How not to hide decolonization

ABSTRACT

This short article responds to Ron Eyerman and Giuseppe Sciortino, eds, The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). The response considers the main themes of the book, including cultural trauma and the violence of decolonization. It suggests that these and other avenues of interest might benefit from including case studies that are missing here: German expellees, and colonial “returnees” in Russia and Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• repatriation
• cultural trauma
• German expellees
• Russian decolonization
• British decolonization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My title is an oblique reference to the recent book by Daniel Immerwahr (Immerwahr 2019).

2 Much more can be said about the relationship between “cultural trauma”, on the one hand, and degrees of economic insecurity and economic prospects among colonial repatriates, on the other.

3 The literature on migrants and trauma is considerable. An excellent and original recent study is Gutiérrez (2020).