Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? (2011)

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 few
months, in the wake of the unrest that hit the French suburbs in 2005, the terms
postcolonial and postcoloniality have become common currency in intellectual
and political debate. Scholarly and academic circles are no longer immune to
the controversy that these terms have triggered.1 However, these words have not
been fully explainedindeed, even the simple question of their spelling remains
unclear. Should we write postcolonial or post-colonial? It all depends, says
Akhil Gupta: postcolonial to describe what comes chronologically after colonization, and post-colonial when we need to think the postcolonial as all
that proceeds from the fact of the colonial situation, regardless of temporality.2
When is the postcolonial deemed to have started? When Third World intellectuals arrived in the universities of the developed world, says Arif Dirlik wryly,
hardly less ironic than Kwame Anthony Appiah: Postcoloniality is the condition
of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively
This article owes much to my exchange of ideas with Romain Bertrand, who also kindly read
and commented on the first draft, and to the remarks and suggestions of Mohamed Tozy and Peter
Geschiere. I am, however, solely responsible for any errors, approximations, and questionable judgments that it contains. My thoughts are indebted to the Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Governance program conducted by the Fonds danalyse des socits politiques with the assistance of the
Research Department of the French Development Agency in 20056.
1. See Marie-Claude Smouts, ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les postcolonial studies dans le
dbat 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 of
consideration for the reader, I will not observe this convention in the rest of this article.
Public Culture 23:1
doi
10.1215/08992363-2010-016
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
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small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate

the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.3
But we can provide a more inclusive definition of the postcolonial, characterizing it, as does Georges Balandier, as a situation which is actually shared by
all our contemporariesa definition that tends to identify it with globalization:
We are all, in different ways, in a postcolonial situation.4 This postcolonial
situation would thus be a total social fact, like the colonial situation invoked
by Balandier in his seminal article of 1951; it is a situation that substantiates the
importance of the colonial period in the process of globalization undergone in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 It is in this second sense that the comprador
intelligentsiaoriginating in the Third World and Western-style, now with
white disciples in its trainsees the colonial situation and its reproduction as
the origin and cause of contemporary social relations, whether of class, gender,
or community membership both in the former colonies and in the former metropolitan centers. Thus French historians have over the past few years focused on
deciphering their society through the prism of the colonial legacy by attributing
the widely recognized social divide ( fracture sociale) to a colonial divide
(fracture coloniale) and by postulating a continuity that underlies modes of representation and behavior from the colonial era to the contemporary period. The
imaginary figures of Arab and African immigrants to France have been their first
objects 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 the
revolution, in terms of colonization, whichso they claimimmediately undermined the purported universalism of both these phenomena, being consubstantial
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 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149, quoted in Jacques Pouchepadass, Le projet critique des
postcolonial studies entre hier et demain, in Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 18788.
4. Georges Balandier, preface to Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 24.
5. Jean-Franois Bayart, Le gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalisation (Paris: Fayard, 2004), translated by Andrew Brown as Global Subjects: A Political Critique of
Globalization (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007), chap. 4; Georges Balandier, La situation coloniale:
Approche thorique, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 4479.
6. See, e.g., Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et ltat colonial
(Paris: Fayard, 2005); Grandmaison, La rpublique impriale: Politique et racisme dtat (Paris:
Fayard, 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). Social
divide was a term Jacques Chirac used during his 2002 presidential campaign.
56
Activists, in their turn, have appropriated these interpretations to mobilize as

