Graduate Studies

Interdisciplinary Master's in Art, Media and Design (MA, MDes and MFA)

Huda Salha

Early Work @ https://www.hudasalha.com

While I am interested in the “colonial” part of the term “postcolonial”, dealing with the “post” part of it is tricky, as this prefix means “after”, which connotes a past happening rather than an ongoing one. As someone from an actively colonized country, it is hard to talk about a postcolonial status. This term works when applied to postcolonial countries such as Algeria or South Africa. The same cannot be said when discussing Palestine or even the land of Canada where Indigenous people continue to experience an active displacement and cultural elimination. My very own existence here today is evidence of that fact. Would it not be more accurate and comprehensive to label theories and discourses addressing colonized nations as “anticolonial” theories?--I am not comfortable using the term “decolonial” when addressing liberation strategies to end the occupation. It seems too generic, too soft a term. Since coloniality is a brutal reality, it requires a more aggressive term. In addition to being used to engage in unintelligible debates, and adopted by some “internal colonialist power”, the term is “practically useless for action in the streets and for engaging with concrete indigenous struggles”. Replacing “decolonial” with “anticolonial” would connect it directly to the “language of subalterns” and therefore to national struggle.The term “decolonization” has turned into a blanket term, applied to various contexts of oppression and social injustices. This trend somehow diminishes the gravity of colonialism and the struggle against it, rendering “decolonization” a “metaphor”. Engaging in a social discourse on colonialism without touching on the Indigenous suffering and or addressing the “deoccupying” of land, is an “equivocation”. Likewise, I argue that addressing or theorizing settler colonialism in the Americas, South Africa, and Australia while disregarding settler colonialism in Palestine is hypocritical and misleading. Any discourse about the Palestinian anticolonial struggle demands situating it in the bigger context.

“For Earlier/other work, please visit:https://www.hudasalha.com”