This glossary offers an interdisciplinary guide to the various concepts, practices and cultural products that have come to be known as "postcolonial". In addition to providing an essential orientation map for undergraduates taking courses in postcolonial literature and theory and postcolonial studies more generally, its range makes it a indispensable reference tool for those who have been working in the field for some time.
After an introduction, which examines the usage of the term "postcolonial", it contains some 400 entries on major figures, trends and movements, taking literature and literary theory, disciplines which played a pivotal role in the development of the field, as its central focus.
Its wide-ranging coverage includes entries on the following areas of postcolonial studies:
- Writers, e.g. Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott.
- Concepts, e.g. hybridity, Manichean allegory, the Black Atlantic.
- Terms, e.g. fatwa, francophone, diaspora, "winds of change".
- Music, musicians and musicologists, e.g. karnatic music, Bob Marley, Francis Bebey.
- Historical events, e.g. Partition, Sharpeville, the Mabo Case.
- Movements, e.g. Négritude, Rastafarianism, the Subaltern Studies project.
- Language usage, e.g. Creole, Macauley's Minute, Nation Language.
- Postcolonial responses to canonical authors, e.g. Shakespeare, Defoe, Conrad.
- And many others
