Mehmet Özay 06.01.2019
The relationship between the phenomena called colonialism and postcolonialism continues to attract the attention of social scientists. Apart from the different views and explanations on these phenomena, the fact that the processes of their emergence took place almost five hundred years apart from each other deserves to be a topic of discussion in itself. Despite this difference, there are also approaches that extend the phenomenon of colonialism beyond its historical and geographical dimension corresponding to the modern period to almost the entire known history of humanity.
This is probably meant to be a reflection of the phenomenon of good and evil that exists in human societies. Otherwise, after each phase of colonialism, there should have been a 'post' situation, that is, a 'laterness' that transcended it. However, we realize that this is not the case and that this post-ness corresponds to the context of political and social changes that began to characterize the middle of the last century.
It is quite interesting that the structures of thought that take modernization or the modern state as almost the sole share of reality feel the need to examine the entire history of humanity through this concept when it comes to colonialism. Behind this, it is worth examining whether there is a situation that the nations emerging from the region corresponding to the geography called Western Europe, which is the initiator and perpetuator of modern colonial processes, do not want to accept.
What is also noteworthy is that it is almost the same mind that judged that colonialism was over and that post-colonialism, which gave the impression of a kind of emancipationism, had begun. If this is a good thing, it can be accepted without much thought. But perhaps we should also point out that there is an aspect of this that provokes healthy human reason. That is, that for half a millennium, peoples and masses that have been subjected to colonialism have had little chance of being heard by the voices of thinkers and/or circles that the masses can or have put forward as representatives on their behalf. Isn't that the strange thing indeed!
In fact, just looking at the structures in this regard during the colonial period is enough to give us a clue. While the emancipatory attitude that the colonialists have realized after half a millennium has been brought to the forefront of the agenda by their own mouths, in fact, it is the individuals and groups from the colonized societies, and even the whole society, who have actually manifested this emancipatory attitude in terms of action and thought.
Instead of paying heed to this ear-splitting voice, it is necessary to pay close attention to those who, having all the means of colonization in their hands, suddenly have a strong feeling that their own existence is blocked somewhere and carry this feeling into the political and cultural emancipatory sphere, and who, in the face of the peoples they have colonized, become freedom presenters by publicly presenting the danger and threat of objectifying them again.
What is hard to comprehend is that those who led the process of postcolonialism and were made heroes or heroines of the field were alienated individuals of colonized societies. One has to pause for a moment and ask whether those who are invited to the campuses of the West only after being immersed in the norms of the West have anything left to say about colonialism.
Open Civilization, Year 2, Issue 10, January 2019, Ibn Haldun University.
English and Indonesian versions translated with DeepL AI
