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 theSorbonne and popularized it within Islamo-leftist circles. Edward Said himselfacknowledged his debt to Raymond Schwab, the author of The Oriental Renaissance. The problem thus splits in half. We first need to ascertain the qualitativecontribution of postcolonial studies: what does it contribute that is distinct fromthe work done by French predecessors? Next we need to decide whether this veinhas continued in France (possibly in a different form) or whether and under whaconditions it has terminated.

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

14. I am deliberately using the term French literaturefollowing the example of Salman Rushdie

who sees himself as part of English literature, that is, literature in the English language, anddefinitely 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 ChakravortySpivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? inMarxism 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 ofPostcolonial 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 studiesbenefited from the tremendous theoretical germination that took place in Francein 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 circlesaround Raymond Aron, at the heart of the French academic establishment. Simi-larly, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote in the aftermath of the Second WorldWar 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 colonialconquest and domination.16Actually, the matre penser(mentor) of the liberalRight in France, Alexis de Tocqueville, who legitimized the ravaging of Alge-ria, had from the start sensed the possible relationship between colonial violenceand the establishment of a despotic regime in mainland France.17So, from thispoint of view, postcolonial studies is really rather superfluous. As for the critiqueof the orientalist gaze, it is already fiercely present in the marvellous prefacethat Sartre wrote to a volume of photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson inChina: The idea of what is Chinese recedes and pales: it is no longer any morethan a convenient label [appellation commode]. What remain are human beingswho resemble each other in that they are human beings living presences offlesh and blood, who have not yet been given their appellation contrle. We mustbe grateful to Cartier-Bresson for his nominalism.18

More important, if not more recently, postcolonial thinking has reminded uswith welcome alacrity that race constitutes . . . the wild area of European human-ism, its beast.19This charge already lay at the center of Sartres and Fanons

denunciation of colonialism, but there has been a tendency, over time, to thinkthat it has become anachronistic. The disastrous speech given by Nicolas Sarkozyat the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar on July 26, 2007 such a travestyin its content that one wonders whether the presidents acte manqu (subcon-sciously deliberate mistake) did not inadvertently show that postcolonial studieswas 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 fantasiesis 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 hadnoted in 1951, showing them to have the character of a total social fact, butwhich were then, so it is claimed, neglected by political scientists, historiansand anthropologists, as even someone who despises postcolonial studies, Fred-erick Cooper, puts it?21Things are more complicated. In the discreet fields ofthe French university system and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique(CNRS) research laboratories, historical research on Empire has continued to thegeneral 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 contingencircumstances: the encounter among practices of memory that mark the contem-porary moment of globalization, the need to renew the discourse and mobilizationof activists disaffected by urban social movements toward the Socialist Party, thesensitivities of a stratum of junior parliamentarians in the National Assemblyand the instrumentalization of the past for the purposes of legitimization on thepart of some African states, especially Algeria.22The sudden popularity of post-colonial studies in some circles at the interface between activism and academiais partly to be explained by this sudden piece of good luck. But this popularityis an effect and not a cause of the revival in colonial studies. It should notovershadow the permanent presence in France, ever since decolonization, of away 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 toanalyze colonial situations in the tradition of their illustrious predecessors (JeanSuret-Canale, Charles-Andr Julien, and Charles-Robert Ageron) while recastingthe themes and approaches of their discipline. Nor should it ignore the contribu-tion of political sociologists who, since the 1970s, have assiduously investigatedthe colonial and postcolonial state in Africa and Asia.

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

20. Achille Mbembe, Lintarissable puits aux fantasmes, in LAfrique de Sarkozy: Un dn

dhistoire, ed. Jean-Pierre Chrtien (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 91.21. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 53 54.

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


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

At the same time, the diagnosis that French academia failed to take intoaccount work done in subaltern studies, cultural studies, or postcolonial studiesseems totally wrong, for factual reasons.23As early as the 1980s, and tirelesslythroughout the 1990s, the authors representing these currents were invited, at leastto Paris, by research centers at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales,the Centre dtudes et de recherches internationales atthe Institut dtudes poli-tique de Paris, and the cole normale suprieure and were widely quoted anddiscussed. If the graft did not take, this is not for lack of knowledge but for otherreasons that are not necessarily shameful or due to hostile bias. It may simplyreflect a different configuration of the scholarly field invested by other criticaltraditions inspired by Marxism, Foucault, and Bourdieu or simply by a differenthistoriographical trend. This is a difference that postcolonial studies shouldendorse 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 stigmatizationof French backwardness, a set of rather problematic issues: a niche strategy on thepart of scholars after a share of the academic market; a form of flirtation halfwaybetween Americanophile snobbery and French masochism; a way of reinventingthe figure (a very French figure, after all) of the intellectual committed to thestruggle for justice, the intellectuel engag(public intellectual); a manifestation

