ABSTRACT
In the excitement over what appears to be a ‘new’ focus on colonial issues, students of post-colonialism tend to ignore (or forget) the long history of specifically Marxist anti-imperialist thought. Some hostile critics have been quick to attribute the links between post-colonialism and post-structuralism to temporal contingency and, therefore, to academic fashion alone. In understanding post-colonialism’s vexed relationship with humanism, it is important to recognise that post-colonial studies inherits two chronologically distinct, if ideologically overlapping, approaches to the history and consequences of humanism. Post-colonial theory recognises that colonial discourse typically rationalises itself through rigid oppositions such as maturity/immaturity, civilisation/barbarism, developed/developing, progressive/primitive. The journey between Kantian adulthood and postmodern childhood, that is, between the Enlightenment and its critics, has its basis in an earlier history which officially begins in late November 1619. It is not enough, however, to leave Cartesian man in this state of benign misunderstanding and forgetfulness.
