April 12, 2023, a theoretical seminar "Postcolonial Theory: Methodology and Perspectives" was held at the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Speaker: Chemyakin Evgeny Yurievich, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin.
Summary:
The report is devoted to postcolonial theory - a philosophical and theoretical direction that arose in the 1970s. This direction has set as its goal to rethink the relationship between the West and the East. The methodology of post-colonial studies was based both on the traditions of national liberation ideologies (such as Pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, etc.), and on the ideas of European philosophy of the 19th-20th centuries - Marxism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. This made it possible to take a fresh look at the broad historical context of the colonial relations of European states and dependent territories, the establishment of a political, social and cultural hierarchy, and the building of power relations between cultures. Postcolonial theory has become one of the reversal strategies that made it possible to reconsider the subject-object relationship between the former colonial empires and subject peoples, incl. and develop a new look at the contemporary dialogue of cultures, implemented in the post-colonial space. One of the main goals of this direction was the fight against the Western world's monopolization of the concept of modernity, which manifested itself in the existence of a stable attitude towards the former colonized peoples as "backward", "catching up", "second-rate". Despite the process of decolonization that swept the world in the second half of the 20th century, the preservation of a number of cultural, psychological and social traces of colonialism (the so-called coloniality) is still an acute problem. The report will examine the key ideas and concepts of the classics of postcolonial theory, as well as the most significant works of modern researchers. Some of the current issues that post-colonial theory has been facing in recent times will be touched upon.