How It All Got Started
It's not like the dwellers of formerly colonized nations weren't pissed about it. But righteous anger gets so much more righteous when there's an academic theory to back it up, right? So luckily, in 1978 there popped up a game-changing book called Orientalism, which talked about the West's patronizing representation of the Middle East. The author, Edward Said (say it "saw-EEd"), knew plenty about that, since he was born in the British Mandate of Palestine and educated in British and American schools. The poco hocus pocus had begun!
Why was Eddie's book such a big deal? Let's just say the book came at the right time, smack dab in the middle of an upswing in leftist radical politics at U.S. universities and during an increase in Middle East violence. It wasn't just for academics—the world desperately needed a fresh, critical way to think about the "Orient."
That's the story of postcolonialism's start in the US, but if you really want to go global (and as budding poco-ists, how could you not?), you can go backward to the 1950s and '60s, when French-Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon—supporter of Algeria's war of independence from France and major combatant against racism—put out two major books: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. (If you can't tell by the titles, the dude was pretty dramatic.)
Those books really dissected—for the first time—the psychological effects of colonialism on the colonized and the need for decolonization. Sounds deep, right? That's what all the major thinkers back then thought too, and by "'major,"' we mean people like existentialist extraordinaire Jean-Paul Sartre. And let's be real, you know you've hit the big leagues when Jean-Paul Sartre writes the preface to your book, which is exactly what happened to Fanon.
After these bigshots got the ball rolling, a whole bunch of other academics wanted to jump on the intellectual bandwagon. Hey! they said. Let's expand these ideas to try to destabilize the linguistic, social, and economic assumptions associated with Western thought. If we stop taking for granted that the way the imperialists see the world is the right way, we can make space for our own cultural discourses.
It wasn't about saying that everyone from any country that had had a colony at any point ever was evil. It was saying that there were certain ways of seeing the world associated with the power of those countries. And poco's goal was to see it not that way.
The big point? Postcolonialism—like lots of the big ideas of the 1960s—was born out of serious strife. No abstractions here. We're talking large-scale pain and suffering.