The not-yet of racial evolutionary logic then becomes perpetual deferment, a “not yet forever” (Ghosh and Chakrabarty 148, 152). Thus we find four centuries later that England’s authors – Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland is especially eloquent – are still derisively lamenting the premodern, backward, savage, uncivilized Irish.46 “So,” R. R. Davies wonders, “what was it … about the Irish which persuaded Edmund Spenser that they would never be able to reach that
