"Postcolonial Studies" is an interdisciplinary field that examines how colonial conquest and empire have shaped cultures, subjectivities, and knowledge – and how these legacies persist after formal decolonization. It arose first in literary studies but now spans history, anthropology, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies. This page contains a short overview, you can find an extended critical report here.
1940s–1960s: Anti-colonial thought and “third-worldism” (Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Nkrumah, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961)) provide a psycho-political analysis of racism, violence, and decolonization.(Wikipedia)
1970s: The field crystallizes in Anglophone literary criticism. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is widely treated as the founding text, showing how Western scholarship and fiction produced the “Orient” as an inferior, exotic Other and thereby supported imperial rule.(Wikipedia)
1980s: Institutionalization of “postcolonial theory.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) and the Subaltern Studies collective (Ranajit Guha et al.) reorient the field toward questions of historiography and the silencing of subaltern voices.(ScholarBlogs)
1990s: Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) foregrounds hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry; debates about nationalism, diaspora, and globalization expand the agenda.(ScienceDirect)
2000s–today: The field disperses into work on settler colonialism, indigeneity, globalization, migration, environmental justice, and gender/queer theory, while also facing critiques from Marxist, decolonial, and Global South perspectives.(humanities.brown.edu)
Most surveys still treat a “core” constellation:(eGyankosh)
Edward Said (1935–2003) – Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1993). Analyzes how Western representations of the “East” are structured by power and produce a knowable, governable Other.(Wikipedia)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) – essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Introduces the “subaltern,” strategic essentialism, and a critique of how even radical theory can re-silence the colonized.(lo.unisa.edu.au)
Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) – The Location of Culture (1994). Develops hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence to show how colonial power is never complete but always unsettled by the colonized subject’s partial “repetition” of the colonizer.(ScienceDirect)
Foundational anticolonial precursors include Frantz Fanon, Césaire, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Decolonising the Mind, 1986), and M. K. Gandhi, while later syntheses such as Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998/2019) map the field’s links to Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism.(humanities.brown.edu)
Otherness & representation: Postcolonial theory studies how colonial discourse constructs the colonized as the inferior, exotic, irrational Other, and how this “otherness” is double – marked by both difference and a dependence on the colonizer’s categories.
Resistance and mimicry: Resistance can be overt (anti-colonial struggle) or subtle (mimicry, irony, appropriation). But resistance is double-edged, since it is shaped by the very discourses it opposes.
Hybridity and diaspora: Colonization, migration, and slavery produce mixed, “hybrid” cultures and diasporic identities that unsettle rigid binaries of colonizer/colonized or national/foreign.
Anti-essentialism: The field criticizes any romantic notion of a pure “Indian soul” or unified “Black consciousness,” warning that such essences often reproduce colonial myths.
British India / Subaltern Studies
Historians like Ranajit Guha reread colonial and nationalist archives to recover peasant uprisings, tribal rebellions, and women’s agency that elite histories erased, challenging both imperial and nationalist narratives.(ScholarBlogs)
Algerian War in Fanon
Fanon’s psychiatric work in colonial Algeria leads him to theorize the psychological damage of colonization and the political necessity—and ambiguity—of revolutionary violence, making Algeria a paradigmatic laboratory of decolonization.(Wikipedia)
Caribbean Creole literatures
Writers from the anglophone Caribbean use non-standard English, oral forms, and memory of slavery to “write back” to the empire, embodying hybridity and challenging metropolitan aesthetic norms.
Postcolonial studies remains indispensable for denaturalizing Eurocentric histories and for showing how power operates in language, archives, and aesthetics. Its weakness, especially in the 1990s, was a drift toward highly textual, metropolitan theory that sometimes lost sight of material political economy and ongoing forms of empire. The most exciting contemporary work, in my opinion, is precisely where postcolonial analysis reconnects with capitalism, ecology, and indigenous politics rather than staying within literary criticism. IN other words, the field hasn't reached enough philosophical depth yet.