ABSTRACT
The afterword turns to the ways in which we commonly emplot colonial history, referring to precolonial, colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial periods. (To emplot a set of events is to select, organize, and interpret them in such a way as to give them the comprehensible, causal development of a story.) There are some problems with common ways of periodizing colonialism, and they are not merely terminological. They concern, most significantly, the question of whether or not any society today can reasonably be considered postcolonial, or whether the label “postcolonial” might always and inevitably mischaracterize a condition that is in fact either neocolonialism or derivative colonialism (or both). To address this issue, the afterword looks briefly at three works: one treating economic neocolonialism (Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako), one treating political neocolonialism (Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants), and one treating cultural colonialism (Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman). The third suggests some potentially useful conclusions about the psychology of colonialism, and its disheartening persistence.
