Postcolonial technoscience revisited

What does a postcolonial inquiry into technoscience do? And what is it for? I develop these questions by reconsidering one powerful idea: that science and technology studies (STS) is postcolonial when it elucidates the hybridity, heterogeneity, and indeterminacy of global technoscientific formations, and does so to falsify colonial fantasies of hegemony expressed in imperious conceptual generalities and sovereign universalisms. Revisiting Warwick Anderson’s expositions of postcolonial STS—initiated in this journal two decades ago—I reflect on the form and force of this critical operation. Despite an animating aversion to universalisms, the pursuit of hybridity and heterogeneity may ultimately universalize a liberal metaphysics of agency. This paradox suggests limits to the critical operation that pits hybridity and indeterminacy against hegemony in a postcolonial spirit.