Michael Zuckerman

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Michael Zuckerman | Exceptionalism after All; Or, The Perils of Postcolonialism | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Exceptionalism after All; Or, The Perils of Postcolonialism

THE line I love is from the chase sequence in the most irresistible of all action movies, The Princess Bride. The hunchbacked Sicilian mastermind Vizzini has kidnapped the lovely Buttercup just before her wedding to the evil Prince Humperdinck of Florin. The Sicilian has calculated everything. He has an hour's start on Humperdinck. He has only to cross the Florin Channel and climb the Cliffs of Insanity to get to the Guilder frontier, kill the princess bride, and vanish without a trace. But as Vizzini's vessel is crossing the channel, his Spanish henchman Inigo Montoya sees a black boat in the distance that seems to be following them. Vizzini assures Inigo that this is "inconceivable." No one in Florin knows yet that they have taken Buttercup. And if, somehow, someone is following them, it hardly matters. They have the fastest ship in all of Florin. It is "inconceivable" that the black boat could even keep up with, let alone overtake, them. Nonetheless the Spaniard reports that the black craft is gaining on them. Vizzini's ship lands at the base of the Cliffs of Insanity while their pursuer is still at sea. The cliffs are almost impossible to climb, but Vizzini anticipates every difficulty. His other henchman is the prodigiously powerful giant Fezzik, who lashes the other three to his massive torso and begins hauling them up the sheer face. When they are halfway to the top, Inigo looks down and sees that a masked man dressed in black has landed the black boat and begun to climb. Indeed, the swordsman tells the mastermind, the man in black is gaining on them. "Inconceivable," Vizzini replies once more. And then Inigo utters the line I love. "You keep using that word," he says. "I do not think it means what you think it means."	1
I do not think that postcolonial means what Jack P. Greene thinks it means. For that matter I do not think that theory means what Greene thinks it does either.	2
Greene's misappropriations of postcolonial thinking are subtle. Or rather they are flat where postcolonial thinking is subtle. He conflates the continuance of colonial habits into independence—his concern—with the persistence of a subaltern state of mind after independence, the postcolonial problematic.	3
More than that, he annexes settler colonies to colonies of exploitation with a sublime heedlessness of postcolonial theory (conceding for the sake of argument that there is any theory there in the first place). His settler colonies have, as he admits, "many distinctive features." They do not come within the compass of the colonial condition that engages postcolonialists. Greene's effort to assimilate the settler colonies to postcolonial analysis depends on his slide from postcoloniality to "the broader history of colonialism." But that recurrence to "the principal criteria that define modern colonialism"—settler domination and racial subordination—brings readers back to a generic coloniality.¹ It does not enable scholars to see anything new.	4
Again and again during the course of his extraordinary career, Greene has widened historians' frames of conceptualization. He has always read more and more widely than others. He still does. But his dalliance with postcolonial theory is at odds with his actual interest in explicating America.	5
The postcolonial impulsion is inherently cosmopolitan. Its perspective is a world perspective. Its best insights illuminate the many who were ruled rather than the few who ruled. Greene's impulsion in his essay is inherently parochial. His focus is on the British colonies of the North American mainland and on the nation they announced in 1776. The disjunction is implicit in his discussion of colonies and becomes explicit in his treatment of early modern state formation.	. . .

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