Review: Postcolonial Historical Materialism

Postcolonial Historical Materialism: The Heritage of Critical Theory #

By Filippo Menozzi Bloomsbury Academic, 2025 (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society)

Menozzi, Filippo. 2025. Postcolonial Historical Materialism: The Heritage of Critical Theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-3504-1013-8 (hardback), ISBN-13 9781350410138.

Menozzi opens not with Adorno but with Nnedi Okorafor's 2011 story "Spider the Artist," in which AI robots built to guard Nigerian oil pipelines get renamed through Igbo legend and switch allegiances. The choice announces the book's method. For Menozzi, the postcolonial condition is exactly this coexistence of the absolutely new and the supposedly immemorial (AI and folklore, flexible accumulation and surviving forms of bonded labor), and what such a condition demands is a concept of history that can hold the specific and the world-system together without dissolving either. In this review, I will argue that Menozzi delivers the strongest recent case for keeping the Frankfurt inheritance central to postcolonial critique, while showing that the promised "paradigm" amounts in practice to a reading practice, and that the book's relocation of Critical Theory to the world system still routes nearly all the theorizing through Europe. Menozzi's own thesis holds that the foundations of a postcolonial concept of history already exist in four European thinkers who never systematically wrote about colonialism at all: Ernst Bloch, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. The project is to unlearn them as "Western Marxism" (Perry Anderson's category) and relearn them as theorists of a world-systemic modernity, which for Menozzi means reading them through Samir Amin's account of imperialist rent, Neil Lazarus's insistence that capitalism is a world system without an outside, and the combined-and-uneven-development framework that has organized materialist postcolonial studies for two decades.

The architecture and the best chapters #

The structure is clean: an introduction stating the program, four author chapters, and a pointed conclusion on decolonization. Each chapter pairs its thinker with a contemporary problem rather than offering a survey, and the pairings are where the book's originality lives.

The Bloch chapter is the most inventive. Menozzi reads Bloch as a magic realist in philosophy, tracing magic realism back to its origin in Franz Roh's response to German Expressionism (the debates Bloch participated in) before the category traveled to Latin America and became the signature style of postcolonial fiction. Bloch's refusal to treat the supernatural, the fairy tale, and millennial belief as mere false consciousness, and his concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit (non-synchronism), become what Menozzi nicely calls a historical materialism of the supernatural. The chapter does real work: it explains why magic realism fits peripheral capitalist experience without recourse to culturalist clichés about magical worldviews, grounding the style instead in combined and uneven development.

The Lukács chapter is the bravest, because it walks into a live debate. Menozzi reads Lukács's account of race in The Destruction of Reason (race as feudal ideology repurposed for the imperialist age) as a response to Afro-pessimism, engaging Wilderson's claim that the slave relation is an antagonism with no coherent redress rather than a conflict within capitalism. Menozzi's Lukács answers Afro-pessimism's ontology of social death with a social ontology oriented toward the future, against what Menozzi calls racism's refusals of historicity. The Adorno chapter makes the book's most quotable move: rather than defending Adorno against the Eurocentrism charge (documented from Martin Jay onward), Menozzi argues Adorno matters for postcolonial studies precisely because of his Eurocentrism, since negative dialectics turns the indictment through itself, and a cliched anti-Eurocentrism reifies "the West" into exactly the kind of monolith that blocks understanding of a capitalism that, as Žižek notes, no longer needs Western values to function. The conclusion extends this move into a sharp intervention on decolonization, siding with Táíwò's critique of the "decolonisation industry" and insisting that decolonization detached from the actual ideals of Bandung-era anticolonialism becomes an empty corporate term.

What the paradigm actually is, and is not #

The book's central promise is a "paradigm," and here honest assessment requires the deflationary reading. What Menozzi delivers is a reading practice, a way of reinterpreting canonical texts through resonance with postcolonial situations, not a method someone could take up and apply to new material. He concedes the ground of the difficulty in the introduction: the four authors "did not systematically engage with the questions of colonialism, decolonization and imperialism." The readings therefore work by structural analogy. Bloch's non-synchronism resonates with peripheral modernity; Benjamin's brushing history against the grain resonates with subaltern historiography; Adorno's negative dialectics resonates with the critique of Eurocentrism. Resonance is a legitimate hermeneutic, and Menozzi handles it with more care than most, but at key moments it substitutes for demonstration. The claim that Lukács "can really speak to" Afro-pessimism, for instance, would need to show that Wilderson's ontological argument is answerable by a historicist one rather than simply opposed by it. The chapter stages the confrontation but resolves it by reassertion, and a committed Afro-pessimist would rightly say their position had been treated as a symptom of the age ("the sad passions and apocalyptic foreboding of an age of death") rather than met as an argument.

A related structural fact deserves naming. For a book about relocating Critical Theory in the Global South, the South appears mostly through mediators. Amin, Mbembe, Césaire, Okorafor, Mies and Shiva, and Prashad supply framing, examples, and epigraphs, while the sustained philosophical exposition belongs to the four Europeans, and the heavy theoretical lifting on the postcolonial side falls to Lazarus and Parry, who are metropolitan materialist critics. In my estimation this design is defensible (the book is explicitly about the heritage of Critical Theory, and Menozzi anticipates the objection by refusing the premise that European thought is incommunicable beyond its origin), but the effect is that thinkers from the formerly colonized world function as occasions for European theory to prove its reach, rather than as co-theorists whose own concepts might reorganize the frame. A genuinely world-systemic Critical Theory would presumably let Césaire or Du Bois interpret Adorno, not only the reverse.

The book is also compressed. Four major bodies of work, each the subject of entire scholarly industries, receive roughly 175 pages of main text. The compression mostly reads as discipline, and each chapter announces its delimited textual base honestly (the Hegel writings and music criticism for Adorno, The Destruction of Reason for Lukács). But specialists will find their author's counter-texts missing, and the Benjamin chapter in particular covers ground (the theses on history, Baudelaire, the postcolonial combination) that recent Benjamin scholarship has worked over heavily, with limited space to distinguish its contribution from that literature.

Fit for the course #

For a critical theory doctoral seminar this book is close to ideal, and not only because it models how to write about the Frankfurt tradition without either hagiography or prosecution. It sits at the intersection of three current debates students need to navigate: 1) the decolonizing-the-curriculum controversy, 2) the materialist critique of culturalist postcolonial studies, and 3) the confrontation between Marxist historicism and Afro-pessimist ontology. It also demonstrates, in its prose, that engaged theoretical writing can be clear. Menozzi writes short declarative arguments, states his claims early, and flags his provocations as provocations.

Verdict #

Postcolonial Historical Materialism makes the best recent case for keeping the Frankfurt inheritance central to postcolonial critique, and the Bloch and Adorno chapters will be cited for years. Its limits are the limits of its design: a paradigm that is really a reading practice, confrontations staged more than settled, and a relocation of Critical Theory to the world system that still routes nearly all the theorizing through Europe. Those limits deserve teaching alongside the achievements, because they mark exactly where the next book in this line needs to go. Read it whole, and read the conclusion twice.