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After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third WorldAuthor(s): Rosalind O'Hanlon and David WashbrookReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 141-167Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178988 .

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After Orientalism:Culture,Criticism,and Politics in the ThirdWorldROSALIND O'HANLON

Clare College, Cambridge

DAVID WASHBROOK

University of Warwick

Over the last decade, studies of "third world" histories and cultures havecome to draw to a very considerableextentuponthe theoreticalperspectivesprovided by poststructuralism nd postmodernism.With the publicationin1978 of Edward Said's work, Orientalism,these perspectives-now fusedand extended into a distinctive amalgam of culturalcritique, Foucauldian

approachesto power, engaged "politics of difference,"and postmodernist

emphaseson the decenteredand theheterogeneous-began to be appropriatedin a majorway for the studyof non-European istories andcultures.Certainlyin our own field of Indian colonial

history,Said's characteristic

blendingof

these themes has now become virtuallya paradigm or a new generationofhistoriansandanthropologists.These directionshave been most recentlyand

sharply endorsed in Gyan Prakash'sdiscussion, "WritingPost-OrientalistHistories of the Third World:Perspectivesfrom IndianHistoriography."'

We sharePrakash's oncern with theemancipation f previouslysubmergedcolonialhistoriesand identities.However,we aredeeplyconcernedatthewayin which his "postfoundational" istorywould set aboutthese tasks. Prakashsees this history,andthe postmodernistandpoststructuralisterspectives hat

underlie t, as ourbest futurehopefora genuinelycriticalunderstandingf theIndianpast. We questionthis, given the manner n which theseperspectiveshave come to be interpretedand absorbed into the mainstreamof historicaland anthropologicalscholarship,particularly n the United States. We arguethatpostfoundationalhistoryoffers us ways of "knowing" he Indianpastthatare quite inadequate o its supposed political concerns. In emancipatingour-selves from what Prakashcalls foundationalism,we need also to ask rather

Wewould like to thankAjaySkaria,CrispinBates, SaurabhDube, DavidLudden,FredReid, and

Burt Stein for their readingand commentson this paper.I Gyan Prakash, "WritingPost-OrientalistHistories of the Third World:PerspectivesfromIndianHistoriography,"ComparativeStudies in Society and History, 32:2 (April 1990), 383-408.

0010-4175/92/1609-0300 $5.00 ? 1992 Society for ComparativeStudyof Society andHistory

I4I



142 ROSALIND O'HANLON, DAVID WASHBROOK

more carefullywhat exactly we are emancipatingourselves into. We arguethat these approachesprescriberemedies which actuallycreate new and in

manycases muchmore serious difficultiesof theirown, in partbecausetheyhave, of course, as much to do with argumentsaboutthepoliticsof represen-tationin Western ntellectualandacademiccircles, as they do with imposingthatmannerof representationn the thirdworld'shistory.We discuss what we

see to be the difficultiesof these approachesn the contextof Indianand other

non-Westernhistoricalwritingand suggest thatthey have arisenin partfrom

the widely sharedbut mistakenassumption hat EdwardSaid's workprovidesa clear paradigm for a history that transcends older problems of

representation.

POST-FOUNDATIONAL HISTORY: DILEMMAS AND PROBLEMS

TakingEdwardSaid's definitionof Orientalismas his startingpoint, Prakash

moves througha rangeof approaches or the studyof Indiansociety, showinghow each has inheritedand reproduced ome of Orientalism'skey assump-tions and techniquesof representation. ndian nationalisthistoriography,or

example, has been unable to transcendOrientalism'spreoccupationwith es-

sences and its teleologies of modernity.Its historiansunderstoodknowledge

as a "more or less adequate representation f the real," and India itself ashavingan existence independentof its representations.2ndia itself appearedfor them as an undivided subject struggling to transcend colonial back-

wardnessand to realise itself as a modem nationalstate. Likewise, the area

studies programmesthat dominatedSouth Asian history and anthropologyfromthe 1950s searched or an authentic ndianhistoryandculture,fixing on

caste as Indiansociety's essence and scrutinizing ts structures n terms of

theirpotentialas vehicles for political and economic modernization.

Prakash hen turnsto "post-nationalistoundationalhistories."By this he

means Marxistand what he calls "social historians orientedtowardworldhistory,"suchas C. A. Bayly, who have been concernedwith Indianpolitical

economy, particularly n its relationshipto world-historical ransitions.Al-

though Prakashcarefully points out their gains, he finds them ultimately

unsatisfactorybecausetheirhistories are "foundational."Theyuse categorieswhich are at some level fixed and essential, as if historywere "ultimatelyfounded n andrepresentablehrough ome identity-individual, class, struc-

ture-which resists furtherdecomposition nto heterogeneity."Such catego-ries cannotbut havean "objectivistbias" built into them.3Theiremphasison

the theme of capitalisttransition eads, moreover,to a teleological account

2 Ibid., 390.3 Ibid., 397.



THE THIRD WORLD AFTER ORIENTALISM 143

that sees Indiaprincipallyas an instance of abortedcapitalistmodernityandcannot

exploreandexposethe alteritywhich underlies his identity-otherthancalling tprecapitalist,rotoindustrialorfeudalandsemi-feudal s opposedo capitalist), n-free abor asopposedofree abor), nd raditionalnotmodern). hisstrategyannothistoricizeheemergencef amodem, olonial-capitalistndian ation ecausetdoesnotdisplace hecategoriesramed n andby thathistory.4

These approachescan only in the end legitimatethe structuresof capitalistmodernitythey describe; for, Prakashasks, how is it possible to understandIndianhistoryin terms of the developmentof capitalism,"but also contest, atthe same time, the homogenization of the contemporary world

bycapitalism?"5In the last partof his discussion, Prakashconsiderswhat he calls "post-

Orientalist" histories, which try to move towards postfoundationalap-proaches.These utilise the insightsof EdwardSaid andMichelFoucaultanddrawfurtheron themes frompostmodernism, eminism, minoritydiscoursesand other advocatesof the "politics of difference." These approachessharePrakash'sconcern to show how knowledge about the third world is histor-

ically produced.They seek "to make cultural orms andeven historicalevents

contingent,above

all,on

powerrelations."6

Avoidingthe

temptationo

returnto essential identities, they workinsteadto displacefoundational ubjectsand

essences, to breakup notions of a unitaryIndia into a multiplicityof con-

tingentand unstableidentities which are the effects of changing power rela-

tionships. They refuse the privilegedthemes of global capitalistmoderniza-tion and focus instead off-centre on what those themes exclude: histories ofthe subordinatewhose identity,like all identity,resides in difference. Post-modernistperspectivesare importantn shapingthese approaches,with their"blurred enresand off-centred dentities"andtheirhostilityto systematizing

theories:Fashioned y denialsof grand otalizingheories,postmodernismefies andrefusesdefinition.Onlya laundryist of conditions an be offered-TV images,fashionmagazines, almanRushdie,TalkingHeads, hallengesouniversalistndessentialisttheories,architecturalrreverencendplayfulness,ransnationalapitalism.7

Nor do the new histories limit their vision to India or other third worldsocieties. They forge links with subordinate thersin Westerncontexts, with

radicals, feminists, ethnic and other minorities, in a common challenge to

teleologies of modernization nd their constituent hemes of ReasonandProg-

4 Ibid., 399.5 Ibid., 398.6 Ibid., 401.7 Ibid., 404.




ress. Above all, they do not draw back from political engagement. Theyidentifywith the subject-positionof the subordinate, oncernthemselves with

relationshipsof domination,and self-consciously make their own historicalaccounts into contestatoryacts. In these respects they differ from the often

depoliticizedperspectivesof postmodernism,while at the same time sharingits emphasison the provisionalityof all identities,its resistance o all system-

atizing or totalizing theory and its refusal to set up "new foundations in

history,cultureand knowledge."8Prakashpoints to examplesof these new

approaches.Althoughhe notes theirlimitations,he commendsRanajitGuha

and the SubalternStudies project for deploying poststructuralist rgumentsand the conceptof "subalternity." his has enabledthemto get awayfromthe

older frameworksof colonialismand nationalismwithinwhich Indianhistorywas studiedandto breakuptheirassociatedfoundational ategories, revealingIndia nsteadas "amultiplicityof changingpositionswhich are thentreatedas

effects of power relations."9The workof BernardCohnandNicholas Dirks

revealsin differentways how colonialrulecreatedandfrozesocial institutions

which the British took to be immutable features of India as a primarily

religioussociety. In commonwithpostmodernists,Ashis Nandy'swork on the

cultureand psychology of colonialism has repudiated he "post-Enlighten-ment

ideologyof Reason and

Progress,"in which "Descartes defined ra-

tionalityand Marx defined social criticism."'0Toescape these tyrannies,we

must turnto "mythographies," he hidden stories of colonialism's victims,whichwill "exposethe mythiccharacter f colonialandpostcolonialfables of

modernity."Salman Rushdie likewise shares postmodernism'shostility to

"grand otalizingtheories,"disclosing in Midnight'sChildren he "fable-like

characterof real history."But we see many problemshere. The critiqueof foundationalcategories

derives in large part from the work of JacquesDerrida,althoughDerrida's

work contains very little to indicate howwe should

goabout the

basic,inescapablyactive, and interventionist ask of historicalinterpretation.Der-

rida'sparticular pproach o theproblemof theconventionalandnonobjectivenatureof ourcategoriesandschemes of interpretationmay actually represent

something of an intellectualcul-de-sac, at least for those who would offer

forms of historicalunderstanding.As John Searlehas argued,

Derridaorrectlyees that herearen'tanysuchfoundations,uthe thenmakes hemistakehatmarks imasa classicalmetaphysician.herealmistake f the classical

metaphysicianas notthebelief hat hereweremetaphysicaloundations,utrather

8 Ibid., 406.9 Ibid., 400.10 Ibid., 404-5.1 Ibid., 405.




the belief thatsomehowor othersuch foundationswerenecessary,he beliefthatunless herearefoundationsomethings lostorthreatenedrundermined.12