of the conformism of the migrant found in French or French-speaking scholarsexpatriated to the United States and in thrall to the zeitgeist or to the need to giveideological hostages to their host institutions; a marketing technique on the part ofpublishers who release (too late) translations of the classics of postcolonial studiesin an attempt to surf on the political passions of the moment; a way for Africanacademics, anxious to turn over a new leaf by freeing themselves from their almamater, to move on from the colonial past; or simply one example among others ofthe French-bashing that is de rigueur in our neoliberal age. Still, let us hear outthe accusation with good grace and take up anew the examination of postcolonialstudies 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,Lasituation postcoloniale, 277.


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colonialism to some extent proceeds. This is what we must now consider from thestrict point of view of the social sciences, leaving aside for the moment the hopefor a critical postcolonial humanism, a hope that is invigorating but, at least at theonset, irrelevant. However, it appears that assessing the heuristic character orconversely, the sterility of postcolonial investigations involves an examination ohow it is adapted in France by its epigones. Where Indian subalternists attackedthe epistemic dependence of the Third World and perhaps especially nationalismand nationalist historiography as avatars of colonialism, and where cultural studies in North America extend the postmodern interpretation of globalization, theFrench proponents of postcolonial studies tend to restrict it to a very FrancoFrench critique of the republic, of the genesis of citizenship and of the colonialegacy. Thus they remain tied to the blueprint of a national narrative, even if theydo invert it. If Mbembe is correct to speak of cultural insularity and narcissismin connection with France, it is not clear that the new audience for postcolonialstudies 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 thanthe 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-calledglobal 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 thispoint of view and is useful. It encourages us not to let go of the phenomenon ofcolonialism 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 ondevelopment, transition, reform. It characterizes colonial situations in termsof 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 ascivil society, which is ahistorical by philosophical definition. It encourages usto rescue history from the nation and thus supports the parallel revision of thenationalist and teleological historiographies of the falls of the Ottoman, Haps-burg, Russian, and colonial empires scholarship that has made much progressin recent years.25It 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, isinseparable from that of imperial hegemony in the metropolis, including in termsof relations of gender, class, or ethnic and religious identification.

But we must recognize that, for all its usefulness, postcolonial studies is largelyunnecessary. Most of the issues it has explored had been explored previously orwere simultaneously being investigated by other theories, which often managed toavoid the pitfalls into which postcolonial studies fell. Such convergences do not inthe least rule postcolonial studies out of court, but they should somewhat devalueits 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 relationto the achievements of the past thirty years. It has not yet led to the more modestposture 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 frenziedcritique of Mediterraneanism and scholarly nativism and able to take up theirheritages, including that of colonial knowledge.26The main failing that canbe laid at the door of postcolonial studies is its adherence to the extreme formsof the cultural turn of the 1980s. Spivak had, however, cautioned against thelimitations of the culturalist problematics of the fight against social exclusion andinequality and advocated for the deconstruction of Western conceptualizations ofrepresentation.27But, paradoxically, this author has contributed a fair bit to thatvery same culturalist slide! Postcolonial studies does not address practices (whichwould be documented by fieldwork and archival research) as much as it attends todiscourses and representations on the basis of which it waxes eloquent or makes

often exaggerated overgeneralizations. Thus it gets trapped in the catastrophicconcept of identity and reifies a postcolonial condition onto which it confers aquasi-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 thestrict 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 andto posing a problem exclusively in terms of racism even though it also involvesclass struggle. And it does so at the risk of setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy.In Africa, itdoes not help the problem of slavery to free itself from the level of


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28. Ibrah ima Thioub, Lhistoire vue dAfrique: Enjeux et perspectives, in Chrtien,LAfrique

de Sarkozy, chap. 5; Jean-Franois Bayart, Les chemins de traverse de lhgmonie coloniale enAfrique de lOuest francophone, Politique africaine105 (2007): 201 40.29. Cooper, Colonialism in Question.30. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empire, droits et citoyennet, de 212 1946,Annales

Histoire, sciences sociales63 (2008): 515 16.

nationalist discourse, which obscures the servile social relations internal to subSaharan societies and reduces the legacy of the slave trade to an unambiguousdenunciation 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 concatenationbetween the colonial moment and the postcolonial moment.

