Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction describes how people around the world have increasingly challenged the idea that Western perspectives are the only ones that count. It examines the history of that challenge, outlining the ideas behind it, and exploring how the histories and cultures of the world can be rethought in new, productive directions. This VSI situates the discussion in wide cultural and geographical contexts. It draws on examples such as the situation of indigenous peoples, of those dispossessed from their lands, Algerian raï music, and global social and ecological movements. This new edition also includes updated material on race, slavery, decoloniality, and the postcolonial politics of gender and sexualities.

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The Introduction provides an overview of postcolonialism and postcolonial theory. The term ‘postcolonialism’, which began to be used from the 1990s, represents perspectives critical of or resistant to colonialism or colonial attitudes. Anti-colonial thinkers had always insisted that decolonization had to begin with colonized peoples decolonizing themselves mentally from the ways in which they had begun to see things from the perspective of the colonizers. Postcolonialism too is about changing one’s mind-set and values. In a comparable way, ‘postcolonial theory’ involves a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the West.

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