In the absence of such foundations,Derridacan do little more than reveal,over andover again, the subjectiveandarbitrary atureof ourcategoriesandthe uncertaintyof the knowledgederivedfrom them. He misses, in effect, the

crucial point that we cannot actuallydo without some categories and some

meansof evaluatingordersof certainty, n order o comprehend, o explain, to

elucidate and to do. That these categories are conventions, Searle further

argues, is no barto ourcontinuingto use them providedwe recognize them

for whatthey are, inventionsof our own necessity.However,this recognition

involves a change in the way that we conceive and test them-not againstmetaphysicallyconceived standardsof objectivitybut againsttheiradequacyin serving the purposes for which we want and need to use them. Suchconsiderationsof course include ourselves and the reasons why we require

particularkinds of knowledge. Preoccupiedas he is with the non-problemof

objectivity at the expense of questions of purposive adequacy,Derrida hasrather ittleto offerus on thesekeyquestionsof method. If Prakash's imwere

simply to renderour existing knowledge of Indian and other third world

societies uncertainandunstable,therewould indeedbe a pointin his invoking

Derrida'sattack on foundationalforms of knowledge. Because he actuallyintends a highly purposiveagenda of historicalreconstructionand political

engagement,however, this invocation seems to us starklyinappropriate.Prakash'scritiqueof Indianhistoriography nd his prognosesfor its future

reflect these contradictions.Most who fall into his categoryof Marxistandsocial historians of India have long recognised the irreducibly subjectiveelement in theirinterpretations,eeing that the historian s inescapablya partof what they studyas a constantprocess of movement andtransformation.Most would be thoroughly mystified by the charge that they operate with

reified and ahistoricalcategories of class, individual, and structure. Suchcategoriesareusuallycontextualized n terms of theirmakingandunmaking,

12 JohnSearle, "The WordTurnedUpside Down," NewvYorkReviewof Books (27 October

1983), 78. A good introduction o this debate is in JurgenHabermas,The Philosophical Dis-course of Modernitv(Cambridge:Polity Press, 1990), 194-9. Ajay Skariakindlyprovidedthisreference.

13 Prakash'snotion of what constitutesMarxisthistoryis problematic, or neitherof the two

exampleswhich he providesfall easily into the category.The first, concerningBengali historiesof the Bengali renaissancewould seem most influencedby Bengali nationalist deology, as it is

not clearwhy Bengal'sfailure o generatea secularrationalist ultureand a bourgeoissocial orderprior o the developmentof industrial apitalism s a problem orMarxism.The second, concern-

ing usageof AndreGunderFrank's onceptof underdevelopment, lso ill fits thecategory, orthe

conceptderives from neo-Smithianrather han Marxisteconomic theory:see R. Brenner,"The

Origins of CapitalistDevelopment:A Critiqueof Neo-SmithianMarxism,"New Left Review,104:4 (1977), 25-92.



I46 ROSALIND O'HANLON, DAVID WASHBROOK

theiremergenceand decline. Bayly, forexample,presentseighteenth-centuryIndiain termsof the makingandunmakingof a particular ndcontingentset

of relations,which threwup a distinctive andultimately ransient tructure fclass, on the basis of whichcolonial rule was initiallyestablished.He plainlysees class, along with other forms of structureand identity,as historicallycontingent, unstable, and given to change-certainly not as immutable insome way. It is also not obvious that these historiansunderstand apitalisttransitionmerely in termsof WesterndevelopmentandAsian underdevelop-ment. Within the Marxist discourse, debates aroundthe themes of com-

parativefeudalism,the articulationof modes of production,and the work ofRobert Brennerhave all

exploredthe

specific dynamicsof non-Britishand

widernon-Western elationsof productionand social formation.14 Equally,a

majorthrustof researchon the Indianpast has for a considerable ime nowbeenpreciselyto breakdownEast-Westdichotomiesby exploring he indige-nous forms of capitalismand theirassociatedmilitaryandmercantile nstitu-tions that were developing in India from the late seventeenthcentury.Thisresearchdescribes how these indigenousdynamicspowerfullyandimportant-ly shapedthe East IndiaCompany'sinitial engagementwith the economiesand societies of the subcontinentand its own subsequentdevelopmentas a

colonial state.15Bayly himself sets this againsta sharplyredrawnpictureofearlynineteenth-century ritishsociety designedto reveal thepreciseways inwhich its forms of modernitywere notonly partialand limitedbutcreatedoutof and sustainedby wider imperialrelationships.16

Prakashalso contendsthatanyhistorianwho writes aboutIndia'shistory nterms of capitalism'sdevelopmentmust in the end be complicit in the veryhegemony so described.Rather,we must aim for a "refusalof foundational

categoriesthatconstruct he theme of global modernity."17 he implicationsof this seem somewhatunclear.If the complicity arises from a tendencyto

presentthe world of capitalismas homogeneous, it mustbe pointedout thatmost Marxistsocial history critiquescapitalistmodernitypreciselyin orderto

challengethe self-imagesandpretensions o theuniversalityof Western ocialtheoriesof modernization.Lumpingthe two togetherbecause both appear o

14 See, forexample,T. H. Aston andC. H. E. Philpin,eds., TheBrennerDebate (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1985);T. J. Byresand HarbansMukhia,eds., "FeudalismandNon-

EuropeanSocieties," Journalof PeasantStudies(Special Issue), 12:2, 3 (January,April 1985).15 Fortheseargumentsn Bayly,see TheLocalRootsofIndianPolitics:Allahabad1880-1920

(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress, 1975);Rulers, Townsmen ndBazaars: NorthIndianSociety

in the Age of British Expansion (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1983) and IndianSocietyand the Making of the BritishEmpire (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1988).For a general guide to recent research in this field, see D. A. Washbrook,"ProgressandProblems: South Asian Economic and Social Historyc. 1720-1860," Modern Asian Studies,22:1 (1988), 57-96.

16 Theseargumentsaredevelopedin C. A. Bayly,ImperialMeridian:TheBritishEmpireandThe World 1780-1830 (London:Longman, 1989).

17 Prakash,"WritingPost-OrientalistHistories,"398.




addressthe same problemof the forms and forces of capitalistmodernity s

deeply misconceived. Prakashand the otherpostmodernistheoristson whose

work he draws apparentlyhave the view that merely engaging the questiondeterminesourunderstanding f it so that we oughtactuallyto assume that itdoes not really exist in any systematicform. What his position leaves quiteobscure s whatstatusexactlythiscategoryof "capitalistmodernity"occupiesfor him. If our strategyshould be to "refuse" it in favourof marginalhisto-

ries, of multiple and heterogeneous identities, this suggests that capitalistmodernity s nothingmore than a potentiallydisposablefiction, held in placesimply by our acceptance of its cognitive categories and values. Indeed,Prakash s particularlydisparagingof Marxist and social historians'concern

with capitalismas a "system"of political economy andcoercive instrumen-talities. Yet in other moments Prakash ells us thathistory'sproper ask is to

challenge precisely this "homogenizationof the worldby contemporary ap-italism." 8 If this is so, and there is indeed a graspable ogic to the way inwhich moder capitalismhas spreaditself globally, how are we to go aboutthe central task of comprehendingthis logic in the terms that Prakash

suggests?These problemsseem furthercompounded f we turnto the workof histo-

rians whom Prakash recommends asexemplars

ofpostfoundationalistap-proaches. What is puzzling is that many of these historiansthemselves put

forward imeless or undifferentiatedonceptionsof the Indianpast, often in a

particularlyglaring way. BernardCohn has undoubtedlydone much to dis-assemble monolithicnotions of a traditional ndiaadvanced n colonial social

theory.Yet in his account of how these notions werefabricated,he describesaclash between Europeanand Indian forms of knowledge which are both

undifferentiated, he former located in time somewherebetween the seven-teenth and the nineteenth centuries and the latternot at all.19 Ashis Nandy

identifies the psychological damageand "loss" associatedwith the colonialexperience.Yethis strategyfortherecoveryof an "Indian elf" seems merelyto invert a rangeof what were originallyOrientalistconceptionsabout Indiaand to generalizethe culturalexperienceof Bengaliliterati o thatof thewholenation.20RanajitGuhamay well criticize "bourgeois" ndiannationalism orits failure to identifywith the very differentneeds of subaltern lasses, buthedoes take the centralquestion of modernIndianhistory to be the "historicfailure of the nation to come to its own," a questionthatplainlyderives fromthe nationalistparadigm hat Prakashcondemns so strongly.21Manytheories

