Does anyone still read this stuff?
Postcolonial theory is currently kind of in its prime. It's no longer that hip, avant-garde outfit that just rocked the runway at Paris, but it's also not an old, fuddy-duddy cardigan from the back of your dad's closet.
Postcolonial theory is more like a Michelle Obama outfit: it mixes basics from Target with a splash of super-cool designer stuff that you've never seen before. In other words, it's both accessible and totally inaccessible.
What does that mean for grad students and professors? Or your typical undergrad? It means that if you intend to stay in the humanities, you'll need to know about postcolonialism because parts of the field have become basic to the humanities (like Edward Said and Orientalism—if you don't know that bare-bootied cover at a glance, your oriental peacock is cooked).
The other parts that aren't so basic? They're like the "deep cuts" on an iTunes album; you'll deal with those ideas eventually once you get past the basics.
Either way, the stuff has become part of the mainstream of academic thought. We should add too that this is one field where the connection between theory and literature is super-strong. Writers like Salman Rushdie (sentenced to death for his depiction of Iran), Arundhati Roy (who challenges caste and class in India), J.M. Coetzee (take that, South Africa under apartheid), and, most recently, Zadie Smith (a Jamaican-British novelist who focuses on multiculturalism) have really made the whole idea of postcolonialism a part of literary (and popular) culture.
These writers are famous with a big fat "'F"' for spinning stories with poco themes. They (and others like them) both inspire and are inspired by postcolonial theory. Now there's some legit scholarship in action, yo.
So, hey, you don't feel like reading that super-heavy theory book by the most recent postcolonial academic? You can just as well grab Zadie Smith's newest book NW and get poco ideas through fiction. In fact, that might be even cooler than toting around a tattered copy of The Location of Culture.