At the outset of World War Two, Virginia Woolf's posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941) predicts a postcolonial world. In the novel, the English history pageant staged by local villagers concludes with civilization in ruins “rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handing bricks [building a wall] … Now issued a black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of …” Postwar civilization would be rebuilt, Woolf imagines (with a good dose of racial caricature thrown in), in a manner that includes the sovereign participation of African and Asian nations mediated through the League of Nations. In envisioning postwar development, time unfolds progressively. Black and brown nations follow the lead of white civilizations: man and woman (presumably white) rebuild the world and “now” the black and brown men emerge to signify an international community. Woolf brackets the question of development and modernity in the colonized world in this scene, and she avoids the question of racial difference. The black and brown men conform to a European image of Africans and Asians: the English villagers perform these roles in a manner that repeats racial stereotypes. “Ditto” and “fuzzy wig” suggest the “folksy” nature of a blackface minstrelsy that typecasts racial difference and fails to challenge racial hierarchies through which white people represent persons of color.