One should not dismiss the talk of the "unconscious tool of history" as the expression of a naive teleology, of trust in the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress--the point is simply that the British colonialization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonialization itself. At a reception for Margaret Thatcher in 1985, the Chinese president applied to China Marx's statement about the role of British colonialization in India: "The British occupation has awakened China from its age-old sleep." (Quoted from Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la penitence, p. 153)
Far from signalling continuous self-abasement in front of the ex-colonial powers, statements like these express true "post-postcolonial," namely, a mature independence: to admit the positive effect of colonization, one has to be really free and be able to leave behind its stigma. (And symmetrically, rejecting self-blame, while fully and--why not--proudly claiming one's emancipatory heritage, is a sine qua non for the renewal of the Left.)
Someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers is Frantz Fanon: his thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theorists. However, as a perspicuous thinker trained in psychoanalysis, he also, back in 1952, provided the most poignant expression of the refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers:
"I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past.... My black skin is not a repository for specific values....Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? ... I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden.... I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world.... Am I going to ask today's white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? ... I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.... it would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.... I find myself in a world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other."
(Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press 2008, pp. 201-6)
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