First, past the ‘post’: Shampa Biswas, ‘Unsettling settler colonialism: anticolonialism with and against postcolonialism’, International Politics, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

First, past the ‘post’: Shampa Biswas, ‘Unsettling settler colonialism: anticolonialism with and against postcolonialism’, International Politics, 2024

27May24

Excerpt: The term postcolonialism has a long and contested history. Indeed, there was at one time an active debate within the field of postcolonial studies on the insertion of a hyphen between the “post” and the “colonialism” of the term. Some argued that the absence of a hyphen mistakenly suggested the end of colonialism, thus making it more palatable in the West. Others suggested that that same absence foregrounded the continuity into the present of the relations and practices of classical colonialism, despite the latter’s formal demise. Thus, there is a sense in which hyphenating the two terms honors the contextual specificity of contemporary states trying to carve out a post-independence national identity after the formal dissolution of European empires, while removing the hyphen may erase the ways that formal independence can mask the colonial continuities that continue to shape the present. Implicit in this debate is the question of how much and what kind of rupture the formal departure of colonial rulers provides in the liberation of the colonized. But also implicit are two much less scrutinized assumptions: First, that the post of colonialism can only occur after the departure of the colonizers, which, second, is also the point at which anticolonialism, whose aim is to evict the colonizer, ceases. Rejecting both these assumptions, Somdeep Sen’s Decolonizing Palestine takes up as its subject of study the complicated relationship between the “post” and the “anti” of colonialism in the context of ongoing settler colonialism. What if postcolonialism and anticolonialism remain deeply imbricated, before and after the departure of the colonizers? How does that relationship manifest itself in the conditions of ongoing settler colonialism? What, in such conditions, does real liberation from colonialism look like?

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