Blackwell Reference Online

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What follows is an essay on theorizing postcolonial cultural histories. While I am aware of the difficulties involved in the uses and abuses of the term “postcolonial” (Prakash 1990; Shohat 1992), I am more interested at this point in its advantages. It allows me to think of modernity and postmodernity from a postcolonial perspective, that is, to view “modernity” and understand it from the fringes of colonial histories from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.The distinctiveness and complementarity of the postmodern and the post-colonial in Latin American intellectual production is clearly, if indirectly, indicated by the authors of two articles in a recent special issue of boundary 2 on “The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America.” While José Joaquín Brunner's article conceptualizes modernity and postmodernity in Latin America, Enrique Dussel's contribution is akin to what I am here calling “postcolonial theories and cultural histories.” This program is clearly outlined in Dussel's opening paragraph:Modernity is, for many (for Jürgen Habermas or Charles Taylor, for example), an essentially or exclusively European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the “center” of a World History that it inaugurates; the “periphery” that surrounds this center is consequently ... log in or subscribe to read full text