For the past 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. Colonialism has virtually disappeared from international affairs, and there is no easier way to discredit a political idea or opponent than to raise the cry of ‘colonialism.’ …
It is high time to reevaluate this pejorative meaning. The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing that needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies. The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities – the civilizing mission without scare quotes – that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism.Footnote 1
In September 2017, an essay entitled ‘The Case for Colonialism’ written by an American political scientist, Bruce Gilley, appeared in Third World Quarterly. It immediately provoked a controversy that spilled over to mainstream newspapers like wildfire and, unsurprisingly, set off a firestorm of responses. For instance, Portia Roelof and Max Gallien indict it as ‘a travesty, the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes’.Footnote 2 Petitions soon followed, calling for apology and retraction. The controversy escalated when fifteen members of the editorial board resigned over its publication, which they saw as a violation of the journal’s postcolonial legacy, whereas Noam Chomsky, also a member of the editorial board, defended the academic freedom of Gilley. Eventually, it came to an end when Gilley’s provocative article was withdrawn just before Columbus Day, which is increasingly observed to remember European colonization of the Americas rather than as a celebratory national holiday. This incident, on the one hand, demonstrates that blatant praise of colonialism is no longer tolerated in the contemporary public sphere, but, on the other hand, reflects that doubts about postcolonialism are mounting at the same time. It has rekindled debates about the legacy of colonialism and postcolonialism in various forums. The current discourse has come a long way since the publication of Edward W. Said’s foundational text of postcolonialism, Orientalism, more than four decades ago in 1978.Footnote 3 Yet, the recent event returns us to reflect from ground zero. After decolonization, what is the merit of postcolonialism today?
The same question resonates in the scholarship of Roman history. Although Roman scholarship tends to maintain a sceptical stance in relation to modern theories, the wave of postcolonialism broke into the scholarship – particularly into Romanization studies, which mainly argued that Rome expanded its culture and civilization to its provinces for them to adopt and assimilate into. Since Theodor Mommsen introduced the concept of Romaniserung (‘Romanizing’) in Römische Geschichte in 1885 and Francis J. Haverfield subsequently formulated the framework of Romanization in 1905, the model thrived throughout the twentieth century to attract many scholars’ interest and to generate an ongoing discourse.Footnote 4 The following generations of Roman historians and archaeologists continued to update, modify, and/or revise the framework in accordance with the latest archaeological research and/or changing intellectual climate. In recent decades, postcolonialism in particular steered the course of development of Romanization studies. Postcolonial agendas to decolonize historical and cultural knowledge prompted some Roman historians and archaeologists to recognize that the framework of Romanization has been constructed through the double layers of imperialism – not only ancient Roman but also modern Western.Footnote 5 Thereafter, postcolonialism inspired them to re-examine the model of Romanization and nowadays has firmly entered the lexicon of discourse on Romanization. Nevertheless, the scholarship of Roman history, along with many other disciplines, expresses conflicting sentiments towards postcolonialism: innovative yet questionable, experimental yet ungrounded, and forward-thinking yet ahistorical. It begs a series of questions in much the same spirit. These are the questions that I attempt to explore and answer here in this book. To put it more precisely, this book investigates how postcolonialism travelled to the scholarship of Roman history and reoriented the discourse on Romanization. It does not attempt to provide a comprehensive historiographical review of recent studies on Roman imperialism and Romanization, but rather ventures to understand the path and impact of the travelling ideas of postcolonialism between the point of departure and the point(s) of arrival. Ultimately, it aims to explore how revising the historical narrative of Romanization holds the wider significance and potential to shift the understanding of not just the ancient past but also the contemporary world.
The Commitment to History
But when it comes to this beautiful, resilient, overlooked, traumatised community, I’ve got skin in the game. I’ve got 27 years of experience. So no matter what stories come up in the papers about our trigger-happy gang members or state-dependent single mums, I remember everything first hand. In fact we all do. So why is it that we as a community have no control over our narrative? Our main storytellers are rappers, but the rappers of today are facing the same struggles N.W.A did around the time I was born.Footnote 6 How? Housing, schools, crime, unemployment, is that it? We now provide a fuel for a multi-billion dollar storytelling industry, and all we have to show for it is new versions of the same story.
