Autonomous Histories and World History Siem Reap Conference Paper[1]

8/2/2019 Autonomous Histories and World History Siem Reap Conference Paper[1]

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Autonomous Histories and World HistoryWynn W. Gadkar-Wilcox

Western Connecticut State UniversityPresented at the Southeast Asia in World History Symposium, Pannasastra University,

Siem Reap, Cambodia, January 2, 2012

In the years after the conclusion of World War II, decolonization movements

spread across the world. They brought with them not only new nations but the need to

conceive a new historiography that was appropriate for the postcolonial era. What was

necessary was not just a rewriting of the colonial past, but an entirely new concept of

history. For newly conceived independent nations such as India, Indonesia, or theRepublic of the Congo, writing this new history was complicated by the fact that their

nations only existed as such because of the vicissitudes of colonial power. Since there

had been no Indonesia as such before the onset of the Dutch East Indies, for example,

Indonesian historians were forced to reinvent their pre-colonial history to match their

boundaries to the geographic space of modern Indonesia.

From the 1950s until the 1980s, in these decolonized regions throughout the

globe, the need to produce an independent historiography not tainted by either the

worldview or the chronology of colonialism became a critical priority for historians.

This project took on different names depending on the historiographic tradition or Area

Studies field involved. In Southeast Asian studies, these efforts were categorized as an

effort to achieve autonomous history.1 In Chinese studies, they came to be associated

with a China-centered approach to history, and in African studies, postcolonial

1John R.W. Smail, On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,Journal ofSoutheast Asian History 2:2 (July 1961): 72-102.


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historiography frequently was understood as independent history.2 Each of these

amount to slightly different variations on the same historiographic theme, a theme that

was to become the rallying cry for Area Studies methodology: that historians needed to

construct historical narratives of decolonized nations that were focused on the people of

those nations in themselves, and needed to construct chronologies that were different

from the timelines of the colonial past, but reflected shifts in local experience.

World history, by contrast, has developed with different aims. Since the 1990s

world historians invigorated the study of comparative history byfocusing on integrating

the study of the world with recent theories from the social sciences to produce world-centric insights that show long-term continuities.3 There are many benefits to this

integrative and relational approach to history. At its best, the new world history gives

students a view of the past that allows them to analyze broad themes and make valid

comparisons. Yet one clear drawback is that almost by definition particularity and

autonomy are lost in contemporary world historys instinct to compare and contrast. If a

nation or a region is considered in a world history textbook as a part of a theme such as

the major religions, trade, or colonization, that place is being appreciated

metonymically, as a part of a whole, rather than being appreciated in and of itself.

Additionally, world historians have been cognizant of recent critiques of narrating history

through the lens of the nation-state, and have increasingly local or regional analyses or

2 Paul Cohen,Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 149-198; Caroline Neale, Writing Independent History:African Historiography, 1960-1980. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Harvey Amani Whitfieldand Bonny Ibhawoh, Problems, Perspectives, and Paradigms: Colonial Africanist Historiography and theQuestion of Audience, Canadian Journal of African Studies 39:3 (2005): 586-7.3Patrick Manning, Narrating World History: A Synopsis, World History Connected1:1 (November2003), http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/1.1/manning.html.


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explored topics that allow historians to eschew boundaries altogether.4 In general, it

seems difficult to deny that these trends, not only in world history but also in history

generally, have been positive developments. Clearly, though, they have the potential to

erase the contributions of early postcolonial and area studies historiography. In an effort

to compare experiences, world historians all too often risk narrating the peoples of the

third world as the helpless victims of global political and economic processes such as the

expansion of trade, capitalism, and colonialism. Moreover, the global chronologies of

these themes are inevitably those of the colonizers.

The result is a global history that differs considerably in tone from colonialhistories, but is identical to colonial history in its timelines and in the events it considers.

The discoveries of Europeans in Africa and the Americas and the foundation of

European empires become key points in the narratives in world history, even as world

historians transform the moral implications of these acts. Despite its laudable aspects,

this integrative emphasis in contemporary world history threatens to undo a half-century

of efforts to narrate the national histories of formerly colonized peoples on their own

terms and with respect to events that are domestically relevant to those civilizations.

Returning to the writing of autonomous histories in an area studies paradigm,

however, is not a desirable alternative to writing world history. These histories have

their drawbacks. Autonomous histories tend to overemphasize ethnic nationalism or

distinctions of national character. Assuming that certain developments are indigenous

and that others are foreign all too often draws a false dichotomy between events that in

fact involve an inextricable interaction between local peoples and the world. Moreover,

4 For critiques of the nation-state in history, see Prasenjit Duara,Rescuing History from the Nation(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).


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just as the current paradigm of world history seems incapable of preserving the agency

that autonomous histories provide, so too do autonomous histories seem incapable of

providing the larger comparative contexts that are provided by world history.

This essay seeks to draw upon literature in cultural studies and historiography to

attempt to reconcile and preserve the important aspects of autonomous histories and of

world history. It begins with an analysis of the claims of autonomous and world

histories to develop a deeper familiarity with the aims and purposes of both

historiographic traditions. Then it examines a number of theories of global contact that

have the possibility between bridging the domestic/international gap that exists betweenworld and autonomous histories.

This essay proposes four possible models for solving world historys autonomy

problem. First, it examines hybridity, the idea that decolonization involves a process of

intentionally mimicking selective aspects of the colonizers civilization as a weapon

against colonization. Secondly, it considers transculturation, a theory arising out of

Latin American studies, which posits that even colonized peoples acquire agency, first in

deciding what elements of a colonizers culture to blend with their own, and secondly in

influencing the culture of the colonizers themselves. Third, it considers the theory of

cofiguration, which borrows from theories of translation to say that no prior national

Japanese or Chinese or Indian culture existed before Western contact, and that

these cultures were invented ex post facto in order for nationalists to argue that their

countries favorably compared with Western ones. Finally, it considers the theory of

localization, the idea that when there is a cultural encounter, local people will take


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foreign ideas, drain them of their original significance, an repackage them in ways that

are more useful to them.

