- At this time in the twenty-first century, sovereignty is visibly and brutally under threat (Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan, or Sudan), as we are experiencing the breakdown of what were, following WWII, globally accepted concepts: collective safety, human rights, and multilateralism. Keeping this sense of renewed territorial precarity in mind, presenters on this panel interrogate the parameters and potential of postcolonial theory through the study of artefacts from specific parts of the broadly conceived postcolonial world. While the “decolonial” is often seen as a corrective to postcolonial theory, our panel understands the "decolonial turn" as an opportunity in postcolonial studies that inaugurates a response to postcolonialism’s insufficiencies through an aesthetic and political renewal.
Two senior scholars who have participated in debates on postcolonialism, Deepika Bahri and Anjali Prabhu, and two scholars completing their dissertations, Diaa Alsersawi and Anmol Sahni, take up the challenge, asking, “Once more, with Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?” (title of Bahri’s 1995 ARIEL essay). The panel is subtly structured as a questioning of the field by younger scholars (35 minutes) with senior scholars responding with their own analyses to the demands brought by the new work (20 minutes). The idea is not to produce more purely theoretical discussion but to bring the eloquence of new creative texts to “speak” in this debate. We expect lively audience interaction in the 20 minutes allotted to it. Hybridity, mimicry, subversion through local languages, reading against the grain in the archive, and renewing Marxist methods have provided some classic forms of orientation for postcolonial methods. Models from Said, Spivak, and Bhabha were extended and challenged through interdisciplinarity. South Asian and Anglophone predominance was dislodged by the decolonial challenge from a Latin American perspective and also from the Francophone tradition (Glissant, Khatibi, and Césaire entering alongside the already ubiquitous Fanon). An insight from the decolonial theorists that the “coloniality of power” (Anibal Quijano) undergirds a continual, essentially capitalist, form of exploitation grounds the papers. Modeled on Prabhu’s Hybridity (2007) that questioned the overused term through a situated study of the creolizing processes in the Indian Ocean islands, our panel provides such situated readings to both problematize and reinvigorate postcolonial theory.
Alsersawi analyzes the Lumière brothers’ visual narratives in their collection of short films (La Palestine en 1896), to highlight the way Palestinians’ predicament as a stateless people troubles the decolonial turn. Alsersaawi shows how the first images of Palestine embody the circumstances of displacement of the filmmakers from their subjects. Displacement – under vastly different circumstances - becomes fundamental to the filmmaking endeavor by contemporary Palestinian directors, such as Elia Sulieman or Hany Abu Assad.
Taking up Alsersawi’s formulation of the paradoxical repetition (with a difference) of displacement in the film form, Prabhu examines the cinematic language of the young Parisian filmmaker, Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) as the playing out of another repetition. In this documentary film recording the return of artefacts from a Paris museum to the current Republic of Benin the younger Diop (her uncle was Djibril Diop Mambety) signals a filiality to Third Cinema, while reinvigorating the film language to understand a decolonial gesture within the neocolonial African state.
Sahni, reads the “arboreal aesthetics” in Janice Pariat’s novel, Everything the Light Touches as a distinctly decolonial mode of literary form and worldmaking, asking what distinguishes it from anticolonial and postcolonial frameworks? Sahni traces a shift from critique and representation toward epistemic and ontological reorientation. Privileging a fictional nomadic tribe, the Nongiaid, amongst the Khasi peoples of the Northeast of India, Pariat displaces the logics of circulation, extraction, and translation. Transcending imperial and world-literary paradigms, this reading calls for modes of reading grounded in care and accountability beyond decolonial dismantling.
Responding to Sahni’s focus on a more immediate connection to real world extraction, Bahri closes out the presentations by spotlighting internal colonialism appearing in South Asian literature and film as a decolonial imperative. Bahri points to the growing corpus in Dalit, Indigenous, and Ecological studies that has long demanded but not yet accomplished a theoretical reframing of postcolonial and decolonial modalities. Identifying some of the aesthetic insurgencies that do not shy away from violent images of carnage and devastation in new artistic creation from India, Bahri focuses on the treatment of caste in the stunning documentary, Love, Sex aur Dhokha (2010), that uses found footage on "honor" killings, showing that the bolder aesthetics of gore shocks decolonial aesthetics into urgent interrogation.