Natives of the Republic (Indignes de la rpublique) in the suburbsa movement of people who are deemed to be first and foremost the children of their formerly colonized parents (or grandparents) and whose actions are a consequence
of this.7
A River with Many Tributaries
This political and intellectual sensibility claims a kinship with the approach and
assumptions of postcolonial studies, which have flourished in Australian, British,
and North American universities since 1990 and which originated in different
sources.
Postcolonial studies, moreover, are inseparable from a number of social movements through which have been proclaimed, urbi et orbi, the agency and the
empowerment 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 Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak.8
It follows that there is neither any postcolonial theory nor any precise definition
of the term postcolonial or post-colonial. Postcolonial studies is heterogeneous,
including from the viewpoint of the critique of postcolonial reason, as two of
its principal heralds, Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, explain convincingly: the
former radically rejects the epistemic violence of the West; the latter concludes
his major book Provincializing Europe by indicating that it cannot be a matter
of throwing out Western thought, a gift to us all, and that it should be spoken
of only in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude.9 This intellectual configuration,
writes the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe (who is generally seen as part
of this movement, though he does not entirely claim it), is characterized by its
heterogeneity and is a fragmented thinkingwhich constitutes its strength, but
also its weakness.10 In particular, postcolonial studies involves a certain ambigu7. 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 lre
postcoloniale, Le Dbat, no. 137 (2005): 15975.
8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the
Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 255.
10. Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur, and Jean-L ouis 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 violence
inherent to a particular idea of reason and the gap which, in colonial conditions,
separates European ethical thinking from its practical, political, and symbolic
decisions. This aim is meant to inspire the social sciences in the deconstruction
of its constitutive categories. On the other hand, postcolonial studies assumes a
normative, philosophical, and even prophetic scope, insisting on the humanity to
come, the humanity that must arise once the colonial figures of inhumanity and
racial difference have been abolished. But the key thing is not to blind oneself to
the 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 to
instrumentalize it in their struggles or to discredit it from an academic standpoint.
This universalism stems from the experience of the diaspora, whether Indian,
African, or Caribbean, but also from intercontinental intellectual exchanges over
which Western universities no longer have a monopolyalthough undoubtedly
some of them are the main institutions of postcolonial studies. And yet neither
postcolonial studies itself nor scholarly critique of it have managed to erase an
initial ambiguity. In the works of its theorists, the desire for universalism often
turns into a discourse of identity, and the status (philosophical or scholarly) of its
texts frequently remains uncertain, which makes them difficult to comment on
or to use.
There is thus an ambiguity and heterogeneity in postcolonial studies. And
when we gauge the extent to which it has fragmented, when we swim down this
river with many tributaries, we may well start to think that in reality it exists
mainly 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, as
postcolonial studies have now taken all situations of dominance through the ages
as 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 face
the questions it raises, and if we accept my idea that it exists only in the posture of denunciation! In conferences around the world, in French newspapers and
radio broadcasts, there is a widespread opinion that French academics reject this
approach out of provincialism, out of conservatism, out of a refusal to look the
French colonial past in the face, or, worse, out of a shameful compromise with
the racialist imaginaire (imaginary) thatit is claimedis constitutive of the
republic. 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 the
identity, of the accused. Faithful to its habits, postcolonial studies essentializes
Francea France that may exist only in its imagination and whose heterogeneity and inner conflicts should be recalled. Is it French society that is being put on
trial? If so, the suburbs, full of natives, are part of it. Or is it the French political
class that is on trial? But if so, it does not speak with a unanimous voice. Or is it
the French university system that is on trial? A system that has never been a haven
of theoretical harmony. Is the latter being criticized for not taking into consideration the epistemological critique that postcolonial studies purveys, as well as
its presumed ability to decenter the questionnaire of the humanities, to set up
other questions and other forms of knowledge at the very heart of academia?12
Has French academia failed to detect the colonial continuities in peoples imaginations and behavior?13 Or has it failed to take up the hope for a new critical and
polycentric humanism? Or is French academia quite simply reluctant to speak a
new global pidgin, thereby contributing to the image of a France marginalized on
the international scene, timidly wrapped up in its specific concept of the cultural
exception, confined to an altermondialiste (alter-globalist) siege mentality? Or
is it staying aloof from the civic rituals of affliction that now substitute for real
engagement and where, to packed houses, people put on performances of its all
the fault of Voltaire, General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Jules Ferry, Ren Bousquet, or Jacques Massu. This isnt always clear and should not in any case prevent
us from asking whether French scholars might have good reasons not to appropriate a current of thought that is all the rage across the Atlantic or the English Channel, without its heuristic virtues necessarily having been demonstrated.
Weve Done Our Bit!
Overall, the accusation is rather like accusing an adult who contracted a primary
infection as a child for not becoming tubercular in later life. After all, as the
proponents of postcolonial studies freely admit, these studies owe much not only
to French theory but also, and above all, to the intellectual, literary, artistic, and
political trends that seized on the colonial question in France in the 1950s. Several
names come immediately to mind: Aim Csaire and his Discourse on Colonialism, Lopold Sdar Senghor and the Oeuvres potiques, Albert Memmi and
his Portrait of the Colonized, and Frantz Fanon and his Wretched of the Earth
13. Marie-Claude Smouts, Le postcolonial pour quoi faire? in Smouts, La situation postcoloniale, 25n2.
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and Black Skin, White Masks, not to mention the virulent prefaces that Jean-Paul
Sartre wrote for these last two authors.
On the one hand, the essential questions of postcolonial studies are already
found in the works of these writers. It is difficult to express more violence toward
colonialism than these founding fathers did by advocating or legitimizing armed
struggle and terrorismwhich, in the context of the Algerian war, was no mere
figure of style. If we read Sartres preface to The Wretched of the Earthlet
alone the essay itselfSpivak comes off as a bit of a bridesmaid! Those French
who, like Molires Monsieur Jourdain in Le bourgeois gentilhomme, practiced
postcolonial studies without knowing it, were forced to confront political and
ethical dilemmas that were much harder and more painful than those that now
haunt their heirswho are not particularly anxious to decide whether or not to
act as clandestine agents for Hamas or al-Qaeda.
On the other hand, the authors of French literature who were critical of colonialism had a virtually worldwide audience:14 Ashis Nandy, for example, introduced Fanon into India, and Ali Shariati, one of the main ideologues of the Iranian revolution of 1979, learned about Fanons thought in the lecture halls of the
Sorbonne and popularized it within Islamo-leftist circles. Edward Said himself
acknowledged his debt to Raymond Schwab, the author of The Oriental Renaissance. The problem thus splits in half. We first need to ascertain the qualitative
contribution of postcolonial studies: what does it contribute that is distinct from
the work done by French predecessors? Next we need to decide whether this vein
has continued in France (possibly in a different form) or whether and under what
conditions it has terminated.
The originality of postcolonial studies lies in the way the connection was made
between the critique of colonialism and the critique of other forms of domination, especially with respect to the question of genderborrowing heavily, yet
again, from French writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel
Foucault, who nevertheless had not really integrated the parameter of empire into
their thinking, as Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out, and whose conception of the
subject and of representation, allegedly disembodied and Western-centered, has
not found favor with Spivak.15 The link was not completely absent in the works
14. I am deliberately using the term French literature following the example of Salman Rushdie,
who sees himself as part of English literature, that is, literature in the English language, and
definitely 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 Chakravorty
Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson
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of Fanon and Octave Mannoni, or even Sartre. Nonetheless, postcolonial studies