Ix Idem.19 See, forexample,Cohn's "TheCommandof LanguageandtheLanguageof Command," n

R. Guha, ed., SubalternStudies IV (Delhi: OxfordUniversityPress, 1985), 279-80.20 See especially Ashis Nandy,TheIntimateEnemy:Loss andRecoveryof Self Under Coloni-

alism (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983).21 RanajitGuha, Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: OxfordUniversityPress, 1982), 7.




about Indianpersonalityand social structurewhich Guha uses to test the

consequencesof colonial dominationbear a strongresemblanceto those of

LouisDumont,whose ideas Prakash lsewhere deemsto be "refigured ssen-tialisms."Indeed,Guhahas of late takento referring o the (undifferentiated)Indiannationas "us."22Prakashdismisses "totalizing"understandingsf the

Indian past in favourof the alternative and the marginaland commends

Nicholas Dirks' attackon Dumont'sahistorical heories of caste for makingthis possible. YetDirks himself presentsus witha countertheory f caste that

is scarcelyless generalizing hanDumont'sown. He erectsit, moreover,very

largely on the basis of the worldview and self-images of locally dominant

groups.23Prakashhimself does whathe tells us not to. He warnsus against

writing historyaround he majorthemes of global transitionbut then writes

about Indianhistoriographicaldevelopmentin precisely these terms, seeingthedeterminants f its progressionpassingfromimperialismo nationalism o

a liberalhegemonycenteredon the UnitedStates.

This all makesit verydifficultto graspthe character f postfoundationalist

understandings f the past or to see what they are meantto achieve. These

confusions seem to us to arise out of a wish to generatean historicalpraxisfromDerrideanandpostmodernistperspectives hat areinherently nimical to

it. These perspectivesundermine

possibilitiesfor such a

praxisin two

ways.First, because they regard any interventionby the historianor interpretern

the pastas inherently llegitimate,a kind of complicity,they fail to acknowl-

edge the particular nd specific meansby which that scholaracquiresknowl-

edge of the past. Prakashobjects to our giving some analytical categories

privilegeon thegrounds hatthis "occludes the histories hat ie outsideof the

themes which areprivilegedin history."But this suggeststhatthe themes of

historyareor shouldbe given in the materialof historyitself, exposedor not

exposed by the historian,whose cognitive relationto them is passive. What

this objection reflects is actually a ratherold-fashioned, even positivisticassumptionaboutthe sourcesof historicalknowledge,but one also whichmaynot surpriseus. For as Searlehas argued,Derrida'sown obsession with the

non-problem f objectivityandhis failure o recognizeoursubjectiveneed for

knowledge as primaryand legitimate, leaves his concerns also laden with

22 Guha's latest contribution o SubalternStudies, "DominancewithoutHegemony and its

Historiography,"distinguishes between a British and a precolonial Indian form of political

authority,he latter

organizedaround

principlesof Brahmanic nd

kinglyauthority.He concludes

by describinghis argumentas "a critiqueof our own approach o the Indianpast and ourown

performancen writingaboutit," designedto "assistin the self-criticismof our own historiogra-

phy-the historiography f a colonizedpeople" (Guha'semphasis;SubalternStudiesIV [Delhi:OxfordUniversityPress, 1989], 306-7).

23 In this case, theroyaland dominantKallarcaste in Pudukottai.See NicholasB. Dirks,TheHollow Crown:Ethnohistoryof an IndianKingdom (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1987).



THE THIRD WORLD AFTER ORIENTALISM I49

residuesof positivism.24The objection entirelymisses the fact thatthe past,including its historicalsubjects, comes to the historian hroughfragmentary

and fracturedempirical sources, which possess no inherentthemes and ex-press no unequivocalvoices. In and of themselves, these sources and voicesarejust noise: "Other"historiesuncovereddo not speakfor themselvesanymore than the "facts"of historydo. To state the obvious, the historianmustundertake he prior,and in partsubjective,tasksthatonly thehistorian ando:to turnthe noise into coherentvoices throughwhich the pastmay speakto the

presentand to construct he questionsto which the past may give the presentintelligibleanswers. Prakash eems to refuse to acknowledgethe inevitability(and the responsibility)of this task. Indeed, he offers us a methodologythat

would seem to rule out even the refusalsof whichhe speaks. He enjoinsus torefuse particular hemes and categories, most notablythose pertaining o the

global transition o moderncapitalism,lest simply by engagingwith themwebecome implicated n andso reproduce he hegemonieswhichtheyrepresent.But how can we refuse certain themes if we do not know whatthey are andhow can we know what they are if we are not permitted o engage andstudythem?

Second, and in common with others who have drawn on postmodernist

perspectives,Prakashseems to think that it is not

possibleto

recognisedif-

ferences or resistanceunder the rubric of generalor totalizing systems andtheories of transition. There are fundamentalmisconceptionshere. As Ray-mond Williams andFredricJamesonhave argued n theirdifferentways, it isunclearwhy a systemor processshouldby definitionbe incapableof generat-ing differenceor raisingresistances.Capitalismas most contemporaryMarx-ist historianssee it indeed constitutes a system or processbutone inherentlyconflictual and changeful, incapableof realizing or of stabilizing itself. It

producesandoperatesthrougha wide varietyof social relationsof production

andexploitation,which are themselves in constanttransformation.Althoughits forces may shape forms of resistance, they do not predetermine ts out-

comes, for no hegemonic system can pervadeandexhaust all social experi-ence, least of all one which fails to meet so manyhuman andsocial needs.25

Indeed, it is only in the lightof some conceptionof a dominantcultural ogicor hegemonic system that resistance, emancipation,or difference can be

meaningfully dentifiedor measuredat all.26It is also difficultto takePrakash

seriously when he recommendspostmodernistperspectiveson the groundsthatthey avoidtotalizingforms of theoryor explanation.As Jamesonhas also

pointedout, postmodernistapproachesarethemselves builtarounda formof

24 Searle, "The WorldTurnedUpside Down," 78-9.25 RaymondWilliams,MarxismandLiterature Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress, 1977), 125;

FredricJameson, "Marxism and Postmodernism,"New Left Review, no. 176 (1989), 34-9.26 FredricJameson, "Postmodernism,or The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism,"New Left

Review, no. 146 (1984), 57.




totalizing abstraction hat distinguishes postmoderncultureby its logic ofdifference and its sustainedproductionof randomand unrelatedsubsystems

of all kinds.27In these ways, then, postfoundationalist istoryand the wider

perspectivesfrom which it derivesseem to us to offeranuncertainanddeeplyinconsistentpremisefrom which to conceive our relationship o the past.

REPRESENTATION, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND POLITICS

If these practicalexamplesof a postfoundationalist pproach eem beset with

problems, what of the theoretical arguments, the combinationof cultural

critiques, styled afterSaid, Foucaultianperspectiveson power,engagedpol-itics of difference, and aspects of postmodernist heorythat Prakashsees as

animatingthese new directionsin history?The core of his argument s that

these perspectivescan be combinedand employed both to emancipateother

historiesand to develop new approaches o the largerquestionof representa-tion and its politics. But there arecriticalquestionsheretoo, in particular s

these argumentsrelate to the wider issue of self-representation y minorityand marginalgroupsthemselves and in contexts involving the developed as

well as undevelopednations.As we shall argue,we need to look rathermore

carefullyhere at what we are emancipatingourselvesinto.

Prakash learlywishes to retainsome notionof an

emancipatory oliticsfor

thedispossessed, as against,forexample,anextremeFoucauldian iew of the

inescapabilityof relationsof poweranddomination.If we do wish to hold to

some view of political struggle as potentially emancipatory,yet simul-

taneouslyrefuse to define what the largerstructuresandtrajectoriesof such

struggle mightbe, on the groundsthat this would constitutea totalizingform

of analysis, we pushthe burdenof representing ucha politicsandits trajecto-ries onto those who arein strugglethemselves.This is notjustby default.The

principleof self-representations, as we shall see, enshrinedand positively

recommendedin much explicit postmodernist heory as the very means torecovering suppressedhistories and identities. The obvious problemhere,

though, is that self-representation, he idea that there can be unitaryand

centredsubjectswho areableto speakfor themselvesandpresent heirexperi-ence in their own authenticvoices, is precisely what postmodernist heoryattacksin the Westernhumanisttradition.

