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Abstract
In large part, the advent of postcolonial consciousness has emphasised the all-important returning to shut-in colonial history through a reckoning with the spectres of the nation’s colonial heritage. Postcolonial theory has relied, to a great extent, upon the idea of haunting in order to bring awareness of colonial history to the fragmented present cultural identities. The haunting of the colonial frequently turns on what is undoubtedly a well-intended desire to relate to the Other, the silenced, and the hidden, but it also reveals a more problematic inability to situate resistance, and mobilise memory for such purposes, in relation to ever-increasing transnational conditions that often deny or obfuscate forms of situated or positioned resistance.1
Haunting is pervasive in postcolonial thought precisely because of its affective dimension, a dimension that creates a sense of the imminently important, present, and disruptive. This disruptive quality of postcolonial haunting is frequently portrayed as the Freudian unheimlich of history and is figured as an interruptive or affective moment in the course of Western consciousness where the repressed colonial scene returns. The reference to an affective and situated colonial encounter found in the deployment of haunting suggests a desire to focus a theory of resistance through reference to concrete encounters of the colonial type. Yet, the use of haunting in postcolonial theory as a placeless yet always-quotable mode of resistance also suggests a lurking anxiety concerning the ways that situated conflicts and encounters are not always aligned with the often intangible nature of new transnational realities and postcolonial forms of oppression. Viewed this way, we might say that the deployment of haunting in postcolonial theory represents a suspended condition, in-between because it is symptomatic of an era poised between the traces of an increasingly inoperative colonial history and uncertain transnational forms of hierarchy and oppression. As new forms of neo- imperialism and transnational capital become commonplace, active imperialism characterized by visible and situated forms of conflict related to nation-states has receded to a great extent. However, while we might say that colonial history becomes inoperative in this way, it is not necessarily easy to locate tangible forms of neo-imperialism, particularly given their transnational nature.