‘Postcolonial peace’

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Page, Tiffany
  • Hokowhitu, Brendan

• For those familiar with Maori Studies, Ranginui Walker's Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End is one of those seminal texts that academics in the field return to time and time again. Its title reverberates with Achille Mbembe's construction of colonial peace as a 'war without end.' Often peace and war are states that humans find themselves 'in,' and are seldom thought of as being tied to identity. In this article, however, we argue that postcolonial occupation, which may be framed as 'postcolonial peace,' underpins postcolonial identity construction. Here we theorise postcolonial peace as that "state inscribed in an 'economy of violence'" where exclusion forms the identity construction of both indigenous and non-indigenous alike.3 In this article we examine the Derridian notion of an 'economy of violence' to help to understand the current violence based on exclusion and demarcation that is occurring in the interstitial space of postcolonial identity politics.

• Date created

  2011

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Decolonization--Social aspects
  • Group identity
  • Poststructuralism--Methods
  • Postcolonialism--Analysis

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R33K0N

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 International