A numberof criticshave triedto blur this problemby talkingin termsof a

kind of rainbowalliance sharedamong a rangeof oppositionalvoices. This

may, indeed, be Prakash'sattemptedsolutionto this dilemma. He describes

how "thenew post-Orientalist cholarship'sattempt o releasethe thirdworldfrom its marginalposition forms a partof the movementthat advocatesthe

'politics of difference'-racial, class, gender, ethnic, national and so

27 Jameson, "Marxismand Postmodernism,"34.




forth."28This appearsat first to resolve the difficulties in privileging self-

representation, or what is offered instead is a common platformsharedbe-

tween a varietyof dissenting groups, who can speakto and for others andforthemselves. In some respects, resistances from the point of view of class,

gender, ethnicityor thirdworld nationhood ndeedsharecommonground;but

assumingthat these share the sameagendain some moregeneralandpositiveway simplifies what areactuallyvery complexandsometimesfiercely antag-onistic positions.29 It is also very difficult, from any set of Foucauldian

perspectivesat least, to generatea commonplatformor a fusion of strugglefor these localised oppositional groups. Doing so means subordinatinghem

to a transcendent r totalizingform of politicallogic. If it is hard o generatea

commonagendafor these oppositionalgroups,we are led back to some formof privilegedself-representation.Veryclearly,it is tremendously mportanto

attend o the experiencesandself-accountsof marginalgroups;but this is verydifferent from the nativist view, implicit here, that they have some kind of

inherentlysuperiorvalidity.Prakashdisassociateshimself stronglyfrom sucha view, but it is hardto see how he can avoid it, given the contradictionsdescribed above.

This leads on to a further et of problems.We are invited to see these new

critiquesof Orientalistand other forms of

privilegedknowledgeas contestato-

ry acts, to commend their concernwith relationshipsof dominationand their

efforts to unlock and release histories, cultures and identities frozen by theessentialisations of the past. This implies not only that subjectscan and do

represent hemselves on the basis of theirexperience; t suggestsalso thattheirresistances eventuatein forms of knowledge which are emancipatory, ran-

scending relationshipsof domination, n some senses at least. The problem sthat these assumptionsare not consonant with the kind of Foucauldianper-spectiveon powerandidentitythat Prakash ommendselsewhere.As a range

of critics have pointedout, includingSaid himself, it is difficultto see howany concertedpolitical engagement, let alone one with the processesof cap-italistmodernization, s possible on the basis of Foucault'sdeliberatelyamor-

phous anddispersedvision of power.30Such an engagement ooks even less

promising when we are told that postfoundationalism'smajorvirtue is itsintellectualrefusal to acceptthe very analytical hemeof capitalistmodernity,

28 Prakash, "WritingPost-OrientalistHistories,"406.29 On the issue of sati in India, for example, compareAshis Nandy,At theEdge of Psycholo-

gy: Essays in Politics and Culture(Delhi: OxfordUniversityPress, 1980), 1-31, with SharadaJain, NirjaMisra, and KavitaShrivastava,"DeoralaEpisode:Women'sProtest in Rajasthan,"Economic and Political Weekly,nos. 7, 11 (1987), 1891-4. See also the very interestingdiscus-sion of Nandy's positionon the RoopKanwarcase in LataMani, "MultipleMediations:Feminist

Scholarship n the Age of MultinationalReception," Inscriptions,no. 5 (1989), 15-16.30 EdwardSaid, The World,The Text and The Critic (London:FaberandFaber,1984), 245.




lest we take on its ideologies by admitting o anyof its realities. Theprincipalcasualtyof this inadequacymust be politics, for whatkindof resistancecanbe

raised to capitalism's systemic coercions if thatresistanceapparentlydeniestheir existence?

Indeed, it is even less clear that one can generatewhat is ultimatelya

politics of emancipation rom a set of Foucauldianassumptionsaboutpowerand social relations.Prakashandmanywho sharehis approachesvigorouslyand virtuouslyassert the presence of struggle in all social relations whilst

saying very little about the systematicpoliticalmeansby whichemancipationis to be pursuedor what indeed it might look like if it were ever achieved.

Accordingto thisview, emancipationbecomesa strugglepurely nternal o theconsciousness of thosewho resist andonly representable y them. Thepreciseeffect of this readingof emancipationback into Foucaultis to return heseareas of his argument o theirsourcesin Nietzsche. Emancipationbecomes aNietzschean act of pureautonomouswill. This mightseem an ironicpositionfor a theory concerning itself with the struggles of underclasses,31but asPrakashhimself notes, this has been preciselythe approachof the SubalternStudiesgroup,whichhe thencommendsto us for its creativeappropriationf

poststructuralist erspectives!Thereare furtherdifficulties

concerningquestionsof

subjectivityandhence

of historyand agency. Prakashdraws on Foucaultto arguethatsubalternity,indeedthe multiplicityof changing positions within Indiansociety, are to be

regardedas "effects of powerrelations."The subject-position f thesubalternlikewise is an effect, contingentandunstable,which "residesin difference."

Questions of subjectivity are discussed in terms of the discourses which

constructit. Thus,

the identificationwith the subordinated'subject-position,rather hannationalorigin,has been the crucial element in formulatingcritical third-worldperspectives. Of

course, as subordinatedsubjects, Indian historians have obviously developed andembracedthe victim's subject-positionmorereadily.But because the experienceand

expressionof subordination re discursivelyformulated,we are led back to the pro-cesses and forces thatorganisethe subordinate's ubject-position.32

The difficulty here is that it is hard to see how this approach can have room for

any theory about experience as the medium through which resistances emergeand are crystallised or about the conditions under which the subordinate can

become active agents of their own emancipation on the basis of this experi-ence. Some conception of experience and agency are absolutely required by

the dispossessed's call for a politics of contest, for it is not clear how a

31 The wideranddeeplyconservative mplicationsof post-Nietzscheanprojects oremancipa-tion outside any frameworkof instrumental easonare discussed in JurgenHabermas's lassic

article, "Modernityversus Postmoderity," New GermanCritique,22 (Winter1981).32 Prakash,"WritingPost-OrientalistHistories,"402-3.




dispersedeffect of power relationscan at the same time be an agent whose

experienceand reflectionform the basisof a strivingforchange.Toarguethat

we need these categories in some form does not at all imply a return o theundifferentiatedand static conceptionsof nineteenth-centuryiberal human-

ism. Our present challenge lies precisely in understandinghow the under-

classes we wish to study are at once constructed n conflictualways as sub-

jects yet also findthe meansthrough truggleto realize themselvesin coherent

and subjectivelycentredways as agents.33The question of historicalunderstandings still more crucial. As Fredric

Jamesonand AndreasHuyssenhave argued,and we have tried in a different

way to suggest above, postmodernistapproachesdesperately ack a sense of

history,a capacityfor thatlabourof remembrance ndunderstandinghroughwhich agents become able to experience history in an active way, to orientthemselves individuallyandcollectively in the present,and so to act. Indeed,this capacitymust lie at the very centre of whatPrakashandmanyotherscallfor-in the recovery of frozen and silenced histories as partof a conscious

politicalstrategydesignedto engagecontemporaryelationsof domination,asthese have affected third-worldsocieties. The problem, though, is that it is

extremelydifficult to see how we can actuallyhave a postmodernperspectivewhich

possesses anykind of

stronghistorical sense. On

presentdefinitions,

the two would seem to be a ratherstrongcontradiction n terms. What dis-

tinguishes the former is precisely its sense of depthlessness, of the past'sdisassembly into a vast collection of images and fragmentsavailable in the

presentonly for the purposesof nostalgiaor pastiche.34Whilst acknowledgingthe extent to which he and others have drawn on

these perspectives, Prakashcertainly emphasises the very significant dif-ferences in theirapproaches o issues of politics andpower. The concerns of

postmodernismhave in the end been differentin two ways. First, they have

tended to takepleasure n a Bakhtinianproliferation f voices for its own sakeand in a way more aesthetic than political. Second, their own efforts to

fragmentWesternproceduresof representation un the risk of using third-world voices andculturesmerelyas others.Yet Prakashdoes notreallytell us

how his more politically engaged stance is substantiallydifferentfrom the

politics of postmodernism.In fact, it is strikinghow much the two have in

common. Both arecaughtbetween the critiqueof objectivistformsof repre-sentation on the one handand whatbecomes a slide towardsself-representa-tion on the other. Likewise, postfoundationalhistory tries to dissolve the

33 This question of how we might conceptualisethe presence of the subaltern s discussedfurtherand with differentemphasesin R. O'Hanlon, "Recovering he Subject:SubalternStudiesand Historiesof Resistancein Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 218.

