Frederick Cooper – Colonialism in Question
12 November, 2021 -
examPrep
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- 3 – Such concerns have led some scholars to examine thoughtfully the complex ways in which Europe was made from its colonies and how the very categories by which we understand the colonies’ past and the ex-colonies’ future were shaped by the process of colonization.
- 4 – The refusal to leave the “colonial” as a neatly bounded, excisable dimension of European history marks an important challenge to historical analysis. Yet unbounding colonialism risks leaving us with a colonial project vaguely situated between 1492 and the 1970 s, of varying contents and significance, alongside an equally atemporal “post-Enlightenment” Europe, missing the struggles that reconfigured possibilities and constraints across this period. This is why a reconsideration of colonialism’s place in history should both engage deeply with the critical scholarship of the last two decades and insist on moving beyond the limitations that have emerged within it.
- Europe’s ambivalent conquests— oscillating between attempts to project outward its own ways of understanding the world and efforts to demarcate colonizer from colonized, civilized from primitive, core from periphery— made the space of empire into a terrain where concepts were not only imposed but also engaged and contested.
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- Ambivalent colonialism — to project european knowledge onto colonies and the insulate Europe from knowledge from colonies, but also to insulate colonies from anti-colonial or liberatory ideas from the colonizer; to allow raw materials (and arts because their export, in the hands of whites exoticizes the colony but does little to enrich or empower the colony) to flow from colony but not manufactures or crafts, to allow the technology conducive to the extraction of raw materials flow into the colony, but not liberatory technologies or those that make self-determination possible. What magical and mind-boggling pipes and valves must the colonizer construct between itself and its colonies that would make possible such an incoherent and hypocritical set of flows?
- Conceptual issues are the focus of this book. How can one study colonial societies, keeping in mind— but not being paralyzed by— the fact that the tools of analysis we use emerged from the history we are trying to examine?
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- The central paradox of the history of colonialism from within euro-american historiographical culture
- 25 – I argue that colonial regimes and oppositions to them reshaped the conceptual frameworks in which both operated. Struggle was never on level ground, but power was not monolithic either.
