Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theorists write in different disciplinary areas such as political theory, cultural [Page 662]studies, literature, history, and women's studies. Postcolonial theory engages issues of race, class, gender, culture, language, and nation in terms of empire and imperialism, popular culture and diaspora, identity, representation, and multicultur-alism. Scholars writing in the field of curriculum studies who engage postcolonial theory have noted that education itself is deeply implicated in the project of colonialism and plays a role in transmitting colonialist structures and practices. For instance, a number of scholars (such as Philip Altbach, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Greg Dimitriadis, Cameron McCarthy, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Sofia Villenas, Gauri Viswanathan, among others) have critiqued Eurocentrism in education and spoken to the issues of disregard for and marginalization and loss of indigenous knowledge ...