Postcolonial Theory

Emergence of Postcolonial Theory

Many parts of the world have been impacted by colonialism and continue to be shaped through neocolonial relationships and various kinds of cultural imperialism. One historical trajectory of contemporary postcolonial theory marks its origins at World War II, with Indian independence from Britain as one of the hallmarks of the scholarly enterprise. The third-world migration to cities and the emergence of English-speaking formerly colonized academics in the Western academy created the push for postcolonial theorizing. Specifically, postcolonial theorists asked the West to confront its colonial history and refused what Dipesh Chakraborty calls a waiting room version of history where colonized and formerly colonized peoples are configured in a liminal, or threshold, space in relation to the West. This is, however, only one version of the emergence of postcolonial theory.

Other scholars such as Angelita Reyes, mark the emergence of something called postcoloniality in the 19th century. Frantz Fanon is sometimes credited for the earliest postcolonial writing in books such as his 1952 text, Black Skin, White Mask. Still other scholars contend that Edward Said's 1978 book, Orientalism, is the hallmark text in postcolonial theory. Other key figures in postcolonial theory include Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Albert Memmi, and Aime Cesaire.

Though there are disagreements about the origin of postcolonial theorizing, a number of similarities exist across versions of postcolonialism. Foremost, postcolonial theory is a transformative stance, focused on reconfiguring epistemic or knowledge structures and making connections to groups' and cultures' obliterated pasts. This is not simply an intellectual endeavor, although much good work remains to be done in the academy. In that vein, postcolonial theory challenges established disciplinary knowledge that has been created through the force of modernity and long histories of imperialism. Postcolonial theory thus provides historical and transnational depth to understandings of culture and power.