Introduction: What are "postcolonial studies"? What are words?

         Etymology - the study of the history of words - is a useful place to begin a discussion on literature, because literature is, after all, composed of written words, and these words have meaning only insofar as their writer, at least, has an understanding of the history of their definitions. Ideally, to state the obvious, both writer and reader should have in mind clear, yet flexible, definitions for the key terms they use, and these clear and agreed definitions should be available in an independently-consultable form such as a dictionary or encyclopedia for the benefit of readers who lack them; thus equipped, the readers’ mental forms should be sufficiently close to those of the writer to enable them to evolve in some useful way during the course of the reading.

That this obvious desideratum of written communication has become routinely controversial in the abstract academic field known as “postcolonial studies” should in itself alert the interested reader to the fact that many texts which are highly regarded in this field are open to fantastically wide and varied interpretation, as well as prewarning her that no reliable mechanisms presently exist – save, perhaps, for her own mind - for winnowing these wildly different, yet equally valid, interpretations from the willful, occasionally extreme and even obscene misinterpretations to which the texts have also, sometimes quite deliberately, been left entirely exposed by their authors and professional critics.