About Postcolonial Studies

The Postcolonial Studies Collective understands 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, but also the study, development, or 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:

• the political and cultural movements of decolonization
• the early theorizations by scholars such as Frantz Fanon or C.L.R. James
• the coordinated articulation of anti-colonial resistance in the Bandung conference of 1949 and the non-alignment movement
• the different trajectories and schools of subaltern studies, decolonial studies and Indigenous resurgence emerging from South Asia, Africa as well as from the Americas and other settler colonies
• the formative writings of Edward Said or Valentin-Yves Mudimbe studying Europe’s invention of its Others in the interest of imperial control
• approaches since the 1970s and 1980s which have productively used poststructuralist theory to illuminate or problematize colonial and postcolonial discourses, such as in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Homi Bhaba
• approaches to land that resist extractivism and other colonial land relations, as well as approaches that critically rethink the conception of the ‘human’ and its relation to the other-than-human
• learning from and about non-Western epistemologies, i.e., ways of knowing about the world beyond Eurocentric systems of knowledge

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.