Issue 100: Fall 2009

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Postcolonialism

By Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel on October 30, 2009
Abstract: This essay proposes a brief reflection on the meanings and relevancy of postcolonialism as a keyword in contemporary cultural studies. Taking as a point of departure the well-known etymological crisis through which many scholars feel compelled to explain how postcolonial theory is still a productive approach, this entry questions the applicability of the postcolonial paradigm to study sixteenth-century Latin America, nineteenth-century Africa, or the twentieth-century Caribbean. The Caribbean and Latin America are used as a disciplinary counterpoint, to trace the advantages and disadvantages of the universalization of the postcolonial paradigm. This essay also reviews some of the key contributions to this topic by articles published in SOCIAL TEXT, as a way to celebrate this journal's publication of one hundred issues.
If postcolonial theory has ended, what exactly ended, and what was its 
task? 
 -- Simon Gikandi 
Our dialogue . . . reminds me of why postcolonial studies has been 
significant for me. This field opened my mind. . . . But our dialogue has 
also reminded me of why I have found postcolonial studies frustrating. 
 -- Fernando Coronil 


In 2007, the PMLA published an editor's column titled "The End of Postcolonial Theory?" that hosted a conversation with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel. For the epigraphs above, I have chosen two moments of this dialogue that illustrate the ambivalent intellectual positionings provoked by postcolonial theory. The column repeats a well-known scene in most of the scholarship that adopts postcolonialism as 

its theoretical paradigm: the moment of etymological crisis in which the authors feel compelled to explain how the postcolonial is still a productive approach to pose questions about sixteenth-century Latin America, nineteenth-century Africa, or the twentieth-century Caribbean. In each case, to use Coronil's wording, postcolonialism opens the mind and frustrates specific modes of understanding. 


 

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