Der Kolonisator und der Kolonisierte. Zwei Porträts

The colonies have largely been abolished, but has the colonial relationship and the pervasive racism dissolved as well? Recent debates on postcolonialism, including the theses of philosopher Achille Mbembe and the concept of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin Castle, demonstrate that this trauma still weighs heavily on many countries in the Third World even after achieving political independence. A racially or colonialistically tinted superiority complex continues to be a disturbing attitude that the First World holds towards the people and societies in the former colonies. At a high literary level and with an unflinching, precise view of the reality of his society, Albert Memmi, born as a Jew in Tunisia, first outlined a foundational text of anticolonial opposition in the 1950s with his two portraits. Although this study is certainly read differently today than during the phase of the collapse of the great colonial empires, Adam Shatz shows in the attached afterword, recently published in the London Review of Books, that it has lost none of its relevance.