Degree zero of history

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by Barlow, Tani E

Some Suggestions for a Critical History

The evidence suggests that Scott, Haver and Spivak's position on history puts them in the minority. Possibly as financial globalization heightens our scholarly frustration and institutional crises (witness the recent splash Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire seems to be making), the cultural left will once again produce a new, orthodox version of a masterful, narrative explanatory framework. In the effort to keep open "historicity as the surplus of conceptuality," I have, instead, enlisted Gayatri Spivak's work of literary deconstruction.16

What, then, is a useful way of addressing Joan Scott's call for more to be said about the good historian, while considering the historical displacement that Gayatri Spivak's projects have achieved? In The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism I have experimented with a critical historiography A la Joan Scott but in a post-Spivakian mode. This experiment does not presume that because imperialism and colonialism (now globalization) were global practices, they have provoked similar effects everywhere. I have let go of the certainty of uniformity, and I have also shifted away from both the question of representation per se and the related question of subalterneity to focus primarily on social-ideological conditions of possibility and the categorical debates characterizing what historians and theorists often (misleadingly) call context. In other words, my project's archive consists of controversies and institutional ideologies that discontinuously predicated subjects during the processes of modernization, anti-colonial liberation struggle, socialist development policy implementation, and current globalization initiatives. From Joan Scott and her protegee Mrinalini Sinha, I adapted the historian's precision about subject and context and joined it to the more general theoretical concern with subject predication richly developed in literary criticism.17

Of course, the effort of trying to be a good historian has produced some changes in the ways that I work. For instance, what I had earlier named the period of "colonial modernity" indeed proved to be a durable thread. But unlike the disciplinary historian's conventional understanding of periodization (e.g., the Republican period in twentieth-century China or "maritime modernity" of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia), colonial modernity was temporal (a "period") only in relation to a specific social class: the intellectual or commercial-cultural bourgeoisie. On reflection, I have concluded that what best characterizes the era of colonial modernity are the distinctive relations of Chinese elites to modern Japanese, U.S., Russian and European truth claims. These truths were vested in institutions like the modern Chinese University and its enlightened heritage, the professionalization of work, and politics and transnational commercial culture. Indeed, it is still unclear whether the era of colonial modernity outlasted the modern "intellectual" or educated elite or how it will connect to the era Mao Zedong called "semi-feudal, semi-colonial" The period of colonial modernity persisted in the social prerogatives and practices of this new intellectual (zhishifenzi) class.