Is the Postcolonial Dead?—Stuck in Miss Havisham’s Mirror

Abstract

Since the 1970s, Postcolonial theory has held sway over discussions particularly in the human and social sciences. Its popularity was however the aggregation of previous research whose major flaw was that it had not been attributed a scholarly tag in the form of a theory. From Walter Rodney through Frantz Fanon to Edward Said, there was already significant work in the direction of dismantling imperial and colonial agencies with regards to their impact on what became global enclaves. By the time Bill Ashcroft et al came to the scene, pioneer African writers were already transiting from the colonial period into, and interrogating independence realism. This paper therefore argues that the term “postcolonial” is not only a misnomer but has already exhausted its apparent potentials in claiming and describing a grafted scholarship, especially so because unlike other theories, postcolonialism does not support an ideological base, as was wont to be the case, for the postcolony. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the postcolonial delusion must give way to a more functional research paradigm (after decades of mirage scholarship) that harnesses the postcolony toward acceptable global relevance.