Postcolonialism
Not unlike the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and postmodernism, postcolonialism refers not only to a temporal marker that signals a shift in mentalities and metaphilosophical questioning but also to a decolonizing movement enabled by new material conditions and to a theoretical and philosophical methodology. As a temporal marker postcolonialism is caught in a series of paradoxes. On the one hand, postcolonialism signals the alleged end of colonialism and the beginning of a new historical period. On the other hand, at the center of postcolonialism is the exploration of what postcolonial theorists have called the postcolonial present, namely, the enduring legacy of colonialism in contemporary times. Still, one of the most basic goals of postcolonialism is to foreground the movements of decolonization that began as early as the end of World War II, peaked during the 1950s and 1960s, and have lasted into the twenty-first century. For this reason many postcolonial theorists argue that postcolonialism is less an "ism" that describes an already past movement, but is more a series of philosophical issues that emerge from the ongoing process of decolonization in the midst of the global hegemony of Europe and the United States.
Undoubtedly, postcolonialism also refers to all the movements of decolonization that emerged during the 1950s, movements that predominantly took the form of so-called Third World nationalism.
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