Decolonization Now

Abstract Post–World War II ushered in an era of rapid decolonization across the Global South; a period about which Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah exultantly wrote that European direct rule was “everywhere in retreat.” Still, those anticolonial victories were experienced unevenly across the decolonizing world, often undone by new forms of neocolonial exploitation, rising authoritarianism, and counterinsurgent violence. For many peoples, especially in spaces remade by settler colonialism and native dispossession, independence remained out of reach. As the hopefulness of Nkrumah’s era has long since waned, the reality of a world divided between well-fed and hungry has only become more sharply defined, and naked forms of colonial violence—as with the ongoing genocide in Palestine—continue to shape our political horizons. This introductory essay examines the urgency of this historical moment and the role of the historian in confronting contemporary colonial violence with new decolonial and emancipatory horizons.