Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

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This essay reads Lala Har Dayal’s Hints for Self-Culture (1934) in order to highlight how anticolonial agitator Lala Har Dayal imagines a history appropriate for a future anticolonial utopia. By simultaneously tracking Har Dayal’s “promiscuous afterlives” in Punjab in the 1930s and offering a close reading of Hints for Self-Culture, Elam argues that the writer offers an insurgent political theory of utopia heralded under the sign of anticolonial critique. In the case of Hints for Self-Culture, this takes the form of a radical self-making process toward the creation of a future utopian project. In Har Dayal’s hands, however, such a project requires a doubling back of history; a political project that torques the present back onto its impossible pasts. Hints for Self-Culture does this in two significant moves, in ways that the bulk of this essay explores. First, Har Dayal returns to nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer in order to produce a radical self-making project for the present. Second, Har Dayal offers a utopian vision of a future World-State, which, as the product of radical self-making, is a radical world-making project that repeatedly glances backward. At each of these stages, a palimpsestic utopia emerges, with the figures of the past not fully erased but having morphed into something of use.

This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.