Customer Reviews

Colonial Discourse/ Post-Colonial Theory: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader

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This book is an excellent introduction to the field of postcolonial theory, and because it gives you both historical and more recent texts, it really gives you a sense of how the field developed and the directions it's moved in. It is a bit out of date now, but it is still the anthology I use the most, and is the one I'm putting on my syllabus for the introduction to postcolonial lit class I'm teaching. Its major advantage over Ashcroft's The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is that this anthology gives you the full text of the essays it includes - Ashcroft's reader is basically the Reader's Digest version of postcolonial theory, except that in many cases (like Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak") condensing the essays makes them more difficult to understand. (I own that one, too, and find it utterly useless; haven't referred back to it in years.) For an introduction to the field, you really can't beat this one. (And if you already know your theory, this contains most of those articles that you refer to all the time and of which you have tatty old copies that you can never find, so this will save you headaches!)

This is a terrific collection of all the most important critiques of colonialism throughout history. It is essential reading for those interested in subaltern voices.