ABSTRACT
Post-colonial writing and literary theory intersect in several ways with recent European movements, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism, and with both contemporary Marxist ideological criticism and feminist criticism. These theories offer perspectives which illuminate some of the crucial issues addressed by the post-colonial text, although post-colonial discourse itself is constituted in texts prior to and independent of them. As many post-colonial critics have asserted, we need to avoid the assumption that they supersede or replace the local and particular (Soyinka 1975). But it is also necessary to avoid the pretence that theory in post-colonial literatures is somehow conceived entirely independently of all coincidents, or that European theories have functioned merely as ‘contexts’ for the recent developments in post-colonial theory. In fact, they clearly function as the conditions of the development of post-colonial theory in its contemporary form and as the determinants of much of its present nature and content.
