Perspectives on postcolonial Europe¹

1. Brief sections of this essay appeared before, in modified form, in Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Racism, Postcolonialism, Transnationalism (Oxford University Press, 2007). The text is reprinted by Permission of Oxford University Press (www.oup.com). Thanks to the publisher for granting permission to reproduce this work.

Abstract

This essay makes a plea for reintroducing Europe into the domain of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, on the grounds not only that postcolonial approaches and methods can be usefully applied to current social, cultural and political trends in contemporary Europe but also that – at least in postcolonial circles – Dipesh Chakrabarty’s passionate call for the “provincialization of Europe” has been heeded only too well. Postcolonialism, it is often said, effectively negates its own prefix; but another way of seeing this is that it looks forward to a time when its own interventionist tactics will no longer be needed; to a time when the neo‐imperial world order it currently describes, and implicitly resists, will have been definitively transformed. A similar idealism informs the notion of “postcolonial Europe” – a notion centred not on the residual figure of the “postcolonial migrant” but on emergent figures like Gilroy’s “Black European”, who are part of a larger process of transition that “may [eventually] take us beyond racialised and racialisable categories of all kinds” (Gilroy, After Empire).

Keywords:

• Europe
• postcolonialism
• empire
• racism
• migration
• cultural studies
• globalization
• multiculturalism

Notes

1. Brief sections of this essay appeared before, in modified form, in Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Racism, Postcolonialism, Transnationalism (Oxford University Press, 2007). The text is reprinted by Permission of Oxford University Press (www.oup.com). Thanks to the publisher for granting permission to reproduce this work.