Decolonizing Post-colonial Theory

This paper seeks to critique the ways in which post-colonial theory, especially as it is produced, consumed and valorized by Western academia, informs and inscribes critical reception and canonization of literary productions from ex-colonized societies. Despite the fact that post-colonial theory is a revisionary project that aims to foreground and recuperate repressed, excommunicated, marginalized and othered epistemes, it does not, and perhaps cannot, mobilize its formations in a completely nonhegemonic mode and, thus, creates its own marginalia. With this statement, I may be running the risk of having an essentialist view about post-colonial theory but I am aware that even anti-essentialism cannot but produce its own essence. Post-colonial theory, as a discursive formation, inevitably hierarchizes some subject positions into ' ideal' post-colonial positions - turning them into the same despotic icons that it seeks to dismantle.