This essay provides an introduction to postcolonial theory and criticism. It offers an overview of the questions and problematics with which postcolonial scholarship is concerned. It charts the historical and intellectual development of postcolonial studies. Finally, it explores the intersections of postcolonial studies and communication studies, and makes a case for the relevance of this area of work to communication scholarship.

Postcolonial theory and criticism provide rhetorical studies with an important critical and political perspective with which to engage in issues of neocolonialism and racism. This essay offers an overview of postcolonial theory and criticism, and delineates some of the implications of a postcolonial perspective for rhetorical studies by demonstrating how a postcolonial rhetorical approach pushes the traditional frontiers of the discipline in a manner that enables racially and culturally marginalized perspectives on rhetoric to emerge.

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This article argues for the importance of a spatial perspective in critical communication studies. It suggests that a focus on spatial relations of power enables scholars of communication and culture to understand and theorize the complex ways in which identities are being reproduced in our current moment of globalization. The article suggests that, instead of theorizing cultural power only through the category of identity, we need to adopt a spatial perspective on power that may better enable us to theorize various relations of identity and culture.

This essay examines white femininity as a transnational phenomenon. Specifially, the essay addresses the representational logics of whiteness through which contemporary white women are positioned as ''global'' mothers in popular culture. The larger goal of this is to illustrate how ''intimate'' relations of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism are negotiated and managed in contemporary positionings of white women as ''global mothers.''