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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-2846-0258

Abstract

This article describes a discursive shift at the beginning of the twenty-first century in academic and public debates from postcolonial to decolonial critiques and asks what this means for the study of national and imperial memories. While some critics, like Robert J. C. Young, see this shift within postcolonial discourse, others, like Sylvia Wynter, believe that postcolonial theory itself needs to be decolonized. Regardless of whether one believes the shift is taking place within postcolonial studies or caused from outside, in any case it presents at least twelve complex transformations. While many of the characteristics hark back to a longer history, the shift has nonetheless brought about their radicalization. One important change is the demand to leave behind European conceptual hegemony, including a focus on “Western” elite universities and European languages. A second aspect is the departure from postcolonial theory’s infatuation with poststructuralism, including paradoxes, which also entails a third move away from exhaustive and systematic theorizing towards specific narrative explorations. The critique of Eurocentric ideas of modernity and postmodernity is a fourth element, relating to the fifth; that of decolonial thinking’s rejection of capitalism, communism, and socialism. A sixth point is the crossing of national frameworks through concepts such as creolization, hybridity, and transculturality. Seventh is the critique of amorphous and ahistorical ideas of “the West,” an increasing awareness of internal colonization after the so-called age of colonization, and a widening of the gaze towards “non-Western” forms of colonialism and imperialism. An eighth aspect is the move beyond historical relations and boundaries of empires toward recognizing, for instance, South-South relations of cultural remembrance. Nineth is the problematization of national and imperial memories’ entanglements with constructions of race, class, gender, and other such categories. The push to reconsider and transcend concepts of the human and humanism towards a more-than-human understanding presents a tenth and rapidly expanding discussion. An eleventh point is the self-reflexive turn to academic authority to question ideas of an abstract, objective, and universal standpoint. A twelfth and only preliminarily last point is the decolonial strategy of transforming academic writing by including both public and personal elements, text, images, and other materials. The article discusses these discursive transformations in relation to cultural memories and more specifically their negotiation in Hazel V. Carby’s historical biography Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. Carby was born in the first half of the twentieth century, thus living through the historical eras of decolonization and postcolonialism, and she wrote Imperial Intimacies during the discursive shift from postcolonial to decolonial debates. This text not only exemplifies the twelve shifts, but also transcends both theoretical-political umbrella terms to suggest that such rallying cries while enabling critical insights sometimes also inhibit understanding historical developments, everyday practices, and creative imagination. Like her mentor Stuart Hall, Carby’s historical biography suggests that in the end theory is only a means to something more important, namely, confronting the complex, dynamic, and interlocking challenges ahead.

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