What is to be repaired? Scattered Speculations on Postcolonial Justice, Reparations, and Anti-Capitalism

This article proposes a definition of the concept of postcolonial justice in view of elaborating a fruitful theoretical framework for connecting distinct demands for racial, cultural, epistemic, memorial, and spatial justice that have been emerging on a global scale in the last two decades. The article conceives postcolonial justice as both critical and reparative, maintaining that reparation claims must be considered a crucial pillar in a theory of postcolonial justice. It also argues that postcolonial justice is better understood as a complement to a radically egalitarian conception of global social justice, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. Finally, it concludes that while reparations are relevant for an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial theory of global social justice, the reparative grammar of postcolonial justice is not sufficient to target current distributive inequalities that depend on existing infrastructures of domination. The latter cannot be repaired and should instead be abolished.