Feindbild postkoloniale Studien: imperiale Projektionen des (deutschen) Anti-Antisemitismus

Postcolonial studies emerged as a critical-emancipatory tradition of criticism that analyzes historical forms of imperialism and colonial forms of knowledge and practice (such as racist exclusions) as constitutive of Western modernity. By now, this tradition is often declared the enemy of Western civilization. In recent years, it has been the target of attacks from the right and those who describe themselves as left-wing in Germany and beyond. Postcolonial perspectives are depicted as being unscientific, opposed to the universalism of modernity, embodying a Manichean view of history, glorifying violence, and endorsing antisemitism. This article shows that these charges instead reflect the premises of the attacks themselves, revealing their embeddedness in a civilizational, imperial discourse centered on the figure of „the West“ – a project of ruling space and time that postcolonial studies set out to unpack and criticize. Against this background, the analysis first shows how postcolonial perspectives allow us to discern the imperial legacies and anti-democratic, stifling, racializing, violent effects of dominant forms of anti-antisemitism in Germany and beyond. The attacks on postcolonial studies thus become legible as moments of moral and epistemic denial, a rejection of political responsibility (while using the language of moral responsibility, clarity, and superiority), and, partly, a reassertion of an imperial project in the face of actual and threatened genocide. The second part of the article lays out key analytic contributions of the tradition of postcolonial studies, showing how it deconstructs the time-space of imperial understandings of the (Western) community and develops an emancipatory understanding of history, knowledge, and politics instead.