34 For these arguments in Jameson and Huyssen, see Jameson, "Postmodernism,or theCulturalLogic of LateCapitalism,"especiallypp. 64-71; and AndreasHuyssen,Afterthe GreatDivide: Modernism,Mass Cultureand Postmodernism London: Macmillan, 1988).




concepts of experienceand identityand to questionthe use of any historical

category "which resists furtherdecomposition ntoheterogeneity."Likepost-

moder theory itself, this tends to inhibit ratherthan to promotean activepolitics.

Ironically, in fact, not all feminist and black criticism, which Prakashwould draw into alliance, is actually so hostile to founding categories or

conceptsof experience, identity,orpoliticalagency.Withinfeministcriticismthereis, of course,an immenselywide rangeof positionsandapproaches;butas Denise Riley has argued,if feminismabandons hecategoryof women andthe proposition hatthey have a differenthistory,it dissolves its own subject.Although feminists contend strongly amongstthemselves as to whetherthe

concept of woman constitutes a universalcategory, they must for some pur-poses and at some levels continue to act as if such a categoryindeedexists,

preciselyfor the reason that the world continuesto behaveandtreatwomen as

thoughone does.35Not all feminists have foreclosed on questionsof agency,experience, and identity.Both feminism and postmodernism trive to revealthe implicationof many forms of knowledge in power, but many feminists

arguethat they cannot limit themselves to dissection or to the fundamentalculturalrelativism that underliespostmodernism'srefusal to do more than

proliferatedeconstructive

questions. Showinghow certain kinds of knowl-

edge areprivilegeddoes not in itself changeverymuch.Postmodernismtselfcannotprovidea theoryfor or make the move to agency, preciselybecauseit

regardsall knowledgeas tainted andcomplicit. Because its ultimateconcernis with realsocial changefeminism can and mustmake this move, which also

keeps open the possibilitythat theremaybe some forms of knowledgewhichare emancipatoryratherthan taintedand complicit and which are measured

againsttheirusefulnessfor feministpurposesrather hanagainstthe inverted

positivist standardsof postmodernistepistemology. Likewise, questions of

experienceandidentityremainopen ones for manyfeminists. In the Westerntradition,as LindaHutcheonsuggests, women have not been identifiedhistor-

ically with origins, authority,or ego. On the contrary, hey envisage them-

selves as lackingthese attributesalready.Their task must be to reconstruct s

well as question concepts of self and experience, for as emphasisedabove,

politicalaction becomes impossibleif women as subjectssee themselvesandtheirexperienceonly in terms of dispersal.36

If feminists have made these differencesvery clear, so too have at least

some criticswritingfrom otherminoritybackgrounds, ertainlysome of those

to which Prakashrefers. In an articleon these minoritydiscoursesin theirrelation to the Westernintellectualtraditionand its academic institutions,

35 Denise Riley,AmI That Name? Feminismand the Category of 'Women' n History(Lon-don: Macmillan, 1988), 112-4.

36 LindaHutcheon,ThePolitics of PostmodernismLondon:Routledge,1989),39 and167-8.




AbdulJanMohamed ndDavidLloyddo not hesitateto use privilegedcatego-ries or totalizing forms of analysis. For them, the problems of minorityintellectualsspring "as inevitablyfrom the modes of late capitalistsociety asdo the systematicexploitationof the less privilegedminoritygroupsand the

feminizationof poverty."37They are very clear, moreover,that for all the

importanceof changes at the level of discourse, emancipationdependsulti-

mately on "radical transformationsof the material structuresof exploita-tion."38The questionof identityalso remainsanopenone, significantonly in

the end for issues of practiceand struggle. Fragmented dentity

is forminorities givenof their ocialexistence.But as sucha given t is notyetby

anymeansan ndexof

liberation,otevenof that ormal ndabstractiberation hich

is all thatpoststructuralism,n itself and disarticulatedromanyactualprocessofstruggle, ouldoffer.Onthecontrary,henon-identityf minoritiesemainshesignof materialdamage,to whichthe only coherent esponses struggle,not ironicdistanciation.39

EDWARD SAID: PROBLEMS OF A PARADIGM

That Prakash'sposition shouldbe so shot throughwith inconsistenciesis in

some senses understandable.He takes his definitions andmanyof his prem-ises from Said, whose text also has manyof these same contradictions.It is

worthreturning o these aspectsof Said's work, because Prakash s only oneof a greatnumberof historianswho seem to us to have basedthemselves on

Said's positions withoutattendingadequately o the problemsin them.

It is well known thatSaid drawsheavilyon a rangeof Foucauldianperspec-tives, both for the analysisof Orientalismas a formof discourseand for his

own repudiationof Europe's "universalisinghistoricism."He brings these

themes togetherto press home one of his centralarguments:Orientalistcon-

structionsare notmerelyinaccurate,biased, or in needof replacingwith more

adequateones. Rather,Orientalismas a styleof authoritativeepresentations

itself the taintedproductof an epistemology and an intellectualtradition nwhich "the one humanhistoryuniting humanityeither culminated n or was

observed from the vantagepoint of Europe."40Said's continuingcommitmentat otherlevels both to conventionalhuman-

ist techniquesof representation nd to an implicitlyuniversalistdiscourse of

freedomis often less well appreciated.Despitehis criticismof Orientalismasa style of representation,he makes it clear that his concernis not to rejectthe

possibilityof any kindof objectiverepresentation.Knowledgefor Said clear-

ly is not just the endlessly self-referentialproductof all-pervasivepower

37 Abdul R. JanMohamed nd David Lloyd, "Introduction:MinorityDiscourse-What is toBe Done?," CulturalCritique,Fall (1987), 12.

38 Ibid., 15.39 Ibid., 16.40 Edward Said, "OrientalismReconsidered,"in Francis Barkeret al., eds., Literature,

Politics and Theory(London:Methuen, 1986), 223.




relations.On the contrary,his interest ies in developingforms of representa-tion and knowledge which are emancipatory n their effects and which can

serve as a basis for active politicalcommitmentand intervention.As he says,unless intellectualsare interested n changing political relations, in disman-

tling systems of dominationas well as defining them, the critiqueof Orien-

talism is merely "anephemeralpastime."4'He sees any worthwhilecultural

criticismas "constitutionallyopposedto every form of tyranny,domination,and abuse; its social goals are non-coerciveknowledge producedin the in-

terests of human freedom."42This pursuitof criticism's active emancipatory

potentialis "a fundamentalhumanand intellectualobligation."43He differs

sharplyhere from DerridaandFoucault,whom he sees as havingabandoned

the critic's propertask of an engagementwhich is ultimatelypolitical in itsnaturewith the dominantstructures f contemporary ulture.Derridaelected

to illustratewhat is undecidablewithin texts, rather hanto investigatetheir

worldly power;andFoucault orgotthatultimately"the fascinateddescriptionof exercised power is never a substitute or tryingto changepowerrelations

within society."44Said also reserves a place and a significance for individualagents and

individual experience in the shaping of Orientalistdiscourse: "Yet unlike

MichelFoucault,

to whose work I amgreatly

indebted, I do believe in the

determining mprintof individualwritersuponthe otherwiseanonymouscol-

lective body of texts constitutinga discursiveformation ike Orientalism."45

This position is wildly at odds with Foucault'sown unremittingattemptsto

fragmentthese categorieson the groundsof theirhumanistand essentialist

character. n contrast,Said refersto his own andsimilarprojectsas humanist

in a broadsense andin an interview n 1986 referred eryexplicitlybothto the

contradictionsin his own position and to his radical disagreementwith

Foucauldianperspectiveson representation ndpower: "Orientalisms the-

oretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way: I didn't want Foucault'smethod, or anybody'smethod, to overridewhatI was tryingto put forward.