And I’ve got an idea. We should revisit our story, and instead of retelling it, we should rewrite it. I’m not saying we should fabricate history. I’m saying let’s learn to interpret what we are going through in a way that makes us stronger and leaves us with a better idea of how to manage it.Footnote 7
This is how George Mpanga, known as George the Poet, a British spoken-word performer and poet with Ugandan heritage, opens his podcast Have You Heard George’s Podcast?Footnote 8Serenely narrating his evocative words, he articulates his commitment to weaving a new narrative of his community, replacing those narratives dominated by violence and deprivation which render the community incomprehensible to many. In the power of narrative, he finds the best hope to break the chains of current dynamics and to picture a different future.
Homi K. Bhabha, a prominent postcolonial thinker, probably best unravels the ‘right to narrate’ and its potential, as explored by George the Poet. In fact, this phrase is the title of the Preface to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, from which he develops the subsequent chapters. He contends that when we revisit and revise the historical narrative of national and communal identities, this will necessitate rethinking ‘our myths of belonging’ and the place of ourselves and our neighbours around the world.Footnote 9 The historical narrative of a nation which often provides the foundation of a nation as an ‘imagined community’, as Benedict Anderson famously coined, assumes ‘horizontal comradeship’ amongst its members and ‘homogeneous empty time’ of modernity and progress.Footnote 10 Bhabha alerts us that this blanket narrative does not embrace ‘alternative histories of the excluded’ – those located outside the horizontal camaraderie and homogenous progress: for example, the narratives of migrants, refugees, minorities, and colonized. Narratives forgotten, erased, or denied for the sake of general and universal history do not dissipate eventually but evolve into ‘unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt [the present]’ in many forms and stages of social division that we witness from up close and from afar.Footnote 11 To translate and insert these repressed pasts in order to retell history is ‘to [renew] the past … that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present’.Footnote 12 To rewrite history is to enact ‘“past-present” [that] becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living’.Footnote 13 In other words, it is to estrange ourselves from the current sense of the home and the world, to relocate the position of ourselves and our neighbours in the world, and to unsettle the current imagined community and reconstruct it.
However, this does not result in a pluralist anarchy of local histories, Bhabha asserts. It is not to collect various narratives to make rainbow history of diversity. Precisely, Bhabha rejects the idea that cultural diversity is the basis for the revision of history. He explains that cultural diversity presumes culture to be a knowable object, rather than a source of knowledge, and totalizes different cultures under the innocuous notion of multiculturalism. ‘[C]ultural diversity is the recognition of pregiven cultural “contents” and customs’ as opposed to the appreciation of cultural significance, value system, and authority.Footnote 14 He argues that cultural diversity projects a false utopian vision where imagined communities form their own unique collective identities through their mythic narrative and exist side by side while separately enclosed and undisrupted by the entwined histories. Accumulating local histories to fill in the map of cultural diversity does not provide a breakthrough to reveal their interconnectedness through history, to question the imagined borders between communities, and to rethink our sense of belonging.
Instead, Bhabha advances cultural difference to become a cornerstone of how to rewrite history and, by extension, how to revise our myths of belonging. He argues that cultural difference, in contrast to the relativism of cultural diversity, brings ‘the ambivalence of cultural authority’ to the fore. Cultural difference is only noticed at the boundaries of cultural authority, where its authority as a stable system of reference, tradition, truth, and community is contested, (mis)read, or (mis)appropriated. At the very moment of pronouncing cultural difference, cultural authority exposes its inherent limit of applicability and introduces a split in cultural identifications. This split in cultural identifications hinges on how individuals and communities identify themselves with(in) historical narratives. One of the recent incidents surrounding the cultural symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement well captures the cultural difference that Bhabha conceptualizes. When Dominic Raab, Foreign Secretary in the British government between 2019 and 2021, was asked by Julia Hartley-Brewer, a broadcaster on talkRadio, if he would ‘take the knee’ to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement, he replied that he considered the action ‘a symbol of subjugation and subordination, rather than one of liberation and emancipation’, as shown on the HBO TV series Game of Thrones. Both cultural meanings of the same action of ‘taking the knee’ have historical origins, either a medieval gesture of subjection or a modern twist of nonviolent resistance, but the cultural difference in how one identifies with the cultural symbol reflects which historical narrative one associates oneself with or refuses to associate with. Simultaneously, the very moment of articulating cultural difference acknowledges that cultural authority to determine the referential significance is fluctuating.
