POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION IN MARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY

Abstract

In examining the relation between Marxist historiography and the theoretical trajectories of postcolonial studies, the problem posed in Marxist theory under the name of ‘the national question’ remains decisive. This question is always emerging around the tensions generated between the logic of capital, the purified circuit-process of capital's self-unfolding, and the local conditions of its deployment, typically the modern form of the nation-state. I argue that the history of the prewar debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism, which was itself the fundamental locus for the development of Marxist historiography and theory in Japan, can be a suggestive source of clues for the explication of this relation. In examining the theoretical problems that inhere in this historical moment, I attempt to argue that the national question in Marxist theory can be forcefully renewed through a parallax movement with the question of the postcolonial, that is, the irreversibility of the history of colonialism inscribed in the form of the nation-state. In other words, the national question is not only a question of the levels and stages of capitalist development in given, apparently stable areas; it is also the question of how the logic of capital relates to the historico-epistemological production of ‘the national’ itself.