Postcolonial intellectuals: new paradigms

Abstract

The figure of the intellectual has fascinated and mesmerized generations of thinkers, from Antonio Gramsci to Edward Said, from Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze, from Pierre Bourdieu to Jürgen Habermas, from Noam Chomsky to Cornel West, from Nancy Fraser to Gayatri Spivak, from Frantz Fanon to Stuart Hall, from Paul Gilroy to Rosi Braidotti, from Bruce Robbins to Helen Small and from Achille Mbembe to Judith Butler to mention but a few. The intellectual has also been studied from different disciplinary perspectives: political science, referring to the role of publicness and democratic influence; philosophy, concerning the question of truth and rhetoric; gender studies, concerning the divide between public and private and the visibility of feminist interventions; celebrity studies, concerning the role of charisma and stardom; (digital) media communication, concerning the role of new social media platforms and the authenticity, trust and accountability of news online; and postcolonial studies, concerning the question of individuality and collectivity in representing and speaking up for minorities, subalterns and marginalized groups. However, in my view postcolonial intellectuals are not only ‘spokespersons’, to avoid Jameson’s definition of the postcolonial intellectual as an ‘allegory of the third world’. On the contrary, my take on the postcolonial intellectual is to revisit, deconstruct and rethink the category of the intellectual not as universal, individualistic and autonomous but as embedded in collective discursive practices and political engagements. This special issue draws from a two-day international conference that was held at Utrecht University on 5–6 February 2019. The conference, entitled ‘Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics’, was organized to help launch a large new European research network called PIN (Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe) for which I was the PI. The network is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in collaboration with several European partners, including prominent centres, institutes and departments in postcolonial studies (among others, the University of Leeds, University of Warwick and Newcastle University in the UK; Utrecht University in the Netherlands; the University of Lisbon in Portugal; Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy; Aalborg University in Denmark and INALCO in France).