Post-Colonial Theory

Post-colonial theory is a critical body of knowledge that questions the dominant ways through which the world is known and how this knowledge is defined. Also referred to as post-colonial critique or post-colonialism, this body of knowledge is fundamentally premised on the critique of what is seen as Western intellectualism and knowledge hegemony, with its discourses and thought formations believed to be unduly privileged as the mainstream. Spurning what it considers established agendas and radically rejecting accustomed ways of seeing, post-colonialism contends that these are not only rooted in colonial perspectives but that they advance a Western world view to the exclusion of ‘other’, non-Western views—that is, that there are intrinsically ethnocentric assumptions underpinning ‘mainstream’ disciplines which are fundamentally unrecognizing of the values and practices of other non-Western cultures.

Despite the chronological connotation reflected in the prefix ‘post’, post-colonial in this case does not necessarily refer to descriptions of time or periodic shifts, as in ‘after-colonialism’; rather, it is connotative of an adverse theoretical stance or opposing position to what has come to be regarded as the ‘establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ in knowledge formation. In her 2007 article, Brett Christophers defined this as the wide-ranging critique of the ways of thinking, of seeing and of representing the imperialist ‘empire’ which continue to persist in different degrees, long after the dismantling of that empire. In challenging established ways of knowing, it advocates a deconstruction of mainstream knowledge regimes, which it argues are a product of the colonizer's world view and as such are underpinned by colonial forms of thought and patterns of knowing, and again, it calls for a repositioning of dominant Western discourses in a way that presents these not as totalitarian or universal but, more reflexively, as part of a plurality of knowledges.

Post-colonialism therefore challenges and critiques the dynamics of knowledge creation and argues for an ontological deconstruction of mainstream knowledge formations; in particular, it problematizes how we ‘know’ the world and pushes for an epistemological reorientation with regard to our perception, acknowledgement and validation of ‘truth’. This entry discusses some of the main arguments and key theoretical concepts that underpin this perspective and will briefly examine its relevance as a possible outlook for future research.