Switzerland and ‘Colonialism without Colonies’

Sheepology: The Postcolonial Politics of Raceless Racism in Switzerland

“…8 It is only recently that Switzerland has been examined in postcolonial investigations exploring 'how colonial and postcolonial constellations are currently negotiated, reproduced, and re-encoded, and how these are related to contemporary forms of racism'. 9 Contributing to this emerging academic engagement, this section provides a historicized reading of the discursive-that is the visual, textual, and affective-elements articulated by the SVP campaign. The poster reactivates three racialized discourses: commodity racism, the spectacle of the 'other' and obsession with purity.…”

“…I share the recent characterization of Switzerland's postcoloniality as a form of 'colonialism without colonies', namely as a community which has constructed a 'self-perception on the idea of having been a "colonial outsider"' since the beginning of decolonizations and their accompanying moral condemnation of colonialism. 63 Such a self-perception has nurtured discourses of 'exceptionalism', particularly a conviction that the history of race has been-and still is-extraneous to Switzerland. This conviction explains the belated emergence of anti-racist movements and adoption of anti-racist legislation in comparison to the broader European context.…”

“…Thus commodity racism became a privileged site of articulation where discourses on the 'Swiss nation' and on 'race' intersected. 12 Many goods were advertised through animal characters, simple graphic language, and derived products for children. In this context, the sheep poster's mode of address recalls the childish figures that constituted privileged vessels of euphemized racial meanings; 13 its black/white dichotomy recalls the fusion of chromatic and phenotypic codes that were common within the semiotics of commodity racism.…”

State of the Union: Survival Blankets and Falling Stars

“…Finally Switzerland, the only country in this collection that is not part of the European Union, has recently been conceptualized as a postcolonial country in spite of the fact that it never had a colonial history. 15 This is part of a larger theoretical trajectory that considers 'colonialism without colonies' as an imperialistic system in which countries such as Switzerland, Sweden, and Iceland 'had an explicit selfunderstanding as being outside the realm of colonialism, but nevertheless engaged in the colonial project in a variety of ways and benefitted from these interactions'. 16 If the centrality of the British paradigm is historically determined, part of this centrality is also dependent on the language in which the postcolonial discourse is produced and articulated.…”

Colonialism without colonies: examining blank spaces in colonial studies

“…With the emergence of a postcolonial critique in the 1980s, postcolonial theory has found attention in contexts which at first sight seem less appropriate. Despite expressions of concern about the conceptual utility of the term 'postcolonial' expressed by many scholars, the suspicion about the entrenchment of postcolonial scholars in Euro-American universities, and attacks on the field for its insufficient attention to material and economic dimensions 1 (Jefferess, McGonegal, & Milz, 2006), scholars inspired by postcolonial theory have generated new and productive debates with a special focus on what we call 'colonialism without colonies' (Purtschert, Falk, & Lüthi, 2015;Purtschert & Fischer-Tiné, 2015). Without doubt, postcolonial theory has allowed us to expand the framework of historical and theoretical understanding in several ways.…”