Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial EnlightenmentDuke University Press, 3 dec 2004 - 279 pagina's At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future. |
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... Anticolonial Revolution 58 THREE Conscripts of Modernity 98 FOUR Toussaint's Tragic Dilemma 132 FIVE The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment 170 Epilogue 209 Notes 223 Acknowledgments 271 Index 273 ! Prologue Milton has a great phrase ...
... anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares . I think we live in tragic times . This , however , is not merely because our world is assailed by one moral and social catastrophe after another . It is rather ...
... anticolonial nationalists , for their essentialism - that is , for holding conceptions of nation , race , identity , history , and so on that assume ( in the well - known phrase ) a metaphysics of presence , a stable ground of ...
The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment David Scott. philosopher R. G. Collingwood and his more Wittgensteinian ... anticolonial ones ) ought to entail an analysis less of the transformative projects themselves than of the way those ...
... anticolonial picture of the problem of colonial- ism . That is to say , the conception of colonialism that postcolonialism has constructed and made the target of its analytical focus has continued to bear the distinctive traces of ...
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Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment David Scott Gedeeltelijke weergave - 2004 |
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