ABSTRACT
In the introduction to this collection of essays, written for the most part by academics who come from (or live and work in) former British colonies, Helen Tiffin remarks that ‘This is the first book to seek to characterise post-modernist and post-colonial discourses in relation to each other, and to chart their interesting and diverging trajectories’ (p. vii). Postmodern discourse and postcolonialism emerged from the same historical moment —the decentring of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. But whereas the first term refers to the post-industrialism of the West under late capitalism and to its mode of representation, the latter refers to writing (both literacy and critical) from former colonies of Europe. More specifically, as Stephen Slemon points out in the opening essay (p. 2), postmodernism has been defined both as an historical period of Western capitalism (Jameson) and as a catalogue of textual devices-parody, allegory, the free play of signifiers, etc. (Hassan, Michael Newman, Hutcheon). But Slemon goes beyond the traditional definition of postcolonialism as a post-independence historical period in once-colonized nations and instead defines it as ‘a specifically anti-or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture’ (p. 3), which has the advantage of identifying postcolonial discourse within colonial and neo-colonial periods of a nation’s history.