benefited from the tremendous theoretical germination that took place in France
in the 1960s and the way its seeds were then sown in America. Duly noted.
Conversely, the causal relation between the colonial situation and totalitarianism had been mooted by Hannah Arendt, whose work was popular in the circles
around Raymond Aron, at the heart of the French academic establishment. Similarly, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote in the aftermath of the Second World
War that Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European continent, and more generally to the white-raced countries, of the methods of colonial
conquest and domination.16 Actually, the matre penser (mentor) of the liberal
Right in France, Alexis de Tocqueville, who legitimized the ravaging of Algeria, had from the start sensed the possible relationship between colonial violence
and the establishment of a despotic regime in mainland France.17 So, from this
point of view, postcolonial studies is really rather superfluous. As for the critique
of the orientalist gaze, it is already fiercely present in the marvellous preface
that Sartre wrote to a volume of photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in
China: The idea of what is Chinese recedes and pales: it is no longer any more
than a convenient label [appellation commode]. What remain are human beings
who resemble each other in that they are human beingsliving presences of
flesh and blood, who have not yet been given their appellation contrle. We must
be grateful to Cartier-Bresson for his nominalism.18
More important, if not more recently, postcolonial thinking has reminded us
with welcome alacrity that race constitutes . . . the wild area of European humanism, its beast.19 This charge already lay at the center of Sartres and Fanons
denunciation of colonialism, but there has been a tendency, over time, to think
that it has become anachronistic. The disastrous speech given by Nicolas Sarkozy
at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar on July 26, 2007such a travesty
in its content that one wonders whether the presidents acte manqu (subconsciously deliberate mistake) did not inadvertently show that postcolonial studies
was right all alongunfortunately confirmed this intuition that racial violence
and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271313; Spivak, Critique of
Postcolonial Reason.
16. Simone Weil, Oeuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Gallimard, Quarto, 1999), 43031.
17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Travail sur lAlgrie (octobre 1841), in Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard,
1991), 1:71213.
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.
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continues to underlie the representation of Africa and that the well of fantasies
is decidedly inexhaustible in this respect.20
Should we acknowledge that postcolonial studies can be credited with having rehabilitated the study of colonial situations, which Balandiers article had
noted in 1951, showing them to have the character of a total social fact, but
which were then, so it is claimed, neglected by political scientists, historians,
and anthropologists, as even someone who despises postcolonial studies, Frederick Cooper, puts it? 21 Things are more complicated. In the discreet fields of
the French university system and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique
(CNRS) research laboratories, historical research on Empire has continued to the
general indifference of public opinion, the political class, the media, and, admittedly, other specialties of the discipline. The resurgence, with the new millennium, of the colonial question in public debate in France owes much to contingent
circumstances: the encounter among practices of memory that mark the contemporary moment of globalization, the need to renew the discourse and mobilization
of activists disaffected by urban social movements toward the Socialist Party, the
sensitivities of a stratum of junior parliamentarians in the National Assembly,
and the instrumentalization of the past for the purposes of legitimization on the
part of some African states, especially Algeria.22 The sudden popularity of postcolonial studies in some circles at the interface between activism and academia
is partly to be explained by this sudden piece of good luck. But this popularity
is an effectand not a causeof the revival in colonial studies. It should not
overshadow the permanent presence in France, ever since decolonization, of a
way of thinking that is close to, yet independent of, the sensibilities of postcolonial studies or the contribution of a new generation of historians who continue to
analyze colonial situations in the tradition of their illustrious predecessors (Jean
Suret-Canale, Charles-Andr Julien, and Charles-Robert Ageron) while recasting
the themes and approaches of their discipline. Nor should it ignore the contribution of political sociologists who, since the 1970s, have assiduously investigated
the colonial and postcolonial state in Africa and Asia.
As for the legacy of the anticolonial thought of the 1950s, it is surprising that
those who denigrate French provincialism willingly pass over in silence the cir20. Achille Mbembe, Lintarissable puits aux fantasmes, in LAfrique de Sarkozy: Un dni
dhistoire, ed. Jean-Pierre Chrtien (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 91.
21. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5354.
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 kept
aliveboth in France and outside itthe flame of a thinking that is critical of
the imperial situation in a very postcolonial spirit.
At the same time, the diagnosis that French academia failed to take into
account work done in subaltern studies, cultural studies, or postcolonial studies
seems totally wrong, for factual reasons.23 As early as the 1980s, and tirelessly
throughout the 1990s, the authors representing these currents were invited, at least
to Paris, by research centers at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales,
the Centre dtudes et de recherches internationales at the Institut dtudes politique de Paris, and the cole normale suprieure and were widely quoted and
discussed. If the graft did not take, this is not for lack of knowledge but for other
reasons that are not necessarily shameful or due to hostile bias. It may simply
reflect a different configuration of the scholarly field invested by other critical
traditions inspired by Marxism, Foucault, and Bourdieu or simply by a different
historiographical trend. This is a difference that postcolonial studies should
endorse 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 stigmatization
of French backwardness, a set of rather problematic issues: a niche strategy on the
part of scholars after a share of the academic market; a form of flirtation halfway
between Americanophile snobbery and French masochism; a way of reinventing
the figure (a very French figure, after all) of the intellectual committed to the
struggle for justice, the intellectuel engag (public intellectual); a manifestation
of the conformism of the migrant found in French or French-speaking scholars
expatriated to the United States and in thrall to the zeitgeist or to the need to give
ideological hostages to their host institutions; a marketing technique on the part of
publishers who release (too late) translations of the classics of postcolonial studies
in an attempt to surf on the political passions of the moment; a way for African
academics, anxious to turn over a new leaf by freeing themselves from their alma
mater, to move on from the colonial past; or simply one example among others of
the French-bashing that is de rigueur in our neoliberal age. Still, let us hear out
the accusation with good grace and take up anew the examination of postcolonial
studies to ensure it is relevant to the understanding of colonialism and its consequences 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, La
situation postcoloniale, 277.
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colonialism to some extent proceeds. This is what we must now consider from the
strict point of view of the social sciences, leaving aside for the moment the hope
for a critical postcolonial humanism, a hope that is invigorating but, at least at the
onset, irrelevant. However, it appears that assessing the heuristic characteror,
conversely, the sterilityof postcolonial investigations involves an examination of
how it is adapted in France by its epigones. Where Indian subalternists attacked
the epistemic dependence of the Third World and perhaps especially nationalism
and nationalist historiography as avatars of colonialism, and where cultural studies in North America extend the postmodern interpretation of globalization, the
French proponents of postcolonial studies tend to restrict it to a very FrancoFrench critique of the republic, of the genesis of citizenship and of the colonial
legacy. Thus they remain tied to the blueprint of a national narrative, even if they
do invert it. If Mbembe is correct to speak of cultural insularity and narcissism
in connection with France, it is not clear that the new audience for postcolonial
studies 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 than
the copy and first focus on what it has to tell us about the historicity of colonialism as such, about the historicity of our relation with colonialism in our so-called
global 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 this
point of view and is useful. It encourages us not to let go of the phenomenon of
colonialism despite its increasing distance from us. It feeds into the epistemological critique of the different forms of historicism (Chakrabarty) and mimicry
(Homi Bhabha) that underlie the fashionable academic or political discourses on
development, transition, reform. It characterizes colonial situations in terms
of hegemony or lack of hegemony, as the ups and downs of a substantial argument dictate. It helps to deconstruct portmanteau words and expressions, such as
civil society, which is ahistorical by philosophical definition. It encourages us
to rescue history from the nation and thus supports the parallel revision of the
nationalist and teleological historiographies of the falls of the Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, and colonial empiresscholarship that has made much progress
in recent years.25 It reminds us that the nation-state is inseparable from Empire
25. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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and that the question of hegemony in the colonies, something it has debated, is
inseparable from that of imperial hegemony in the metropolis, including in terms
of relations of gender, class, or ethnic and religious identification.
But we must recognize that, for all its usefulness, postcolonial studies is largely
unnecessary. Most of the issues it has explored had been explored previously or
were simultaneously being investigated by other theories, which often managed to
avoid the pitfalls into which postcolonial studies fell. Such convergences do not in
the least rule postcolonial studies out of court, but they should somewhat devalue
its current intellectual capital.
Postcolonial studies is questionable; it leads the study of colonial or postcolonial situations to a dead end, with the risk of a real scholarly regression in relation
to the achievements of the past thirty years. It has not yet led to the more modest
posture that has been adopted by anthropologists from both shores of the Mediterranean, conscious of their need to put behind them the excesses of the frenzied
critique of Mediterraneanism and scholarly nativism and able to take up their
heritages, including that of colonial knowledge.26 The main failing that can
be laid at the door of postcolonial studies is its adherence to the extreme forms
of the cultural turn of the 1980s. Spivak had, however, cautioned against the
limitations of the culturalist problematics of the fight against social exclusion and
inequality and advocated for the deconstruction of Western conceptualizations of
representation.27 But, paradoxically, this author has contributed a fair bit to that
very same culturalist slide! Postcolonial studies does not address practices (which
would be documented by fieldwork and archival research) as much as it attends to
discourses and representations on the basis of which it waxes eloquent or makes
often exaggerated overgeneralizations. Thus it gets trapped in the catastrophic
concept of identity and reifies a postcolonial condition onto which it confers a
quasi-ontological status in accordance with a kind of tropical or diasporic Calvinism: colonialism and slavery are the predestined fate of natives (and their master).
In so doing, postcolonial studies leaves the field of scientific scholarship in the
strict sense but still remains in thrall to its initial premises. In France, it contributes, for instance, to ethnicizing the social and political issue of the suburbs and
to posing a problem exclusively in terms of racism even though it also involves
class struggle. And it does so at the risk of setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In Africa, it does not help the problem of slavery to free itself from the level of
26. Dionigi Albera and Mohamed Tozy, La Mditerrane des anthropologues: Fractures, filiations, contiguts (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2005), 25.
27. Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
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nationalist discourse, which obscures the servile social relations internal to subSaharan societies and reduces the legacy of the slave trade to an unambiguous
denunciation of the West.28
The origin of this shift lies in two methodological errors: first, the dehistoricizing of colonialism, which is reified, and, second, the dehistoricizing of continuities and discontinuities or, more precisely, the links and the concatenation
between the colonial moment and the postcolonial moment.
The Reification of the Colonial
When it comes to the analysis of colonialism, postcolonial studies exaggerates its

