4 - The institutionalization of postcolonial studies

Summary

Beginnings: colonial discourse analysis

Those wanting to understand the beginnings and development of postcolonial studies will readily find numerous Introductions, Readers, Companions, monographs, and journal articles offering a variety of definitions and genealogies, advising further reading, and proposing new objects of study. If the scale of publications testifies to the rapid assimilation of a disparate interdisciplinary undertaking within academic curricula, then the range of analytic strategies suggests a volatile and contested discussion. Yet despite a project in which poststructuralists vie with Marxists, culturalists with materialists, textualists with realists, postcolonial criticism has come to be identified as postmodernist in its orientation - an alignment promoted more or less actively by prominent critics in the field. One consequence of this is that there has been a fluid, polysemic, and ambiguous usage of the term “postcolonial” within and beyond specialist circles. The plenitude of signification is such that “postcolonial” can indicate a historical transition, an achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical stance - indeed, in the spirit of mastery favored by Humpty Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean.2 As a result it is not uncommon to find the term used in connection with any discursive contest against oppression or marginalization - such as feminist or queer or disability studies.