Sessions 4 and 5: Questions for discussion

Session 4 and 5: Questions for discussion (CU):

What is the postcolonial/ postcolony? Can it be a distinctive category that encompasses the experiences of all postcolonial countries? What is the connection between modernity/ modern state and the postcolony? Is the postcolonial state a variant of modern state, and the modal modern state the western state? How do these various scholars of postcolonialism – Kaviraj, Chatterjee, Mbembe – theorise the state? The question of colonial state and nationalism come back in all these readings: What are the connections between colonial and postcolonial states – is it a straightforward linear trajectory of supersession and fetishisation of western bureaucratic institutions and law, or a contested history of recovering other pasts? How did precolonial institutions or ideologies of rule get incorporated into colonial and postcolonial states? How did anti-colonial nationalist movements reconstitute the modern state? 

Theorising and studying the postcolonial state:

What is the role of imagination and ideology in the formation and reproduction of postcolonial states and modes of power? What are the symbolic, ritual, and bureaucratic practices that create the idea and power of the state in the postcolony? In their focus on the work of imagination, spectacle, and symbolic languages and practices of 'stateness', through which the state and its authority are brought into being, how has the work of anthropologists been informed by, and gone beyond, Althusser's theory of ideological state apparatus and Gramsci's concept of hegemony? According to Hansen and Stepputat, what are the main questions about the constitution of the state that we should address, and what are sites and methods through which we can study the state ethnographically?