Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality Project Muse Upcc Books

How can we best forge a theoretical practice that directly addresses the struggles of once-colonized countries, many of which face the collapse of both state and society in today's era of economic reform? David Scott argues that recent cultural theories aimed at deconstructing Western representations of the non-West have been successful to a point, but that changing realities in these countries require a new approach. In Refashioning Futures, he proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view in areas of the world where the very coherence of a secular-modern project can no longer be taken for granted. Through a series of linked essays on culture and politics in his native Jamaica and in Sri Lanka, the site of his long scholarly involvement, Scott examines the ways in which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized. The institutional procedures encoded in these modern postcolonial states and their legal systems come under scrutiny, as do our contemporary languages of the political. Scott demonstrates that modern concepts of political representation, community, rights, justice, obligation, and the common good do not apply universally and require reconsideration. His ultimate goal is to describe the modern colonial past in a way that enables us to appreciate more deeply the contours of our historical present and that enlarges the possibility of reshaping it. How can we best forge a theoretical practice that directly addresses the struggles of once-colonized countries, many of which face the collapse of both state and society in today's era of economic reform? David Scott argues that recent cultural theories aimed at "deconstructing" Western representations of the non-West have been successful to a point, but that changing realities in these countries require a new approach. In Refashioning Futures, he proposes a strategic practice of criticism that brings the political more clearly into view in areas of the world where the very coherence of a secular-modern project can no longer be taken for granted. Through a series of linked essays on culture and politics in his native Jamaica and in Sri Lanka, the site of his long scholarly involvement, Scott examines the ways in which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized. The institutional procedures encoded in these modern postcolonial states and their legal systems come under scrutiny, as do our contemporary languages of the political. Scott demonstrates that modern concepts of political representation, community, rights, justice, obligation, and the common good do not apply universally and require reconsideration. His ultimate goal is to describe the modern colonial past in a way that enables us to appreciate more deeply the contours of our historical present and that enlarges the possibility of reshaping it. What is the demand of criticism in the postcolonial present? What does the political present demand of postcolonial criticism? What ought such criticism demand of the contemporary moment in which we live? If the answers to these questions are not transparently self-evident, are not already covered by the available cultural-political vocabularies, how do we begin to formulate answers to them? These are the questions with which David Scott is concerned in Refashioning Futures.In a series of interconnected chapters on culture and politics in Sri Lanka and Jamaica, the book moves from a discussion of some of the rationalities that made up the colonial projects in these two historical spaces, through a consideration of some ways in which debates about the past have been deployed in nationalist discourses about collective identity in the present, to an interrogation of contemporary cultural-political predicaments. Scott argues that postcolonial criticism has to fold its hitherto dominant focus on epistemology into a critical practice in which a new object is brought into view: the political. If postcolonial criticism is to renew its project, there has to be a shift from a politics of colonial representation to a re-theorization of the horizons of postcolonial politics. David Scott. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.