Postcolonialism: interdisciplinary or interdiscursive?

Abstract

This essay critically examines the nature and scope of postcolonial interdisciplinarity. Although postcolonial studies claims to operate on, and forge in, an interdisplinary approach, its intentions are largely interdiscursive. In spite of the vague and elusive claims evident in the catalogue of introductory texts on postcolonial theory, neither postcolonial theorists nor its exponents have adequately established the disciplinary bounds or their methodological fusion(s) specific to, and required for, interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the disciplinary foundations of literature, history and philosophy, this essay demonstrates that postcolonial theory has developed an implicit oppositional critique to eurocentrism. This oppositional critique, while discursive in intention and formulaic in application, is subsequently borrowed by a host of social science disciplines—anthropology, geography and development studies— as a proxy methodology that protects against the perils of eurocentric longings.

Notes

The author wishes to thank Diana Brydon, Len Findlay, Cecile Sandten, Sákéj Henderson and Birte Heidemann for reading the previous drafts of this article.

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