The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?

Abstract

No discussion of the 'postcolonial' should proceed without participants making known their understanding of the term, for no word is more seductive in appearing to offer limitless possibilities for composing a revised narrative of colonialism and its consequences, and few words have proved more elusive. Yet within the multiplicity of literary and cultural studies now identified as constituting a 'postcolonial criticism', there is a constant slippage between significations of an historical transition, a cultural location, a discursive stance, and an epochal condition. Not only has postcoloniality been privileged as the position from which to deconstruct colonialism's past self-representations and legitimating strategies but it is also designated the location for producing properly postmodern intellectual work on the contemporary world, which, it is asserted, has seen the implosion of Western culture under the impact of its inhabitation by other voices, histories, and experiences.1 Nor do these variants exhaust the connotations which, more narrowly, include a description of those Third World literatures characterized by intertextuality that (in contrast to fictions of an earlier phase) devise 'post-nationalist narratives'. Such indeterminacy in signification has prompted essays and lectures with titles such as 'What is Post(-)colonialism?' and 'When was the Postcolonial?';2 and indeed a glance at the contents of the two recent Postcolonial Readers will suggest the range of topics and methodologies now being subsumed under the sign of the postcolonial.3 But if the critical freedom from precision and closure has induced scepticism in some critics, the very multivalencies of the term have been valorized by others concerned to rearticulate colonialism and its aftermath from a theoretical position that has disentangled itself from the categories of political theory, state formation, and structural socio-economic relationships. It is this model that came to attain predominance in the burgeoning discussion, and while its suppositions and