Continental · 1950s – today
Postcolonial thought
Colonialism ruled minds as well as lands, so liberation requires undoing the categories through which the West described and governed others.
How did empire shape the way we know and see others?
After 1945, struggles for independence swept Asia and Africa. Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique working in Algeria during its war against France, analysed racism and colonial violence from the inside; later Said and Spivak, teaching in American universities, turned literary and philosophical theory on the archive of empire.
Colonial rule depended on knowledge: maps, grammars, censuses and novels that described the colonised as backward, timeless or silent. If that knowledge was a form of power, independence alone would not end it; it survives in self-images, school curricula and Western scholarship, and must be dismantled by critique.
- Colonialism dehumanises both colonised and coloniser.
- “The Orient” is a Western construction serving power.
- The subaltern is spoken for, rarely heard.
It transformed literary studies, history and anthropology, and feeds today’s debates on decolonising universities, museums and philosophy itself.
Thinkers
1925–1961Frantz FanonMartinican psychiatrist and theorist of anticolonial liberation1935–2003Edward SaidPalestinian-American literary critic at Columbia Universityborn 1942Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakIndian-born theorist and translator of Derrida, at Columbia UniversityKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofMarxismFanon and Spivak drew on Marx, and Gramsci’s word “subaltern” became a key term of the field.Grew out of
ExistentialismFanon wrote in dialogue with Sartre, who prefaced The Wretched of the Earth.Grew out of
Post-structuralismSaid built Orientalism on Foucault’s idea of discourse, and Spivak translated Derrida.