Colonial amnesia (also known as postcolonial amnesia or imperialist amnesia) is a concept in

postcolonial studies Postcolonialism (also post-colonial theory) is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and thei ...

describing the phenomenon of forgetting colonial history or remembering it in certain ways that erase the history of the colonized people. Colonial amnesia may also manifest by romanticizing the colonial past or feeling nostalgia for it.

Examples

Germany

According to anti-colonial activists, the German colonial past was long erased within Germany. However, Germany has begun to address aspects of its colonial legacy in Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, Rwanda and Burundi. The anti-colonial German historian Paul Grosse has claimed that the enormity of the German reckoning with

the Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

had once "overshadowed" the colonial atrocities in German colonies, but that Germans were increasingly aware of German colonial history.

Nordic countries

Critics of the history of Nordic colonialism have highlighted what they view as the colonial amnesia of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Finnish people. According to the Danish sociologist Mette Evelyn Bjerre, "colonial amnesia is strong in the Nordic countries" and many Nordic people believe they were "mere bystanders to European colonialism and slavery and therefore do not have a racialized view of the world." Bjerre describes this notion as a fallacy.

United States

Dean Itsuji Saranillio, a Filipino-American academic from

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; ) is an island U.S. state, state of the United States, in the Pacific Ocean about southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two Non-contiguous United States, non-contiguous U.S. states (along with Alaska), it is the only sta ...

, has criticized the colonial amnesia of the " Filipino settler" community in relation to

Native Hawaiians Native Hawaiians (also known as Indigenous Hawaiians, Kānaka Maoli, Aboriginal Hawaiians, or simply Hawaiians; , , , and ) are the Indigenous Polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaiʻi was settled at least 800 years ago by Polynesian ...

Palestine and Israel

The Israeli Arab-Jewish writer

Ariella Azoulay Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (; born Tel Aviv, born February 21, 1962) is an author, art curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature ...

has characterized the

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel. Its objective is to pressure Israel to meet what the BDS movement describes as Israel's ...

movement as part of the Palestinian struggle against the "structural colonial amnesia" of the Israeli state and the Zionist movement.

References