What is "postcolonialism"

alt. 1 An era or attitude relating to the period after the settlement of one country by another, or very broadly, after the 1960s, when many colonised countries gained their independence. 2 An academic discipline that attempts to analyse, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. n. 1 An era or attitude relating to the period after the settlement of one country by another, or very broadly, after the 1960s, when many colonised countries gained their independence. 2 An academic discipline that attempts to analyse, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation of a native people and its lands. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyse the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by examining the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism—the imperial regime's depictions (social, political, cultural) of the colonizer and of the colonized.

As a genre of contemporary history, postcolonialism questions and reinvents the manner in which a culture is being viewed, challenging the narratives expounded during the colonial era. Anthropologically, it records human nations between the colonists and the peoples under colonial rule, seeking to build an understanding of the nature and practice of colonial rule. As a critical theory, it presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology and practice of neocolonialism with examples drawn from history, political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and human geography. It also examines the effects of colonial rule on the cultural aspects of the colony and its treatment of women, language, literature, and humanity.

Postcolonial International relations scholarship posits a critical theory approach to International relations (IR), and is a non-mainstream area of international relations scholarship. According to Baylis postcolonial international relations scholarship has been largely ignored by mainstream international relations theorists and has only recently begun to make an impact on the discipline. Post-colonialism focuses on the persistence of colonial forms of power and the continuing existence of racism in world politics.

Postcolonial IR challenges the eurocentrism of IR—particularly its parochial assumption that Western Enlightenment thinking is superior, progressive and universally applicable. Postcolonialists argue that this is enabled through constructing the Other as irrational and backwards.

Postcolonial IR attempts to expose such parochial assumptions of IR; for example, in the construction of white versus coloured peoples. An example is the IR story of a white men's burden to educate and liberate coloured men and women, to protect coloured women from coloured men. Often this is linked to other postpositivist theories, for example, through Postcolonial feminism, which analyze issues in IR through the lenses of both gender and culture.

Examples of the parochialistic nature of IR include geographical parochialism and cultural chauvinism. For the former, the construction of the Cold War era as a time of peace ignores the reality that major conflicts continued in the developing world. Furthermore, the oft-cited history of IR is constructed in western terms (more information under history); and IR has been used to justify everything from imperialism to a playground for skirmishes between the two Cold War superpowers. For the latter, the West (through IGOs such as the IMF's quick rush to "save" Asia in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–8) could be seen as both a white men's burden to save Asia or to reformulate Asian capitalism in a Western image.