Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory

Six traditions, one argument. This lesson takes the body of theory that has tried to state what they have in common — and there are two such bodies, they disagree, and the disagreement is more instructive than either alone.

Postcolonial theory developed in Anglophone literary and cultural studies out of the South Asian and Middle Eastern experience. Decolonial theory developed in Latin America, in Spanish and Portuguese, out of the experience of conquest four centuries earlier.

They are frequently treated as the same thing. They are not, and knowing why is the point of this lesson.

Two dates, and what they imply.

Ask a postcolonial theorist when the colonial period begins and the answer will centre on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the British in India, the scramble for Africa, the high imperial era whose archive Said analysed (6.1.1).

Ask a decolonial theorist and the answer is 1492.

That difference is not pedantry. It determines everything that follows.

If colonialism begins in the eighteenth century, then it is a phase of modernity — something modern Europe did once it had become modern. Modernity comes first; colonialism is what it did. The critique is therefore of modernity's failure to live up to itself, and the remedy is to extend its promises to those it excluded.

If it begins in 1492, then the conquest of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans and the extraction of American silver are not consequences of European modernity but its conditions. There is no modernity that precedes them. Modernity and coloniality are two faces of one thing, and the critique cannot be that modernity failed to include everyone, because the exclusion is what constituted it.

Enrique Dussel's formulation: "Modernity is a European phenomenon, but constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity." Europe becomes Europe by having an outside.

And Aníbal Quijano's conclusion follows: colonialism ended, and coloniality did not. The formal administrations were dismantled; the structure of knowledge, authority and labour they produced was not.

Both traditions are answering the same question, and it is the one this Part has been building towards.

The formal empires are gone. Almost every colonised territory is now an independent state with a seat at the United Nations. Why does the structure persist?

Persist in what? Three things the traditions agree on.

In the distribution of wealth, which tracks the imperial map with uncomfortable closeness (4.5.3).

In the categories — race, tribe, caste, tradition, development — which were produced administratively and outlived the administrations (6.1.1, 6.2.5, 6.4.1).

And in the organisation of knowledge: which institutions produce theory and which produce data; which languages count; which questions are general and which are local; and who is a theorist and who is an informant.

Both traditions locate the answer in something that was not removed by independence. They disagree about what it is, where it came from, and what would remove it.

Postcolonial theory

The canonical trio: Said (6.1.1), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha — with the Subaltern Studies collective as the historiographical wing.

Said established the framework: colonial discourse as producing its object (6.1.1).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), the most cited and most misread essay in the tradition.

The question is not whether subordinated people can talk. Obviously they can. Spivak's question is whether the subaltern can be heard as a speaking subject within the discursive structures available — or whether their speech is always reinscribed into someone else's framework.

Her central case: the debate over sati (4.2.4). The British represented it as "white men saving brown women from brown men"; Indian nationalists represented it as "the women actually wanted to die." Two framings, contesting each other, and in neither does the woman's own account appear — because no framework existed in which it would have registered as testimony.

And her example of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri — a young woman who hanged herself in 1926, having waited for her menstruation so that the death could not be read as illicit pregnancy, and who had been unable to carry out a political assassination she had been assigned. Her deliberate attempt to make her act legible was, Spivak reports, read by her own family for decades as a love affair.

Spivak's conclusion — "the subaltern cannot speak" — is a statement about the structure, not about the person. She later said the sentence was "an inadvisable remark," precisely because it was read as denying agency rather than as describing the absence of a hearing.

And her positive proposal is methodological: strategic essentialism (a term she also later distanced herself from) — the provisional use of a unified identity for political purposes while acknowledging its constructedness; and the demand that the intellectual "unlearn their privilege" and examine what their own position permits them not to hear.

Homi Bhabha — the psychological and cultural register. Hybridity: colonial encounter produces neither preserved tradition nor successful assimilation but mixed, unstable forms. Mimicry: the colonised subject encouraged to be "almost the same, but not quite" — and the "not quite" is both the mechanism of subordination and, Bhabha argues, a source of menace to colonial authority, because the copy exposes the original's contingency. The third space: the site of enunciation where meaning is negotiated and neither party controls the outcome.

Bhabha's prose is famously difficult, and the criticism that his framework locates resistance in ambivalence and textual instability rather than in organised action is widely made and hard to answer.

Subaltern Studies — the historiographical project founded by Ranajit Guha in 1982, taking Gramsci's term for subordinate groups (5.5.1).

Its target: Indian historiography written from two elite standpoints — colonialist accounts crediting British administration, and nationalist accounts crediting the Congress leadership. In both, the peasantry appears as material to be mobilised.

Its programme: to recover the autonomous domain of subaltern politics — showing that peasant insurgency had its own logic, organisation and consciousness, not derived from elite leadership.

Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) is the major work: a systematic analysis of the forms of peasant rebellion — negation, ambiguity, modality, solidarity, transmission, territoriality — read from the counter-insurgency archive, since the insurgents left few records of their own.

And the method is the interesting part: reading the archive against the grain, extracting the rebels' logic from the reports of those suppressing them. This is Du Bois's method in Black Reconstruction (4.5.4), arrived at independently.

The collective later split, with some members moving towards the discursive and literary concerns of postcolonial theory and others — and critics — arguing that the turn away from political economy abandoned the project's original purpose.

Decolonial theory

The Latin American tradition, and its central concept is Quijano's.

Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018), Peruvian sociologist. Coloniality of power (colonialidad del poder) is the framework's foundation.

Its claim: the conquest of the Americas produced a novel structure of world power with two founding elements.

One: the invention of race. Quijano's argument is that "race" as we know it did not exist before 1492. It was produced in the Americas as a classification of the conquered — indio, negro, mestizo, and, crucially, "European" itself as a category — and it became the basic criterion of social classification worldwide.

Two: a global division of labour organised by that classification. Slavery, serfdom, wage labour and independent production were distributed across the world system by racial category, and the distribution was not incidental to capitalism but constitutive of it. This is Robinson's racial capitalism (4.5.3) arrived at independently.

And the third element, added by Quijano and developed by others: coloniality of knowledge. European knowledge was universalised, other knowledges were subordinated as local, folkloric or superstitious, and the criteria for what counts as knowledge were set by one party.

Walter Mignolo develops this into epistemic disobedience and border thinking — thinking from the position of those the system classified, using the categories the system produced and turning them.

Enrique Dussel supplies the philosophical argument: the "myth of modernity" — that Europe's development was endogenous, a matter of its own reason and institutions — is false, and Europe's centrality dates from 1492 rather than from any prior superiority.

María Lugones adds the coloniality of gender: that the conquest imposed a gender system as well as a racial one, and that pre-conquest arrangements in the Americas were not simply patriarchal in the European form. This is the tradition's most important internal development and it connects directly to 5.6.2.

And Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Portuguese, working substantially in Latin America) contributes epistemicide — the destruction of knowledge systems — and the "abyssal line" dividing knowledge that counts from knowledge that does not exist for the system.

The disagreement is substantive, and setting it out is the most useful thing this lesson does.

	Postcolonial	Decolonial
Origin point	18th–19th century high imperialism	1492
Geographical base	South Asia, Middle East, Anglophone academy	Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese
Theoretical sources	Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Gramsci	Dependency theory, liberation philosophy, Fanon
Central concept	discourse, representation, hybridity	coloniality of power and knowledge
Modernity is	a project whose promises were unevenly delivered	constituted by coloniality; the two are inseparable
The remedy	critique, deconstruction, provincialising Europe	delinking, epistemic disobedience, pluriversality
Located in	literature and cultural studies departments	sociology, philosophy, social movements

And the substantive disagreements:

On modernity. Postcolonial theory generally works within modernity's critical resources — Foucault, Marx, Derrida — to expose its exclusions. Decolonial theory argues this is insufficient, because those resources are themselves products of the structure being criticised. Mignolo's position is that critique from within reproduces the terms; what is needed is delinking.

On the discipline. Postcolonial theory is largely a project of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, conducted in elite Western universities, and its practitioners are frequently diasporic South Asian intellectuals holding chairs in the United States. Decolonial theory has made this an explicit criticism: that a critique of Western knowledge produced in Western institutions in the Western academy's most fashionable idiom is compromised.

And the postcolonial reply is worth stating: that decolonial theory's call for delinking is more easily announced than performed, that its own key texts circulate through the same academic apparatus, and that Quijano and Mignolo also hold or held Western university positions.

Neither side has clean hands, and both know it. Which is 6.8's problem, and it is genuine rather than rhetorical.

The materialist criticism

The sharpest criticism of both traditions comes from Marxists, and it should not be dismissed.

Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (1992) and Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) make the case at length.

The argument, in four parts:

It substitutes culture for political economy. A body of theory about colonialism that produces enormous literatures on representation, discourse and identity and comparatively little on land, labour, extraction and capital has misplaced its object.

It essentialises the difference it claims to defend. In arguing that Western categories do not apply to non-Western societies, postcolonial theory reproduces the Orientalist claim that the East is fundamentally other. Chibber's specific target is Subaltern Studies' claim that capital failed to universalise in India — he argues that capital never universalised anywhere in the way the claim requires, including in Europe, and that Indian capitalism is not sui generis but a case of a general process.

It denies universalism to those who need it. The claims of the poor, of workers, of women rest on universal categories — human rights, exploitation, equality. A theory holding that universals are Western impositions removes the vocabulary in which those claims are made.

