The Decolonization Reader (review)

Since the publication of Edward Said’s provocative and path-breaking Orientalism in 1978 research on colonialism, decolonization, and their aftermaths has received much renewed attention among scholars who have developed innovative methodologies, produced alternative interpretations of historical experiences, and elaborated new investigative and analytical angles that have significantly changed our knowledge and understanding of the contemporary world. James D. Le Sueur has brought together samples of work on some of the most important themes in the study of decolonization and its meaning, from research done on societies throughout Asia and Africa, in The Decolonization Reader. In the process he has furnished scholars, emerging and established, with an invaluable tool in the fields of colonial and post-colonial studies. In addition, the publication of this volume indicates the degree to which the subject of decolonization has become a focus of study by scholars from a variety of disciplines in the past two decades suggesting that the field has reached a stage of synthesis.

The Decolonization Reader is conveniently divided into eight parts containing two to three selections from writings by scholars in those sub-fields of decolonization preceded by a brief introductory essay written by the editor. In addition, Le Sueur has written an overall introduction to the volume elucidating the context that brings coherence to the volume’s contributions. In the general introduction, Le Sueur frames the essays to follow by arguing that researchers are better served by thinking “of colonialism and decolonization as dialogical processes.... [B]ecause in this way metropolitan and indigenous voices carry equal weight.” (2) Yet, one of the fundamental questions to arise in such an endeavor is to define (in this particular case) what one means by “decolonization.” For Le Sueur decolonization means “a process during which hard-won battles were waged between nationalists and metropolitan colonial powers.” (2) While this adequately frames the context within which the subsequent contributions become meaningful, it also tightly circumscribes our understanding of decolonization situating it fundamentally at the state-political level and relegating it to the process of achieving formal political independence. Moreover, it also tends to reinforce the binary of colonialist/nationalist that has, itself, been called into question and complicated by much recent scholarship on decolonization in the past twenty years. In part, this may result from Le Sueur’s attempt to overcome what he sees as a weakness resulting from the explosive development of postcolonial studies and theory during that period – the cutting “away at the remains of the historian’s enterprise.” (3) Consequently, the contributions that comprise The Decolonization Reader specifically concentrate our attention on the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, spanning the demise of the formal colonial empires ruled by a handful of West European countries (in this case mostly France and the United Kingdom) in Asia and Africa.

The eight parts of The Decolonization Reader each highlight a particular aspect of the decolonization process that has benefited from recent scholarly investigation and are comprised by parts of essays designed to provide a comparative understanding of the particular issues of the sub-field. “Part One,” with essays by Dane Kennedy and Frederick Cooper, centers on a fundamental problematic sketched in the introduction – Defining Decolonization. “Part Two,” Metropolitan and International Politics, is comprised of contributions from William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, Martin Shipway, and James D. Le Sueur and offers an assessment of the importance of the contexts beyond the colonial setting for shaping the processes of decolonization. “Part Three” brings together new insights and methodological approaches to the study of the Economy and Labor in the demise of European colonial empires in Asia and Africa through analyses by Pierre van der Eng, Catherine R. Schenk, and Frederick Cooper. “Part Four” takes us from the extra-colonial and imperial superstructures to the colonial actors themselves with studies by David Gilmartin, Jean Marie Allman, and Heather J. Sharkey on Nationalism and Anticolonialism. “Part Five” visits a theme that is particularly salient to contemporary discussions of the breakdown of the post-colonial state that...