The Reication of the Colonial

When it comes to the analysis of colonialism, postcolonial studies exaggerates itsspecificity in relation to other imperial forms and thus fails to understand its historicity by oversimplifying the way that it is singularized. It is now demonstratedthat colonial empires were in some respects empires just like any others, andso they should be read in terms of the classic investigations that have led to the

decoding of the latter.29Moreover, colonial situations have evolved in very different ways, and yet postcolonial studies merges them by not distinguishing settle-ment colonies and slaving colonies from other kinds of colonies, even thoughthese 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 noto mention the historical contingencies that soon explode these big classificatorycategories, possession by possession, or the canonical contrast between a con-quering state, violent by nature and necessity, and a colonial State in the stricsense, which manifest the ethical imperatives of bureaucratic rationalizationand 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 entities, irreducible to a binary structure of the type metropolis/colony.30Howeverthis lack of legal uniformity in the French Union was central to the postcolonialcondition of those called, rather too hastily, the new French. Similarly, there arehardly any anthropologists or historians left who still believe in a generic defini-tion of slavery, a conceptual distinction that appears to leave the proponents opostcolonial studies quite unmoved.


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Postcolonial studies also shows a marked lack of interest in a variety of colonialor paracolonial situations, a consideration of which would have enriched its prob-lematic. It generally ignores the liberal and financial imperialism that was centralto British history, as has been demonstrated by Peter J. Cain and Anthony G.Hopkins including the experiences of the white colonies and the postcolonialsituations of the dominions and the Latin American nation-states subjected to thehegemony of free trade;31the Japanese colonial empire (1895 1945); Ottomanprotocolonialism in some of its Arab provinces or even in Anatolia (but not in theBalkans); 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 (from1912 to 1947); the emergence of Indian colonialism within the British Empire oreven maybe of Scottish or Irish colonialism in Quebec; and the assertion of newpostcolonial forms of colonialism among African or Asian states. Postcolonialstudies simultaneously spares itself the effort of making any precise or restrictivedefinition of the colonial, for which scaling would have had heuristic value. 32Witness Moses I. Finleys attempt to limit the concept to situations of nonnativesettlement dependent on a metropolis and engaging in coercive appropriation ofland; by this standard, the partition of Africa was not colonial in nature, evenif Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Angola, and Algeria were real colonies, sincethey were settlement territories; and the Venetian Empire does not deserve thisdescription either, despite the bureaucratic dependence of its provinces on theSerenissima, because it was based neither on settlement nor on agrarian extor-tion.33It is thanks to this semantic carelessness that postcolonial studies can nowclaim 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 setitself 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 colonialempires were moral spaces swayed by conflicts, if not wars, of subjectification orethics. The colonial task saw itself as a moral conquest that would promote an

31. Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins,British Imperialism, 1688 200 0(London: Longman,

1993).32. Jacques Revel, Jeux dchelles: La micro-analyse lexprience(Paris: cole des hautestudes en sciences sociales, Gallimard, and Seuil, 1996).

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


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

This support for colonization on the part of the colonized is independent othe colonial project itself. It proceeds from a historicity that cannot be reducedentirely to the colonial project itself and draws on longer temporalities (duresthan its own. Thus the demand for dignity, central to nationalist movementsin West Africa and recurrent in the social movements of immigrants in Francedraws simultaneously on the centuries-old repertoires of honor, on their reformulation during the colonial period in the form of a working-class, military, oeducational ethos, and on the ideology of the civilizing mission itself.35Thiambiguity, inherent in the colonial situation and its memory, is also found in theways that the orientalism stigmatized by Said was developed. One of the majomodes of colonial government was the invention of tradition, especially, but noexclusively, when it proceeded by co-opting former elites within the frameworkof indirect administration.36Western scholars and local literati were combined tocoproduce a perfect Tradition that nationalist movements then appropriated.3

The prosperity of Aryanism in South Asia and Iran, and of ethnic culturalism insub-Saharan Africa, illustrates the vigor of these processes of ideological innovation and subjectification.

Basically, postcolonial studies is trapped in a contradiction noted by Cooper in1994.38Because it sees the subalterns as full actors, aware of their autonomy,it should also acknowledge the ability of these actors either to reverse the colonia

domination that founds their subordination or to appropriate its modernity itpolitical modernity in particular, in the form of the nation-state. The concept oappropriation 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 SouthEast Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Romain Bertrand, tat colonial, noblesse enationalisme 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 RobinsonPaths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880 1920(Athens: Ohio University Press; Oxford, U.K.: James Currey, 2000).