The notion of a non-coerciveknowledge, which I come to at the end of the

book, was deliberatelyanti-Foucault."46

How, then, is the criticto go aboutthe universalmoral andpoliticaltasks,which Said commends, withoutappearing o invoke the taintedauthorityof

Europeanor any othersingle anddominating ntellectual radition?He notes

that a whole range of intellectualprojects,just like his own, have already

41 Ibid., 229.42 Said, The World,29.43 Ibid., 30.44 Ibid., 222.

45 Said, Orientalism(London:PeregrineBooks, 1985), 23.46 See the interviewwith Said in ImreSalusinszky,Criticismin Society (London:Methuen,

1987), 137.




begunto breakup old objectsof knowledgeruledby Orientalismand to form

new fields of investigation. These projectsare local and self-convicted but

form a common endeavour.Their methodsdeliberatelyavoid totalizingandsystematizing;rather, hey striveconsciously to be secular,marginal,opposi-tional. They work out of a decenteredconsciousness, intendingthe end of

dominating,coercive systems of knowledge;but they do not seek common

unity by appealsto anykindof sovereign authority,methodologicalconsisten-

cy, canonicity,science.47

The pointaboutconsistencyis certainlytrue, for what comes out of all this

is a very strainedandcontradictoryposition. Said recommends hat we aban-

don totalizationandsystematizationn favourof the off-centreand themargin-al. But what view could have been morecentrallyfocussed andsystematisingthan thatwhich he presentedin Orientalism?Whatgave the latterits powerwas precisely its ability to reinterpret,within a single analyticalframework,core elements in the European ntellectualand political traditionfor a very

long period and, indeed, to reinterprethem in ways that obscured internal

relationsof contestationand resistancein Westerncultures. If Said had fol-

lowed his own injunctions,now echoed in Prakash,Orientalismwould never

havebeen written,with muchloss to the whole scholarlycommunity.Again,Said advocates humanist values and a set of universal moral

imperativesregardingpolitics and humanfreedom, the fundamentalobligationsof intel-

lectuals, the properrole of culturalcriticism. But how are these strongand

central normativethemes reconciledwith the secular and marginalposition,the extremerelativist"pluralityof terrains,multipleexperiencesanddifferent

constituencies"which Said commends elsewhere?48Ambiguityalso marks

Said'spositionon representation.He repudiates he view thatonly womencan

write aboutwomen, blacksaboutblacks, thatonly criticismwhich treats hem

well is good criticism. But as he himself says, the kind of local and self-

committed ntellectualprojectshe commendsare

alwaysin

dangerof

slippinginto a kind of "possessive exclusivism," which holds thatthe only valid kind

of representations the self-representation f insiders.49

Of course, it is true thatsuch contradictionscan be very fruitful,particu-

larly in handsas deft as Said's. But theirfruitfulness ies surelyin promptingus to recognizeandgo beyondthem. Moreover,theredo seem to be levels in

Said's widerpositionat which creativetensionsbeginto look like submergedself-contradictions.This was perhapsmost interestingly o, for ourpurposes,in what he said early in 1989duringthe battles over Salman Rushdie'swork.

Rushdie's "fundamentalrights" should be protected,Said argued, becausethe contemporaryworld, for all its particularities,must be regardedas one

47 Said, "OrientalismReconsidered,"228.48 Idem.49 Ibid., 229.




world and humanhistory as one history.(But not, to paraphrasehis earlier

remarks,a humanhistoryseen fromEurope'svantagepoint.) This meantthat

therewas no pureunsullied essence to which Muslims or anyoneelse couldreturn;his singleworld was irredeemably eterogeneous,andRushdie'sworkwas a partof that. At the same time, one feature of his work that made it

legitimatewas that "Rushdie,from the communityof Islam, has written fortheWest aboutIslam.TheSatanic Verses s thusa self-representation."50his

bringsSaidveryclose to whathe rejectedearlieraboutself-representation:ts

tendency merelyto invert the essentialcategoriesof Orientalism. t is simplyvery difficult to combine argumentsconcerningfundamental ightsand pos-sibilities for

emancipationwith a

postmodernistefusal of

anykind of

unitaryor systematizingperspectiveas to what these rights mightbe or what eman-

cipationis from or into. Consequently,rights, dominance,andemancipationare defined only from the extreme relativistperspectiveof the multifarious

struggles of oppositional groups. And when one version of emancipationconflicts with another,the naturaldefence for both becomes the principleof

self-representation s such.

HISTORICIZING POSTMODERNISM? PERSPECTIVES

ON A LIBERAL CULTURE

Why, then, have these perspectivesachieved such widespreadpopularity n

Western,particularlyAmerican,academic circles?Thereis now, of course, a

large and influential body of postmodernist writing in history and an-

thropology,mostly published n the UnitedStates.5'Thiswritingdoes notjustembracepostmodernist ndpoststructuralisttrategiespartiallyand contradic-

torily as Said and Prakashdo but advocatesthem wholeheartedlyas the verymeans to fashion new possibilities for writing and representation n a

postcolonialworld. There have been a rangeof prominentcontributorshere,

butperhaps hemost influentialhas been JamesClifford,both in the collectionedited withGeorgeMarcus n 1986, WritingCulture,and his own morerecentvolume of essays, The Predicament of Culture.52 We would like to turn now

to look at Clifford'smore thoroughgoingrecommendation f postmodernist

perspectives,to discuss what we see to be its extremelyconservativepolitical

implications, implicationswhich Prakashcannotlogically disassociate him-self from.

50This short articleappeared n the Observernewspaper 26 February1989, 14).51 Useful introductions o this literatureare AndreasHuyssen,Afterthe Great Divide: Mod-

ernism,Mass Cultureand Postmodernism;and D. Kellner,ed., Postmodernism, ameson,Cri-

tique (Washington,D.C.: MaisonneuvePress, 1989).52 James Clifford and George E. Marcus,eds., WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politics of

Ethnography Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1986);JamesClifford,ThePredicament

of Culture:Twentieth-Century thnography,Literature,and Art (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard

UniversityPress, 1988).



THE THIRD WORLD AFTER ORIENTALISM I59

Clifford himself notes that Said remains "ambivalentlyenmeshed in the

totalizing habits of Western humanism."53 For him, the relativist and

poststructuralisteatures of Said's work make it important;ts humanistanduniversalistelements are merely an unfortunatehangoverfrom an outmodedintellectual tradition:

theprivilege f standing bovecultural articularism,f appealingotheuniversalistpower hat peaksorhumanity,oruniversalxperiencesf love,work,death, tc., isa privilegenvented y totalizingWesterniberalism.54

Clifford's critique of Said flows out of a set of clear postmodernistand

poststructuralistommitments.New possibilitiesforpostcolonialethnography

are best opened up througha rejectionof all universal ormsof understandingculture or the past. Ethnography hould focus insteadon the ways in which

cultures,as forms of "collectively constituteddifference,"are in a constant

process of local invention, carriedout in relation to recentcolonial historiesand new national identities.55In this mobile postcolonial world, in whichexotic others return he ethnographer's aze, new ways must also be foundof

talkingabout relations betweencultures which emphasisethat these are rela-

tionships of power. This does not mean, however, that we can devise newtheories about global homogenizationor the transformation f postcolonial

societies in the image of Europe. Certainly, Clifford concedes, there areincreasingly pervasive processes of economic and culturalcentralisationatwork. But these do not tell the whole or the only story.Whatemergescon-

stantlyat the level of local societies are new and inventiveordersof culturaldifference and of subversion, mockery, syncretismand revival, which chal-

lenge all efforts to constructany single master narrativeof global historical

change: "Indeed, modernethnographichistories are perhapscondemned tooscillate between two metanarratives: ne of homogenization,the other of

emergence;one of loss, the otherof invention."56Here, then, postmodernisthostility to any kind of universalhistory,and what is in effect a position ofextreme culturalrelativism, feed into and reinforceone another. From this

perspective,one can see why Clifford s anxiousto hold on to someconceptofcultureitself, for its "differentialandrelativist"functionsarepreciselywhatis important.57What we thereforeneed, he argues,are new ways of construct-

ing and authorisingknowledge about others. Instead of the ethnographer sthe privileged purveyorof suchknowledge,we must learnto envisagea worldof generalizedethnographyand texts which are franklythe productof many

53 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 271.54 Ibid., 263.55 Ibid., 274. For a good summaryof the argumentsabout cultureas collectively constituted,

see Roger M. Keesing, "Anthropologyas InterpretativeQuest," CurrentAnthropology,28:2

(April 1987).56 Clifford, The Predicamentof Culture, 17.57 Ibid., 274.




voices. This means going beyond methods which make the writer into anomniscientauthorityandspokesman,which screen off the whole businessof

researchandwriting,and whichdeal withabstract ollectivities andtypifyingprocesses, such as "the Nuer think .. ." It means having ethnographieswhich are open abouttheir status as "a constructivenegotiation nvolving atleast two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects."58These new dialogicalapproachesnot only strive to createtexts which are an

open-endedinterplayof many voices, along the lines that Mikhail Bakhtin

envisaged. They also seek to return ontrol over knowledgeto its indigenoussources, to representadequately he authorityof informants,andto open realtextual spaces for a multitudeof indigenousvoices whose

perspectivesand

agendasare not imposedon themfromoutside: "If accordedan autonomoustextual space, transcribedat sufficient length, indigenousstatementsmakesense in terms different rom those of the arranging thnographer.Ethnogra-phy is invadedby heteroglossia."59

