ABSTRACT
To date, the field of postcolonial studies has been stratified according to several overarching concerns. These concerns can be loosely categorized in terms of questions engaging the politics of the following: textual translation and language acquisition, representation and authority in criticism and primary works, terminology of the discipline and academic marketing, and definitions of nationalism and the relationship between ethnicity and the state. Prominent critical personas have come to be associated with particular discursive categories, but there is so much cross-pollination between interests and so much resistance to theoretical classification that any attempt to shuffle theorists into organized patterns of writing and pedagogy is necessarily contrived. This introduction to the field itemizes the salient arguments in a vast, pluralized, and shape-shifting field, which is by its very nascence poststructural and thus conditional. This chapter arranges the dominant critiques under the overarching concerns around language, representation, marketing, and nationalism, and highlights the critics best known for advancing them. I then forecast where future interventions are being or need to be made in order to maintain the field’s relevancy in an era of climate and planetary crisis.
