The long shadow of colonialism. A literary essay on “Colonialism and Modern Social Theory”

When we talk about ‘post-colonialism’ today, we are referring to many different schools of thought at the same time. The term has its clearest contours when it is applied to the first generation of political intellectuals who, after the liberation of their home countries from colonialism, began to examine the consequences that colonial rule had left behind in their own consciousness and that of their compatriots. Here, with thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire or Léopold Sédar Senghor, the ‘post’ in the concept of post-colonialism still quite literally had the temporal meaning of an ‘after’, from whose direct experience the wounds that former colonialism had inflicted on its victims were to be uncovered. However, the term loses this meaning of a direct coming to terms with the past when it is used today to describe a new generation of postcolonial thinkers. Their intention is no longer to come to terms with the horrors of colonialism, which was thought to have just been overcome, but to raise awareness of the fact that it is still oppressively present in a post-colonial age. It is therefore no longer the past that is at stake in today’s postcolonialism, but our present itself; the temporal reference has changed over the decades, the past tense has now become the present tense of colonialism. With this change in temporal reference, however, the addressee of postcolonialism has also changed accordingly; it is no longer primarily the victims of colonialism to whom the appeal for a change of consciousness and attitude is addressed, but those who continue to benefit from it, i.e. the members of Western states.