Sovereignties in Question: The Instance of Metissage In the Colonial (Un)Consciousness

Stoler's emphasis on the term “internal frontier” (516) shows its curious logic: a frontier, if it is to make coherent sense, exists in the liminal space between incommensurable entities. Even as it tries to demarcate purity and homogeneity, it can never function without its outside. Stoler’s focus on the issue of metissage becomes interesting because it interrogates the logic of colonial identity as needing to anxiously manufacture and redefine its sense of exclusivity. The powerful liminal presence of members of a community who disrupt the boundaries between colonizer and colonized suggest how this separation comes to be produced and maintained by a colonial apparatus militating against ideological collapse.

The threat of this collapse bespeaks a fear of European devolution, assuaged through modernity’s focus on the increasing rationalization of societal and governmental processes that order people into discrete categories of control. Systems of subordination that shore up cultural identities and mores are thereby naturalized, justified, and rendered as epistemologically transparent. Max Weber's gloomy pronouncements on this kind of instrumental rationality that traps people in its iron cage, and Adorno and Horkheimer's indictments on the value of “reason” in this system that ultimately led to the Holocaust can be seen as powerful attempts to challenge this rationale.

Perhaps it is bourgeois society's use of language, and its role as enabling the objectivity and standardization of the administrator and scientist that needs to be questioned. Literature must then inhabit a zone of textual metissage to effect this critique: literary language, as a self-reflexive phenomenon that both points to an author's and readers’ positionality on events, and enables the critique and subversion of that stance in favour of a certain interpretive uncertainty that cannot and must not become absolute, provides such an alternative. This is perhaps the moral impetus of reading and writing.