David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Introduction

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)

This is a mostly theoretical volume in which the author addresses the question of how political attitudes influence the ways people reconstruct the past and anticipate the future. Scott hypothesize that the tragedy of post-colonial regimes is caused by their inability to provide a conceptual framework for envisioning of a better future:

The old languages of moral-political vision and hope are no longer in sync with the world they were meant to describe and normatively criticize. The result is that our time is suffering from what Raymond Williams (in his discussion of modern tragedy) aptly described as “the loss of hope; the slowly settling loss of any acceptable future.” (2)

He then argues that the ways in which in conceptualize our pasts allows to understand the present conceptual paradigms, and he is worried about historical representations of colonialism, as the way historians use them construct post-colonial paradigms in the way he is worried about. His worry is that currently, the postcolonial theory does not illuminate “the difference between the questions that animated former presents and those that animate our own,” (3) or to put it another way, contemporary post-colonial critics of colonialism and its effects impose their visions (“their questions”) on the past they are supposed to study, thus “essentializing” it with the contemporary meanings.

To solve this question, Scott suggests the concept “problem-space,” which he introduces in order

first of all to demarcate a discursive context, a context of language. But it is more than a cognitively intelligible arrangement of concepts, ideas, images, meanings, and so on— though it is certainly this. It is a context of argument and, therefore, one of intervention. A problem-space, in other words, is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs. That is to say, what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed as problems as such (the problem of ‘‘race,’’ say), but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having. (4)

The fallacy of postcolonial critics, then, is that “the conception of colonialism that postcolonialism has constructed and made the target of its analytical focus has continued to bear the distinctive traces of anticolonialism’s conceptual preoccupations.” (6)

He then introduces the concept of “strategic criticism,” by which he means that in order to avoid essentializing the past, we should identify the difference in stakes which were involved in the “past pasts” and “present pasts,” “past presents” and “present pasts,” “past futures” and “present,” and “past futures” and “present futures.”

Scott then refers to R. G. Collingwood, Quentin Skinner and Bernard Yack as scholars who shaped his method, which is to study the relationship between concepts (which include “hopes,” “demands,” “expectations, etc.) and desires for social transformation (different kinds). Referring to Yack, Scott says:

many studies of revolutionary discontent have failed to adequately understand the role of new concepts in generating social discontent. This is because they have mistakenly focused on the way these concepts define alternatives to the present social limitations rather than on the way they shape our understanding of these limitations themselves. (5)

For the post-colonial studies to get rid of the essentialism, Scott suggests to reformulate its very object of research:

It seems to me that a more fruitful approach to the historical appreciation of prior understandings of the relation between pasts, presents, and futures is to think of different historical conjunctures as constituting different conceptual-ideological problem-spaces, and to think of these problem-spaces less as generators of new propositions than as generators of new questions and new demands. (7)

Scott argues that the structure which embodies these “conceptual-ideological problem-spaces” is narrative, which links the future, the present and the past as envisioned within one discourse. He draws on Hayden White to argue that different narrative forms have invested into their linguistic structures certain political and ideological implications. Consequently, “different stories organize the relation between past, present, and future differently.” (7) Drawing on this, Scott argues that Romance is the chief genre used by post-colonial stories, as they tend to be “narratives of overcoming, often narratives of vindication; they have tended to enact a distinctive rhythm and pacing, a distinctive direction, and to tell stories of salvation and redemption.” (8)

Scott then announces that he is going to apply all research questions formulated above to The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James as a starting point to challenge the current post-colonial conceptualization of the colonialism. He argues that The Black Jacobins are written (or, rather, revised for the second edition) in the genre of tragedy, which allowed Scott to formulate and address the “relation between identity and difference, reason and unreason, blindness and insight, action and responsibility, guilt and innocence.” (13) The use of the tragic genre allowed James to challenge other narratives which were then used by Europeans to write about the history of former colonies: his Toussaint Louverture is simultaneously a “Caliban appropriating language <of Prospero, i.e. of the dominant group> and remaking history” and “a modernist intellectual, suffering, like Hamlet, the modern fracturing of thought and action.” (16)

In general, Scott explains his interest to The Black Jacobins by the facts that “if the Black Jacobins is a classic work of black and anticolonial history this is <…> because it offers in an unparalleled way an endless source of postcolonial reflection on the relation between colonial pasts from which we have come, presents we inhabit, and futures we might hope for.” (21)