17 - Decolonization Terminable and Interminable

Summary

Decolonization, understood as the achievement of national independence for formerly colonized peoples, was hardly pre-ordained. Its conception and concretization depended on transformations in political imagination as well as activism. The possibility of decolonization as an aspirational idea of liberation from colonial oppression thus exceeds the narrow temporal boundary of a discrete era. It both preceded the postwar decades in which many colonized nations acceded to formal political independence and continues to resonate beyond that period, not least because the achievement of national sovereignty did not necessarily bring about social and psychic emancipation. Decolonization thus remains subject to a perpetual questioning, and it is hard to determine whether and where it might end. To this day, postcolonial critics continue to revisit the question, to paraphrase Freud, of decolonization as “terminable or interminable.”