Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Reading through the thirty essays collected in this book, one is struck by how much more difficult it has become to describe postcolonial studies than it was even five years ago. We see this as a very positive development. Anyone looking for a single, simple definition of this field will be disappointed by what follows. However, those seeking global scale and local commitment brought to the last fifty years of world history will, we feel, be amply rewarded. Postcolonial studies as a field can be described in several ways. In an historical sense, postcolonial studies describes the movements for national liberation that ended Europe's political domination of the globe, with 1947 an epochal date signaling the emergence of South Asia, “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, as an independent region. For the next forty years, one nation after another shook off colonial domination until the United Nations in 1987 numbered some 160 autonomous member-states. The dismantling of the Soviet Union since 1989 has resulted in the emergence of many more, with continuing effects upon the shape of the world, but the question of whether this continues the worldwide movement of decolonization will be taken up in the essay that opens this volume by Neil Larsen. In either event, this freeing and splintering of political entities has been among the most characteristic and most determining features ... log in or subscribe to read full text