If one must speak the colony, then it is necessary to decide which discourse of knowledge is capable of such speech, and by means of which disciplines. What I first called the phrase designates the buildable linguistic agglomerate that encircles and expresses the colonial adventure. We have seen how a political theology of languages attempted to determine how the indigene could speak up, including the double-sided invention of francophonie. In these configurations, the discourse of knowledge does not constitute an end; my ultimate goal is not to constrain colonial experience within science as the only licit discourse. This final part of the book interrogates precisely this desire to make research and scholarly statements adequate to (post)colonial realities. In fact, texts, practices, and methods that go beyond the self-described scope of their pertinence to their object are repeatedly established in the field of knowledge. Such discourses do not engage with the colony by accident; they integrate the colony into their own definition.
Immediately, two bodies of knowledge, separated by a century, spring to mind, each in its own name claiming a perfect adequacy with its field of study. In Europe, the last decades of the nineteenth century witness the development of different modes of inquiry and interpretation that attempt to form a “colonial science.” Institutes, reviews, associations, and teaching curricula all recognize this budding science, which is always threatened by an uncertainty regarding its own scope; in particular, this field of study hesitates between the decoding of annexed countries and the encoding of “civilizing” activity. Contemporary postcolonial studies, especially vibrant in the United States and the United Kingdom, can be seen as responding to this effort to construe a field of adapted knowledge. Today’s theoreticians, who are often products of the diasporas created by the former British Empire, aim at allowing an alternative voice to be heard. The oscillations of colonial science would therefore be typical of the double register of the “West” in its relationship with conquered peoples. Without any unification of these registers, a new discourse establishes itself at the intersection of disciplines created for understanding and commenting on colonialism, from yesterday to today.
I will add a third case of discursive consubstantiality: anthropology. The intrinsic relationship to colonialism is perhaps less obvious in this case. However, in the age of Marcel Mauss or Franz Boas, ethnology is certainly shaped by the colony. Even now, after the self-criticism unleashed by the wars for independence, the discipline is restructuring itself in relation to colonialism in order to rehabilitate its epistemology. I am not equating scholars with agents of imperialism, but I sense that the link between anthropology and the colony is not a random one. This relation is susceptible to opposing values; for better or worse, it conditions the privilege that both anthropology and ethnology claim for their disciplines.1
Confronting colonial science, anthropology, and postcolonial theory with one another will bring these problems of adequacy to the surface. Such a confrontation will certainly help me to qualify my own approach. I think that the place given to literature in my analysis will be elucidated in a new light. Every book of erudition contains some declaration of its method and the circumstances of its analysis. Many works, however, decide to limit themselves to the minimum that can be expressed in this regard, unaware that their reserve is eloquent in itself. The researcher who reflects on the modes of his or her thinking is quickly accused of narcissism, intellectual aridity, or even practical impotence. When required, there are handbooks, manuals, and guides that collect the best recipes or general theories—and which can help in the teaching of students, or as digests of big ideas for a public ranging from the merely curious to those at the university. The split is regrettable whenever it reinforces the idea that some people think, whereas others act. The epistemology of the social sciences should be included in all research related to this field. In writing this book, I have doubled the investigation by considering the responsibility of the site of my own language. Now we go back to square one, and we examine how (groups of) disciplines claim to proceed from the colony, while coiling up in a phrase and establishing a space of knowledge. And we examine, moreover, the ways that what is said in this space might be transmitted to other spaces.