specificity in relation to other imperial forms and thus fails to understand its historicity by oversimplifying the way that it is singularized. It is now demonstrated
that colonial empires were in some respects empires just like any others, and
so they should be read in terms of the classic investigations that have led to the
decoding of the latter.29 Moreover, colonial situations have evolved in very different ways, and yet postcolonial studies merges them by not distinguishing settlement colonies and slaving colonies from other kinds of colonies, even though
these realities are at the heart of its concerns. People are not colonized, and therefore postcolonized, in the same way in the Caribbean as they are in Indianot
to mention the historical contingencies that soon explode these big classificatory
categories, possession by possession, or the canonical contrast between a conquering state, violent by nature and necessity, and a colonial State in the strict
sense, which manifest the ethical imperatives of bureaucratic rationalization
and economic intensification constitutive of a second occupation. We should
also remember, following Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, that, after the Second World War, the French Union included no fewer than six separate legal entities, irreducible to a binary structure of the type metropolis/colony.30 However,
this lack of legal uniformity in the French Union was central to the postcolonial
condition of those called, rather too hastily, the new French. Similarly, there are
hardly any anthropologists or historians left who still believe in a generic definition of slavery, a conceptual distinction that appears to leave the proponents of
postcolonial studies quite unmoved.
28. Ibrahima Thioub, Lhistoire vue dAfrique: Enjeux et perspectives, in Chrtien, LAfrique
de Sarkozy, chap. 5; Jean-Franois Bayart, Les chemins de traverse de lhgmonie coloniale en
Afrique de lOuest francophone, Politique africaine 105 (2007): 20140.
29. Cooper, Colonialism in Question.
30. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empire, droits et citoyennet, de 212 1946, Annales:
Histoire, sciences sociales 63 (2008): 51516.
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Postcolonial studies also shows a marked lack of interest in a variety of colonial

or paracolonial situations, a consideration of which would have enriched its problematic. It generally ignores the liberal and financial imperialism that was central
to British history, as has been demonstrated by Peter J. Cain and Anthony G.
Hopkinsincluding the experiences of the white colonies and the postcolonial
situations of the dominions and the Latin American nation-states subjected to the
hegemony of free trade;31 the Japanese colonial empire (18951945); Ottoman
protocolonialism in some of its Arab provinces or even in Anatolia (but not in the
Balkans); 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 (from
1912 to 1947); the emergence of Indian colonialism within the British Empire or
even maybe of Scottish or Irish colonialism in Quebec; and the assertion of new
postcolonial forms of colonialism among African or Asian states. Postcolonial
studies simultaneously spares itself the effort of making any precise or restrictive
definition of the colonial, for which scaling would have had heuristic value.32
Witness Moses I. Finleys attempt to limit the concept to situations of nonnative
settlement dependent on a metropolis and engaging in coercive appropriation of
land; by this standard, the partition of Africa was not colonial in nature, even
if Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, Angola, and Algeria were real colonies, since
they were settlement territories; and the Venetian Empire does not deserve this
description either, despite the bureaucratic dependence of its provinces on the
Serenissima, because it was based neither on settlement nor on agrarian extortion.33 It is thanks to this semantic carelessness that postcolonial studies can now
claim to be relevant to situations whose colonial character is at the very least
debatableas in the case of Zionismor else is quite absurd and can now set
itself up as a metadiscourse with a universal vocation.
Nor can postcolonial studies be bothered to develop anything like a more precise sociology of colonial domination. The actors in the latter were many and varied and often contradicted one another, impelled as they were by disparate interests, values, and projects. Postcolonial studies do not realize, either, that colonial
empires were moral spaces swayed by conflicts, if not wars, of subjectification or
ethics. The colonial task saw itself as a moral conquest that would promote an
31. Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 16882000 (London: Longman,
1993).
32. Jacques Revel, Jeux dchelles: La micro-a nalyse lexprience (Paris: cole des hautes
tudes en sciences sociales, Gallimard, and Seuil, 1996).
33. Moses I. Finley, Coloniesan Attempt at a Typology, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 5th ser., 26 (1976): 16788.
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ethical administration.34 And it benefited from the collaboration of many of its

subjects. Indeed, it would be politically legitimate, but historically anachronistic,
to reduce this collaboration to betrayal or alienation, as Sartre does in his preface
to The Wretched of the Earth.
This support for colonization on the part of the colonized is independent of
the colonial project itself. It proceeds from a historicity that cannot be reduced
entirely to the colonial project itself and draws on longer temporalities (dures)
than its own. Thus the demand for dignity, central to nationalist movements
in West Africa and recurrent in the social movements of immigrants in France,
draws simultaneously on the centuries-old repertoires of honor, on their reformulation during the colonial period in the form of a working-class, military, or
educational ethos, and on the ideology of the civilizing mission itself.35 This
ambiguity, inherent in the colonial situation and its memory, is also found in the
ways that the orientalism stigmatized by Said was developed. One of the major
modes of colonial government was the invention of tradition, especially, but not
exclusively, when it proceeded by co-opting former elites within the framework
of indirect administration.36 Western scholars and local literati were combined to
coproduce a perfect Tradition that nationalist movements then appropriated.37
The prosperity of Aryanism in South Asia and Iran, and of ethnic culturalism in
sub-Saharan Africa, illustrates the vigor of these processes of ideological innovation and subjectification.
Basically, postcolonial studies is trapped in a contradiction noted by Cooper in
1994.38 Because it sees the subalterns as full actors, aware of their autonomy,
it should also acknowledge the ability of these actors either to reverse the colonial
domination that founds their subordination or to appropriate its modernityits
political modernity in particular, in the form of the nation-state. The concept of
appropriation must then be taken in its fully Marxist sense, as in the first Cri34. Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in South ast Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Romain Bertrand, tat colonial, noblesse et
E
nationalisme 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: Cambridge 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 Knowledge: The British in India(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); and David Robinson,
Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 18801920 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Oxford, U.K.: James Currey, 2000).
38. Frederick Cooper, Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History, American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1545.
68
tique of Political Economy: the sensuous appropriation of the human essence

