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From Colonial History to Postcolonial History: A Turn Too Far?
David Armitage
| A specter is haunting American history: the specter of postcolonialism. Jack P. Greene is only the latest in a diverse series of Americanists to call for a postcolonial turn in the study of what has long been termed colonial America.1 There are weak and strong versions of that turn. The weaker version is postcolonial in the chronological sense that it is the successor of colonial history: less beholden to teleology, unencumbered by anachronism and nationalism, and not hierarchically disposed between center and periphery, metropole and colony, dependency and independence. It demands a change in the scale of American history by placing that history in broader contexts of comparison and conjunction, encompassing the entire North American continent, the hemispheric Americas, the greater Atlantic world, or the British Empire, for example. |
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The strong version, by contrast, is postcolonial in the metaphysical sense that it assumes "that some of its characteristic features could not have arisen without the particular colonial history that went before."2 Such a history assumes the continuity of colonialism beyond independence or decolonization but attempts to avoid the disabling narratives of inclusion and exclusion, inferiority and superiority, achievement and potential, which informed the ideology of colonialism itself. To make a postcolonial turn in this sense would set American history within the same analytic framework as the histories of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—those parts of the globe that mostly European colonialism forcibly shaped, leaving behind ineradicable colonial legacies even for the formally decolonized. It would also demand nothing less than a wholesale revision of the histories of the peoples and territory now occupied by the United States. |
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The weak version of a postcolonial American history is now sweeping the board in scholarship and teaching. We may not all be Atlanticists now (or yet), but the salutary expansion of historical horizons to encompass the prehistory of the continental United States and the larger oceanic and imperial connections of the British American colonies has proceeded apace in the last three decades. Much of the credit for this achievement can go to Greene himself, thanks to his periodic reports on the state of the field and his frequent exhortations to consider alternative and more expansive approaches to it. In the mid-1980s, for example, Greene, J. R. Pole, and others collaborated in reconceiving colonial American history as the history of early modern British America: a chronologically postcolonial history before the term postcolonialism had even entered the vocabulary of the human sciences. Now that the metaphysically postcolonial is reshaping studies even of the Middle Ages, Greene recommends that students of antebellum America should follow suit.3 But has he now moved from weak to strong, from chronological to metaphysical, postcolonialism? And if so how likely is he to find others to follow him in this sharper turn? |
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For the moment at least, Greene's postcolonialism is somewhat stronger than the version he and his collaborators offered more than two decades ago. It decisively questions the teleological subordination of colonial American history to the history of American nationhood: "No longer can scholars think of colonial as something exclusively prenational," Greene writes. It also aligns itself with a broader movement among students of colonialism to include settler colonialism within their ambit. It will be greatly reinforced by, and will in turn further encourage studies that place the American experience of settlement, the process of dispossession, the extension of law, and the elaboration of sovereignty in the comparative context of Anglophone settlement across the globe.4 |
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