After Postcolonial Governmentalities

2011

A special section of Studies in Social and Political Thought. The submissions, received from four continents, were remarkable in the diversity of perspectives, issues, concepts and approaches they represented and the intriguing and novel insights they offered. Each of the section’s articles represent contributions to the debates and discourses surrounding one of the key challenges facing social and political thought today: namely, how to reconcile core concepts and ideas from canonical authors which, though universal in their claims, are undeniably European in their origins.

International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016

It is generally acknowledged that post-colonialism is a product of some ideologies and hermeneutic methodologies that have contributed to its formation and development. As a fighting term, a theoretical weapon, and “the need, in nations or groups which have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by Universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images,” postcolonial discourse is torn between its use of mutually incompatible critical categories. This means that post-colonialism is lacking a monolithic foundation. With this in mind, the present paper seeks to highlight the ideologies and trajectories which have shaped the field of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline, which attempts to undermine and transform the dominance of Eurocentrist colonial discourses. The purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive account of the field, but to focus on the main hermeneutic methodologies that have contributed to the constitution of post-colonialism as a discursi...

Postcolonial Studies, 2022

In the last decade, the terms ‘decolonial’ and ‘decoloniality’ have been deployed in an expansive manner and have gained increasing traction across many theoretical and political domains. Therefore, a critical assessment of the specific decolonial vocabulary is both timely and necessary. The relationship between the decolonial and the postcolonial especially requires more critical scrutiny than it has received so far. This special issue takes a step in this direction by staging critical dialogues between postcolonial and decolonial approaches on different terrains. While decolonial theory tends to operate as an expansive and centripetal force, pulling within its orbit a variety of other theoretical and political formation, our focus is on the original formulation of ‘decoloniality’ – or the ‘decolonial option’ – within the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) group. In this introduction, we outline some of the main objections that decolonial critics have formulated against postcolonial theory, and we argue that these critiques have been instrumental in defining the decolonial option itself. While advocates of decoloniality have been very vocal in their critiques of postcolonial theory, we note among postcolonial critics – with some exceptions – a predominant tendency either not to respond to these charges or to downplay them in favour of reconciliatory moves. As an alternative to this tendency, we stress the value of a postcolonial critical response to the decolonial intervention. We argue that postcolonial theories still have something to offer to a critique of the present and the past. In the face of the decolonial claim to have radicalized or surpassed postcolonial theory, we suggest that the postcolonial must speak back and reclaim the value of its critical apparatus in the context of the unfinished struggle for decolonizing knowledge and the social unconscious of postcoloniality.

Since the mid-1980s the term "postcolonial" has become a well-known key signifier in analysis of cultural and political representations of dominance and subalternity in contemporary societies. It was in the wake of the success of this term that from the early 1990s an impressive field of studies, from transversal to traditional disciplines, entered the archives of Western knowledge, at first in the Anglo-American world but later worldwide: postcolonial studies, or postcolonial critique. It could be argued, as in the case of cultural studies, that postcolonial criticism emerged at an imaginary epis-temic intersectional point, binding in new ways objects, approaches, and perspectives coming from different traditional disciplines: from literary critique to philosophy, from anthropology to psychoanalysis and sociology, from history to the political sciences, from English to linguistics. It is for this reason that the postcolonial discursive formation is usually conceived both as a radical epistemological challenge to traditional academic disciplines and specializations and as a new and more democratic approach to the conceptualization of contemporary and historical relationships between the West and its others. According to this self-representation, then, postcolonial studies may be better defined as an emergent critical space aimed at the decolonization of current theoretical and political practices. Despite its close association with academic European postmodernism and poststruc-turalism in mainstream critical thinking, postcolonial critique can be approached as the effect of a very complex genealogy. My approach to its emergence as a discipline is based on Edward Said's constructivist idea of beginning. A beginning, Said maintains, is different from an origin because a beginning can be chosen, while an origin can only be acknowledged: "beginning is not so much an event unto itself as an opening within discourse" (Said 1975, 350; emphasis original). Said's idea of beginning is important here because it seeks to methodologically combine "intention" and "method," allowing subjectivity and politics ("secular agency") to enter the domain of theory through an epistemological solid ground. Our starting premise will be that postcolonial criticism came out of multiple hybrid and transnational roots. It was not a discourse that originated in the postcolonial world but one produced by migrant postcolonial intellectuals displaced in the West, who were also notably critical of the essentialist and binary political imaginary of anticolonial first "great narrations." However, it could be argued that its beginning can be tracked down to classical anticolonial thinking (to political interventions of figures such as Mariátegui, Gandhi, Sartre, Césaire, Fanon, etc.), namely to the critique of Western imperialism that arose in the context of the different national liberation movements during the decol-onization processes. Its beginning can also be tracked down to the development of The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2020

She is the author of several volumes and essays, including Critica alla cooperazione neoliberale. Resilienza e governance nelle politiche di cooperazione allo sviluppo, Mimesis 2018 (A critique of Neoliberal Cooperation.

Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2006

The theoretical approach of postcolonialism is one that has attempted to address the malaise of foreign control and establish an empirical framework that incorporates non-westernized narratives into academic discourse. Postcolonialism emerged alongside efforts of decolonization, as the scholarly community recognized many ignored, subaltern narratives of subjugation and resistance. The approach has evolved to both heal the historical wounds inflicted upon indigenous populations, empower a ‘voiceless’ class subjugated to colonial, imperialist, or foreign rule, and analyze contemporary models of Western dominance in history, politics, sociology, and language. The framework that postcolonialism constructs is one that establishes an attempt to shed light upon the perspectives of the ‘voiceless’—the colonized—and incorporate them into a new, empirically accurate dialogue.

What is “postcolonial sociology”? While the study of postcoloniality has taken on the form of “postcolonial theory” in the humanities, sociology’s approach to postcolonial issues has been comparably muted. This essay considers postcolonial theory in the humanities and its potential utility for reorienting sociological theory and research. After sketching the historical background and context of postcolonial studies, three broad areas of contribution to sociology are highlighted: reconsiderations of agency, the injunction to overcome analytic bifurcations, and a recognition of sociology’s imperial standpoint.