Cultural difference brings us back to the right to narrate, more specifically the right to rewrite history as a strategy to challenge and destabilize cultural authority. Cultural difference highlights that cultural authority is based on and legitimized by historical memory – a selective processing of the pasts which reiterates, reproduces, and endorses some pasts, while it represses, obliterates, and excludes others. Unpacking the relationship between past and present enshrined in cultural authority, Bhabha divulges that national historical memory is not a linear progression of imagined community from primordial past to modern present, but a modern strategy to cast pasts in a homogenous narrative to establish cultural authority in the present:
The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic. That iteration negates our sense of the origins of the struggle. It undermines our sense of the homogenizing effects of cultural symbols and icons, by questioning our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general.Footnote 15
Therefore, according to Bhabha, writing or rewriting history is not simply an empirical study of the past but becomes an active performance to influence the cultural authority in place. In order to revise mythic memory, historical intervention is to be carried out. He argues that ‘[s]uch an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenising unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People’.Footnote 16
Bhabha also phrases this historical intervention as ‘“projective” past, a form of future anterior’.Footnote 17 It is projective because repressed pasts that haunt the present are yet to become an integral part of the collective historical narrative. These pasts do not merely add omitted details to the grand narrative of linear progress, but interrupt the narrative of homogenous modernity and attempt to negotiate a different future. In the words of Bhabha, ‘[t]he aim … is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of … the minority that resists totalization … where adding to does not add up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other places of subtler signification’.Footnote 18 Instead of leading towards a pluralist anarchy of disconnected local histories, inscribing alternative histories of the excluded across the boundaries of imagined communities throws light on the transnational reality. ‘[T]he history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees’ – which fluctuate between cultural identifications, translate cultural significances and values, and challenge universality of any cultural authority – provide a key to better understand how communities are interconnected through margins unregistered in national histories. These histories, then, become a creative space to connect historical dots in an unprecedented way and to explore the dynamics underlying social conflicts and contradictions. Bhabha contends that this historical intervention of projective past could achieve even more. Postcolonial re-inscription of history holds the possibility of ‘a radical revision in the concept of human community itself’, as illustrated by Bhabha with an example from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses:
The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity; and the reason for this is made clear in the stammering, drunken words of Mr ‘Whisky’ Sisodia from The Satanic Verses: ‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means’.Footnote 19
He concludes that when we revise history with the postcolonial right to narrate, this shall ‘not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical’. While Bhabha made his commitment to theory to envisage the revision of human community through historical intervention, here I suggest that we adopt his theory and translate it to the commitment to history to make historical interventions.
Then, the question turns again to: what is the merit of postcolonialism in Roman history? What kind of role can the ancient history of Roman imperialism and Romanization play in historical intervention to revise our myths of belonging? At a cursory glance, postcolonial studies mainly explores the impact and legacy of modern European colonization, and postcolonial rewriting of history accordingly attempts to negotiate a different sense of community based on revising the relatively recent history of modern European imperialism, rather than ancient Roman imperialism. However, ancient Roman history, as a part of classical antiquity, has been an integral part of Western historical narrative, including the history of modern European imperialism, and, by extension, Western cultural authority.Footnote 20 For instance, when Bhabha illustrates how English text has established itself as the cultural authority of the West that can be universalized, ‘the English book’ in this sense becomes interchangeable with ‘the Classics’ in its claim to universal and timeless cultural authority: ‘Still the idea of the English book (or the Classics) is presented as universally adequate: like the “metaphoric writing of the West”, it communicates ‘“the immediate vision of the thing, freed from the discourse that accompanied it, or even encumbered it”’.Footnote 21 Since ancient Roman history has served as the locus of Western civilization, intellectual tradition, and cultural authority, postcolonial rewriting of Roman imperialism and Romanization will open up a vital avenue to revise the Western sense of archaic originary Past rooted in classical antiquity and, accordingly, each of our myths of belonging.
