'Things Do Look Different from Here, on the Borderlands': An Interview with Warwick Anderson

摘要

Thank you Warwick for the interview. It is indeed a pleasure and honour to have this opportunity to further engage with your vast intellectual contribution. I am hoping to use this occasion to further explore some of your analytical and methodological interventions. Let me start by taking you back nearly one and a half decades. In the special issue that you co-edited in 2002 you deployed the phrase 'postcolonial technoscience', which acquired a trajectory of its own and has been commonly used in various articles and books thereafter. Obviously, you were juxtaposing postcolonial analytics and sensibility and the Latourian concept of technoscience. In fact, you candidly asserted in your introduction to the special issue: 'A postcolonial study of science and technology might offer new, and more richly textured, answers to many of the questions posed in actor-network-theory' [ANT] (2002, p. 649). Thereafter, in another article, you wrote: 'While they [actor-network-theorists] shy from any direct engagement with postcolonial studies, they seem to have picked up and amplified the vibe' (2009, p. 392). More recently, you have celebrated Wen-yuan Lin and John Law's call for 'balance of betrayal' in STS (Lin & Law, 2014), calling their contribution 'an enticing prospect' that opens new possibilities for postcolonial investigations. Can you elaborate your intellectual affinity and connections with ANT? And do you think with Lin and Law's intervention ANT has not only embraced postcolonial concerns, but is also charting new trajectories in that regard?