#postcolonialism

“The displacement of Marxist categories in the discussion of hybridity also alibis and parallels the displacement and replacement of third worldist solidarity work and internationalist politics with a cosmopolitan ‘post-colonial elite’ politics. This joins up with a stay-at-home-lecturing-from-afar approach by the white left, incapable of engaging a struggle against capital at home,…

Not every silence means absence.

Some stories were buried under empires, textbooks, and polished narratives.

Subaltern Studies listens to the forgotten voices — workers, peasants, colonized lives, people history often walked past.

Maybe history was never complete. Maybe we were only hearing one side of it.

Read more here: https://worldliterature24.blogspot.com/2026/05/subaltern-studies.html

At the beginning of the film, France represents freedom, opportunities, and luxury to Diouana. She imagines France as an escape where she can find her identity and experience a better life. Her excitement reflects how colonial powers often portrayed Europe as the center of civilization and success. The scenes of travel and arrival almost feels like a dream, showing how hopeful Diouana is before she fully experiences its reality.

However, the reality of France quickly destroys this fantasy. Instead of independence, Diouana gets trapped inside a small apartment where her identity is all about domestic labor and obedience. Langford explains that the film critiques the idealized image of France by exposing the inequalities hidden beneath the fantasies. Through Diouana’s experience, the film critiques how colonialism shaped migration and the African diaspora by selling dreams of opportunity while maintaining systems of exploitation. Watching this film made me think about how people often imagine certain places as symbols of freedom or success, only to later realize the reality which completely shatters their hope.

A few days ago, my friend and colleague Karminn Daytec Yañgot shared a post about a problem that many of us in Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, and heritage work keep running into. Some of our colleagues, she noted, remain preoccupied with the idea that decolonization means locating an authentic Indigenous self in a precolonial past, as if Indigenous peoples are unchanging, as if history happened everywhere else but somehow stopped at the edge of Indigenous worlds.

That habit runs deep in Philippine public discourse. It appears whenever people ask what is truly Filipino, purely native, or really precolonial. It appears in arguments about food, ritual, architecture, and language. It also appears in national histories that search for one interior cultural voice that can stand in for the whole archipelago, as if the many peoples of these islands once shared one worldview, one cultural core, one story.

Postcolonial and decolonial theory are not, in an official capacity, interchangeable. Postcolonial theory analyses the cultural and intellectual aftermath of colonialism. Decolonial theory assumes that colonialism never ended given that its structures continue organising modern life. However, there is significant overlap between the two types of theory, and their theorists have significantly influenced one another over the decades. Here are 10 works which are a quick introduction to this area of political thought and world philosophy.

Frantz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth

Edward Said – Orientalism

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

Walter Mignolo – The Darker Side of Western Modernity

Anibal Quijano – “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”

Enrique Dussel – Philosophy of Liberation

Aimé Césaire – "Discourse on Colonialism"

Homi K. Bhabha – The Location of Culture