Travelling Theory, Paradigm Shift, and Tipping Point
Nonetheless, it is an intellectual voyage of considerable distance that postcolonial theories have embarked on to enter Romanization studies. During their journey, postcolonial ideas on history and historiography have been reconfigured in their meaning and significance through various interpretations, applications, and evaluations. This process inevitably brought about a difference between postcolonial ideas in their primary sense and postcolonial perspectives applied to the scholarship on Romanization studies. In order to understand the process of how postcolonial perspectives have reoriented the discourse on Romanization, we need to explore not only primary texts of postcolonial ideas, but also secondary postcolonial interpretations and applications in the context of Roman scholarship, which will be discussed further in Chapters 3 and 4. Understanding how postcolonial ideas have travelled to Romanization studies and what new significances they have acquired will illuminate how they have reshaped the discourse on Romanization.
The concept of travelling theory put forward by Said is useful here.Footnote 22 In The World, the Text, and the Critic, published in 1983, Said explains that the passage of any travelling theory involves interaction with political realities, historical developments, and intellectual environments that are different from its original surroundings and, thereby, unfold divergent patterns of its circulation, consumption, and application. The travelling idea is not a simple misinterpretation or misrepresentation, but a new idea ‘to some extent transformed by its new users, its new positions in a new time and place’.Footnote 23 Therefore, readers and users of the travelling idea should situate it in its specific social, political, and historical time and place and understand how it relates to its specific temporal and spatial surroundings:
No reading is neutral or innocent, and by the same token every text and every reader is to some extent the product of a theoretical standpoint, however implicit or unconscious such a standpoint may be. I am arguing, however, that we distinguish theory from critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and the time out of which it emerges as a part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it; then, consequently, that first place can be measured against subsequent places where the theory turns up for use. The critical consciousness is awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported.Footnote 24
Here, Said neither encourages nor criticizes the phenomenon whereby ideas and theories travel to different contexts. Rather, he emphasizes that understanding a travelling idea requires a comparative study between the point of departure and that of arrival and/or between different points of arrival. Admittedly, different social, political, and historical realities do not solely determine or explain varying patterns of diffusion, consumption, and application. Nevertheless, social, political, and historical conditions in which ideas travel and diffuse unavoidably influence their respective significance in each context and, therefore, are critical in order to grasp the new idea transformed by its locality.
In fact, postcolonial studies is one of the best examples of a travelling theory, since it was established as a new branch of academic study, as the French poststructuralist thoughts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan travelled into the Anglo-American intellectual world. Also, many other ideas on (post)colonial experiences cross-fertilized across disciplines and borders to form the basis of postcolonial theories, which, in turn, travelled again to have far-reaching impact on the current intellectual climate.Footnote 25 Thus, a comparative study between the point of departure and that of arrival will enhance our understanding of the travel of postcolonial thought. For our purpose, we will follow the route of the diffusion of postcolonial ideas into the scholarship of Roman history. In order to grasp the process, factors specific to the discipline of Roman history as well as those shared within wider Anglo-American scholarship will be considered. Although these factors will not be exhaustive, investigating the diffusion of postcolonial ideas in the context of surrounding factors will provide a broader picture of the environment in which postcolonial ideas came into contact with the scholarship of Roman history and influenced Romanization studies in particular. Accordingly, the point of arrival of postcolonialism determines the main scope of this book, that is, the discourse on Romanization in Anglo-American scholarship from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century. In addition, the French discourse on Romanization will be discussed in brief in Appendices at the end of each chapter as a comparative point of arrival. Following the passage of travelling ideas, this book ultimately aims to understand the paradigm shift that postcolonialism triggered in the discourse on Romanization.
