Ep30: Postcolonialism with Somdeep Sen

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.” — Frantz Fanon

What does liberation mean when the very language of freedom is shaped by empire?

In this episode, we speak with Somdeep Sen, political scientist and author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas Between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial, about what it means to struggle for freedom in a postcolonial world. Drawing from personal experience and deep theoretical work, Sen challenges the universalist narratives of human rights, democracy, and justice that often underpin activist discourse.

We ask hard questions:

• Can we be liberated within systems that define what liberation should look like?
• What happens when activism reuses the same symbolic frameworks as the powers it resists?
• How can we hear subaltern voices outside the scripts we've written for them?

Postcolonial theory complicates easy binaries of oppressor and oppressed. It insists that resistance must also question its own assumptions, ideologies, and categories. It urges us to find what Homi Bhabha calls the “third space” — an ambiguous, non-deterministic zone where new forms of struggle, identity, and solidarity can emerge.

Sen challenges us to move beyond performative politics and imagine a liberation that is not defined by the coloniser’s table, but by shared values, radical imagination, and transnational solidarity.

 

Resources & Show Links:

• Decolonizing Palestine – by Somdeep Sen (Book) 
• Beautiful Trouble Toolbox - Postcolonialism

Host: Phil Wilmot Guest: Somdeep Sen Producer & Audio Production: Rodgers George Intro/Outro Jingles: Mwaduga Salum & Beautiful Trouble