And its institutional position is compromised: a radical critique conducted in the most prestigious institutions of the societies criticised, in an idiom accessible only to those trained in them.

The replies, which are also serious:

That the cultural is not a substitute for the material but a dimension of it, and that the categories through which extraction was organised — race, tribe, native, developing — are not epiphenomenal.

That Chibber's target is a specific claim of one wing of Subaltern Studies, and that treating it as a refutation of the whole field is the flattening it accuses others of.

And that the universalism defended is a particular universalism — one that arrived with gunboats — and that the demand is not for its abandonment but for its actual generalisation, which requires acknowledging where it came from.

This course's position: the materialist criticism lands hardest on the literary-cultural wing, less on the historiographical work of Guha and the early Subaltern Studies, and least on the decolonial tradition, which grew out of dependency theory and retained its political economy. And the demand for both — the material and the categorial — is not obviously incoherent.

Go deeper

Fanon, who belongs to both

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) — born in Martinique, trained as a psychiatrist in France, served in the Free French forces, worked in a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, joined the FLN, and died of leukaemia at thirty-six.

Black Skin, White Masks (1952) — the phenomenology of racialisation. The moment of being fixed by a look and a phrase ("Look, a Negro!"); the "epidermalisation" of inferiority; and the psychological structure of a colonised subject who has internalised the coloniser's gaze. This is Du Bois's double consciousness (4.5.2) with a psychiatrist's apparatus and a colonial setting, and Fanon is less hopeful than Du Bois about merging the two selves.

The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — written as he was dying, and containing four things:

The analysis of the colonial world as Manichean — divided into two zones, with the settler's town and the native's town, and a violence that structures the relation rather than accompanying it.

The much-quoted argument on violence, which is the most misread thing in the tradition. Fanon's claim is descriptive as well as prescriptive: that colonialism is established and maintained by violence, that it responds to nothing else, and that the colonised subject's violence is a reclamation of the agency the system denied. It is an argument about a specific situation of settler colonialism under a war of independence, and reading it as a general endorsement of political violence is not what the text supports.

The chapter on national consciousness — his most prescient. He predicts, in 1961, that decolonisation will produce national bourgeoisies that take over the extractive apparatus without transforming it, becoming intermediaries for foreign capital rather than developing their economies. "The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary." This has aged extraordinarily well.

And the clinical case notes, which close the book: psychiatric cases from the Algerian war, including both Algerians tortured by French forces and French torturers, presented as evidence of what colonial war does to everyone in it.

Fanon is claimed by both traditions and belongs fully to neither, which is a good position for a thinker.

Provincialising Europe

Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincialising Europe (2000) is the most careful statement of the postcolonial position and worth taking on its own terms.

Its problem: European thought is "both indispensable and inadequate" for thinking about non-European histories.

Indispensable — because the categories of modern political and social thought (citizenship, the state, civil society, rights, equality, the individual) are the ones in which claims are made everywhere, including by anti-colonial movements, and they cannot simply be abandoned.

Inadequate — because they were produced from a particular history and carry it, and applying them to other histories produces the "not yet" structure: other societies are described as lacking what Europe has, and therefore as being in Europe's past.

His alternative to rejection: provincialising — not discarding European thought but relocating it as one provincial tradition among others, and writing histories that do not treat European trajectory as the norm from which others deviate.

And his methodological proposal: two histories. History 1 — the universalising logic of capital, which does travel and does apply. History 2 — the specific life-worlds, practices and conceptions that capital encounters, which are not simply obstacles to be overcome and which persist inside capitalist relations.

This is a serious answer, it retains political economy, and it is the version of the argument most compatible with what the rest of this course has established.

"Postcolonial and decolonial theory are the same thing." Different origin points (1492 versus the nineteenth century), different sources, different disciplines, and a substantive disagreement about whether modernity can be criticised from within.

"Spivak said subaltern people cannot talk." She said the structure provides no position from which their speech registers as testimony. She later called the sentence "inadvisable" for exactly this reason.

"Postcolonial theory denies that capitalism is universal." One wing of Subaltern Studies made a version of this claim; Chibber attacks it; and Chakrabarty's History 1 / History 2 distinction concedes the universalising logic while insisting on what it encounters.

"Fanon advocated violence." He analysed a settler-colonial war of independence, argued that the system was constituted by violence and responded to nothing else, and wrote clinical notes on what such a war does to everyone in it.

"Decolonial theory rejects Western thought." It calls for delinking and border thinking — thinking from the position the system produced — which is a different operation from rejection, and its own texts circulate through Western academic institutions.

"Race existed before 1492." Ideas of descent, lineage and inherited difference existed widely. Quijano's claim is that race as a global classification organising a world division of labour was produced in the conquest of the Americas, which is a specific and defensible claim.

