ABSTRACT
In the past decade or so, a growing number of studies and articles have taken issue with matters that postcolonialism silences or simply chooses not to discuss, and with the new hierarchies and hegemonies it has set up in Western academe. Privileged subjects include a certain type of politically correct discourse; a certain type/genre of literature (say, “hybrid” metropolitan fiction) and perhaps even certain points of origination of this literature, such as India or South Africa; the Anglophone colonial sphere over other types of colonial experience, although this particular gap is being quickly filled by the rise in postcolonial Francophone, Latin American, Middle Eastern and First Peoples studies; and so forth. In a parallel movement, a significant number of new critical approaches have emerged within its fold (environmentalism, new geographies and temporalities, etc.), each trying to address the multiple challenges that globalization poses and to confront contemporary neo-imperial practices. By and large, postcolonial studies has succeeded in adapting its modes of critique to the new, post-Cold War dispositions of power and influence and their resultant inequities. Indeed, so successful has it been that the postcolonial has moved in recent years from being a historical marker to a globally inflected term applicable to a variety of regions, as the collection of essays I co-edited with Janet Wilson and Sarah Lawson Welsh (Rerouting the Postcolonial, Routledge, 2009) suggests. Yet in one crucial respect the postcolonial paradigm has fallen short of its critical potential and ethical ambition, namely in its interaction – or lack thereof – with the communist “Second World” and its post-communist aftermath.
