I wish to acknowledgement the Darug people, their elders past and present and to remind that this lecture is taking place on stolen Darug land.. I also want to begin my lecture by positioning myself as a European West Asian Jewish woman living on stolen Gadigal land. My work on race and racism over the last twenty years has been informed by my own experiences of migration and displacement caused by racialisation, war and genocide.
However, it has also been informed by my own life history as a double settler-coloniser, a position which reveals the extent to which race and coloniality are in constant cycles of production and reproduction. As inherently unstable structures, they are, as Patrick Wolfe reminded us in constant need of being remade. This truth creates the crack into which we can work our chisels and chip away at their walls. The aim of this lecture is to explore the possibilities for social and political critique opened up by the decolonial approach.
In so doing, I shall examine the interconnections between postcolonial theory and the decolonial, uncovering the trajectory that began with Indian subaltern studies and Latin American autonomous social science, for example.
I shall also examine the impact of a critical focus on race, gender and sexuality on the opening out of decolonial approaches. This work will go towards asking questions about the epistemological implications of taking a decolonial approach as well as examining the possibilities for transformative social and political action.
Postcolonial theory and postcolonial studies grew out of the anti-colonial movement which formally overthrew European colonial government in almost all of the states in which it had intervened. The postcolonial is, therefore, as much the theorisation of an aspiration borne of struggle as it is an attempt to capture, as Couze Venn says, the legacy of European colonization.