Each of these four alternatives provides a potentially productive way to form a

compromise between autonomous histories and world history. These methods allow

world historians to narrate elements of world history according to the chronologies

provided by the colonizer, thus allowing world historians to discuss European exploration

and conquest in a coherent way. However, these methods also do not assume that

colonized countries are mere passive victims of exploitation whose cultures are destroyed

by colonization, but rather prescribe a more contingent process of cultural transformationin which the point of view of the colonized country may be preserved.

The Theory of Autonomous History and Its Critique of World History

Let us first examine the narrative structure of autonomous postcolonial histories

and world histories in more detail. Seminal texts in postcolonial historiography reflect

the balkanized nature of post-World War II Area Studies scholarship, and therefore East

Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, African, and Latin American historiographies each

have a different key texts declaring independence from colonial historiography traditions.

To narrow this analysis, I will consider one key text in postcolonial historiography, John

R.W. Smails On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Southeast Asia (1961)

and compare it to the major themes in recent writing on World History.

Smails essay delved into an existing postcolonial debate about Eurocentrism in

historical writing. One of the major features of the essay was to develop an analysis of

the different ways that historical writing could be Europe-centric or Asia-centric.


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Drawing from the writings of the Dutch Indonesian historian J.C. Van Leur, Smail drew a

distinction between a Europe-centric perspective, and a Europe-centric moral

viewpoint. Historians who adopt a Eurocentric perspective tend to discuss the histories

of non-European places (in Smails discussion, Southeast Asia) by focusing on the

European impact on these places. In the Southeast Asian case, the inflection points of a

history of Southeast Asia written from a Eurocentric perspective would be at the points in

the timeline in which there was an interaction brought about by European traders or

colonizers. Thus, the significant events in Southeast Asian history from the colonial

perspective include the Portuguese colonization of Malacca in 1511 and the Spanishcolonization of the Philippines later in the same century, the galleon and spice trades, the

French conquest of Indochina, and so forth. In each of these cases, Southeast Asia

becomes almost a derivative of a discussion of European colonial power in the world.

Historians operating in this mode run the risk of reiterating the same colonial mentality

that motivated European imperialism in the first place; namely, that places like Southeast

Asia are metonymically reduced to mere resources for colonial plunder. Actual

Southeast Asian people are thus relegated to the background as discussions of the need

for camphor and cinnamon and sandalwood and tea are brought to the foreground.

One of Smails key insights is that anticolonial nationalists could be just as

Eurocentric as Europeans, at least when it came to the question of perspective and point

of view. Although anticolonial historians might inveigh against the excesses and

atrocities of colonialism, the way in which they did so would necessarily be within the

confines of Eurocentric teleology. A history of Southeast Asia, for example, that is

critical of the Portuguese attack on Malacca or decries French exploitation on colonial


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rubber plantations might be an example of an Asia-centric nationalist moral viewpoint,

but still reflects a Eurocentric perspective. This is because the actors in Southeast Asian

history remain Europeans, and the natives react or respond to European acts . All that

has changed in the narrative of nationalist historians is that for them, the moral

implications actions of European imperialists negatively, whereas colonial historians

viewed them positively. The dilemma that Smail grasped then became clear: how could

nationalist historians in newly independent nations criticize their colonial forbearers

without remaining trapped in the same colonial chronology?

Smails solution to this conundrum was to draw a distinction between aEurocentric perspective and a Eurocentric moral viewpoint. Smail notes that

anticolonial historians are very successful in switching the moral viewpoint of Southeast

Asian history to an Asia-centric one through the criticism of colonialism. But in

essence, the basic narrative of Southeast Asian history did not change, even in the face of

withering anti-colonial criticism. This is because anti-colonial history is anti-colonial

and hence implies, or rather requires, the existence of a strong colonialism. No colony, no

anti-colonial sentiment, which means in practice: the weaker or more localized or more

casual the colonial rule, the less material for the anti-colonialist.5 Thus, early

anticolonial histories of Southeast Asia focused on the same events as the colonial

histories did, but reversed the moral judgment of these events.

Smails antidote for this malady was to prescribe a shifting of the historians

moral viewpoint from Europe-centric to neutral and of his or her perspective from

Europe-centric to Asia-centric. This shift in focus, Smail argued, would allow events

5John R.W. Smail, On the possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,Journal ofSoutheast Asian History 2:2 (July 1961): 81.


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that were important to indigenous groups to become the center of narratives about

Southeast Asia, in place of narratives about colonization, missionary activity, or the Cold

War. In addition, Smail argued that this neutral moral tone would avoid the

overcorrection of overzealous anticolonial historians whose narratives still focused on

colonization but whose moral evaluation simply shifted the Europeans who had been the

focus ofcolonial historiography from good Europeans to bad ones. If historians failed

to focus on the particularistic and microcosmic events of Southeast Asian history, Smail

argued, they would find narratives of small regions perpetually overshadowed by the

larger themes that so occupy world historians today, because historiography had:too much of the colonial relationship, too much East-West, in our thoughtsabout modern Southeast Asian history is very much like too much ColdWar in our thoughts about the contemporary scene. There is no doubt thatthe Cold War is here with us in Southeast Asia and is a matter of greatimportance. But I am sure that most of us at one time or another havenoticed how strange a caricature of events here one gets from the generalpress in New York or Moscow, London or Peking (and indeed in much ofthe local press), mainly because of the cold war perspective. An electionwhich we saw fought out on a complex of local and national issuesemerges as a simple entry for the scoreboard, so many for Left, so manyfor Right. The issue does not simply stand out above others, it eats themup; it chews up the complex reality, digests it and leaves us with only acouple of basic sugars.6

Any world historian would be remiss to avoid seeing in Smails description above the

outlines of the very historical narratives that frame World History texts, not to mention

World History curricula, right up until the present day. Moreover, Smails critique is

broadly representative of the thinking that emerged from postcolonial historiography

from the 1960s through the 1980s and served as the intellectual cornerstone for Area

Studies research during that era. If there is indeed an intellectual basis for the aversion

6 Smail, 95.


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of some with Area Studies training toward the newer models offered by the development

of World History in the last two decades, it might be based on an instinctual feeling that

World History runs the risk of causing postcolonial countries to lose the hard-won

recognition of their own historical particularity.

