436 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
in the process of reexamination. Postcolonialism refers, first of all, simply to a
historical period on the order of Ming dynasty or the Mughal period. Colonial
powers have fallen; something else is now going on. Of course, such historical
periodization is the product of intellectual labor; otherwise history is just “one
damn thing after another.” A second sense of postcolonialism is the continuing
cultural impact of the colonial period. Colonialism left its impact everywhere it
went in Asia, in the dominance of alien languages over others now in decline;
in radically altered systems of production; in restructured class systems and the
disappearance of whole classes; in electoral politics and political cultures
honed first in Europe, then in nationalist resistance movements; in tastes for
material goods. There is a postcolonial literature; a postcolonial feminism.
The third sense of postcolonialism is the drive to deconstruct its remnants.
This is being done politically in the once-colonized nations as they attempt to
reconstruct their identities and evaluate how much of the old colonial culture
they wish to keep and what to change, if and where they can. This is also being
done intellectually, by the scholarly project of deconstructing colonial knowl-
edge. Colonialism’s intellectual underpinnings were the Enlightenment’s cer-
tainty about progress and the dedication to science to bring it about. Science
meant both technological discoveries that fueled the emerging world economic
system and also the sciences of cartography, geography, botany, and anthropol-
ogy. The Enlightenment was about understanding the world—that is, building
knowledge about the world. One of its assumptions was that science can stand
free of the social and political order and that “knowledge” and “truth” are
independent of context. Enlightenment thinkers gave too little thought to the
framework of colonial domination of the world on which the vast new knowl-
edge base was built. This search for “truth” and “objective knowledge” could
not fail to be colored by the social location of the scientists. Now, in the postco-
lonial era, we are heirs to this vast structure of knowledge, which we must
examine with caution, especially the parts that theorize human nature and
human diversity; that posit a historical direction and a value called progress;
and that shapes the global economic order.