The Postcolonial Volk - Couverture rigide

Zachariah, Benjamin

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 150956263X ISBN 13 : 9781509562633

Editeur : Polity Press, 2026

Synopsis

Postcolonial theory and its bedfellow, decolonial theory, are the most flourishing products of academia in recent times. Transcending their origins in universities and literary criticism, and clustering around what is coming to be known as 'theory from the Global South', their guiding assumptions have leaked into the public domain and become shibboleths with which to acknowledge historically victimised communities. With this success has come a disturbing trend: political activity operates based on clumsy victimhood analogies, and much of its rhetoric is deliberately anti-rational, reproducing and perpetuating the manufactured categories of racist and sectarian imaginations.

Benjamin Zachariah examines this phenomenon and its worrying affinities with völkisch thinking. A product of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, völkisch is an adjective that indicates a community of blood, soil and race. These aspects are less explicit in its newer guises, which instead invoke communities of collective memory. Nonetheless, Zachariah argues, the older form of collective belonging remains embedded in the apparently new attitudes, as a compulsory community of inherited victimhood and organic belonging.

Striking and thought-provoking, this book is a major intervention that will be of interest to anyone concerned by the more insidious side of postcolonialism.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Benjamin Zachariah is a senior research fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Polity Press
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 150956263X
• ISBN 13: 9781509562633
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 176
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218; gpsr.requests@easproject.com; ; Mustamäe tee 50, 10621, Tallinn, Estonia; Tallinn; Estonie