Time, History, Politics: Anticolonial Constellations

Abstract

One of the most significant elements of the international relations of the twentieth century was the transformation from a colonial to a postcolonial world order. That transformation, contested, lengthy and uneven, was the fruit of struggles by colonised peoples for independence. The postcolonial experience has proved very different from that hoped for by the anticolonial generation. From the perspective of our own times, how can we learn from the thought and practice of those earlier struggles? In this essay I first discuss the work of David Scott, who has posed this question in compelling terms, arguing that our postcolonial present requires a tragic apprehension of anticolonialism. Finding his questions urgent but his conclusions too restrictive, I turn to Walter Benjamin and show how his method offers alternative possibilities for exploring the questions Scott poses. Drawing on archives of African anticolonialism, I consider how we can engage with these struggles for our own times, through three elements of Benjamin’s approach: the question of time and temporality; the method of montage and quotation; and the device of the dialectical image. In doing so, this essay sketches possibilities of an anticolonial method suitable for our own neoliberal but still imperial times.

• Anticolonialism
• method
• montage
• postcolonialism
• temporality

Acknowledgements

Very many thanks to Rob Walker, Kathleen Davies, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Cemal Burak Tansel, Jon Mansell, David Martin, Sanjay Seth, Raj Pandey, Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Rui Lopes, Hannah Hughes and all Cardiff colleagues at the ISRU seminar in 2016 for helpful discussions; and to Alina Sajed and Tim Seidel for wonderful discussions, support and patience. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This is the storm that we call progress.” (Benjamin 1968, 257–258)

Additional information

Funding

This essay contributes to the project Amílcar Cabral, da História Política às Políticas da Memória, funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PTDC/EPH-HIS/6964/2014).