This seminar examines postcolonial theory in history, particularly in the wake of Edward Said's classic 1978 text, "Orientalism," and the historiographical intervention known as "Subaltern Studies" (which flourished in the 1980s and '90s). The paradox invoked in the title is both historical and historiographical. At one level it refers to the persistence of colonial practices, ideologies, and regimes of thought (or "epistemes") in the decolonized world; at another level it signals the critique by intellectuals, both within and beyond the "global south," of the forms of knowledge--especially history--that sustained European imperialism and colonialism. Students will explore how philosophically and theoretically inclined historians from the global south and beyond have wrestled with the double-bind of postcolonialism, beginning with historians in South Asia but extending to Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Latin America--and even the "global north." |