Although first published in 1979 (with an influential English edition in 1984), Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition remains central through the 1980–2000 debates as a touchstone for claims about incredulity toward grand narratives—claims postcolonial critics often contest when imperial histories and liberation projects demand explanatory and political narratives.
Fredric Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (later expanded into a 1991 book) becomes a major reference point for debates about whether postmodern culture is primarily a stylistic/intellectual shift or a historically specific formation tied to late capitalism—an issue that postcolonial critics often reframe through imperial and global histories.
Benita Parry’s “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” critiques influential theory-driven approaches (often associated with deconstruction) for limiting the conceptual space for anti-colonial agency, helping define a recurring fault line: textualist/postmodern critique versus materialist and emancipatory political readings.
Homi K. Bhabha’s essay “The Commitment to Theory” rejects the claim that “theory” is inherently Western and politically disabling, helping frame later disputes over whether postmodern theoretical languages (deconstruction, discourse theory) aid or derail anti-imperial critique.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s canonical 1988 version of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” crystallizes a key postcolonial challenge to poststructuralist/postmodern assumptions about representation and agency, arguing that structures of knowledge and power can render subaltern speech unreadable within dominant archives and discourses.
The Empire Writes Back consolidates postcolonial literary studies as a field by theorizing how writing in English from formerly colonized contexts contests metropolitan canons and linguistic norms—setting up later friction with postmodern accounts that treat textual play or “difference” without sustained attention to imperial history.
Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism advances an influential account of postmodern culture as politically implicated, emphasizing how representation (including parody and historiographic metafiction) can expose ideology—an approach that later intersects contentiously with postcolonial critiques of power, history, and voice.
In “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Kwame Anthony Appiah questions easy alignments between postmodern and postcolonial formations, warning that Euro-American postmodern desires for “difference” can reproduce primitivist expectations about Africa and the Third World.
Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism synthesizes his earlier essay into an extended Marxist critique of postmodern culture, offering a major target and resource for postcolonial critics debating how empire, nation, and global inequality relate to late-capitalist cultural forms.
Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures argues that certain metropolitan theoretical trends (including aspects of postcolonial and postmodern discourse) risk displacing class, political economy, and historical specificity—sharpening disputes about whether postmodern frameworks obscure imperial and nationalist contradictions.
Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism extends and deepens the argument that canonical Western literature and culture are entwined with imperial power, providing a major postcolonial counterweight to postmodern accounts that treat culture primarily through fragmentation, simulation, or discourse without sustained imperial genealogy.
Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture develops concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, and liminality, becoming central to postcolonial theoretical debates that sometimes converge with (and sometimes resist) postmodern emphases on indeterminacy and textual play.
Arif Dirlik’s “The Postcolonial Aura” argues that postcolonial discourse can function as a prominent “post-” within Euro-American cultural criticism while being shaped by contemporary global capitalism—intensifying arguments over whether postmodern/postcolonial theory risks institutionalization and political dilution.
Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity traces how “the postmodern” developed as an idea and cultural diagnosis, with special attention to Jameson—providing a high-profile map of the conceptual terrain on which postcolonial critics argue over periodization, capitalism, and the legacies of modernity/empire.
Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (subtitled Toward a History of the Vanishing Present) offers a synthetic critique of how even oppositional disciplines can reproduce imperial epistemologies, pushing debates beyond “postmodern textualism vs. postcolonial history” toward questions of complicity, methodology, and institutional knowledge-production.
Postmodernism vs. postcolonial critique: debates and key publications (1980–2000)
