6. Hybridity

‘Hybridity’ explains that cultural hybridity can be seen as an expansion of W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’: a painful incompatibility between how people see themselves and how society sees them only in terms of their race. Nevertheless, this has also formed the basis of the extraordinary cultural creativity of African-Americans. Drawing on cultural memory of their African roots, African-Americans have adapted and transformed aspects of European culture encountered in the US, particularly noticeable in the realm of African-American music. A comparable development of a hybridized culture is considered by tracing the emergence of raï music in 1970s Algeria, following the traumatic experiences of the Algerian War of Independence.

3. Slavery, race, caste

‘Slavery, race, caste’ explains how the most sustained form of early colonial violence involved the enslavement of millions of non-Europeans. Slavery was not simply an oppressive practice: it was given moral, ethical, even philosophical justification by a broader ideology of race, which continued—indeed, strengthened—after slavery was abolished. Racial theories developed first in defence of slavery were elaborated, as imperialism expanded, to justify colonial rule of allegedly ‘backward’ peoples. The contemporary practice of decoloniality attempts to arrest, reconfigure, and transform the collective memory of slavery and ideology of race which sustained it. Race and racism in the West and caste in Asia make for interesting comparisons.

8. Gender, queering, and feminism in a postcolonial context

‘Gender, queering, and feminism in a postcolonial context’ explains how recently, ‘queer’ and ‘queering’ have been adopted to describe a strategy of shifting social or intellectual perspectives out of their dominant binary forms. It is often in societies of the Global South that patriarchal norms remain strongest. It is also where the greatest resistance can be found to more flexible ideas of genders and sexualities, which are sometimes portrayed as yet another instance of Western cultural imperialism. Queering the norms of such cultures—in Africa, the Middle East, or the Caribbean, for example—has become a major, sometimes controversial, arena of postcolonial gender politics.

7. The ambivalence of the veil

‘The ambivalence of the veil’ explores the relationship between Western and Muslim worlds. For many Westerners, nothing symbolizes the differences more than ‘the veil’, a shorthand for the many ways in which Muslim women choose to dress, sometimes covering their heads or faces. Today, in Islamic societies, and among many Muslim women in non-Islamic societies, the veil (hijab) has come to symbolize a cultural and religious identity. A pertinent question to ask is how can a 1930s colonial image of an ‘Arab woman’ typifies European stereotypical representations of, and assumptions about, Muslim women even today. This can be contrasted with how men in masks—Batman or the Zapatistas in balaclavas—are considered to exhibit positive forms of masculinity.

1. Subaltern knowledges

‘Subaltern knowledges’ discusses subaltern knowledges by looking at the perspectives of refugees. The terms ‘postcolonial’ and ‘decolonial’ signal the presence of the insurgent knowledges that come from the peripheries, from the indigenous, the marginalized, the dispossessed, and seek to transform the terms and values under which people live. Early interest in subalternity focused on subaltern consciousness but expanded to include divergent knowledges. Such knowledges are produced not just by subordinated groups with their individual cultures and histories but are also articulated in their different languages.

9. Globalization from a postcolonial perspective

'Globalization from a postcolonial perspective' begins by considering how Che Guevara was influenced by Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which rapidly became the bible of decolonization after its publication in 1961. However, the inexorable forces of globalization since the 1980s have increasingly brought the world’s economies into a single capitalist system. While multi- and transnational companies looked to global markets for growth, they simultaneously lowered their cost base by outsourcing manufacturing or administration to any country that was poor and reasonably politically stable; few societies today have not felt the impact of their place in the world economy and the international division of labour.

5. Nomads, nation-states, borders

‘Nomads, nation-states, borders’ describes the concepts of nomadism, nation-states, and borders. Nomadic people in the Americas, Australasia, and elsewhere never owned or possessed land in a European sense, so European colonists declared their land empty. Colonial appropriation and confiscation of land can be conceptualized as ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’. Ultimately, a consequence of colonial rule was the reorganization of the whole world from empires into nation-states. Historically, colonialism formed an intrinsic part of the creation of European nation-states; today global migration from the newer decolonized states fulfils a similar function. Notwithstanding the claims for the cultural identity of its people, nothing really defines a nation like its borders since all nation-states are heterogeneous.

4. History and power, from below and above

‘History and power, from below and above’ addresses the continuing interference by former colonial powers in the internal affairs of independent decolonized states. Indeed, countries that achieved sovereignty in their independence struggles still find that they are the object of interventions by the Western countries that had once ruled them. Has the Middle East ever really been free of Western interference since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 or the remnants of the Ottoman Empire were divided up between Britain and France at the end of the First World War? An interesting example can be seen in the intermittent bombing of Baghdad and Iraq by Western powers since 1920.

2. Colonialisms, decolonization, decoloniality

‘Colonialisms, decolonization, decoloniality’ explains that colonization took two major forms: the first, with colonizers gradually taking over land where sovereignty was not established in a European way, or occupying a foreign state, and then administering and taxing it; the second, with the settlement of Europeans arriving with the intention of adopting the colony as their permanent home. Such ‘settler colonialism’ has had continuing effects on the indigenous peoples right up to the present day. Here, anti-colonial activists argue that decolonization begins with decolonizing oneself from the settler colonial culture. Intellectual decolonization has to form a part of political decolonization.

11. Translation

‘Translation’ explores the concept of translation which reflects the central conceptual and political dynamic of postcolonialism. Translating a text from one language to another transforms its material identity. Transforming an indigenous culture into the subordinated culture of a colonial regime or sovereign settler colony, or superimposing the colonial apparatus into which all aspects of the original culture have to be reconstructed operate as processes of translational dematerialization and reconstruction. Translation is an intercultural communication, but it also always involves questions of power relations and forms of domination. Colonized people must therefore retranslate themselves and their cultures; Frantz Fanon’s politics of translation offer a means to political empowerment and social transformation.