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The postcolonial condition
Mezzadra, Sandro Rahola, Federico
Mezzadra, Sandro
Rahola, Federico
Author(s)
Mezzadra, Sandro
Rahola, Federico
Rahola, Federico
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Keywords
global ethics
GE Subjects
Political ethics
Ethics of political systems
Governance and ethics
Ethics of political systems
Governance and ethics
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Abstract
"Our time appears entirely incapable of giving itself a positive definition. It is a ―post‖ time: post-modern, post-historic, post-Fordist and, according to an even tiresome refrain, postcolonial. A never-accomplished transition seems to be the only possible framework to grasp the present. At first gaze the postcolonial discourse appears merely to reflect such a predicament. Setting aside, for the moment, the clamour around the question ―what is the meaning of ‗post‘ in postcolonial,‖ and looking at the most widespread understanding of this term across the ―global‖ theoretical debate and public discourse, there‘s little to get excited about. It seems that the era of binary codes, so magisterially defined by Fanon, which organised the space, the time and the experience of the colonies, has been followed by one in which everything is entangled or ―hybridised.‖ It seems that we are witnessing the inverse of the movement described by Max Weber in the final, memorable pages of the Protestant Ethic: the "iron cage" of colonial despotism is said by many to have turned into a "light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment."[1] A set of displacements is said to have transformed the world into a plane of absolute immanence, crossed by nomadic subjects committed, on the edge of irony, to composing shifting identities: one moment drawing fragments from the now disused warehouses of the old colonial emporia; the next feeding on the memories of the anti-colonial struggles. So creolisation is well on its way to becoming a global mood, promoted by the large corporations as it is by youth cultures; adopted by tailors as it is by architects and restaurant menus."
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Article
Date
2006
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With permission of the license/copyright holder