and human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man, this
appropriation of human reality, which implies its transformation.39
Curiously enough, postcolonial studies reduces the action of subalterns to a
ritual of affliction in the service of a morbid cult of redemptive suffering or, in the
manner of the functionalist (and imperial) anthropology of Max Gluckman, see
it as a mere ritual of rebellion ultimately reinforcing colonial and postcolonial
domination. But the mimicry of the colonized that it denounces can just as easily 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 as
a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual terms
never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualization
or differenciation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any
imitation of a pre-existing possibility.40
It should be remembered hereechoing the reservations of Romain Bertrand
vis--vis the problematics that limit appropriation to a derivation of the colonial
state and confine the agency of natives to a reactive registerthat the concept
of appropriation designates perfectly well the positive and creative character of
native investment in the colonial scene without assuming that their initiative (to
employ the term used by Balandier in his Sociology of Black Africa) is limited to
their interaction, whether of conflict or collaboration, with the foreign occupier
or that their practice of the colonial state is limited to colonial reason.41 In other
words, we must admit that the institution of the colonial State proceeds in part
from the autonomous action of the colonized and from the historicity of the occupied societies, regardless of the actions, the plans, and the knowledge-power
of the colonizer. The irreducibility of the colonized societies to the colonial situ39. Karl Marx, Nationalkonomie und Philosophie, in Die Frhschriften, translated Gregor
Benton 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 Bertrand, Politiques du moment colonial: Historicits indignes et rapports vernaculaires au politique en situation coloniale, Questions de recherche 26 (2008): 1215; Georges
Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de lAfrique noire (Sociology of Black Africa) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 33, 62.
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ation is, of course, defined in an elsewhere, off camera.42 But it is also found
in the relation between societies and the colonial state. And it is in this autonomy
of the social, including in its relation to the colonial state, that the historicity of
the postcolonial state comes into being.
It follows that we can dismiss the objection that the concept of colonial state
without political sovereignty would be inappropriate, except for situations of
independence without decolonization, as for Latin America in the early nineteenth century, Rhodesia during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or
even Israel for some of the detractors of Zionism. In reality, the autonomy of the
colonial state (and its successor) follows from the autonomy of the social, which
it by no means abolishes and which it recognizes in its own way, even if this
is by default or impotence. It also piggybacks on endogenous processes of state
formationprocesses that it did not eradicate but rather reconstructed, amplified, or founded, depending on the case, and through which colonial domination
has sometimes crumbled. It is these conjoined, long-haul stories, of which the
state is the focus, that need to be grasped, sometimes in their interaction, sometimes 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 the
colonial. And an ahistorical presentation of the colonial situation leaves us with
an ahistorical legacy of the colonial. We are told nothing, via the intermediary
of effective history (die wirkliche Historie), of the conditions for the possible
transmission of this heritage, of the sociology of its universal legatees, of the
changes that affect the situations of usage of certain practices or discourses
that are supposed to have been exactly reproduced, of the morphological dimension of certain permanent features that sometimes owe more to geography than
to colonial domination; of the evaporation of aspects of the legacy within its very
continuation, of the heterogeneity of the legacies of historically diverse and contingent colonialisms, of its ambiguity (Balandiers term), which is matched only
42. Bertrand, Politiques du moment colonial; and Bertrand, Les sciences sociales et le
moment colonial: De la problmatique de la domination coloniale celle de lhgmonie impriale, Questions de recherche 18 (2006). It is in the same spirit that Cooper criticizes the thematics
of resistance dear to the African nationalist historiography. Cooper, Conflict and Connection;
Cooper, Africa and the World Economy, African Studies Review 24, nos. 23 (1981): 186.
70
by that of the colonial situation itself.43 All this, curiously, is found in the writings of historians and essayists who placed the plurality of space-times and the
ambiguity of social phenomena at the heart of their preoccupations. The way
postcolonial studies has drifted away from its initial ambitions is not unlike that
of the Latin American school of dependency, which originally questioned the
historicity of societies on the periphery, eventually reducing this to the historicity
of the imperialist center in a grossly simplistic way.
But there is no lack of studies in France that sociologize the colonial legacy
and the actual conditions of its transmission. In addition, the real question is not
the (abstract and ontological) question of the relation between the postcolonial
and the colonial but that of the link between the historicity of the one and the
historicity of the other.
Finally, the link between the historicity of the colonial and the postcolonial
cannot be abstracted from other dures, to which historians and sociologists must
be attentive. Michel Samuel showed in 1978 how the condition of the black African proletariat in France was not simply part of the continuation of the colonial
situation and the capitalist exploitation which that situation had fostered but also
resulted from the longer-lasting split between social elders (ans sociaux) and
youngsters (cadets sociaux), according to the terms of the articulation of modes
of production dear to French Marxist anthropology.44 The imaginaire of African
immigration to France is haunted not only by the racialist imagoes of colonialism or the Atlantic slave trade but also by representations of lineage or slavery
that brought out the inequality characteristic of sub-Saharan societies, which was
reconfigured in the colonial period.
The conclusion drawn from all this is a paradoxical one. The intuition of postcolonial studies that there is a direct, if not unbroken, line from colonial to postcolonial seems convincing. But the demonstration is false, when it is not simply
absent or disturbing in the way it turns its back on the most elementary methodological rules of the social sciences. The price to be paid for this indifference, or
indeed this contempt or hostility, toward the autonomy of the academic field from
political commitment is high.
So we must, in turn, raise the question of the continuity between the colonial
and the postcolonial as claimed by postcolonial studies itself and ask to what
extent it is not involved in the reproduction of colonial hegemony. This involves
43. Georges Balandier, Afrique ambigu (Paris: 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 colonial

