ABSTRACT
My title derives from one of Western Europe’s most liberatory texts: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1819), and I invoke this text to indicate a contradiction waiting to confound us when we speak of postcolonialism and children. The postcolonial critical enterprise is liberatory: it en-acts a desire for humanity to overcome an outmoded paternalism that seems to curtail a people’s freedom of movement and expression of self. In certain manifestations, it seeks to overcome through what we might term “Shellyean” means: the raising of consciousness that will result in our acceptance and understanding of difference. In his Defence of Poetry. Shelley speaks of the necessity for people to have the strength to imagine that which they know. To imagine that which we know is tantamount to relinquishing that which we know, letting it go, understanding it as something other than what we are and celebrating that otherness. Imagination is otherness. This is the lesson of postcoloniality.
