“Postcolonial” – Forwards! Forwards! Towards a definition!

In discussing the meaning of the term “postcolonial”, as we will here, we first need to examine the root term, “colony”. A colony, etymologically speaking, is a farm. Several near-cognates are well-defined in Greek and Latin, with undercurrents of cherishing, cultivating, looking after, honouring, helping to prosper. And so it is that, when we speak of a “colony” in the political, imperial sense, there is a clear implication that some, at least, of the human beings involved in a colony are in no way different from any other farmed animals, their lives, families, and futures fenced and fattened for the benefit of others. In speaking, then, of a “colony”, we speak of a social order in which there is a class of human beings who are used as a crop, bought, sold, bred, fattened up, and slaughtered for the profit and amusement of another class of human beings.

Such social orders are neither rare, nor universal. It deserves to be said, quite clearly, that while all of the large countries of the world are presently organized into precisely such farms, some offering their human beasts better conditions than others, there are, even now, and have, in the past, probably always been some groups of people, either within or outside those farms, who have devoted great effort and ingenuity to attempts to organize themselves in a less brutally hierarchical way – a fact of which every human being is, I believe, deeply emotionally aware. Every prisoner - and every prison guard - instinctively knows that there is, that there must be, a place beyond the walls. Culturally, such a space can only exist within a zone in which hierarchy and abuse in all their forms have been somehow excluded or neutralized; a task which is neither simple, nor impossible.

Each farm, each colony, each nation, each empire, defines itself primarily by the barbed wire fences around it. These fences represent the fear of the unknown, of the outside, but even more, they express the fear that the beasts - the population - might escape. To create a zone without fences, without guards - a place where the population might wish to escape to - becomes, then, a natural and noble intermediate goal of any heartful student of colonial situations.

In speaking, however, of a "post" colonial situation, we imply a future world in which all these colonial fences have been taken down - both the physical fences of national boundary, and the deeper fences, such as prejudice, social exclusion, and fear of others, of which the physical fences were symbolic; a world in which the hierarchies have been somehow flattened, and a global space created and maintained in which the human animals are left free to roam as they will, yet with a freedom that is structured or educated sufficiently to prevent the blind recreation of the same prisons of prejudice and ignorance which were so recently demolished.