Postcolonial Critique and Its Limits — Bhabha, Zinoviev and the Greenlandic Example

This essay argues that the popular "decolonise yourself" concept, though rhetorically powerful, contains a structural inconsistency: it is most often championed by postcolonial elites whose own position depends on the institutional and academic frameworks they claim to challenge. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's concepts of mimicry and hybridity, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi's account of psychological colonisation, and Alexander Zinoviev's sociological theory of "communality," the essay proposes a more materially grounded theory of decolonisation. It uses the historical case of Greenland — where the coloniser's technological and competence-based superiority, central to Fanon's model, was largely absent — to argue that psychological autonomy under colonial rule depends less on identity or proclamation than on material self-sufficiency, relational complexity, and everyday practice.