Contemporary Europe is increasingly becoming aware of its colonial pasts. From political debates about postcolonial responsibility, to new trends in popular literature in mainstream historiography, and major museums taking stock of the provenance of their collections, the imperial past is visible throughout public life.

This course is designed to help students understand the postcolonial turn in European societies and cultures. It acts both as an introduction to postcolonial theory and dependency studies, and as an exploration of Europe’s internal and external colonialisms. Students will be introduced to classic postcolonial thinkers from the global South, such as Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, whose critiques of European imperialism and western discourse laid the foundations for further critical reflections on global colonial legacies. We will also explore the imperial legacies of individual western European nations and their dominant representations of imperial history, as well as the implication of the EU as a supranational body in the legacies of imperialism.

Debates around colonial relations along Europe’s east-west axis will also be studied in some depth: is the very notion of ‘eastern Europe’ an ‘intellectual project of demi-Orientalization’, as Larry Wolff has argued? Moreover, was the Soviet Union a colonial empire, and how did the fall of state socialism in 1989/91 affect the region and its dependencies?

Overall, the course will offer a multiperspectival overview of postcolonial approaches to European identities and cultures.