38. Frederick Cooper, Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,American Historical Review99 (1994): 1545.


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39. Karl Marx, Nationalkonomie und Philosophie, inDie Frhschriften , translated GregorBenton 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 Bert rand, Politiques du moment colonial: Historicits indignes et rappor ts verna-culaires au politique en situation coloniale, Questions de recherche26 (2008): 12 15;GeorgesBalandier, 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 essenceand human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man, thisappropriation of human reality, which implies its transformation.39

Curiously enough, postcolonial studies reduces the action of subalterns to aritual of affliction in the service of a morbid cult of redemptive suffering or, in themanner of the functionalist (and imperial) anthropology of Max Gluckman, seeit as a mere ritual of rebellion ultimately reinforcing colonial and postcolonialdomination. 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 asa process no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual termsnever resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualizationor 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 Bertrandvis--vis the problematics that limit appropriation to a derivation of the colonialstate and confine the agency of natives to a reactive register that the conceptof appropriation designates perfectly well the positive and creative character ofnative investment in the colonial scene without assuming that their initiative (toemploy the term used by Balandier in his Sociology of Black Africa) is limited totheir interaction, whether of conflict or collaboration, with the foreign occupieror that their practice of the colonial state is limited to colonial reason.41In otherwords, we must admit that the institution of the colonial State proceeds in partfrom the autonomous action of the colonized and from the historicity of the occu-pied societies, regardless of the actions, the plans, and the knowledge-powerof 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.42But it is also foundin the relation between societies and the colonial state.And it is in this autonomyof the social, including in its relation to the colonial state, that the historicity ofthe postcolonial state comes into being.

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

An Ahistorical Situation Leaves an Ahistorical Legacy

This brings us to a second methodological error in postcolonial studies. It postulates a mechanical, unambiguous, and overdetermining reproduction of thecolonial. And an ahistorical presentation of the colonial situation leaves us withan ahistorical legacy of the colonial. We are told nothing, via the intermediaryof effective history (die wirkliche Historie), of the conditions for the possible

transmission of this heritage, of the sociology of its universal legatees, of thechanges that affect the situations of usage of certain practices or discoursesthat are supposed to have been exactly reproduced, of the morphological dimen-sion of certain permanent features that sometimes owe more to geography thanto colonial domination; of the evaporation of aspects of the legacy within its verycontinuation, 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 lemoment colonial: De la problmatique de la domination coloniale celle de lhgmonie impriale, Questions de recherche18 (2006).It is in the same spir it that Cooper criticizes the thematicof resistance dear to the African nationalist historiography. Cooper, Conflict and ConnectionCooper, Africa and the World Economy,African Studies Review24, nos. 2 3 (1981): 1 86.


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

But there is no lack of studies in France that sociologize the colonial legacyand the actual conditions of its transmission. In addition, the real question is notthe (abstract and ontological) question of the relation between the postcolonialand the colonial but that of the link between the historicity of the one and thehistoricity of the other.

Finally, the link between the historicity of the colonial and the postcolonialcannot be abstracted from other dures, to which historians and sociologists mustbe 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 colonialsituation and the capitalist exploitation which that situation had fostered but alsoresulted from the longer-lasting split between social elders (ans sociaux) andyoungsters (cadets sociaux), according to the terms of the articulation of modesof production dear to French Marxist anthropology.44The imaginaireof Africanimmigration 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 slaverythat brought out the inequality characteristic of sub-Saharan societies, which wasreconfigured 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 simplyabsent 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, orindeed this contempt or hostility, toward the autonomy of the academic field frompolitical commitment is high.

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

43. Georges Balandier,Afrique ambigu(Par is: 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 coloniahegemony, of colonial sociology as an administrative science of colonizationand, more generally, of imperial culturalism as a major ideology of globaliza-tion over these past two centuries45 not, of course, without turning them upsidedown. Seen from this ironic angle, postcolonial studies appears as a great aca-demic carnival, a moment of emotional release that in no way endangers theascendancy of the triumphant utilitarianism of rational choice theory in Americanand North Atlantic universities and which, in passing, allows them to co-opt themost brilliant troublemakers from the native elite, as has been wickedly pointedout by Dirlik and Appiah. We still need to identify what aspects of the colonial orpostcolonial 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 thegeneric category of empires, as Cooper suggests, and not to isolate the way weanalyze them from the general way historians investigate this political form, evenif its definition and delimitation are in their view problematic. It then becomea matter of understanding what it meant to think like an empire, acceptingthe historical ordinariness of this mode of political sovereignty; emphasizingconversely, the lateness of the emergence of the nation-state in history; and notaking for granted the route from the one to the other, as the teleological inclinations 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 especially on the synergistic relationship between globalization and the nation-statein the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the role of incubators for thenation-state played by empires in their colonial versions and their classic configurations for example, the Ottoman, the Hapsburg, and the Russian-Sovieempires. The idea of the nation was contingent and often followed the collapseof the imperial framework. The fact can never be repeated enough: the nationstate arose from empire, not from the nation, and most often this bastard was notdesired, except by a few perverse spirits.