The frequently quoted term paradigm shift, from Thomas S. Kuhn’s epoch-making The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, which was first published in 1962, has now firmly entered popular vocabulary, requiring little further explanation.Footnote 26 The Kuhnian paradigm shift is an appropriate, as well as useful, concept to conceive how various alternative models of Romanization proposed from the second half of the twentieth century onwards have challenged the traditional worldview – views on the ancient Roman world, views on the relationship between the past and the present, and views on imperial history and colonialist historiography. Yet the emerging paradigm shift in Romanization studies did not occur independently. The shift, which originated from postcolonialism, travelled to the scholarship of Roman history and then, in turn, triggered a paradigm shift in the discourse on Romanization. In a sense, the wave of emerging paradigm shifts in the discourse on Romanization could be understood as a part of the wider intellectual epidemics initiated by the paradigm shift of postcolonialism.
In order to comprehend the process of how postcolonialism travelled to propel a similar paradigm shift in Romanization studies, I would like, at the risk of resorting to a less scholarly notion, to introduce another concept. A tipping point is a concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s eponymous bestseller from 2000, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, which examines social epidemics, ranging from Paul Revere’s midnight ride to spread the news of impending British arrival and the popularity of Sesame Street to the outbreak of syphilis in Baltimore.Footnote 27 What is meaningful to our enquiry is that Gladwell sheds light on how an idea can travel across a given field and infect wider disciplines to tip a worldview: in other words, to shift a paradigm beyond its immediate reach. As Jason Cowley in the Guardian notes, ‘tipping point’ could be another way of looking at the phenomenon of paradigm shift.Footnote 28 Gladwell also makes clear that he tackles more or less the same phenomenon – only from a different angle:
Epidemics are, at their root, about this very process of transformation. When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance.Footnote 29
For our purpose, postcolonialism would be one of the intellectual epidemics of transformation that tipped to provoke widespread paradigm shifts. If Kuhn’s paradigm shift explains how postcolonial revision of history supplants colonialist historiography and – theoretically – revolutionizes the worldview, Gladwell’s tipping point could offer valuable insights into how the paradigm shift of postcolonialism travels, diffuses, and – practically – revolutionizes the predominant worldview by inspiring further paradigm shifts in different corners. This includes the paradigm shift in Romanization studies.
Among many conceptual tools which Gladwell proposes in order to understand the phenomenon of social epidemics, the diffusion model could be particularly useful to our analysis of postcolonial ideas travelling to Romanization studies:
what sociologists call the diffusion model, which is a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or product or innovation moves through a population. … If you plot that progression on a paragraph, it forms a perfect epidemic curve – starting slowly, tipping just as the Early Adopters start using the seed, then rising sharply as the Majority catches on, and falling away at the end when the Laggards come straggling in.Footnote 30
Following his description, we can draw an epidemic curve to visualize the travel of postcolonial ideas to Romanization studies. It may be difficult to hold that postcolonialism was well received in the scholarship of Classics or ancient history in general during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Yet, during this early phase, various influences, such as Marxism, the Annales school, the cliometrics revolution, and poststructuralism, were instrumental in making the intellectual environment of Roman history scholarship relatively more hospitable to various intellectual currents, in which postcolonial ideas later came to take hold. Then, slowly and gradually, postcolonial ideas travelled to the scholarship of Roman history and ‘contaminated’ Roman historians and archaeologists, prompting them to question the colonialist epistemology built into the discipline. The Early Adopters, who started to tinker with the seed of postcolonial ideas, published a few key works and circulated the seed across the discipline. Four chapters will guide us through the passage of how travelling ideas of postcolonialism diffused into the discourse on Romanization to prompt a paradigm shift.
