Decolonizing German theory: an introduction

This special issue is concerned with German theory, which is to say, theory generated in German cultural and linguistic spaces, in the territories claimed by the various German states over time, and among German-speaking emigrants and refugees. ‘Theory’ is defined here to encompass the space shared by philosophy, social theory, and cultural theory*/the theory-space that is most relevant for the humanities and interpretive social sciences more generally. Since the eighteenth century this theory-space has borne a strong imprint of the inherited and burgeoning archive of German theory. The German genealogy of theories of colonialism and postcolonialism is, however, much less evident at first glance. Of course some of the earliest theorists of colonialism and imperialism*/from Lenin, to dependency theory, to theorists of the articulation of modes of production, to writers like Ranajit Guha, Mahmood Mandani, and Dipesh Chakrabarty*/trace their lineage partly to Marx. Postcolonial theory is rooted in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, such that Freud, Heidegger, and Nietzsche figure centrally. But for reasons that are not immediately obvious, postcolonial theory has not subjected these German theoretical antecedents to the same sorts of criticism that it directs at most European cultural texts. Yet these theories and the texts they are used to interrogate presumably emerged from the same colonial and imperial context. Intellectual history and postcolonial thought are often still approached in a somewhat nationalist way, oriented toward specific European countries and traditions. But such a ‘national-container’ view of history ignores the fact that Germany was part of a wider pan-European economic and cultural formation for centuries before the late nineteenth-century explosion of colonial activism. Germany’s modern overseas colonial empire lasted just a little over three decades, from 1884 to World War I. And unlike the other world powers, Germans had participated only fleetingly in the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of America. Germany’s early loss of its colonies meant that the decolonization movements of the twentieth century tended to ignore Germany (or even to deploy Germany and German thinkers tactically against the other colonial powers). But Germans were involved in European exploration, colonialism, and slaving, often in the service of another flag, throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. German Jesuits, Moravians, and (starting in the nineteenth century) Lutherans were active around the globe as missionaries. This European colonial formation