Abstract

This essay responds to Robert Young and Dipesh Chakrabary's essays on postcolonialism both recently published by NLH. It suggests that, on the one side, Young overestimates the continuing relevance of the postcolonialism paradigm, while, on the other, Chakrabarty overestimates the degree to which anthropogenic global warming constitutes a break in world history. To make its case it weighs the current applicability of “benefit of empire” and pro-development arguments, arguing that today these have real, if problematic, legitimacy and force at least so long as one accepts the legitimacy of the current global system of democratic state capitalism. Were we to move past the concepts which legitimate that system we would need to turn from human life as a primary and necessary moral value. In that spirit, the essay offers a brief reading of Janet Frame's fine novel, Living in the Maniototo, which describes the inhuman structures of human life, as ordered by colonial cultural ecology of grasslands.

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