:Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment

TLDR

The book questions whether historical inquiries and narratives remain relevant, building on Scott’s earlier critique of postcolonial theory and noting the bleak post‑colonial present after the collapse of anticolonial hopes. The author argues that scrutiny should focus on the questions themselves rather than their answers. He distinguishes between postcolonial questions that shaped former presents and those that inform today’s present. Scott concludes that the questions are no longer relevant, diagnosing a paralysis of will, corruption, and authoritarianism that have turned the utopian project into a nightmare.

Abstract

Are the questions we have been asking the past to answer still questions worth having answers to? Are the stories we have been telling about the past's relation to the present still relevant? David Scott does not think so. In this book he strongly argues that it is not the answers but the questions that demand scrutiny: he stresses the need to identify the difference between the postcolonial questions that informed former presents and those that inform our own present. This study is a follow-up to his previous book, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999), in which Scott discussed the limits of postcolonial criticism. Scott's picture of the postcolonial present, after the collapse of the socioeconomic and political hopes that animated anticolonial and independence movements, is bleak. He identifies an “acute paralysis of will and sheer vacancy of imagination, the rampant corruption and vicious authoritarianism, the instrumental self-interest and showy self-congratulation” as symptoms of a utopian project that has run out of steam and turned into a “nightmare” (p. 2).