ABSTRACT
A further movement which draws on the more radical implica-tions of poststructuralism is the study of colonial discourse, or what is usually termed ‘postcolonial criticism’ – although we should offer a caveat about settling too neatly on a name for this internally diverse cluster of writers and writings. Analysis of the cultural dimension of colonialism/ imperialism is as old as the struggle against it; such work has been a staple of anti-colonial movements everywhere. It entered the agenda of metropolitan intellectuals and academics as a reflex of a new consciousness attendant on Indian independence (1947) and as part of a general leftist reorientation to the ‘Third-World’ struggles (above all in Algeria) from the 1950s onwards. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was and remains an inspirational key text (it had an important preface by the metropolitan ‘convert’, Jean-Paul Sartre). Thereafter, ‘postcolonial studies’ overtook the troublesome ideological category of ‘Commonwealth literature’ to emerge in the 1980s as a set of concerns marked by the decentredness otherwise associated, philosophically, with poststructuralism and particularly deconstruction (see Chapter 8).