For the colonial relationship, the cultural contact between East and West, and the

Cold War are the bellwethers of what produces the contacts and comparisons that make

World History possible. One does not have to look far to find descriptions of the

postcolonial world that, in Smails formulation, adopt an Asia-centric moral viewpoint

while steadfastly maintaining a Eurocentric perspective. Consider this description from apopular world history textbook of the imposition of French colonial authority over

Vietnam.

Vietnams imperial structure was modeled on that of China, but centralpower was declining in the late eighteenth century. With the countrywracked by rebellion, the Nguyen family, vying for control, allied withFrench missionaries and in 1802 established the new Nguyen dynasty,with Catholic missionaries representing French influence at theVietnamese court. The French moved from indirect influence to directimperial control when Emperor Napoleon III, anxious to expand hiscountrys global empire, sent an army of occupation to Vietnam in 1858.In 1862 the Nguyen ruler ceded control of the Mekong Delta and thecommercial center of Saigon to French, opened three treaty ports toEuropean trade, and gave the French free passage up the Mekong River.7

Putting aside the considerable number of factual errors in this passage, in this

narrative, the Vietnamese people as hapless victims of the French. Based on this

narrative, one wonders why Napoleon III would have to send an army in the first place,

since it appears that French control of Vietnam existed everywhere but on paper before

1862. Rather than put up a fight, Vietnams imperial structure had crumbled for a

hundred years, and the Nguyn, it would seem, merely raised their hands in surrender.

7 Valerie Hansen and Kenneth R. Curtis, Voyages in World History (Boston: Wadsworth, 2010), 769-70.


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An actual understanding of Vietnamese history seems in this case to be a casualty of the

efforts of the authors to convince their students to condemn imperialism as an unqualified

evilan effort which, incidentally, makes it entirely impossible to understand

Vietnamese supporters of the French efforts. Moreover, it robs Vietnamese actors of all

agency in resisting colonialism and constructs Vietnam as derivative of China, and tends

to construct Vietnam as possessing an essentially unchanging premodern past that was

interrupted by the coming of the French. This narrative condemns colonization, but like

Smails nationalist historiography, the authors remain slaves to Eurocentic chronologies,

European actors, and European events.Moreover, this kind of an interpretation of the colonial context is not an isolated

case but is in fact typical of world historical treatments. Consider, for example, that a

passage from a general introduction to China designed to supplement readings in World

History classes argues that it was not until the nineteenth century that the Western world

began to make itself felt in China to any marked degree and that in the early nineteenth

century Chinese authorities were so unfamiliar with world affairs that the significance of

the western impact was not at all evident to them, since they thought that the barbarians

could be contained and controlled by the time-honored methods that China had long

employed.8 In addition to the question of whether this is a valid reading of the facts in

the face of Jesuit scientific and religious influence, the Macartney embassy, and many

other events in pre-nineteenth century, this interpretation suffers from the same flaws that

Smail had noted so many years before: it denies any significant premodern changes in

8 William Scott Morton and Charlton M. Lewis, China: Its History and Culture (New York: McGraw Hill,2005), 148.


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Chinese history and subordinates Chinese agency in attempting to combat efforts at

western colonization.

What these quotations illustrate, above all else, is that in a sense histories of

autonomy and interaction, or of integration and dispersion, or simply of Area Studies or

World History traditions, are mutually exclusive. In a literal sense it is impossible to

constitute a comparative study of peoples without reducing those peoples to the themes

suggested by the comparisons, and it is impossible to create a study of the particularity or

uniqueness of a people within the framework of a comparison. Just like the nationalist

historians of the 1960s, World Historians risk turning formerly colonized people intonameless victims of Imperial expansion, colonialism, and environmental destruction, only

accommodating occasional quotations of a peasant as the voice of the homogeneous and

undifferentiated other who had been exploited by these global processes.

Surely, however, the mere fact that Smails critique of nationalist historians of the

1960s seems to apply equally well to the World Historians of today is an insufficient

reason to adopt his suggestions, which in the main lead to an emphasis on national and

regional history and a de-emphasizing of world and comparative history. There are

several reasons why the critiques of postcolonial historians are an insufficient reason to

reject the larger narratives of World History tout court.

In fact, the notion of developing an autonomous or independent history for each

region or nation in the world is problematic, for several reasons. First, the idea of

studying a region in itself and for itself has its origins in Leopold Van Rankes

conception that history could and should be studied for its own purposes. In both cases,

however, this line of reasoning fails to recognize that what constitutes the in itself must


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be subjectively defined. To study Southeast Asia, or East Asia, or Africa in itself

presumes that such an independent history exists. In reality, it does not, since no region

has ever developed historically in isolation from other regions. In some cases, such a

history in itself cannot be said to exist because the regional designation is itself either

capricious and arbitrary or of such recent vintage to make a premodern study

anachronistic.

