What are Postcolonial Studies?

We understand the field of postcolonial studies as a critical perspective that challenges and offers alternatives to colonial and neo-colonial ways of ordering the world. This includes research on coloniality and decolonial resistance in all its forms, the implementation of new critical methodologies in research and teaching, as well as a sustained effort to connect academic research to social actors and developments outside the university.

The modern world has been manifestly shaped by colonial processes and colonial discourses. This includes, among other factors, the global distribution of power and wealth, the maintenance of a system of increasingly fortified borders around nation-states, some migration movements, the roots of various contemporary military conflicts, relations to land and the environment, and the framing of relations between the global South and North. The post in postcolonialism stands for a critical perspective that challenges colonial ideologies and practices. Rather than being a mere temporal marker, the post points to possibilities of thinking and acting beyond the colonial.

Postcolonial Studies serves as an inclusive umbrella for many fields of study that can include:

• political and cultural movements of decolonization
• different trajectories and schools of subaltern studies, decolonial studies and Indigenous resurgence across South Asia, Africa, the Americas and other settler colonies
• theoretical approaches since the 1970s and 1980s that draw on poststructuralist theory to analyze and critique colonial and postcolonial discourses
• perspectives on land that resist extractivism and other colonial land relations, alongside frameworks that critically rethink the concept of the ‘human’ and its relation to the other-than-human
• engagement with non-Western epistemologies, i.e., ways of knowing beyond Eurocentric knowledge systems

Postcolonial studies is not a homogeneous, unified field – in fact, some of these approaches are in tension or in friction with each other. The negotiation of diverging positions and positionalities is a key element of postcolonial studies and encourages students, scholars, artists, and other actors to reflect on their own position, consider other perspectives, navigate complexity, and carefully build and maintain connections and allegiances. Postcolonial studies can thus also serve as a space for critical dialogue across differing histories, experiences, and standpoints.