hegemony, of colonial sociology as an administrative science of colonization
and, more generally, of imperial culturalism as a major ideology of globalization over these past two centuries45not, of course, without turning them upside
down. Seen from this ironic angle, postcolonial studies appears as a great academic carnival, a moment of emotional release that in no way endangers the
ascendancy of the triumphant utilitarianism of rational choice theory in American
and North Atlantic universities and which, in passing, allows them to co-opt the
most brilliant troublemakers from the native elite, as has been wickedly pointed
out by Dirlik and Appiah. We still need to identify what aspects of the colonial or
postcolonial it prevents us from understanding.
For a New Road Map
If we are to wean ourselves away from nationalist ideology, as suggested by subaltern studies, the best thing is definitely to put colonial empires back within the
generic category of empires, as Cooper suggests, and not to isolate the way we
analyze them from the general way historians investigate this political form, even
if its definition and delimitation are in their view problematic. It then becomes
a matter of understanding what it meant to think like an empire, accepting
the historical ordinariness of this mode of political sovereignty; emphasizing,
conversely, the lateness of the emergence of the nation-state in history; and not
taking 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-stateand especially on the synergistic relationship between globalization and the nation-state
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on the role of incubators for the
nation-state played by empires in their colonial versions and their classic configurationsfor example, the Ottoman, the Hapsburg, and the Russian-Soviet
empires. The idea of the nation was contingent and often followed the collapse
of 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 not
desired, 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.
72
None of this should deter us from separating out the uniqueness of the colonial
mode from the imperial phenomenon. Several factors contributed to founding
this colonial mode: the scientific racialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capitalist globalization, the phenomena of identitarian shrink-wrapping that
accompanied capitalist globalization in the guise of culturalism and nationalism,
the universalization of the nation-state as a mode of political organization and
sovereignty, and the power of the industrial and technological revolution and the
idea of the masses that it engendered. But despite its civilizing pretensions and
its outrageously coercive methods, the colonial empire could never be the Leviathan dreamed up by nationalist historiography or postcolonial studies. And this
remains true even though it has often acted as a crazed demiurge, as a Gulliver
unbound, as a breaker of rocks (Bula Matari, as he appears, terrifyingly, in the
Congo), capable not only of penetrating the mountains and striding across rivers
but also of submitting entire countries to compulsory collective vaccination without wondering too much about the health consequences of such campaigns, or of
gathering and keeping peasants in villages while forcing them to undergo deadly
and dehumanizing labor migrations.47
In its violence, it might these days be described as a weak state, whose functionaries and fiscal resources were insignificant in number and whose privatization comprised one of the sources of the minimum state as desired by multilateral
donors in the framework of the neoliberal programs of structural adjustment
throughout the 1980s.48 Curiously, however, postcolonial studies, quite indifferent to political economy, even in its more historical version, fails to mention this
origin even though it could provide grist to its mill.49 So colonial government was
an empire on the cheap.50 As for the grip and the systematic nature of colonial
knowledge, they were quite relative. This is one reason why colonization was
never able to level down the historicity characteristic of African or Asian societies: the privatization of its indirect rule required the intermediation of native
social 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 privatisation 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, in De la postcolonie (Paris: Karthala,
2000), chap. 2; translated by A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, and Steven Rendall as On
the 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, the
problem-concept is less that of appropriation than thevery fashionable
concept of agency. E. P. Thompsonone of the instigators, as we know, of
subaltern studiesspecifically proposed linking the experience of repression to
the opportunities for action available to the poor and excluded.51 The concept
thus tends to restrict the subaltern to the interaction of the colonial situation
even though subaltern studies aspired to restore the politics of the people in its
autonomy. The conceptualization of colonial subjection in terms of subjectification appears to have heuristic merit from this viewpoint, provided the latter is not
equated with an unambiguous discipline, as happens in so many works of neoFoucauldian inspiration.52 Similarly, it is now impossible to continue to believe
in the total nature, if not of the colonial situation, at least of its real domination.
Its reign, though coercive, was fleeting and incomplete, not least because it was
exercised on heterogeneous societies comprising a variety of space-times.
The Contingency of Colonialism
The historicity and the incompleteness of the colonial moment force us to focus
on research areas that have not always been sufficiently explored.53 First, the contingency of colonialism, to which Cooper drew our attention long ago, implies
that we account for modes of occupation in all their disparity, including different
levels of duration and intensity, before we tackle its administrative organization
and its political and legal form (colony, protectorate, dominion, concession, mandate, etc.).54 However, colonization was sometimes very brief and incomplete.
There is, therefore, both a disjunction and a paradox between the power of overdetermination that postcolonial studies attribute to the colonial moment, on the
one 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 Identity.
53. The expression is found, for example, in the writings of Andrew Roberts, in The Colonial
Moment in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Personally, I use it in the same
sense as Bertrand, espousing his desire to historicize and relativize the influence of the colonial
situation 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: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 18901925 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1980), 5657.
74
other. Rather than stick to the study of the hard core of empirestheir metropolises, their administrative centers, their main population areas, their public policies, colonial knowledge, plantations, et ceteraand their potential postcolonial
reproduction, we should now consider their peripheries: colonialism results from
negotiations pursued by the overseas territories with the metropolis, but also from
the lines of flight with which the metropolis must manage on its margins and
which take the form of dissident fractions, migration, and smuggling and other
types of fraudulent exchange.
Second, the colonial moment is based on building the short- or mediumterm duration of the encounter and occupation into the long duration of local
societiesa long duration (longue dure) that transcends it and which it never
manages to absorb. It should be noted also that the colonial moment, in its metropolitan aspect, refers simultaneously to the longer durations in European societies
themselvesfor example, in the development of categories of sovereignty, creed,
race, and gender, which are not invariants of Western culture, but ever-evolving
historical constructions. It is indeed this superposition of times characteristic of
all imperial formations that needs to be restored if we want to recognize the historicity of the situations under consideration. The break represented by colonization
was altogether relative, and the risk run by colonial (and postcolonial) studies is
that they exaggerate its importance. The difficulty lies in understanding simultaneously the irreducible incommensurability of the durations that constitute societies in the colonial (or postcolonial) moment and the processes of formation of
scales of commensurability that are inherent in imperial enterprises, irrespective
of the concepts by which they are designated: hegemonic quest or hegemony,
governmentality, colonial knowledge, or civilizing mission! We must take into
account, on the one hand, the heterogeneity of the space-times that established
empire and, on the other, the working misunderstandings that ensured inter
actions among its members.55 On the one hand, we have lines of flight from the
colonial situation; on the other, we have the unprecedented centralization caused
by the addition of capitalist exploitation and its productive forces to the bureaucratic institutions of the colonial state. Today the historical and economic anthropology of the processes of value formation and the historical sociology of contact
situations (and the actors in this contact) open up promising paths of research.56
But the task is difficult. Indeed, the interplay of commensurability and incom55. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
56. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: 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 belief,
economic and monetary exchange, material culture, techniques of the body, and
even 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, for
example, is repellent to the white person (and vice versa). Between one order and
the other, there are disjunctions. Here, as we see, the diptych colonizer/colonized
betrays its fundamental poverty.
Imperial Hegemonic Transactions
From this twofold point of view, the operative concept becomes imperial hegemonic transaction.57 Empires should always balance the incorporation of peoples and territories with the differentiation that maintained the power and meaning of the coherence of the elite.58 They 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-option
as much as on occupation and on support as well as submission. It is a mode of
domination (Herrschaft) that generates obedience, rather than a simple regime
or system of force or might (Macht). It does indeed consist in a certain governmentality, at the intersection of techniques for domination over others and
techniques of the self, or in the hegemony of a consensus, as defined respectively by Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. The voluntary servitude that it sets
up is based on the intermediation of social institutions and conformist elites and
on the sharing of third languages, which serve as vehicles for intermediation.
These third languages are the result not simply of discourse and knowledge but
also of the imaginaire, of material culture and the techniques of the body: paideia and humanitas in antiquity, adab in the Ottoman Empire, tapa in Java, the
gentlemanly nature of British financial imperialism, and civilization in French
colonial Africa.
The advantage of seeing colonial empires as empiresand therefore as nothing specialis that we avoid the normative characterization of their constitutive
hegemonic transactions and thus avoid seeing them simply as a lie, as Fanon and
Sartre put it. Thanks to historians and anthropologists, we are now well aware of
the institutions and social groups that carried (tragen, in Max Webers term) the
57. Bertrand, Les sciences sociales et le moment colonial, 3034; Jean-Franois Bayart and
Romain Bertrand, De quels legs colonial parle-t-on? Esprit, December 2006, 15458.
76
third languages of colonization and their life conduct (Lebensfhrung). Colonization relied on cultural, political, and administrative intermediaries in the framework of indirect rule and in the army, hospitals, schools, businesses, plantations,
Christian missions, and the Islamic brotherhoods. And, it is worth repeating, this
involved the bodies of protagonists as much as their speech. It was a matter of
desire and fear, of pleasure and suffering as much as reason, knowledge, and calculation. In its way, postcolonial studies says all this, but remains confined to the
order of discourse on the body rather than its real practices, as is consistent with
the approach of cultural studies, and fails to understand the ambiguity of what the
great historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown, calls styles of social exchange,
with their elements of moral, material, and physical aesthetic.59 Furthermore, it
reduces the historicity of the colonized society to its interaction with the colonial
state, without noting what it conceals or noting the dialogical relation of the colonial field with independent social durations. One can thus justifiably say that the
ideas of development and nationalism, and indeed the representation of immigration in the Western world, are derivatives of colonial hegemony and contribute
to its reproduction.60 However, these ideas of development and nationalism also
refer to a prior moral economy of prosperity, justice, inequality, and power, which
informs them and establishes the autonomy of the colonial state (and its memory)
vis--vis the colonial situation. To analyze these configurations, we cannot stick to
the static and binary vision of a tte--ttereified in its very essencebetween
colonizer and colonized, as a more or less dramatic (and always ahistorical) zerosum game, in the indulgent manner of postcolonial studies. Better to take into consideration the processes, or sometimes the real social movements, through which
imperial hegemonic transactions are negotiated diachronically: for example, the
emergence of the brotherhood-based Republic of Senegal through a compromise
between the colonial authorities and the Mourid social revolution in the early
twentieth century and the political integration of former captives that it enabled.
Any continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial arises not from begging
the ontological principle but from a demonstration that brings out the concrete
links treated by effective history. Of course, these links are even more complex
than 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 the
Colonial 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 on
other colonial or imperial situations, concomitant or anterior. Where postcolonial
studies see colonialism as one-dimensional, restricting it to an exclusive relationship between the colonized and the colonizer and the colonizers metropolis, what
prevails is actually a clearly multidimensional situation. Colonial empires first
experienced an internal traffic of people, ideas, beliefs, policies, and property, on
a transcontinental and intercontinental scale. Their metropolitan functionaries had
no monopoly on these administrative peregrinations that were one of the marks of
imperial distinction and competence and for which some territoriesAlgeria for
the French, India for the Britishwere more or less obligatory points of passage.
Native traders and executives also moved from one possession to another in the
course of their lives and careers, and certain colonies or towns set themselves up
as preferred channels of recruitment. From the nineteenth century on, the colonial
authorities were even obsessed by the danger incarnated in their eyes by floating populations and interlopers (the former empires or merchant companies
of the mercantilist age, they were multi-national and multi-ethnic or even, at
least in the case of the Ottoman Empire, multi-confessional). It is therefore wrong
to compare empires to wheels whose radii lead to the center, so that the periphery can communicate only with the center or via its intermediary.61 In addition,
the peripheries of the imperial provinces or the provinces on the peripheries of
empires were often border zones where political sovereignties, cultural influences,
markets, and populaces all overlapped.
Ultimately, the European, American, Russian-Soviet, and Japanese, or indeed
Ottoman, colonial empires were veritable echo chambers. Ideologies, administrative models, religious beliefs, goods, techniques of the body, people of science
and faith, functionaries, and merchants constantly explored their spaces, from one
territory to another, and also from one empire to another, against a background
of national rivalries, economic competition, police cooperation, racial communion, and even comparative colonial policy or pancolonialism, of which the
International Colonial Institute, founded in Brussels in 1894 on the initiative of
the Frenchman Joseph Chailley-Bert, was the first major institution, before the
debate was carriedin a more aggressive and polemical wayinto the heart
of the worldwide associative movement, the Congress of Versailles, the League
of 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 York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 4.
78
postcolonial natives remained trapped. Curiously, postcolonial studies, a prisoner

