Postcolonial Historical Materialism

Finally, someone has done it: demonstrate that a postcolonialist impulse lies at the heart of critical theory and the Marxian tradition. Menozzi succeeds in showing how critical theory's commitment to reason and the rational origins of Western Marxism forged an anti-colonial and anti-racist position well before the bloated and misguided diatribes of the present. To those discourses that advocate anti-rationalism and a critique of progress and the Enlightenment, Menozzi provides us with a crucial corrective: that critical theory's defense of the critical power of reason was at the heart of an emancipatory critical project that has yet to be realized. * Michael J. Thompson, Professor of Political Theory, William Paterson University, USA * The past cannot be shaken off so easily - as the ‘post’ bound to the ongoing legacy of colonialism indicates in the name post-colonialism. Critical Theory, in its founding moments, proximate as it was to revolutionary practice and emancipatory thinking, need not be condemned as stuck in another time and place and, therefore, debarbed through condescension. Menozzi’s careful and insightful work mobilises critical theory’s decidedly anti-capitalist orientation to liberation, drawing out its theoretical stance of fractured time, space, progress, identity, in order to rescue neglected, rejected or misunderstood stances, and to re-establish historical and materialist analysis essential for the still benighted present. * Esther Leslie FBA, Professor of Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London, UK *