Is there a Space for Post-Colonial Theory in the Socio-Psychological Research on Consequences of Colonial Past?

Abstract

The focus of my commentary is two-fold. First, I discuss what appeared to me as the central theoretical focus of the article; the possibility to create a space, if at all, for integrating post-colonial theory into the broader research field of social and psychological studies of the consequences of colonial past. Second, I intend to show why, in my opinion, the methodological choices of the authors and the criteria adopted for corpus construction allowed for data that, although too thin to establishing the state of knowledge in the field of study on consequences of colonial past, is nevertheless very informative and thoughts-provoking. My conclusions suggest that this study is an innovative attempt at describing and grasping the results of a search guided by two among the more consolidated electronic datasets currently available for English-speaking scholars. However, this study may not easily understand which can be the space to integrate post-colonial theory in the field of research on consequences of colonial past. To better reach this aim, it is perhaps necessary to build another kind of corpus, open to other languages (starting from French) and focused also on other scientific products, as books or proceedings of congress. In addition, disciplinary boundaries have to be even more explored, starting from interdisciplinary studies on education and historical culture. In spite of these limitations, I am convinced that this innovative study by Tomicic and Berardi tackles issues of relevance to any serious effort towards reflecting on long-term consequences of colonial violence and opens up to valuable new research questions and methods, to be taken into serious account and further explored in future works.