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The metaphors that come easily to mind — surveying, navigating, mapping, exploring, investigating — in undertaking literary and cultural analysis reveal the problematic ways in which the English language as well as the nature of literary studies are (still) permeated by the discourses of imperialism and colonialism. One charts (plots, maps) a field (area, domain) of study; one adopts a stance — a centre or grounding point in the familiar — from which to undertake this exploration into the class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">unknown, in order to bring it into one's sphere of knowledge and understanding (manipulate, make visible) and do something with it (make useful, domesticate). That space between worlds, between the known and the unknown (contact zone, site of encounter), is a highly charged one, shot through with complex power relations. The process of deterritorializing, defamiliarizing, deprivileging one's place within such discursive systems is thus, as Mohanty (1995) ironically points out in the epigraph above, always already a complicated one. Simply naming this particular approach is a fraught process: how to engage with the post- prefix given that it comes with its own discursive, temporal and spatial issues; whether to use a hyphen, or not. These contentious questions generated debate among critics and theorists in the 1990s, the decade in which postcolonial studies established itself in the academy.¹

DOI: 10.1057/9780230206045_11

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