ABSTRACT
Introducing The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Neil Lazarus cogently argued that the notion of “postcoloniality” had ceased to be designated as “a historical category,” a mere indicator of a historical moment that can be clearly perceived or understood as “after colonialism” (2004a: 3; original emphasis). Rather, “postcolonial” is a “fighting term” and a “theoretical weapon” which, on the one hand, goes beyond the ideological assumptions and articulations of “modernity” so often associated with postcolonial discourses, and, on the other hand, resists any attempt to consolidate or concretize its meanings with “all forms of nationalism” (Lazarus: 4). Ania Loomba similarly avers that “postcolonial” is “a descriptive [and] not an evaluative term” (1110). As such, postcoloniality is better understood as a critical term featuring “migrancy, liminality, hybridity, and multiculturality” as some of the major tropes and terrains for describing and investigating the complex cultural contacts and crossings, and its approaches are aptly those marked with indeterminacy and ambivalence, instead of moving toward a holistic and systematic analysis of social changes (Lazarus 4). Timothy Brennan further argues that what have been considered the “states of virtue” in postcolonial studies are the dynamics of “mobility and mixedness”—not so much for the accentuation of contingent historical experiences, as for the articulation and signification of common modes of being (2004: 133).
