SOURCE: “Once More with Feeling: What Is Postcolonialism?” in Ariel, Vol. 26, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 51-82.

In the following essay, Bahri provides an overview of the concept of postcolonialism, including a brief survey of various definitions of the subject.

Defining the parameters and boundaries of the postcolonial territory is a task not without its challenges. Much of the work done under the label “postcolonial” is content to assume a general understanding of its limits and possibilities. A sufficiently thoughtful definitional and conceptual framework, however, continues to elude us. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, in postcoloniality, “every metropolitan definition is dislodged. The general mode for the postcolonial is citation, reinscription, rerouting the historical” (Outside 217). In a very fundamental sense, of course, “postcolonial” is that which has been preceded by colonization. The second edition of the American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “of, relating to, or being the time following the...