Within postcolonial studies there is now a well-established wariness of the Eurocentric\udor metrocentric tendencies of postcolonial theory itself. For some the charge that postcolonial\udtheory continues to interpret the history and culture of non-European societies\udthrough European frames of reference can be traced to the provocative theory of colonisation\uddeveloped by French philosopher, novelist and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre.\udWe subject Sartre’s theory of colonialism to critical scrutiny and question this claim.\udWe locate Sartre’s philosophical works and political activism against the backdrop of a\udtwentieth-century Parisian intellectual life marked by fierce struggles over the future of\udMarxism. Sartre’s metrocentricism was tempered by his tortuous efforts to write existentialism\udinto the Marxist canon, a theoretical endeavour that led him to replace Marxism’s\udeschatology and linear teleology with a series of circular histories based on the\udcomplex ways in which separate anti-colonial movements spiral off following their\udown contingent, creolised and anarchic trajectories. Sartre’s desire to contest and\udrethink rather than submit to and seal metrocentric framings of colonialism and anticolonialism\udderived from his weddedness to a historicised phenomenology of existence\udas spatial. Critical interrogation of the complicity of postcolonial theory in the global\udmarch of metrocentric ontology affords both geography and postcolonial studies a new\udimpetus for dialogue. Any project that aspires to a transcendence of metropolitan\udmodes of knowing must first better understand the situated production and complexities\udof such modes of knowing. Before scrutinising how the colonising tendencies of\udpostcolonial theory might best be handled, there is a need to map historical geographies\udof the different theoretical projects and practices that have emerged in different\udmetropolitan locations and at different times.
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