Locating History, Geostrategy and Geopolitics in Postcolonial Studies: A Perspective from Africa

Abstract

From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, European colonial powers dominated and ruled some parts of the world known as colonized territories. Thus, from Africa to Asia, many peoples experienced Western domination through British, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Belgian colonization. This article aims at analysing the historical and geostrategical, geopolitical transformations engendered by Western imperialism in the works of two key figures of postcolonial studies,  Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994). Using Ngugi wa Thiong’s theory of postcolonialism, Enrique Dussel’s theory of transmodernity and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, it unearths how the colonial discourse used history to legitimate Western subjugation of other geographical spaces and races, but also how imperialism has reshaped the geography of the world and influenced the geopolitical relations.

Keywords: Imperialism, History, Geostrategy, Geopolitics, Post/Colonial, Hegemony, Transmodernity