From political reference to self-narration

Abstract

The term ‘postcolonial,’ although well established in reference to the history of the Americas since the nineteenth century, proliferated in frequency through the 1960s with the acceleration of processes of decolonization. Down through the 1970s and 1980s, ‘postcolonial’ remained for the most part a relatively straightforward periodizer of political order. In the wake of both deepening disillusionment with the regimes that had followed colonial rule and the movement into Western universities of intellectuals who had emerged out of the postcolonial milieu, dissatisfactions with existing national and developmental narratives intersected with a whole set of intellectual repudiations that travelled under the loose banners of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism.’ In the process, ‘postcolonial’ began a slow transformation from a periodizer of political order to a periodizer of intellectual and cultural dispositions implicated in the history of colonialism. As the term ‘postcolonial’ assumed significance in primary reference to forms of artistic and scholarly practice, the object of postcolonial scholarship increasingly shifted from a problematic of historical periodization to one of conceptual approach, so that since the turn of the millennium one has been able to speak of a thriving field of ‘postcolonial medieval studies.’