of the national narrative of the colonial situation and its offspring, barely raises
the question of this first multilateral system of modern globalization.
Moreover, the Western and Japanese imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had to deal with other empires that existed before it or that it helped
to create. Again, the advantage of showing that the colonial version of imperialism was commonplace lies in the demonstration that it is always a combination of
diverse elements. Such was the case with the galaxy of Greek cities, in symbiosis
with Achaemenid Asia Minor, then the Roman Empire, faced with the Hellenic
and Persian worlds. This was also the kind of configuration from which emerged
the Russian Empire or the Chinese Qing dynasty, on the margin of successive
Mongol empires.62 As for the East India Company, it carved out its mercantile
empire at the interface of the British Crown and the Mogul Empire. In particular, imperialism proceeds by the concatenation of one historical formation with
another, and the problematic of the colonial legacy, which obsesses postcolonial
studies, must reflect this diachronic complexity better than it has managed thus
far. The Ottoman Empire was an heir of Byzantium, but so was the republican
empire of Venice. France, the United Kingdom, and Italy superimposed their sovereignty or dominion on those of the Ottoman Empire in Algeria and Tunisia; in
Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and the Dodecanese; and then in the Mashreq. Paris, London, and Pretoria shared out German possessions in Africa after the First World
War. Imperial projects drew sustenance from European imperial expansion in
Asia and Africa, along with Oman in the Indian Ocean or Samory and his state in
West 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 later
Soviet Empire annexed provinces of the Ottoman and Qajar empires. The European colonial empires were able, here and there, to outsource the administration of
their sovereignty not just to local authorities under the system of indirect rule but
rather to actual sub-imperialisms, like that of India in the Indian Oceanan
India, in other words, that was both colonizer and colonized. They were also faced
with the autonomy and dynamism of trading interests and diasporic networks that
came to hunt on their lands or circumvented their propensity to control the movement of goods and people: for example, Portugal was confronted by the power of
Brazilian 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 Greeks

