Revisiting postcolonial theory: Continuities and departures in the twenty-first century

Abstract

This article aims to map the terrain of postcolonial theory from its Marxist origins, to a postmodern ‘totalizing’, and ‘hegemonic’ view of reading culture. One of the coordinates, that of continuities, reinforces notions of pure cultures and other instances of vestigial populist nostalgia about putatively pure tradition, while another, that of departures, places identity in a world that is susceptible to constant transitions. Postcolonial theory is elaborated through its intersection with globalization – a concept which is quasicolonial in its application, and is used here broadly as a metaphor for modernity. Rather than nurturing and relying on a facile optimism based on paradigms that assume the linear march of history, and hence identity, this article argues for an ever-contested and infinitely viable terrain of postcolonial theory that is deployed to contend with, and continually interrogate, the notion of identity as rooted in realism and in tradition, thus making that notion self-consciously diverse, fluid and heterogeneous.