For example, although many Southeast Asian nations clearly share cultural

similarities, the category Southeast Asia only became a widely accepted description of

the region with the inauguration of Lord Mountbattens South-East Asia Commandduring World War II. In addition to the fact that the name has only become widely

accepted relatively recently, the larger problem is that the idea of a region of Southeast

Asia projects homogeneity, unity, and boundedness onto a part of the world that is in

fact heterogeneous, disunited, and hard to delimit.9 What this means for autonomous

history is that to study Southeast Asia in itself is an impossibility because the region

being studied is at best a product of the historians imagination and is at worst a product

of the very colonial apparatus from which Smail wished to escape. There can be no

Southeast Asia in itself before the twentieth century because there was in a real sense no

Southeast Asia at all.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the identity of regions is not produced

autonomously but rather through their interactions with the rest of the world. Even as

an abstract principle of logic, this point is clear. One can only assert that a region or a

nation is unique through a process of comparison with somewhere else. Otherwise, it

9Donald Emmerson, Southeast Asia: Whats in a Name?Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15:1 (March1984): 1, 7.


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would be impossible to know whether a particular historical event or cultural form was

truly unique, since without any comparison, it would be impossible to say whether the

cultural practice or historical event in question had also occurred elsewhere. For

example, one cannot say that the premodern tendency toward matrilineal traditions is a

unique characteristic of Southeast Asian society without at least implicitly comparing it

to India or China. If this is the case, then to create an autonomous history of Southeast

Asia would involve recognizing these points of comparison and consciously

deemphasizing them or pretending that ones study of an indigenous cultural formation

did not begin with a comparison with somewhere else.Even though proponents of China-centered, independent, or autonomous

histories do not advocate a removal of Europeans from the narratives of non-Western

places, their methodologies would involve a picking out and preferencing of

autochthonous narratives. That means that for autonomous history, the historian

arrogates to himself or herself the responsibility of determining what counts as

indigenous. This obviously poses considerable problems, not just of a historical nature

but also of an ethical one. For example, if one is to write China-centered, autonomous, or

independent history, historian places on himself or herself the burden of determining

what is authentically Chinese, Southeast Asian, African, and so on. This is true even if,

as Smail claims, the goal of the autonomous historian is not to eliminate foreigners from

indigenous narratives but only to limit the emphasis on foreign events. Either way, it

becomes necessary to draw a binary opposition between foreign and domestic, and sort

out who belongs in which category. This leads to a number of vexing problems of

criteria: Are ethnic Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia part of an autonomous Southeast


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Asian perspective? Are Anglo-Indians in India part of a European colonial narrative, or

an independent Indian one? At worst, resolving these questions requires the historians to

place the subjects of their histories into artificial ethnic boxes.

It is clear, then, that while World Historians cannot simply ignore the need for

particularistic and autonomous histories, it is not desirable for historians to return to a

purely autonomous or independent Area Studies method either. Rather, World

Historians need to find ways to address particular histories while not subsuming them

only into larger themes. The key to being able to do so is to understand that the key to

refiguring our narratives about the center and the periphery, or about the first and thirdworlds, has to do with the way that historians designate people into categories and the

way that we think about global identity and interaction. The remainder of this essay will

examine ways to understand interactions that do not erase the priorities of postcolonial

historiography but are less problematic than autonomy. I will examine four ways of

autonomously narrating world history, namely hybridity, transculturation, co-figuration,

and localization. Then, I will return to the passage I have quoted on the imposition of

French control over Vietnam and will consider how our interpretation of this event would

change if each of these approaches were applied.

Alternatives to Autonomy

1. HybridityA fundamental aspect of reconciling the historical particularity of autonomy with

the benefits of thematic historical integration represented by methods of World History is

in refiguring the self/other distinction. World Historians have done a laudable job of


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including more information about civilizations in premodern Africa and Asia into their

textbooks. Nevertheless, in their coverage of colonialism, the environment, and the cold

war, most World Histories clearly place the third world in the category of the other.

What has really changed, as Smails half-century old critique made clear, is the moral

implications of these events, as in the following example from a major World History

textbook. Rather than civilizing the other, imperialists subjugated them, turning a

romantic narrative a tragic one. But whether the peoples of Africa, Latin America, or

Asia are seen as objects of the civilizing mission or victims of it, they are defined as the

other in a way the proves problematic for granting people agency. The implication ofSmails insight is that any solution to the problem of reconciling the agency given with

autonomous history and the potential for integration of world-historical narratives must

provide a method of returning this agency.

For this reason, Edward Saids acclaimed Orientalism (1979) does not provide a

useful model for such reconciliation. Said does offer a trenchant critique of the ways in

which armchair historians and writers of travel literature in eighteenth and nineteenth

century Europe invented a version of a profane Orient that needed to be saved by

Western imperalism. However, Saids critique does not offer a realistic way to remove

the problematic aspects of this self-other dichotomy. One of the main points of Saids

work was to argue that the imperialist subtext of this enlightenment writing was a failure

of humanism, and that the solution to the problem of the creation of the other was to

recognize the common humanity of those from both Occident and Orient.10

Yet Saids humanism runs contrary to the Foucauldian method of the rest of his

work. Additionally, the humanism he posits as the ultimate solution to the problem of

10 Edward Said, Orientalism. (New York: Vintage, 1979), 328.


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Orientalism is implicated by the same enlightenment thought that Said is critiquing. It is

the very positing of a universal humanity that leads these authors to assume that

European experiences were universal in the first place, and to urge European nations to

elevate the Orient to a European standard.11 Humanist universalism cannot be the

solution to Orientalism if the particular form of universalism advocated by Said is itself

Eurocentric. Finally, Saids work cannot be used to reformulate a problematic self-other

dichotomy that leads either to the balkanization and compartmentalization inherent in

