'Postcolonialism' tag archive

With the publication of In Theory in 1992, Aijaz Ahmad threw a spanner into the works of what seemed at the time to be the relentless march of postcolonial theory within departments of English and comparative literary studies in the Anglo-American academy. 1 The increasing power of this purportedly new field of study was made […]

Nadine El-Enany, (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 312pp., £20.00 hb., 978 1 52614 542 0 On the 11th August 2020, in the midst of a tabloid maelstrom around people travelling from Calais to Dover in small boats, the UK Home Office released a statement that departed from their usual […]

The aim must be to reduce inequality in every area where it is found. To do this therefore we must refashion, or ‘revolutionise’, the laws which lead to the reproduction of the relations of domination and exploitation. Mohammed Bedjaoui 1 Attempts to enforce the NIEO [New International Economic Order] would lead to a Hobbesian war […]

The following text is the last chapter of a book on Marx that will be published later this year in English under the title In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects. Articulated in ten short chapters, the book combines a close reading of some of Marx’s texts with a concern for the ways in which his […]

Postcolonial melancholy A reply to Luke Gibbons Francis Mulhern Luke Gibbons (RP67) certainly has a way with words, especially those of others; his representation of my views (RP65) is something less than fastidious. l However, there is little value in dwelling much on this; an appropriately detailed self-defence would consist mainly of requotation. Interested readers […]

Dialogue Without the Other? A Reply to Francis Mulhern Luke Gibbons Condemning national values has a different meaning depending on whether one lives in a little country (one’s own) in the orbit ofanother, larger one, or whether one lives abroad, in a third country, where one is – where one believes oneself to be – […]

Social scientists have long grappled with ideas about race. In recent years, discussion on the significance of these ideas – particularly in exploring notions of identity, and the cultural and political options these appear to make available – have penetrated other areas of the humanities. A spate of recent publications signals that it is philosophyʼs […]

Primordial Being Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory Chetan bhatt century Enlightenment philosophers – others could have been chosen – considered the place of ʻIndiaʼ and some of its religions and philosophies in their grand civilizational, cultural and philosophical chronographies. This is a difficult area whose complexities can be elided by the […]

Actually existing postcolonialism Bill schwarz From the start, there has always been an ambiguity in the academic literature on the postcolonial. Does the term ʻpostcolonialʼ refer to a historical process that has already occurred, such that we are currently living in a historical epoch ʻafter colonialismʼ? Or does the idea of the postcolonial refer not […]

…we read [in Herderʼs text]: ʻIt would be an easy principle, but an evil one, to maintain in the philosophy of human history than man is an animal who needs a master, and who expects from this master, or from his association with him, the happiness of his ultimate destiny.ʼ … [We read further that] […]

Documenta 11 was one of the most radically conceived events in the history of postcolonial art practice. It is exemplary of the influence of postcolonial discourses on critical art practice over the last twenty years in breaking profoundly with the colonial presuppositions of the nineteenth-century tradition of ethnographic or anthropological exhibitions of non-Western art as […]

Commentary Geographies of violence and democracy Politics in Spain Alejandro colás On the morning of 11 March 2004, after ten bombs were detonated on four commuter trains in southern Madrid, the communist-led United Left coalition released a press statement, part of which translates as follows: Today is a day of democratic unity. With this fascist-like […]

Commentary England, whose England? Jon Beasley-Murray By their fear you shall know them. The USA responded to al-Qaedaʼs September 2001 attacks with a proliferation of flags reaffirming national pride and widespread support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed by George W. Bushʼs 2004 re-election. Spain reacted to the Madrid train explosions of March […]

Marx’s Eurocentrism Postcolonial studies and Marx scholarship Kolja lindner The English jackasses need an enormous amount of time to arrive at an even approximate understanding of the real conditions of … conquered groups. Karl Marx, 1879A great deal of ink has already been spilled on the question of Marx’s Eurocentrism. The debate turns on his […]

Who needs postcoloniality? A reply to Lindner Harry harootunian In Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune on British colonialism in India and the events leading to the Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the structure of […]