ABSTRACT

There has always been a straightforward political and historicist sense in which the word ‘postcolonial’ has been used to mean after the end of colonization. Yet, especially when coupled with the word ‘studies’, the postcolonial has also been configured as an academic discourse that relocates that denotation and its attendant political urgency into an interdisciplinary and cross-border mode of reading often extending backwards in time, and finding practices of resistance and subversion in cultural production both before and after the moment of colonization, and in different regions of the once-colonial world.