Althoughthese aims are in some senses still utopian,Cliffordpoints to a

rangeof recent studies that have tried to accordto particularly nowledgeableor sophisticatedinformantsthe status not merely "of independentenunci-

ators,butof writers."60Anthropologistswritingfrom this perspective"havedescribedthe

indigenous 'ethnographers'with whom

they shared,to some

degree, a distanced,analytic, even ironic view of custom. These individualsbecame valued informantsbecausethey understood,often with real subtlety,what an ethnographicattitude toward culture entailed."61In this way, an-

thropology has been able not only to move towards a world of pluralau-

thorshipbut to recognizeethnography'sparticipationnthe actual nventionof

culture,as in the collectively producedstudy,PimanShamanismand StayingSickness.The ethnographer,DonaldBahr,appearson the titlepagewiththreeotherauthors,who arePapagoIndians.The book is intended "to transfer o a

shamanas many as possible of the functions normallyassociatedwith au-thorship."62 he shaman,Gregorio,is thus the mainsource or the "theoryof

disease"described n the book. The audiencesto which the book is addressedare also multiple. Gregorio'scommentariesare in Piman, with translations

made by the interpreter,David Lopez; and the linguist, AlbertAlvarez;and

accompaniedby Bahr'sown interpretations.Thus the book not only keepsdistinctthe contributionsof each butprovidesmaterial or qualifiedPapagosas well as for Westernaudiences.Indeed,Alvarez himselfdesignedthe trans-

58 Ibid., 41.59 Ibid., 51.60 Idem.61 Ibid., 49.62 Ibid., 51.



THE THIRD WORLD AFTER ORIENTALISM I6I

lationsso thatthe,bookcould be used in languageteaching,thuscontributingto the developmentof Piman as a writtenlanguage:"Thusthe book contrib-

utes to the Papagos' literaryinvention of theirculture."63What, then, arethe broader mplicationsof this approach?Certainly, ssues

of power are taken to be central to the relationbetween ethnographerand

writer-informant;nda very largeeffortis made to changethe termson which

theyconducttheirexchanges.However,we need to look moreclosely at these

terms of exchange and to ask how far they manage to avoid the problemsidentifiedearlier.We would like to arguenot only that theseproblemsarenot

avoided,but that there is actuallyanotherand much moredisturbingpolitical

logicin these argumentsas presentedby Clifford.

Here certainly,the principleof self-representations pushedto its logicalconclusion, which is the self-representation f individuals.This is preciselywhat is implied in the new dialogical approach o ethnography hatCliffordand othersadvocateas the meansto supercedeolder styles of representation,with their questionableassumptionsabout authorship,their typifying pro-cedures,andtheir referencesto abstract ollectivities. If we arenot to employthe latter, ndeed, it certainly s very difficult to see whatothercategoriesandaccounts ethnographers ould work with except for direct indigenousstate-

ments, quotationsand

translations,such as those of

Gregoriothe

shaman,who have a sophisticatedknowledge of the cultureand an understanding fwhat a properlyethnographicattitudeentails. But because it privilegesonlythe voices of authoritative ndigenous individuals, this approachpresentsaclear problem. It is hard to see how such an approachcan recogniseor giveadequate place to conflict within social contexts thus examined or to those

groups or communities who may dissent very strongly from these au-thoritativeaccounts. It is not clear how such relationshipsof power are dis-cussed at all if the analyticalmeans of abstractionand typificationare es-

chewed in favour of a dialogue between individuals.Indeed, the strategies proposedhere look disturbinglysimilarto those of

East IndianCompanyofficials, who also thoughtof culture as "collectivelyconstituteddifference" n earlycolonial India.Whentheywishedto elucidatethe majorprinciplesof what they assumed to be a composite Hinduculture,

they turnedto the Brahmanpandits who were deemed to be experts andauthorities n the matter.The result of thisprivilegingof particularnformantswas the longer-term mergenceof an all-IndiaHindutraditionvery much inthe image of Brahmanicreligious values. These values, now embodied in

written legal codes and disseminated in a wide range of social contexts,graduallyeroded what had previouslybeen a much moreheterogeneouscol-

63 Ibid., 52.




lection of local social and religious practices.64Given the great play thatCliffordand others make with their vigorous repudiationof all legacies of

colonialism, one would have thoughtthat an especial targetof their attackwould have been precisely this sortof colonial effort to establishdominance

throughthe textualisationof culturesin collaborationwith carefullychosen

indigenousauthorities.But this is just the kind of intervention hathe seems torecommend n the exampleof thejointly producedbook on Papagoculture,inwhich the shamanGregorio's translatedaccounts were designed in part tocontribute o "the Papagos'literary nvention of theirculture."

Postmodernismsupposedly distinguishesthis kind of collaborationfrom

colonial strategies, of course, with the argumentthat ethnographiccon-

sciousness is now no longerthe monopolyof Western pecialistsbutis shared

with a whole rangeof indigenousaudienceswho will scrutinizeethnographictexts and decode them in their own ways. Indigenousas well as Western

voices are now free to negotiateandcontest suchrepresentations n whathas

become a world-wideculturalstage. Local culturesconstantlyreinvent hem-

selves within and against these new circumstances of global relationality.Theirstoriesare different.They continuallyundercutand forbidthe construc-

tion of any single or totalisingnarrative.

To question thesebasic

suppositionsis not to

denythat

indigenousau-

diences are sharplyalive to the political consequencesof novel cultural n-

terpretationsand interventions.The disseminationof Brahmanicalreligiousvalues was consciously andbitterlycontestedin nineteenth-centuryndiaand

continuesto be fought by ratherdifferentgroupsat present.But it is quite a

differentthing to posit, as Cliffordappearsto here, a sharedethnographicconsciousness, a commonparticipationn the textualization f culturesand in

what he calls the "distanced, analytic, even ironic view of custom" that

ethnographicconsciousness entails.65Most obvious, it seems unlikely that

those amongst indigenousaudienceswho are neitherpowerholdersnor spe-cialist purveyorsof knowledgewill be able to afforda detachedor abstracted

view of custom, particularlywhen its terms are being reinterpreted rom

outsideas well as fromabove. Even withinthe termsof a dialogicalapproach,which focusses much more narrowlyon exchanges between ethnographersand theirselectedwriter-collaborators,t is hard o see how we can speakof a

64 Historianshave documentedthis process across a rangeof fields. See, for example, L.

Mani, "ContentiousTraditions:The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,"CulturalCritique,Fall

(1987);D.

Washbrook,"Law,State and

AgrarianSocietyin Colonial

India,"ModernAsian

Studies, 15:3 1981; R. O'Hanlon, "Culturesof Rule, Communitiesof Resistance:Gender,DiscourseandTradition n Recent SouthAsian Historiographies," ocial Analysis, no. 25 (Sep-tember1989);C. Bayly,IndianSocietyand theMakingof the BritishEmpire, 136-68; N. Dirks,"The Inventionof Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India,"Social Analysis, no. 5 (September1989); Lucy Carroll, "Law,Customand StatutarySocial Reform:The HinduWidows' Remar-

riage Act of 1856," IndianEconomicand Social HistoryReview, 20:4 (1983).65 Clifford,ThePredicamentof Culture,49.




dialogueor negotiationwhich both shareon near-equalerms. The issue is not

simplytheproblemof a text's internal omposition,whichis the chief concern

of dialogical approaches. It is also, as Bob Scholte has argued, that eth-

nographic texts are subject to external as well as to internal relations of

production, which include a professionalacademic apparatusof seminars,lectures and conferences, fundingbodies, researchcouncils and committeesof appointment.66t would be very difficult to deny that this intellectualandinstitutionalapparatushelps set to a considerable extent the agendas and

framingquestionswhichethnographersake with theminto the field andthatit also exerts a large control in shaping professional standards,styles of

writing, and access topublication;

in awarding recognitionandconferringacademic authority;and in approvingand financingfurtherresearch.Local

writer-collaboratorsmay indeed have long-lastingand intimateconnectionswith individualethnographers. t is much less clear whataccess andinfluence

they, let alone wider and less privileged indigenousaudiences, are able tocommand in these complex externalcontextsof a text's production.

This is anextraordinary lindness. As we have seen, postmodernistwritingin this field repeatedly nsists thatits paramount oncern is with relationshipsof powerand the immersionof all knowledgewithinthem. Butthisapparently

applies to all knowledgeand to all forms of historical and

social belongingexcept the postmoderncritic'sown. In manyways, such a positionis entirelyconsistentwith postmodernism'sbroaderpremises, which deny possibilitiesfor an active historical self-understandingand experience in favourof my-thifiedandfabulizedstories which melt our sense of the past's solidity.Theyrefuse to equip themselves for any kind of wider historicalor sociologicalvision, for to do so would need the rangeof analytical ools thatbothClifford

and Prakash ask us to echew: privilegedcategories which "occlude" other

histories, abstractcollectivities and typifying processes, totalizingand sys-

tematizingforms of understanding.What follows fromthis, in terms of post-modernism'srefusalto examineits own historicalprovenance,maybe consis-

tent;but it is none the less disconcerting.It bearsa strangeresemblance o

colonial strategiesof knowledge, which notoriouslyregardedall indigenousidentities andrelationsas properobjectsfor investigation in consultation,of

course, withproper ndigenousauthorities)whilstveiling its own historyfrom

scrutiny.If, as Cliffordsees it, indigenouswritersnow virtuallydefineandrepresent

themselvesthroughethnographicexts, so too do local cultures hemselves in

these new global relationships.In view of postmodernism'shostilityto total-ities, of course, it is somewhatdifficultto hold onto any conceptof a cultureas such. The way around his, whichClifford akes, is to suggestthatcultures

66 Bob Scholte, "The Literary Turn in ContemporaryAnthropology," Critique of An-

thropology, 7:1, 38.




may not actuallybe totalities at all but "mobile ensembles"thatconstantlyreinventthemselves, tell theirown stories, and create theirown variantson

global political relationships.We end up with still a totality but one con-

ceived, like postcolonialsubjectsthemselves, in extremelyvolatile and volun-taristicways. Postcolonialsocieties are free, it would seem almost, to rein-

vent global political and economic relationshipsat will. There are forces

through which the world is becoming increasingly homogeneous, but we

cannotaccepta unitaryor systematicanalysisof thesechanges.Our stories of

homogenizationare in the end no differentfrom their stories of local and

differentself-invention.

