ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s the well-known postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha proposed that postcolonial literature might be the new world literature. For him the literature of the displaced, the exiled, the uprooted, the marginalized, more accurately reflected the state of the present-day world than the postmodern literature produced by so-called mainstream literatures in the West. In reality, the division between postcolonialism and postmodernism is not so clear-cut. In fact, many contemporary writers may be seen to fit both categories. Moreover, most of the writers that would fit Bhabha’s postcolonial category write in the language of the former colonizer or the present-day hegemon. This raises the question whether the postcolonial as commonly conceived of in present-day literary studies, rather than an alternative to “Western” literature, is not simply one more projection of that same Western hegemony in matters literary, theoretical as well as practical. If such issues have increasingly come to the fore in Anglophone literary criticism, they have been much less debated in other languages. Very recently, though, the issue has erupted also in French-language literature with a much-noted manifesto in a leading Parisian daily, followed by a collective volume.
