Reading :: Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume Two: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier

Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier
By John L. and Jean Comaroff

I just reviewed Volume One, in which (I just noticed) the order of the authors was reversed. Volume One explored the early encounter between British missionaries and the Southern Tswana in South Africa; this volume explores the later colonial world, as "these processes worked themselves out over the much longer run" (p.7). 

In this volume, they make seven claims about colonialism:

1. Colonialism was a process in political economy and culture. (p.19)
2. Colonialism effected changes via informal rather than formal agents of empire. (p.21)
3. Colonialism remade the colonizers as much as the colonized. (p.22)
4. The categories of "colonizers" and "colonized" are not just polar; each category should be internally differentiated. (p.24)
5. Still, colonizers and colonized are represented as poles, a feature that is intrinsic to colonialism. (p.25)
6. Non-Western societies were complex and fluid, and their workings had a direct effect on colonial encounter; the old view of these societies as "closed," "traditional," or "unchanging" is inaccurate. (p.27)
7. "Colonialism was founded on a series of discontinuities and contradictions." (p.27)

These come together in the authors' central argument: that "colonial encounters everywhere consisted in a complex dialectic: a dialectic, mediated by social differences and cultural distinctions, that transformed everyone and everything caught up in it, if not in the same way" (p.28).

Much of the rest of the Introduction involves the authors taking their critics to task—the critics who argued with their Volume One. As an outsider to the discussion, I was entertained. The rest of the book is densely argued, drawing from archives to explore the forms of agency and resistance in this dialectical encounter.

Like Volume One, Volume Two is tough sledding for nonspecialists. But if you have an interest in colonialism and post-colonialism, agency, or just culture, definitely take a look.