After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World

Abstract

Over the last decade, studies of ‘third world’ histories and cultures have come to draw to a very considerable extent upon the theoretical perspectives provided by poststructuralism and postmodernism. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's work,Orientalism, these perspectives—now fused and extended into a distinctive amalgam of cultural critique, Foucauldian approaches to power, engaged ‘politics of difference,’ and postmodernist emphases on the decentered and the heterogeneous—began to be appropriated in a major way for the study of non-European histories and cultures. Certainly in our own field of Indian colonial history, Said's characteristic blending of these themes has now become virtually a paradigm for a new generation of historians and anthropologists. These directions have been most recently and sharply endorsed in Gyan Prakash's discussion, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.’

Análises de poder em disputa: Foucault e a virada pós-estruturalista nos Subaltern Studies

“…Para escapar dessas "tiranias", no caso da historiografia indiana, dever-se-ia voltar para as "mitografias", para as histórias escondidas das vítimas do colonialismo, "que vão expor o caráter mítico das fábulas coloniais e pós-coloniais da modernidade" (o'hanlon;Washbrook, 2000, p. 194). Mas modernismo entendido aqui como algum campo já ultrapassado de planejamento de cima para baixo, seja ele do governo, da economia ou da estética, um lugar de poder centralizado, em profunda discordância com os valores da descentralização e dos aspectos característicos de qualquer "novo sistema pós-moderno".…”

Dutch Scholarship in the Age of Empire and Beyond

“…In order to seem somewhat convincing to the relevant non-western peoples, they had to be -if only partially and selectively -in keeping with existing views and customs (O'Hanlon and Washbrook 1992;Hastings 1997: 1-35). This also applies to Indonesian adat law, as recorded by administrators, ethnologists and missionaries in consultation with local leaders and other interlocuteurs valables around 1900.…”

Subaltern Studies and African Studies

“…Postfoundational histories in the interim presented a fundamental problem of reconciling a postmodern desire for destabilizing convention, while also engaging in empirical reconstructions of the past based on accepted sets of analytic tools; at their worst, such histories in their view also denied any kind of emancipatory politics, through a de-emphasis of material conditions and a perspective on cultural difference that at times resembled those employed by the British colonial state. 27 Prakash's published response to this dual critique returned to the problem of historical paradigms that reduced experience as the result of a singular historical logic -whether global capitalism or colonialism writ-large -rather than recognize an empirical heterogeneity that defined and continues to define the possibility of history-making by individuals. In Prakash's words, "The assertion of this heterogeneity, the insistence that the histories of the metropolitan proletariat and the colonized worker are discrepant, even if both are exploited by capitalism, therefore, is to insist on difference as the condition of history's possibility."…”