ABSTRACT
It has been more than a decade since the cultural theorist scholar, Stuart Hall (1996) remarked on the future direction of postcolonial theorizing. Hall’s essay, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial?’ Thinking at the Limit” engaged and convincingly responded to a series of arguments (many of them wrongheaded and misleading) by several esteemed scholars (Dirlik, 1994; McClintock, 1992; and Shohat, 1992) who were concerned with what the term “postcolonial” was effectively tomark.As variouslyobserved, a recurring criticism found in the literature has centered on the usefulness of the term (cf. Slemon, 2001). For many critics, the prefix “post” suggested a definitive closure or announced an “end”, a time after colonialism. But as argued by Shome (1998) and Hulme (1995), the “post” connotes thinking through the relations and problematics of that to which it is appended. Furthermore, the political, economic, cultural relations and conjunctures characteristic of the present cannot be understood solely through the thematics and problematics of territorial colonial occupation and conquest advanced in materialist critical paradigms (cf. Bhabha&Comaroff, 2002; Devenney, 2007; Hall, 1996; Hulme, 1995; Shome, 1998). To paraphrase Shome (1998), a simple binary of domination/subjugation, self/other, center/periphery, and colonizer/colonized that may have been useful for comprehending power relations or explaining the production of colonial difference during various colonial occupations is inadequate for discerning the current conjuncture and its complexity.
