My initial engagement with the term post-colonial was in anthropology.  The use of it as a temporal marker, simply meaning that a society no longer has a colonizer present in their nation.  I wrestled with this knowing that colonialism and settler colonialism are best understood as processes and projects.  My first engagements with this rhetoric and sets of work revealed my discomfort with the continuity of colonialism and settler colonial projects and the ghostly stain that they have left on peoples, land, and societies.  I came to prefer post-colonial scholarship in English, sociology, and science and technology studies (STS).  I coupled this with my engagement with decolonization literature written by people of African descent aiming to combat structural inequity around the world.  I shared McClintock’s frustrations and in a number of ways still do.  McClintock problematizes the temporal ontological formulation of post-colonialism that places history in a linear formulation always in reference to European colonialism and temporal singularities that never escape colonialism.  This causes a series of problems that duplicates singular means of theorizing existence as well as erasing the multiplicities of time, existence, and experiences.  We do not simply have “a common past” instead we have a shared interwoven dynamic live histories and contemporary experiences. Much of this article reminds me of Lisa Lowe’s (2015) book “The Intimacies of Four Continents”.

McClintock discusses how “post-colonialism” fails to adequately capture and theorize partial and settler colonialisms along with more contemporary military “interventions” is what is now categorized as post-colonial nations (e.g. Latin America, Libya, Mozambique, etc.). I don’t exactly agree with McClintock’s argument that neo-colonialism doesn’t truly adequately account for the account of the MNR, to be quite honest, it can’t nothing can.  Those events were a consequence of a number of contingencies that include neo-colonialism and other intersecting forms of domination.  

McClintock also argues that some forms of inequity cannot be laid at the feet of colonialism, meaning that gender inequity is not simply a consequence of colonialism and must also be theorized distinctly.  In many ways Lugones’ coloniality of gender fixes all of the problems in the McClintock piece.  McClinntock’s discussion ignores not only other contingencies and that it can be many things at once but also that to speak of modernity is to speak of development and thus colonialism.  The uses of post-colonial are multiple: the temporal sense based on a reference to an era after a series and time of many anti-colonial movements and then anti-colonial/decolonial theorizations that look to construct a truly postcolonial world.  Just as we are to look at history as a live set of processes moving into the contemporary and beyond it, post-colonialism is a dynamic process.  But it is clear that this McClintock piece is a critique of overdeterminism (p.96) as well as an overall critique of the obsession with the “post-” phenomena, arguing that the political climate and events of the time could not be adequately explained or captured by “post-” colonialism nor “neo-” colonialism.  The Loomba chapter contextualizes as well as organizes much of what McClintock argued and placed many of the definitions McClintock puts to test into other historical contexts.  These two texts problematize as well as reveals a complicated picture that disjunctures understandings of contemporary existence from the space-time warp of “modernity”.  

Lugones’ piece does an amazing job at not only tackling the questions McClintock raises but also asking new questions.  The coloniality of gender enables contextualizes the oppressive colonial imposition as a complex interaction of economic, racializing, and gendering systems in which every person in the colonial encounter can be found as a live, historical, fully described being.(Lugones 2010:747) Lugones’ coloniality of gender seems to speak back to the Cixous et al. (1976) article, revealing a live engagement of not only histories but a set of conversations between resistance and oppressing.  That process is a conversation and a disjuncture from dominant narratives of time.  For Cixous et al., writing from the margins but publicly (seen by the centered) and speaking out is a key component of resistance and existence for Black women.  For me, Lugones’ (2010) & Cixous et al. (1976) arguments are entangled in conversation.  Coloniality speaks, the Black woman, other women of color speak back, but coloniality once again speaks/strikes back in its operation of erasure.  This reveals the linguistic and dialogue(d) functions of colonialisms.  But that resistance is required in order to push us away from the modern to the non-modern and hence becoming “…beings in relation, rather than dichotomously split over & over in hierarchically and violently ordered fragments” (Lugones 2010).

Much of what this means for me with regards to de-colonialization, de-orientalization, and post-colonialism is a continual strive of moving to the post, it’s a struggle to get there to the non-modern and the possibilities beyond it. That is a futurist project but also a project that requires shaking linear reductionist notions of colonial ‘time’. Seeing the coloniality of power puts us in the position to be able to engage it.  As a scholar, I predominately engage with postcolonialism from this understanding coupled with its multiplicities and processes that continue necropolitical projects.