A loosely-applied rubric for a large variety of work (creative and critical) across a range of disciplines---particularly anthropology, history, and literary studies---with a shared interest in the effects of colonization on the cultures of both the colonizers and the colonized. The leading theorists in the field are Bhabha, Homi, Spivak, Gayatri, and Said, Edward. The field is large enough for there to be several different sub-fields operating under its umbrella such as feminism postcolonial studies and Queer Theory and postcolonial studies. The origins of Postcolonial Studies are predominantly Anglophone, but a comparative dimension has blossomed in the past two decades so that there are now substantial Francophone, Lusophone, Germanophone, and Hispanophone (as well as many other language groups) bodies of work in the area as well. The term was originally used by historians and economists in hyphenated form (âpost-colonialismâ) to describe the political and economic situation of nations following decolonization, thus it had a specific historical point of reference. However, it is in literary studies rather than history that the term has put down its deepest roots, becoming in the process one of the most important intellectual movements in the entire discipline, easily outpacing deconstruction and New Historicism whose central tenets it has in any case absorbed. Postcolonial Studies offers itself as a radical alternative to the bland and ideologically naive Commonwealth Literatures project. Literary studies has deleted the hyphen and with it the precision of reference it had in history, thus allowing the term to encompass the analysis of virtually any aspect of colonization, from the Early Modern or pre-colonial period of European exploration of the globe up to the present day. The deleting of the hyphen should be regarded as an essentially polemic gesture problematizing the very idea that colonialism is something that belongs safely in the past. Indeed, there are many who would argue that viewed globally we are very far from being postcolonial inasmuch that there are still many countries where the institutions, practices, and power relations of colonization are still very much present (from the perspective of indigenous peoples, this is true of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US, to name only the most obvious). Similarly, there are those who observe that, even where the colonizers have departed, their models of governance remain so that a situation of neocolonialism obtains (here one might point to Israel and Palestine, whose recent history offers an even more complex case of the persistence of colonization). It is difficult to generalize about a field of study as broad as Postcolonial Studies, but it can be observed that (i) it takes an anti-essentialist approach to identity (though it will allow the necessity for strategic essentialism); (ii) it privileges differend over sameness (but acknowledges that difference is not without its ambivalence); (iii) its political outlook is pluralist and anti-hegemony (it openly celebrates Creoleness, diaspora, and hybridity, and at the same time problematizes all forms of subaltern and subjugation); and (iv) it equates representation with power (Saidâs Orientalism thesis has it that the control of representation is an index of power and the exercise of that control one of the things postcolonial critics must not tire of exposing). Theoretically, Postcolonial Studies draws on Marxism (albeit in a non-Marxist way), psychoanalysis (particularly on issues to do with alterity), drive, actual, and to a limited extent Deleuze, Gilles and authority (especially their concept of the rhizome). Further Reading: B. Ashcroft et al. The Empire Writes Back (2002). D. Gregory The Colonial Present (2004). R. Young Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003).