Globalization and the Postcolonial Eclipse

Beyond the Straits: Postcolonial Allegories of the Globe

PETER HULME

Mañana, mañana
Ojos sin brillo
Noche encalmada
Y no viene el día
No viene.
—RADIO TARIFA, "Mañana, mañana"

The conference on which this volume is based asked its speakers to reflect on the future directions that postcolonial studies might take. This essay begins by suggesting what new horizons might be glimpsed across the straits that have appeared in recent years to encircle postcolonial studies, defining it in narrow and restrictive ways. But it is also concerned to follow the implications of its title in ways literal, historical, and theoretical. The essay was written in the shadow of the reestablishment of one of the world's most influential frontiers, that between southwest Europe and northwest Africa: it revisits the shape of the earth verified by the European journeys from that portal, and it speculates on the survival of the allegories of globality that flowed from those journeys, allegories that might seem irredeemably tainted by the association with European imperial hegemony that they helped establish. On its own journey, the essay sails close to the contentious debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism that currently enrich postcolonial studies, but it takes too idiosyncratic and meditative a course to contribute anything of substance to them.

My personal commitment to the idea of postcolonial studies is probably as strong as it is because the appearance of that field in the late 1980s gave me a real sense of belonging: I recognized postcolonial studies as what I had been doing for fifteen years or so without realizing it. If there is one particular stance I take with respect to the current state of postcolonial studies, it is that we are still discovering, slowly, perhaps, and unmethodically, but—as far as I am concerned—with a continuing sense of excitement, the dimensions of the field. What I mean by this is both that the field is getting bigger as the characteristic language and thematic concerns of postcolonial studies spread across many disciplines and that at the same time we are unearthing a lot of earlier anticolonial work, often neglected at its time of writing, that is allowing us to piece together a fuller history of the development of postcolonial studies. So one of the fundamental "beyonds" suggested by my title is an encouragement to strip off the straitjacket of those accounts and definitions of postcolonial studies that simplify and narrow its range to the work of a handful of theorists and a handful of novelists. In the past, some of those who work within the field, or have a productive relationship to it, have even accepted that oversimplified picture of postcolonial studies. Fortunately, as this volume suggests, the picture is now beginning to broaden.

Perhaps the most obvious of my titular straits are the straits of Eurocentric thinking that postcolonial studies is dedicated to surpassing. As one might have predicted, the most resistant categories of Eurocentrism are those so deeply embedded that we have come to think of them simply as parts of a natural geohistorical landscape; and probably none of these categories has a deader hand than that of historical periodization. Until recently, postcolonial studies largely situated itself in the modern world, giving consistent attention to the notion of modernity, though that narrowness of historical range is beginning to broaden. However, even when postcolonial studies has looked back beyond the nineteenth century, it has tended to thump into the backstop of 1492, reinforcing the idea of the Middle Ages as some kind of dark hole out of which modernity seems magically to have emerged. Certainly by the eighteenth century, medieval had already become a colonial term in the sense of giving Western modernity a period into which to shunt at least some of the social formations it encountered. Not accidentally, the term medieval has now made a reappearance as the period in which Islam, in at least certain of its forms, can be fundamentally situated: "the medieval savagery of the Taliban," for example—as if the Middle Ages could teach the modern world anything about savagery. Anyway, standing against these various simplifications and stereotypes there is now a growing body of work by self-defined postcolonial medievalists who tend to ask some of the most searching questions about the nature of nationalism and of colonialism.

In geographical terms, to look back beyond the straits of 1492 would be to give more postcolonial attention to the Iberian Peninsula and to the empires developed there. One indication of what might be possible comes with the essay Gayatri Spivak contributed to a recent volume in honor of Edward Said, which takes the form of an extensive critical tribute to a book by a distinguished Native American historian, Jack Forbes, called Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. In this book, Forbes attempts to understand the shifting terminology of racial and color classifications by means of a detailed tracking of the fourteenth-century Arabic and Portuguese origins of words like mulatto, pardo, and moro—not to show what they really mean, but to demonstrate the vertiginous shifts in their meanings over the centuries, in fact to unmoor them from their conventional definitions. Spivak sees in this what she calls—in an unaccountably tender phrase—an "empirical intuition of affirmative deconstruction."

Spivak relates Forbes to Said in a purely conventional way: Said is the groundbreaker, while "Forbes belongs to the group of social scientists who have been chipping away at the monolithic Eurocentrism of their disciplines ... during the two decades after Orientalism" (which actually does Forbes less than justice since his first contribution to the rewriting of American history was published as early as 1960). But by putting Forbes and Said in the same frame, Spivak both draws Forbes's work into the postcolonial field, where its intellectual and political allies are grouping, and extends and deepens that field by adding to it the complexity of Forbes's American concerns and the breadth of his lexicographical scholarship.

It is profoundly telling that it was a Native American historian, interested in why the mixing between Americans and Africans had remained so invisible to scholarship, who took the trouble to undertake this extraordinary work, which leads back to the equally invisible trafficking of Arabic terms into the developing European vernaculars—most traces of which would eventually be purged by the great European etymological dictionaries, those monuments to scholarship and amnesia. Traffic—a word now almost synonymous with modernity—may itself be of Arabic origin. In any event, traffic—in this case human traffic across the...