After the Korean War (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) by Heonik Kwon

Author:Heonik Kwon [Kwon, Heonik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chakrabarty’s critique is more than a project of history. It is also part of a broader project of postcolonial criticism intended to confront the problematic process of decolonization: postcolonial modernity was envisioned in the colonies in terms of the model of political modernity learned from Europe; this makes resistance to colonial domination an act of emulating the dominator rather than an authentic, creative act. He proposes that the project to “provincialize” the European heritage of political modernity is a necessary step for pluralizing modernity, which is, in turn, an indispensable step for the decolonization of the imagination. Making one’s own political history distinct from the theoretical premises of historical development in European thought, in other words, is an act of obtaining freedom from colonialism in thought.

Considering this broad objective, it is understandable that Chakrabarty presents the idea of traditional Bengali brotherhood in sharp contrast to the Lockean idea of political brotherhood. Upon further examination, however, we notice that there is something not quite viable in this project to provincialize the Western representation of political modernity. The idea of the postcolonial experience proposed by Chakrabarty is based on a conceptual separation of colonialism into two domains, an institutional order and a cultural schema, and the related premise that the latter, colonialism as culture, continues after the achievement of political self-rule, that is, the end of colonialism as an institutional order. He conceptualizes the predicate “post” in postcolonial as potent symbolic vitality in the present of the past experience of the actual existence of colonialism. In this rendering of historically spectral but experientially real continuity of colonial imaginaries, however, it is surprising to see that the project of postcolonial criticism makes no analytical associations with the political history of the Cold War, which apparently coincides with the historical change of colonialism from an institutional structure to a cultural form. The idea of postcolonial culture tends to project the historical epoch from the end of the Second World War to the present as an uninterrupted struggle to be free from the cultural and mental effects of colonialism, after this world is freed from the formal institutional grid of colonial subjugation from the 1950s to the 1960s. This conceptual scheme does not consider the momentous shift in global power relations during this period, from colonial to bipolar in nature, or the resultant complication for nation-building in the postcolonial world. Most of all, the scheme is oblivious to the radical political bipolarization of postcolonial processes and the consequent complications in human communal life.

What is distinctive about societies that experienced the postcolonial Cold War in the form of a civil war is the fact that the rendering of this symbolic analogy between family and nation takes on, rather than a positive fusion, a negative condition of partition and distortion – a condition that needs to be overcome in the future with appropriate actions.20 In these contexts, it is difficult to conceive of a “natural” or pre-political brotherhood as a discreet indigenous entity, which then can be

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