July 31, 2026
The Postcolonial Volk
By Benjamin Zachariah
Polity, 176 pages, $25
You might have noticed that at some point, progressive types began to use the term “folks” to refer to “people.” There are black folks, queer folks, indigenous folks. The change is significant. Whereas “people” evokes a sense of a universal subject, “folks” is particular. It implies a world of distinctions: different cultures, different experiences, different interests. No people, just “peoples,” all speaking with a different voice. From this perspective, “The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.”
While the idea of a pluriverse has become increasingly popular within decolonial thought, that last line didn’t come from the tradition’s ever-proliferating ranks of academic adherents. It came from Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist. At a time when everything is “literally Hitler,” the comparison can seem overwrought. But it is precisely the comparison between post-colonial particularism and the völkisch right that Benjamin Zachariah reveals with a keen sense of the absurd in his new book, The Postcolonial Volk.
Zachariah critiques the “conglomerate” of postcolonial and decolonial theory clustering around what’s come to be known as “theory from the Global South.” But appearances are deceiving, because it’s not really from the Global South at all. As Zachariah describes, its language and legitimacy claims are crafted in the Global North, exported to the Global South, and then reimported as authentic non-Western knowledge.
And just as it is not really of the Global South, this ostensibly left-wing “postcolonial-decolonial-Global South conglomerate” is not really of the left either. Despite the right’s insistence that the ghost of Karl Marx is currently undertaking a long march through the institutions, Zachariah’s central claim is that the contemporary left actually has far more in common with anti-communist and proto-fascist forces than with the nineteenth-century founder of “scientific socialism.” In important respects, its ethos actually arises from an entirely rival tradition, one that encompasses romantic nationalism, indigenism, cultural organicism, and völkisch thought. It is, Zachariah says, “Romanticism, rather than the much-reviled Enlightenment, that suggests itself as the intellectual basis of the ‘post-Enlightenment’ world that Global Southistan now lays claim to.”
This is why, as Zachariah shows, the po
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