Postcolonialism and Postcoloniality: A Premortem Prognosis

Postcolonialism as theory, contrasted with postcoloniality as reality, was born sometime during the earlier period of the Cold War that had developed Sphinx-like following the World War II announcing the death of Europe and the rise of two extra-European superpowers. Naturally, the end of the War also began a decade-long process of decolonization, marking the end of European political domination over most of Asia and Africa. The collapse of the continent that owned almost one half of the globe generated a profoundly unsettling soulsearching and re-examination of the values and norms of metropolitan civilization informed by the Enlightenment masculist and quasi-racist rationality, although a critique of Western bourgeois views and values dates back to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and later Rudolf Pannwitz (1881-1969), author of The Crisis of European Culture (1917), and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of The Decline of the West (1918).