Conclusion: Towards a Cosmopolitan Humanism

Abstract

Postcolonial studies is a disparate and multidisciplinary field in a constant state of redefinition and, like most cultural or critical movements that are regarded as having perhaps received more attention than they originally deserved, the recurrent announcement of its demise has been instrumental to its continued revision and, as attempted in this study, to its reinvigoration. The editors of Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium seek to defend the tenets of postco-lonialism from those thinkers who have become too keen to fill in its death report:

[T]he encroachment of globalization studies, now often considered to be the dominant perspective through which to consider the contemporary moment, has led in the new millennium to the perception of a ‘crisis’ in postcolonialism. That postcolonial theory is now an ‘exhausted paradigm’ was the subject of an [sic] Modern Languages Association roundtable discussion ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory’ in 2006; [...] Other critics, however, have noted the collusion between the fields and stress their interrelatedness rather than opposition.

(Wilson, Sandru and Lawson Welsh, p. 1)