The three responses to “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” raise
significant questions for studying such discourse but with significant
similarities and differences. Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo embark on
commentaries that endeavor in part to define a new position of engagement
for intellectuals, while Rolena Adorno retains traditional academic
distance. Yet all three responses provide colonial and postcolonial
discourse with a historic trajectory. Showing that a trend has roots in the
past, even if accounts of those roots differ, is a grudging way of
acknowledging its legitimacy in the present. Although such a process is an
interesting phenomenon of academic life, in this instance it leaves me, a
historian by training, in the unusual position of arguing for the tangible
difference between the contemporary world and our understandings of it.
Perhaps that in itself is symptomatic of how the current trend toward
interdisciplinary inquiry differs from those of the past. Our traditional
disciplinary practices are much more at risk in the present.