Colonial Aphasia in Postcolonial Europe

In Chris Rumford’s SAGE Handbook of European Studies (2009), Gurminder Bhambra charts Europe as a postcolonial historical, cultural, and political space. Important bodies of postcolonial theory and historical scholarship have been produced since the publication of The Empire Writes Back (1989), not only in the United Kingdom, but also in France, the Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. However, most postcolonial theorists continue to deplore the lack of broad public awareness about Europe’s colonial past, and absence of colonial history from school curricula. Europeans’ failure to grasp Europe as postcolonial has consequences for domestic and international relations in the age of a new “Compact with Africa” proposed at the G20 summits in Germany in 2017. Do recent attempts to generate critical approaches to the colonial past in German museums finally bridge activist, academic, and public discourses about global disparities and postcolonial obligations? I draw on Laura Stoler’s concept of “colonial aphasia” to examine the promises and limitations of public memory work on European post colonialism.