ABSTRACT
In the obvious sense, postcolonial simply means ‘after the colonial’ and, until the early 1980s, was used ‘to describe a condition referring to peoples, states and societies that have been through a process of formal decolonization’ (Sidaway, 2000: 594). In the flurry of literature since that time, the scope of the term has widened. In 1990, Robert Young (1990: 11) suggested that the analysis of colonial discourse ‘itself forms the point of questioning Western knowledge’s categories and assumptions’; it demanded, in Mongia’s words, ‘a rethinking of the very terms by which knowledge has been constructed’ (1995: 2).
