In Africa anti-colonial agitation congealed, as a theoretical problematic, around the idea of négritude, a nativist “thinking” that was built around alternative and self-empowering readings of African civilizations. This shift in consciousness only began to take critical shape in the mid-20th century with the gradual dismantling of the non-settler European empires. But the discourse itself required a consciousness of the colonial experience in its diverse articulations and a corresponding legitimation of the lives of those colonized. In the languages of the colonized-those of the ruling class as well as its subjects-a critical discourse of displacement, enslavement, and exploitation co-existed with what Conrad called the redemptive power of an “idea.” Postcolonial theory took shape in response to this discourse as a way of explaining this complex colonial encounter. Postcolonial discourse is the critical underside of imperialism, the latter a hegemonic form going back to the beginnings of empire building.
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