Postcolonial Europe

This special issue brings together the interventions of a number of scholars from different European countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark) where postcolonial theory has been produced outside the “mainstream” of postcolonial studies – geopolitically represented by Great Britain, France, and, to a certain extent, the Netherlands. The collection thus scrutinizes how “peripheral” perspectives on the postcolonial reshape and revitalize the postcolonial paradigm as a whole. By this we do not mean to suggest that the colonial histories of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands are the same or that they have produced the same effects. Nor do we imply that all the countries we include in this special issue are postcolonial in the same way, or that they adopt the same paradigm of postcoloniality; quite the opposite, in fact. Our methodology aims at identifying lines of continuity among different national cases that may help define a European postcoloniality, while simultaneously tracing lines of discontinuity that may bring to focus the specific postcoloniality of the national cases under consideration. With this intent in mind, each essay included in Postcolonial Europe presents the colonial history of the national case under scrutiny, while also examining how other specific historical events and social phenomena, at European level, have historically contributed to the shaping of the country’s national identity. Many of the contributors in the volume also explore issues of colonial memory and legacy, tracing trajectories among different postcolonialities in the present, mainly interrogating issues of subalternity, dynamics of empires within and without Europe, processes of racialisation, and the impact in today’s European societies of transnational immigrants, many (but not all) of whom are descendants of ex-colonial subjects. The articles gathered in this special issue point to model of postcoloniliality that are alternative – and complementary – to the British one. More specifically, they show how the dichotomy hegemonic/subaltern does not quite represent all postcolonial imperial histories. Boaventura De Sousa Santos has notably criticized the lack of comparative perspective that has pervaded postcolonial studies, which traditionally has considered the relationship of the British empire with all its colonies as homogeneous, and at the same time has disregarded the many differences existing between British and other colonialisms. Analyzing how the British paradigm cannot be applied to the Portuguese context, Santos has argued that the semiperipheral position Portugal has occupied in capitalist modernity since the seventeenth century has produced a semiperipheral colonialism and postcoloniality, as well as a semiperipheral position within the European Union. Locating Portugal on the fringe of modernity, Santos has pointed out that the outcome of this marginality was a colonialism not quite hegemonic. It was colonialism nonetheless, but of a “subaltern” kind. Processes of “otherisation” enacted in and by minor colonial empires – such as Portugal – are not linear or binary. If the colonised was “the Other” of the coloniser, the Portuguese coloniser in turn was otherised by some major empires. This process produced a lesser sense of otherisation in the colonised of minor empires and not quite the same sense of hegemony in the coloniser. This theoretical framework is here applied – mutatis mutandis – to other minor colonial cultures included in this collection and to their postcolonialities. Today, the notion of subalternity not only shifts in time, but it changes as a result of migrations because it intersects categories of race, class, religion, and citizenship. Migratory flows reposition and redefine subjectivity in national and intranational contexts in today’s Europe.