Why it matters

It names what all six traditions in this Part have in common: not a shared culture but a shared position in a structure of knowledge production, and a set of categories produced administratively that outlived the administrations.

It supplies coloniality, which is the most useful single concept: colonialism ended, coloniality did not. The distinction between an administration and the structure it left behind explains why formal independence changed less than expected, in every case this Part has covered.

It contains an argument between two traditions that is more useful than either alone. Whether modernity can be criticised from within its own resources, or whether that reproduces the terms, is a real question with real consequences for method — and neither side has answered it.

And it contains the materialist criticism, which this course takes seriously. A body of theory about colonialism should be able to say something about land, labour and extraction, and the wing of it that cannot has misplaced its object. The decolonial tradition, which grew out of dependency theory, is better placed here than the literary-cultural wing — which is worth knowing when choosing what to read.

Two traditions, one argument. Postcolonial: eighteenth–nineteenth century origin, South Asian and Middle Eastern base, Foucault and Derrida as sources, located in literary and cultural studies. Decolonial: 1492, Latin American base, dependency theory and Fanon as sources, located in sociology and philosophy.

And the substantive disagreement: whether modernity's own critical resources can be used against it, or whether that reproduces the terms — delinking against critique.

Postcolonial theory: Said on discourse; Spivak on whether the subaltern can be heard — the sati debate in which neither framing contains the woman's account, and Bhubaneswari Bhaduri's deliberate attempt to make her act legible, read for decades as a love affair; Bhabha on hybridity, mimicry ("almost the same, but not quite") and the third space; and Subaltern Studies, whose method of reading the archive against the grain is Du Bois's, arrived at independently.

Decolonial theory: Quijano's coloniality of power — race invented in the conquest of the Americas as the classification organising a global division of labour, with "European" itself among its categories; coloniality of knowledge; Mignolo's epistemic disobedience and border thinking; Dussel's myth of modernity; Lugones's coloniality of gender; de Sousa Santos's epistemicide and abyssal line.

And the central distinction: colonialism ended; coloniality did not.

The materialist criticism (Ahmad, Chibber): culture substituted for political economy; difference essentialised; universalism denied to those who need it; and an institutional position in the academies of the societies criticised. It lands hardest on the literary-cultural wing and least on the decolonial tradition, which retained dependency theory's political economy.

Fanon belongs to both: epidermalisation and the colonised gaze; the Manichean colonial world; the violence argument, which is about a specific settler-colonial war; and the prescient 1961 prediction that decolonisation would produce national bourgeoisies acting as intermediaries for foreign capital.

And Chakrabarty's Provincialising Europe: European thought as "both indispensable and inadequate," the "not yet" structure, and History 1 / History 2 — the universalising logic of capital, and the life-worlds it encounters and does not dissolve.

Coloniality — the structure of power, knowledge and classification that survived the end of formal colonial administration.

Coloniality of power — Quijano's global division of labour organised by racial classification produced in the conquest.

Coloniality of knowledge — the universalisation of European knowledge and the subordination of others as local.

Coloniality of gender — Lugones's argument that the conquest imposed a gender system as well as a racial one.

Delinking / epistemic disobedience / border thinking — Mignolo's alternative to internal critique.

Subaltern — Gramsci's term for subordinate groups, taken by Guha's historiographical project.

Reading against the grain — extracting subaltern logic from the archives of those suppressing it.

Strategic essentialism — the provisional use of a unified identity for political purposes, acknowledged as constructed.

Hybridity / mimicry / third space — Bhabha's terms for the unstable forms produced by colonial encounter.

Epidermalisation — Fanon's term for the inscription of inferiority on the body.

Provincialising — Chakrabarty's relocation of European thought as one tradition among others.

History 1 / History 2 — the universalising logic of capital, and the life-worlds it encounters.

Epistemicide — de Sousa Santos's term for the destruction of knowledge systems.

One — apply the two origin points. Take any account of modernity and ask whether it treats 1492 as a founding event or as an episode. The answer determines what the account can say.

Two — test coloniality. Find an institution in a formerly colonised country that outlived independence — a legal code, a language policy, a land tenure system, an examination. Ask what changed at independence and what did not.

Three — read against the grain. Take any official report about a subordinated group — a police report, an inspection, a colonial dispatch — and try to reconstruct the group's own logic from it. That is Guha's method and Du Bois's.

Four — find a "not yet." Locate a description of a society as lacking something another has, and note that it places the first in the second's past. Chakrabarty's structure is everywhere in development writing.

Five — hold the materialist objection. Take a piece of postcolonial analysis you find persuasive and ask what it says about land, labour and extraction. If the answer is nothing, ask whether that matters. Sometimes it does not; frequently it does.