ABSTRACT
Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is a critical theoretical approach that emerged in the Anglo-American academy in the 1980s, and has tended to base itself conceptually and politically on a division of the world into ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, even as it sets out to challenge such distinctions. This rest was first understood to be the non-aligned ‘Third World’ or developing world, but has more recently come to be referred to as the global South. Postcolonial criticism was specifically concerned to question, deconstruct and undermine binary divisions of colonial self and colonised other, and to nuance, complicate and interrogate paradigms of West and rest, us and them. While postcolonialism, therefore, grows out of the radicalism of South–South relations as epitomised in the ‘Bandung spirit’ of the 1950s and 1960s, it is also always ready to critique South–South relations when they are compromised by power dynamics that disenfranchise and immiserate the world’s most marginalised populations. If postcolonialism is then the main avenue through which South–South relations might be incorporated into the Northern academy, particularly in the disciplines of literature and the humanities, the self-critical methodologies long deployed by postcolonial scholars ensure that such incorporation mostly remains radical rather than assimilationist.
