At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history--when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism--David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance--as a story of overcoming and vindication, of...