What, then,arewe to makeof the

apparentpopularityof this combination

of extremeculturalrelativismwith a liberal,almost individualistunderstand-

ing of thesepostcolonialsocieties'abilityto defineandcreate hemselves?For

Prakash,as indeed for otherswho share his approaches,postmodernistper-

spectives help makepossible a radical-sounding ssault, issued along with a

declamatorypubliccommitment o theemancipation f marginalised ultures,on all existingframeworksof interpretation. orClifford, ust as for Prakash,

moder capitalism'sglobal spreadcan produceonly homogenization, ust as

any historyfocussing on the themeof capitalisttransition an recognizeonly

homogeneityto the detrimentof otherand differenthistories. Wesee here thepostmodernistmisconceptiondescribedabove, thatsystemscanonly generatesameness. This makes it possible, within a culturedeeply antagonistic o anykindof materialisthistoricalexplanation, o dismisssuggestionsthatthe local

differenceswe see emergingin postcolonialsocietiesmighthavesomethingat

leastto do withlogics of differentiationntrinsic o modemcapitalism,since it

is against and in spite of such logics that these local cultures invent them-

selves. But the resultbringsus strangelyclose to the classic liberal view that

culturerepresents ome realmof freedomand choice. Althoughwe can study

largerforces of global economic centralizationandthe coercionsthey exert,culturalrelativismmeans that this metanarrativean do no more than stand

alongsideits opposite, thatof local cultures'self-creation.Further,hese very

public commitmentsto culturalemancipationseem to displace most of the

intellectualrisk onto writer-collaborators ho authorise heirown representa-tions, indigenousaudienceswho decode texts in theirown ways, and a rangeof national,ethnic and othermarginalizedpeople who are maderesponsiblefortheirown self-representation,heirown visions of emancipationandpolit-ical strugglestowardsit.

CliffordGeertzhas identifiedsome of the logics underlying his position.All these approaches he calls thempretensions) ryto "getround he un-get-roundable act that all ethnographicaldescriptionsare homemade,that theyare the describer'sdescriptions,not those of the described."67Althoughthe

67 CliffordGeertz, Worksand Lives:TheAnthropologistas Author Cambridge:PolityPress,

1988), 144.




business of representationhas become infinitely more complex in recent

years, althoughethnographers nd historiansaremoresharplyawarethanever

beforeof its acute moral andpoliticaldifficulties,thesecannot be shifted ontothose whose control over the productionof ethnographic exts is moreappar-ent thanreal; nor can it be resolved throughtechnique:

Theburden f authorshipannot eevaded,however eavytmayhavegrown;here sno possibility f displacingt onto "method", language"r (anespeciallypopularmaneuver t the moment)"thepeoplethemselves"edescribed"appropriated"sprobablyhe better erm)as co-authors.68

We would go rather further than this. These postmodernistapproaches,particularlyClifford's, actuallyoffer us an epistemology that denies that itsown history can be seriously investigatedand an analyticalpreoccupationwith a very narrowlydefined set of individualrelationships.Effectively de-

politicised by being insulatedfrom their materialand institutionalcontexts,these relationshipsare presented as an arena in which indigenous collab-oratorsandaudiences are free, as it were, to inventandbe themselves. Suchefforts to sever off spheresof activityforfree individualsorculturesare a veryold device of liberal ideology. The British colonial record is full of them.

If all this looks more like a device for legitimationthan any basis for an

emancipatoryorm of

knowledge,what is

being legitimized?Said, Huyssen,and others have made the point that Frenchpostmodernismand poststruc-turalism underwenta peculiarmetamorphosiswhen they were domesticatedwithin American liberal culture from the early 1960s. Theirrapid growthin

popularityreflected the degreeto which they were evisceratedof theirearlierand radical political content by literaryand culturalcritics, who convertedthem into forms of "writerlyconnoisseurismandtextualgentrification."69Wesee these intellectualpositions sustainingkey aspectsof contemporarypoliti-cal culture in the United States. The first concerns the way in which the

advance of argumentsabout the self-representationf thirdworldpeoples fitsneatly into its self-consciously multiminorityacademicculture.Whatmarksdebate here is, of course, a deep concernwith multipleandconflictualidenti-ties. Yet what is strikingabout these debates, particularly hose employingpostmodernistperspectives, is how one particular dentity, that of class ormaterialrelations,is so oftendownplayedorscreenedoff. Not only do partici-pants in these debates frequently ignore questions of class, but they seethemselves also as having to challenge the larger intellectual traditionofhistorical materialism that establishes those questions as central, on the

groundsthat its universalistandobjectivistpretensionsarereallyno differentto those of liberalmodernization heory.One consequenceof this is thatself-defined minority or subalterncritics are saved from doing what they con-

stantlydemand of others, which is to historicisethe conditions of theirown

68 Ibid., 140.69

Huyssen, Afier the Great Divide, 212; Said, The World, 3-5.




emergence as authoritativevoices-conditions which could hardly be de-scribed without referenceof some kind to materialor class relations.

At other levels, the exclusion of class and of the materialistcritiqueof

capitalismfrom the agendaof scholarshiphas implicationsthat seem to us

absolutelycritical. What t means is thatthe trueunderclasses f the worldare

only permitted o presentthemselves as victims of the particularistic inds of

gender,racial, and nationaloppressionwhich they sharewithpreponderantlymiddle-classAmericanscholars andcritics, who wouldspeakwith or in theirvoices. What such underclassesaredeniedis the abilityto present hemselvesas classes: as victims of the universalistic,systemicandmaterialdeprivationsof capitalismwhichclearly separate hemoff fromtheirsubaltern

xpositors.In sum, the deeply unfortunateresult of these radical postmodernistap-proaches n the minoritiesdebate s thus to reinforceand to give new credenceto the well-known hostility of American political culture to any kind ofmaterialistor class analysis.

These approachesalso seem to us to have hadimportant ndwiderimplica-tions in Americanpoliticalandacademicculture.Anotheranthropologistwho

employsthem, PaulRabinow, ells us engaginglythathe is "temperamentallymore comfortable n anoppositionalstance."70Thesame seems to be trueof a

wide rangeof currentacademic

writing.There runs

through t a desire to beseen on the side of the dispossessedagainstpower, workingwith theirstrangevoices and different stories, subvertingdominantcultures and intellectualtraditions"from within the academy."But in the case of postmodernistap-proaches, these commitments can be made with a lightenedburdenof au-

thorshipanda comfortingsense that n thisvolatile new worldof cultural elf-

invention, the critic's own history is at best a fable. Whatall this begins tolook very like, in fact, is a new form of that key and enduringfeature ofWesterncapitalistand imperialistculture:the bad conscience of liberalism,

still strugglingwith the continuingparadoxbetweenan ideology of libertyathome and therealityof profoundlyexploitativepoliticalrelationsabroad,and

now striving to salve and reequip itself in a postcolonial world with new

argumentsandbettercamouflaged ormsof moralauthority.But the solutions

it offers-methodological individualism,the depoliticisinginsulation of so-

cial from materialdomains, a view of social relations that is in practiceextremelyvoluntaristic, he refusalof anykind of programmatic olitics-donot seem to us radical, subversive,or emancipatory.Theyare on the contraryconservative and implicitly authoritarian, s they were indeed when recom-

mended more overtly in the heydayof Britain'sown imperialpower.Prakashhimselfdoes notpushtheseperspectives o theirmost authoritarian

conclusionsand tries rightlyto be criticalof theirdepoliticisingeffects. But

70 Paul Rabinow, "RepresentationsAre Social Facts:Modernityand Post-Modernityn An-

thropology," n Clifford and Marcus,WritingCulture,258.




since he sharesmanyof their core assumptions,his effortsresult n ambiguityand contradiction.His is basically an attempt,like thatof Said andof manyothers who tryto use his positionas a pointof departure,o ride two horses atonce. But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstantriders,andSaid himself does at least seem to know which of them in the end he wouldratherbe on.

after orientalism_david washbrook

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