The Postcolonial Volk

By: Benjamin Zachariah

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Hardcover | 29 January 2026 | Edition Number 1

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Hardcover
176 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.84 x 14.22 x 2.54

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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 v¶lkisch thinking. A product of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, v¶lkisch 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.

Industry Reviews

"A tart, sarcastic, and lethal polemic by a highly original thinker who is clearly unwilling and even unable to suffer fools gladly. Each page bristles with irony, insight, and erudition."
Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University

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