ABSTRACT
That mode of thinking which would set up ‘centre’ against ‘periphery’ in a bipolar structural opposition is unremittingly modernist. It is also just such an opposition which enables the power relations in imperialism and colonialism. When the north western tip of Europe designated itself as the centre of ‘Enlightenment’ in the eighteenth century, it did so in the secure knowledge that an ‘unenlightened periphery’ was thereby constructed; and the imperialist expansion that went hand in hand with the development of Enlightenment philosophy was not just a mercantile affair, for it also had a series of conceptual components. To be ‘enlightened’, by definition, is implicitly to construct an idea of oneself as a Subjectin-time; one has a present, characterised by light, which is distinguished from something dark which is necessarily prior to the moment of enlightenment. A specific model of historical narrative is thereby put in place. It is this narrative which is exported partly ‘in return for’ the mercantile exploitation of a world which is now deemed to be in need o f colonisation. This situation also produces a ‘world history’, a single narrative which leads inexorably to a delineation of the condition of the imperialist powers as the most advanced (somewhat akin to Rorty’s pragmatism, discussed above). The politics of imperialism and colonialism is thus a politics which is founded not just upon geography but also upon a series of temporal factors, and most significantly upon a question of ‘speed’: the coloniser posits herself or himself as ‘advanced’ - in advance of a colonised, who is thereby stigmatised as ‘tardy’ or ‘underdeveloped’. The coloniser thus comes ‘first’, while the tardy colonised comes in as a poor second or, more usually these days, a ‘Third’ world.
