Postcolonialism and Recent Women's Writing in Afrikaans

ture. Although cynical words have been spoken about the current popularity and academic marketability of postcolonial theory, it cannot be denied that it has provided valuable new perspectives on the world's so-called marginal literatures. One's understanding of postcolonialism is largely determined by the way in which the prefix postin postcolonialism is read. If it is read as reference to temporal succession and even supersession, the term postcolonialism applies to that which follows after colonialism. If, however, colonialism is defined as the way in which unequal international relations of economic, political, military, and cultural power are maintained, it cannot be argued that the colonial era is really over. Moreover, viewing colonialism as a homogeneous thing of the past (Thomas, 13) in the hope of achieving break with blameless present poses the risk of obscuring the historical, geographic, and political specificity of totally different forms of colonization. Anne McClintock has also argued that the reading of postcolonialism as that which follows after colonialism divides history into series of teleologically directed phases that progresses from the pre-colonial via the colonial to the postcolonial. This description of history as linear march of time falls into the same trap as the metanarrative of Western historicism by arranging world history around the single binary opposition of colonial/postcolonial (292-93). The writers of the well-known book on postcolonialism The Empire Writes Back (1989) seem to avoid these pitfalls by defining postcolonialism as that which undermines colonialism rather than that