The first chapter sets the scene. It sketches the broader landscape of the scholarship of Roman history when the framework of Romanization was first introduced and examines the original model of Romanization in the wider context of the intellectual climate in the early twentieth century. The second chapter ushers us into the travelling idea of postcolonialism. It concerns the point of departure, discussing postcolonial thought in its primary sense. Instead of providing a landscape overview of postcolonial theories that span from literature to sociology to economics, it delves into the key themes that Roman historians and archaeologists engaged with – that is, postcolonial questions on history and historiography. The third chapter moves on to explore the route of travelling ideas and the point of arrival. In order to understand the path of diffusion, it explores the political, historical, and intellectual environment surrounding the scholarship of Roman history and investigates the context into which postcolonialism travelled. It then investigates how Roman historians and archaeologists began to adopt postcolonial ideas and to pose postcolonial questions to the framework of Romanization from the mid-twentieth century. The fourth chapter probes alternative paradigms that scholars put forward from their respective postcolonial perspectives.
The concluding Historical Intervention tackles the question that remains. Looking back on the journey of the travelling ideas of postcolonialism thus far, it attempts to reflect on their impact on the discourse on Romanization as a heuristic tool to bring about a paradigm shift in the dominant historical narrative and to revise our myths of belonging. Some further thoughts on travelling theory by James Clifford and Edward W. Said lend a critical lens to better comprehend the theory of postcolonialism travelling into Romanization studies. In his article ‘Notes on Travel and Theory’ published in 1989, Clifford crucially points out that the path of travelling theory is not always linear but more complex:
these stages read like an all-too-familiar story of immigration and acculturation. Such a linear path cannot do justice to the feedback loops, the ambivalent appropriations and resistances that characterize the travels of theories, and theorists, between places in the ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds.
Theirs is not a condition of exile, of critical ‘distance,’ but rather a place of betweenness, a hybridity composed of distinct, historically-connected postcolonial spaces.
Theory is always written from some ‘where,’ and that ‘where’ is less a place than itineraries: different, concrete histories of dwelling, immigration, exile, migration. These include the migration of third world intellectuals into the metropolitan universities, to pass through or to remain, changed by their travel but marked by places of origin, by peculiar allegiances and alienations.Footnote 31
The path of postcolonial ideas travelling to Romanization studies is far from a linear movement across one academic discipline to another. By contrast, its complex path could lay claim to one of the most daring intellectual aspirations of travelling ideas. It traverses the periphery and the centre of both ancient and modern times, brings the spaces connected through both ancient Roman and modern Western imperial history together, and thereby presents a possibility of decolonizing the colonialist history and historiography which is deep-rooted through multiple layers.
The journey of travelling postcolonial ideas has not come to an end to face its verdict. Yet, Said’s optimism regarding the potential of travelling theories, expressed in his essay ‘Traveling Theory Reconsidered’ published in 2001, might well be extended here.Footnote 32 At one point he even entertains the notion of ‘transgressive theory’, which travels to challenge hasty totalization and dogmatic orthodoxy and to find ways to reconcile contradictions in the original travelling theory while rekindling its spirit:
The work of theory, criticism, demystification, deconsecration, and decentralization they imply is never finished. The point of theory therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile.
To speak here only of borrowing and adaptation is not adequate. There is in particular an intellectual, and perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word. As a way of getting seriously past the weightlessness of one theory after another, the remorseless indignations of orthodoxy, and the expressions of tired advocacy to which we are often submitted, the exercise involved in figuring out where the theory went and how in getting there its fiery core was reignited is invigoration – and is also another voyage, one that is central to intellectual life in the late twentieth century.Footnote 33
His earlier suggestion that travelling theory is almost a necessary evil of modern intellectual life, new ideas morphed by their locality, is dispelled. Instead, Said concludes that travelling theories hold the potential to actualize their radical force in new environments without dwelling on totalization or orthodoxy. Reflection on the value of postcolonialism to the discourse on Romanization in light of the significance which Said came to attach to the potential of travelling ideas brings this work to a close. The Historical Intervention argues that the travel of postcolonial ideas to Romanization studies offers a key to decolonize the history and historiography not only of ancient Roman but also of modern Western imperialism and, furthermore, to destabilize the sense of archaic originary Past enforced through colonialist history and historiography. Now, let us visit the formation period of Romanization studies prior to the travelling ideas of postcolonialism.