45. Jean-Franois Bayart,Lillusion identitaire(Paris: Fayard, 1996); translated by Steven Rendall, 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 colonialmode from the imperial phenomenon. Several factors contributed to foundingthis colonial mode: the scientific racialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, capitalist globalization, the phenomena of identitarian shrink-wrapping thataccompanied capitalist globalization in the guise of culturalism and nationalism,the universalization of the nation-state as a mode of political organization andsovereignty, and the power of the industrial and technological revolution and theidea of the masses that it engendered. But despite its civilizing pretensions andits outrageously coercive methods, the colonial empire could never be the Levia-than dreamed up by nationalist historiography or postcolonial studies. And thisremains true even though it has often acted as a crazed demiurge, as a Gulliverunbound, as a breaker of rocks (Bula Matari, as he appears, terrifyingly, in theCongo), capable not only of penetrating the mountains and striding across riversbut also of submitting entire countries to compulsory collective vaccination with-out wondering too much about the health consequences of such campaigns, or ofgathering and keeping peasants in villages while forcing them to undergo deadlyand 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 multilateraldonors in the framework of the neoliberal programs of structural adjustmentthroughout the 1980s.48Curiously, however, postcolonial studies, quite indiffer-ent to political economy, even in its more historical version, fails to mention thisorigin even though it could provide grist to its mill.49So colonial government was

an empire on the cheap.50

As for the grip and the systematic nature of colonialknowledge, they were quite relative. This is one reason why colonization wasnever able to level down the historicity characteristic of African or Asian societ-ies: the privatization of its indirect rule required the intermediation of nativesocial 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 privatisat ion 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, inDe la postcolonie(Paris: Karthala,2000), chap. 2; translated by A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, and Steven Rendall as Onthe 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-ofproduction Marxist anthropology, we must think in nonutilitarian terms of processes and practices, abandoning a political sociology of actors, their agency,or their initiative, and the mirage of their intentional strategies. Ultimately, theproblem-concept is less that of appropriation than the very fashionable concept of agency. E. P. Thompson one of the instigators, as we know, ofsubaltern studies specifically proposed linking the experience of repression tothe opportunities for action available to the poor and excluded. 51The concepthus tends to restrict the subaltern to the interaction of the colonial situationeven though subaltern studies aspired to restore the politics of the people in itsautonomy. The conceptualization of colonial subjection in terms of subjectifica-tion appears to have heuristic merit from this viewpoint, provided the latter is noequated with an unambiguous discipline, as happens in so many works of neoFoucauldian inspiration.52Similarly, it is now impossible to continue to believein the total nature, if not of the colonial situation, at least of its real dominationIts reign, though coercive, was fleeting and incomplete, not least because it wasexercised on heterogeneous societies comprising a variety of space-times.

The Contingency of Colonialism

The historicity and the incompleteness of the colonial momentforce us to focuon research areas that have not always been sufficiently explored.53First, the contingency of colonialism, to which Cooper drew our attention long ago, impliesthat we account for modes of occupation in all their disparity, including differenlevels of duration and intensity, before we tackle its administrative organization

and its political and legal form (colony, protectorate, dominion, concession, mandate, etc.).54However, colonization was sometimes very brief and incompleteThere is, therefore, both a disjunction and a paradox between the power of over-determination that postcolonial studies attribute to the colonial moment, on theone 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 Identit y.53. The expression is found, for example, in the writings of Andrew Roberts, in The Colonia

