SUMMARY:

David Chioni Moore revisits his seminal essay, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique” (2001), from the perspective of 2024. His return to the topic is prompted by the fact that debates on the postcolonial are far from over and that world events since 2001 (and especially since February 24, 2022) have variously altered, refuted, and reinforced many of the propositions he first made. Moore starts with a review of what the words “post-,” “colonial,” and “postcolonial” mean, highlighting how the term “postcolonial” came into widespread academic use, even fashion, in the West between 1988 and 1992. He then weighs the term “post-Soviet” against its frequently used alternatives “postcommunist” and “postsocialist.” Next, Moore overviews the wide variations in postcolonial fortunes in the post-Soviet world that attempt to avoid uniformity. He characterizes NATO and the European Union as decolonial accelerators and revisits what he had termed in 2001 as the “double silence”: whereas post-Sovietists avoided postcolonial discussions, postcolonialists avoided the Russo-Soviet expanse. He offers an explanation for why, more than two decades later, only the second kind of silence remains. In the last section of the essay, Moore addresses the return of Russian imperial-colonial war, the horrors of war in Ukraine, and he provides a comparison with Kenya, also discussing postcolonial studies’ differential responses to the recent cataclysms in Gaza and Ukraine.