Postcolonial theory is a literary theory or critical approach that deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries. It may also deal with literature written in or by citizens of colonising countries that takes colonies or their peoples as its subject matter. The theory is based around concepts of otherness and resistance.
Postcolonial theory became part of the critical toolbox in the 1970s, and many practitioners credit Edward Said's book Orientalism as being the founding work.
Typically, the proponents of the theory examine the ways in which writers from colonised countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim them from the colonisers. They also examine ways in which the literature of the colonial powers is used to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonised as inferior. However, attempts at coming up with a single definition of postcolonial theory have proved controversial, and some writers have strongly critiqued the whole concept.
As a literary theory or critical approach it deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries.
Postcolonialtheory became part of the critical toolbox in the 1970s, and many practitioners take Edward Said's book Orientalism to be the theory's founding work.
Attempts at coming up with a single definition of postcolonialtheory have proved controversial, and some writers have strongly critiqued the concept, which is embedded in identity politics.
For that matter, other settler countries such as Canada and Australia are sometimes omitted from the category "postcolonial" because of their relatively shorter struggle for independence, their loyalist tendencies toward the mother country which colonized them, and the absence of problems of racism or of the imposition of a foreign language.
In all of these senses, the "postcolonial," rather than indicating only a specific and materially historical event, seems to describe the second half of the twentieth-century in general as a period in the aftermath of the heyday of colonialism.
Further, the rise of Postcolonial Studies at a time of growing transnational movements of capital, labor, and culture is viewed by some with suspicion in that it is thought to deflect attention away from the material realities of exploitation both in the First and the Third World.
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