ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what postcolonialism is all about. Postcolonialism avoids a material focus on the economics of a capitalist world order in favor of a focus on the psychological and sociological effects of colonization on cultures and societies. Homegrown Islamic extremism, riots, protests, and terrorism can be traced to an under-swelling of Muslim impatience with Islamification, and postcolonialism plays right into that. Postcolonial thinkers look at culture from two standpoints: a postmodernist approach and a poststructuralist approach. Postcolonialists are somewhat ambivalent about race because racial thinking has been such a powerful tool for imperialism, but the same could be said for nationalism. They much prefer the concept of ethnicity or, better, the Kantian notion of "unchanging inner essence" as with the phrase "race of mankind." This shows how fluid the field of postcolonialism is, so it will be difficult to be precise with the conceptual vocabulary.
