{"id":47756,"date":"2022-05-13T12:30:49","date_gmt":"2022-05-13T11:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=47756"},"modified":"2025-08-07T11:45:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T10:45:27","slug":"on-decolonization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2022\/05\/13\/on-decolonization\/","title":{"rendered":"On decolonization"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The times they are a-changing, Bob Dylan once noted, and so are the concepts we use to make sense of the world. One of these concepts is decolonization. It clearly has gained wider currency in recent years, but it has also changed in meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initially, \u201cdecolonization\u201d was invented by European elites<\/a> and \u201cworked to absorb and deflect the phenomenon it ostensibly described.\u201d Then, the concept entered the vocabulary of anticolonial thinkers \u2013 maybe most prominently Frantz Fanon\u2019s, who gave it a new, combative meaning<\/a>. His \u201cdecolonization\u201d was a call to arms as much as it was the promise of an existential revolution: a complete undoing, a reversal even, of the colonial situation. Many activists in Asia and Africa, however, simultaneously used, or preferred, other concepts. They spoke of \u201cfreedom, \u201cself-determination\u201d, \u201cnational liberation,\u201d or \u201canticolonial revolution\u201d to demand, implement, and interpret the end of empire. After the 1970s, finally, \u201cdecolonization\u201d was mostly used by historians<\/a>. They serenely employed the somewhat bulky term as a device of periodization, and to designate a process they studied \u2013 a shorthand for the years between 1945 and 1975 that brought the final demise of European overseas empires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then something changed. Across large parts of the globe, the last decade or so has witnessed the emergence of academic and social movements that proclaim, and put into practice, a turn towards \u201cdecolonial\u201d politics. Rhodes Must Fall<\/em>, the dethroning or defacing of other monuments connected to the past of slavery or colonialism, as well as parts of the Black Lives Matter<\/em><\/a> movement are examples, and their power to make a difference in the conversation about colonial legacies and present-day racism has been impressive. Calls for \u201cdecolonizing\u201d the classroom, the museum, the courts, the penal system, but also our diet, health system, fashion industry, and of course our minds have become ubiquitous. \u201cDecolonize everything!<\/a>\u201d is the title of a podcast, and a slogan printed on T-shirts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This effervescence of a new, decolonial politics has produced different reactions. Among them is, unsurprisingly, the fierce opposition of those \u2013 from conservatives to liberals \u2013 who feel threatened. They denigrate the movement as \u201cwokeness\u201d or \u201ccancel culture\u201d menacing national traditions<\/a>, Western identity, the freedom of speech, or the reign of reason itself. Others, by contrast, fear that the movement is not going far enough yet or is being coopted by neoliberal capitalism. As the term \u201chas taken over our social media timelines with a vengeance\u201d, as Bhakti Shringarpure noted, and \u201cdecolonization is all kinds of trendy these days,\u201d they criticize that \u201cdecolonizing is the new black<\/a>\u201d, caution against \u201cfake decolonization<\/a>\u201d, and demand \u201cto decolonize the decolonization movement<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems obvious to me that much is gained by the recent decolonial movement. Instead of conceiving of empire as a historical period that can be contained in the past and studied \u2013 or worse, romanticized \u2013 from the safe distance of the present, activists now, not unlike earlier \u201cpostcolonial\u201d thinkers, urge us to consider how colonialism endured beyond the end of empire into our present. They inspire us to interrogate the many ways in which structures rooted in colonialism continue to define what we learn and how we think. They make us alert to whose voices get heard and who is being excluded, and how we can, how we must change this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like others<\/a> who are sympathetic to the decolonial turn, I also think, however, that much gets lost in the insistence on a structural \u201ccoloniality\u201d that risks obfuscating the difference between past and present, and that tends to see colonialism everywhere. Ironically, I would like to add, some of the new uses of decolonization \u2014 as a call to action, and as utopia \u2013, tend to obscure the significance of decolonization as history<\/em>, that is, as a set of processes in the twentieth century that remade ideologies and practices of empire, and that gave birth to a distinctly post-imperial world between 1945 and 1975. While colonial mindsets did not simply vanish with the end of imperial rule, they did not remain unaltered, either. And while it is ultimately impossible to determine when exactly empire ended or when decolonization will be complete, we must, I believe, take seriously the historical transition out of formal empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The richness of this transition can be studied in many ways, and in various locales. In my new article for Contemporary European History<\/a><\/em>, I focus on its history in the metropole and approach it through the lens of migrations. Looking at Portugal in its Western European context, I aim to shed light on the concrete effects that the unravelling of empires had. How did Portugal deal with this transition, and with the people it brought (back) to the country? How does empire both die and live on in the post-imperial metropole? How did decolonization remake communities, and what are the roles of racialization and racism in this process? In conversation with scholarly works on Portugal, France and the United Kingdom, my article argues that decolonization \u2013 and the migrations from the (former) colonies that it provoked \u2013 triggered and molded a new process of post-imperial nation-building in Western Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This claim is substantiated by surveying how migrations of decolonization affected citizenship, the welfare state, and public memories. Comparative and relational in its approach, the article links the histories of white \u2018returnees\u2019 from Portugal\u2019s African colonies after the 1974 Carnation Revolution to those of non-white \u2018immigrants.\u2019 It argues that we must situate in the same analytical field all those who migrated from (formerly) colonized territories to the metropole during the drawn-out end of empire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent decolonial movement has liberated the concept of decolonization from the specialist language of historical studies, infusing it with renewed urgency. But history is still needed in order to avoid \u2018excessive abstraction<\/a>, rampant culturalism,\u2019 and a sweeping \u2018\u201deverything is colonial\u201d-rhetoric\u2019. Decolonization as a combative present, and as a utopian future, can only gain from looking at decolonization as history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the full open access article Building Nations After Empire: Post-Imperial Migrations to Portugal in a Western European Context<\/a> on Cambridge Core now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The times they are a-changing, Bob Dylan once noted, and so are the concepts we use to make sense of the world. One of these concepts is decolonization. It clearly has gained wider currency in recent years, but it has also changed in meaning. Initially, \u201cdecolonization\u201d was invented by European elites and \u201cworked to absorb […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":822,"featured_media":47949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[9833,3500,11807,247,3713],"coauthors":[9575],"class_list":["post-47756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","tag-20th-century-history","tag-ceh","tag-cehblog","tag-contemporary-european-history","tag-european-history"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/822"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47756"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47967,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47756\/revisions\/47967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47756"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=47756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}