Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies

By Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001. 1998

Price: not stated; pages: 275

Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Montreal, Canada

From colonialism to globalisation the world has, for better or for worse, been affected incisively by 19th century European imperialism. From the post-colonial nation-states structures and institutions to the increasing aping of the European imperialism, non-European countries live in the framework of European rational-legal, scientific, judiciary, and overall development paradigm.

The mission of the authors of this dictionary-type key concepts and words used not only in academia but also on the streets of post-colonial Africa, South and Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia is open up proper understanding of the "continuing effects of colonial and neo-colonial power. "

In a roundabout way by understanding the post-colonial power game in either Nigeria or Gabon one gets to know the nature and impact of colonial structures left behind in these states, inherited by the locals, how the locals are continuing with the colonial power game, and how all these are ballooned into modern global culture, economics, military and politics.

Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, therefore, seeks to let us know different ways of in which in the aftermath of colonialism how terms are used, their ancestry or conceptual evolution, and why these terms remain an important icon in the post-colonial cultural debate.

Oiled by very good international communication systems such as fax, computers, fibre optics, telephony, print and electronic mass media, satellite, post office, internet, transportation systems, and so on these colonial structures are being operated in different ways today unlike yesteryears when the Europeans were physically present. The Europeans contemporary colonialism is otherwise called globalisation, which not only make the post-colonial nation-state either created in Africa or South America obsolete but dances to the dictates of European-induced world economic and cultural system despite sometimes their apparent pervasiveness in cultural relations either one is dealing relations of nation-states, ethnic groups in Africa, race, class, economics and gender.

But different post-colonial peoples use certain concepts and words, in the aftermath of colonialism, differently. This is informed by different historical facts of imperialism to the incorporation of different cultures and marginality into a form of synchronic post-modernism via vast societies who uses of English words changes with time and simultaneously the inflections of nation, ethnicity, region, class, power, and gender.

And so there is, in the narrower sense, no absolute authority on the use of concepts, terms /or words like race, racism, ethnicity, globalisation, diaspora, ecological imperialism, world system, colonialism, decolonisation, imperialism, modernity, magic realism, Manicheanism, marginality, subaltern, indented labour, and so on.