About the Conference

Locating postcolonial studies within the 21st century means situating it within the globalising world, and by doing so to shift anew the configurations within which we can engage the contemporary with the so called ‘post’. There has been an outpour of writing both celebrating, on the one hand, ‘postcolonial theory’s and studies’ attempts to subvert, interrogate and challenge the established structure of western Eurocentric thought and on the other, to denounce ‘postcolonial studies’ as a sort of spurious attempt to do just that. Part of the reason for the denouncement lies in the question of how to locate the ‘post’ of ‘postcolonial’. The argument forwarded has often been that the term ‘postcolonial’ itself, which as scholars have previously pointed out, indicates a linear conception of time, whilst others have argued that ‘postcolonial’ need not necessarily indicate a temporal linearity but an attempt to go beyond established parameters and structures of colonialism. Hence the ‘post’ like in postmodernism, post-structuralism and so on.  Within this framework several questions arise:  the question of where are we headed to? If, or not, postcolonialism has ended? Where to locate it? And more importantly, how to locate it within the 21st century? These are just some of the questions that are informed by the curious ways in which we understand the word ‘post’. But however we choose to understand the term, are we still caught in the very structures of Eurocentric, western thought paradigms that postcolonialism claims to and tries to subvert: whether those thought paradigms have to do with history and re-telling history, or the discourse on the so called ‘other’, or on the much articulated terms of hybridist, multiculturalism and difference. Is there a way out? Or is the way out yet another trap door which you exit only to return to the same point of entry? Perhaps, it is the unique situation of the 21st century globalised world that will provide us with the tools to push postcolonial studies beyond rather than simply announcing its premature demise.