UC Irvine

The three responses to “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” raise significant questions for studying such discourse but with significant similarities and differences. Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo embark on commentaries that endeavor in part to define a new position of engagement for intellectuals, while Rolena Adorno retains traditional academic distance. Yet all three responses provide colonial and postcolonial discourse with a historic trajectory. Showing that a trend has roots in the past, even if accounts of those roots differ, is a grudging way of acknowledging its legitimacy in the present. Although such a process is an interesting phenomenon of academic life, in this instance it leaves me, a historian by training, in the unusual position of arguing for the tangible difference between the contemporary world and our understandings of it. Perhaps that in itself is symptomatic of how the current trend toward interdisciplinary inquiry differs from those of the past. Our traditional disciplinary practices are much more at risk in the present.