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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Postcolonial Volk

The Postcolonial Volk

Zachariah, Benjamin

Hardcover

Philosophy

ISBN10: 150956263X
ISBN13: 9781509562633
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: Jul 28 2026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

Postcolonial theory and its bedfellow, decolonial theory, are the most flourishing products of academia in recent times. Transcending their origins in universities and literary criticism, and clustering around what is coming to be known as 'theory from the Global South', their guiding assumptions have leaked into the public domain and become shibboleths with which to acknowledge historically victimised communities. With this success has come a disturbing trend: political activity operates based on clumsy victimhood analogies, and much of its rhetoric is deliberately anti-rational, reproducing and perpetuating the manufactured categories of racist and sectarian imaginations.

Benjamin Zachariah examines this phenomenon and its worrying affinities with völkisch thinking. A product of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, völkisch is an adjective that indicates a community of blood, soil and race. These aspects are less explicit in its newer guises, which instead invoke communities of collective memory. Nonetheless, Zachariah argues, the older form of collective belonging remains embedded in the apparently new attitudes, as a compulsory community of inherited victimhood and organic belonging.

Striking and thought-provoking, this book is a major intervention that will be of interest to anyone concerned by the more insidious side of postcolonialism.

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