Area Studies historiography or the consumption of individual and group identity to a

larger narrative framework in world historiography. This is because ultimately Saidprovides no remedy for these self-other dichotomies. While his work purports to be a

critique of the construction of an Occidental self and an Oriental other, Saids analysis

slides back to making assumptions about the naturalness of these distinctions and does

not, at the end of the work, prescribe any practical way of transcending this East/West

construction. Even if he demonstrates the extent to which the Orient was an invention of

Western writers, in that very formulation Saids work relapses into the essentializing

modes it attacks.12

One potential solution to the conundrum of the self-other distinction that Said

poses but does not resolve is to narrate modern World History, particularly in the context

of colonialism and the cold war, as a hybrid process. In his classic 1994 work entitled

TheLocation of Culture, Homi Bhabha reformulates the problems of colonialism and

postcolonialism. Drawing on Franz Fanon and others, Bhabha proposes that the most

effective colonial strategy consists of adopting certain cultural and intellectual aspects of

11 See Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. (New York: Routledge, 1990),132-3.12 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard, 1988), 270-1.


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the culture of the colonizer and refiguring them in indigenous ways. Creating such a

hybrid identity confuses colonial civilizing strategies by calling into question whether the

colonized is truly uncivilized, since they contain elements of the colonizers culture. In

one section of his work, Bhabha provides an example of the effect of hybrid cultural

processes on the colonizer through an anecdote about the role of the common Indian

flatbread chapatti and its use during the Sepoy mutiny in 1857. A rumor surfaced in the

aftermath of the famous discovery that the British East India Company was making rifle

grease out of a combination of pork and beef tallow, thus angering both the Muslim and

Hindu Indian soldiers of the company. The rumor was that chapattis were beingcirculated from village to village. The British were at a loss to explain the circulation of

this flatbread, and interpreted it variably as a warning that the villagers were being told

they needed to fight if they were to continue to be able to eat, as a superstitious way of

warding off disease, or as proof that the British were trying to pollute them by mixing

ground-up bone in chapatti flour.13 Ultimately, the indeterminate meaning of the

distribution of the chapatti caused a generalized panic.

Historians of the sepoy mutiny have considered this chapatti episode in some

detail. World histories typically include the sepoy mutiny as well. The more recent

world-historical accounts, following Indian nationalist and subaltern historiography, have

reformulated it as the Indian Rebellion, a violent rebellion in which the rebels

imagined that the Mughal Empire might be restored to its former power and glory.14

This interpretation seeks to provide a clear and uncomplicated view of the mutiny in

which the soldiers rejected the British Empire (and mutatis mutandis the West) in favor

13 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 200-202.14 Robert W. Strayer, Ways of the World: A Global History with Sources (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins,2011), 953.


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of a traditional ruler. Yet nothing is as simple as it seems in this case. The ruler in

question, Bahadur Shah was a Muslim in a land with a majority Hindu population. He

was not independent of the British but implicated in British rule through the Mughal

collaboration with the East India Company. Additionally, it is important to remember

that these sepoys were willing to agree to serve the British as soldiers in the first place,

which makes them unlikely to be philosophically opposed to British rule, particularly

when being disadvantaged in the prior Mughal society was a main reason to be attracted

to the job of being a sepoy in the first place. Finally, the rebellion was not started for the

restoration of an independent India, for there had never been such an India in the past (India as we know it today being essentially a consequence of British Imperialism), but

rather as a religious protest, similar kinds of which had been lodged against the Mughal

emperors many times in the past as well.

What this analysis should show us is that there is a tendency in world history to

present an analysis of particular events that fits into a universal theme. In this case, what

is important is to articulate the sepoy mutiny within a larger narrative that discusses the

nationalist responses to colonial aggression. First, this world-historical theme reenacts

the central contradiction of nationalist historiography: in order to tell a patriotic story of

national resistance, one must articulate the colonizer as the main actor in history who

takes the action that the colonized must resist. Thus, seeing the sepoy mutiny as a

Mughal restorationist movement provides a perfect example of Smails critique of

nationalist historiography, since it clearly reverses the moral implications of colonialism

but stays within a Eurocentric teleology.


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Bhabhas critique of these narratives, however, is somewhat different than

Smails. For Bhabha, the central problem with seeing the sepoy mutiny as an

unproblematic independence movement is precisely that it sorts out the British and Indian

aspects of the story far too firmly. The chapatti story is absent from most world-

historical considerations of the mutiny because of its confusing undecidability. There is

no room in a story of nationalist heroism for an event of unclear meaning or

interpretation. The sepoys themselves, with their clean-cut British uniforms, are caught

in the interstices of British and Indian. One of the difficulties the Company faced in

getting the sepoys to fight was that they would shed the discipline of their uniformsduring the fight, making it impossible to tell the difference between a soldier and a civil

insurgent.15 The circulation of the chapatti, too is an undecidable event; one cannot say

what the intentions of the chapatti circulators actually were. Historians who attempt to

resolve this event into a unified Indian cultural strategy to resist the British bite the

bullet and circulate the myth of the chapati and pass on the contagion of rumour and

panic into their own serial, sensible narratives that become unsettled by the very act of

repetition.16

As Bhabha puts it:

The margin of hybridity, where cultural differences contingently and

conflictually touch, becomes the moment of panic which reveals the

borderline experience. It resists the binary opposition of racial and

cultural groups, sipahis and sahibs, as homogeneous politicized cultural

consciousness. The political psychosis of panic constitutes the boundary

15 Bhabha, 210.16 Bhabha, 202.


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of cultural hybridity across which the Mutiny is fought. The native order

of Indian symbols, their indigenous ethnic reference inside area, are

displaced and turned inside-out; they become the circulating signs of an

English panic, disavowed by the official discourse of imperial history,

represented in the language of indeterminacy.17

In Bhabhas reformulation, the sepoys march to Delhi was not a clear-cut attempt to

support Bahadur Shah as an alternative to British rule, but was another hybrid,

undecidable act whose purpose was to spread uncertainty and panic and create a

psychological opening for popular action. The mutineers contrived to bring out BahadurShah in a royal procession, hoping that the spectacle produces a magic through

which they can use the rumour of extensive uprisings and distracted British troops to

force the King to assume authority.18

What Bhabha would like historians to do is to uncover these moments of

uncertainty in history. Rather than resolving the actors and events involved as British or

