Susie Tharu

on the End of
Postcolonial Theory
Susie Tharu

◈ Teacher of cultural
studies, literary theory
and feminism
◈ Employed in the
Central Institute for
English and Foreign
Languages
◈ Affiliated with the
School of Critical
Humanities, School of
Letters, and Anveshi

2
Tharu’s Main Arguments
ON END OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

3
 “
The tough question is, given its location
and its concerns, what and how is
postcolonial studies cutting?

4
 On The Postcolonial Intra-contradictions

Tharu mainly partitioned her arguments into two,

namely,

○ that PC is paradoxically too narrow and too

diffused at the same time.

○ that Orientalism, that of which can be assumed

as PC’s founding text, is far from being about
the Orient.

5
 Postcolonial Intra-contradictions

too narrow! too diffused!

PC is too restricted within the PC is too broad (as is everything
confines of the “colonial” that is outside the Eur-Am matrix
problematic (or the concept of is “PC”). it is not necessarily
colonialism thereof) bound by a specific location.

6
 On The Postcolonial Intra-contradictions

Said’s Orientalism is Postcolonialism became

NOT about the the overarching theory
non-West, but rather in which followers of
about the outdated
“Euro-American Commonwealth
academy and the literature and old area
power/knowledge axis studies repatriated to.
of that institution” (643).

7
 “
“Abandoning the responsibility of engaging
Western power/knowledge in its entirety,
the new postcolonial studies, with
anthropology in the lead, has concerned
itself with a problematic designed to
unearth residual or continuing colonialism
in the ex-colonies” (643).

8
With these at hand,
how, then, does postcolonial
studies work?

9
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES IS
EXCEPTIONALLY SELF-REFLEXIVE.

10
 Politico-theoretical Relativism

Postcolonial
studies
HISTORY Scholarship and
Theory
Colonial History

11
 “
The tough question is, given its location
and its concerns, what and how is
postcolonial studies cutting?

12