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Book Review
Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. By DAVID SCOTT. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. 233pp. $49.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
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Since the 1970s, a loosely interconnected body of analysis known as postcolonial studies has marked one of the most important and dynamic forms of criticism in the postwar academy. The success of post-colonial studies has been, and continues to be, in part, its grounding in the social, cultural, and political contingencies of the present in order to craft a framework of analysis for understanding our collective global pasts. The seminal work in this regard was, of course, Edward Said's Orientalism, which marked an important turning point in the form of criticism now known as postcolonial studies. Said's Orientalism ushered in a new set of categories—colonial discourse analysis, representation, and constructivism—in order to understand the relationship between culture and politics during the age of nineteenth-century imperialism. It is no coincidence that this work emerged when it did, curing the dusk of the imperial project itself and at the moment, however fleeting it may have been, of Third Worldism's political maturity. David Scott's Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality offers a series of meditations on the present state of postcolonial studies, looking particularly at Jamaica and Sri Lanka. It asks a series of trenchant and timely questions: What are the contingencies in which scholars and critics presently find themselves? How have these contingencies changed since the foundational moment of postcolonial studies? In what ways are new constellations of forces and interests shaping the direction of our analyses of the present and the past? Have postcolonial studies shown the necessary flexibility and commitment to evolve in accordance with the new contingencies, or are we presently situated at the moment of its eclipse? |
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