The Postcolonial Volk

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 voelkisch thinking. A product of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, voelkisch is an adjective that indicates a community of blood, soil and race. These aspects are less explicit in its newer guises, which instead invoke a community of collective memory and victimhood. Nonetheless, Zachariah argues, that older form of collective belonging remains embedded in apparently new attitudes: a compulsory community of both inherited victimhood and organic belonging.

Striking and thought-provoking, this book is a major intervention for anyone concerned by the more insidious side of postcolonialism.