Indian, nationalist or colonialist, Bhabha would prefer a historiography that refused the

urge for constant resolution. Rather, he would like us to see that, in the example of the

sepoys of the British East India Company in 1857, the collaboration or loyalty of the

sepoys should not suddenly and paradoxically be transformed into resistance and

rebellion. Rather, the mutiny operated at the interstices of these categories, and the

mutineers exploited the ambiguity of their rebellion both to draw in as many supporters

with discrete aims as possible and to spread the panic that emerged from the very

undecidability of their actions.

17 Bhabha, 207.18 Bhabha, 209-10.


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Rather than resolving moments of undecidability through a definitive

interpretation of an event, Bhabha would have historians avoid producing interpretive

closure. Instead, historians could focus on opening up closed interpretations of difficult

events in world history such as the sepoy mutiny in order to reveal their ambivalent,

undecidable, hybrid character. The usefulness of Bhabhas method for world history is

that it does have the potential of destabilizing the self-other dichotomy that plagues both

world and autonomous histories. Bhabha would suggest that one of the most important

aspects of the sepoy mutiny was that the sepoys were not reflective of a wholesome

Indian national culture at all, but represented an undecidable cultural hybrid. Bhabhasformulation is useful for creating a world history with some level of indigenous agency,

since his view of the Sepoy mutiny has British officials reacting in panic to an indigenous

ambiguity, rather than the mutineers responding to British colonization with a failed and

ultimately victimizing crushed rebellion. Bhabha also cites the example of the Christian

missionary who inartfully explains the communion to a group of Hindu vegetarians, thus

exposing Christians as a group of carnivorous vampires who regularly drink the blood

and eat the flesh of their god.19

Bhabhas method is not without its drawbacks. As Robert Young has pointed

out, the concept of hybridity has its own problematic nineteenth-century origins. As a

concept it was first used to describe miscegenation and an undesirable mixing of the

races.20 In a sense, despite his critique of cultural essences, Bhabhas theory implies a

cultural whole, since a hybrid must necessary be a blend of two pure elements. These

reservations aside, Bhabhas understanding of historical events certainly has the

19 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York, Routledge, 1995),153.20 Ibid., 8-9.


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possibility of decentering both the chronology of world history and the self-other

distinctions of autonomous history.

To give one example of how hybridity could be applied in a world-historical

context, we might consider the ways in which French-educated Vietnamese elites

disturbed French notions of colonial power, by becoming very wealthy or by involving

themselves in colonial development schemes through purchasing land that was assumed

to be going to French companies for development, or by using the guarantees of liberty

found in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen against French authorities.

These moves serve to unsettle colonial authorities in precisely the way that Bhabhadescribes, and they provide a useful alternative for finding comparisons between

colonized countries in world history.

2. TransculturationTransculturation provides another potential model for a resolution of the tensions

between world and autonomous histories. In an anthropological context, transculturation

can refer to the process of ethnoconvergence, whereby different cultures adopt selectively

certain elements of each other. As the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz explained in

the 1940s, over a relatively short period of time, different cultures in contact with one

another selectively embrace certain elements of the other, changing both cultures in the

meantime. Ortizs descriptions explained why a new Cuban culture was forged

relatively quickly from the combination of African slaves and Hispanic owners in

colonial Cuba.

Building on these insights, Mary Louise Pratt has suggested that transculturation

may be a way of recovering indigenous agency. Pratt suggests that transculturation may


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allow subjugated peoples can determine to varying extents what they absorb into their

culture, and what they use it for. This transcultural process can perhaps even help

colonized people affect the terms of their colonization by influencing their colonizers;

Pratt suggests that we may be able to speak of transculturation from the colonies to the

metropolis.21

Applying the idea of transculturation to world history, we can see that rather than

narrating a history of imperialism that constructs Europeans as pure exploiters and

colonized people as passive victims, both interact in complex ways through cultural

interaction in what Pratt calls a contact zone. She describes the contact zone in thefollowing way.

One coinage that recurs throughout the book is the term contact zone, which I use torefer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically andhistory separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations,usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractableconflict..."contact zone is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence ofsubjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whosetrajectories now intersect. By using the term contact I aim to foreground theinteractive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored orsuppressed by diffusionist account of conquest and domination. A contact perspective

emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other.22

In other words, beyond the question of the oppression of colonial policy lies a

complex set of networks in which both the colonizers and the colonized must interact.

Practicality dictates that these everyday economic and social relations must not be

entirely one-sided, and must involve some reasonable level of cultural understanding.

