Postcolonial Historical Materialism

The Heritage of Critical Theory

Filippo Menozzi author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:24th Apr '25

£85.00

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Postcolonial Historical Materialism cover

Proposing an alternative genealogy of critical theory that moves beyond its European provenance, Menozzi explores the relevance of Bloch, Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin to pressing concerns in postcolonial studies.

Through a reappraisal of the work of four major figures in critical theory – Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin – Filippo Menozzi rethinks the tradition of critical theory in relation to pressing concerns in postcolonial studies.

Revealing these authors’ continued relevance to urgent issues in the 21st century, from struggles against racism to social movements and the transmutations of global capitalism, Menozzi reimagines them as central to an alternative genealogy of critical theory that moves beyond their European provenance and the limitations of “Western Marxism”. In doing so, this book challenges, more broadly, the view of critical theory as steeped in Eurocentrism, culturally conservative, and politically defeatist. Contesting this in four chapters, Postcolonial Historical Materialism inserts Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and Benjamin into key contemporary sites of militancy and debate.

Engaging with a wide range of European and non-European sources, Menozzi proposes a new concept of “postcolonial historical materialism”, indicating how the heritage of critical theory can reopen global possibilities of utopia and revolution in a non-utopian age of global emergencies, social unrest, and the unfinished history of decolonisation.

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 *

ISBN: 9781350410138

Dimensions: 238mm x 162mm x 18mm

Weight: 480g

216 pages