ABSTRACT
Postcolonial governments are inclined, with some predictability, to gener ate narratives of national crisis, driven perhaps-the generous explanationto reenact periodically the state’s traumatic if also liberating separation from colonial authority, a moment catachrestically founding the nation itself qua nation. Typically, however, such narratives of crisis serve more than one category of reassurance: by repeatedly focusing anxiety on the fragility of the new nation, its ostensible vulnerability to every kind of exigency, the state’s originating agency is periodically reinvoked and ratified, its access to wideranging instruments of power in the service of national protection continually consolidated. It is a post-Foucauldian truism that they who successfully define and superintend a crisis, furnishing its lexicon and discursive parameters, suc cessfully confirm themselves the owners of power, the administration of crisis operating to revitalize ownership of the instruments of power even as it vindi cates the necessity of their use.
