"Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans examines key theoretical conflicts between postcolonial studies and interlocutors of the Enlightenment, from Kant to the present. While postcolonialism has regularly been accused of rejecting Enlightenment norms like cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and equality, Nikita Dhawan shows how these accusations rely on a convenient amnesia about the effects of European colonialism on the postcolonial world. Dhawan argues for the urgent task of putting postcolonial and holocaust studies in conversation with each other to reveal the relative shallowness of Europe's self-critique for its historical crimes. In the first half of the book, Dhawan takes up Enlightenment thought on colonialism from the eighteenth century through the Frankfurt school to the present. In the second half of the book, Dhawan examines how the colonial legacies of the Enlightenment play out in different sites of decolonial struggle around the globe from Gaza to South Africa to Germany. In doing so, Dhawan expansively and persuasively argues that the postcolonial challenge ultimately lies in salvaging Enlightenment goals in a non-Western world"-- Provided by publisher.