south of the Sahara.
These effects of concatenation significantly complicate both the colonial and
the postcolonial moments. The legacysocial, economic, political, and mnemonicof colonization is thus a tangled skein. To unravel this, it is not the proponents of postcolonial studies but those of connected history who can provide
a convincing answer, even if their favorite subject is the mercantilist modern age
rather than the colonial or postcolonial moment.
If we now move on from the problem of connection to address that of legacy, in the Weberian sense of the term,63 the most convincing way of bringing
out the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial and the postcolonial seems ultimately to have been that of comparative historical sociology. This
approach is particularly well suited to trace the singular itineraries of practices,
interests, or social groups: for example, that of the Greek Orthodox or Jewish
Dodecanese communities who fled from poverty and Ottoman imperial domination, then Italian colonialism, settling in southern Africa and Katanga; that of
soap in Rhodesia; or that of clothes in India.64 Comparative social history can also
involve identifying, across time, the procedures and scenarios of the production of
social and political inequality so as to conceptualize a whole variety of concepts,
such as primitive accumulation, passive revolution, social revolution, conservative modernization, and the molecular process of reciprocal assimilation
of segments of the elite.65 Historical sociology also considers political sequences,
for example, in terms of the centralization of the state, in the way that Tocqueville
did in The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, or the concatenation of the Islamic,
Ottoman, colonial, nationalist, and neoliberal thematics of reform in a country
like Tunisia.66 But the comparative historical sociology of politics derives most of
its 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 particular 15992.
64. Benjamin Rubbers, Faire fortune en Afrique: Anthropologie des derniers colons du Katanga
(Paris: Karthala, 2009); Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Emma
Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996).
65. See, e.g., Jean-Franois Bayart, Ltat en Afrique. La politique du ventre (Paris: Fayard,
2006), translated by Nancy Harper, Christopher Harrison, Elizabeth Harris, and Stephen Ellis as
The 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: Political
Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2011).
80
It seems surreal to continue to talk of the colonial legacy in the case of Africa, or
of the relationship between Africa and its former colonial metropolises, or indeed
the 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 its
historical system of value formation.67 When compared with the breakthroughs
that the social sciences have made over the past few years, the morose repetitive
meanderings 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 hegemony. As we have seen, subaltern studies immediately took this as its object, and
now the reproduction of discursive and identity-based categories of colonialism
characterizes much current work in postcolonial studies. And yet neither trend
managed to solve the problems it has raised because it has failed to clarify the
theoretical questions of the relations between extraversion and coercion, on the
one hand, and hegemony and the reproduction of hegemony, on the other. It is
clear that the colonial moment was a moment of cultural extraversion and that it
rested on the intensive use of coercion. But this coercion is not contradictory with
the emergence of hegemony, and the extraversion of colonized societies cannot
be reduced to the relation between the colonized and the colonial situation or the
mere 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 to
believe. In Africa, the intensive use of the whip seems to have played a large part in
fabricating hegemony and the exercise of legitimate domination, rather than the
mere imposition of a state of force.68 From this point of view, the way that postcolonial studies interpret the disciplinary institutions of the colonial situation
the plantations, the prisons, forced labor, conscription, sport, corporal punishment, even tortureis too one-way and thus too impoverished, even though
Chakrabarty comes close to formulating matters correctly when he insists on the
undemocratic foundations of democracy on which the modern Western state
67. Jane Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2004).
68. Jean-Franois Bayart, Hgmonie et coercition en Afrique subsaharienne: La politique de
la chicotte, Politique africaine 110 (2008): 12352.
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(and its overseas offshoots) prides itself. He rightly says that this coercion is both
originary/foundational (that is, historic) as well as pandemic and quotidian.69 But
this is precisely the point: domination and hegemony were established through
this violence: thanks to it, and not in spite of it. In the Four Communes of Senegal,
the indigenous civility that provided one of the cultural repertories of inter
mediation and compromise between the colonial state and the Sufi brotherhoods
was thus forged in a slave society: here, conscription was the mode of access to
French citizenship.70 Everywhere in Africa, public health gave birth to veritable
medical fraternities between whites and blacks and was met with the support of
patients in the African subcontinent, at the same time as it implemented coercive
vaccination campaigns that left a traumatic mark on the social imaginaire and to
which the AIDS pandemic is sometimes attributed. In the British Empire, as is
well known, cricket stirred up considerable enthusiasm even though it was one of
the 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 day,
as well as imposed and shared. And it fostered and sustained alliances between
the whites and different native social groups, such as the Moors of Senegambia
or the Mauritanian desert (against the blacks) or the Tutsis of the Great Lakes
(against the Hutus), alliances inherited by postcolonial states. Finally, discussions
about potential independence on the basis of a new third language (that of the
nation and development) were undertaken via the repression of nationalist movements, for instance in Kenya and Malaysia. Coercion was indeed a component in
the 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 provides
them with a repertoire of subjectification that is all the more seductive in that it
precedes, transcends, and envelops colonial reason, instead of being a mere emanation of it. Cultural extraversion can even on occasion contradict the colonial
movement. For example, it was not uncommon that Africans appropriated Western material culture or techniques of the body, such as clothing and military drills,
against the wishes and desires of the colonial authorities and Christian missions,
following considerations that had little to do with the European presence.71 Dog69. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 44.
70. Mamadou Diouf, The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of the Originaires of the Four Communes (Senegal): A Nineteenth-Century Globalization Project, Development and Change 29 (1998): 67196.
71. Terence O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 18901970: The Beni Ngoma
(London: Heinemann, 1975).
82
matically, we can see in this paradox the pinnacle of alienation. Sociologically

and historically, this still needs to be proven and leaves untouched one undeniable
fact: hegemony, which is doubtless, by philosophical definition, a system of alienation, makes capital out of extraversion, and not just in situations of dependence,
since Rome thought of itself in Greek. Postcolonial studies prides itself on being
able to read the hearts and minds of native peoples. Maybe. But when it comes to
their intimate lives, or even their intimate Enemy, as Ashis Nandy puts it in the
title of his book, postcolonial studies does not emerge from the dependentist and
nationalist dogma from which it claimed to have broken free.72
Conclusion
The Copernican revolution that postcolonial studies hoped to bring about still
lies ahead. If we wish to understand the historicity proper to different societies
by emancipating ourselves from the historicism of the Western epistemeand
never has this task been more imperativewe need first to liberate our problematics from the colonial interaction to which postcolonial studies persists in consigning them. Colonization was a moment of connectionviolent, iniquitous,
and traumatic. Nonetheless, it did not annul the moral and political economy of
the societies that it subjected, nor did it totally absorb it. So the yardstick of our
arguments should not be the systematic nature of the colonial system, or even
that of the void that its plenum never managed to control, which leads to
insistence on practices of resistance, flight, hijacking, and subversion, to which
decidedly unsubmissive natives have resorted. Instead, we need to set out from
the positivity of historic societies and thus show how they came through the colonial moment and brought about the autonomy of the colonial state and its potential
hegemony with regard to the colonial situation. In other words, the colonial state
owes its epithet (anecdotal and in any case contingent) only to the period that saw
it emerge and not to its essence. In fact, it is defined largely by dimensions other
than that of the interaction between the colonized and the colonizer.
Once the colonial moment has become historical, it inhabits the consciousness
of those who have survived it or were born after it had faded away. But the relation that both the former and the latter have with the colonial moment is a relation
of enunciation and not of determination. We remain the prisoners of the historicism 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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instead of seeing the representation of the colony as the effect of its polemical
appropriation by postcolonials. In France, the Natives of the Republic invented
the colony out of their nightmares, and also out of their dreamsin other words,
from their struggle against exclusion, social injustice, and ordinary racism. This
myth of postcolonial nationhood, which has its equivalents in India and Latin
America, is politically legitimate. But it tells us nothing about what the colonial
moment really was.
The myth of the colony would be, for the suburbs, what the myth of the Cathars
was for the south of France: a political invention of traditionan invention that is
historically inept. And the danger for postcolonial studies is that of becoming an
alterconservatisme (alter-conservatism),73 persisting in consigning native peoples
to a fantasized colonial condition, when Csaire appealed to the right to history
rather than to the duty of memory.74 It is the unamiable role of the social sciences to remind us of this fact.
73. I have borrowed this expression from Jean-Pierre Chrtien, in LAfrique de Sarkozy, 26.
74. Following the Caribbean writer Daniel Maximin quoting Aim Csaire in LExpress (Paris),
May 7, 2009, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/daniel-maximin-hair-c-est-encore-dependre
_823480.html
84

Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? (2011)

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A Political Invention of Tradition?

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small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate

Activists, in their turn, have appropriated these interpretations to mobilize as

of Fanon and Octave Mannoni, or even Sartre. Nonetheless, postcolonial studies

When it comes to the analysis of colonialism, postcolonial studies exaggerates its

Postcolonial studies also shows a marked lack of interest in a variety of colonial

ethical administration.34 And it benefited from the collaboration of many of its

tique of Political Economy: the sensuous appropriation of the human essence

particularly the reproduction of the identitarian categories arising from colonial

postcolonial natives remained trapped. Curiously, postcolonial studies, a prisoner

62. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 162.

Kingdom, and Portugal, by the establishment of the Syro-Lebanese and Greeks

The central preoccupation of postcolonial studies is the hegemony of the West,

matically, we can see in this paradox the pinnacle of alienation. Sociologically

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