Postcolonial theory is an attempt to uncover the colonial ideologies implicit in European texts about the non-European. The term “postcolonial literature” now replaces the traditional category of “Commonwealth literature” or “Third World literature.”
Postcolonial theory looks at colonialism’s strategies of representation of the native; the epistemological underpinnings of colonial projects; the “writing” of colonial histories; the feminization, marginalization and dehumanization of the native; the rise of nationalist and/or nativist discourse; the psychological effects of colonialism on both the coloniser and the colonised; the role of apparatuses like education, English studies, historiography, art and architecture in the “execution” of the colonial project and the “transitive” or negotiator structure of post- colonialism.