“Are we nothing but postcolonial? As planetary destruction by human greed is upon us, the mindset change that is required must accommodate such questions and more.” Literary theorist and critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak began her keynote talk at Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF)’s March Meeting 2022 by issuing this challenge, before referring to the late Egyptian-French theorist Samir Amin’s call to “re-center ourselves to confront globalized neoliberalism, which is what turns nation-states into global capital managers while encouraging the nation-ization of identity in the name of anticolonialism.” Spivak then proposed: “We must look at classed-based collaboration. What was there before the colonies? Did all deployment of power relations start with the colonies?” She then quipped: “I speak from a country [India] with thousands of years of caste oppression—the colonies are the day before yesterday.”

With those fierce evocations, Spivak set in motion a conversation about “The Afterlives of the Postcolonial” that would expand over