ABSTRACT
A number of core issues underpin postcolonial approaches. First, they stress the need to destabilize the dominant discourses of imperial Europe (e.g. history, philosophy, linguistics and ‘development’), which are unconsciously ethnocentric, rooted in European cultures and ref lective of a dominant Western worldview. Postcolonial studies problematize the very ways in which the world is known, challenging the unacknowledged and unexamined assumptions at the heart of European and American disciplines that are profoundly insensitive to the meanings, values and practices of other cultures.
