ABSTRACT
In postcolonial studies, overgeneralizations about the hierarchies of power between former colonial powers and colonies are deliberately avoided. Instead, scholars pay heed to the complexities of different postcolonial contexts and to the complicatedness of their specific interconnections. This is articulated by Nash (2002: 228; emphasis added) who argues that ‘understanding colonialism as general and global, and particular and local, between the critical engagement with a grand narrative of colonialism, and the political implications of complex, untidy, differentiated and ambiguous local stories’ actually helps us to appreciate that postcolonialism is a highly contested and provisional term that is constantly in question.
