Questioning Colonialism, 2005-2023

Abstract

My book Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005) is a collection of essays engaging colonial and postcolonial studies and examining essential categories – including identity, modernity, globalization, nation-state, and empire – used in these and other scholarly domains. This essay discusses how this book came to be written, some of the arguments it provoked, and the continued salience of the colonial question between 2005 and 2023. It explores the relationship between empirical and theoretical scholarship, the difficulty of following conceptual categories across time, and the tension between concepts used by activists to make claims and scholars to analyze social and political phenomena.

Keywords

• decolonization
• colonialism
• globalization
• identity
• empire
• modernity