Moment in Africa(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Personally, I use it in the sam

sense as Bertrand, espousing his desire to historicize and relativize the influence of the colonialsituation 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.: YalUniversity 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 postcolonialreproduction, we should now consider their peripheries: colonialism results fromnegotiations pursued by the overseas territories with the metropolis, but also fromthe lines of flight with which the metropolis must manage on its margins andwhich take the form of dissident fractions, migration, and smuggling and othertypes 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 localsocieties a long duration (longue dure) that transcends it and which it nevermanages to absorb. It should be noted also that the colonial moment, in its metro-politan aspect, refers simultaneously to the longer durations in European societiesthemselves for example, in the development of categories of sovereignty, creed,race, and gender, which are not invariants of Western culture, but ever-evolvinghistorical constructions. It is indeed this superposition of times characteristic ofall imperial formations that needs to be restored if we want to recognize the histo-ricity of the situations under consideration. The break represented by colonizationwas altogether relative, and the risk run by colonial (and postcolonial)studies isthat 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 ofscales of commensurability that are inherent in imperial enterprises, irrespectiveof the concepts by which they are designated: hegemonic quest or hegemony,

governmentality, colonial knowledge, or civilizing mission! We must take intoaccount, on the one hand, the heterogeneity of the space-times that establishedempire and, on the other, the working misunderstandings that ensured inter-actions among its members.55On the one hand, we have lines of flight from thecolonial situation; on the other, we have the unprecedented centralization causedby 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 contactsituations (and the actors in this contact) open up promising paths of research.56But 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 discursive and legal domains, of military force or police, but also in the order of beliefeconomic and monetary exchange, material culture, techniques of the body, andeven of the senses, since the skin and the cooking of the colonized and colonizer are objects of desire, pleasure,or repulsion, and the smell of the native, forexample, is repellent to the white person (and vice versa). Between one order andthe other, there are disjunctions. Here, as we see, the diptych colonizer/colonizedbetrays its fundamental poverty.

Imperial Hegemonic Transactions

From this twofold point of view, the operative concept becomes imperial hegemonic transaction.57Empires should always balance the incorporation of peoples and territories with the differentiation that maintained the power and meaning of the coherence of the elite.58They were in a position to garner the loyalty

and identification of their subjects, but more often they coaxed them through contingent and shortsighted accommodations. An empire is thus based on co-optionas much as on occupation and on support as well as submission. It is a mode ofdomination (Herrschaft) that generates obedience, rather than a simple regimeor system of force or might (Macht). It does indeed consist in a certain governmentality, at the intersection of techniques for domination over others andtechniques of the self, or in the hegemony of a consensus, as defined respec-tively by Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. The voluntary servitude that it setup is based on the intermediation of social institutions and conformist elites andon the sharing of third languages, which serve as vehicles for intermediation

These third languages are the result not simply of discourse and knowledge butalso of the imaginaire, of material culture and the techniques of the body:paideiaand humanitasin antiquity, adabin the Ottoman Empire, tapain Java, thegentlemanly nature of British financial imperialism, and civilization in Frenchcolonial Africa.

The advantage of seeing colonial empires as empires and therefore as nothing special is that we avoid the normative characterization of their constitutivehegemonic transactions and thus avoid seeing them simply as a lie, as Fanon andSartre put it. Thanks to historians and anthropologists, we are now well aware ofthe 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 andRomain 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, thisinvolved the bodies of protagonists as much as their speech. It was a matter ofdesire 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 theorder of discourse on the body rather than its real practices, as is consistent withthe approach of cultural studies, and fails to understand the ambiguity of what thegreat historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown, calls styles of social exchange,with their elements of moral, material, and physical aesthetic.59Furthermore, itreduces the historicity of the colonized society to its interaction with the colonialstate, 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 theideas of development and nationalism, and indeed the representation of immi-gration in the Western world, are derivatives of colonial hegemony and contributeto its reproduction.60However, these ideas of development and nationalismalsorefer to a prior moral economy of prosperity, justice, inequality, and power, whichinforms them and establishes the autonomy of the colonial state (and its memory)vis--vis the colonial situation. To analyze these configurations, we cannot stick tothe static and binary vision of a tte--tte reified in its very essence betweencolonizer 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, theemergence of the brotherhood-based Republic of Senegal through a compromisebetween the colonial authorities and the Mourid social revolution in the earlytwentieth century and the political integration of former captives that it enabled.Any continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial arises not from beggingthe ontological principle but from a demonstration that brings out the concretelinks treated by effective history. Of course, these links are even more complexthan 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 theColonial 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 onother colonial or imperial situations, concomitant or anterior. Where postcoloniastudies see colonialism as one-dimensional, restricting it to an exclusive relationship between the colonized and the colonizer and the colonizers metropolis, whaprevails is actually a clearly multidimensional situation. Colonial empires firsexperienced an internal traffic of people, ideas, beliefs, policies, and property, ona transcontinental and intercontinental scale. Their metropolitan functionaries hadno monopoly on these administrative peregrinations that were one of the marks oimperial distinction and competence and for which some territories Algeria fothe French, India for the British were more or less obligatory points of passageNative traders and executives also moved from one possession to another in thecourse of their lives and careers, and certain colonies or towns set themselves upas preferred channels of recruitment. From the nineteenth century on, the coloniaauthorities were even obsessed by the danger incarnated in their eyes by floating populations and interlopers (the former empires or merchant companiesof the mercantilist age, they were multi-national and multi-ethnic or even, aleast in the case of the Ottoman Empire, multi-confessional). It is therefore wrongto 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.61In additionthe peripheries of the imperial provinces or the provinces on the peripheries oempires were often border zones where political sovereignties, cultural influencesmarkets, and populaces all overlapped.

Ultimately, the European, American, Russian-Soviet, and Japanese, or indeedOttoman, colonial empires were veritable echo chambers. Ideologies, administra

tive models, religious beliefs, goods, techniques of the body, people of scienceand faith, functionaries, and merchants constantly explored their spaces, from oneterritory to another, and also from one empire to another, against a backgroundof national rivalries, economic competition, police cooperation, racial commu-nion, and even comparative colonial policy or pancolonialism, of which theInternational Colonial Institute, founded in Brussels in 1894 on the initiative ofthe Frenchman Joseph Chailley-Bert, was the first major institution, before thedebate was carried in a more aggressive and polemical way into the hearof the worldwide associative movement, the Congress of Versailles, the Leagueof 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 YorkColumbia University Press, 2001), 4.


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postcolonial natives remained trapped. Curiously, postcolonial studies, a prisonerof the national narrative of the colonial situation and its offspring, barely raisesthe 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 helpedto 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 ofdiverse elements. Such was the case with the galaxy of Greek cities, in symbiosiswith Achaemenid Asia Minor, then the Roman Empire, faced with the Hellenicand Persian worlds. This was also the kind of configuration from which emergedthe Russian Empire or the Chinese Qing dynasty, on the margin of successiveMongol empires.62As for the East India Company, it carved out its mercantileempire at the interface of the British Crown and the Mogul Empire. In particu-lar, imperialism proceeds by the concatenation of one historical formation withanother, and the problematic of the colonial legacy, which obsesses postcolonialstudies, must reflect this diachronic complexity better than it has managed thusfar. The Ottoman Empire was an heir of Byzantium, but so was the republicanempire of Venice. France, the United Kingdom, and Italy superimposed their sov-ereignty or dominion on those of the Ottoman Empire in Algeria and Tunisia; inEgypt, Sudan, Libya, and the Dodecanese; and then in the Mashreq. Paris, Lon-don, and Pretoria shared out German possessions in Africa after the First WorldWar. Imperial projects drew sustenance from European imperial expansion inAsia and Africa, along with Oman in the Indian Ocean or Samory and his state inWest 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 laterSoviet Empire annexed provinces of the Ottoman and Qajar empires. The Euro-pean colonial empires were able, here and there, to outsource the administration oftheir sovereignty not just to local authorities under the system of indirect rule butrather to actual sub-imperialisms, like that of India in the Indian Ocean anIndia, in other words, that was both colonizer and colonized. They were also facedwith the autonomy and dynamism of trading interests and diasporic networks thatcame 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 ofBrazilian 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 Greekssouth of the Sahara.

These effects of concatenation significantly complicate both the colonial andthe postcolonial moments. The legacy social, economic, political, and mnemonic of colonization is thus a tangled skein. To unravel this, it is not the proponents of postcolonial studies but those of connected history who can providea convincing answer, even if their favorite subject is the mercantilist modern agerather 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,63the most convincing way of bringingout the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial and the postcolonial seems ultimately to have been that of comparative historical sociology. Thisapproach is particularly well suited to trace the singular itineraries of practicesinterests, or social groups: for example, that of the Greek Orthodox or JewishDodecanese communities who fled from poverty and Ottoman imperial domination, then Italian colonialism, settling in southern Africa and Katanga; that ofsoap in Rhodesia; or that of clothes in India.64Comparative social history can alsoinvolve identifying, across time, the procedures and scenarios of the production osocial and political inequality so as to conceptualize a whole variety of conceptssuch as primitive accumulation, passive revolution, social revolution, conservative modernization, and the molecular process of reciprocal assimilationof segments of the elite.65Historical sociology also considers political sequencesfor example, in terms of the centralization of the state, in the way that Tocquevilledid in The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, or the concatenation of the Islamic

Ottoman, colonial, nationalist, and neoliberal thematics of reform in a countrylike Tunisia.66But the comparative historical sociology of politics derives most oits 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 particula r 159 92.

