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 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.

About the Author

Benjamin Zachariah is a senior research fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

Reviews

"The first two paragraphs of Zachariah's The Postcolonial Volk grabbed me so thoroughly that I instantly knew a sleepless night was ahead of me.... He shows that fascism is coming back not only in Trumpian populism; it is also alive and kicking in the anti-Eurocentrism that permeates today's left. If you seriously want the authentic left to come back, drop everything else and read this book!"
-Slavoj Zizek, University of Ljubljana

"A tart, sarcastic, and lethal polemic by a highly original thinker who is clearly unwilling and even unable to suffer fools gladly. Each page bristles with irony, insight, and erudition."
-Stephen Holmes, New York University

"Rejecting the emancipatory claims of postcolonial/decolonial scholarship, Benjamin Zachariah charges it with indigenism, obscurantism and moral relativism.... Essential reading for all who refuse to avenge Western brutalities by glorifying the worst of the East."
-Chandak Sengoopta, Birkbeck College, University of London

"Benjamin Zachariah's original and timely analysis of postcolonial thinking redirects our attention to deeper, structural, almost atavistic forces that linger on in the perpetuation of voelkisch ideas that have done so much to pervert modern democracies and undermine global humanism."
-Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University

"I have been impressed by this book most importantly for its critique of the tendency to consider only 'the oppressed' (or those who claim to speak for them) as legitimated to present and represent their experiences, struggles and resistances, their oppression being the unique basis for the right to speak."
-Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Florence

"Thought patterns from postcolonial and decolonial studiesthreaten to lapse into a thorough re-ethnicization of belonging of a voelkisch type, Benjamin Zachariah argues. The critique of universal values as an exclusively Western fabrication facilitates their abrogation in the name of cultural exceptionalism."
-Hans Harder, Heidelberg University

Book Information
ISBN 9781509562633
Author Benjamin Zachariah
Format Hardback
Page Count 176
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd