The debates over postcolonial studies have generally been framed around competing assessments of the field’s commitment to emancipation and third-world revolution: it is usually understood either as committed to the liberation of non-Western peoples from imperial and colonial rule or as having betrayed that project through its abandonment of the properly revolutionary and universal tools of Marxist critique. While both sides in this debate assume the virtue of radical historical transcendence, another, less frequently remarked tendency in postcolonial discourse eschews the goal of revolution, the virtue of social justice, and the ideal of equality. For these thinkers, revolution itself is a notion compromised by its European conceptual provenance and the threat it poses, analogous to that of imperialism itself, to traditional lifeways. The goal of anticolonial action, if action is indeed commended, is rather the recovery of an authentic, precolonial heritage and the renewal of traditions severed or rendered moribund by colonialism. Like its more progressive counterparts, postcolonial cultural conservatism calls attention to the epistemological violence of foreign rule; yet postcolonial cultural conservatism cites this violence within arguments against the desirability or possibility of autonomous social transformation.

The contributors to this panel will examine the historical catalysts, arguments, and intellectual affiliations of conservatism in postcolonial discourse of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Recognizing that conservatism is itself a form of traveling theory and so not bound in any essential way to the historical referents of Western right-wing thought (paradigmatically, the French Revolution and the workers’ movement), the panelists will reflect on the historical specificity of ideas, demands, and aesthetic forms proposed by writers under the suasion of movements on behalf of tradition.

Kaitlin Staudt examines a cohort of intellectuals in early post-Ottoman Turkey determined to resist the state’s efforts to proscribe engagement with the country’s imperial past. Whereas the government sponsored cultural modernization efforts and proffered a vision of the Turkish novel that contributed to that project, novelists like Peyami Safa turned away from the project of Turkish nationalism in the 1930s and sought to reclaim an older heritage. Paradoxically, however, Safa employed experimental aesthetics in the service of his critique of government-sponsored modernity. In his 1933 novel Bir Tereddüdün Romanı [The Novel of a Hesitation], Safa employed some of the very strategies associated with literary modernism elsewhere, including rearrangements of chronology and a focus on representations of interiority. The performative contradictions of cultural conservativism in the early Turkish Republic reveal the need for a globally differentiated theory of how the past figures in arguments about national culture.

Adam Spanos takes account of the multiple engagements with Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of a “tradition” in postcolonial criticism concerned to negotiate the Western intellectual heritage. MacIntyre represents tradition as a dialogue authorized by intellectual inheritances; it fosters practices that contribute to human flourishing over multiple generations by sustaining those obligations to the past. For Talal Asad, this concept shores up an understanding of Islam as an “extended argument in time” and allows him to rebut characterizations of Islam as monolithic and unchanging. MacIntyre’s concept of tradition also informs David Scott’s brief for a charitable hermeneutics that aims to reconstruct rather than debunk, and so allows for the possibility of fostering a community of postcolonial intellectuals. Asad and Scott employ MacIntyre’s arguments to shore up communities and practices they perceive to be threatened by contemporary habits of Western intellectual thought, including preoccupations with critique and revolution.

Srigowri Kumar grapples with the reception in metropolitan contexts of claims on behalf of cultural authenticity made by migrant writers and intellectuals. In such contexts, one can observe a double misprision: both by migrant writers of the pasts on which they draw in order to authorize their claims to speak, and by audiences in the Global North who construe those writers as authentic representatives of foreign pasts. The claims of postcolonial cultural conservatism circulate uncontested in formerly imperial countries because of the investment of national majorities in the paternalistic fiction of their own benevolent recognition of minority groups. Taking Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy as a case study, Kumar argues that both the novel’s form and its mostly favorable critical response are conservative in their tacit endorsement of cultural authenticity. Yet the tension between the conservative assumptions of Selvadurai’s bildungsroman and those of the novel’s reception open possibilities for challenging the consensus established around the uses of the past the novel represents.

These papers, each limited to eighteen minutes, will be followed by an open question and answer session that will last for approximately twenty minutes.