<Jan.Blommaert@rug.ac.be>


[editor's note: this debate is related to the Interview
with Jan Vansina and replies: see
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~africa/ ]


'Postcolonialism and postmodernity: a reply to Vellut'
Jan Blommaert

         I read with considerable interest and
appreciation Jean-Luc Vellut's reply to the interview
with Jan Vansina on postcolonial Belgian
historiography. I can only applaud and encourage the
attempt to engage in a debate which, belatedly, now
seems to erupt in this country on its colonial past and
legacy, here as well as in Africa. I think I can say in
all modesty that we have contributed to the genesis of
that debate by organizing, in 1999 and in collaboration
with the RMCA, the conference 'Belgium's Africa'.
Mature debate and sober reflection are necessary in
this field, and Vansina has made a valuable
contribution to this in his interview.

         Vellut's reply ends with 'You want
postmodernism? You got it'. He thus suggests that he
does not want postmodernism, and he does this,
apparently, on the basis of an essay called _Ex Shit
Congo_, of which I happen to be the author. The remark
is a bit off-track, for it frames the history of
historiography in terms of epochal and paradigmatic
differences between 'postmodernism' and something else
(enlightenment? Modernism?), immediately implying a
warning against the various ways in which such
paradigmatic choices could obliterate methodological,
philosophical and theoretical differences. Bad work is
all right, if it is done in a postmodernist paradigm,
could be a rough summary of the point made.

         As the author of the _Ex Shit Congo_ essay, I
can assure Vellut that there is little reason to be
upset, at least if one takes the effort of closely
scrutinizing the arguments produced in real (not
virtual or imputed) texts. What I attempted in the
essay comes down to a description of the inchoative
state of the debate on colonial and postcolonial
imaginings of Africa in Belgium, and I did this by
focusing on a series of recent events that _represent_
- not _are_ - this struggle to come to terms with the
past, culturally as well as politically and
scientifically. I stressed the issue of voice in my
discussion of these events, and the ways in which
voices were contextualized in discussions on the
events, as well as could lead to different forms of
'readability' of these events.

         Now, all of this can be called postmodernist.
That is, if one commits the persisting error to subsume
analytical approaches that focus on discourse and
representation as 'postmodern'. By the same token,
approaches that do not address issues of discourse and
representation would then be free from the flaws that
seem to be inherent in 'postmodernism'. It is, one
shall grant me that, a bit of a caricature of method
and methodology, and it would not be wise to reduce the
debate to these terms of reference. More important, it
seems to me, are the ways in which differences in
methodology and approach raise issues of relevance and
value. The latter can only be approached in terms of
the situatedness of research and regimes of knowledge
in which it fits, and the crucial questions are thus:
why do we ask such questions now? And why do we need to
approach them in this particular way now? What would be
the compelling reasons, for instance, for including
discourse and representation in an analytical toolkit
for looking at our past? And why are some paradigms and
approaches no longer sustainable now?

         None of these questions is easy to answer in a
straightforward way, and it would be a mistake to
answer them by offhand remarks about the _intrinsic_
value of particular methods or approaches. The toolkit
is assembled in light of a wide array of
preoccupations, most of them scientific - the
conviction we have that some methods yield better
answers to our problems - but some of them political,
ethical, and cultural. Neutral science often only
exists in the head of the scientist. In society at
large, however, scientific interventions are often
inserted in debates that have nothing to do with
scientific rigor but everything to do with political
preferences and cultural changes. When a specific field
of investigation - e.g. the decolonization of the Congo
- is a politically and culturally sensitive one, then
science quickly becomes 'opinion' or 'point of view'.
Dismissing this is of little use for us, researchers,
for it deeply impacts on the uptake of our work. It is
a matter of realism to assume that what we say on
Africa has an audience far surpassing the gentle
milieux of academies and lecture halls.

         Again, one can call this postmodernism and
attach all kinds of associative (negative) attributions
to that term. But I fear that doing that neglects an
important aspect of relevance and value for our work:
the relevance and value attributed to it by particular
social actors, communities and audiences. Over this we
have little control, but at least we should have
learned that scientificity is no argument at all when
it comes to demonstrating relevance and value to these
groups.

         Saying this implies that I have to cope with
all kinds of unintended effects caused by reading a
text such as _Ex Shit Congo_. I do, and I have no
problems with that. At the same time, when it comes to
audiences, I did not have Vellut in mind, and I did not
write this text as part of a grand project to introduce
'postmodernism' as a paradigm of leadership in Belgian
African studies. By now it should be clear that I
reject that label, and the use of it, I believe,
illustrates precisely the point I was trying to make in
the text. My text has been resituated, not in a
dialogue on relevance and value, but in one on
paradigmatic leadership and authority. We all seem to
be different audiences at the same time.

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