Modernidad, temporalidad histórica y nacionalismo en los estudios postcoloniales

Abstract

Postcolonial studies have helped, in the field of historiography, to conceptually define modernity in a global sense, critically synthesizing the foregoing considerations concerning the historical narrative and the concept of subordination. In this sense, the postcolonial perspective attempted to recover the narrative of progress by changing its spatial and temporal structure, researching the history as a segmented reality alien to a linear and progressive conception of time (the impossibility and irrationality of the historical progress). Above all, it is mainly an observation of the possibilities and modalities of subaltern speech, its representation in a «hybrid» language (external to that of the western academic world) and its definition as an example of an alternative modernity. This essay considers not only the «national paradigm» as a verification of the postcolonial approach, for its central role in «Western» history (the European Weltgeschichte), but it also shows its plural and flexible nature, able to integrate oral and written narratives and the different symbolical representations of the concept of identity. Postcolonialism will be evaluated as an innovative possibility, both in terms of the traditional debate associated to nationalism, between «modernist» and «primordialist», as in the cognitive sense concerning the identity feeling as a timeless and cyclical phenomenon of human relationships.