ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, literary and cultural studies were swept by a powerful movement, in publications, conferences and curricula, centred on the term ‘postcolonial’. Postcolonial discourse displaced an older paradigm, influential from the 1950s to the 1970s, focusing on the notion of Third World’, and associated with anti-colonial nationalist movements. Such older anti-colonial discourse came increasingly to be seen as insisting on fixed, binary, stable distinctions between First and Third Worlds, the colonizer and colonized. Postcolonial theory promised to be more adequate to a postmodern world of contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences generated by First World-Third World intersections, in particular the experiences of Third World peoples in Western metropolitan centres.
