Critical Post-Colonial Studies: Opening Up the Post-Colonial to a Broader Geopolitical View

Abstract

The new framework of critical post-colonial studies adds the innovative feature of a broader geopolitical view to an existing branch of critique that challenges the postcolonial regime of knowledge as a whole, simultaneously taking into account the impact of the “traveling concepts” of postcolonial theories on contemporary thought. A radical scrutiny of its core tenets questions postcolonial studies’ perception and representation of colonialism that are selectively confined to the areas of the West and the formerly colonized non-West. The new research field of critical post-colonial studies, by contrast, deploys a multidirectional framework that strives to unthink the quasi-Manichean reverse division of the world into a devalued West and an upgraded non-West characteristic of the postcolonial mainstream. Critical post-colonial studies is thus not intended to be yet another subdivision of the wide academic field of postcolonial studies but one that departs from a broadening of the geopolitical space and shows how this inevitably inflects conventional understanding of the postcolonial. Important steps for a critical dismantling of mainstream postcolonial studies are a conceptual disengagement of the mechanisms of “othering” and a disentanglement of the components of the specific postcolonial continuity thesis. Discarding these and other restrictions makes room for the urgently needed paradigm shift in postcolonial scholarship and for the fashioning of a new academic language of critical post-colonial studies that, on the one hand, meets the needs of the multidirectional conditions of imperialism and colonialism and their various semantics and is, on the other hand, able to grasp universal patterns in different geopolitical and historical conditions.