In a world of “Post-”

I wrote my last blog post on the conceptualization of time in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Temporality unfolds not only in the ways in which historical subjects are said to associate with time and the way time is imagined as linear or cyclical but also in the ways historians write of the lineage of history writing.

Gyan Prakash divides Indian history writing into orientalist and post-orientalist histories. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook critique Prakash’s analysis. For them the historians that Prakash has categorized as post-orientalist use many of the troupes of orientalism for instance Bernard Cohn’s use of India’s timelessness. They are also interested in exploring why post-modernism is popular in the academy and what does that tell us about the process of intellectual labor. Gyan Prakash responds to O’Hanlon and Washbrook by referring to deconstruction and the possibility for history writing that it opens up. This scholarly debate aside (which is admittedly a lot of fun) what is particularly interesting to my mind is the importance accorded to categories. “Post-” is a very popular word: Post-orientalist, post-foundationalist, post-modernist are words that are critical to this debate which can in many ways be seen as a debate about the place of terminology as much as it is about the ways of history writing.

“Post” reaffirms a point of departure from something. It is one way to deal with the ambivalence of subject-position that Prakash identifies. For Prakash it is also one way in which deconstruction can be applied to history and historical difference can be explained and understood. Prakash says it is not about a narrative of origins and about writing a history that “would only return to origins” rather it is about the possibility of re-inscribing assumptions of history writing. This question of ambivalence and historical difference is an important one because it not only shapes the way history is written but also the ways in which one imagines oneself as a subject (Prakash’s acceptance of hanging onto two horses inconstantly). But is a world of post- and what came before the only way to understand this ambivalence of writing and being?