Colonial Diffractions in Illiberal Times: Forecasts on the Future

Abstract

Abstract This article identifies two radical shifts in how colonialism is politically positioned and temporally framed, shifts that alter what invocations of colonialism look like, what distinguishes the attention they garner, and thus what they are implicitly or explicitly called upon to do. For one, invocations of colonialism are now oriented less to “residual” damage than to deepening racial inequalities on which (il)liberal politics increasingly thrive. Two, they are rendered not only as violating histories of the present but as premonitions in a dark diagnostics, as foreboding forecasts—histories of the global future across broader zones of disrepair, disregard, and degraded care.