Iain Chambers’ Way to a Decolonised Postcolonialism

To Chambers, decolonialising “does not merely mean finally to pay attention to the so-called colonial periphery of yesterday”, rather it means to “confront the brutal evidence of Occidental colonialism being involved in a perpetual war on the rest of the planet for the last five centuries” (5) and to confront the plain records that the last three decades of warfare on Muslim countries is just part of that uninterrupted process. To put it sharply, this is not an accidental pathology but a structural process informing Western hegemony up to contemporaneity: “the colonial past, conquests, racist slavery and the division of the world among imperial powers are never simply ‘back there’; they are constitutive of the present” (3)