Introduction: Decolonizing Futures

The study of postcolonial literature is at a pivotal disciplinary moment. At its inception in the late twentieth century with the groundbreaking works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and others, postcolonial studies posed a radical intervention; it allowed for both a critique of imperial intersections of knowledge and power and a critical infusion of new voices in an expanded global literary canon. However, while there is much rigorous new work that links postcolonial studies to both race and ethnic studies, and Global South studies (Goyal, Roberts and Stephens, Menon, DeLoughray)—some of which we highlight in this volume—many perceive it to have evolved into a toothless “world literature” which has ironically ossified neo-colonial monoliths such as the nation-state and English/Anglophone literature, thereby obscuring huge swathes of literary production that impacts wholly differently organized networks of readers and thinkers. We find ourselves at a crossroads: postcolonial theory and literary studies can either become a fossilized intervention of a particular time and place or can radically expand its purview to renew its catalytic and scholarly activist relevance. This Companion aims to do the latter.