Chicanos in the second half of the twentieth century collaborated with African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans to appropriate the word “colonial” by situating their own histories in the context of Third World liberation movements (“Alcatraz Reclaimed” 1971; “El Plan” 1972; Ho 2000). Black activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton (1967, 5–6) exemplify this mode of analysis in their book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America: “Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects in relation to the white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism. Obviously, the analogy is not perfect.” By acknowledging the imperfections of this “internal colonization” argument at the very moment of formulating it, Carmichael and Hamilton foreground both the difficulty and the importance of thinking the keyword “colonial” in an international context.

This is an excerpt from David Kazanjian's entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 55).