Interrogating the Postcolonial: On the Limits of Freedom, Subalternity, and Hegemonic Knowledge

This review surveys four recent publications in postcolonial studies: Edmund Burke’s Ethnographic State; Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time; Viatcheslav Morozov’s Russia’s Postcolonial Identity; and Nayoung Aimee Kwon’s Intimate Empire. The central topics covered by these four books range from questioning the inevitability and givenness of the national independence option during decolonization, to attempting to sketch a history of French Orientalism in Morocco, to revisiting the notion of subaltern(ity) by positing Russia as a subaltern empire, and, finally, to examining the shared yet fraught experience of colonial modernity between Korea and Japan. In that sense, each of these books directly engages postcolonial studies by either questioning an established framework (e.g., national independence as the end goal of decolonization; Orientalism seen solely as epistemology; subalternity as morally superior because of its marginal position vis-à-vis power) or by complicating the binary of resistance versus collaboration/assimilation.