Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment

Abstract

Milton has a great phrase; he says: ''A good book is the precious life-blood of a master's spirit.''But it is more than that.It is the result of the circumstances of the age playing upon a mentality and the circumstances of people who are central to it.i My most general concern in this book is with the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them.More specifically, my principal concern is with our own postcolonial present, our present after the collapse of the social and political hopes that went into the anticolonial imagining and postcolonial making of national sovereignties.This is our present, as I have put it elsewhere, after Bandung. 1 My concern is with the relation between this (as it seems to me) dead-end present and, on the one hand, the old utopian futures that inspired and for a long time sustained it and, on the other, an imagined idiom of future futures that might reanimate this present and even engender in it new and unexpected horizons of transformative possibility.What are the critical conceptual resources needed for this exercise?There is today no clear answer to this question.In many parts of the once-colonized world (not least in the one that forms the geopolitical background-if not the specific object-of this book, the Caribbean), the bankruptcy of postcolonial regimes is palpable in the extreme.Where in the early decades of new nationhood an earnestly progressive ideology (radical nationalisms, Marxisms, Fanonian liberationisms, indigenous socialisms, or what have you) aimed at giving point to the relation between where we have come from, where we are, and where we might be going, these days even the nostalgia for what the late Guya-