Abstract

Our experience of the world swings between two extremes, unification-globalization and forms of turbulence. Postcolonial studies stand at the juncture between the two, hence their interest. They question, not so much modernity as the European model of modernity, abstract in substance, linear in time and space . The best postcolonial studies are keenly aware of the breaks in modernity, and in this regard the example of Haiti is illuminating : the first victorious slave revolt, at the very moment when factory production became the rule. If so little attention has been paid to it, there has clearly been a cover-up. But that was at least partially inevitable. Recording and narration have their gaps ; History and the multiplicity of stories cannot be so easily reconciled. Precisely this is at stake in postcolonial historiography