Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies

Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualising different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post-) colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blend...

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Main Author: Göttsche, Dirk
Format: Article
Published: SAGE 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/47686/
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author Göttsche, Dirk
author_facet Göttsche, Dirk
author_sort Göttsche, Dirk
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualising different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post-) colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodisation and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled ‘postcolonial’. The colonial revisionism of Germany’s interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial.
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spelling nottingham-476862020-05-04T18:47:56Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/47686/ Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies Göttsche, Dirk Taking German history and culture as a starting point, this essay suggests a historical approach to reconceptualising different forms of literary engagement with colonial discourse, colonial legacies and (post-) colonial memory in the context of Comparative Postcolonial Studies. The deliberate blending of a historical, a conceptual and a political understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ in postcolonial scholarship raises problems of periodisation and historical terminology when, for example, anti-colonial discourse from the colonial period or colonialist discourse in Weimar Germany are labelled ‘postcolonial’. The colonial revisionism of Germany’s interwar period is more usefully classed as post-imperial, as are particular strands of retrospective engagement with colonial history and legacy in British, French and other European literatures and cultures after 1945. At the same time, some recent developments in Francophone, Anglophone and German literature, e.g. Afropolitan writing, move beyond defining features of postcolonial discourse and raise the question of the post-postcolonial. SAGE 2017-06-01 Article PeerReviewed Göttsche, Dirk (2017) Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies. Journal of European Studies, 47 (2). pp. 111-128. ISSN 1740-2379 Colonialism Imperialism Postcolonialism Comparative postcolonial studies Memory Afropolitanism http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047244117700070 doi:10.1177/0047244117700070 doi:10.1177/0047244117700070
spellingShingle Colonialism
Imperialism
Postcolonialism
Comparative postcolonial studies
Memory
Afropolitanism
Göttsche, Dirk
Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
title Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
title_full Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
title_fullStr Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
title_full_unstemmed Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
title_short Post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
title_sort post-imperialism, postcolonialism and beyond: towards a periodisation of cultural discourse about colonial legacies
topic Colonialism
Imperialism
Postcolonialism
Comparative postcolonial studies
Memory
Afropolitanism
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/47686/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/47686/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/47686/