ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter offers an inevitably partial examination of challenges, indicating some new directions postcolonial studies has either taken, or must take. It highlights four areas: the environment; the history and present of indigenous peoples and societies; premodern histories and cultures; and the ongoing colonisation of territories, labour and peoples by global capitalism. All of these demand fresh thinking about colonial history, the shape of freedom, racial hierarchies, gender dynamics, and community. It suggests that such thinking is taking place, in the academy and beyond. Many commentators have suggested that postcolonial studies should not be thought of as a discrete field so much as an approach that has been honed by work on colonial dynamics and legacies in several disciplines; nevertheless, it is also a formation within the academy, shaped largely within English departments. The chapter also discusses some recent scholarship and political movements that show why that the colonial past and the globalized present are deeply interconnected.
