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.There are, however, ways in which this call for attention to nuance andcomplication might itself be problematized.In this chapter, I want to argue thatthere are contexts in which this line of reasoning, now more or less orthodox in post-colonial studies, has limits.Those contexts discussed here are teaching, the academy,and (academic representations of) international relations of trade.To elaborate brieflyon the first two of these, teaching and the academic context, White s assertion seemsto me (potentially at least) to create a tension between the ethics of scholarship, andthe ethics and efficacy of pedagogy: should we, in teaching, at all times be troubledas much as by ambiguity as by injustice? Perhaps one could suggest that this is aquestion of scaffolding complexity: in teaching, one tends to make a progressionfrom less to more difficult concepts.If we begin with complication, in the name ofscholarly rigor, where does that leave discussion of injustice? At the heart of whatI see as the difficulty posed by White s remark is the question of audience: what isappropriate in a scholarly volume directed towards academics and graduate students1 Daniel Callahan, What Price Better Health? Hazards of the Research Imperative(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press; New York: The MillbankMemorial Fund, 2003), p.220.2 Luise White, Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and CentralAfrica , Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds Frederick Cooperand Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,1997), pp.437 8. 194 Economies of Representation, 1790 2000might need to be rethought when presented to those coming to post-colonial studiesfor the first time.I also want to engage with what I think is the implied teleologyin White s remark, indicated in the term obsolete : an assumption that there is analmost inevitable movement towards the present which correlates with increasingintellectual sophistication, thence an increased level of detachment, a morallysuperior judiciousness.I assumed precisely this kind of progression from past to present, fromsimplicity to complexity, from passion to detachment, when I asked students to givein-class reports on key texts in post-colonial studies in a tertiary course on post-colonial literature.I asked two students each week to complete a report on a key text,setting these texts in roughly chronological order and, as I saw it, increasing levelsof complexity.I was struck by the students enthusiasm for works of the 1950s and1960s, by politically engaged and impassioned writers like Aimé Césaire, KwameNkrumah, C.L.R.James and Albert Memmi, along with slightly later works by Ngig)wa Thiong o and Jamaica Kincaid.By way of contrast, responses to the dozen or sointroductions to post-colonialism (as an academic practice) prescribed for the laterweeks were dutiful but dour.To presume, as one might, that the students were notready for the more sophisticated arguments in these more recent works is beliedby the subtlety and energy they demonstrated in responses to the literary texts theywere reading at the same time.Interestingly, those few students who did see value inthe more overtly theoretical texts seized on precisely that call to complicate (andnot just to differentiate) the colonial field, and they invoked this scholarly argumentrepeatedly to oppose those who declared emphatically that colonization had beenan injustice.This is not to say that the invocation of simplicity, any more than theinvocation of complication, is necessarily desirable practice.With that contentionin mind, I want now to turn to textbooks of International Economics, and theirrepresentation of Africa , focusing on the subtopic of trade.This is to move to thethird context noted in the introduction above, as one in which we might test White sassertion, while still bearing in mind questions of pedagogy.Economics does not generally come under the rubric of postcolonial studies ,even though the teaching of this subject is perhaps one of the most important sites atwhich knowledge of the (once?) colonized world is generated in modern universities,and thus in policy-making and government
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