Turning Postcolonial Historians into White Men?

Abstract

I want to use this author-meets-critic forum to think about what happens to postcolonial ethical commitments when they are worked through the genre of the adventure tale—those stories of brave white men on far-flung travels in search of mysteries. Warwick Anderson’s The Collectors of Lost Souls risks this move, offering us a pageturning, globe-trotting romp sprinkled with explicit references to Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s novels have long generated debate among postcolonial critics: does his work merely maintain racist colonial ideology? Or is it more liminal, tentatively bearing witness to the violence of colonialism and yet nonetheless symptomatic of the frame of empire? Literary critics have struggled to name Conrad’s style, his romanticism tinged with irony and self-deprecation. Anderson’s book—a work of thick, multisited research, energized with clever and sharp prose—is crafted through some of the same ethical ambiguities that mark Conrad’s work. Critical of past scientific styles of appropriation and noncommodified forms of exchange, it is, at the same time, a work infused with nostalgia for the intimacies of past fieldwork and animated by attention to the ghoulish details of science. Anderson’s book has been lauded by many reviewers and has won numerous awards, and its virtues—gripping narrative and dense empiricism—are amply and justlypraised.Iwouldlikeinsteadtousethebooktohelpframeamuch-neededdebate about the stakes of postcolonial science and technology studies. To be frank, STS has beenafieldslowtoengagepostcolonialstudies,sometimesstubbornlyso.Anderson’s work has helped to define the postcolonial turn in STS over the previous decade, and his latest book, written in a dramatically different genre than his previous contributions, offers one more prompt to engage hard questions about the stakes of postcolonial critique in STS—this time perhaps not quite in the manner he intended. In The Collectors of Lost Souls, Anderson has chosen to write a trade book, a “rippingyarn,” foralargeraudience.Reviews inprominentpublic healthand medical journals signal the success of this strategy; but the decision is not without its price. Without the scaffolding of postcolonial critique, the book knowingly courts romanticism and all its troubles. Colleagues who already understand the political stakes of