Characteristics
Post-colonial studies entail the critical destabilization of the intellectual and linguistic, social and economic theories that support the Western ways of thinking (Deductive reasoning, Rule of Law, Monotheism), of perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world; thus is intellectual space created for the subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and so produce alternative conversations to the dominant “Us-and-Them” discourse, between the colonist and the colonized. Occasionally, the term post-colonialism is applied literally — as the period after colonialism — which is problematic, given that the de-colonized world is filled with “contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and liminalities”. Hence does post-colonialism also denote the continuation of colonialism by other means — economic, cultural, and linguistic — by the “Mother Country”, which are relationships of colonial power that control the production and distribution of knowledge about the world.
In Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996), Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins clarified the denotational functions:
The term post-colonialism — according to a too-rigid etymology — is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state. Not a naïve teleological sequence, which supersedes colonialism, post-colonialism is, rather, an engagement with, and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies. . . . A theory of post-colonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism.
— Post-Colonial Drama (1996).
The Western Way of thinking about the world usually reduces the de-colonized peoples, their cultures, and their countries, into a homogeneous whole, such as “The Third World”, which conceptually comprises Africa, most of Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Post-colonial studies analyses and criticises such an over-inclusive term, and its philosophic functions, to demonstrate that such a fantastic place as the Third World is composed of heterogeneous peoples and cultures, because the impact of colonialism varied by country, people, and culture. The connections among the “heart and margins” of the colonial empire are demonstrated by analyses of the ways in which “relations, practices, and representations” of the past are “reproduced or transformed”, of how knowledge of the world is generated and controlled.
Post-colonial studies recognise that many of the intellectual, cultural, and religious assumptions that underlie the logic of colonialism remain active in contemporary society. Some post-colonial theoreticians, such as Homi K. Bhabha, propose that the individual study of the colonial dominant knowledge of the world and of the Subaltern knowledge of the world, as if they exist in a binary intellectual-relation, perpetuates their existence as homogenous entities, rather than as an ambiguous whole. Hence, the post-colonial world should give value to the hybrid socio-cultural spaces wherein truth and authenticity are displaced by ambiguity, therefore, the condition of hybridity poses the most profound philosophic challenge to colonialism.
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