Guest Editorial: Postcolonial past, world present, global futures?

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the editorial's first paragraph: A good way to think about postcolonial literary studies today is by looking at how the field is described in job listings addressed to us, or which we feel “interpellated” by (Althusser, 2014/1971: 190−97). In some of its recent posts, the British website Jobs.ac.uk, for example, advertised positions in postcolonial studies, but also in global literatures, global Anglophone literatures, world literature, and in some cases transnational literatures. These different ways of naming the subdiscipline and its objects of study confirm a shift that has been happening over time, which is that the colonial experience is no longer the automatic lens through which we train our critical gaze on the literatures of Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and beyond. Accompanying this development, especially since the early twenty-first century, has been a sense of crisis in the field as its applicability to today’s world continues to be called into question.