Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World

The form of Conrad’s narrative has had two lives in the post-colonial world. Its assertive sovereign inclusiveness has been reproduced by those who speak today for the West, what the West did, and what the rest of the world is, was, and may be. Between colonialism and its genealogical offspring there is thus a holding and crossing-over. Many of the post-colonial writers bear their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending towards a future, as urgently re-interpretable and re-deployable experiences in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the colonialist. Nevertheless, a resistant, perhaps ultimately subjective, component of oppositional energy resides in the intellectual vocation itself, and it is on this that one has to rely, particularly when collective energies seem mostly harnessed to movements for domination and coercion. And we should not be too optimistic about standing up to them.