1. Introduction
Modern literary theory can be read as a prolonged dismantling of the belief that literature expresses a timeless, universal human essence. What once appeared as the self-evident truth of “great literature”—that it speaks across cultures, histories, and societies—gradually becomes suspect under theoretical scrutiny. From Marxism onward, theory repeatedly exposes the mechanisms through which universality is produced, authorized, and naturalized.
Marxist criticism initiates this shift by historicizing literature within material relations. Texts are no longer autonomous expressions of human truth but cultural formations shaped by class struggle, ideology, and economic conditions. The “human” revealed in literature is not humanity as such, but humanity as lived within specific social arrangements. What passes as universal experience is often the experience of a dominant class abstracted from its conditions of production.
Structuralism further destabilizes universality by relocating meaning from individual consciousness to systems of signification. Literature ceases to be the voice of a sovereign subject and becomes a function of linguistic and narrative structures that precede the author. Meaning is no longer grounded in human depth but in differential relations. The human subject, once the guarantor of universal meaning, is displaced by structure.
Psychoanalysis intensifies this displacement by fracturing the subject from within. Whether in Freudian or Lacanian form, psychoanalytic criticism denies the transparency of consciousness. Desire, repression, lack, and symbolic law intervene between experience and meaning. Literature now appears not as the expression of shared humanity but as a site where psychic conflict—structured by language and prohibition—finds displaced articulation.
Poststructuralism radicalizes these insights by undermining the stability of structure itself. Meaning slips, binaries collapse, presence is haunted by absence. At this stage, literary theory has already dismantled the philosophical foundations of universality: no stable subject, no fixed meaning, no neutral language.
What remains insufficiently addressed, however, is why European literature was historically able to present itself as universal in the first place. This is the problem to which postcolonial literary theory responds.
Postcolonial Theory and the Geopolitics of Literary Universality
Postcolonial theory does not reject the theoretical critique of universality; it completes it by introducing a global and historical dimension that earlier theories largely presupposed rather than interrogated. It asks not only how universality is constructed, but under what geopolitical conditions it became credible.
The foundational intervention comes with Orientalism by Edward Said, which demonstrates that literature, scholarship, and culture are integral to imperial power. Said’s argument is not that Western texts occasionally misrepresent the non-West, but that a vast, institutionalized discourse systematically produces “the Orient” as Europe’s epistemic opposite: passive, irrational, timeless, and inferior. This discourse circulates across genres—novels, travel writing, philology, anthropology—and acquires the authority of truth through repetition and institutional endorsement.
Said draws heavily on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse, particularly the inseparability of knowledge and power. Yet he modifies Foucault by retaining a humanistic insistence on agency. Discourses do not operate autonomously; they are authored, taught, funded, rewarded. The authority of Western literature to speak universally is not accidental—it is produced within the historical context of empire.
Postcolonial theory thus reframes the universal claims of European literature. Characters such as Hamlet or Oedipus may still articulate profound conflicts, but those conflicts can no longer be assumed to represent humanity as such. They represent historically situated subjectivities formed within a Europe that possessed the power to universalize its own experience while relegating other cultures to the margins of representation.
In this sense, postcolonial theory does not politicize literature from the outside; it reveals the political conditions that were always already internal to literary universality.
Colonial Encounter, Subject Formation, and Cultural Ambivalence
While Said’s work exposes the representational structures of empire, it leaves relatively unexplored the lived, unstable, and reciprocal dimensions of colonial interaction. This is where Homi K. Bhabha significantly extends postcolonial theory by drawing on psychoanalysis—particularly Jacques Lacan—to analyze colonial subject formation.
Bhabha’s key contribution lies in showing that colonial power is never fully secure. It depends on producing subjects who internalize the colonizer’s norms, yet this very process generates anxiety and instability. Lacan’s insight that identity is formed through misrecognition becomes, in Bhabha’s hands, a theory of colonial mimicry. The colonized subject imitates the colonizer’s language, manners, and values, but never completely. This partial resemblance—“almost the same, but not quite”—exposes the artificiality of colonial hierarchy.
Colonial discourse thus becomes ambivalent. It desires resemblance as proof of civilizational superiority, yet fears resemblance as a threat to difference and domination. Power must continually repeat itself because it is never fully persuasive. What earlier theories identified as textual instability, Bhabha re-situates within a historically specific scene: the colonial encounter.
This theoretical move allows postcolonial criticism to read literary texts not merely as representations of domination, but as sites where colonial authority reveals its own fragility. Cultural identity emerges not as a fixed essence but as a negotiated, hybrid process unfolding in what Bhabha calls a “Third Space.” Here, meaning is neither purely imposed nor purely resistant; it is produced through tension, misrecognition, and repetition.
Literature, Counter-Archives, and Postcolonial Narratives
Postcolonial literary texts intervene directly in the epistemic structures identified by theory. Things Fall Apart reconstructs Igbo society not as a static backdrop but as a complex moral and social order disrupted by colonial intrusion. Achebe’s narrative does more than correct misrepresentation; it challenges the authority of colonial archives by presenting African life as already meaningful, internally differentiated, and historically dynamic.
In A House for Mr Biswas, the focus shifts from the moment of colonial encounter to its long aftermath. Biswas’s obsessive desire for a house symbolizes the colonial subject’s struggle for symbolic stability in a world where traditional structures have been eroded and replacement structures remain alien. Colonialism here appears not as overt domination but as a chronic condition of psychic and social displacement.
Midnight’s Children transforms postcolonial history into narrative form itself. Fragmentation, excess, and hybridity are not stylistic ornaments but enactments of a world produced by colonial rupture and national reinvention. The instability of history, memory, and identity mirrors the instability of postcolonial subjectivity.
Finally, Waiting for the Barbarians distills empire into a recurring structure of governance that depends on producing an enemy to justify its authority. The novel exposes how even ethical doubt can remain trapped within imperial frames, suggesting the difficulty of imagining a position entirely outside the language of domination.
Subalternity, Representation, and the Limits of Theory
If Said reveals discourse and Bhabha reveals ambivalence, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak exposes a limit internal to literary theory itself. Drawing on poststructuralism, she asks whether those most marginalized by colonial and postcolonial power—the subaltern—can appear as speaking subjects within existing systems of representation.
Her answer is not optimistic. The subaltern is not simply unheard but structurally excluded from the circuits that render speech intelligible. Representation, even when critical, risks reproducing domination by speaking for rather than with. This problem becomes especially acute in relation to gender, where colonial discourse and indigenous patriarchy converge to silence women through competing claims of protection and authority.
Spivak’s engagement with Mahasveta Devi demonstrates that postcolonial theory must grapple not only with textual analysis but with the ethics of interpretation itself. The task is not to recover a pure voice of the oppressed, but to expose the conditions that prevent such a voice from being heard as speech.
Conclusion: Postcolonial Theory within Literary Theory
Seen in its proper context, postcolonial literary theory is not an external political correction imposed on literary studies. It is a necessary consequence of literary theory’s own trajectory. Marxism dismantles economic universality; structuralism dismantles semantic universality; psychoanalysis dismantles subjective universality; poststructuralism dismantles epistemic universality. Postcolonial theory dismantles imperial universality.
It establishes that literature’s claims to universality are historically produced effects of colonial power. To read literature today without attending to colonial and postcolonial contexts is not neutrality—it is the unexamined inheritance of empire. Postcolonial theory therefore stands not at the margins of literary theory, but at its critical center, completing its most fundamental task: showing that what once passed as “humanity” was, all too often, the world seen from a single place and spoken in a single voice.