General Introduction

The General Introduction to the Handbook makes the case for postcolonialism as a committed mode of revisionist knowledge, both rigorously aware and resolutely adversarial, that dedicates itself to the service of human freedom in the context of a world historically conditioned by colonial relations of power. Beginning with a brief discussion of the recent events of the Arab Spring, the Introduction argues that, far from turning its back on its own liberationist anti-colonial origins, postcolonialism enters into constructive dialogue with these. Similarly, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reconciliatory’ postcolonialisms, sometimes seen as being mutually exclusive, enter into a negotiated relationship with critical revisionism that offers a new, triangulated way of looking at and creatively accounting for the constitutive contradictions in the postcolonial field. The Introduction concludes by re-asserting, as do the subsequent chapters in the volume, postcolonialism’s continuing obligation to complexity, and by reconfirming its urgent relevance to a world that is persistently marked and marred by colonialism—by multiple colonialisms—even as postcolonial critics work towards their utopian goal of making colonialism and the ideologies that drive it a thing of the past.

Colonialism · Constructive · Context (archaeology) · Decolonization · Ideology · Obligation · Political science · Politics · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Power (physics) · Sociology · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies