Postcolonialism Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Naguib Mahfouz’s Last Dreams of Cairo

In a new translation of the author’s late writing, dreaming is an act of mapping Egyptian identity

November 11, 2025 • by Mariam Matar

The Arabic word barzakh refers to the liminal space between death and the day of judgment. In his introduction to a new collection of Naguib Mahfouz’s late-career writing on dreams, editor and translator Hisham Matar describes Mahfouz ensconced in a barzakh-like state during the final decade of his life. In ...

Colonization

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

A plea for a blank slate and a new beginning

October 9, 2025 • by Kwach Abonyo

Of all the ways Frantz Fanon has been misinterpreted, none is more persistent or consequential than the misunderstanding of his theory of violence. His reflections, especially as represented in The Wretched of the Earth, have drawn intense debate and condemnation, particularly from liberal and post-Enlightenment humanist circles. Among his most notable ...

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

Activism

Protestors Aren’t Destroying History, They Are Recasting It

When monuments to racism, slavery, and empire come down, new possibilities rise up

June 25, 2020 • by Durba Ghosh and Kelly King-O’Brien

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, the movement to remove Confederate monuments has accelerated rapidly as part of a new wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Protestors argue these monuments represent institutional racism and should be removed immediately. Many governors and local politicians readily ...

Protestors Aren’t Destroying History, They Are Recasting It

Race

black on Black

The digital future of color bias and racism

June 15, 2020 • by Asha Hassan Nooli

Asha Hassan Nooli is a rising sophomore at Lang College, and a first-generation American coming from a Somali background. She is interested in stimulating social reform on a global scale. The essay that follows was Hassan Nooli’s contribution to the New School Dean’s Honor Symposium, an annual celebration of the ...

Reviews

Whose Home? Whose Rule?

Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule and the politics of autochthony

May 21, 2020 • by Mat Cusick

Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press: 2020) In February 2002, five months after Narendra Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, an anti-Muslim pogrom erupted in his state. In three months of violence, Hindu nationalist rioters raped and murdered hundreds of Muslim ...

Feature

Postcolonial Investigations and the Role of Necessary Discontinuity

A Review of Iain Chambers’ Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities

October 24, 2017 • by Dora Suarez

In Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities, Iain Chambers is preoccupied with the critical foreclosure that impedes our perception of the ways contemporary migration, as well as “the racism that precedes and accompanies it,” is not abnormal or exceptional.[1] In face of the waves of violence that convulse the landscape of the ...

Postcolonial Investigations and the Role of Necessary Discontinuity

Education

Decolonizing Epistemologies: Part 2

Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology

April 11, 2017 • by Alana Lentin

This blog post is republished with the permission of the author, Alana Lentin, from her blog, alanalentin.net. This discussion is a continuation of the discussion begun in the last post, Decolonizing Epistemologies: part 1. Decolonial approach The decolonial approach to the discussion of the relationship between modernity and coloniality and how this continues ...

Education

Decolonizing Epistemologies: Part 1

Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology

April 10, 2017 • by Alana Lentin

This blog post is republished with the permission of the author, Alana Lentin, from her blog, alanalentin.net . What are the possibilities for social and political critique opened up by the decolonial approach? I shall examine the interconnections between postcolonial theory and the Decolonial, uncovering the trajectory that began with Indian subaltern studies ...