For example, in his description of eighteenth-century interactions between French

missionaries and trappers and Algonquians, Richard White has described how the two

groups sought out a Middle Ground:

21 Mary Louise Pratt,Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (New York: Routledge, 1992),p. 6-722 Ibid.


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Because the French and Algonquians were trading partners and allies, the boundaries ofthe Algonquian and French worlds melted at the edges and merged. Althoughidentifiable Frenchmen and identifiable Indians obviously continued to exist, whether aparticular practice or way of doing things was French or Indian was, after a time, not soclear. This was not because individual Indians became Frenchified or becauseindividual Frenchman went native, although both might occur. Rather, it was becauseAlgonquians who were perfectly comfortable with their status and practices as Indiansand Frenchman, confident in the rightness of French ways, nonetheless had to deal withpeople who shared neither their values nor their assumptions about the appropriate wayof accomplishing tasks. They had to arrive at some common conception of suitable waysof acting; they had to create what I have already referred to as a middle ground.23

Transculturation differs from hybridity primary in its description of the colonial

process. To Homi Bhabha, when colonized people embrace ambiguous cultural forms

derived from the colonizers, as when they wear European clothing or distribute chapattis,

part of the desired effect of that action is to unsettle colonial authorities and confuse the

purposes of the civilizing mission. The transformative potential of transculturation

works differently. Whereas hybridity assumes that natives break up a hierarchical space

originally dominated by colonizers, theories of transculturation assume that spaces exist

outside of a firm power structure. To examine a contact zone in history does not

necessarily deny the brutal power of colonial structures, but it does give agency to theinteractions within the colonial space.

In integrating Southeast Asian narratives into world-historical narratives,

historians could profitably use transculturation theory to discuss a number of unique

episodes such as the Burmese attempts to conquer Martaban in the 1540s, in which

Portuguese mercenaries fighting for King Tabinshweti fought Portuguese soldiers

defending the port city, or, as I have done, to describe the multiethnic milieu of

mercenaries fighting on behalf of King Gia Long in Gia Dinh in the 1790s. Thus, to

return to the Vietnamese example, a transcultural history of French imperialism in

23 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 50.


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Vietnam would start with a discussion of the Vietnamese middle ground 1790s through

the 1830s, a period during which European merchants, missionaries, and mercenaries

interacted in important ways and on a more or less equal basis with Vietnamese elites and

officials, to the point that several Europeans accepted official positions in the Nguyn

bureaucracy, intermarried with local Vietnamese families, and took Vietnamese names.24

3. CofigurationOne potential problem with both hybridity and transculturation as theories of

cultural contact is that they both tend to assume that there exists a time prior to culturalcontact in which there were two prior cultures. In the case of hybridity, Bhabhas

transformational vision of the potential of cultural difference to unsettle colonial

narratives is based on an older, biological notion of hybridity in which two supposedly

pure entities are artificially merged into one, a notion inextricably connected to late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth century eugenic racism and social Darwinism. As Robert

Young points out in his critique of Bhabha, this potential contradiction in the cultural

theory of hybridity, in which its supposedly destabilizing influence rests on the

presumption of two prior stable cultures, means that we may rather be repeating the past

rather than distancing ourselves from it orproviding a critique of it.25 While

transculturation as a term is not fraught with the same troubled past as the word

hybridity, it too indicates that two cultures can merge and blend, which presumes

something that we know to be false: that we can locate in the misty past some reference

24See Wynn Wilcox, Transnationalism and Multiethnicity in the early Nguyn nh-Gia Long Period, inNhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds.), Vietnam: Borderless Histories (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 194-216.25 Young, Colonial Desire, 25.


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point of origins in which there were two pure, hermetically sealed cultures that had not

interacted and transculturated.

One way of seeing this problem differently is to understand cultural difference as

being a product of a search for particularity that results in a comparison and contrast; that

is, to see cultural comparisons not as describing difference but producing it, much in the

way thatMahayana texts speak about the creation of things through interdependent

origination. In this sense, traditional cultures are defined as traditional through a

search for equivalency with the West.26 Thus, taking for example the case of Cambodian

nationalism, for every purportedly beneficial element of Western modernity there must bean equally beneficial element indigenous to Cambodia; if there is none, such a tradition

must be invented. Through this move, Cambodians invent a traditional Cambodia after

the fact, as ideas that are not recognizably uniquely Cambodian, such as Hindu

iconography, Theravada Buddhism, and the melodramatic romance become an

autochthonous part of Cambodian culture. In Naoki Sakais analysis, this creation of

particularity was a fundamental part of the production of Asian modernities:

The attempt to posit the identity of ones own ethnicity or nationality interms of the gap between it and the putative West, that is, to create thehistory of ones own nation through the dynamics of attraction to andrepulsion from the West, has, almost without exception, been adopted as ahistorical mission by non-Western intellectuals. Eurocentrism,characteristic of modernity, is most powerfully manifest in narratives bynon-Western intellectuals, and it is in this respect that the history ofJapanese thought carries with it the seal of modernity.27

From Sakais analysis, it is possible to see that, as an alternative to examining

26 On the idea of searches for equivalency, see Joseph Richmond Levenson,Liang Chi Chao and theMind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).27 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50.


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colonialism as a clash between East and West, world historians might profitably explore

the ways in which these identities are in fact produced through a process of intellectual

exchange, particularly through the exchange of different nationalist ideas.

To return to our practical application of these concepts to how world historians

might treat the French conquest of Vietnam, cofiguration suggests the ways in which

colonization created new ideologies of national history. Vietnamese nationalism

changed fundamentally due to colonial influences, and as the nineteenth century waned

resistance to the French shifted from resorationist rebellions to a new anti-French

sentiment based on loyalty to particular European ideologies. Thus, Marxist Vietnamesehistorians found in their past the Stalinist stages of history, just as Anarchist Vietnamese

found in their past their own versions of the Paris Commune. Even conservative

Vietnamese, rather than relying upon models from the Vietnamese past, found instead

analogies in Vietnamese history to figures they associated with French conservatism.

This trend led the satirist V Trng Phng to give us the character of Joseph Thit, who

was such a staunch royalist that he wanted to restore not the power of the Nguyn regime

but of the House of Orlans in France.28

4. LocalizationAlmost three decades ago, in his reflections on the Indianization of Southeast

Asia inHistory, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, O.W. Wolters

proposed that a better term for the processes called Indianization by colonial historians

was localization. In 850AD, when Jayavarman II ascended Phnom Kulen not far from

where we are here in Siem Reap, declared it Mount Mahendra, and used four Hindu

28V Trng Phng,Dumb Luck. Trans. Peter Zinoman and Nguyn Nguyt Cm. (Ann Arbor: Universityof Michigan Press, 2002), p. 81.


