Postcolonial Studies

The debate over nationalism extends to the nation-state and to nationalism's legacy in postindependent societies. Deconstructionists argue that the state is an alien structure imposed by colonialism. By adopting it as their goal and means of social liberation, anticolonial nationalists doomed themselves to cultural inauthenticity and to political failure. Against this, materialists have argued that the state, as a political structure, has its origins in precolonial, not colonial, polity. They suggest that in a world increasingly governed by global capitalism, the state potentially provides an important safeguard of human needs. As a structure it is uniquely accountable to, and transformable by, its populations; the nation-state remains a tool to oppose neocolonialism.

Both tendencies agree that there are serious difficulties besetting much of the postcolonial world. Materialists regard and study political corruption, ethnic and religious conflicts, patriarchal practices, gross socioeconomic inequality, and national debt as originating in colonialism and in contemporary global configurations of capitalism that follow a neocolonial dynamic. Postmodernists interpret these same phenomena as arising from the structural flaws of nationalism itself.