Introduction: Coloniality's Persistence

SAYING "POST-COLONIALITY" IS LIKE SAYING "PRESIDENT BUSH"(II). YOUR words cry "freedom" while your life is full of bombs, surveillance, police brutality, corporate looting, fire and brimstone, Black Death, comprador complicity, democratic fascism, un-freedom. When a CIA father invents a "dictator" chief, installs him against a people's will, then bombs these same people again and again; and when his unelected son continues, after said chief becomes disposable, after another chief "terrorist" and former employee cannot be found, all in the name of Liberty, in the name of white men's burdens; then it's time we remember that Liberty was a slave ship. That it is a slave ship.

And we know furthermore, that putting the Post to Coloniality, acting as if it's already past, is part of Coloniality's general mission of misnaming. Anti-colonialism. Anti-imperialism. De-colonization. True and Total Liberation. Actual Independence, as opposed to Flag. That's another story. Another point of view.

The Coloniality Working Group was founded around the mid-1990s by Kelvin Santiago-Valles and others at the State University of New York at Binghamton (now proudly privatizing as "Binghamton University"). We began while many academics played along with "post-coloniality" (as many continue to do still) in politically narrow terms, both spatially and temporally. Our very name engages with Aníbal Quijano's concept of the Coloniality of Power, even as we extend and rework what Coloniality is or must be from a wide range of perspectives, some Quijano-centered, some not so at all. We have organized several successful conferences over the years involving members, local and nonlocal, as well as guests. This interdisciplinary work has already been influential, with or without recognition. Now some of it will finally be available in print.

And we, the contributors, are not playing. Ifi Amadiume faults conventional periodization for lack of depth and imagination. She goes beyond nineteenth-century territorial models of colonial history and, capable of going beyond mere 500-year historicity too, confronts the tradition/modernity convention for the sake of political opposition. Dynamic African tradition is located in the present, prophecy in spirit as well as letters, followed by a fresh analysis of Chinua Achebe and "matrikin" that is powerful and provocative: Okonkwo and Nelson Mandela will never look the same! In the Americas, Lena Delgado de Torres reviews Quijano in detail to rethink nationality and citizenship for Africa's Diaspora. Her focus is on Aponte's Black rebellion which, though taking place in Cuba in 1812, took inspiration from revolution in Haiti (whose 200th anniversary is here). Santiago-Valles examines nation-state ideas in "colonial-modern historical capitalism," whose race and body logics show this coloniality of power to be as much about the colonizer as the colonized. He tracks the emergence of "Europeanness-as-whiteness" in a longer history of "colonization-globalization" than usually acknowledged, thus confirming and diverging from Quijano while incorporating the critical insights of Sylvia Wynter. Relatedly, Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz regards questions of "womanhood" and "race" in interwar Puerto Rico with a historiographic reading of poems by Carmen María Colón Pellot.

Next, Biray Kolluoglu-Kirli impresses as she narrates a discursive-institutional shift from "Orientalism," as a distinctly European enterprise, to "area studies," as a distinctly (U.S.) European-American enterprise. She notes that the former managed the world with its focus on the past, while the latter manages with its focus on the present; but both manage for Occidentalism nonetheless. Breaking new ground for resistance, moreover, is Vandana Swami, who retheorizes "nature" as she thinks "environmental colonialism" with regard to India. Her reflections on South Asia lead to Eliza Noh's meticulous exposé of "transnational feminism" as more "imperial feminism" in trendy disguise. Writing with pragmatic brilliance for Asian American women, Noh takes world-systems theory to task as well in stressing the continued significance of "nations," or nationalization, in a world where colonialism thrives under old...