Europe and Its Shadows by Hamid Dabashi;

Author:Hamid Dabashi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Faceless Masks?

But if not “humiliation,” then what and where was the paramount anticolonial sentiment, or even more fundamentally, what was the metaphysics of our morals, to use the language of a seminal European philosopher? How did we get ourselves together? How did we gather? If Mustafa Sa’eed is murderously pathological, and he is, then who and how and what was normative postcolonial metaphysics of our morals? Are we all faceless masks? Were we all faceless masks before Frantz Fanon wrote his brilliant Black Skin, White Masks (1952) or Said in his Orientalism (1978)? Sometimes postcolonial theory has a very short memory.

The condition of postcoloniality the world inherited in the aftermath of European imperial conquests was from the very beginning a productive paradox, a creative crisis, in and of itself a postcolonial condition of contradictions, at once enabling and disabling, opening and closing, resistances to it. In my Theology of Discontent (1993), I have already demonstrated in some detail how the production of Islamic ideology in resistance to the U.S. and European domination of Muslim lands was itself a deeply Eurocentric project. The condition of coloniality enabled a new mode of knowledge production in confrontation with the very idea of Europe, but at the same time it effectively disrupted and foreclosed the preceding conditions (in multiple forms and varied contexts) of knowing and acting. The European and then American empires had glossed over the previous imperial conditions of knowledge and power—so that the postcolonial subject formation had become perforce fragmentary, allegorical, memorial, always already contingent on the stable metaphor of “Europe.” The condition of postcoloniality was conducive to that fragmentary mode of subjection, and therefore the postcolonial subject became a shadowy and allegorical figure. The postcolonial person had become integral in the formation of that fragmentary subjection of himself/herself, the product of an interface between European colonialism and the postcolonial subject it had foregrounded and foreshadowed. That postcolonial paradox, I contend, has now been resolved and absolved, and the post-European person is freed both from within and from without Europe, which can now only be used under a worldly erasure, or Europe as Europe.

Before we can begin to understand that post-European person, we must have a clear conception of the path the postcolonial subject has traveled upon and through this Europe and its global shadows. When we look at the biographical genealogy of a postcolonial person today, we need to wonder if there is any face behind the masks we see—or are these mere faceless masks, feeding on the “humiliation” of which Said just wrote? What would a mapping of the metaphysics of our morals look like, if we were to use Kant’s language, in the condition we like to call postcolonial? Suppose the sustained criticism of Europe is necessary but not sufficient. Let me take you to a crucial encounter between two seminal European thinkers and we will then part ways with them and go back to our own condition of postcoloniality. I have always been mesmerized by a simple reflection of Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks about Kant.

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