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tantric texts to create a microcosm of the heavens on earth, what he was doing was not

Indianizationper se, even if Sivakaivalya, Jayavarman IIs personal priest, was a

Brahmin and perhaps was even from the Indian subcontinent.29 The idea ofdevaraja

itself, that the Kings of Cambodia had special relationships or access to particular gods, is

not unknown to India but reflects much more particularly an idea found throughout

Southeast Asia that rulers have a justification for their rule by virtue of being what

Wolters calls men of prowess: those with extraordinary, almost magical abilities,

qualities that Southeast Asian polities looked for in a ruler long before any question of

Siva-like metaphors arose.

30

To Wolters, in the process of localization, Indianmaterials tended to be fractured and restated and therefore drained of their original

significance and what matters is how these materials are recreated in a local context.31

As a theory of cultural contact that can be applied to world history, localization

has the same advantage as cofiguration. Unlike hybridity or transculturation, it does not

assume that there are two coherent, hermetically sealed cultures that exist prior to a

defined point of interaction. In fact, Wolters himself perceived that unlike ideas such as

syncretism and synthesis, localization rejected the assumption that cultural clash or

adaptation was derived from a reconciliation of originally contradictory difference.32

Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, localization is as useful a concept for

analyzing colonization, nationalism, or modernity as it is a means to rethink ancient

29For a narration of these events, see Louis Finot, Notes depigraphie,Bulletin de lecole FranaisedExtrme-Orient15 (1915): 52-56.30 Wolters,History, Culture, and Region, p. 113. For a discussion of the Trn kings use of prowess inVietnam, see O.W. Wolters, On Telling a Story about Vietnam in the Thirteenth and FourteenthCenturies,Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26:1 (March 1995): 67.31 Wolters,History, Culture, and Region, p. 55.32 Ibid., p. 56.


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cultural flows from India to Southeast Asia.33 To return to our example of French

colonization in Vietnam, a localization approach might consider the ways in which

originally French objects were drained of their original meaning and now serve to

represent Vietnamese tradition. For example,ph, the Vietnamese noodle soup long

informally recognized as the Vietnamese national dish, may have derived its origin from

a desire of a Vietnamese cook to recreate the Frenchpot-au-feu under Vietnamese

conditions. Similarly, the a di, the womens tunic now cited as a distinctive national

dress, had its origins in efforts in the French colonial period to produce a modern dress

that reflected French sensibilities but would also be worn by Vietnamese women.

34

Aworld history that focused its discussion on colonialism on the question of how the

cultural forms of the colonized were integrated locally would not only be instructive in

understanding both societies but also would allow for a discussion of colonialism that

maintained some of the uniqueness of autonomous historiography.

Conclusion

The efforts of historians throughout the postcolonial world in the mid-twentieth

century to produce autonomous and independent histories bore important fruit that world

historians would do well not to ignore. An important goal of this work in the

development of an Area Studies approach was to avoid producing a nationalist

historiography that was a mere mirror image of the colonial interpretation of the past, one

that covered the same ground as the colonial historians but merely argued that everything

33See Wynn Wilcox, Introduction, in Wynn Wilcox (ed.), Vietnam and the West: New Approaches(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program 2010), 2-3.34Ann Marie Leshkowich, The Ao Dai Goes Global: How International Influences and FemaleEntrepreneurs Have Shaped Vietnams National Costume, in Re-Orienting Fashion, ed. SandraNiessen et al. (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 79116.


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the colonial historians thought was progress was merely an imposition by a foreign

power. Instead, autonomous historians sought to create national and regional histories

based on new, indigenous chronologies, ones that found the locus for change neither in

accepting European trade or colonization but in local efforts to integrate into the cultures

and economies of the larger world. The area studies tradition of autonomy is far from

perfect; its tendency to draw a binary opposition between the autonomous culture of a

particular region and the external cultures of everywhere else has a tendency to

marginalize ethnic minorities and those with mixed-race backgrounds. Yet its legacy is

that it has produced a chronology for the colonized world that is not based primarily onthe vicissitudes of European contact.

World historians, too, have made important contributions to the development of

historiography in the postcolonial world. If it were not for the growth of readable texts

in the field of world history, then at least in the United States history instruction in

secondary schools and universities would most likely be considerably more skewed

toward European and American topics. An increase in the teaching of world history has

also encouraged the early development of comparative history, and this has the clear

advantage of improving the analytical skills of students of history. However, because the

main purpose of the development and expansion of the field of world history has been to

integrate the stories of the world into a single comprehensible narrative, world historians

unintentionally undermine the efforts of autonomous historians to provide a unique and

independent chronology for the history of decolonized nations and regions. World

historians, in other words, cannot fulfill their desire to compare different histories, or to

integrate multiple histories in a single narrative, while still preserving perfectly the


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uniqueness of national and regional narratives desired by autonomous historians as a

correction to the influence of colonial historiography. Equally, though, area studies

specialists will find the audience for their works to be shrinking without the relevant

frameworks provided by world history.

This paper has argued that it is possible to practice world history while preserving

the important goals of historical distinctiveness offered by autonomous historiography.

The four approaches suggested here are all ways of maintaining the chronological

benchmarks of a world-historical narrative that discusses world trade and European

colonization while still narrating these experiences in a way that gives those beingcolonized some semblance of agency in the processes of colonization and of

modernization. Integrating one or all of these perspectives into studies of World History

would help preserve elements of particularity and uniqueness while still maintaining a

larger comparative perspective.

Autonomous Histories and World History Siem Reap Conference Paper[1]

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