Decolonization and Humanism

This collection challenges the understanding of decolonization and humanism pervasive in post-Foucauldian postcolonial studies, in which the former signifies a positive good with the latter rejected as racializing colonial discourse. This formulation presents an epistemological confusion between the universalism of decolonization and particularism of an anti-humanism from an identitarian segmented perspective. A corrective is offered by exploring Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) thoughts on hegemony and freedom, which he dislocates from the binary paradigm of tradition and modernity, thereby making a distinction between decolonization and cultural/ethnic nationalism. Tagore’s writings provide the earliest classical example of anti-colonial critique.