ABSTRACT
Culturalism is not a school of thought, an intellectual movement, or a theory. Nor is it (like Marxism, poststructuralism and New Historicism), an ‘-ism’ with which postcolonial critics self-consciously identify. Rather, it is best thought of as the tendency to foreground and explore the central role of culture in maintenance of (neo-)colonial power and postcolonial dissidence. Such an awareness of culture as a crucially determining factor in the ways we see and act upon the world, and not simply (or innocently) a passive reflection of social reality, can be found in the work of critics who, as we shall see, take different attitudes to the centrality of culture in many postcolonial studies.
