From the vantage point of the postcolonial, the notion of a "history of the present"
has strong resonance and appeal. Colonial architecture, memorials,
archives and the scientific disciplines that flourished under the guidance of
colonial institutions are dissected as technologies of rule whose "legacies" and
"influences" are embodied in our comportments and leisures, lodged in our
everyday accoutrements and embedded in the habitus of the present. The remembrance
of past colonial relations of power has emerged as fundamental to
a range of postcolonial intellectual and political agendas that make the recording,
rewriting and eliciting of colonial memories so pertinent and charged