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

65. See, e.g., Jean-Franois Bayart, Ltat en Afrique. La polit ique du ventre (Paris: Fayard

2006), translated by Nancy Harper, Christopher Harrison, Elizabeth Harris, and Stephen Ellis aThe 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: PoliticaEconomy 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, orof the relationship between Africa and its former colonial metropolises, or indeedthe 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 itshistorical system of value formation.67When compared with the breakthroughsthat the social sciences have made over the past few years, the morose repetitivemeanderings 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, andnow the reproduction of discursive and identity-based categories of colonialism

characterizes much current work in postcolonial studies. And yet neither trendmanaged to solve the problems it has raised because it has failed to clarify thetheoretical questions of the relations between extraversion and coercion, on theone hand, and hegemony and the reproduction of hegemony, on the other. It isclear that the colonial moment was a moment of cultural extraversion and that itrested on the intensive use of coercion. But this coercion is not contradictory withthe emergence of hegemony, and the extraversion of colonized societies cannotbe reduced to the relation between the colonized and the colonial situation or themere 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 tobelieve. In Africa, the intensive use of the whip seems to have played a large part infabricating hegemony and the exercise of legitimate domination, rather than themere imposition of a state of force.68From 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 thoughChakrabarty comes close to formulating matters correctly when he insists on theundemocraticfoundations of democracy on which the modern Western state

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

68. Jean-Franois Bayart, Hgmonie et coercition en Afrique subsaharienne: La politique dela chicotte, Politique africaine110 (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 Originairesof the Four Communes (Senegal): A Nineteenth-Century Globalization Project,Develop-ment and Change29 (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 bothoriginary/foundational (that is, historic) as well as pandemic and quotidian.69Buthis is precisely the point: domination and hegemony were established throughthis violence: thanks to it, and not in spite of it. In the Four Communes of Senegalthe indigenous civility that provided one of the cultural repertories of inter-mediation and compromise between the colonial state and the Sufi brotherhoodswas thus forged in a slave society: here, conscription was the mode of access toFrench citizenship.70Everywhere in Africa, public health gave birth to veritablemedical fraternities between whites and blacks and was met with the support ofpatients in the African subcontinent, at the same time as it implemented coercivevaccination campaigns that left a traumatic mark on the social imaginaireand towhich the AIDS pandemic is sometimes attributed. In the British Empire, as iswell known, cricket stirred up considerable enthusiasm even though it was one ofthe 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 dayas well as imposed and shared. And it fostered and sustained alliances betweenthe whites and different native social groups, such as the Moors of Senegambiaor the Mauritanian desert (against the blacks) or the Tutsis of the Great Lakes(against the Hutus), alliances inherited by postcolonial states. Finally, discussionsabout potential independence on the basis of a new third language (that of thenation and development) were undertaken via the repression of nationalist move-ments, for instance in Kenya and Malaysia. Coercion was indeed a component inthe 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 providesthem with a repertoire of subjectification that is all the more seductive in that itprecedes, transcends, and envelops colonial reason, instead of being a mere ema-nation of it. Cultural extraversion can even on occasion contradict the colonialmovement. For example, it was not uncommon that Africans appropriated West-ern material culture or techniques of the body, such as clothing and military drillsagainst the wishes and desires of the colonial authorities and Christian missionsfollowing considerations that had little to do with the European presence.71Dog-


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matically, we can see in this paradox the pinnacle of alienation. Sociologicallyand historically, this still needs to be proven and leaves untouched one undeniablefact: 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 beingable to read the hearts and minds of native peoples. Maybe. But when it comes totheir intimate lives, or even their intimate Enemy, as Ashis Nandy puts it in thetitle of his book, postcolonial studies does not emerge from the dependentist andnationalist dogma from which it claimed to have broken free.72

Conclusion

The Copernican revolution that postcolonial studies hoped to bring about stilllies ahead. If we wish to understand the historicity proper to different societiesby 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 ofthe societies that it subjected, nor did it totally absorb it. So the yardstick of ourarguments should not be the systematic nature of the colonial system, or eventhat of the void that its plenum never managed to control, which leads toinsistence on practices of resistance, flight, hijacking, and subversion, to whichdecidedly unsubmissive natives have resorted. Instead, we need to set out fromthe 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 potentialhegemony with regard to the colonial situation. In other words, the colonial stateowes its epithet (anecdotal and in any case contingent) only to the period that sawit emerge and not to its essence. In fact, it is defined largely by dimensions otherthan that of the interaction between the colonized and the colonizer.

Once the colonial moment has become historical, it inhabits the consciousnessof 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 relationof 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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Bayart 2011 Postcolonial Studies a Political Invention of Tradition