Post-Palliative: Coloniality's Affective Dissonance

by Ranjana Khanna, Postcolonial Text, Vol.2., No.1 (2006)

"Is the alibi still avoidable? Is it not already too late?" (Derrida, Without Alibi 280)

Debate concerning field formation and demise is often accompanied by language of birth, newness, and radical hopefulness in the first instance, and melancholia, disappointment, and outdatedness in the second. Some fields that have announced their "newness" with the prefix "post": postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, for example, have often suggested a critical engagement with and surpassing of that which has preceded the former in political and/or disciplinary terms. Others, like postfeminism, have simply announced the demise and lack of importance of the field, and the death-notice is often accompanied by a sense of despair on the part of those who conceptualize a continued need for the field and the politics associated with it, seeing its hasty burial as testimony to the necessity of its revitalization.