Book Launch “The Postcolonial Volk” with author Benjamin Zachariah
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Join us for the book launch of Benjamin Zachariah’s new book “The Postcolonial Volk” with a discussion with the author.
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.
Table of Contents:
1. ‘How Dare You, Sir! You Must Be a White Man’: The Premises of Our Divided World
2. So What is Point, Decolonize?
3. Which Way is South?
4. Postcolonial Heroes, Fascist Heroes
5. Post-Lefts and New Rights: Postcolonial, Decolonial, Neo-Fascist
"Benjamin Zachariah works at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and with the project on the contemporary history of historiography at the University of Trier. He was trained in the discipline of history in the last decade of the previous century. After an uneventful beginning to a perfectly normal academic career, he began to take an interest in the importance of history outside the circle of professional historians, and the destruction of the profession by the profession. He is interested in the writing and teaching of history and the place of history in the public domain."
Published by Polity Books, the book will be for sale in store!
Statement by Benjamin Zachariah
Spaces are limited!
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.
Table of Contents:
1. ‘How Dare You, Sir! You Must Be a White Man’: The Premises of Our Divided World
2. So What is Point, Decolonize?
3. Which Way is South?
4. Postcolonial Heroes, Fascist Heroes
5. Post-Lefts and New Rights: Postcolonial, Decolonial, Neo-Fascist
"Benjamin Zachariah works at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and with the project on the contemporary history of historiography at the University of Trier. He was trained in the discipline of history in the last decade of the previous century. After an uneventful beginning to a perfectly normal academic career, he began to take an interest in the importance of history outside the circle of professional historians, and the destruction of the profession by the profession. He is interested in the writing and teaching of history and the place of history in the public domain."
Published by Polity Books, the book will be for sale in store!
Statement by Benjamin Zachariah
Spaces are limited!
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