ABSTRACT

The term 'postcolonial' has been under a great deal of scrutiny ever since it was used to include 'all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day'. The institutionalization of postcolonial cultural studies began with the assertion of freedom and justice as witnessed in Sartre's preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Postcolonialism as a discursive construction, freed of its third-world location, is then easily transferred across the Atlantic to reside in the classrooms of advanced capitalist countries that have a homegrown postcolonial population of their own – the ethnic groups and migrants. Postcolonial studies in the US is evidently related with the growing ascendancy of a cultural studies programme and its own advancement as a global power by the end of the Cold War. The prioritizing of global capitalism over praxis corresponds with the waning of Marxism and Marxist studies.