Postcolonial Theory Basics
Postcolonial Theory Basics
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why of Postcolonial Theory
Beginnings
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,...
Big Players
The Old GuardYou can basically split the "'big players"' into two camps. There's the old guard— Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, and Edward Said—who came into the academic vanguard at a time when s...
Key Debates
"Who is post-colonial?"That's a direct quote, straight from one of the points of controversy—the 1989 book The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. The three aut...
State of the Theory
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...
Talking the Talk
What is literature? For pocos, literature can be anything as long as it has a link to some colonial or neo-colonial empire. In fact, poco theorists live for things like a shopping list from a remo...